Biology Experiment

Whether a date’s spontaneous or planned, the first or the last date, or you’re young or old, sooner or later, going out with someone comes to this: Somebody has to ask for the date.

No matter how much or how little you plan (and regardless of your reputation, your Aunt Sylvia, the knot in your stomach, the advice of your friends, your New Year’s resolution, or your success with dating or lack thereof) nobody, with the possible exception of Adam, ever made a date without asking for it. I bet that even with God as the go-between, sooner or later Eve expected Adam to pony up and find the courage to ask if they could take a walk in Paradise, and if he didn’t, well, it explains a lot about the snake, don’t you think?

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With advances in computer technology and DNA science, it seemed likely that a way would be found for the far-flung children of China to find their birth families. That day seemed far off in the future. However that day is here now, and it has arrived 20 years before I expected it. A new kind of internet website provides the means for adopting parents of children adopted from China to discover if their child has a sibling, half-sibling, cousin or other relative adopted anywhere in the world. In addition, birth parents in China will be able to search for their biological child who has been adopted by a family living somewhere in the world. While China adoptions are the largest example of what is now possible, it applies to every adoption in the world today. I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that this is the most startling development in the field of adoption information in the past 25 years.

There are two new kinds of sites in particular that seem useful to the adoption community. They are interesting because both kinds are the first of a new genre of websites. The first are DNA social networking sites; the second are primarily gene-decoding sites.

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Slovakia lies in the center of Central Europe and many tourists, among whom Americans are not any exceptions, find it really attractive. One of the world’s youngest (in the geographical terminology) mountain range called the Tatras or the High Tatras (Vysoke Tatry) lies in the heart of this small country. The arrangement of these mountains is very dense, which means that in the Alps (Austria, Switzerland…), for example, there is a bigger distance between particular peaks. The High Tatras peaks are condensed and thus exceptionally attractive. In these mountains, you can make most of any touristic trips just in one day and you can see all the loveliness of nature hidden within the woods and the rocks.

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