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U.S. News & World Report: Treaty of Versailles did not treat Germany badly
Many historians have contended for decades that the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, created by the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, treated Germany poorly and contributed to a second world war. But some scholars are now arguing that the Treaty of Versailles was neither vengeful nor did its reparations provisions, to the tune of $33 million, push Germany into World War II, says the December 2 U.S. News & World Report. Hitler may have complained that European boundaries drawn at Versailles unjustly separated “ethnic” Germans from their brethren in Germany, a case in point being the Sudetenland, but if the Allies had drawn boundaries on ethnicity alone, says William Keylor, a CAS professor of history, postwar Germany would have been bigger than it was in 1914. After four years of fighting and millions of deaths, that “was politically impossible.” Looking at Europe at the end of 1919, says Keylor, author of the forthcoming A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945, “it comes as close to an ethnographic map as any settlement before or since.”
ABC News Online: 2002 Nobel chemistry choice sparks protest
The announcement in October of this year’s Nobel prize recipient in chemistry, which was awarded to Japanese chemical engineer Koichi Tanaka on December 10, sparked a bitter dispute among scientists, says the December 9 ABC News Online, leading many of Tanaka’s peers to declare him unworthy of the award. The controversy isn’t based on the fact that Tanaka is one of the youngest Nobel laureates or because he lacks a Ph.D., but because the precision equipment maker made a one-time contribution to the field — developing a method of separating protein molecules and spreading them out in order to make detailed analysis possible. “I believe that what has happened is deeply unfair,” says Catherine Costello, a MED research professor in biochemistry. The award, a number of scientists say, should go to German scientists Michael Karas and Franz Hillenkamp, who published similar results to Tanaka’s two months after him and who have made numerous contributions to the field.
Time: Arthritis more than just a pain in the joint
A third of American adults suffer from some type of joint disease, reports Time magazine December 9, and doctors believe that osteoarthritis — a degenerative disorder in which the cartilage that cushions the inside of joints begins to break down — will affect 40 million Americans by 2020. But there’s more to the development of arthritis than bones and cartilage. Muscle weakness can precede osteoarthritis, and once damage to the joints gets under way, the body’s immune system can also add to the condition through an inflammatory process known as rheumatoid arthritis. “Everything is failing together,” says David Felson, a MED professor of medicine and a rheumatologist at Boston Medical Center. “That includes bone damage, the responses to that, muscle weakness, inflammation of the lining of the joint, and ligament disruption.”
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December 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations