conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Founded, American, Museum with the genre: Science & Math, Nature & Ecology
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Gathering of Wonders'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Gathering of Wonders
  After his Cuba forays, Lutz focused on collecting insects closer to home, describing new species sent in by other collectors, and essaying innovative experiments on insect behavior. In one series of studies, he measured the amount of ultraviolet light (invisible to us, but not to many arthropods) reflected by different flowers, insects, and spiders, with a goal of understanding how the world looks to what he called "its principal inhabitants."
  Some of these encounters have been fatal. Mammalogist and anatomist Harry C. Raven, one of the most prominent curators at the Museum during the first half of the century, died at age 55 in 1944 after a long, painful struggle with the disease. In 1965, ornithologist E. T. Gilliard died (at only 53) of a heart attack, contributed to by decades of recurrent malarial fevers and years of increasingly toxic treatments for the disease.
  Van Gelder's report of the travails that followed make for frightening reading. For months, he suffered recurrent fevers (as high as 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit), chills, anemia, an enlarged liver, and other symptoms. And though drugs eventually cured him of the disease, his bout with malaria left marks that lasted the rest of his life. "He wasn't yet fifty years old when he contracted malaria," says his daughter Leslie, "but he came out of the experience an old man. He never again had the energy and strength he'd always had before."
  What is the cost of malaria? "For me, it meant ninety-two days out of work, twenty of which I spent in hospitals," said Van Gelder, as well as the less quantifiable long-term effects. For the world as a whole, the costs are incalculable. In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention placed the number of people affected by malaria each year at a staggering 300 million. Although new prophylactic medications can now prevent chloroquine-resistant strains of the disease, no expert believes that the protozoans have "lost" and that modern medicine has "won." Quite the reverse: the struggle against malaria is clearly an ongoing war whose final battle is at best years away—and whose ultimate fate remains frighteningly in doubt.
  How important are insects and other arthropods? Important enough that scientists from other departments study them, along with those of us in Entomology. I think that at any given time, a third of the biologists in this Museum are studying various arthropod species.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The bogged-down animals would perish, and then would be quickly covered by clay and other sediments. As a result, the accumulating skeletons—many found still articulated, and some so well preserved that skin impressions are visible—give paleontologists an almost unprecedented look at the life around the lake between approximately 200,000 and 700,000 years ago.
  I don't believe that the golden age of exploration is something that we have to look back on, something that has passed. I feel very fortunate that there are still places like the Gobi Desert, where you can make important finds—discoveries that can still revolutionize our view of vertebrate evolution.
  Howling winds. Dangerous sandstorms. Blisteringly hot days and frigidly cold nights. The constant threat of sandblindness, of injuries sustained far from any doctor or hospital, of illness or death from tainted or absent water.
  All these risks characterize any visit to the Gobi Desert. So why on earth would generations of Museum paleontologists brave such conditions to spend months tracking across this forbidding, nearly inaccessible wilderness?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: By 1963, the rush to modernize had inevitably stumbled over some harsh realities. "Almost overnight the plagues of the modern world—crowding into cities, pollution from deposits of human waste in the sea, and juvenile delinquency—appeared, ten years out of the first proud modernization effort," she wrote. "The people had still not realized much economic progress because the island has few resources."
  When Mead returned in 1971, she found that the dream of quick, seamless modernization had faded, and that the islanders "were beginning to ponder what was worth saving from the past before it was gone forever. The slit gongs, once abandoned for a gong made from a torpedo case, were back.... The old dancers were back also, in old costumes worn over modern dress, which looked unesthetic to our eyes, but not to theirs."
  During her last visit in 1975, Mead was even more hopeful of the Manus's ability to balance the best of their own traditions with the most useful benefits offered by modernization. "The society was still distinctively Manus, but with a new sense of identity, ready to combine the old and the new," she wrote.
  For Mead, the perspective gained by her years visiting with the Manus proved what she had suspected from the start of her career in anthropology—and what the invaluable insights gained by today's ethnologists confirm: "I realized how little we had been able to learn when we used to study a people only once, and how illuminating and unique was this opportunity to follow the same population—a microcosm of the world—for forty-seven years, as they fanned out into the wider world, but retained the core of their culture at home."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: By 1963, the rush to modernize had inevitably stumbled over some harsh realities. "Almost overnight the plagues of the modern world—crowding into cities, pollution from deposits of human waste in the sea, and juvenile delinquency—appeared, ten years out of the first proud modernization effort," she wrote. "The people had still not realized much economic progress because the island has few resources."
  When Mead returned in 1971, she found that the dream of quick, seamless modernization had faded, and that the islanders "were beginning to ponder what was worth saving from the past before it was gone forever. The slit gongs, once abandoned for a gong made from a torpedo case, were back.... The old dancers were back also, in old costumes worn over modern dress, which looked unesthetic to our eyes, but not to theirs."
  During her last visit in 1975, Mead was even more hopeful of the Manus's ability to balance the best of their own traditions with the most useful benefits offered by modernization. "The society was still distinctively Manus, but with a new sense of identity, ready to combine the old and the new," she wrote.
  For Mead, the perspective gained by her years visiting with the Manus proved what she had suspected from the start of her career in anthropology—and what the invaluable insights gained by today's ethnologists confirm: "I realized how little we had been able to learn when we used to study a people only once, and how illuminating and unique was this opportunity to follow the same population—a microcosm of the world—for forty-seven years, as they fanned out into the wider world, but retained the core of their culture at home.