September 11, 01 英文参考文献.docVIP

/2001/2/10/comment/1012.1 Comment September 11, 01 Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 26 September 2001 GenomeBiology 2001, 2(10):comment1012.1–1012.2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2001/2/10/comment/1012 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) I was in a car driving past the Pentagon about an hour before the hijacked plane hit it. By the time it hit, I was at the National Science 1 oundation, a mile or two away. The first indication that something horrible was happening was an NS1 staff member who told us that an airplane had just crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. My first thought was that a terrible accident had occurred. Eighteen minutes later, when the second plane plowed into the other tower, we all knew that it was no accident. Death had come out of the sky, not by chance, but by the malevo- lent design of evil men. When the towers collapsed, one after the other, in an eerily quiet, vertical fall that resembled the controlled implosion of a derelict hotel, the casualty list included more than the passengers and crew of the aircraft, the office workers in the buildings and the heroic firemen and policemen who had rushed inside to aid in the evacua- tion. Dead also was our American sense ? false as it may have been ? of isolation from the madness welling up in remote parts of the world, and of invulnerability by virtue of that isolation and our mighty technology. In a few terrible seconds, our world changed into an infinitely more frighten- ing and unpredictable one. claimed had become increasingly secular. But as we mourn the dead, try to comfort the bereaved, and look for answers to the questions of who did this for what p