Three years have passed since August 9, 2001, when President George W. Bush drew a line in the sand: he announced that research on human embryonic stem cells created before that date would be supported by federal dollars; research on lines created later would not. The President's policy has severely curtailed opportunities for U.S. scientists to study the cell lines that have since been established, many of which have unique attributes or represent invaluable models of human disease.

It was common in the past century to see the war as a blunder into which the masses were herded like sheep while the poets and philosophers grieved in vain. The new histories suggest that the war was welcomed in 1914, and particularly by the literate classes, as a necessary act of hygiene, a chance to restore seriousness of purpose after the two trivial decades of the Edwardian Belle Époque.