We did have some success with uracil when we would preincorporate the uracil into a mutant of E. coli that had a uracil requirement and then feed this cellular content from E. coli.
When schizophrenia and autism, for example, turned out to be largely heritable, we no longer blamed these disorders on cold or inept mothers. But, for such freighted traits as intelligence, liberals remained understandably anxious and continued to insist that differences—not just on a group level but on an individual one—were merely artifacts of an unequal environment. Conservatives pointed out that an à-la-carte approach to scientific findings was intellectually incoherent.
But ever since the concept of hamartia recurred through Aristotle's Poetics, in an attempt to describe man's ingrained iniquity, our impulse has been to identify a telling defect in those brought suddenly and dramatically low.
Old pigtailed seamen would tell of horseshoes found in the meat casks; of curious barkings and neighings heard in the slaughter-houses; and of negroes who disappeared near the victualling yards, to be seen no more.
