Unlike transplants between identical twins, whose genetic endowment is the same, all patients receiving hearts or other organs must take antirejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

ln one of the most stunning reversals in the history of marketing, the Coca-Cola company in July 1985 yielded to thousands of irate consumers demanding that it should bring back the original Coke formula.

Efforts to equalize the funds available to school districts, a major goal of education reformers and many states in the 1970’s, has not significantly reduced the gaps existing between the richest and poorest districts.

Most state constitutions now mandate that the state budget be balanced each year.

Samuel Sewall viewed marriage, as other seventeenth-century colonists, like a property arrangement rather than an emotional bond based on romantic love.

In the mid-1960’s a newly installed radar warning system mistook the rising of the moon as a massive missile attack by the Soviets.

When the technique known as gene-splicing was invented in the early 1970’s, it was feared that scientists might inadvertently create an “Andromeda strain” a microbe never before seen on Earth that might escape from the laboratory and it would kill vast numbers of humans who would have no natural defenses against it.

A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that even Theodore C. Sorensen, the White House counsel, did not know it existed.

In 1791 Robert Carter III, one of the wealthiest plantation owners in Virginia, stunned his family, friends, and neighbors by filing a deed of emancipation, setting free the more than 500 slaves who were legally considered his property.

Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are suspicious of strangers.