Many people in developing countries lack access to health technologies, even basic ones. Why do these problems in access persist? What can be done to improve access to good health technologies, especially for poor people in poor countries?

This book answers those questions by developing a comprehensive analytical framework for access and examining six case studies to explain why some health technologies achieved more access than others. The technologies include praziquantel (for the treatment of schistosomiasis), hepatitis B vaccine, malaria rapid diagnostic tests, vaccine vial monitors for temperature exposure, the Norplant implant contraceptive, and female condoms.

Based on research studies commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to better understand the development, adoption, and uptake of health technologies in poor countries, the book concludes with specific lessons on strategies to improve access. These lessons will be of keen interest to students of health and development, public health professionals, and health technology developers—all who seek to improve access to health technologies in poor countries.

This examination of the office of the German chancellorship as it has evolved under six post-war chancellors analyzes both the nature of executive leadership as institutionalized in the constitutional order or political system and the evolution of the office during the course of individual incumbencies. The distinguished contributors evaluate the "chancellor democracy" model rooted in the imperious incumbency of Konrad Adenauer, which postulates a concentration of executive authority around the chancellorship, and the model of "coordination democracy," which casts the chancellor in a more managerial role in a political system marked by the diffusion of authority. This volume traces a progression from the first model to the second over time.

German unification has thrust new roles on the chancellor, including one as a symbol of unity in an incomplete process of integration, and another as a key figure in redefining Germany's new national and international identity. A number of the contributors address the question of whether the office has the political resources to enable the incumbent to fill these new roles.

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.

A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year

“An intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics.”
—Foreign Affairs

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent years. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from there in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of leading economists and other social scientists—including Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, Laura Tyson, and Michael Spence—tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty.

“A fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital, and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation…showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run.”
—Nature

“Piketty’s work…laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge.”
—Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan

Before the Cultural Revolution, Ai Ssu-ch’i (1910–1966) was one of Communist China’s foremost Marxist philosophers, second only to Chairman Mao himself. Ai was attracted to Marxism-Leninism as a young student in China and Japan, and wrote numerous books and articles seeking to explain the complexities of the philosophy in language everyone could understand. His writings were enormously popular during the 1930s and 1940s, and went through many printings despite continuous harassment from Kuomintang censors.

This volume is the first full-length study of Ai Ssu-ch’i. In spite of his popularity, Ai has largely been ignored in recent histories of the Chinese Communist movement, because his importance lies in his function as a popularizer rather than as an original thinker. However, it can be shown that Mao and other leaders of the movement were influenced by him, and his writings and translations certainly helped to attract many young Chinese intellectuals to the Communist cause.

The recent flood of reminiscence literature in China has reserved a special place of prominence for Ai Ssu-ch’i. This is not only because he was so admired by Mao, but also because he devoted his life so enthusiastically and wholeheartedly to the Party. Joshua Fogel traces the pattern of this devotion via Ai’s crucial role in spreading Marxist-Leninist thought among Chinese intellectuals.

At the dawn of the 1990s, it seemed that Amazonia had become irrevocably trapped in a downward spiral of deforestation, environmental destruction and social conflict. Yet over the past ten years a more acute awareness has emerged at all levels, national and international, of the need to encourage more sustainable policies and practices. That is, measures that provide for the economic development needs of Amazonia's diverse population, while at the same time conserving and managing the region's natural resource base. At a major conference, organised in London in June 1998 by the Institute of Latin American Studies (Amazonia 2000: Development, Environment and Geopolitics), over twenty international scholars traced the evolution of this gradual shift in thinking. The present volume, based on that conference, examines past patterns of destructive resource extraction in Amazonia and, more importantly, critically analyses a series of newer initiatives that offer more sustainable options. These include, amongst others, new production strategies, such as agroforestry, innovative resource governance models such as inland fisheries co-management and agro-ecological zoning. The challenge at this critical juncture is how to integrate such policies and practices into mainstream development within Amazonia. Contributors: David Cleary, Rene; Dreifuss, Philip Fearnside, Jessica Groenendijk, Anthony Hall, Judith Kimerling, Tom Lovejoy, Dennis Mahar, David McGrath, Emilio Moran, Darrel Posey, Nigel Smith, and Wouter Veening.

The evolutionist Ernst Mayr considered August Weismann “one of the great biologists of all time.” Yet the man who formulated the germ plasm theory—that inheritance is transmitted solely through the nuclei of the egg and sperm cells—has not received an in-depth historical examination. August Weismann reintroduces readers to a towering figure in the life sciences. In this first full-length biography, Frederick Churchill situates Weismann in the swirling intellectual currents of his era and demonstrates how his work paved the way for the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution in the twentieth century.

In 1859 Darwin’s tantalizing new idea stirred up a great deal of activity and turmoil in the scientific world, to a large extent because the underlying biological mechanisms of evolution through natural selection had not yet been worked out. Weismann’s achievement was to unite natural history, embryology, and cell biology under the capacious dome of evolutionary theory. In his major work on the germ plasm (1892), which established the material basis of heredity in the “germ cells,” Weismann delivered a crushing blow to Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired traits.

In this deeply researched biography, Churchill explains the development of Weismann’s pioneering work based on cytology and embryology and opens up an expanded history of biology from 1859 to 1914. August Weismann is sure to become the definitive account of an extraordinary life and career.