Quotes of the Day

Julie Gerberding
The Health-Crisis Manager

It was in the basement of her family's rural South Dakota home that Julie Gerberding created her first laboratory, studied the life cycle of bugs and planted the roots of her public-health career. As the first female director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she helms an agency that is the nation's front line of defense against invasions from the world of microbes both natural and, with the threat of bioterrorism, increasingly man-made. A careful, soft-spoken physician, Gerberding first drew attention for her honest, concise handling of the anthrax attacks in 2001. Since getting the top CDC post a year later, she has spearheaded the creation of the Emergency Response Center, a high-tech war room that allows the CDC to link to and share information with scientists from around the world. "We are redefining CDC as the nation's health-protection agency," says Gerberding. That means being ready for a terrorist attack with smallpox, preparing for the next influenza pandemic and battling the growing obesity epidemic among America's young all at the same time. It also means being able to think globally. During the SARS crisis, for example, the CDC became part of a pioneering virtual lab in which researchers from different continents collaborated via computer to detect, identify and analyze the agent responsible for SARS in record time. Such openness to collaboration is a hallmark of Gerberding's style and will remain the key to how the CDC handles future crises. --By Alice Park

Eric Lander
Unraveling the Threads of Life

When President Bill Clinton hosted an event at the White House four years ago to celebrate the end of the race to decode human DNA, the headlines belonged to the leaders of the two competing teams: J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins. But everyone in the room knew that the unheralded star of the race was the big teddy bear of a man sitting in the fourth row.

It was Eric Lander, while working for Collins in the tortoise-paced Human Genome Project, who saw that his team was losing and made it his business to beat Venter's harelike private venture at its own game. With $34 million from the Genome Project and a $38 million loan from M.I.T.'s Whitehead Institute, Lander ordered dozens of special-purpose computers and state-of-the-art capillary machines and built a huge automated gene-sequencing pipeline so insatiable that he was soon grabbing long stretches of DNA from other labs to feed its monstrous appetite. It was his lab's work that brought the race to a photo finish, and it was his name that appeared first on the Nature article that published the results.

Lander, 47, a math prodigy who learned genetics in his spare time, has always seemed a little larger than life. He was valedictorian of his class at brainy Stuyvesant High School in New York City, took first place in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, graduated first in his class at Princeton and earned a Ph.D. in math as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He was teaching economics at Harvard when he started reading about DNA. "Suddenly it was clear to me that all the beautiful complexity of life had simplicity at its core," he says. "This is the kind of thing mathematicians love." Today Lander is leading the effort to use the new genetic tools to find treatments for ancient human diseases. At the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., which he founded and directs, he is bringing together M.I.T. engineers who can navigate the genetic code and Harvard doctors who understand cancer, infectious diseases and psychiatric illness. It's an enormous challenge — just Lander's size. --By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Bernard Lewis
Seeking the Roots of Muslim Rage

A few months after the attacks on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, several key Washington figures were invited to dinner at the Vice President's residence. The star turn was by an elderly professor from Princeton, whom Dick Cheney asked to conduct a seminar on Islam, the Koran and Muslim attitudes toward Americans. The teacher was Bernard Lewis, now 87, who first studied the Islamic world in his native London in the 1930s and — with a break spent serving in British intelligence during World War II — has been engaged in a life of scholarship ever since. But it is only in the past few years that the depth of Lewis' influence on key U.S. policymakers has become clear.

In a 1990 article in the Atlantic, Lewis identified the struggle between Islam and the West as a "clash of civilizations," long before the term was fashionable. The roots of Muslim rage, he argued, lay less in any evils of the West than in a "feeling of humiliation" in the Islamic world, deriving from the fact that Muslims' proud civilization had been "overtaken, overborne and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors." Once the the rage and failure of the Islamic world slipped out of their natural confines, as they did on Sept. 11, 2001, neoconservatives were able to argue that something dramatic was needed to ameliorate the threat to the West. Only transformation of the politics of the Islamic nations would suffice. Lewis — who is close to Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons' favorite Iraqi politician — became an advocate of intervention in Iraq in the hope of establishing a modern democracy there.

So the struggle in Iraq is as much a test of a theory as it is a war. For Lewis and the neoconservatives, the failure of Islam to reconcile itself to modernity is now too dangerous to leave alone. Moreover, they believe, the application of external force can be a catalyst for reform and peace. No scholar has had more influence than Lewis on the decision to wage war in Iraq. To what end, we don't yet know. --By Michael Elliott

Edward Witten
The World in A Superstring

Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may finally be on the verge of success, largely thanks to Edward Witten, generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world. "Ed is unique," says John Schwarz, a theorist at Caltech, "the kind of person who comes along once a century."

The tall, thin, soft-spoken Witten, 52, didn't even set out to be a scientist. He majored in history at Brandeis and originally planned to be a journalist but ended up getting a Ph.D. in physics instead. By the mid-1980s, some of his colleagues had decided that the answer to Einstein's failed dream was to treat the building blocks of matter — quarks, photons, electrons and such — as minuscule, vibrating strings of energy rather than as particles. But superstring theory was considered no more than an esoteric and eccentric subspecialty until Witten (by this time a full professor at Princeton) turned his attention to it. Before long he was the dominant player in the field, and string theory was the hottest area of physics. Many of the big developments in string physics — the kind of ideas that break through theoretical logjams and bring everyone to a deeper level of understanding — can be traced to Witten. "Most other people have made one or two such contributions," says Juan Maldacena, who, like Witten, is at Einstein's old stomping ground, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. "Ed has made 10 or 15."

What sort of contributions? Don't ask, unless twistor-space methods and Yang-Mills theories are your cup of tea. But if Witten's string theory is right, it means that the quest Einstein began to find the ultimate laws of the universe may nearly be over. The proof, however, may still be many years off. Witten once called string theory "a bit of 21st century physics that somehow dropped into the 20th century." If so, Witten clearly has the 21st century mind to handle it. --By Michael Lemonick

Hernando De Soto
Unlocking the Riches of the Poor

Development schemes for Third World countries rarely benefit the poor, largely because aid is too often squandered by corrupt bureaucracies. That makes fresher, commonsense visions like those of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto all the more welcome. De Soto has spent years looking deep inside the underground economies where poor people — who make up two-thirds of the world's population — eke out a living. He figures the value of their extralegal property, from cinder-block squatter homes to black-market street-vendor sales, at almost $10 billion. De Soto insists that bringing the poor and their assets into the formal economy, which is usually closed to them by oligarchies and epic red tape, would eclipse all previous development efforts.

But how? De Soto, 62, offers a simple solution: give these underground denizens legal title to their homes and businesses. That would grant them access to bank credit and investment capital, much as the property-title revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries enriched Western Europe and North America. A limited experiment in Peru in the 1990s proved the idea had merit when it brought in more than $1 billion in new tax revenue. Some 30 heads of state, from Egypt to Mexico, have hired de Soto for similar projects. "I think our time has come," says de Soto. "Four billion people exist outside the market, where angry folks like Osama bin Laden followers lurk."

This month de Soto became the second recipient of the Washington-based Cato Institute's $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. "Hernando sees strong entrepreneurs among the poor who make do in such horrible circumstances," says Cato's president, Edward Crane. "This is going to grow." And so, it's hoped, will the fortunes of those underground. --By Tim Padgett

Samantha Power
Voice Against Genocide

"We have all been bystanders to genocide," Samantha Power wrote in the opening of her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. "The crucial question is why." Combining archival research with her own reporting from the killing fields of Rwanda and Bosnia, Power, a former freelance journalist and war correspondent, and a graduate of Harvard Law School, set out to explain why the U.S., at the height of its power, failed to stop the major genocides of the 20th century. Power's study examined U.S. responses to such horrors as the Ottoman massacre of the Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, the crimes of Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds. In each case, Power argued, U.S. policymakers "did almost nothing to deter the crime." During atrocities like Saddam's slaughter of the Kurds and the Hutu killing of 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda, the U.S.'s refusal to intervene emboldened the killers even more.

What made Power's argument so bracing — and cemented its place as one of the decade's most important books on U.S. foreign policy — was her verdict that, far from ignoring genocide, three generations of American leaders knowingly and deliberately decided it was not in the country's interest to stop it. "One of the most important conclusions I have reached," Power wrote, "is that the U.S. record is not one of failure. It is one of success ... U.S. officials worked the system and the system worked."

A Problem from Hell won the Pulitzer Prize and made Power, an Irish-born 33-year-old who is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, the new conscience of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Though she worked as an adviser to former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, Power has a nuanced philosophy that is not an easy fit with either party. She condemns the first Bush Administration for not committing military force to stop Iraqi genocide before and after the first Gulf War. But she opposed the second Gulf War. "My criterion for military intervention — with a strong preference for multilateral intervention — is an immediate threat of large-scale loss of life," she has said. "That's a standard that would have been met in Iraq in 1988 but wasn't in 2003." --By Romesh Ratnesar

Bjorn Lomborg
Green Contrarian

He just might be the Martin Luther of the environmental movement. A statistician from the University of Aarhus in Denmark, Bjorn Lomborg examined the state of the world, using reputable sources and long series of data in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, and found a surprising thing: by most measures the planet is getting healthier — less pollution, more forests, more food per head. He exposed the often misleading and selective use of scientific evidence by environmental pressure groups, urged us to be optimistic rather than despairing about environmental problems, and set out what should be the true priorities of environmental action. He thinks global warming is happening but that it would be better and cheaper for the world to adapt to it rather than cut carbon emissions.

Lomborg was not the first to say these things, but he hit a nerve. Environmentalists reacted to him in the way that corporate public relations departments had learned not to react to them: by fanning the flames with intemperate attacks. He was vilified in Scientific American magazine. He was found guilty of "scientific dishonesty" by a national committee of Danish scientists (the verdict was later overturned). With each attack, sales of his book boomed. And try as they might, the critics could not paint this mild-mannered, bicycle-riding, leftish vegetarian as a corporate apologist.

Lomborg now runs the Environmental Assessment Institute for the Danish government. His next big project will assemble a group of top economists to rank the world's priorities from a short list of 10: trade barriers, malnutrition, climate change, conflicts, financial instability, sanitation, human migration, communicable diseases, education and corruption. --By Matt Ridley, author of Nature via Nurture

Sandra Day O'Connor
Good Sense, Swing Vote

Despite the divisiveness of political discourse these days, most sensible Americans share common ground on most issues. They realize that on a variety of controversies — abortion, affirmative action, religion in public life — there are legitimate values that compete and must be pragmatically balanced.

For more than three decades, the Supreme Court has been able to define this common ground. Its complex process of getting there through split decisions based on opinions that concur and dissent in parts can seem magical. In fact, that magic has a human face to it: that of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. By being the practical-minded swing vote on the court, she has quietly become one of the most influential people in the U.S. and, at age 74, has let friends know that she has no plans to relinquish that role.

Plucked by Ronald Reagan in 1981 from a state appeals court in Arizona to be the first female on the Supreme Court, O'Connor established a reputation for seeking sensible outcomes on a case-by-case basis rather than developing a sweeping legal philosophy. By the 1990s, she had become the swing vote that most frequently determined the most important cases. That was evident in a 1992 landmark abortion ruling, cobbled together with partial concurrences, in which she reaffirmed Roe v. Wade while noting the legitimate state interests in protecting "the life of the fetus that may become a child." In the University of Michigan affirmative-action cases last year, she grounded her opinion in contemporary practical interests rather than immutable philosophic principles. "We expect," she wrote, "that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

Her elegant, personal 2003 autobiography was titled, somewhat misleadingly, The Majesty of the Law. But her own majestic qualities are refreshingly devoid of regal pretense. They are marked instead by the humility and tolerance and restraint that are the true foundations of the constitutional principles that she endeavors both to balance and to obey. --By Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute

Joschka Fischer
European Without Being Anti-American

He left high school without passing exams and shunned university, but Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister and a leader of its Green Party, has become one of the leading political thinkers in Europe. In the 1980s he convinced his party that it could not change the world unless it became more pragmatic and therefore electable. He has helped modernize German thinking on the use of force: without his personal intervention, the Bundestag would have voted to support neither NATO action against Serbia in 1999 nor the deployment of German troops to Afghanistan two years later. And his speech at Berlin's Humboldt University four years ago triggered a major debate on how closely the countries of the European Union should be integrated.

