Eighty years ago.docVIP

Comment Eighty years ago Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 30 June 2005 Genome Biology 2005, 6:114 (doi:10.1186/gb-2005-6-7-114) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2005/6/7/114 ? 2005 BioMed Central Ltd Public acts of the State of Tennessee passed by the sixty - fourth general assembly, 1925. Chapter no. 27, House Bill No. 185 (By Mr. Butler) hadn’t been invented in 1925), but also because of the pas- sions burning in the trial lawyers, the witnesses, and the spectators. Forget the O.J. Simpson trial, the Clinton impeachment, and any other claimants - in the US at least, the Scopes Monkey Trial, as the press dubbed it, really was The Trial of the Century. AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof. How could it not be, given the issues involved and, espe- cially, the cast of characters? The question was not whether John Scopes had taught a high-school biology class from a book mentioning evolution, in direct violation of Tennessee House Bill No. 185 - no one disputed that he had. No, the question was whether the law, prohibiting the teaching of anything that denied the biblical story of creation, was against the Law of the Land - the Constitution of the United States. Scopes was the figurehead; it was evolution, and by extension science itself, that was actually on trial. Reporting on that trial in a series of savagely sarcastic dispatches was H.L. Mencken, the brilliant, iconoclastic journalist from the Baltimore Evening Sun. Appearing as cons