Word: finlay
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...Where and how we draw our colors is the subject of Victoria Finlay's book, Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. A British author and adventurer, Finlay embarks on a quest for the origins of colors?her favorites, anyway. Finlay is part scholar, part mad scientist and always a sprightly and engaging storyteller. This search takes her, inevitably, to Sar-e-Sang mine in northern Afghanistan, the main source of lapis. "The first 20 meters would have given the stones for the Egyptian tombs," she writes. "A little later was where the Bamiyan Buddhas got their haloes." Deeper down was "where...
...genesis of Finlay's book began when she was eight, touring the Chartres Cathedral near Paris with her father. She was entranced by the sunlight beaming through the stained glass, "the blue and red lights dancing on white stones." Her father remarked that artisans had lost the secret for making the blue in the 800-year-old glass, and that comment stuck with Finlay. During a stint as a journalist in Asia, working as arts editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, she broadened the spectrum of her color obsession into ocher, indigo, yellow, green and violet...
...Both the Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology Center (known by its Spanish initials CIGB) and the Finlay Institute are part of a massive biomedical complex on Havana's west side known as the "Scientific Pole." The CIGB alone takes up some more than 120,000 square feet, mostly full of gray, monolithic Soviet-era buildings, but laid out in a campus style reminiscent of U.S. software firms. Some of the hemisphere's most advanced research in pharmaceuticals, immunology, mammal cell genetics, plant molecular biology and even plant cloning and transgenic experimentation is conducted at the CIGB. The buildings are crammed with state...
...Inside the Finlay, director Concepci?n Campa, a Politburo member, oversees an assembly line of vaccines for diseases such as hepatitis, tetanus and meningitis. When a meningitis epidemic hit the U.S. in the late '90s, the pharmaceutical giant Smith-Kline came calling - working around the softened U.S. economic embargo against Cuba - to buy a special vaccine that Campa herself had developed. Asked if Cuba had any bio-weapons research going on in its labs that Time couldn't see, Campa strongly denied it. "You see all this equipment we've imported, even for things as simple as conserving the low temperatures...
...Cuba watchers agree that even Castro - a frustrated scientist who committed his communist revolution as much to medical research as sports prowess when he consolidated his power in the 1960s - probably wouldn't be foolish enough to compromise the credibility of labs like the CIGB and Finlay by allowing bio-weaponry to be produced in them. That doesn't mean, of course, that such research and production couldn't be going on. Cuba's advanced biological and chemical research capacity has long given the international community pause, especially after bioterrorism became such a broad concern after Sept. 11. "Cuba...