Barbara katz rothman biography sample

In March, Avi Ben-Abraham, an Israeli doctor, announced that he planned to clone a human being. I would have thought that Jews, of all people, would understand the dangers of playing with genetics. But no, it's not Jews who learned that lesson -- it's Germans. Wherever scientists start cloning people, trying to improve our genes, it won't happen in Germany.

I'm a Jew who became interested in the genetic revolution not as a Jew, but as a mother. It was the idea of prenatal testing that first drew me in. Back in the 1980's, I wrote a book about how hard amniocentesis and other prenatal tests were on women. The book, The Tentative Pregnancy: Prenatal Diagnosis and the Future of Motherhood, was translated into German and is better known in Germany than in the United States.

The first time I went to Germany to lecture about genetic testing, in 1990, my mother was troubled. She didn't want me there. She didn't want me to bring back any gifts, spend a penny more than I had to. If I co