Despite his leftist past — as a young man, he once spent seven weeks in jail and took part in street fights against the Frankfurt police — Fischer did not echo Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's anti-American rhetoric during the 2002 elections. "He understands the importance of U.S. leadership in the world and wants to channel it in the right direction," says Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution. Unlike some other Europeans, says Gordon, "Fischer understands Israel's security dilemmas and the importance of a European commitment to Israeli security." He is thought to covet the position of E.U. Foreign Minister, which will be established when a draft European constitution is ratified. Europe would be lucky to have so thoughtful a spokesman. --By Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform in London

Niall Ferguson
Theorist of Liberal Imperialism

Timing is everything. In the spring of 2003, Niall Ferguson was known among historians as an astonishingly prolific scholar who had published important books on the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, the House of Rothschild and World War I, and was the impresario of a school of "counterfactual" writers who took seriously the amateur historian's favorite question: What would have happened if ...?

Then his book Empire — originally written to accompany a British TV series — was published in the U.S. The book's central thesis was a defense of the "liberal imperialism" that Britain purported to practice toward the end of its time as a great power. Moreover, Ferguson argued that the U.S., whether it wanted to admit the fact or not, had become an imperialist power itself. Rather as Rudyard Kipling had done a century before (though he is careful to say that Kipling's language is that of a bygone age), Ferguson invited Americans to take up the white man's burden that the tired British had perforce laid down.

Imperialism had already made its intellectual comeback in the U.S. by the time Empire was published, but since it hit bookstores just as the U.S. Army was triumphantly entering Baghdad, it was an instant success. As it happens, Ferguson, a Scot (and proud of it), now 40, doesn't think the U.S. has done a very good job in Iraq. It was, Ferguson says, "very clear" that there would be a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq, as Americans would have known if they had studied the history of the British there. And in his new book, Colossus, he worries that the U.S. may not have the will or the wallet to stick at its imperial mission long enough to make a difference. --By Michael Elliott

Linus Torvalds
The Free-Software Champion

In August 1991, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a request to an Internet discussion group asking for help on a project to build a free computer operating system (OS). Linus Torvalds wanted an OS that he could tinker with. But neither Apple nor Microsoft was much interested in giving away the codes that make their machines run.

With this simple request, Torvalds began a process that would complete one of the most extraordinary collaborations in history. In 1984 M.I.T. researcher Richard Stallman had launched the "free-software movement" in a project to build a free operating system that he called GNU. It provided the scaffolding within which Torvalds' kernel ("Linux") could hang. In the dozen years since Torvalds' post, literally thousands of programmers from around the world have authored and tinkered with the GNU and Linux code to produce Microsoft's most dreaded competition. Microsoft's fear is not that this GNU/Linux OS is better. It might well be, but that's a problem Microsoft could fix. Yet what Microsoft sells no one else can, because the company controls the source code that makes its programs run. The source for GNU/Linux, however, is free for anyone to take. That freedom is guaranteed by the license that governs it. And that guarantee has led key competitors of Microsoft — IBM, in particular — to invest billions in an OS that has been promised to remain free.

Fueling competition among the world's most powerful technology companies was not in Torvalds' mind in 1991. Nor could he have imagined the extraordinary movement that his self-effacing but certain leadership would help produce. Yet there is little doubt that the free-software movement for which Stallman planted the seed has achieved a permanence through Torvalds' pragmatic work. And there is no doubt that the open, collaborative model that produced GNU/Linux has changed the business of software development forever. --By Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and author of Free Culture

Steven Pinker
How Our Minds Evolved

Britain's Financial Times once described Steven Pinker as "a handsome man" with a hairstyle that "works equally well for Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant." But even if the Harvard psychologist didn't look like a rock star, he would still play to packed houses on the lecture circuit. He has something rare among top-tier scholars, an ability to convey complex ideas with clarity, flair and wit. That's one reason his books — most recently, The Blank Slate — make best-seller lists even as they make waves in academia. The other reason is those waves in academia. Pinker is on the forefront of an intellectual sea change.

