Word: fieldwork
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was just the fieldwork. Coe also chose scripts, fought with sponsors over the hiring of blacklisted actors, scoured the theater scene for talent. He enticed stars, from Jose Ferrer (Coe put Cyrano de Bergerac on TV between its Broadway run and the Kramer film adaptation) to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda (for a Producer's Showcase staging of The Petrified Forest) to Frank Sinatra (who, in the musical version of Our Town, sang Love and Marriage). Coe's 1955 airing of the Mary Martin Peter Pan was the highest-rated show in the young medium's history...
...long ago, scientists would never have relied on such a ragtag band, or such low-rent equipment, to do their fieldwork. But lately that's changed. With the contraction of federal science budgets and the expansion of the World Wide Web, private research is going decidedly public. From astronomy to epidemiology to archaeology, more and more professionals are finding that when you're looking for lab assistants to collect good data at a bargain price, you can't beat the amateurs on the Internet...
...involves a conflict between intelligent good and cunning evil. But it's easier just to have smart people do dumb things. The noble intentions of The Lost World's team of scientists--trying to protect the dinosaurs from a group of rapacious hunters--are undercut by some laughably inane fieldwork. They take close-up photos of the beasts with incredibly noisy cameras that are bound to startle any dino into a frenzy; they kidnap a T. rex baby to mend its leg while Big Mama prowls closer. It's knaves vs. fools in the Jurassic jungle...
...what research it was. Starting in the 1930s, when the prevailing view had the human family rooted in Asia, the Leakeys reversed scientific opinion and placed man's origins in Africa. But while Louis spun grand--sometimes grandiose--theories, Mary preferred the nitty-gritty of fieldwork. She spent long hours under the broiling African sun unearthing precious fossils and stone tools, then carefully measuring, sketching and cataloging them. "Theories come and go," she once told Pennsylvania State University anatomist Alan Walker, "but fundamental data always remain the same...
Mary left active fieldwork in 1983 and retired to a five-acre compound near Nairobi with her books and her Dalmatians. "Actually, given a chance, I'd rather be in a tent than in a house," she told a reporter this summer. In August the unflappable, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking "grande dame of archaeology," as Virginia Morell called Leakey in her recent book Ancestral Passions, got one last glimpse of her beloved footprints just before they were buried under layers of protective fabric, earth and boulders to preserve them for future generations...