YEAR IN REVIEW 2001: BIOGRAPHY

Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid Even five years after he was declared an apostate by a high court, ordered to divorce his wife, and, in effect, forced out of his homeland, Egyptian academic Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd continued to serve as a focal point for those concerned with the human and civil rights excesses of Islamic fundamentalism in 2000. Abu Zayd's case was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Indian-born author Salman Rushdie and Bangladeshi feminist Taslima Nasrin, both also unable to return to their homelands because their writings had been declared insulting to Islam. Abu Zayd was born in Tanta, Egypt, in the Nile Delta on Oct. 7, 1943. He attended Cairo University and received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1981. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the Andalusian-born Sufi Ibn al-'Arabi (1165-1240), a mystic and philosopher who wrote in a multicultural (Provenal, Latin, and Arabic) and multireligious (Judaic, Christian, and Islamic) environment that he sought to reconcile in a universal love. Abu Zayd's thesis was published as The Philosophy of Hermeneutics in Beirut in 1983. From his studies Abu Zayd realized the importance of sociocultural factors in the interpretation of the Qur'an and took the point that interpretation is human, not divine, into his own beliefs. Abu Zayd observed how Islam was being interpreted by fundamentalists in Egypt and elsewhere in ways that served political ends, a position he opposed in his 1992 book Naqd al-khitab al-dini ("Critique of Religious Discourse"). When in that same year he applied for promotion to full professor at Cairo University, the tenure committee split. One of Abu Zayd's colleagues resorted to the pulpit of a mosque in Cairo to denounce him as an apostate for his writings. The Abu Zayd case became a cause clbre among Muslim fundamentalists, and even the newspaper of the ruling National Democratic Party called for his expulsion from the university and execution as a heretic. On June 14, 1995, a Cairo court ruled that Abu Zayd had to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis, a teacher of French culture at Cairo University, because he was a heretic and therefore a non-Muslim, and a Muslim woman could not be married to a non-Muslim man. The Court of Cassation upheld the ruling in 1996. Fearful for their lives, the couple fled Egypt and settled in The Netherlands. As his case continued to draw attention from international human rights organizations, Abu Zayd followed academic pursuits at the State University of Leiden, Neth., lectured throughout Europe and the U.S., and served on the editorial board for two forthcoming volumes of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an. Marius K. Deeb Amis, Martin The publication in May 2000 of Martin Amis's long-anticipated memoir, Experience, was greeted with enthusiasm by most literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Hitherto, few had questioned Amis's stature as a writer of brilliance and biting satire, but some had found his prodigious cleverness lacking at times in emotional depth. Most reviewers agreed, however, that the pages of Experience resounded with a new candour and thoughtfulness. As an autobiography and a riveting portrait of an unusual family-particularly, the depiction of his close relationship with his late father, novelist Kingsley Amis-the book was hailed as not just "entertaining" and "gossip-rich" but also "fine," "affecting," and "profound." Amis himself explained that he always knew he would be compelled to commemorate his father, who had leapt to international fame with the publication of Lucky Jim (1954) when Martin was five: "He was a writer and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to describe our case-a literary curiosity." Martin Louis Amis was born on Aug. 25, 1949, in Oxford, Eng., and was the godson of poet Philip Larkin. Despite having had literary influences, Amis was dismissed from school; his intellect was termed "unexceptional." He went on, however, to graduate from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1971 with first-class honours in English. After a brief stint as a book reviewer, Amis joined the Times Literary Supplement, and he soon became its fiction and poetry editor. He then moved to the New Statesman, where he became literary editor. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), won the Somerset Maugham Award and was followed by eight more novels and several short stories. Amis, the father of two sons by his first marriage to American philosopher Antonia Phillips and of two daughters by his second marriage to writer Isabel Fonseca, discovered in 1995 that he had a third daughter, Delilah Seale, from an affair two decades earlier. In Experience he describes meeting his 19-year-old daughter for the first time: there were "hugs and kisses for the girl with my face." His life, magnified by his extroverted nature, was much documented by the press. He acknowledged the rancour with which some fellow writers and journalists judged his glittering career: "I'm like the son of the lord of manor, in that I took over the estate . . . by right of birth, whereas everyone else has had to struggle." His style had been frequently imitated but rarely matched. Such novels as Other People (1981), Money (1984), and London Fields (1989) showcased his virtuoso storytelling technique but also revealed a dark side. Amis's characters inhabited a frightening world, where selfishness and avidity had caused humanity to teeter on the edge of disaster. Regardless of his birthright, Amis's continuing reputation as a doyen of English letters had been secured with his endlessly inventive, highly readable prose. Siobhan Dowd Arkan Serbian paramilitary leader (b. April 17, 1952, Brezice, Slovenia-d. Jan. 15, 2000, Belgrade, Yugos.), was head of the Serbian Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary force known as the Tigers that was accused of committing atrocities during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first half of the 1990s. While still a teenager, he allegedly became a hit man for the Yugoslav secret police. During the 1970s and early 1980s, he was involved in criminal activities across Western Europe, including bank and jewelry theft. Despite a number of convictions, he managed to escape from jails in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany. By 1990 he had begun organizing the Tigers. Among the force's alleged crimes were the massacre of more than 250 Croat civilians during a siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia in 1991 and the slaughter of some 1,000 Muslims in the eastern Bosnian towns of Bijeljina and Zvornik the following year. Celebrated as a hero among Serbs, Arkan was elected to the Serbian parliament in 1992 and launched the ultranationalist Serbian Unity Party. In 1997 the UN's International War Crimes Tribunal indicted him for crimes against humanity. He was shot dead by masked gunmen in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade. Assad, Bashar al- On July 17, 2000, Bashar al-Assad was inaugurated president of Syria. The 34-year-old ophthalmologist, described as intellectual and soft-spoken, was elected to the office for a seven-year term after the death on June 10 of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria since 1971. In his inaugural speech the new president emphasized the need to modernize the nation's economy, which was mostly government-controlled and was heavily dependent on oil exports. He also continued his father's hard-line approach in regard to recovering for Syria the Golan Heights region, which had been lost to Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Assad was born Sept. 11, 1965, in Damascus, the capital of Syria. He studied medicine at the University of Damascus and graduated as a general practitioner in 1988. He then trained to become an ophthalmologist at a Damascus military hospital and in 1992 moved to London to continue his studies. In 1994 his older brother, Basil, who had been designated his father's heir apparent, was killed in an automobile accident, and Bashar was summoned to return to Syria to take his brother's place. He was sent to a military academy north of Damascus to receive the requisite training for becoming the nation's president and eventually gained the rank of colonel in the elite Presidential Guard. Assad also took over his brother's position as head of the Syrian Computing Society and made it his goal to increase the use of computers in his nation. In 1999 he traveled to France, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Jordan to meet with the leaders of those countries. On June 18, soon after the death of his father, Assad was appointed secretary-general of the ruling Ba'th Party, and two days later the party congress nominated him as its candidate for the presidency. The national legislature approved the nomination on June 27, and on July 10, running unopposed, Assad gained the approval of 97.29% of those who voted. Among his first moves as president was to announce that, unlike his father, he did not want to see pictures of himself on public and private buildings throughout Syria. In his inaugural address he stated that he would not support policies that might threaten the dominance of the Ba'th Party and that freedom of expression should be encouraged but in the form of "positive criticism" of government policies. Rejecting democracy as practiced in other countries, Assad declared, "We have to have our own democracy to match our history and culture, arising from the needs of our people and our reality." David R. Calhoun Booth, Cherie Until 1997, when the Labour Party's victory in the U.K. general election propelled her into Downing Street as the wife of the incoming prime minister, Tony Blair, British barrister Cherie Booth was normally referred to by her married name. After her husband's election, however, she reclaimed her maiden name to emphasize her determination to pursue an independent professional career; she became the first spouse of a British prime minister to maintain a career of her own. In 2000 she also became the first woman in over 150 years to give birth while her husband was serving as prime