Required for next week: March 19, 1996

• Chapters 7 and 8 of Tainted Truth by Cynthia Crossen. Come prepared to discuss these and ask questions about the parts you didn't understand.

In the Globe and Mail this week

• ``Federal revenue and spending'' Mar. 7, A1 The big news item this week was probably the federal budget, and most of the details are in the Mar. 7 and 8 issues. This particular item is a nice graphic showing program spending and interest on the federal debt from 1960 to 1999.
• ``New drugs raise hope that HIV manageable'' Mar.7 A1 (by Wallace Immen) A new generation of drugs, called protease inhibitors, seem to be apparently effective in combination with the standard treatment, AZT. Excitement in the AIDS research community is running high: Dr. Martin Schechter, national director of the Canadian HIV Trials Network is quoted as saying ``we've begun to think of being able to treat it as a chronic illness that can be controlled.

  However, the article goes on to say that the drugs have been tested only for short periods of time. There is a reference to ``newly published clinical trials'', but no specifics are given. It is mentioned that the new drugs could cost between $17,000 and $24,000 a year. There is a fuller discussion of the cost issue in an article on the same topic in Chance News 5.03

• ``Getting older not bad news for the brain'' Mar. 7, A10 (by Daniel Coleman, NY Times Service) Apparently brain cells die off less quickly, and with less impact on mental ability, than had been previously thought. The article is based on a paper to be published next month in the journal Neurology. Some of the data came from men and women who had volunteered to be part of a control group in a 16-year study of Alzheimer's disease. It might be the same group that reported the results of the 'nuns study' that was in the Globe & Mail last week (see March 5 handout). Chance News 5.03 has an article from the New York Times on the nuns study as well, which is considerably more thorough than the Globe & Mail article.
• ``Feds to revamp science plan'' Mar. 11, B1&B2 (Barrie McKenna) The science education community has been waiting a long time for this federal review of science and technology. According to this article, it's long on philosophy and very short on specifics. The overriding theme is to transfer government funded activity to public-private collaboration, or to the private sector. Great.