Working Together Against the Infectious Diseases There is another area that really may sound like it’s outside the range of politics and Iraqi people where we’re cooperating together, but it’s an area that is vital to the well-being of the Chinese people, the American people, the people in the world, and it’s now we’re working together to deal with the dangers inherent in infectious diseases. China’s sobering experience with SARS stands as a lesson to all countries on the challenge of infectious diseases. I have called HIV/AIDS the world’s greatest weapon of mass destruction today. It threatens to kill tens of millions of men, women and children—in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in the subcontinent, especially in Africa—and yes, it is a danger to China as well. And China’s government is facing up to this crisis, working with us. The United States has told China we are ready to help. Last month, our Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson spoke in China of President Bush’s interest in furthering our practical cooperation on HIV/AIDS and other health issues. Specialists from our Centers for Disease Control are working on the ground with their Chinese counterparts. Our National Institute of Health has granted $14.8 million to help China upgrade its health care infrastructure. My friends, it is upon such concrete forms of cooperation on issues of regional and global importance that a 21st century US-China relationship will be built, issue by issue, experience by experience, challenge by challenge, initiative by initiative, program by program. As China participates more actively in world affairs, we will extend our welcome. Building and sustaining a healthy overall relationship is good for America, it is good for China, it is good for the region, and good for the international community.
相关问题推荐
-
Green Gene Technology For the past 10,000 years humans have influenced the plants they use at first unknowingly, later by design. Today’s crops have been created by a process of selection and classical breeding. More specific improvements in breeding will be possible in future. Science has cracked the genetic information code. Green gene technology is an effective tool in crop breeding, enabling us to develop new crops even more rapidly and specifically. We can make them more efficient, optimizing their contents and valuable substances to suit the wishes and requirements of customers and the processing industry. Their metabolism can be individually modified, making them produce starch, protein and fats with special properties. Through gene transfer plants can be made more resistant to viruses, bacteria, harmful fungi and insect pests. Genetically modified plants can be cultivated to possess improved stress behavior, with the result that they absorb water better in dry locations and can make more efficient use of soil nutrients. We can also optimize weed control. To do so, we make crops tolerant to environmentally sound and easily degradable herbicides. This is not as simple as it sounds. But we have been successful: Innovator has been on the Canadian market since 1995. This is the first oilseed rape variety to contain the glufosinate tolerance gene, facilitating the use of AgrEvo’s broad-spectrum herbicide liberty. We are committed to green gene technology, with which we aim to make crop breeding even more efficient and environmentally friendly. Before being brought on to the market these genetically modified plants are researched and tested for years until the questions posed regarding their safety have been answered. This is a great opportunity for us to realize our vision: the use of faster methods to breed varieties which will continue to provide us with sufficient food and raw materials in future. Our fossil reserves will soon be exhausted. Experts estimate that we only have enough oil for another 43 years and natural gas for less than 60. This means we must rethink and act accordingly, using new crop varieties to step up the move to replenishable sources of raw materials and energy. In other words, green gene technology is the key technology for sustainable agriculture.
-
The Truth about Genetically Modified Food At almost every public lecture I give, someone asks me my opinion on genetic modification—whatever be the topic of the lecture. Genetic modification (GM) has the power to save lives through its use in medicine, such as the production of insulin for diabetics or the treatment of genetic disorders. The current outcry comes when it is used to produce food. Some of these public concerns reflect real problems, but others are fuelled by misinformation and overdramatisation. There is nothing new about crop modification; plant breeders have been doing it since agriculture began. The wonderful range of apples or potatoes we now enjoy is the result of crossing different varieties. Cabbages, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale and broccoli all originated from one botanical species. Modern molecular biology has enabled us to go much further. We can now isolate the gene for a particular characteristic of an organism and transfer it to another species. It is this practice of transforming a plant with alien genes—perhaps from an animal or bacterium—that is causing all the controversy. There are three main concerns. Scientists can now take a gene for resistance to a particular herbicide and transfer it to a crop: when these plants are sprayed with weed-killer, the weeds are destroyed while the crop is unharmed. A prime concern is the harmful effect this could have on the biodiversity of farmland, where so many insects, birds and other animals depend upon “weed” species. Another fear is that alien genes from a GM plant could escape into a wild population of a related species. Since plants are fertilized by pollen that is carried through their, often for great distances, this is entirely possible. A wild species modified in this way with pesticide resistance could become a “super-weed”, while a species that becomes unnaturally resistant to animals that feed on it could disrupt the food chain. The third worry concerns a proposal to produce seeds for cereals that cannot germinate to produce next year’s seeds. This “terminator technology” would be of obvious advantage to seed companies, since farms would be forced to buy new weed annually. But the same technology could be devastating to some farmers in the developing world who depend upon saving some seeds for next year’s crop. Fortunately this technology is not yet in use and there has been strong pressure to abandon it. I would not hesitate to eat a GM vegetable—it is most unlikely that the current modifications are harmful to the consumer, despite what we read in the press. However, the introduction of animal genes into food plants presents considerable ethical difficulties to vegetarinsarians and member of religious that forbid the eating of certain animals. This is one of the reasons people are demanding that tall genetically modified food products be clearly labeled. The public have a fight to know what they are eating and a fight to choose. I believe that in my own nation GM is well regulated, but this cannot be said for some other countries. One of the problems is that at the moment this technology is commercially motivated. Because the compositions developing GM food want to introduce it as quickly as possible, in my opinion, it is being rushed into without adequate research or precautions. Genetic’ modification is here to stay, and there is no doubt it will save lives. But ,like so many other scientific discoveries, such as splitting the atom, it can be seriously misused. Instead of condemning the technique, we, should ensure it is used wisely. We need to evaluate each application carefully, from environmental and ethical standpoints, and we must urge governments and companies to use it for good rather than for greed.
-
Transformation of St Kilda Seventy-five years ago, the residents of a group of islands off the northwest coast of Scotland packed up and left for good. Their home—St Kilda—-now has World Heritage status but with the departure of the St Kildans in August 1930, a way of life that had existed for thousands of years, vanished. St Kilda was years for years known as the most remote settlement in the entire British Empire, but actually it is not so far away—-around 200 km west of the nearest point of the Scottish mainland. Seventy-five years ago, at the end of August 1930, the last 36 islanders banked up their turf fires, opened their Bibles at Exodus, put some oats on the table, then left forever, bringing to an end a habitation and a way of life that stretched back at least two thousand years. St Kilda is an archipelago of sea stacks, skerries and four islands, of which only one, Hirta, was permanently inhabited. It was remote in ways other than geography. The people, who never numbered more than a couple of hundred, spoke not English but a distinctive form of Gaelic. Their economy, their whole culture, revolved round seabirds—fulmars, gannets and puffins. They ate them and exchanged their feathers and precious oil for goods such as tea and sugar from the mainland. In the Victorian era, at the height of Britain’s imperial adventure, this self-sufficient life held a strange fascination. St Kilda became a fashionable tourist destination and steamers regularly dropped anchor in Village Bay. But the visitors could not comprehend the St Kildans they gawped at. There is an astonishing recording in the BBC’s archives of an islander saying that her mother, in payment for a bale of tweed which had taken all winter to weave, was given an orange. She didn’t know what it was. There had been worse traumas: St Kilda’s graveyard is one of the most heartrending places. It is full of tiny hummocks, where infants are buried. Newborn babies were all anointed where the cord had been cut with a concoction of fulmar oil, dung and earth and 8 out of 10 of them died of neonatal tetanus. The minister finally put a stop to this in 1891 and after that the babies lived, but it was too late. Add to this grief, emigration and harsh religion and it’s no wonder that the St Kildans lost heart. By the 1920s there were no longer enough people to do all the work. In 1930 they planted no crops and petitioned the government to take them off the island. St Kilda is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. There are tow National Trust wardens and in the summer volunteer work parties come to maintain the buildings. There’s a resident archaeologist. A century on St Kilda has become a chic destination once again. There were 15,000 visitors last year. Recently one of the wardens found the first piece of litter; a plastic water bottle wedged between the stones of a wall.
