As any well-informed newspaper reader knows by now, the white-robed prohet Rael (neé Claude Vorilhon) is a solft-spoken, French-born, Canadian-based apostle of cloning technology who claims to have been conceived by a human mother and a space alien. The former race car driver also claims to have had two encounters with aliens in the 1970s [...]
It had been yet another miserable, nose-dripping, red-eyed spring a couple of years ago, when I finally went to see an allergy specialist. I’ve been battered by seasonal allergies all my life but relied on family doctors and, more recently, ”primary-care physicians” for relief. In a kind of a pharmaceutical version [...]
On a wet, blustery April morning, mist blowing sideways across the docks marking the lower end of Union Street on the Brooklyn waterfront, 17-year-old Alice Warren-Gregory races down the steps from her family’s third-floor apartment a little after 5:30 a.m. Clutching a calculator and a copy of ”The Great Gatsby,” she hurries up the [...]
Almost every weekday morning, usually before 10:30, an overnight delivery truck with an unusual cargo negotiates the hilly streets on the outskirts of Worcester, Mass., and comes to a halt in front of a brick-and-tinted-glass building called Biotech Three. The courier disappears into the building with one or two large gray containers and drops them [...]
On an insufferably muggy afternoon in July, with the thermometer pushing 90 degrees and ozone alerts filling the airwaves, Alexander Bregstein was in a foul mood. He was furious, in fact, for reasons that would become clear only later. Working on just three hours of sleep, and having spent the last eight hours minding a [...]
At a few minutes after 4 on a Sunday afternoon in January, when most of New York was tuning in to the playoff game between the Jets and the Broncos, I had something else on my mind. More precisely, I had something around my mind, namely the 1.5-ton magnet of the magnetic [...]
It was a beautiful, springlike day in early December, and as Ruth Lippin sat in an examination room at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, waiting for her very interesting brain to be scanned in the adjoining neuroimaging suite, she gazed out the window and took in what was once for her a bloodcurdling [...]
In death as in life, Jason Altom managed to be both extremely methodical and extraordinarily good-hearted. On the warm, humid day in mid-August when he ended his life, he walked up to the third-floor bedroom of the Somerville, Mass., house he shared with two fellow graduate students at Harvard University, drank a liquid laced with [...]
‘God bless you, little boy. Bless you.” The mother’s voice coos at her 4-month-old, who is clearly pleased. ”Oh, everybody’s getting smiles now,” the mother observes. ”You’re a cutie.. . .”
A soothing voice, a blessing, a cherubic smile. It has all the nuzzling intimacy of a quiet conversation between mother and child, except for the [...]
The radio was on in the background the other day, low volume as usual, when I found myself inclining toward vaguely familiar music. It was something I had once known very well, and as I began to listen more intently, a few swells of melody pushed a button somewhere in my brainpan: Gershwin. The [...]