minister. On May 20, at the age of 45, Booth became a mother for the fourth time when Leo Blair was born. Booth was born on Sept. 23, 1954, in Bury, Lancashire. Both of her parents, Anthony Booth and Gale Smith, were actors, socialists, and Roman Catholics. Life became significantly harder when her father left her mother in the early 1960s. Though he went on to become a well-known comedy actor through the long-running BBC television series Till Death Do Us Part, his private life dissolved into alcoholism, womanizing, and debt, and Smith and her children never benefited materially from his acting success. Cherie Booth attended Roman Catholic schools near Liverpool and subsequently studied law at the London School of Economics. In 1976 Booth was offered a "pupillage" (trainee position) with a group of lawyers headed by Derry Irvine (he was subsequently made a life peer and in 1997 was appointed lord chancellor). It was there that she met Blair, who was hired at the same time she was. Blair and Booth married in 1980, by which time both were active in the Labour Party, though she was widely regarded as the more radical of the two. Both stood for Parliament in the general election of 1983. Whereas he won a traditional Labour constituency in the north of England, she came in third in a normally Conservative part of Kent, southeast of London. As her husband's political career flourished, Booth dedicated herself to the law. She specialized in public-law issues, such as workers' rights and sex-discrimination cases. Following Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, the couple decided that she should continue her career but refrain from becoming a "political" wife in the manner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton. Booth was appointed a queen's counsel, or senior barrister, in 1995. Following Labour's return to government in 1997, she continued to fight public-law cases, which occasionally required her to argue in court against the government led by her husband. The only political topic on which she spoke publicly concerned the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, a cause she strongly supported and on which she commanded a considerable amount of professional authority. In 2000 Booth helped to set up Matrix, a new firm of London lawyers specializing in human rights cases. Peter Kellner Brosnan, Pierce Although the James Bond film franchise was approaching 40 years of age, the adventures of the suave Agent 007 were more popular than ever in 2000, thanks to Irish actor Pierce Brosnan, the most recent Bond incarnation in a long line of handsome leading men. The latest Bond film, The World Is Not Enough (1999), was the 19th in the series, and it did more than $30 million in business during its first weekend, the most for any Bond film. Pierce Brendan Brosnan was born May 16, 1953, in County Meath, Ire. His father left home shortly thereafter, so he was raised by relatives after his mother left to work in England. At age 15 Brosnan set out on his own in London to be an actor. He joined a theatre group and later studied at the Drama Centre of London. He married actress Cassandra Harris, and when the two moved to the U.S., Harris landed a role in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only. Brosnan became a rising star with his role in the NBC television detective series Remington Steele, but when he was chosen as the successor to Roger Moore as Agent 007 in 1986, his NBC contract prevented him from accepting, and Timothy Dalton took the role instead. Brosnan continued to take on television and film roles and in 1991 dealt with the loss of his wife, who died after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer. Meanwhile, Dalton's two Bond films were seen as relative failures, and the series was in need of a saviour. In 1994 Brosnan finally had his chance-he was signed to a contract as the fifth James Bond for three films, with an option for a fourth. His first film, GoldenEye, made more than $350 million worldwide, the most ever for a Bond film. The second, Tomorrow Never Dies, scored record grosses for a Bond film in the U.S. Brosnan brought out the human side of the Bond character, and the series producers sought to emphasize that in The World Is Not Enough. Brosnan's Bond was vulnerable, almost fallible. Although he might have been tiring of the role after making the second film, Brosnan seemed to be hinting in early 2000 that he would stick around to make a fourth. Still, he sought to expand his repertoire and took advantage of his popularity to choose new projects. In 1999 he produced and starred in a remake of the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, and he had plans to produce more of his own films. Anthony G. Craine Browne, Sir John With its $27 billion acquisition of Atlantic Richfield Co. in 2000, BP Amoco became the world's second largest producer of oil and natural gas. At the helm of the ever-growing energy giant was chief executive officer Sir John Browne, a shy, private, unmarried man who lived with his mother and was known for his long work hours and unflagging loyalty to the company that had employed him for more than 