Author - SftP Archives

The Road to the Holocaust: Nazi Science and Medicine

And science as much as any other form of culture has been involved in the attempt to preserve social order; biology in particular has long served as a useful social weapon. In the late 19th and early 20th century, American and British social darwinists found in the theory of evolution by natural selection a kind of...

Book Review: Bad Blood — The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment

Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James Jones, is a chronicle of the appalling cruelty that turned people into "subjects" for the sake of science. The men in the study were told that they had "bad blood''—but the "treatment'' they received was only aspirin and iron tonic. The PHS worked with local...

Agricultural Research and the Penetration of Capital

At present, only 10% of the value added in agriculture is actually added on the farm. About 40% of the value is added in creating the inputs (fertilizer, machinery, seeds, hired labor, fuel, pesticides, etc.), and 50% is added in processing, transportation and exchange after the farm commodities leave the farm gate...

Medicine By The People: Self Help Health Care

Self-care involves developing the competence to do for oneself and one’s family and friends many of the things which we now rely on medical professionals to do. Most importantly, it means developing the capacity to diagnose common health problems and to deal with them effectively without going to a doctor and without...

Taking Back the Land

This article will first provide a discussion of the conditions in Nicaragua following the revolution. The steps taken to reconstruct the economy, particularly those relevant to the agricultural sector, will be outlined, and we will then describe the current structure and performance of this sector.

No Choice for Poor Women: Cook County — Back to Coathangers

On October 20 over 200 angry women and men from the community and the coalition packed the regularly scheduled County Board meeting to demand that Dunne’s order be reversed. Although the issue of abortion cutbacks was originally not even on the meeting’s agenda, members of the pro-choice coalition forced the Board to...

Science and the Attack on Women: Girls, Boys and Math

Seen in this light, sex role research is most easily explained as a social and political phenomenon, not a scientific one. Once again the scientific community has come forth with an apology for the status quo (in this case, male domination), and once again, it has done so with great success. There is no deliberate...

Guess Who’s Stealing Your Dinner: Robots at G.E.

Technological advance cannot be stopped, nor do I think that even if it were possible that it would be a fruitful area to explore. Rather, the social cost and abuse of technology is my concern. Since in the U.S. the collective bargaining system is the key area for dealing with the abuse of power by the corporations...

International Meeting of Radical Science Journals

The journals started meeting four years ago, for a very simple reason: we knew of each other's existence; we (sometimes) read each other's issues (when the language was not a barrier) and we were at least in part aware of the similarities and differences in our approaches. However, we knew very little of the reasons...

Nicaragua: Disability, After the Revolution

The disabled of Nicaragua have a collective history of which they can be proud. Many of them became disabled while fighting the dictatorship. A good many blind people used their disability as a disguise of innocence while smuggling messages and arms to the Sandinistas during the insurrection. They now have a...