In Brief
History: Putting the war down in words
From Homer's Iliad to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , some of the most enduring works of literature come from the experience of war. The federal government is now launching a program to encourage troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to chronicle those experiences. Prominent American writers like Mark Bowden and Bobbie Ann Mason will fan out to American military bases to teach writing workshops to soldiers and their spouses. The program harks back to the Depression-era Federal Writers' Project, which put unemployed journalists and writers to work documenting American life. Says Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, which is sponsoring the program: "In an age of E-mail and cellphones, the rich documentation of previous wars, when soldiers wrote long letters home, doesn't exist anymore." -Caroline Hsu
Sex: The Irrelevant Man
It was bound to come to this. First artificial insemination and sperm donors made fathers interchangeable. Now, scientists report in Nature, they've developed a technique that could make men irrelevant altogether. Using genetic material from two female mice, they've unlocked the secret of entirely male-free reproduction, producing a healthy, fertile pup they named Kaguya. And you guessed it, Kaguya is a she.
Reproduction in mammals usually requires specific developmental instructions from a female and a male, so the feat took some complicated tinkering. The scientists harvested egg cell DNA and, using cloning techniques, combined it with other eggs. The procedure is far from perfect--only two of 371 embryos survived to birth--but further refinements are expected to produce large improvements.
The scientists--no, they aren't all women--aren't trying to do away with men, and the prospect of using the technique to produce human girls remains slight. But that may have to change, according to a controversial new theory. In the new book Adam's Curse, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes surveys the "genetic ruin" that is the male Y chromosome and concludes that men are headed for oblivion, possibly within 125,000 years. The reason? The Y passes straight from father to son, the only chromosome to do so without "mixing" with a chromosome from Mom, so it misses out on important DNA repair processes. Sykes predicts increasing male infertility and, eventually, an end to our species' ability to reproduce at all. -Thomas Hayden
Longevity: Fountain Of Youth?
A new study of people on very low calorie diets suggests that such a regimen, known to extend the lives of rats, mice, and worms, gives humans a shot at a healthier life, too. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis examined the blood and arteries of 18 people committed to eating less and living longer. The dieters were at much lower risk of clogged arteries than people who eat a normal diet. They also had lower levels of bad cholesterol and higher levels of the good stuff. This doesn't mean people should rush out and, well, stop eating. While the people in the study do have extremely low risk of heart disease, no one knows yet if they might be unhealthy in other ways. For example, eating less might weaken their bones or throw off their hormones. -Helen Fields
This story appears in the May 3, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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