Word: wars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Talk about wishful thinking. One might as well ask if there will be a war that will end all wars, or a pill that will make us all good looking. It is also a perfectly understandable question, given that half a million Americans will die this year of a disorder that is often discussed in terms that make it seem less like a disease than an implacable enemy. What tuberculosis was to the 19th century, cancer is to the 20th: an insidious, malevolent force that frightens people beyond all reason--far more than, say, diabetes or high blood pressure...
...these futuristic scenarios is an idea that most researchers have begun to embrace but that many patients will undoubtedly find difficult to accept. That is the prediction that certain cancers may require treatment for the rest of a patient's long life. Coming out of a century that declared war on the disease, a century that felt the only reasonable response to a tumor was to annihilate it, this may be hard to imagine. But turning cancer into a controllable condition is not so different from treating high blood pressure or diabetes. "I don't think curing cancer...
When Julius Caesar made his triumphal entrance into Rome in 45 B.C., he celebrated by giving a feast at which thousands of guests gorged on poultry, seafood and game. Similar celebrations featuring exorbitant consumption of animal flesh have marked human victories--in war, sport, politics and commerce--since our species learned to control fire. Throughout the developing world today, one of the first things people do as they climb out of poverty is to shift from their peasant diet of mainly grains and beans to one that is rich in pork or beef. Since 1950, per capita consumption of meat...
...hunt?" Well, the 21st century is going to be one hell of a bug hunt. There's no doubt that eerie new infectious diseases will appear, and the struggles against some of them will make the fight against the AIDS virus look like the opening battle of a war. Of course, by then there will probably be a vaccine for AIDS, and the shot will cost a few dollars or be given for free...
...short, we declared open war on the very local ecosystems that had until then been our home. As preagricultural hunter-gatherers, we humans held niches in ecosystems, and those niches, resource-limited as they always were, had indeed kept our numbers down. Estimates vary, but a figure of roughly 6 million people on Earth at the beginning of agriculture is reasonable. By 1798 the population reached 900 million. Agriculture altered how we related to the natural world and, in liberating us from the confines of the local ecosystem, removed the Malthusian lid in one fell swoop...