-
Globalization What exactly does globalization mean? Concepts related to globalization include “internationalization”, “multidomestic marketing”, and “multinational or transnational marketing”, suggesting that the basic criterion is transactions across national boundaries. In the marketing and strategic management literature, globalization is conceptualized as a means to gain competitive advantage by locating different stages of production in different geographic regions according to the particular region’s comparative advantage. This conceptualization focuses only on the economic aspects of globalization; social, cultural and political factors are only considered in the context of achieving economic advantage. Thus, being “culturally sensitive” in global markets is being able to sell one’s product with enough ingenuity to avoid possible pitfalls arising from the seller’s ignorance of local customs. International marketing textbooks discuss such cultural pitfalls in great detail; however, the cultural contest of globalization is always framed by the economy. Broader conceptualization of globalization can be found in other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. Waters defined globalization as “a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding.” This conceptualization with its much broader scope, allows for the examination of a number of consequences of globalization, not jut economic but social, cultural and political ones. While there are a few different conceptualizations of globalization, researchers seem to be in agreement that there are at least three dimensions of globalization: economic, political and cultural. The economic aspects of globalization stem from the spread of the capitalist world economy and the resulting expansion of goods and services. The need for cheap raw materials, cheap labor and new markets saw the expansion of the capitalist world economy from one that was primarily Eurocentric to one that encompassed the entire world. This process was achieved by various means and often involved overcoming political resistances in the new markets. The political aspects of globalization involved establishing control over markets and raw materials through either the use of direct military power or the establishment of international institutions that control such markets. The rise of the nation-state is an example of the political aspect of globalization, although it is argued that advances in telecommunications and information systems and the resulting constructions of institutions that transience territorial boundaries are making the nation-state obsolete. If the economic and political aspects of globalization involve material and power exchanges, the cultural of globalization involves the expression of symbols that represents facts, meanings, beliefs, preferences, tastes and values. In fact, these symbolic exchanges are increasingly displacing economic and political exchanges in the spread of global mass culture. Traditional barriers of language pose no problems to modem means of cultural production such as satellite television and film. However, the new “global culture”, despite its manifestations through consumption of global products and symbols in different part of the globe, is essentially the culture of dominant groups centered in the West.
-
Expressionism Expressionism is an art movement that produced a wealth of wonderful works of art, and the lives of the artists who created them were no less colorful and exciting. The word "expressionism" can be used to describe art from different times and places, most of them were part of a movement that took place in Germany from 1905 to 1920. They shared some of the beliefs. Those beliefs were that art should try to change society, to make it less conservative. It should express the energy of nature—following in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh—-and personal feeling rather than simply representing nature. It should feel "uncomfortable", which means it should challenge the traditional ways of looking at the world. This differed from the opinion of Henri Matisse who believed that art should be "comfortable". Expressionist art should be inspired by folk art, and the art of what were then called "primitive" people, for example from Africa. The aim of the Expressionists was to express personal feeling about what they were painting rather than representing it exactly as it was. It should have strong colors and shapes, be relatively direct, untutored and unplanned and should still contain recognizable things, but not be realistic. The lines could be distorted, and the colors could be strengthened or changed as in the art movement that began in 1905 called Fauvism. Expressionism was more than a style in painting. It could be found in theatre and cinema, literature and architecture. It was a sharing of ideas and experiences across all these media. The life stories of the Expressionist artists show just how much they had in common. Many began by studying applied art, such as furniture design, often to please their parents. Although they later made more personal art, they continued to make use of those technical skills. Both art critics and the public received this new movement with derision and outrage. Expressionist artists were trying to shock by challenging the traditional, conservative views held by many people. Gradually, however, it became accepted and even admired. All the Expressionists were affected by World War I (1914-18). Some fled from Germany and spent the war years in exile. Some never returned to their homeland. Most served in the war and some were killed. At first some of them hoped a war would change society for the better but they were soon disillusioned when they saw the destruction and suffering that it caused. In the years after the war, many Expressionist artist revealed the horrors they experienced in their work. After World War I, Expressionism became very fashionable in Germany, where art was allowed to flourish. This freedom ended in 1933 when Hitler declared all Expressionists were "degenerate". This led to them being sacked from their jobs or forced to leave Germany. In 1937 the Nazis took thousands of art works from German museums and put them in an enormous exhibition called the Degenerate Art Exhibition, to show how bad and decadent this art was. It presented a view of the world that went against their political and cultural ambitions to rid Germany of all inferior races.