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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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from: Natalie Angier

Why Darva Dumped Rick: A New Theory

Posted Thursday, Feb. 24, 2000, at 5:49 PM ET

Jonathan,

Matthew During's latest paper is indeed a beautiful piece of science, but, of course, at the moment, it's all about rats. Not to be glib, but why is it so easy to cure rodents of every nasty disease that they obligingly contract, or that we deftly induce in them, and so difficult to apply those miraculous results to humans? Mice and rats get cancer very easily. By a year or 18 months of age, most mice are riddled with tumors. They're short-lived animals that have evolved to breed quickly and profligately, so their DNA repair and immune systems don't seem to bother taking the long view and fixing what's broke or mutated. As a result, they get lots of tumors. But are their tumors like our tumors? Is stroke damage in a rat equivalent to stroke damage in a person? And so we'll be left again with the need for human trials at some point, to which I, along with the rest of us Abbies (aging baby boomers), can say, Godspeed, before our generation loses it altogether. ...

In closing our conversation, I must return, with heavy heart, to a subject on which it began. I refer, of course, to the untimely demise of the historic love affair between Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell, although whether it can rightly be called a love affair is another matter, considering that the marriage was, as Rockwell confessed, never consummated. In fact, the newlyweds didn't so much as share cabin space on their honeymoon cruise. What was it that Darva disliked so quickly about Rick? Maybe she hated his smell. Spouses can put up with a lot of things about each other, but a discordance of body odors--a surrogate marker for clashing immune systems?--isn't one of them. As Guido Ceronetti says in his clever aphoristic narrative "The Silence of the Body": " 'Don't marry Hermengard,' Pope Stephen III wrote to Charlemagne. 'She stinks like all the Longobards.' Charlemagne married her anyway, and ended up repudiating her. He couldn't stand her stench."

The moral is--don't marry anybody who failed to pass peer review.

With great good cheer,
Natalie

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314151617
from: Natalie Angier

Why Darva Dumped Rick: A New Theory

Posted Thursday, Feb. 24, 2000, at 5:49 PM ET
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Natalie Angier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times, is the author, most recently, of Woman: An Intimate Geography (click here to buy the book). Jonathan Weiner is the writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University and the author of The Beak of the Finch, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 (click here to buy the book).
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