George Lyman Duff memorial lecture. Cholesterol revisited. Molecule, medicine, and media.

T he past year has been truly extraordinary. Not only has there been astonishing medical and public health interest in cholesterol, but the term cholesterol has been brought by the media into common culture and consciousness in quite surprising ways. How did this happen? And what are its implications for science, for medicine, and for public health and policy? This evening I will try to address some of these issues— not in a thorough and systematic way, but from the vantage point of someone who has been caught up and tossed aloft by the tidal wave of cholesterol concern, and who has been trying to remain afloat and perhaps even channel the wave in desirable directions. When Arthur Spector invited me to give this year's Duff Lecture, I was faced with a quandary. Previous Duff Lecturers have generally provided a scholarly and stateof-the-art review of a scientific topic that embodies their own research. In my case, however, such a review would deal with retinoids and retinoid-binding proteins and would be neither sufficiently entertaining nor really appropriate for this occasion. Accordingly, I will speak tonight more as an essayist and journalistic observer than as a scientist—and will adopt the stance of the Roman god for whom our month of January is named, by looking both backward and forward—and even at times straight ahead. Nullius In Verba. That is the motto of the Royal Society of London, a motto that proclaims that experiments, not words, are the test of truth. An obvious concept, you say; yet not so obvious in 1662, when Charles II first chartered the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Among the founders were such great scientists as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, and also nonscientists such as Christopher Wren, John Locke, John Dryden, and Samuel Pepys. Their guiding philosophy was that we are "beholden to Experiments; which though they have not yet completed the discovery of the true world, they have already vanquished those wild inhabitants of the false world that us'd to astonish the minds of men." Enlightened thinking, yes indeed—a product of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth