Word: britain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...free speech. But there are some characteristically British obstacles in the way of real reform. One is that Parliament is loath to give up its traditional supremacy over the courts, which would happen if judges were allowed to declare laws unconstitutional. Another is the sheer slowness of change in Britain. But after his success at Strasbourg, Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans promised to do his best to speed it along. If the Sunday Times, closed since Nov. 30 in a dispute with its printers, ever resumes publishing, Evans says he intends to challenge the contempt laws by reporting on important...
Vanessa Redgrave is committed. She is also between acting jobs. Thus the fiery star can be found, these pre-election days in Britain, stumping the decaying Moss Side district of industrial Manchester, red hair flowing and red rosette of the Workers Revolutionary Party flapping. Redgrave seeks to become Moss Side's Member of Parliament, but most of the voters she accosts appear more concerned about jobs and high living costs than the party's proposal for a workers' militia to replace the British bobby and its jeremiads against capitalism and the monarchy. Even for such an illustrious...
...molecular biology's leap into prominence has been amply documented. In 1953, at Britain's venerable Cambridge University, two brash young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick made a discovery comparable to the fissioning of the atom or Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. In a matter of months, after cribbing clues from associates and competitors, Watson, then 25, and Crick, 36, cracked what they grandiosely called "the secret of life": they unraveled the long, spiraling architecture of the DNA molecule, a feat that suggested how heredity truly worked...
...decided to use bacteria-eating viruses as a kind of genetic scalpel; the virtually forgotten work of Rockefeller Institute's Oswald Avery; the painstaking efforts of scientists to explain exactly how DNA and its kin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), performed their magic; and finally the patient toil of Britain's Max Perutz, who unraveled the structure and precise workings of the blood's oxygen-carrying molecule that, in complexity of design, is to DNA what a skyscraper is to a town house...
Margaret Thatcher's achievement in becoming Britain's first woman Prime Minister is writ large with irony. Thursday's general election brought no cheer to feminists: Britain's only avowed lesbian MP lost her seat, as did Labour's most important woman politician, popular cabinet minister Shirley Williams. The new House of Commons contains the smallest contingent of women since 1950. As for Mrs. Thatcher herself, some regard her views on the role of women in society as being just about on a par with the Ayatollah Khomeini...