Mary Kenny
French geneticist Jérome Lejeune It is so welcome, and so fitting, that Pope Francis has just declared the late French geneticist Jérome Lejeune as ‘venerable’. Prof. Lejeune, who discovered the chromosome that causes Down Syndrome, was surely a saintly man, as well as a very distinguished scientist.
Before he identified this chromosomal difference in 1958, the condition was called ‘Mongolism’. He renamed it with the medical name ‘Trisomy 21’ (the condition is caused by an extra copy of this chromosome). In English, ‘Mongolism’ became Down Syndrome, after the Victorian physician John Langdon Down who had first described its appearance.
He thought it tragic that because they were born with a chromosomal disability that they should not be permitted to live”
It was an anguish to Jerome Lejeune that the medical identification of Trisomy 21, which he hoped would help babies with the condition, was then so widely used to promote the termination of pregnancies through pre-natal diagnosis.
I met Prof. Lejeune when he visited London in the 1980s and did a rather brief interview with him between his speaking engagements. He was a courteous and charming person, but what I remember most vividly was his evident feeling of care for Down Syndrome people. He thought it tragic that because they were born with a chromosomal disability that they should not be permitted to live. I could see that he felt a real sense of distress that his scientific work was used for this purpose. He was a smoker and when speaking about this subject, he reached for another cigarette to allay his pained feelings.
Institutions
Prof. Lejeune, who was married with five children, was garlanded with honours and awards from universities and scientific institutions. But there are grounds to believe he was deprived of the Nobel prize because of the position he took on supporting the Down Syndrome children, for whom he felt such a tender sense of protectiveness and care.
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One of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders was to ban all discrimination against transgender students in educational institutions (and subsequently in the military).
Most fair-minded people are opposed to discrimination, but Mr Biden’s executive order on this issue is controversial, and may be problematic: “Children should be able to learn without worrying whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room or school sport.” Feminists, and women in sport, are concerned that in allowing individuals who were born males access to women’s facilities – and competing with those born females in sport – this will rebound against women. A hashtag #Bidenerasedwomen emerged to make this point.
All human persons are deserving of respect, and those with body dysmorphia – convinced that they were born into the wrong sex – should be included. Yet the fact remains that a sportsperson born male will almost always have a physical advantage over those born female, even after a sex change. That is why most sports are segregated by sex (with the noted exception, as Princess Anne once drily pointed out, “those that involve a horse”).
Football teams, rugby teams, baseball teams, or any other team do not mingle men and women equally – because of different physical capacity and musculature. Even tennis ‘mixed doubles’ must be composed of a male and female on each side, to balance out the comparative physical differences. That, however, is not recognised in the new president’s executive order, which seems to favour political ‘wokeness’ before women’s best interest.
Little optimism over lockdown alcholism
A report in Britain last weekend indicated that during lockdown mental health problems were up by 40%: most people were eating more and piling on the weight: and most people were drinking more too.
I dread to think of the increases in alcoholism we may see as an outcome of lockdown. Alcoholics, who have few enough sources of help for their addiction, can’t go to AA meetings during present conditions – and Zooming negates the crucial principle of anonymity. Neither can they do the things that alcohol counsellors often advise when the craving for liquor becomes overwhelming – go for a drive, go for a long walk somewhere distracting, go out for a coffee with a friend, go to the cinema.
When I was quitting alcohol back in the 1990s, the cinema was my saviour. The point about alcohol is that it is a form of escape – it is getting you out of your own head and into a fantasy world. Whenever I felt the urge for that gin-and-tonic, I’d take myself off to see a movie.
Yes, you can see a movie online these days: but a computer screen is not the same as getting out of your own environment.
I am, nowadays, involved with an alcohol addiction problem within my own family, and it has got much worse with lockdown. There are no outside agencies to help, and the alcoholic broods, ever more intensely, on the demons tormenting him, reaching for the only remedy he knows – the bottle. The sorrow and the pity are inexpressible.