Robert S. Root-Bern- stein, in Perspectives in Bioloev and Medicine (Summer 1990), Culver Hall 403, 1025 E. 57 ST, Chicago, 111. 60'637, and "Is the AIDS Virus a Science Fiction?" Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, in Policy Review (Summer 1990), 214 Mass. Ave. N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.
The whole world is waiting for a cure for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Yet medical researchers may have made a fundamental mistake. They may be wrong about its cause.
The generally...
spraying a solution of manufactured bacteria over mine wastes and processing the liquid, workers can re- cover huge amounts of copper. "Bioleach- ing," which produced about 30 percent of the U.S. copper industry's output 1989, literally saved American copper compa- nies from extinction.
Some day, Debus says, it may be possi- ble to eliminate conventional mining alto- gether. Bacteria engineered to remove specific kinds of minerals may be pumped into the ground and then extracted and placed...
con-
trast, physicians in England,
home of the empirical tradi-
tion of Bacon, Hume, and
Locke, are the most cau-
tious. They even dispute the
efficacy of the drug AZT as a
treatment for AIDS.
Neither the West Ger- mans nor the French have ever fully accepted Louis Pasteur's discovery that germs cause many diseases; they share the tendency to view disease as a "failure of internal defenses rather than an invasion from with- out," notes Payer. Thus, German doctors rarely pre-...
mystics and certain apologists for industry who saw the Gaian vision of a self-policing global environ- ment as a license to pollute. But now, be- cause of increased appreciation of feed- back mechanisms, scientists are beginning to pay serious attention to the idea.
The problem, Schneider suggests, is that there is more than one Gaia hypothesis. "The realization that climate and life mu- tually influence each other is pro- found. . . . Nonetheless, to say that climate and life 'grew up together,'...
persuading Con- gress to allow the EPA to weigh costs and feasibility or doing so covertly. Con- gress has not gone along, and the courts, naturally enough, have rejected the EPA's covert efforts to do so.
Other commentators wag their fingers at
ARTS & LETTERS
Congress for passing laws that are impossi- ble to enforce, but Dwyer considers him- self too much of a realist to believe that that will do much good. He suggests that regulators work behind the scenes to win informal concessions wit...
"Burdens and Songs: The Anglo-American Rudyard Kipling" by
Christopher Kitchens, in Grand Street (Spring 1990), 50 River- side Dr., New York, N.Y. 10024.
Take up the White Man's burden- wrote his famous poem for an American Send forth the best ye breed- audience, and it was well received. As Go bind your sons to exile soon as the poem was finished he rushed it To serve your captives' need, off to his friend, Governor Theodore Roo- sevelt of New York, with the hope that it These opening...
then, however, the game was up for Britain. That very autumn, Harold MacMil- lan, the future prime minister, made his famous remark suggesting that Britain's role in the future would be to play Greece to America's Rome. That was not how Kip- ling had hoped things would turn out. But Hitchens suggests that "given the transmis- sion of British imperial notions to the Legates of the new Rome, he was not so quixotic a figure as Churchill's gesture makes him seem."
Subsidizing "Subsidies...
port-commissions, direct grants, and purchases for the national collection. In- deed, public subsidies for the arts remain far more generous than they are in the United States: $33 per capita annually, ver- sus 7 1 cents. Dutch art-often criticized as boring and repetitious-may not have im- proved since the abolition of the Arrange- ment, Tallman allows, but, in what seems a dubious defense, she says that the great- est defect of the Arrangement has been remedied: Art is no longer stored away i...
PERIODICALS
nesses of the French way were calami-tously revealed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France's overly central- ized system could not get troops to the front in time to stop the Prussians.
At various times during its history-no- tably during the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848-the Corps and all it stood for were endangered the brief ascendancy of politicians and ideas in the classical lib- eral mode of Adam Smith. Between the 1880s and World War 11, these ideas did p...
ROAD TO DIVORCE: England 1530-1987. By
Lawrence Stone. Oxford. 485 pp. $27.95