I sadly quote:

"America and China seem to prefer advancing into the space race isolated from the other nations. I cannot imagine that this won´t have a serious impact on the transatlantic relationship."

How in fitting with the current, politically correct matra about an isolated US hated by all the world. All that was lacking was the customery dig at Bush & the Republicans.

The facts are, of course, otherwise. The costly International Space Station is a joint affair, with the US and Russia the largest contributors. And planetary missions by any nation invariably involve NASA's Deep Space Network. Its 220-foot dishes were even able to extract some data from the misprogrammed European Jupiter-moon lander--roughly the equivalent of picking up a cell-phone at some 200 million miles. No, there's no isolationism in US science. More than every before, the Internet is creating a global scientific community.

In medicine, there's no doubt that the U.S. modeled its medical schools on those in Germany and, until Nazism, someone who wanted to be a world-class physician almost always studied in Germany.

At least as late as the 1930s, the Journal of the American Medical Association maintained a regular correspondent to report on developments in Germany. Nothing is so revealing of the change Hitler brought as comparing the JAMA articles just before he took power with those just after. It's quite clear that almost overnight their unnamed reporter no longer felt able to talk freely.

--Michael W. Perry, Editor: Eugenics and Other Evils