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December 13, 2002
Front-Page
News
A Life in Research
The Bush administration is misguided in its continuing efforts
to curb medical research involving embryos, Lynn Morgan, MHC professor
of anthropology, argues in a commentary in the November 29 edition
of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Morgan offers the example
of Carnegie No. 836, an embryo that is "eighty-eight years
old and still going strong" in the world of research. The
embryo, removed from a woman's uterus after a 1914 hysterectomy,
has been photographed, sketched, and, in a twenty-first century
development, scanned into a computer for online 3-D reconstruction
and image sharing. "Many scientists hope that enhanced embryo
imagery will make the public appreciate the need for embryological
research. Paradoxically, the latest pictures could have the opposite
effect. In a political climate that filters everything about embryos
through the lens of abortion, the very same image can be interpreted
either to promote respect for the mysteries of life that unfold
through scientific research or to cast every embryo as a sacred
symbol of life off-limits to researchers," Morgan writes.
"Of course science does need to be regulated, but by personifying
the embryo the administration has chosen the wrong course."
The Risks of Silence
Gail Hornstein, MHC professor of psychology and education, writes
in the November 15 edition of the Chronicle Review of finding
herself remaining silent about her Jewish identity during a semester
in Britain, and her realization of the cost of being hidden. "Anti-Semitism
is so deeply ingrained in British daily life, and Jewishness so
totally absent from popular culture, that even the slightest reference
to Jews seems out of place," she writes in "The Risks
of Silence, or How I Went to England and Disappeared in Plain
Sight," in the magazine's "Diary" section.
Through a variety of encounters and observations, she develops
a new feeling for the risks she takes by not speaking up in the
presence of anti-Semitism. Despite her attachment to and admiration
for British culture, she writes, being Jewish "feels anomalous,
requires disclosure, becomes an ‘issue' that has to
be dealt with" in Britain. "Every time I hear a colleague
being dismissed as ‘unrefined,' or I read one of the
Guardian's tirades against Israel, I think about protesting.
But, wary of reinforcing the stereotype of Jews as ‘overly
sensitive,' I say nothing. Now, ashamed of my cowardice,
I worry that I've become
complicit in the very system that silences me."
Mad about Madness
Susan Pliner, acting director of the College's Speaking,
Arguing, and Writing Program, reviews Through Madness,
a film about three people living with psychiatric disabilities,
in the September 2002 issue of MultiCultural Review. Pliner
calls the film "a useful tool for initiating discussions
about psychiatric disabilities and the disparate experiences of
those who live life with mental illness. . . . The use of personal
narratives is an effective and engaging way to humanize psychiatric
disabilities, challenge commonly held stereotypes, and dismantle
the distance between people with and without direct experience
of mental illness."
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