Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Medicine: Can Science Pick a Child's Sex?
Doctors challenge new methods of granting an ancient wish
It is one of nature's most coveted secrets, and over the centuries many have professed to know it. Aristotle had a surefire formula: make love in the north wind to conceive a male child and in the south wind for a girl. Hippocrates had his own prescription—tie a string around the right testicle to stimulate the production of male seed, or the left, if a daughter is sought. Medieval alchemists had an even more exotic recipe for a son: a precoital drink of lion's blood and...
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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
