ISSUES | fall 1988

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11.3 (Fall 1988)

Featuring the work of R.E.W. Adams, Susan Allport, Robert Crease, James Gleick, Patrick Huyghe, Morton Hunt, Roger Lewin, James Patterson, Jack Sanders, Herman Schneider, Leo Schneider, Lois Wingerson, Terra Ziporyn, and an interview with Barry Lopez.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

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Nonfiction

Dec 01 1990

Man's Place in Nature

“My heart began to pound as we approached the village,” recalls Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, Illinois. “It was hot and muggy, and my clothing was soaked with perspiration…The small, biting gnats were out in astronomical numbers, for it was the beginning of the dry season. My face and hands were swollen from the venom of their numerous stings. In just a few moments I was to meet my first Yanomamo, my first primitive man.”

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

The Human Side of Science

The human side of science. It’s a little like the Emperor’s new clothes. It must exist. Science, after all, is a thing made by humans, and its history is crowded with examples of how such human wrinkles as ambition, competition, personal likes and dislikes have punctuated its course. But while The Double Helix went far in dispelling any view of science as an impersonal, completely rational endeavor, many scientists are still of the opionion that the human side of science is ignored, that it is, in the end, irrelevant to the progress of science itself.

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Interviews

Sep 01 1988

An Interview with Barry Lopez

I wanted to write, but I never thought that I could make my living that way, so like everybody else in that position, I decided to go to graduate school. I didn’t know what else to do. I finished a Master’s degree, and I was very briefly in an MFA program. I never thought of myself in terms of having an occupation as a writer until I filled out my 1040 in April, where I put that down. I just did what I thought of as “my work”. I traveled and paid attention, and I tried to express what I saw clearly in language that I thought would leave me, personally on the periphery. I would remind myself that if I lost a sense of naivete I’d lose the frame of mind the reader needs, which is to start with you from scratch.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

A Dread Disease: Cancer in Modern American Culture

When the John Jacob Astors offered to give the Womans Hospital of New York a cancer pavilion in 1884, they received a cool reception from the hospital board. Some of the trustees feared that cancer was contagious. Others did not want to associate the hospital with such a sickness. “Cancer may not be contagious,” one board member is supposed to have said, “but the name is.” Irritated and impatient, the Astors decided to finance the building of a new and separate institution for women with cancer. It opened in 1887, only a century ago, as the New York Cancer Hospital, the first such institution in the United States.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

A Balanced View of Humankind

Sociologist Samuel Oliner, tweedy, bespectacled, and silverhaired, is the visual ideal of the small university professor, but his handsome features and thoughtful manner conceal a dark truth, certain horrendous experiences of his childhood and teens that are central to his real identity. Oliner rarely speaks of them to friends or to colleagues at Humboldt State University at Arcata in northern California, but seeking to exorcise the demons of that period from his psyche he wrote a memoir, privately published in 1979, titled Restless Memories. It opens with an account of the event that destroyed Oliner’s world and led him, forty years later, to undertake the major work of his life, an ambitious research project, just completed, on the psychological and social factors that make for human altruism.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

The Rediscovery of Experiment

“Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment,” wrote American scientist Robert Millikan on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for physics in 1924. “Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both, by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations.”

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

The Tursiops Mystery

After seeing so much wretched debris, Bob Schoelkopf found it jarring to encounter a corpse that looked beautiful. It had washed ashore alive at Lewes, Delaware, just before noon, and expired as someone tried to move it. This death raised the body count to thirty, in six weeks.

The corpse arrived in Cape May at 5:00 on July 30, 1987, on the flatbed of a pickup truck aboard the ferry from Lewes. Now it lay motionless on a bed of ice, seven feet long and sleek. Like the others, it appeared to be smiling.

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Foreword

Sep 01 1988

Foreword

It is a curious fact that in an age so dominated by the products of science and technology, there is a relatively low level of interest in the subject. As recently as twenty years ago, science-writing staffs hardly existed among newspapers. Even the largest newspapers have taken on science staffs only within the last few years. Before 1984, there were only nineteen newspapers in the country that had weekly science sections, mostly dedicated to health and medicine although that number increased to sixty-six within two years. The controversies over AIDS and the increased public interest in preventive health contributed to this expansion, making health overwhelmingly the area of highest growth. Serious coverage of the non-health sciences remains at surprisingly low levels. Relatively few nonmetropolitan newspapers have science staffs; therefore, what few stories they run are off the wire. This makes for great blank spaces in the country, where local scientific and tecnological issues are virtually ignored by the press.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

The Slipper and Its Chamber

Be they yellow, pink, white, or combinations thereof, the lady’s slippers are among those special wildflowers whose locations are whispered only to trusted people. It’s not just that they may be rare, but also that they look rare.

Indeed, wildflower enthusiasts are usually careful to catalogue, mentally at least, the locations of these largest of our orchids. One May, when I was looking for some yellows and pinks to photograph, I asked a couple of knowledgeable friends who immediately remembered where they had seen yellow lady’s slippers twenty years earlier. We went to the spot in deep moist woods and, sure enough, they were still there.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

Medical Science in the Popular American Press: Beginnings

Medicine has a uniquely important relationship with the public. More than a science, it has a practical side employing theory, yet distinct from it. This practical side always depends on the interaction of two parties: doctor and patient. Consequently, a patient’s ideas about medicine comprise part of the practice of medicine itself. But even before becoming a patient, a person must have some conception of medical theory (science) as well. Doctors, after all, do not operate on unwilling, inanimate objects: people go to doctors for help in certain types of problems because they believe that these problems and their solutions fall under the rubric of medicine. In this regard, the efficacy of medicine depends on the general public’s conception of it.

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Nonfiction

Sep 01 1988

Looking For God's Footprints

Sure, it’s easy to make fun. Our planet flies through space more smoothly than any airplane, covered with water yet never spilling a drop, so it must have had a Designer. Our eyes display too complex an architecture to be reached by random mutations, so they must have had a Biological Engineer. Our atmosphere contains just enough oxygen, just enough carbon to support life, so it must have had an Environmental Consultant. New York City offers a brilliantly conceived breeding ground for cockroaches; surely, therefore, we can deduce the existence of a cockroach diety. The so called argument from design–from design, that is, to the existence of God, had barely been thought up before it was being satirized, and you can’t always tell the serious versions from the parodies.