30 years. Browne's personal life, daring deals, and calls for environmentally sound business practices made him an odd and highly recognizable character within the oil industry. When Browne took charge of British Petroleum (BP) in 1995, it was a company that had no clear direction and had just raised itself from debt. Browne laid out a plan to expand BP and, in the process, protect it from fluctuating oil prices while grabbing a larger share of the market for natural gas, which increased in demand as producers reacted to consumers' wishes for cleaner alternatives to oil. Browne first made waves in 1997 when he abandoned the oil industry's customary resistance to more environmentally friendly production procedures. He later promised to see that BP cut its emission of greenhouse gases by 10% by 2010. In 1999 BP Amoco began a plan to power 200 of its retail outlets by using solar panels. Although some environmentalists were skeptical, Browne said that he was responding to the wishes of consumers, who, he believed, would continue demanding cleaner alternatives to fossil fuel. He backed this up in April 1999 by spending $45 million for a controlling interest in Solarex and thereby making BP Amoco the world's largest solar-energy concern. He also created a major commotion in the petroleum industry in August 1998 when he announced BP's $57 billion agreement to merge with Amoco, which effectively eliminated one competitor while sending industry giants Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron scrambling to attempt their own mergers in response. Edmund John Phillip Browne was born on Feb. 20, 1948, in Hamburg, Ger. At the suggestion of his father, who worked for BP, he took a position with the firm in 1966 as an apprentice while studying at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a degree in physics. He later received a business degree from Stanford University and held various positions at BP in exploration and production before becoming group treasurer and chief executive officer of BP Finance International in 1984. He became CEO of the Standard Oil Co. after it merged with BP in 1987, and he continued his climb up the BP management ladder until he was named CEO in 1995. Browne was knighted in 1998. Anthony G. Craine Bush, George W. As a result of the vote held on Nov. 7, 2000, Republican George W. Bush, governor of Texas, was elected the 43rd president of the U.S. He defeated the Democratic candidate, Al Gore (q.v.), the country's vice president. It was the closest presidential election in more than a century, with Gore winning the popular vote by more than 500,000 out of some 105,000,000 ballots cast but with Bush taking the electoral college 271-266. The electoral count was not settled until December, after political and legal disputes over the results in Florida. Bush was especially strong in suburban, small town, and rural areas in Southern and Western states. His father, George Bush, had served as the 41st U.S. president (1989-93), and with his election George W. Bush thus became the second son of a president to be elected to the office, the first having been John Quincy Adams, the 6th U.S. president (1825-29), the son of John Adams, the 2nd president (1797-1801). Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Conn., to a politically active family. Not only did his father have a long career in government, but his grandfather Prescott Bush was a U.S. senator from Connecticut (1952-62). The younger Bush grew up mostly in Texas. He graduated from Yale University (B.A., 1968) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A., 1975). Beginning in the mid-1970s he worked in the oil business in Midland, Texas, and for a time he owned his own company. In 1978 he lost a bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He later worked for his father, and in 1989 he was the managing partner of a group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team. In 1994 he was elected governor of Texas, the first son of a U.S. president to win a governorship, and in 1998 he was reelected. As governor he presided over changes in the state's welfare system and an increase in spending on schools. Bush announced his candidacy for president on June 12, 1999, advocating what he called "compassionate conservatism." He raised record amounts of campaign money and gained the endorsements of prominent Republican officeholders. His principal rival was U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, known particularly as an advocate of campaign finance reform. McCain upset Bush in the first primary, held on Feb. 1, 2000, in New Hampshire, but by March 7, so-called Super Tuesday, when Bush took 9 of 13 contests, it was clear that he would win the nomination. During the primaries Bush courted right-wing Republicans, but with his choice of Richard B. Cheney (q.v.), who had been his father's secretary of defense, as his running mate, he tied his candidacy more closely to the party's mainstream and then moved farther toward the centre. Bush's campaign proposals included large tax cuts and a partial privatization of Social Security. Although some people criticized his lack of experience at