A.C. White

My family emigrated to the U.S. in 1940 from China. My education background includes a B.A. in Zoology, M.A. in Embryology, Ph.D. in Genetics. I taught for 28 years at a State University in N.J., and am a former Chair of the Department of Biology. I was awarded grants from NSF, and awarded for my teaching and research by my university. My book includes my experiences as a double minority: as an immigrant growing up in the U.S., and as a woman scientist and educator. There is also a love story that is impacted by the fact that my central character is a woman. Also,like any human endeavor, there is politics in higher education and cutting edge research, that the general public does not necessarily understand. I hope my book will inform them. But foremost in my goal as an author of this book is to educate and encourage the general public to consider the possible consequences of genetic engineering and cloning. I developed Genetics courses and wrote textbooks for both science and non-science majors (under my real name) because I have always believed that Genetics is a science for society in general. Choices, my novel, is science fiction, because we cannot now do what I claim my central characters can do, but what if we can in the future? So much of what can be done now was not possible twenty years ago. I submit that what my characters can do may become possible at some point in the future, namely to be able to clone anyone and any thing that lived as long as we can recover their DNA, eg., in the blood of Abraham Lincoln from the shirt he wore when assassinated, or the blood of Jesus Christ which is purportedly in two vials in an Italian cathedral. We may have the technology, but do we have the wisdom to make the right choices?