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BIOHAZARD: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told From Inside by the Man Who Ran It, by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman. Random House, 319 pp., $24.95. The VECTOR death factory was nearly deserted when I visited. Siberia's wind blew mercilessly against its untended buildings, which had greeted the subzero challenge by cracking, shedding, shattering and peeling, leaving gaping holes from which sprung weeds or freed steel cables and rebar. Russian soldiers lazed about, barely acknowledging the buildings' test tubes full of enough lethality to obliterate humanity. I felt a shudder of goosebumps as our driver passed through the security gates of VECTOR and couldn't help wonder why the biological warfare scientists of the former Soviet Union's premier virus laboratory had agreed to meet with an American journalist, Romanian photographer and Russian physician-translater. The reader will experience the same sensation from every page of Ken Alibek's \"Biohazard.\" Based on hours of interviews conducted with the Kazakhstani scientist formerly known as Kantijan Alibekov, Time magazine columnist Stephen Handelman has skillfully crafted an autobiographical tour of America's worst-case nightmare: a massive, highly capable biological warfare program in enemy hands. From 1975 until his defection to the U.S. in 1992, Alibek worked inside Biopreparat, the USSR's 60,000-scientist-and-technican-strong biological warfare program. He was the program's deputy director from 1988 to 1992, privy to Kremlin decisions under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

NOTHING PLEASES physicians practicing medicine in the 1990s more than the recognition that their efforts are guided by insights far superior to those which formed the basis of medical practice in the 1890s. And no doubt those same 19th-Century doctors felt wholly confident that their appreciation of the workings and frailties of the human body far outstripped the understandings of the physicians who assisted Napoleon's troops at the Battle of Waterloo. Medical egos aside, though, history tells a very different story. Advances in curative medicine account for very few of the improvements in human survival over the last two milleniae. That infant mortality has declined and life expectancy stretched by decades in most of the world is testament not to surgical skills or reductions in cholesterol intake, but to the basic elements of public health: clean water, hygienic hospitals, bathing, higher quality housing, home heating supplied by relatively clean fuel, disease surveillance, and most recently, vaccination. It should be said at the outset that even [Roy] Porter admits in his introductory remarks that his subtitle - \"A Medical History of Humanity\" - is inaccurate, as his 831-page tome tells the story of only Western medicine, from the Greco-Roman era to the present age of MRIs and CAT scans. Given the depth of Porter's attention to detail, however, we can assume that his take on the histories of Native American, Asian and African medical beliefs would have consumed more than 7,000 pages.

IF YOU'RE A HEARTY beef eater - and determined to stand by your burgers - don't read this book. For that matter, ardent consumers of chicken, pig, lamb or elk meat are forewarned that Richard Rhodes' \"Deadly Feasts\" may tip your scales toward embracing a true vegetarian diet. Rhodes, who brought us the truth about America's nuclear sciences in his Pulitzer Prize-winning \"The Making of the Atomic Bomb,\" now turns his reportorial and writing talents to a disease crisis that has no agreed-upon scientific name: call it kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, prions, Mad Cow Disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), infectious amyloids syndrome, scrapie or TSE. Having covered much of the ground Rhodes treads in this frightening book, however, I can attest to its accuracy in areas with which I have first-hand familiarity. Whether his forecasts of up to 200,000 annual cases of \"Mad Cow Disease\" among British humans by 2015 will be borne out I cannot say but find apocryphal. Rhodes got that ominous prediction from British scientist Richard Lacey, a man often denounced in England as a Chicken Little figure. The use of the term \"plague\" to describe what has until now been a fairly small human health problem will likewise draw scorn from many quarters. But readers may find themselves willing to accept at least some of Rhodes' dire forecasts once the well-outlined basic science is absorbed.

Almost two centuries later, American G.I.'s have fallen prey to dengue hemorrhagic fever. A viral disease, dengue produces irritating skin rashes - sites of microscopic bleeding - and a host of debilitating symptoms that include fevers, nausea, headaches, aching \"breakbone\" joints and internal bleeding. Although none of the soldiers have died, severe cases can be lethal. During the 1950s, the war heroes who had led the United States to victory in World War II clearly understood that infectious diseases represented a threat to the nation. Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower had seen their troops ravaged by malaria, cholera, polio, influenza, yellow fever and, all too often, utterly mysterious ailments. Indeed, more U.S. soldiers perished in the Pacific from microbial diseases than from bombs and bullets. So these and other leaders resolved to rid the world of disease-carrying mosquitoes, develop military and civilian capabilities of manufacturing powerful drugs and vaccines, and vanquish step-by-step humanity's microbial scourges. Now, according to the CDC's Duane Gubler, the mosquitoes that carry dengue, and the virus, can be found all over the Carribean and South America. Worse yet, it is now understood that the newer types of dengue fever are the result of sequential infections with different strains of the virus - each strain plays novel tricks on the immune system, setting the human victim up for ever more dangerous diseases. That's why, last November 25, the CDC issued a sharp warning to American physicians who might be treating soldiers returning from Haiti: Because some of them had already suffered one bout of dengue during Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, their second infections in Haiti could be lethal.

Bottom line: Should women take estrogen supplements during and after menopause to decrease their chances of suffering heart disease, strokes and bone-brittling osteoporosis? Or should they muddle through with only a short course of hormone therapy - or none - in order to avoid estrogen-induced breast cancer? Now there's a fun choice for you: die of a heart attack, stoop over with crippling bone disease or succumb to breast cancer. Into this fray now marches (and in her case, \"march\" is the appropriate verb) famed breast cancer surgeon Susan Love. Having recently gone through menopause herself, Love now trains her cancer-skilled guns on the hormone that most defines \"female.\" And she labels estrogen a poison. Random House is hoping that \"Doctor Susan Love's Hormone Book: Making Informed Choices About Menopause\" will fly off bookstore shelves the way her previous \"Doctor Susan Love's Breast Book\" did. The earlier book revolutionized the way women and their health providers view mammography, breast cancer, mastectomies, chemotherapy, lump removal and many of the sociopolitical dynamics of breast cancer treatment and research. It sparked a mass movement that culminated in the multi-million-dollar Women's Health Initiative, a congressionally mandated 15-year research effort at the National Institutes of Health that aims to resolve precisely the sorts of menopause, heart disease and cancer questions baby boomers now face. The Initiative has only just begun, however, and is unlikely to yield useful information before 2010.

Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company credited eleven women with directing at least 170 films, but by the mid-1920s all of these directors had left Universal and only one still worked in the film industry at all. Two generations of cinema historians have either overlooked or been stymied by the mystery of why Universal first systematically supported and promoted women directors and then abruptly reversed that policy._x000B__x000B_In this trailblazing study, Mark Garrett Cooper approaches the phenomenon as a case study in how corporate movie studios interpret and act on institutional culture in deciding what it means to work as a man or woman. In focusing on issues of institutional change, Cooper challenges interpretations that explain women's exile from the film industry as the inevitable result of a transhistorical sexism or as an effect of a broadly cultural revision of gendered work roles. Drawing on a range of historical and sociological approaches to studying corporate institutions, Cooper examines the relationship between institutional organization and aesthetic conventions during the formative years when women filmmakers such as Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Elise Jane Wilson, and Ida May Park directed films for Universal._x000B_