Word: alienations
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Sigourney Weaver Alien...
...that as it may, the movie, which Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) eventually decided to direct himself, starts out in a low, ingratiating gear. It looks like a "buddy romp," as Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, puts it. Thelma is married to a carpet salesman named Darryl, who represents everything stupid and stupefying about traditional masculinity, keeping Thelma in a state of near childish dependency. Her best pal, Louise (Susan Sarandon), lives with an oft traveling musician named Jimmy, who is nice enough but suffers from the other great modern male defect -- a maddening inability to make permanent commitments. Both women...
...present golden age of transplants occurred only after researchers began tackling one of medicine's greatest puzzles: How do you sneak a foreign organ past the body's immune system, which is dedicated to the proposition that all alien tissue is dangerous and should be destroyed? On the one hand, doctors try to disable the body's defenses just enough so that they will not reject the transplant. Here the trick is not to go overboard and completely cripple the immune system, leaving the body open to attack by deadly viruses and bacteria. On the other hand, they...
...single drug, derived from a Scandinavian soil sample, provided a stunning breakthrough in the effort to tame the immune system. Cyclosporine targets the killer T cells -- the cellular commandos that seek out alien tissues after other defenders have marked them for elimination. Within a few years of the drug's introduction, first-year survival rates for kidney recipients jumped from 50% to over 80%. Only a handful of drugs have had such an impact on the history of medicine...
Getting people to think in categories is one of the techniques of evil. Marxist-Leninist zealots thought of "the bourgeoisie," a category, a class, not the human beings, and it is easy to exterminate a category, a class, a race, an alien tribe. Mao's zealots in the Cultural Revolution, a vividly brainless evil, destroyed China's intellectual classes for a generation...