It seems like only yesterday that Alfred Vellucci, the crusty mayor of Cambridge, Mass. during the 1970s and self-styled one-man poison pill to the burgeoning biotech industry, hauled the cloners of Harvard and MIT before the city council and gave them a lesson in English 101. "Most of
us in this room, including myself, are lay people," he solemnly intoned during an infamous June 1976 meeting, during which the burghers debated a moratorium on experiments using recombinant DNA. "We don't understand your alphabet. So you will spell it out for us so we'll know exactly what you're talking about..."

A scientist stripped of jargon, it must be said, offers a particularly forlorn form of public nakedness. Although I never found Vellucci's scientific arguments against recombinant DNA very convincing, I have always had a grudging admiration for the populist economy with which he revised the terms of the debate. He displayed an artful ability to see that a common vocabulary was essential to resolving (or, in this case, roiling) public debate about a new technology.