Holland -- whose remarkably diverse career includes two earlier Holocaust themes ("Europa, Europa," "Bitter Harvest"), a Henry James novel ("Washington Square"), "The Secret Garden" and three episodes of David Simon’s "The Wire" --  first turned down the film because its principal backers demanded that the actors speak English. She wanted the languages to reproduce the polyglot Babel of Lwow, then a Polish city and now a center of Ukrainian nationalism.

We spoke with Holland last week, ahead of the Oscar nominations, in Washington, D.C., where "In Darkness" was screened at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Many of us approach the Holocaust with a mixture of horror and wonder, it’s so inexplicable. Do you keep returning to it in film because it’s unsolvable, or because you’re trying to understand something about it?

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Nature, in all its whimsy, has thrown us a big, fat, ugly curve -- a virus with a harmless background that suddenly turned lethal.

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Now they stood, Emily and Tim and Piper and Lindsey, like hobbits at the gates of Mordor, on a snowy Forest Service access road across frozen Duck Creek from the bison trap on old man Koelzer's farm. Shivering in the 20-below-zero cold, clad in Salvation Army pea coats and plaid pants and Doc Martens, the youthful quartet were briefed on how to fight the power, which, in this case, meant getting ready to sit. To sit, to watch, and to videotape.

Over the past five years, more than 1,000 volunteers have come to an unheated backcountry cabin north of West Yellowstone to participate in a remarkable campaign of environmental activism. They have come to the coldest spot in the lower 48 states from places as far-flung as New Zealand and Israel and Germany to witness, and at times obstruct, the Montana Department of Livestock in its roundup and slaughter of buffalo that wander out of Yellowstone National Park.

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Most of the secular bioethicists struggling with the challenges of cutting-edge medicine and biology plod forward with pragmatic ideas about limiting harm from science. Kass, on the other hand, has always seemed less worried by the practical risks than by what technology is doing to our souls. Sensitive to the "wisdom of repugnance," he has opposed in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and cloning, often citing a personal reverence for the mystery of life. And he has done so from his chair at Chicago's lofty Committee on Social Thought.

That's deep stuff for a panel charged with telling Bush how to think. The stuff got even deeper Friday, when the government unveiled the man selected to serve at Kass' side as executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics.

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The new Americans, mostly university students, are taking part in a study this month to determine whether the 15 million existing U.S. vaccine doses can be stretched to make as many as 150 million. It's a gloomy experiment with an outdated vaccine.

"Who would ever have thought in our lifetime we'd be working on this again?" asks Dr. Carol Tacket, who heads the Baltimore wing of the trial at the University of Maryland's Center for Vaccine Development. "The conquest of smallpox was certainly the greatest achievement of public health. And to think that we're revisiting that so soon just gives this undertone of sadness to the whole undertaking."

Dr. Mary Guinan shares that sadness. In 1974, the freshly minted doctor headed off to Uttar Pradesh, India, to fight smallpox. "It was mind-blowing," she recalls. "You'd go to these unbelievable remote places in the mountains near Nepal. It was cold. There were no maps. There were no hotels, just mud huts. Smallpox was where civilization wasn't."

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Until this week, all confirmed anthrax cases had been traced to mailrooms or a handful of letters directed to celebrities or news media. The approach to managing the disease was to blanket potentially exposed individuals with antibiotics, while disinfecting their workplaces.

Authorities haven't ruled out a post office link to Nguyen, a 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who lived in the Bronx and worked in a Manhattan hospital. But her case, as well the mysterious, cutaneous-anthrax infection of a New Jersey woman, have raised fears that lethal doses of free-floating anthrax spores could threaten more Americans than previously thought possible, though the threat of mass infection still remains small.

"If, in fact, the postal paradigm is changing, it's a whole new ballgame," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the NIH's top infectious disease specialist. "Not only will it change where we look for anthrax, but also the kind of recommendations we'll be making for the public health."

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Yet, despite Parker's comment, and the Centers for Disease Control's recommendation that doctors use either Cipro or doxycycline to treat suspected cases of anthrax, Cipro alone has been given to more than 10,000 people who might be infected with anthrax. And it is Cipro that the government has obsessed over, haggling with Bayer to buy 100 million pills at the cut-rate price of 95 cents each.

