It was the biggest scientific grudge match since the space race. The Genome Wars had everything: two groups with appealing leaders ready to fight in a scientific dead heat, pushing the limits of technology and rhetoric as they battled to become the first to read every last one of the 3 billion DNA "letters" in the human body. The scientific importance of the work is unquestionable. The completed DNA sequence is expected to give scientists unprecedented insights into the workings of the human body, revolutionizing medicine and biology. But the race itself, between the government’s Human Genome Project and Rockville, Md., biotechnology company Celera Genomics, was at least partly symbolic, the public/private conflict played out in a genetic lab.
Now the race is over. After years of public attacks and several failed attempts at reconciliation, the two sides are taking a step toward a period of calm. HOP head Francis Collins (and .Ari Patrinos of the Department of Energy, an important ally on the government side) and Craig Venter, the founder of Celera, agreed to hold a joint press conference in Washington this Monday to declare that the race was over (sort of), that both sides had won (kind of) and that the hostilities were resolved (for the time being).
No one is exactly sure how things will be different now. Neither side will be turning off its sequencing machines any time soon--the "finish lines" each has crossed are largely arbitrary points, "first drafts" rather than the definitive version. And while the joint announcement brings the former Genome Warriors closer together than they’ve been in years, insiders say I that future agreements are more likely to take the form of coordination, rather than outright collaboration.
The conflict blew up this February when Britain’s Welcome Trust, an HGP participant, released a confidential letter to Celera outlining the HGP’s complaints. Venter called the move "a lowlife thing to do," but by spring, there were the first signs of a thaw. "The attacks and nastiness are bad for science and our investors," Venter told Newsweek in March, "and fighting back is probably not helpful." At a cancer meeting earlier this month, Venter and Collins praised each other’s approaches, and expressed hope that all of the scientists involved in sequencing the human genome would be able to share the credit By late last week, that hope was becoming a reality as details for Monday’s joint announcement were hammered out. Scientists in both camps welcomed an end to the hostilities. "If this ends the horse race, science wins." With their difference behind them, or at least set aside, the scientists should now be able to get down to the interesting stuff, figuring how to make use of all that data.
The critical thing facing the scientists is to

A:apply the newly-found knowledge to the benefit of mankind. B:end their horse race for the success of science. C:get down to their genome research. D:set their differences aside

Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America’s troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in "Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector.
That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America’s health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care."
Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America’s problem is to quash the private sector’s role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain’s National Health Service.
Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America’s health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes:" health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says.
Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other fallings of today’s system.
If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now.
In the same vein, if Mr. Porter’s prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub-optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market—which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter’s powerful vision.
We can infer from the last two paragraphs that

A:there is no easy money on the pavement for passers by to pick up. B:Mr. Porter is very likely to fall in a trap set up by the economists. C:competition alone is not enough to cure the health care system. D:only government actions can sweep aside the obstacles along the way.

Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America’s troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in " Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector.
That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America’s health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care. "
Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America’s problem is to quash the private sector’s role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain’s National Health Service.
Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America’s health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes:" health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says.
Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized ) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other failings of today’s system.
If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $ 20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now.
In the same vein, if Mr. Porter’s prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub- optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market--which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter’s powerful vision.
We can infer from the last two paragraphs that

A:there is no easy money on the pavement for passers by to pick up. B:Mr. Porter is very likely to fall in a trap set up by the economists. C:competition alone is not enough to cure the health care system. D:only government actions can sweep aside the obstacles along the way.

Text 2

A:there is no easy money on the pavement for passers by to pick up. B:Mr. Porter is very likely to fall in a trap set up by the economists. C:competition alone is not enough to cure the health care system. D:only government actions can sweep aside the obstacles along the way.

It was the biggest scientific grudge match since the space race. The Genome Wars had everything: two groups with appealing leaders ready to fight in a scientific dead heat, pushing the limits of technology and rhetoric as they battled to become the first to read every last one of the 3 billion DNA "letters" in the human body. The scientific importance of the work is unquestionable. The completed DNA sequence is expected to give scientists unprecedented insights into the workings of the human body, revolutionizing medicine and biology. But the race itself, between the government’s Human Genome Project and Rockville, Md., biotechnology company Celera Genomics, was at least partly symbolic, the public/private conflict played out in a genetic lab.
Now the race is over. After years of public attacks and several failed attempts at reconciliation, the two sides are taking a step toward a period of calm. HOP head Francis Collins (and .Ari Patrinos of the Department of Energy, an important ally on the government side) and Craig Venter, the founder of Celera, agreed to hold a joint press conference in Washington this Monday to declare that the race was over (sort of), that both sides had won (kind of) and that the hostilities were resolved (for the time being).
No one is exactly sure how things will be different now. Neither side will be turning off its sequencing machines any time soon--the "finish lines" each has crossed are largely arbitrary points, "first drafts" rather than the definitive version. And while the joint announcement brings the former Genome Warriors closer together than they’ve been in years, insiders say I that future agreements are more likely to take the form of coordination, rather than outright collaboration.
The conflict blew up this February when Britain’s Welcome Trust, an HGP participant, released a confidential letter to Celera outlining the HGP’s complaints. Venter called the move "a lowlife thing to do," but by spring, there were the first signs of a thaw. "The attacks and nastiness are bad for science and our investors," Venter told Newsweek in March, "and fighting back is probably not helpful." At a cancer meeting earlier this month, Venter and Collins praised each other’s approaches, and expressed hope that all of the scientists involved in sequencing the human genome would be able to share the credit By late last week, that hope was becoming a reality as details for Monday’s joint announcement were hammered out. Scientists in both camps welcomed an end to the hostilities. "If this ends the horse race, science wins." With their difference behind them, or at least set aside, the scientists should now be able to get down to the interesting stuff, figuring how to make use of all that data

A:apply the newly-found knowledge to the benefit of mankind. B:end their horse race for the success of science. C:get down to their genome research. D:set their differences aside

Text 2

A:there is no easy money on the pavement for passers by to pick up. B:Mr. Porter is very likely to fail in a trap set up by the economists. C:competition alone is not enough to cure the health care system. D:only government actions can sweep aside the obstacles along the way.

Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America’s troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in " Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector.
That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America’s health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care. "
Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America’s problem is to quash the private sector’s role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain’s National Health Service.
Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America’s health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes:" health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says.
Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized ) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other failings of today’s system.
If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $ 20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now.
In the same vein, if Mr. Porter’s prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub- optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market--which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter’s powerful vision.

A:there is no easy money on the pavement for passers by to pick up B:Mr. Porter is very likely to fall in a trap set up by the economists C:competition alone is not enough to cure the health care system D:only government actions can sweep aside the obstacles along the way

The writer suggests that it is a good idea to set aside some money because ______.

A:you probably will not be able to follow your budget B:people usually spend more than they plan to do C:one can hardly plan everything in advance D:others may want to borrow some money from you

The writer suggests that it is a good idea to set aside some money because ______.

A:you probably will not be able to follow your budget B:people usually spend more than they plan to do C:things can happen unexpectedly D:others may want to borrow some money from you