Letters

Re your article "mean streets" by Jim Erickson [Aug. 9]: Against the background of the high rate of road deaths, Asians must take a close look at what causes car and motorcycle accidents. Asian countries are more vulnerable to road-related mishaps because traffic-safety measures have been put on the back burner. In spite of an increasing number of cars and drivers, governments here don't put a high priority on establishing safer traffic systems. Red tape has further slowed any progress. Some steps that should be taken are developing better postcrash medical treatment, creating safety awareness among drivers and stringently enforcing safety rules. Let the road lead its users to their destinations rather than to the gates of heaven.
Arvind K. Pandey
Allahabad, India

Weighing the Risks
South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun may have stood firm with plans to dispatch 3,000 Korean soldiers to Iraq, but one of his citizens was murdered after being taken hostage there. From this example, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo learned a lesson [Aug. 9]. Her decision to pull out our peacekeepers from Iraq in order to save a kidnapped Philippine truck driver may have been against the wishes and plans of Washington and other allies, but her actions saved a life.
Dionne Lee Esteban Caytiles
Quezon City, the Philippines

Al-Qaeda's Poppy Profits Tim McGirk's article "terrorism's harvest" [Aug. 9] described how heroin trafficking is now "a principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists." It's quite ironic that just a few months before we "liberated" Afghanistan by bombing it and sending in troops, we gave a $43 million grant to the Taliban for its splendid job in cutting back opium production. Yes indeed, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it with unaccustomed understatement, "Democracy is untidy." Tragically, Americans, Afghans and the rest of the world are paying the price for the untidiness that we have wrought. Might there have been a better way?
Robert G. Newman, M.D.
Director
Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute
Beth Israel Medical Center
New York City

The Democrats Convene In his piece "The Audacity of Hope," Joe Klein analyzed the impact of John Kerry's speech at the Democratic Convention [Aug. 9]. After I listened to Kerry talk, I got the impression that he is a man who is truly educated and enlightened. Very likely, he has been "misunderestimated" by George W. Bush regarding his potential for the "embetterment" of America!
Varakur S. Gopalakrishnan
Bombay

Kerry says he will respond appropriately to any attack by terrorists. Bush, however, has prevented destructive attacks by going after the terrorists. Responding or preventing? The choice is easy.
Peter Norsk
Nivaa, Denmark

The Secret of Life
James D. Watson wrote a very personal piece about the death of his colleague Francis Crick [Aug. 9]. In a cover story 33 years ago, TIME described their exhilaration and the impact of their breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA [April 19, 1971]:

"Wildly excited, two men dashed out of a side door of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory ... and ducked into the Eagle, a pub where generations of Cambridge scientists have met to gossip about experiments and celebrate triumphs. Over drinks, James D. Watson, then 24, and Francis Crick, 36, talked excitedly, Crick's booming voice damping out conversations among other Eagle patrons. When friends stopped to ask what the commotion was all about, Crick did not mince words. 'We,' he announced exultantly, 'have discovered the secret of life!' Brave words—and in a sense, incredibly true ... On that late winter day in 1953, the two unknown scientists had finally worked out the double-helical shape of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. IN DNA'S FAMED SPIRAL-STAIRCASE STRUCTURE ARE HIDDEN THE MYSTERIES OF HEREDITY, OF GROWTH, OF DISEASE AND AGING ... As the basic ingredient of the genes in the cells of all living organisms, DNA is truly the master molecule of life. [The discovery] was one of the great events in science, comparable to the splitting of the atom or the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species."