Word: distinctive
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...structure of DNA so revealed, medical scientists began as never before to focus their attention on the internal functioning of the cell and the myriad chemical interactions that are the essence of the activities of all living things. The new field of study soon established itself as a distinct scientific specialty, known as molecular biology, and grew so rapidly that some of the brightest young minds in the Western world began flocking to its bustling labs and classrooms...
...same-sex marriage as "trendy moral relativism," Coats can easily justify denying certain citizens fundamental rights available to all other Americans. It is simple and safe to curtail a group's rights if that group is reduced to a bunch of flighty deviants who abide by a parallel and distinct version of morality. Such tactics have been used for centuries, to a far more extreme degree by slave-owners and Nazis. Both oppressor groups justified their persecution and slaughtering by reducing their respective objects of hatred to the sub-human...
...President has told interviewers that he sees no inconsistency between these two statements. Yeah. Sure. But the conventional view, not only from foes but also from White House aides, is that they typify a split of Clinton's term into distinct--but dissonant--halves. Stage One, an activist, anything-is-possible phase lasted from Inauguration to November 1994. In the public mind it was marked by fumbling, waffling, minor scandals, disastrous appointments and above all the grandiose health-care plan that was to be Clinton's monument but that died ignominiously in congressional committees. The voters spoke, sweeping Democrats...
...anthropologists, however, Africa's most impressive statistics are the ones that measure the enormous diversity of its people. Some 1,300 languages are spoken on the continent, about a third of the world's total. Each represents a distinct ethnic group with its own beliefs and its own rituals and ceremonies--some of which have been performed for hundreds of years...
...Giroux; 306 pages; $27.50), David Hajdu suggests why someone with such talent would settle for such anonymity. Strayhorn was homosexual; in that era the only way he could live an openly gay life was to keep out of the public eye. Hajdu gives Strayhorn his belated due as a distinct musical voice and an engaging, if conflicted, personality. Strayhorn's taste and wit, his relentless drinking, his lovers, his activism in Harlem cultural life and the civil rights movement, his generosity--all are sensitively evoked. "He was just everything that I wanted in a man, except he wasn't interested...