It's not especially pleasing to write about death in the first column of the New Year, but there's a lot of it about.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein has been executed. In Libya, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death on charges of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV. In the United States, many death-row inmates are wondering if they will escape execution, as courts agonize over whether or not execution by lethal injection is humane. And in Japan, 21 people -- including Aum Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara -- have had their death sentences finalized for this year.
Execution is a personal matter. If you believe in it, or not, depends on your own feelings about crime and punishment. Given that it is a personal matter, you may be wondering what place a discussion of execution has in a science column. The answer is that, in one way or another, science impacts on the death penalty in all four of the cases mentioned above.