AIDS is the most serious threat to public health in decades. Historians will look back in astonishment at the Reagan Administration’s flaccid response during the first eight years of the epidemics has spread. They will ask how any President could fail to implement the most obvious public health measures, or tardily assign the making of national strategy to a quarreling commission with no recognizable expertise. They will wonder how his cabinet members could be torpid spectators of the virus’s spread, seeing it only as a pretext for impressing their own morals on others.
—Editorial: “The Reagan AIDS
Strategy in Ruins
The New York Times, Sec. 4,
p. 26, October 11, 1987
I’m rather bemused by the immense hope the new technology of genetic engineering is perceived to hold for solving most of the world’s problems.... I suggest there is an analogy here to the hope promulgated by the mechanical engineers ...
