Word: sissela
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Until the winter sky begins to darken, Sissela Bok, the wife of the President of Harvard University, the mother of three children, the daughter of Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Mrydal, is alone in a small garret on the top floor of her Cambridge house. She has more than a room of her own up there; she has a whole land to herself where she can dream and reminisce, a land no foreigner can invade...
...Sissela Bok is writing her first book, a study of medical ethics. She spends eight hours a day writing in her room--starting early in the morning, after jogging, and ending when her children return from school in the afternoon. She does on her three children, and when they return, she will often take them out back for a game of soccer on the palatial grounds of the house Harvard has given her husband. But during the day, with the house to herself, she writes...
...gazing, even when afflicted with writers block. She will simply walk toward a little doorway in the far corner, pass through a tiny bathroom, and emerge in her second writing room. In that room, another desk is cluttered with another set of papers. This is the room where Sissela Bok is writing a book about lying and deception. When she tires of medical ethics, she will write about dishonesty; when she tires of dishonesty, it is back through the bathroom and into the world of euthanasia, abortion and other medical issues...
Bizarre Scenario. Sissela Bok, a lecturer on medical ethics at Harvard and M.I.T. and wife of Harvard President Derek Bok, is concerned about the "brutalization" of scientists and of society unless most research is banned on fetuses that might be viable (that is, able to live outside the womb). At what point fetuses become viable is, of course, a subject under hot dispute. Federal guidelines proposed in 1971 limited experiments to fetuses less than 500 grams in weight (one fetus that weighed only 395 grams has survived outside the womb...
...Sissela Bok, former research fellow in Medical Ethics, sees The Taking of Pelham One Two Three four times and hijacks the Harvard-Radcliffe shuttlebus, demanding its collected fares. Told that the bus is free, Bok demands to be driven to Cuba. The driver lies and tells her there is not enough fuel, and she is captured attempting to parachute out the rear emergency door. "We can't all be Einstein," she shrugs, as she is led away...