Stop staring at me--I can t help it! A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School has isolated the gene responsible for synophrys, the phenomenon known as unibrow , giving hope to sufferers from the affliction that their children will grow up with two normal eyebrows, rather than a single furry caterpillar crawling across their foreheads. I can t tell you the hurt that unibrow caused me when I was growing up, says Stanley Klesko of Donora, Pennsylvania.
The kids would chant Stan s eyebrow is one straight line, That s why he s no friend of mine , Klesko recalls painfully. The mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, and the manipulation of particular genes will become a reality over time. The rush to identify the unibrow gene was propelled forward when Sesame Street s Bert, who has perhaps the world s most famous example of the deformity, collapsed after a skip and wave show in Pittsburgh due to the weight of his eyebrow hair and the perspiration that it absorbed during the performance.
We worked round the clock and consumed a lot of pizza and Chinese food, says Dr. Wang Lee, a professor of biophysics. Then we fell asleep and a couple of graduate assistants did all the work.
Couples will now have the option of choosing from a smorgasboard of eyebrow options for their children, ranging from the slender and graceful Audrey Hepburn model to the more rugged and masculine Clark Gable style. It s all about relieving human suffering, says Dr. Nothing hurts worse than pulling out an eyebrow hair, he notes, unless it s pulling out a nosehair, but they didn t ask us to fix that problem.
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I've got nothing else to do, what's next? Send this to someone! Stop staring at me--I can t help it!