Science

Anthropologist and co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, Mercedes Doretti. The group was founded in 1984 to investigate the fate of persons who had been “disappeared” by the former Argentinean military regime. The team consisting of an anthropologist, pathologist, radiologist, ballistic expert, and an archaeologist exhume grave sites, and the sites of massacres to determine the truth behind what happened, and to identify skeletal remains. Since their initial work in Argentina, the EAAF has worked in many other countries to investigate human rights abuses.

An expert in forensic anthropology Dr. Clyde Snow He first developed the forensic team approach to investigating human rights abuses and acted as trainer and mentor to the EAAF team.

Journalist Eileen Welsome talks about her book, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press). The Plutonium Files is about the thousands of secret, government sponsored radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting Americans during the Cold War. Welsome won the Pulitzer Prize for her initial research and writing on these experiments. Her book includes new facts about the Manhattan Project, the scientists who conducted the research, and the experiments’ victims.

Inventor and ex-magician David Levy. His inventions include a tiny keypad - the size of a credit card, a tattoo whose design can be changed at will, and a devise that seals severed arteries in one minute. In 1996, at MIT, he won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which acknowledged him as one of the nation's premier young inventors.

Barbara Bogaev interviews astronomer and writer Donald Goldsmith about the future of space travel. He was the consultant to the PBS documentary film "Voyage to the Milky Way" (TV/Books) and is the author of the companion book.

Julia Ericksen is the author of the new book "Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century" (Harvard University Press). Ericksen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University.

Nobel-prize winning biologist, Dr. David Baltimore talks about where we are in the search for an HIV vaccine. He also talks about recent studies and what they've told us about the disease. Baltimore heads the National Institutes of health advisory committee for AIDS Vaccine.

Robert Weinberg is the author of the new book "One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins." (Basic Books) Weinberg talks about how cancer develops and what can be done to stop it. He is Director of the Oncology Research Laboratory at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts. He is also a professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. He is also author of "Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer."

An expert on fungi, George Hudler is a professor of Plant Pathology at Cornell University. He's written a new book about the existence of fungi in all its forms, "Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds: The remarkable story of the fungus kingdom and its impact on human affairs." (Princeton University Press).

An excerpt from the 6/6/94 interview with astronaut Alan Shepard. He died yesterday.