Two Views I was pleased to see Ricki Lewis' article "Reevaluating Sex Reassignment."1 The piece is good as far as it goes, but it fails to do justice to the academic work that has been under way for the past five years, and which has used reasoned analysis to call for a change in the practice of sex reassignment surgery at birth. Such academic work has argued instead for greater gender variation and autonomy for the patients on whom surgery is now imposed. I recommend to the readers of The Scien

I was deeply disturbed by the entry on Beatrix Potter in the "Notebook" section of The Scientist on Oct. 26, 1992 [page 4]. The article used words like "gruesome" and "bizarre" to describe Potter's childhood interest in science, while giving no indication that Potter was an important scientist in her era. Her work on the symbiotic nature of lichen--the first to be published in the British isles--was read before the Linnaean Society of London by her uncle. She could neither deliver the work herse