the national level-particularly in foreign affairs-and even questioned his competence, he did better than expected in debates with Gore, and he projected an easygoing manner that was popular among large groups of voters. Robert Rauch Case, Steve During the closing months of 1999, Steve Case, the boyish-looking 41-year-old cofounder and CEO of Internet service provider (ISP) America Online, Inc. (AOL), initiated talks that would result in the largest corporate merger in history and the coming of age of the "dot-com" industry of Internet-related businesses. His effort resulted in the January 2000 announcement that AOL would purchase entertainment behemoth Time Warner Inc. in a $183 billion deal. The move marked the latest and largest step in Case's steady path toward fulfilling a nearly 20-year-old vision of what an on-line service could be-a vision that, not so long before, few shared with the man who had become one of the most powerful executives in the world. Stephen M. Case was born Aug. 21, 1958, in Honolulu. His father was a corporate lawyer, his mother a teacher, and from a young age Case and his brother Dan-later a millionaire venture capitalist-began devising business opportunities for themselves. After graduating (1981) from Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., with a degree in political science, Case held positions in the marketing departments of Procter & Gamble and Pizza Hut. Not long after buying his first computer and discovering the world of on-line computing, Case took a marketing position in 1983 with Control Video Corp., a start-up company that planned to offer consumers downloadable video-game software via telephone lines. The plan failed, but the company-at Case's suggestion-regrouped and, under the name Quantum Computer Services, began providing an on-line network for users of Commodore 64 computers. Case foresaw an information-delivery service for computer users not unlike those that were being offered by Prodigy and CompuServe. His idea was to make the service far more user-friendly and more widely available. Quantum, using a friendly graphical interface originally developed by Apple Computer, Inc., became America Online in 1991 and confounded its critics by steadily outpacing all other on-line services in number of subscribers. By the end of 1999, Case had built AOL into the world's largest ISP, engineered AOL's takeover of rival CompuServe and of World Wide Web-browser company Netscape Communications, and arranged deals that would ensure delivery of AOL services via satellite television, palmtop computers, and wireless telephones. Throughout, he seemed unaffected by ego; steady, unassuming, and simple, he surrounded himself with capable managers and built a reputation for loyalty. As the merger unfolded, he suggested that Time Warner CEO Gerald M. Levin assume the top position of the newly created AOL Time Warner. As he moved ahead with his plans in 2000, Case appeared to be writing his own chapter in the history of communications technology. Anthony G. Craine Chalayan, Hussein The 2000 autumn-winter ready-to-wear show staged by Hussein Chalayan at Sadler's Wells, an east London dance theatre, was such a critical hit that it propelled the 30-year-old Turkish Cypriot designer to the designation of British Designer of the Year-for the second consecutive year-by the British Fashion Council. The audience compared his presentation with performance art. Chalayan's stage set consisted of modernist furniture-just four chairs and a circular coffee table set up at the foot of his catwalk. Throughout the show, models wearing his signature elegant, skillfully designed ensembles-floral-sprigged tops and skirts and black coats made of layered fabric and edged in white-moved by these pieces. At the finale of the show, a model approached the table, removed an inner wood ring from it, and stepped into the table; the furniture piece was instantly fashioned as a skirt. By blending such clever theatrics with his beautiful designs, Chalayan became known as one of fashion's most intellectual designers. In a previous season he had dressed a troupe of models in traditional female Muslim headdresses but left their bodies naked. His presentation outraged the Muslim community, of which he was a member, but attracted the attention of the press. At another show models wore metal prongs that twisted their facial expressions into screams. In explaining his penchant for going to such stylistic extremes, Chalayan said simply, "Fashion is so transient. I am trying to give my work constant development, both conceptually and aesthetically." Unlike the designers whose catwalk theatrics overshadowed their clothes, Chalayan's work was remembered as clearly as his avant-garde styling. Shortly after his autumn-winter show, the London department store Harvey Nichols stocked his work for the first time. Although there was speculation that Chalayan would succeed Jil Sander as design director of her former company-which she sold to the Prada group-as the year drew to a close, Chalayan was still based in London designing his own line as well as knitwear for TSE New York. Chalayan was born Huseyin Chaglayan