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"During World War I, in 1916, Herbert Dow, founder of The Dow Chemical Company, received news of "star shells," weapons that glowed eerily as they descended over the trenches of the enemy, making them easier to attack. The critical component in these flares was magnesium, a metal that was suddenly in great demand. Dow, along with a half-dozen other U.S. firms, swiftly began manufacturing magnesium, but by 1927 Dow was the only U.S. company still in the business. Dow's key innovation was a method of extracting the metal from seawater, an engineering accomplishment finally achieved at Freeport, Texas, only eleven months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. Dow was the principal supplier of magnesium for U.S. and British planes during World War II, a distinction that ironically yielded an indictment from the U.S. government on monopoly charges. The company eventually became the world's largest manufacturer of magnesium until 1990, when the Chinese entered the market and offered the metal at rock-bottom prices. Dow quietly ended its production of magnesium in 1998. Brandt's history is an engaging look at Dow's eighty-three-year romance with this remarkable metal."--Publisher's website

Publicly funded institutions, such as NIH, NLM, and state-supported universities, have explicit public service missions that extend beyond the walls of a single institution. During the past few years, national organizations, such as NLM and AAMC, have funded studies and projects to measure how well universities are adapting to technological change and educational reform. The IAIMS models are evidence of universities fostering cooperative rather than duplicative effort. Opportunities and problems facing universities extending systems and services to the private practice setting, to community-based health care HMO's, and to state and local health care agencies are discussed in terms of political, economic, and geographic realities. Instilling lifelong learning concepts begins before the health professional enters practice and is dependent on the emphasis universities place on "excellence in teaching." Without cooperation among core facilities, such as libraries, computer centers, and excellent instructors, continuing education will remain a parochial issue instead of a national thrust toward the continuum of the learning process. If continuing education is to become a high priority for universities and take its place on the education spectrum, flexible policies must be established to accommodate individual practitioners' expectations and interests.

In an address, this past summer, to the National Convention of State Legislatures, President Reagan captured to essence of the block grant proposal in a sentence. "Our task," the President said, "is to restore the constitutional symmetry between the Central Government and the States and to re-establish the freedom and variety of federalism." Consolidating the current profusion of complex and often overlapping Federal health grants into four State-administered packages will greatly reduce administrative costs and allow us to make wise use of scarce health dollars in a time of economic trial. At the same time, these changes will give States the managerial and policy flexibility that they need, but have lacked, to respond to their own most pressing needs. Of perhaps most importance in the long run, this system of grants will return a just portion of responsibility for the preservation and improvement of our health care system to the States, their communities, and the people. It is precisely this kind of equilibrium, this symmetry, that the President had in mind and that, for too many years, the Federal-State-Private partnership in health has been without. The restoration of this equilibrium, it should be noted by all, is underway.

Carl A. Gerstacker was born in 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio. At an early age his father, Rollin, instilled in him an interest in finance and the stock market. In 1930, when Carl turned fourteen, Rollin advised his son to withdraw his paper-route and odd-job money from a local bank and invest it all in The Dow Chemical Company. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last a lifetime. After high school, Carl landed an hourly position with Dow Chemical as a lab assistant and, at the same time, pursued an engineering degree at the University of Michigan as part of the compan

The National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) is a partnership of private and public sectors to provide care to the victims of great disasters. The system is being developed as a voluntary cooperative effort of four major Federal agencies, State and local governments, and the American professional and hospital communities. A medical response component will include 150 disaster medical assistance units capable of clearing or staging operations in a disaster. Each unit will comprise three 29-person teams containing physicians, nurses, medical technicians, and support personnel and will include a 16-person unit command and support element. An evacuation component will be founded on the military aeromedical evacuation system, augmented by civilian aircraft and other transportation resources. A hospital component will enroll 100,000 pre-committed beds in hospitals throughout the nation. The system is designed to care for up to 100,000 casualties arising from a massive peacetime disaster or an overseas conventional military conflict. The National Disaster Medical System will be implemented over a period of 3 to 5 years. The authors recommend that all parts of the American health care community join in support of the system.