Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Henri Moureu, 79, French scientist who in World War II helped to frustrate Nazi efforts to make an atom bomb and later saved Paris from rocketing; in Pau, France. Assigned in 1940 to guard France's secret reserve of deuterium oxide (heavy water), Moureu hid it in a prison cell, then smuggled it to England. In 1944, when the Germans unveiled V-2 rockets, Moureu calculated their size and working principles. He also helped pin point launching sites targeted on Paris, which were destroyed by U.S. bombers...
...test-tube babies are not going to be popping out like peanuts." Rather the concern centers on the far-ranging social, ethical and legal repercussions. In the words of Nobel Laureate James Watson, there is the potential for "all sorts of bad scenarios." What, for instance, could prevent a scientist from taking a fertilized egg from one woman, who perhaps did not want to carry her own baby, and implanting it in the womb of a surrogate. Who then would be the child's legal mother? Or, in the words of an old joke, "Which one gets the Mother...
...Many scientists shared that surprise. For years they have talked about fertilizing the human egg in a test tube. But with every claim of success has come the inevitable countercurrent of doubt. Indeed as early as the 1940s, the eminent Boston gynecologist Dr. John Rock, a pioneer in development of the birth control pill, reported that he and colleagues had managed to fertilize an egg in vitro. But other scientists believe that the few cell divisions observed by Rock were nothing more than "parthenogenic cleavage" (division of the egg without the involvement of a sperm), probably induced by incidental stimulation...
...another English scientist, Dr. Douglas Bevis, casually dropped an even bigger bombshell. Not only had human eggs been fertilized in the test tube, said Bevis, but they had been successfully implanted in three women who subsequently gave birth. It was widely suspected that he was talking about his own work. When he proved unwilling or unable to document his claims, Bevis was so roundly denounced that he soon vowed to give up all such research. To this day, no one really knows whether Bevis was making phony claims or was a victim of the furious scientific competition between rival fertility...
...authors and publishers-that it may well be costly to print as fact books that are fictitious or, even worse, hoaxes. Charging that Rorvik and Lippincott have done just that, Oxford University Geneticist J. Derek Bromhall last week filed a $7 million libel suit against them. Bromhall, a respected scientist, notes that he would not have brought suit had Image been published as fiction. But as nonfiction, he says, the book has "defamed" him by quoting from his research "so as to create the impression that Bromhall was cooperating or in some way had helped and was vouching...