on Aug. 12, 1970, in Nicosia, Cyprus, to Muslim parents. He moved to London with his family while still a child. After graduating from the prestigious British design college Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, London, he established his own independent design label in 1993. Chalayan's big break came soon thereafter when a collection that he developed was presented during London Fashion Week. His Fashion Week debut was critically acclaimed, as were his subsequent shows, which often featured body-inhibiting designs-such as his cocoon dress, a sleeveless creation that bound the arms of its wearer to the sides of the body but provided slits for the release of the hands. In 1995 he won a design competition sponsored by the Absolut Vodka distillers. Two years later the Victoria and Albert Museum included his creations in an exhibition entitled "The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion," and that same year his aubergine-coloured silk beaded gown was chosen as the dress of the year by the Museum of Costume in Bath. Bronwyn Cosgrave Chambers, John T. "The Internet will change companies, industries, and products in ways we can't even imagine. These changes will take place at speeds we have never seen before. If a company does not move rapidly, they will get left behind." So spoke John T. Chambers, president and chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, Inc., and in that role he made sure that his company moved at speeds necessary not only to maintain its position but also to far outstrip competitors. Since becoming head of Cisco in 1995, he had led the computer networking equipment firm to a more than 10-fold increase in annual revenues and a growth of 1,700%. By 2000 it was the third largest company in the world, behind the General Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp., and in January of that year Business Week magazine, which had dubbed Chambers "Mr. Internet," placed him on its list of the world's top 25 executives for the third time. John Thomas Chambers was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Aug. 23, 1949, and grew up in Charleston, W.Va. He gained a bachelor's degree in business and a law degree from West Virginia University as well as an M.B.A. in finance and management from Indiana University at Bloomington. He began his business career at IBM Corp. in 1976, and after six years there he moved to Wang Computers. During his eight-year tenure at Wang, he had to lay off 5,000 employees, and he later said, "I'll do anything to avoid that again." Chambers joined Cisco in 1991 as senior vice president of worldwide operations at a time when the firm had annual sales of $70 million. By 2000 annual revenue was estimated at $14 billion. One share of Cisco stock bought for $18 in 1990 was worth about $14,000 some 10 years later. Chambers made it clear that he did not intend to let Cisco rest on its laurels as the world's chief provider of routers, the powerful network computers that sort the information packets that speed data through the Internet. Although the firm continued to improve the speed and capacity of the routers so that they could process one billion bits of information per second, Chambers had loftier goals. He viewed the future as a time when "data, voice, and video will be delivered over a single connection in our homes." With that in mind, he had engineered the acquisition of more than 60 companies since 1994, aiming to broaden Cisco's expertise and range of products. One area that he planned for Cisco to enter was the telecommunications business; he believed that Cisco's data networks would eventually become the world's leading voice networks. As a leader, Chambers had this credo: "Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't be willing to do yourself." In keeping with that policy, the man named "the best boss in America" by the 20/20 television program had an office that was described as "austere and tiny as that of an entry-level programmer," and he and his top executives flew coach class and had no reserved parking spaces at Cisco's San Jose, Calif., headquarters. David R. Calhoun Cheney, Richard B. When Texas oil executive Richard B. Cheney took the job of heading a search committee to find a running mate for George W. Bush (q.v.), few suspected that he himself would end up the Republican vice presidential candidate. On July 25, 2000, however, Bush announced that Cheney was his choice. What he brought to the ticket was experience in national government and in foreign affairs, both of which Bush lacked. Cheney's campaign appearances, which included attacks on what he called the "big government" policies of Al Gore (q.v.), were effective among many voters and helped the Republican ticket win a narrow victory. Cheney was born on Jan. 