Interview with Air Force veteran General Russell E. Dougherty, former commander-in-chief of Strategic Air Command. The interview includes Dougherty's personal experiences with General Curtis LeMay. Dougherty speaks about LeMay's uncanny judgment, organizational talents, and penchant for discipline, as well as his handling of people in his command, and the Soviet military's assessment of LeMay. The interview includes an appendix with "A General's Perspective: Leadership in the Cold War," written by General Russell E. Dougherty.

Interview with Allen H. Benton, World War II-era veteran of the 112th Cavalry, Texas National Guard. The interview includes Benton's personal experiences about childhood in upstate New York and the Depression-era economy, education at Cornell University, drafting into the U.S. Army Infantry and service at several stateside bases, transferring to Cavalry and combat in the Pacific Theater, and having a career as an author of biological field guides. The interview also includes Benton's memories of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay as well as his opinions on war in general.

Physical and chemical agents in the environment, those used in clinical applications, or encountered during recreational exposures to sunlight, induce damages in DNA. Understanding the biological impact of these agents requires quantitation of the levels of such damages in laboratory test systems as well as in field or clinical samples. Alkaline gel electrophoresis provides a sensitive (down to {approx} a few lesions/5Mb), rapid method of direct quantitation of a wide variety of DNA damages in nanogram quantities of non-radioactive DNAs from laboratory, field, or clinical specimens, including higher plants and animals. This method stems from velocity sedimentation studies of DNA populations, and from the simple methods of agarose gel electrophoresis. Our laboratories have developed quantitative agarose gel methods, analytical descriptions of DNA migration during electrophoresis on agarose gels (1-6), and electronic imaging for accurate determinations of DNA mass (7-9). Although all these components improve sensitivity and throughput of large numbers of samples (7,8,10), a simple version using only standard molecular biology equipment allows routine analysis of DNA damages at moderate frequencies. We present here a description of the methods, as well as a brief description of the underlying principles, required for a simplified approach to quantitation of DNA damages by …