The Sciences January/February 1998 [antikvár]

im-.'- I' I," .',1 ; I M,', I, ¦I ' ' ,lr 'L'i/' I ' I, II I 'I' M I I ¦, Il 11. i.V'ri/ i ¦'¦jr M I lîf' t v., ¦ 1,1 i'l.i ii K'l ¦ f' I - " i i' i II', i'r r ' I 'i ¦ I i JAi . 1 ¦ ' ' 'I ¦ iV' ,' y 11 li- Initial Conations EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK Pale Horse I and, i two n And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider's i me was Death. —Rev. 6:8 T WOULD BE HARI3 TO READ A NEWSPAPEli. THESE DAYS WITHOUT NOTICING in reports of n rry a forebodi idercooked chicke Uion and eight millio tl page; A'ly t irging diseases. Even the food ndercurrent of bad news: Salnionelk, :, Campylobacter, a bacterium responsibl 1 cases of food poisoning a year in and between 200 and 800 deaths. In Fra extended from wine and cheese to beef, of British beef and the mad cow disease : the concept ofprover 1 dubious distinction arisi t allegedly carries. This n ithe vly- tified i Id recipe n raw eggs for between United States ance has been ig from the fear agazine has rulent fomis of ¦ city. A form . 1993 as the : that began among irgei nted with ir cu :hoi I't the ippa: devoted feature articles in recent years to AIDS and to th< miiltiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis that have appeared ir of Hantavirus, spread by the excretions of rodents, was id( agent of a frightening outbreak of a lethal hemorrhagic fe Native Americans in the Southwest. In that same year ha lethal variety o(Escherichia coh, cryptically labeled 0157:H7, killed foi of the Jack in the Box fast-food restaurants. The list goes on: the pal. pestilence and death seems to be straining at the bit. But wait, the skeptic cautions. Before raising the general alarm, isi ent crisis, terrible as the diseases are to the afflicted, chiefly an artifact of superic record keeping? Besides, deadly disease is a dariing of the media, which seldom miss the chance to scare the public with the latest threat to life and civilizarion-what better way to sell papers and airtime? Bottom line: Do the incidence and lethality of the new diseases ever rise above background noise in the gi'eater co: text of humanity's historical relations with microorganisms? The answer, curiously, is both yes and no. George J. Ann Viral Superhighway" (page 24) that the threats are quite real "living in the twilight of the antibiotic era. Within our lifetii and cut fingers may return to the realm of fatal condirions. Jagos argues in "The "We are," he writes mes, scraped knees Yet that same change what Armelagos calls the third epidemiological transirion, is restoring a more traditional, albeit melancholy, relarionship between human and beastie. We may be returning to pre-antibiotic circumstances more familiar to our ancestors than to us, in which sudden, unpredictable and often fatal illness was a way of life. ^ EEDDACK AND CRITICISM ARE THE LIFEBLOOD OF SCIENCE, AND THEY ARE much in evidence this month in Peer Review, our regular department of let- ters to the editor. Thi disagreements with o mous numbers to the tics of race. And as us re-articulating, correc But the biology second (and final!) le :ter writers express their passions—and their passionate ur authors—on matters from the philosophical status of enor-intricacies of themiodynamic theory to the science and poli-;ual, the authors of the original articles fire back, amphfying, :ting, sharpening their arguments. ,d sociology of race hit a special nerve. This issue carries the stallment of letters prompted by our special issue on the topic last year (March/April 1997). This batch, aimed primarily at Alan H. Goodman's -ssay "Bred in the Bone?", argues, in the most sensible and sensitive ways i a tool for classifying human variation cannot be denied. An :n states, with great good sense and forbearance, why—a t it—the categories Asian, Black, Caucasoid and the like ription of human variation as earth, water, air and fire at able, why race a his reply Goodn chemist might pu the scientific de: nagin nd in : to D the lo nety-two ate ¦aUy< ccurr ! been discredited ng elements: the \ nd superseded. :stiges of a world ' that has —Peter G. Brown