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In an April 21 Associated Press story, Lynn Moore, a MED assistant professor of epidemiology, criticized the media's tendency to oversimplify medical studies. "You get the two-sentence synopsis that turns a complicated issue into a black or white, a yes or no," she says. "That's not a great service." Moore was reacting to published doubts about the long-touted benefits of fiber -- and public confusion as medical orthodoxies are overturned.

"It's the supreme form of ego," says Joseph Boskin, a CAS professor of history, in a May 1 Boston Globe story about the seemingly large number of people who will pay to have a star named for them. "And in America, it's crucial. Immigrants came here and reinvented themselves. Their names conveyed power and identity in a new place. We are a wealthy nation, and in the history of mankind the wealthy people want to leave a legacy. That means their name. Anywhere they can."

"It's time to modify the lifelong ban on gay blood donors and institute a one-year deferral policy instead," says Douglas Starr, a COM associate professor of journalism, in an op-ed piece in the April 30 Los Angeles Times. Starr's book Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Knopf, 1998), won the Times Book Prize last year. "We're about to face a historic blood shortage," he warns. "Many blood bankers quietly agree that such a change would be reasonable and safe. Like all blood donors, they'd be rigorously screened with questions and lab tests to protect the safety of the nation's blood supply. But this screening would be based on sound public-health practice, not on residual condemnation or fear."

"More and more young Americans view starting their own businesses as the way to liberate themselves and improve the world," says Bruce Schulman, director of the CAS American Studies Program, in an essay in the April 30 Los Angeles Times. But, he adds, "entrepreneurship can never challenge the basic assumptions of capitalism. Certainly, new technologies can be agents of liberation and empowerment; they can even temper some of the market's rougher edges. But the market cannot advance values openly hostile to the profit motive."

"In The News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.

1 June 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations