Why did Habibie do better?

We have almost run out of words to help remind the political elite. We have warned them that economic recovery can never be achieved so long as they keep quarreling among themselves. Millions of words have been written (to remind them of this reality), only to fall on deaf ears.

Another source of the fall of the rupiah has been the President's statements. The President's remarks scared market investors. Furthermore, the President's manner of communicating with the public created confusion rather than confidence among market players. Take for example his latest remarks about his intention to have several critical public figures arrested -- which he later denied.

Whatever one may say about former president B.J. Habibie's administration, he at least succeeded in bringing the macroeconomic indicators under control. Although Habibie's credibility and legitimacy were low, it cannot be denied that his Cabinet succeeded in stabilizing the rupiah. Why was Habibie's Cabinet able to control the monetary indicators which President Abdurrahman Wahid's government has failed to do?

We would like the President and this country's political elite to ponder this question.

-- Media Indonesia, Jakarta

;JP;AP; ANPAk..r.. Otheropinion-Science-Genome The human genome JP/4/OTHER3

The human genome

The book of life is 800 times longer than the Bible. Yet it is so small that we can carry a hundred billion copies of it around with us in our cells. It is divided into 23 chapters -- three and twenty pairs of chromosomes, each with a different story to tell.

Every dispute between scientists of the publicly funded Human Genome Project and the private company Celera Genomics has revolved around this epic. The crux was how fast, and at what cost, the code could be recorded and written down. The successful commercial code breaker, Craig Venter, certainly put the fear of God into academic scientists with his business Celera Genomics. Without him, that much is certain, Monday's memorable celebration at the White House never would have taken place."

What remains after all the bickering is Monday's announcement of a scientific discovery already being hailed as one of the most momentous for mankind. The human genome has not yet been deciphered, for this would imply that scientists already understood the DNA code they were reading. But the letters are there, and much of the text has been correctly sequenced. That this would ever be possible seemed inconceivable only a decade ago. What we must consider possible, or indeed even probable, is changing almost daily."

The significance of this text for medicine, for healing and preventing diseases, is "hard to understate and probably greater even than the splitting of the atom and space research together," said the head of the Human Genome Project. Greater too are the risks involved. This June 26 looks set to mark the advent of an enormous, generations-long revolution in life.

-- Frankfurter Alllgemeine, Frankfurt