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Date: | Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:15:16 -0400 |
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The amount of energy, time, money, and care that many people devote to
learning about their ancestry is a wonder to some of us not similarly
obsessed (though doubtless we all have equally unremunerative but
gratifying passions; I know I do).
Today, though, an article in The Washington Post offers a stark
reminder of just how important it may be to know your ancestry.
It turns out that a particularly deadly form of breast cancer afflicts
black women far more often than those in other ethnic groups, and at
least part of the reason is very likely ancestral: this particular type
of tumor is extremely common in certain areas of West Africa that were
involved in the Atlantic slave trade.
More at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/
AR2007062201902.html
With news like this, knowledge of one's distant personal past becomes
startlingly, even urgently, relevant.
As William Faulkner famously remarked, "The past is not dead. It's not
even past." Not least because for better or worse, we carry it in our
genes.
-- Jurretta Heckscher
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