Word: dogma
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Unworkable Dogma. Boosting productivity is less difficult in manufacturing, where output per man-hour is easily measured. But even in the factories, the problems are formidable. Many industries, notably steel and oil refining, are now highly automated and have to rely largely on growing demand and greater plant utilization to bring down unit costs. Changes in featherbedding work rules would help. But given labor's militant mood, this probably could be accomplished only at the cost of widespread disruptive strikes...
Medvedev irritated Soviet authorities when two of his works reached the West. In 1969 the Columbia University Press printed The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a devastating history of how the crackpot genetic theories of Stalin's pet scientist were established as unassailable dogma until the fall of Khrushchev...
...waters, Schall contends that the new faith in the environment has widened political differences between nations. Both Communists and leftists in the emerging countries, he says, believe that man is supreme. Therefore, "the old-line revolutionaries of the Second and Third Worlds, who are firmly fixed on the Christian dogma of the dignity of man, are quickly parting company with the new American ecological heresy." If this heresy were generally accepted, he warns, it would "deflate the revolutionary's whole claim to renew the face of the earth for man-to 'hominize' it, as Marx...
...cannot help approving of President Nixon's proposed trip to Red China. Knee-jerk anti-Communists will quote the history of broken treaties by Communist countries as an excuse for isolating this political dogma, but the wise man uses history to his advantage and does not make himself a prisoner of it. The past should make us wary, but it should not paralyze our will to seek a better world through constant reappraisal of our own policies as well as those we oppose...
That process, shown in the accompanying color chart, was summarized by Crick in a series of rules that became known as the Central Dogma. Most scientists interpreted the key rule of that dogma to be that genetic information flowed in one direction: from DNA to RNA to protein. To the surprise of many molecular biologists, however, it has recently been shown that part of the process can sometimes be reversed. This finding, in the opinion of molecular biologists like Columbia's Sol Spiegelman, may offer an important clue to the workings of cancer cells (see box, page...