Timeperiod

Time Period

In the years that Toxin, by Robin Cook, was being written there were a few major events that happened. Among these things were the medical break through of a possible cure for AIDS, the political phenomenon of Hong Kong being returned to the Chinese’s Government, and the scientific discovery of ice on the Moon’s poles. All three of these things happened in a different year and they are all vital to the continuance of today’s society.

The reason that the new medication founded for AIDS, in 1996, was deemed a possible cure is because the trails for it had gone so well. All but one person out of a test trail of thirty-six people became below the detection level of HIV; this caused the FDA to approve the drug in record time. What is this drug, I asked myself. It is actually two drugs, Ritonavir and Indinavir; they work together to attack the enzyme protease, which AIDS needs for replication. For the many HIV sufferers, people that have been told the might not live past their twenties, these two medications bring new hope for longer healthier life spans. “Thirty-four year old Puck from San Francisco says, ‘I’m even thinking of buying a house with a thirty year mortgage…what a concept.’”

I was surprised to find out that for ninety-nine years the Chinese city of Hong Kong was a colony of Great Britain and that in 1977, as in the Joint Declaration, Britain Returned Hong Kong to Beijing. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any concerns from either side of the return. Upon further reading I found out that Britain is worried that the Chinese government will squelch the rights of Hong Kong’s 6.4 million citizens, where as China is worried that the two forms of government will not be able to coincide

because of how different they are from each other. With these chief concerns flying around I wondered what the Chinese government has done so far to alleviate them. I found that instead of doing something to alleviate them China is possibly causing trouble by replacing Hong Kong’s “freely elected legislature with [members of] an appointed Provisional Legislature.” It seemed as though the Chinese government just wanted to get more power through more land to me so I decided to find out what else they had their sights set on. I soon found that the newly retuned Hong Kong gave the Chinese government the courage to try and take back Taiwan; considered to be a “renegade province” that will only wants reunification under a democratic government. Let’s hope that they don’t get Taiwan too soon because who knows what they might set their sights on next.

In March of the year 1998 reports from the Lunar Prospector, an unmanned vehicle on the moon , about ice crystals that had been found within 20 feet of the moon’s surface. It is spread out over thousands of square feet, between 20 inches and 6.5 feet below the surface, on the poles of the moon, between 10 million and a few hundred million tons of ice.
One hundred metric tons of the ice on the moon would fill a lake two miles long on each side and 35 feet deep.
After all of this information settled in my head I wondered what this could possibly mean for our astronauts. So I kept reading and found out that there is a possibility of mining the ice for rocket fuel and water for the astronauts. There was only in person I found in my research that supported this work; that was cited that is, Chief Scientist Alan Binder said, “man’s destiny is to move into space. The moon is the key to that because it has resources we can use.”
There are many things that happen throughout the world that people don’t even realize are happening until they look for them.