Both death as a moment in time and dying as a process result in intersections between spheres which might not usually interact: the theoretical and the social, the academic and the pragmatic, the arcane and the everyday. ‘Crossing Over’ exemplifies a belief that such complex matters can only be addressed by wide and innovative exchanges between academic disciplines and between academics and other professionals.

1. BY SREEREMYA.S
ASS.PROF

2.  Crossing Over’ is an interdisciplinary network of
international experts from different fields of research
on death and dying who will work interactively and
collaboratively on the theoretical and practical
challenges posed by the changing face of
contemporary death.

3.  Both death as a moment in time and dying as a process
result in intersections between spheres which might
not usually interact: the theoretical and the social, the
academic and the pragmatic, the arcane and the
everyday. ‘Crossing Over’ exemplifies a belief that such
complex matters can only be addressed by wide and
innovative exchanges between academic disciplines
and between academics and other professionals.

4.  An unabashed play on words, a trans- state is, among
other things, a coincidentia oppositorum. An
alchemical wedding that defines the fixed place, where
boundaries are actively transgressed. In many ways,
this very undertaking is where the role of the
magician, mystic and artist collide

5.  f anyone had devised a way to create a genetically
engineered baby, I figured George Church would know
about it.

6.  At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical
School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a
novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another
bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA
engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab,
Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological
genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit
himself.
 When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I
speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang.
A Harvard recruit from Beijing, she’d been a key player in
developing a powerful new technology for editing DNA,
called CRISPR-Cas9

7.  Homologous recombination is the process by which
two chromosomes, paired up during prophase 1 of
meiosis, exchange some distal portion of their DNA.

8.  Crossover occurs when two chromosomes, normally
two homologous instances of the same chromosome,
break and then reconnect but to the different end
piece.
 If they break at the same place or locus in the sequence
of base pairs, the result is an exchange of genes, called
genetic recombination.
 This outcome is the normal way for crossover to occur.