In normal circumstances, doctors wouldn't be routinely handing out a drug like Cipro. It belongs to a fairly new class of drugs that are expensive and broadly targeting, wiping out large varieties of bugs. They are also expensive and generally held in reserve for serious infections, to keep them from creating new drug-resistant strains of bacteria.

So why is Cipro the drug of choice for anthrax? To understand that you have to go back to 1989, when the military, anxious to protect soldiers heading off to fight Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the Gulf, asked Col. Art Friedlander, a top scientist in Parker's command, to find a good defense against anthrax.

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On a day when public health officials from Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson on down were promising to spend millions rejuvenating public health, 2,000 postal workers lined up at D.C. General Hospital to get an allotment of the antibiotics that might have saved their two murdered colleagues.

D.C. General, an enormous brick complex near RFK Stadium, was shut down in June after serving impoverished southeastern Washington, in one form or another, for 195 years. Although a skeletal emergency room remains open, vast wings of the hospital are closed, its windows cracked and broken like superannuated Moscow dormitories. On Tuesday, police shooed hordes of reporters away from the doors while Red Cross volunteers passed out crackers and soft drinks.

Many of the postal workers, who got 10 days' worth of Cipro, said their superiors had urged them not to talk to the press. Some worried about getting sick while others expressed confusion about why they were getting antibiotics without first being tested for anthrax.

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Around the same time, a suspicious powder on the roadway led police to close the main highway through Lake Oswego, a wealthy suburb of Portland, Ore., for three hours. The powder turned out to be wheat flour, dropped to mark a path for a jogging club.

In suburban Washington, D.C., police and local news teams rushed to an Episcopalian church, scene of the following emergency: A secretary had felt a "tingling of the mouth" after opening a dusty envelope.

Are we a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown? In the brutal shadow of 9/11, in the peculiar wake of the still-mysterious Florida and New York anthrax cases, powders are giving people jitters coast to coast. Health departments, clinics and emergency rooms are swamped with calls from the worried well; scores of buildings have been evacuated, and some employees quarantined, by fear of unknown powders.

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In a Washington hotel room jammed with Nobel laureates and other brainiacs, two competing groups of researchers presented the 3 billion letters of the human genome to the public Monday with a whimper of surprise. Human genes, it turns out, are remarkably similar to those of lower life forms. Whatever it is that makes us unique is probably not solely in the code that DNA uses to instruct our cells to make proteins.

The biggest surprise of the rough analysis of the first sequencing of the human genome was the number of genes it contains. For years scientists had been predicting that human DNA would contain somewhere between 100,000 and 140,000 genes. It turns out we may have as few as 26,000 -- a genome about the size of a corn plant, with roughly a third more genes than the fruit fly.

When it comes to numbers of genes, size definitely does not matter. Not only that, but our genes look pretty similar, in structure, to most of the genes in fruit flies, roundworms and even brewer's yeast.

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Just as President George Bush banned federal funding for research using fetal tissue (a ban Clinton quickly overturned), so right-to-lifers expect Bush to quickly reverse Clinton's endorsement of embryonic stem cell research. Bush has "consistently opposed federal funding for research that requires embryos to be discarded or destroyed," says his spokesman, Scott McClellan.

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"I was burning up," she recalls. "Naturally, with two doctors in the house we didn't have a thermometer, so I went to the E.R. I was 105."

The diagnosis was malaria -- the disease that had brought Rabinovich to Africa in the first place. She'd taken antimalarial pills before leaving on her tour of six villages along the Gambia River, but evidently that was not enough to prevent the mosquito-borne bug from colonizing in her bloodstream.

Rabinovich cycled through cascades of fever and shaking, burning and cold for a few days before returning home from the hospital. She had undergone her rite of passage as a malaria researcher with the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, created earlier this year by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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But in July 1999 she was also a 44-year-old woman trying to get pregnant for the first time. And like so many middle-aged members of the military reserves, she wasn't wild about complying with an order to get six shots against anthrax, a deadly bacterium she doubted she'd ever have the misfortune to inhale. Savoie had heard that the shots, given over a two-month period, could have the type of side effects a pilot couldn't afford -- joint pain, vertigo, headaches. She worried they might interfere with her in vitro fertilization treatments -- or damage the child she hoped for.

And so, after 26 years in the Air Force and reserves, Maj. Savoie decided she was not going to get the shots. Her husband, Maj. James Hechtl, and more than half of the other 54 pilots in their reserve unit, the 301st Airlift Squadron at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, avoided the shot as well, the couple says. Savoie was particularly outspoken in her opposition to the mandatory vaccine, attending hearings in Congress and talking to reporters.

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Passacantando doesn't care who becomes president because when it comes to the environment he doesn't think it will make much difference. His new strategy for Greenpeace is to bypass the political process altogether and target corporations instead. He wants to hit them where it hurts the most: brand identity.

"Corporations spend millions of dollars on their reputations in the market," says Passacantando, his feet propped on a picnic table during a Greenpeace retreat in the forested mountains of western Maryland. "They want to be considered sexy and attractive. And we're going to go after that identity."

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So it was something of a landmark moment in the campaign when Bush finally broke his silence on the issue last Friday by taking a swipe at the Clinton administration's drug war policies. In a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Bush deplored what he claimed was an increase in teenage drug use caused by Clinton and Gore "sending the wrong message" and "failing to show leadership."

Yet Bush's critique missed by a mile. It's true, as he stated, that teenage marijuana use climbed through most of the 1990s. But that trend occurred throughout the Western world, from lenient Switzerland to France, whose drug laws are nearly as tough as ours. Although Bush argued that the U.S. situation resulted from a "leadership gap," any half-serious examination of the topic makes W's claim appear dubious.

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"I am probably the only NIH institute director who goes to a cocktail party and the first 12 people who come up to me tell me how to fix the drug problem," Leshner said recently. "The director of the National Cancer Institute doesn't have that problem."

But Leshner, a key player in the Clinton administration's controversial war on drugs who works closely with drug czar Barry McCaffrey, is not complaining. He has managed to survive, and even thrive, in his high-profile job since 1994 -- not an unusually long tenure for an NIH director, but a lifetime for most politically sensitive public policy positions in Washington. Under his stewardship, NIDA's budget, which is largely spent on research into substance abuse, has nearly doubled. And Leshner dismisses the notion that he is a shill for the administration's anti-drug policies.

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Last week, Caplan, 50, earned the dubious distinction of being the first prominent bioethicist to get sued for his advice. The father of Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old from Arizona who died a year ago during experimental therapy for his inborn metabolic disorder, named Caplan in a lawsuit against several Penn doctors and two hospitals.

Some bioethicists worry that the lawsuit could stifle ethical debate. Many feel that it represents a coming of age of sorts for bioethics, an academic field that began in the 1960s and whose influence has exploded along with changes in medical technology.

"Over the past five to 10 years, people have begun to realize that bioethics is developing into a discipline. Maybe one of the signs of reaching that status is getting sued," says Gilbert Mailaender, a bioethics professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana.

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This didn't really happen. The killer was only a mannequin and the victims were actors, paid by the Department of Justice to participate in a three-day, $2 million exercise in May that tested the Mile High City's response to a bio-terrorist attack.

But federal policymakers, from President Clinton on down, seem to believe it could happen. The government is spending $10 billion this year on the assumption that a night at the opera is the perfect postmodern battlefield, and the tender little underbelly of Anytown, USA., lies exposed to the claws of terror. An attack with unconventional weapons in the United States is likely, Clinton said after announcing the bio-terrorism initiative in 1998. "It's a cause for serious, disciplined, long-term concern."

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As it turned out, McCaffrey may not even have been addressing the assistant with his request, but the many 70-hour weeks the assistant had put in at the drug czar's side had taken their toll. The assistant snapped. He dropped McCaffrey's bag, went back through security, down the escalator and caught a cab home. The following Monday, he told McCaffrey he wanted out.

Barry McCaffrey is the country's most-decorated general, its longest-serving drug czar and, now, an architect of a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign that on Wednesday took him and President Clinton to Colombia. He's also a fiercely meticulous employer who has always taken it hard when subordinates leave his service.

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But if the French team seemed to have gotten the jump in the research race, the Americans have gotten the lead back.

This week, the New England Journal of Medicine announced the successful results of a similar operation on Matthew Scott, the 38-year-old New Jersey paramedic whom the University of Louisville team operated on four months after the Hallam operation. They reported that Scott can now write and turn the pages of a newspaper, tie his shoes and pick up his two sons. In the subsequent media fanfare, a thoughtful Scott appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday talking about how he'd resigned himself to a life of disability since age 24 when he had a stupid accident with a firecracker.

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