Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...help is on the way, at least for America's vegetation, in the form of the Center for Plant Conservation, which has its headquarters at Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum. With seed money of $500,000, the center has begun an unprecedented program, by far the most comprehensive to date, that aims to preserve every kind of threatened plant...
...spend money and energy to save, say, the frostweed or the small whorled pogonia? Medical benefits alone, says Thibodeau, could justify the center's efforts: "Well over a quarter of all prescription medicines in the U.S. are based on plant products." He points, for example, to antitumor alkaloids found in the Madagascar periwinkle that are now used in the treatment of childhood leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. "The question," says Thibodeau, "is whether you're willing to bet that there isn't another important drug out there among those 3,000 plants or whether you're willing to hold...
...ensure the preservation of most or all of the 3,000 threatened species, the center hopes eventually to create a $15 million endowment. "That works out to about $5,000 per species," says Thibodeau. "In fact, for $5,000 we will be delighted to save an endangered plant in your name." --By Jamie Murphy. Reported by David Bjerklie/New York
Some in Washington feel that Yurchenko was a KGB plant all along, that his defection in Rome was just a ruse. They say it is nonsense to believe that he was a real defector who decided to go back and face likely death because of a change of heart. Given his apparent access to the names and details of KGB agents in the U.S. and other nations, a former senior CIA counterintelligence official argues, a flood of arrests and expulsions would have followed his debriefings if his defection were legitimate. Instead, the skeptics point out, Yurchenko offered only meager pickings...
...fake question the agency's treatment of Yurchenko. Though the CIA in the past has kept defectors virtually imprisoned (KGB Officer Yuri Nosenko, who defected in 1964, was held in a tiny prison cell for nearly four years while U.S. intelligence officials bickered over whether he was a Soviet plant), the policy today is to give them as much freedom as possible in order to reinforce their belief in the American system. Yet sometimes that approach is sloppily executed. Yurchenko, for example, allegedly was left pretty much alone on weekends, with only one junior officer as his companion. How Yurchenko...