Word: humanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...drugs so far developed for AIDS patients, the one called CD4 is unique: it is the first substance designed specifically to combat the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. A synthetic copy of a natural protein, CD4 prevents the deadly virus from entering and infecting healthy cells. While it cannot destroy the invader, scientists hope that CD4 can neutralize its ability to attack the human immune system. Says Samuel Broder, a National Cancer Institute researcher who is a leader in AIDS drug development: "It is one of the most important steps we have ever been able to take...
...accusations came shortly after the release of a U.N. report that graphically documented the use of gas in Iraqi attacks earlier this summer. Even those reports of human suffering paled beside the horrific descriptions of Iraq's most brutal assault, the bombing last March of the village of Halabja in northern Iraq, then held by Iran, with mustard gas, cyanide and a nerve gas. When the deadly yellow and white clouds settled, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloated Kurdish bodies littered the streets. Despite the incontrovertible evidence of a chemical onslaught, Iraq did not admit to the use of poison...
...ward the mother yielded to an eleventh-hour anxiety attack. "Am I doing the right thing?" she asked. The father had one answer: "He wants to become a functional human being. We shouldn't deny him the chance to fight for that." Reza gave her the definitive response in the early-morning hours of April 5, during countdown to surgery. "When this is over," he told his mother, "I'm not going to be nice to those who don't deserve it." He ticked off recollections of deep, silently tolerated anguish inflicted by pitying glances, patronizing caresses, crass jokes...
Actually, Masson goes much further than this. "The therapeutic relationship," he writes, "always involves an imbalance of power. One person pays; the other receives. Vacations, time, duration of the sessions are all in the hands of one party. Only one person is thought to be an 'expert' in human relations and feelings. Only one person is thought to be in trouble." Well, one is tempted to say, yes indeed, that is the way it happens. Masson, however, is an absolutist; he is of the persuasion that if something is not perfect it is terrible. This point of view rarely works...
Many such thinkers downplay the idea that Jesus was God, let alone a member of a complex theological partnership called the Trinity. They emphasize his human qualities, in the hope that believers might better identify with him. But will most people be inspired by this sort of Jesus, who is so different from the Christ of the New Testament, who has captivated artists and peasants alike over the centuries? Will they want to stake their lives on a person about whom so little is certain and who is only dimly divine...