Decades of social-science dogma depicted the human mind as having few built-in features — kind of like a computer with no programs, a blank slate. Pinker, along with others in the young field of evolutionary psychology, disagrees. For starters, he argued in The Language Instinct, we have a genetically based word processor, engineered by natural selection. Among the other legacies of natural selection, say the new Darwinians, are such impulses as jealousy and vengefulness. So Pinker draws fire from those who ascribe all ills to the corruption of pristine souls. But evolutionary psychology has a brighter side: love and compassion are also in our genes. Besides, Pinker notes, biology isn't destiny. "Nature," he quotes Katharine Hepburn's character in The African Queen as saying, "is what we were put in this world to rise above."

Every half-century, it seems, an eminent Harvard psychologist crystallizes an intellectual era. Near the end of the 19th century, William James, writing in Darwin's wake, stressed how naturally functional the mind is. In the mid--20th century, after a pendulum swing, B.F. Skinner depicted the mind as a blank slate. Now the pendulum is swinging again. Harvard, which lured Pinker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, seems poised to keep its tradition alive. --By Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Louise Arbour
Empathetic Judge

In the summer of 1999, Louise Arbour visited a war-crimes site in the southeastern Kosovo village of Vlastica. She walked for a time with a local Albanian woman, who confessed to still fearing for her life. "Don't worry," Arbour replied. "We're here now."

The exchange was classic Arbour: a singular balance of strength and empathy. During her three years as chief prosecutor of war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, this remarkable Canadian stood up to the bullies and stood up for the victims. She demonstrated courage and tenacity, compassion and tact. Above all, she demonstrated persistence. By working to bring to trial former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and many other government officials, Arbour was instrumental in raising the profile of the tribunal from relative obscurity to what many believe to be the most effective international criminal court ever. She returned home when she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1999. Her international influence is only likely to grow anew when she assumes, in June, the position of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, to which Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently named her.

When this Montreal-born jurist was named chief prosecutor in the Hague in 1996, the world, perhaps, did not know what to expect from her. But Canadians did. Our nation has a history of passionate advocacy and determined action for human rights, and the Canadian armed forces have long played a significant role in peacekeeping missions around the world. Our government is the first to make it a priority to ensure that the supply of cheap drugs to combat HIV and AIDS is made available to Africa. We knew that Arbour would represent the virtues we hold dearest: fairness, integrity, a respect for diversity, a belief in equality and, above all else, respect for the individual. She did just that, with exemplary dedication and boundless energy, during her tenure at the court in the Hague. I don't doubt for a moment that she will do so again, and this time on a global scale, in her new assignment. --By Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada

Jong-Wook Lee
Health Watchdog

He never had a grand sense of mission to "save the world," as he puts it. Instead, he was motivated by a fascination with population-size health problems — infectious diseases that claim not handfuls of victims but tens of thousands if left untreated. What lured this Korean-born physician from working with leprosy patients in Hawaii to heading up the immunization program at the World Health Organization (WHO) and led to his being appointed the agency's top executive last year was the notion that as devastating as these diseases could be, they could also be stopped. "What I learned from my career in public health is the importance of action," he says. But when there are 192 member states to answer to, action is not always easy. WHO's responsibilities range from providing basic health education to responding to the outbreak of unknown diseases. It is Lee's job to direct the agency's resources where they are needed — and can accomplish — the most.

Since taking office, Lee has steered WHO into uncharted medical waters. After a decade of ceding the primary role in the worldwide fight against AIDS to the U.N., WHO is making a stronger commitment to ensuring that available drug treatments get to as many of the 40 million infected around the world as possible. Under his direction, the agency is pushing its first antitobacco treaty — urging nations to levy higher taxes on tobacco and widen smoke-free areas — and working to update the international rules for dealing with disease outbreaks. It's an ambitious agenda for WHO, and its success will ultimately rest on how well Lee can move beyond the talk and put it into action. --By Alice Park

Paul Ridker
The Inflammation Response

Fighting Infection And Developing Heart disease don't seem at first to have much in common. Microbes, after all, attack from the outside in, whereas a heart attack is an inside-out job, a gradual gumming up of the body's plumbing system with cholesterol until blood flow to the heart almost comes to a standstill.

At least that's what doctors used to think. But Dr. Paul Ridker has changed that and the way doctors treat heart disease. A cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, he has spent the past decade exposing an alliance between the infection-fighting immune system and heart disease that could finally explain one of the biggest health puzzles in recent decades: If cholesterol is such a major contributor to the nation's No. 1 killer, why do half of all heart attacks occur in people with normal cholesterol levels?

