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DIED. ADOLF BUTENANDT, 91, German scientist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work on hormones; in Munich. Beginning in 1929, Butenandt isolated a number of previously unknown sex hormones, including progesterone, which maintains pregnancy. The knowledge of hormonal structure gained from this research made possible the development of the birth-control pill. A Nazi law forced Butenandt to decline his Nobel Prize, which he finally received in 1949. After the war, he helped rebuild Germany's scientific community as head of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. DIED. THOMAS MAYNE, 93, Australian industrial chemist...
...mostly worried about oppressive majority factions. The modern special-interest group was a species unknown to him. Still, he had a fundamental insight that explains the subsequent origin of that species and its growth. The beauty of a large country, he noted, is the damper it places on factionalism. For when people are dispersed far and wide, even if some of them have "a common motive," the distance among them will make it hard for them to organize -- "to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other." The history of communications technology over the past...
...quick, penetrating and often amusing glimpses of the immigrant experience in London. This is the subject Rushdie treated so brilliantly and, as it turned out, so dangerously in The Satanic Verses. No one writes more convincingly of the tug between old and new, home and the allure of the unknown. Since these stories cannot make things worse for Rushdie than they already are, he has, on the page, the luxury of total freedom...
...most distinctive members of the European branch of the human tree are the Basques of France and Spain. They show unusual patterns for several genes, including the highest rate of the Rh-negative blood type. Their language is of unknown origin and cannot be placed within any standard classification. And the fact that they live in the region adjoining the famous Lascaux and Altamira caves, which contain vivid paintings from Europe's early hunter- gatherers, leads Cavalli-Sforza to a tantalizing conclusion: "The Basques are extremely likely to be the most direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people, among...
...misguided distortion of facts simply can't sustain high drama. In one scene, Beethoven's doomed nephew, driven to suicide by his uncle's frustarted attempts to mold him into a musical prodigy, shoots himself in the head. In a scene reminiscent of the Time-Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" commercial, the composer, miles away, simultaneously doubles over in pain...