Charles Rammelkamp		A Puritan Right “Howard Stern has a Puritan right to say anything he wants on his radio show,” Teddy Vidakovich explains, tentative, soft-spoken. My English class is analyzing an essay on “the Puritan Right.” A defensive end on the football team, ingenuous Teddy told me he thinks he has “negative brain cells” when he came for help during office hours. “I’m just dumb,” he sighed. He can’t focus on the reading; argument eludes him like a halfback escaping a tackler. Teddy’s having trouble in a colleague’s literature class, too. “Hidden meanings?  A little too hidden,” he lamented, self-effacing, apologetic, but with a momentary defiant flair: “But if they’re so important, why hide them?” The essay we’re analyzing deals with freedom of expression, it’s true, the author complaining the Puritan Right is out of bounds when it tries to deny Stern his use of language – fifteen yard penalty for holding. Even if breaking through to Teddy’s comprehension is impossible as running against the Chicago Bears’ defensive line, Teddy’s full of a simplistic goodwill John Calvin would have envied.		A Gene for Motherhood   Harvard University researchers determined inattentive mother mice ignoring their own offspring lack a gene called fosB.   Now joining the genes for alcoholism and breast cancer, one that causes mothers to nurture their young.   Without fosB, otherwise normal mutant mother mice that mated killed their infants by neglect. Neither fed nor tended to, cold, the baby mice inevitably died.   Physically the mothers could nurse, and subsequent offspring survived when given to normal female mice. The mutant mother mice just didn't care.   Soon we'll know all the genes, a complete set, like all the letters of the alphabet spelling out our character and behavior. No more vague terms like “will” or “spirit,” “drive” or “ambition,” “destiny” or “fate,” just genes causing changes to brain circuitry, forcing forms of activity, patterns of learning, memory, personality. We may as well be machines.