Author - SftP Archives

Health and Nutrition Column: Is David Rockefeller Pissing His Calcium Away?

Did David Rockefeller break his hip (see box) because he hates nuts, soybeans, and steamed green leafy vegetables such as chard, beet tops, kale, and spinach? If his diet lacks these and other magnesium-rich foods, he may be excreting excessive calcium in his urine, and have osteoporosis (porous bones), i.e. fragile...

Local 1199

On November 30, 1973, 200 employees from George Washington University Hospital demonstrated in the hospital lobby to demand that the hospital administrator arrange for a Union 1199 representation election for approximately 750 clerical, technical, and nursing personnel. After refusing to meet with a delegation from...

Women Hospital Workers

In our initial enthusiasm for a women's movement, it seemed to us as if our common experiences as women — the expectation that we would all be housewives, our lower pay, the degrading use of our bodies in a thousand different ways — were so overwhelming that we could overcome all other divisions which split us up...

Racism at Harvard

In the middle of May, as students at Harvard Medical School were preparing for their exams, as many medical schools around the country were completing their admissions decisions, as President Ford spoke of "alternatives to busing," Bernard D. Davis, a Professor at Harvard Medical School, stirred up a storm the impact...

Sociobiology: Tool for Social Oppression

Recently, Science for the People groups in Boston and Ann Arbor have formed to analyze and combat this latest appearance of biological determinism. The Boston group prepared a critique which was published in the New York Review of Books (Nov. 13, 1974) and both groups are preparing articles for popular and academic...

Review: Sociobiology — The Skewed Synthesis

In a similar fashion, the theories put forth by the sociobiologists and their predecessors help to support maintenance of the status quo and to convince people that revolutionary changes in social relationships (e.g. class structure and sex roles) are impossible. One way we see this done is by the rapid incorporation...

Report from the Boston Science Teaching Group

The Science Teaching Group has concentrated in the last few months on sales of the 3 “Science and Society” pamphlets, on a Biology Teachers’ Conference in Framingham and on consideration of new projects. Sales of the pamphlets have been going extremely well with both “The Energy Crisis” and “Genetic Engineering” (2000...

Something Old, Something New

Once again the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) will hold its annual meetings in New York, Jan., 1975. This is not new.  Once again Science for the People can be there carrying out its responsibilities to humankind by attacking, behind the mask of science, the technology and ideology of...

Science Teaching Column: Inside Prison Walls

Two of the major goals of the course were to develop the intellectual confidence of the inmates and to enhance their abilities of collectively understanding and solving their problems. Group oral reports and attempts to draw out collective solutions in discussion were methods used to accomplish these goals. The group...

Report from the Genetic Engineering Group

The group is still in the process of defining its goals, but our overall position may be summarized:  (1) Scientific progress does not equal human progress and technology is not a goal in itself.  (2) Scientists cannot be trusted to regulate their own activities; they should account for the consequences of their work...