The answer, it turns out, involves inflammation. As the body's first line of defense against invading bugs, it's the reason that cuts swell and turn red as immune cells flood in to attack the microbes. Fat, when it builds up in plaques inside heart vessels, can launch the same type of alert, causing the plaques to rupture and lead to a heart attack. Ridker exploited this response by measuring inflammation with a specific marker of the process, C-reactive protein (CRP). CRP is easily picked up in the blood and reliably indicates how much inflammation is occurring in the heart — and thus how likely a heart attack might be.

Ridker's first encounters with disease came early on; his family spent two years in New Delhi, where he made a painful and personal acquaintance with parasite after parasite. Before getting his medical degree from Harvard, he spent a year in sub-Saharan Africa, treating patients in Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe just as the AIDS epidemic was emerging. "My experiences overseas gave me the idea that you could use a very different toolbox to tackle the heart-disease problem," says Ridker.

While researchers agree that CRP is a strong predictor of heart disease, they are still conducting studies to prove that reducing CRP levels can actually cut heart-disease risk. Ridker has shown that statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs, work as anti-inflammatory agents as well, hitting heart disease with a one-two punch. Even more exciting are new trials showing that the inflammatory response may play a role in other conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and cancer. After decades undercover, inflammation's role may finally be out in the open. --By Alice Park

Woo Suk Hwang & Shin Yong Moon
Adventures in Cloning

Making scientific history is hard enough. It's tougher still when a lot of people wish you hadn't. That was the problem facing Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University when they announced in February that they had cloned human embryos for the first time. With that development, a medical and ethical door that had remained mostly closed was kicked wide open.

The researchers' method was familiar to anyone who has been following the cloning parade from sheep to mice to other animals over the past several years. After harvesting 242 eggs from 16 female volunteers, Hwang and Moon removed the eggs' genetic material and replaced it with DNA extracted from adult cells donated by the same women. They then used tiny bursts of electricity to fuse together the donor material and egg. Nourished in dishes, 30 of the hybrid eggs developed into blastocysts — balls of hundreds of cells that represent one of the earliest stages of fetal development. When couples undergo in-vitro fertilization, a blastocyst successfully implanted in the womb has a very good chance of becoming a baby.

That's what spooks cloning foes, since in this case, the resulting babies would have been not random mixes of two parents but perfect copies of the women who donated the DNA. That, however, is not what Hwang and Moon wanted. "We will never try to produce cloned human beings," Hwang said. What they do want to produce — and, in fact, did — is embryonic stem cells, the biological blank slates that develop into all the body's tissues. Thanks to stem-cell technology, people could become their own tissue donors with pristine, unrejectable cells at the ready to repair damage done by, say, Alzheimer's disease or spinal-cord injury. Stem-cell research in the U.S. has been hamstrung since the Bush Administration's 2001 decision restricting federal funding for the work to existing cell lines. In South Korea, which forbids human cloning only for reproductive purposes, the game is much more open.

Nobody pretends that Hwang and Moon's findings are ready for clinical application or that they don't raise some disturbing possibilities. But few people deny that they raise some thrilling ones too — precisely what science is supposed to do. --By Jeffrey Kluger

Jurgen Habermas
The Sage of Reason

His rationalist system of social thought is the most elaborate and methodical in the contemporary world, which is why he is often cited as a sage by people who would rather chew glass than read his lumbering prose. But it is the awesome yet careful architecture of Jurgen Habermas' lifetime of scholarship that undergirds his reputation as an independent commentator on most of the ills of the contemporary world. Reason, for this 74-year-old German philosopher-sociologist, is practical, and reason is rooted in the ability to communicate clearly with one another. When people of different cultures come together to speak and listen on an equal footing, they can — and must — formulate a consensus. Constitutions help. So does the law. On such grounds, Habermas has for years argued against the trendier (in the U.S., anyway) French postmodernists.

Having written elaborate treatises on philosophy, social theory and the nature of communication — even his dissertation on the rise of "the public sphere" transformed media studies into a hardheaded discipline — he regularly takes to European Op-Ed pages with lucidity and passion. A man of the left who rose from the ruins of Nazi Germany and attempted to reconstruct Marxism on a reasoned and liberal basis, he was never sentimental about communism. Nor did he fall into the trap of thinking that the cold war was a plot perpetrated malevolently and unilaterally by the U.S.

In recent years, he has become a sort of European uncle watching America with hope, alarm and clarity, consistently arguing against knee-jerk anti-Americanism. In the 1990s, he defended Operation Desert Storm and supported the U.S. interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo on human-rights grounds. But Habermas' carefully grounded tribute to international law also gives weight to his critiques of the Bush doctrine and the war in Iraq. For Habermas, it is the "morality of international law" that refutes Washington's "revolutionary perspective." In this collision of ideas about America's role in the world, Habermas emerges as the genuine conservative. --By Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University

Tariq Ramadan
Modernist or Extremist?

Few observers deny the seductive brilliance of Swiss philosopher and Islamic theoretician Tariq Ramadan, but disagreement over his true agenda is ferocious. Within the past half-decade, Ramadan has become enormously influential among Muslims throughout Europe. He calls for believers to embrace and practice Islam in a thoroughly modern manner. And he advises Muslims on how they can fully integrate into European societies without betraying the universal laws and values of Islam. A successful author, he sells around 50,000 audiocassettes of his speeches each year in France alone.

Detractors claim that Ramadan's messages are filled with a double language. His followers, they say, can decipher his words as a call to furtively spread fundamentalist Islam in society under the cover of modernism and integration. Critics have denounced as anti-Semitic Ramadan's recent critique of "Jewish French intellectual" reaction to the intifadeh. They were appalled when he suggested last year a "moratorium," rather than an outright ban, on the stoning of adulterers in order to consider the legitimacy of the act. (In 2003, his Islamist brother Hani was dismissed as a schoolteacher after defending the stoning of women in Le Monde.)

Ramadan's fans insist that his modernist message is genuine. Some Americans will soon get a chance to judge for themselves. In September he is scheduled to teach a course at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for International Peace Studies called Religion & Conflict. --By Bruce Crumley

Jeffrey Sachs
Economentalist

What's an ambitious economist to do if he has already counseled countries from Bolivia to Poland through rough financial times, advised the Pope on globalization and helped launch a global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria? For Jeffrey Sachs, 49, the logical next act is to help save the entire planet from what he warns could be an "environmental catastrophe" caused by climate change and the destruction of wildlife. In 2002, Sachs abruptly ended a 22-year Harvard career to head Columbia University's Earth Institute, which has 19 research divisions. He has also become a top adviser to the United Nations on how to ease global poverty without putting extra pressure on an overburdened environment, a goal known as sustainable development.

Sachs wants to demolish the notion that economic progress and environmental protection are incompatible. The Earth Institute's approach is to bring together scientists, economists and policy makers to find the best developmental paths. For example, institute researchers will work on techniques that industries can use to slow down climate change by storing underground the carbon released from fossil fuels rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

"We don't have to close down our society to respond to climate change," Sachs insists. "We just have to learn to do something we've never thought about doing before, and that's to manage carbon." That could give us a chance to have our economic growth — and a nice atmosphere too. --By Charles Alexander

Jill Tarter
Waiting for ET's Call

Folks interested in life on other worlds have focused most of their attention on Mars lately. But Jill Tarter makes it her business to pay attention to what's going on in the other 100 billion galaxies that fill the observable sky.

Tarter is director of research at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., where her job is to keep her ears open. The universe fairly roars with electromagnetic noise, most of which flows in randomly. If any arrived in regular pulses, it would be a good bet that something smart was doing the sending.

Tarter has been listening for such cosmic drumbeats for a while. She joined the ET hunt in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she used the school's 85-ft. telescope to search for alien signals. She later became a scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey, which conducted similar research. This experience has led her to bring imagination to her work. With the help of a $25 million endowment from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, she and the other SETI scientists are developing a new telescope array — a collection of up to 350 steerable dish antennas, electronically combined to do the work of a far bigger 115-meter antenna. An even more powerful dish array is being planned. The odds of finding anything are long and the universe that Tarter's team is scanning is big, but they're willing to be the ones who listen for a whisper. --By Jeffrey Kluger

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