BY HARRY RING
BY HARRY RING

Delicate - According to Ian Uydess, the latest tobacco industry researcher to become a whistle-blower, scientists were admonished to avoid words like addiction or carcinogens. If they had to mention health damage, they used "biological activity.

Progress report - In Tennessee, scene of the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, the state senate voted 20-13 to kill a bill that would have permitted school boards to fire teachers for telling students that evolution is a fact.

Sleep well - "Hydrogen gas is building up to dangerous levels in vats and pipes at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and could explode.... The hydrogen is not radioactive, but an explosion could spew radioactive material that remains in pipes, vats and ducts.... The problem came as a surprise to state and local officials." - AP dispatch from Golden, Colorado, 16 miles from Denver.

Maybe a good belch - "A 1,500-pound bundle of uranium fuel is stuck in a reactor at the nation's largest nuclear plant, and federal regulators are now mulling a plan to dislodge it. The public is not in any danger, authorities say." - Report from Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Wintersburg, Arizona.

Please, spare us - Iowa Select Farms, the state's biggest factory- type hog farm, made a video to recruit workers that includes scenes from a Farm Aid concert to support family farmers. Demanding it be removed, a Farm Aid spokesperson said they did not want to be associated "with a company that promotes industrial hog operations over family farms." The company responded it was included in the video "to show things to do in Iowa in your spare time."

No free market? - "Until last year, $30,000 in India could buy a new kidney from a doctor who paid a living donor less than $1,000.... Finally, prompted by general resentment that India was serving as a spare parts repository for richer nations, as well as by reports of shady practitioners who cut costs by stealing organs...the Indian legislature passed laws banning organ sales." - March Scientific American

Be well - At the same time it barred trading in organs of living donors, the Indian government gave a legal OK to the concept of "brain death" - that a person is dead when the brain stops functioning even if the heart and other organs are still working. Or, a cheap new source of organs.

Bunch of gripers - A year ago at the sports complex being built for the Olympic games in Atlanta, a stadium light tower collapsed, killing a worker. Then they found that dorms built for the Olympic Village were sinking as much as nine inches more than expected. Last month, a five-ton roof truss collapsed. The construction chief complained that everybody focuses on "the few incidents" and not all the things that are done right.  
 
 
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