Word: methodic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Norman Mayer, there was method to his madness on the Mall. Always a loner, he singlehanded tried to halt the threat of one kind of annihilation with that of another and died as he had lived, alone, troubled, but strangely sympathetic. What began as a righteous cause for this polite and abstemious antinuclear advocate became an obsession and ultimately ended in a hollow if not insane act of protest. Yet before his bluff was called, Mayer, 66, a balding drifter, managed to frighten the city of Washington and stage a blatant and bizarre act of terrorism at the Washington Monument...
...method of death is mostly a matter of morbid aesthetics, tangential to the far more basic and troublesome question of whether society ought to kill criminals. It is not at all clear that capital punishment deters would-be murderers better than the threat of life imprisonment. Yet there is a stubborn popular belief in the unique deterrent power of the death penalty. Even if deterrence were unequivocally disproved, however, public sentiment might still favor capital punishment. The death penalty, say proponents, is necessary to demonstrate that society takes its laws seriously; retribution seems a natural human urge. As the homicide...
...hence disease. In so-called genetic surgery, doctors hope eventually to use recombinant-DNA techniques to cut out "bad"genes and substitute "good" ones. Now, though, there may be a more immediately applicable way to correct genetic defects. In the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers described an alternative method of genetic manipulation that for the first time has been successfully used to treat a serious disease. The solution: employing a drug to reactivate apparently intact genes that had been dormant since birth...
...other issue in the Brooks fiasco--the questions raised by death by injection--itself will surely prove the starting point for a long debate. One problem is that the method has simply not been adequately tested. Thought to be quick and painless, the injection technique could also cause a bloodbath. As one doctor explained: "Sometimes it's tough as hell to find a vein. If you miss, the pain can be excruciating. And besides, even if you do get the vein, no one is really sure the convict doesn't suffer for a few minutes while the drug is being...
Harvard doctors have entered into a partnership with MIT and IBM to help develop what many experts say is the most revolutionary method of disease diagnosis ever devised...