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Neb., but he grew up in Casper, Wyo. He entered Yale University in 1959 but failed to graduate. Cheney then earned B.A. (1965) and M.A. (1966) degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming and did work toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1968 he went to Washington, D.C., as a congressional fellow, and beginning in 1969 he worked in the administration of Pres. Richard Nixon. In 1974 Cheney became deputy chief of staff and in 1975 chief of staff for Pres. Gerald Ford. In 1978 he was elected from Wyoming to the first of six terms in the House of Representatives, and by 1988 he had risen to become the Republican whip. In the House he took conservative positions on issues, in particular opposing abortion, gun control, and environmental regulation. From 1989 to 1993 he was secretary of defense in the administration of Pres. George Bush and presided over reductions in the military following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Cheney also oversaw military operations in Panama and was the principal strategist of Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. After President Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992, Cheney left government to become a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In 1995 he became the chairman and CEO of the Halliburton Co., a firm in Dallas, Texas, engaged in the oil-services industry and in construction. Beginning in 1978 Cheney suffered three mild heart attacks, and he underwent quadruple-bypass surgery in 1988. Doctors pronounced him fit to participate in a national campaign and to serve as vice president, and his medical condition did not become an issue. Two weeks after the election, however, he suffered another mild heart attack, but he quickly resumed his duties in assisting in transition plans. There were signs that he would play a very active role in a Bush administration. Robert Rauch Cher During a career that spanned well over three decades, Cher had made so many comebacks that, barring her "infomercial years," one might argue that the American singer and actress was never really gone. In 2000 she staged yet another return, this time taking home her first Grammy Award for the hit dance single "Believe." By early 2000 the song had become a number one hit in over 20 countries, and in the United Kingdom it became the top-selling single of all time by a female artist. This came on the heels of her first well-received film performance in years in Tea with Mussolini (1999), and it seemed that in 2000 Cher was once again back on top. Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946, in El Centro, Calif. At age 16 she moved to Los Angeles, where she met Sonny Bono, whom she married in 1964. The couple began singing together, and their first big pop hit came in 1965 with "I Got You Babe," which sold over three million copies. The duo went on to score a number of hits, but by the late 1960s their popularity had begun to fade. A jump start came in 1971 with a television show, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, which ran until 1974 and at its peak drew more than 30 million viewers weekly. During this time Cher's solo career flourished with hits such as "Half Breed" and "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves." Cher and Sonny divorced in 1974, and her later television efforts, both with and without Sonny, never matched their earlier success. The 1980s were boom years for both her film and her music careers. Cher left the successful nightclub act she had cultivated in the late 1970s and early '80s to revisit an earlier interest in acting. She appeared in the Broadway and film versions of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and, on the basis of her solid performance, was cast in a supporting role in Silkwood (1983), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. She made a number of other film appearances and was recognized for her outstanding performance as the mother of a disfigured teen in Mask (1985). In 1988 she won an Academy Award for her starring role as an Italian-American widow in the romantic comedy Moonstruck (1987). In the late 1980s she also had two successful albums-Cher (1987), featuring the hit single "I Found Someone," and Heart of Stone (1989), whose "If I Could Turn Back Time" also topped the charts. Cher's music career, which had waned by the mid-1990s, made a sharp turnaround with the late 1998 release of Believe. In 1998 Cher published the autobiographical The First Time. Sandra Langeneckert Collins, Francis On June 26, 2000, scientists gathered in Washington, D.C., accompanied by U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, to announce that the sequencing of the DNA in the human genetic map had been completed through the combined effort of a public research consortium and a private company. The breakthrough was hailed as the first step toward helping doctors diagnose, treat, and even prevent thousands of illnesses caused by genetic disorders. One of the primary players in the work that led to the historic announcement was Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Though he had come under fire for waging a well-publicized feud with J. Craig Venter, his counterpart in the private sector, Collins had led the government-backed effort, known as the Human Genome Project (HGP), since 1993, steering the effort through years of lean funding and increasing critical scrutiny. Francis Sellers Collins was born on April 14, 1950, in Staunton, Va. Homeschooled by his mother for much of his young life, Collins took an early interest in science. He received his B.S. from the University of Virginia (1970), went on to Yale University to earn his M.S. and Ph.D. (1974), and earned his M.D. (1977) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1984 Collins joined the staff of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as an assistant professor. His work at Michigan would earn him the reputation as one of the world's foremost genetics researchers. In 1989 he announced the discovery of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. The following year a Collins-led team found the gene that causes neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that generates the growth of tumours. He also served as a leading researcher in a collaboration of six laboratories that in 1993 uncovered the gene that causes Huntington chorea, a neurological disease. In 1993 Collins, by then a full professor, left Michigan to take the post as head of the National Institutes of Health's sector of the HGP, which had originated three years earlier with a stated goal of completing the sequencing project in 15 years at a cost of $3 billion by coordinating the work of a number of leading academic research centres around the country, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Wellcome Trust of London. Known as a team player driven by a sincere interest in successful research that could help humanity, Collins was an obvious choice for the job, and he willingly took a sizable pay cut to participate in a historic project. The necessity of a government effort was questioned when a rival operation, Celera Genomics, emerged in 1998 and appeared to be working even faster than the HGP at sequencing DNA. Headed by Venter, a former National Institutes of Health scientist, Celera had devised its own, quicker method-though some scientists, Collins among them, questioned the accuracy of the work. Collins successfully thwarted attempts to merge the public effort with the private endeavours, but in the end the two sides came together to announce the completion of the project. A devout Christian, Collins freely expressed the awe he experienced as a leader in the uncloaking of one of the mysteries of life. As concerns arose about the moral and ethical implications of the research he had conducted, Collins actively cautioned against misuse of genetic information. At congressional hearings in July, Collins urged the passage of federal law to set guidelines on how individuals' genetic information could be handled. "The potential for mischief is quite great," he said. Anthony G. Craine Coutts, Russell To celebrate his 38th birthday, on March 1, 2000, yachtsman Russell Coutts tied a 97-year-old record when he skippered Team New Zealand to its ninth straight winning race with him at the helm in the America's Cup sailing competition. The first five consecutive wins had come when he led the Kiwis' stunning sweep of the U.S. in 1995, his nation's first America's Cup triumph and only the second Cup victory by a non-U.S. team. His four victories in 2000 were over the Italian Prada team in its sleek yacht Luna Rossa and came in the defenders' home waters off New Zealand's North Island. The Kiwis easily overcame the Italians' fast starts, but Coutts waited until the fourth race to introduce a secret weapon-a new, light "code zero" headsail, designed for light winds. He appeared poised to lead the yacht Black Magic to the first-ever America's Cup defense by non-Americans, but instead of setting a personal record, Coutts had another surprise for the sailing world. In the fifth race of the best-five-of-nine series, he yielded command of the Black Magic to his backup helmsman, 26-year-old Dean Barker, who rose to the challenge by leading the crew to a comfortable 48-second win. Afterward, Barker credited Coutts with the victory, "All the hard work's been done by Russell." After the Cup victory and a hero's welcome in a nation where sailing was a leading sport, Coutts remained in the spotlight by joining his design-team leader, Tom Schnackenberg, and tactician Brad Butterworth in taking over the administration of Team New Zealand, replacing yachting legend Sir Peter Blake. Securing and paying a team of yacht designers as well as a crew of sailors, negotiating broadcasting rights, finding sponsorship, and otherwise attending to the details of operating Team New Zealand became the responsibility of Coutts and his two partners. An even bigger surprise was in store, however, when Coutts and Butterworth quit Team New Zealand in May and signed an agreement with Swiss billionaire and avid yachtsman Ernesto Bertarelli to prepare a team from Switzerland to challenge for the next America's Cup, to be held in 2003. Coutts was born March 1, 1962, and won his first regatta when he was nine years old, steering a 2.13-m (7-ft) wooden dinghy off the windy coast of Dunedin, South Island. Nine years later he became the single-handed world youth champion, and in 1984 he won an Olympic gold medal in the Finn class. He was with the national team when it finished third in the 1992 America'