Improved Format

Your newspaper is to be congratulated on improving the format of the index of death notices.

It is much more readable with larger type, lower case for first names and space between the listing of names.

Maurice F. Levie

Baltimore

Stadium Failings

It is extremely rare for me to agree with your architecture writer, Edward Gunts. Of his two review articles in The Sunday Sun, March 22, it's 50-50.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Gunt's criticism of the design for the Teflon tent at the Christopher Columbus Center.

But I disagree with his praise for the new baseball park (which I prefer to call Baltimore Oriole Stadium). We only see eye-to-eye on one thing: An open stadium, with natural grass, is the way baseball is supposed to be played.

Building a stadium with fewer seats than its predecessor seems short-sighted, except that we all know the Orioles planned it that way to give patrons the belief that they had better buy advanced sale reserved tickets. The Orioles don't want to depend on walk-ups, as they could in a larger park.

I don't like an asymetrical field. It causes the home team to build its team for the home field, putting them at a disadvantage in other team's parks.

As for that warehouse, it was obsolete when built. It should have been torn down 50 years ago. During its days as an active warehouse, that monstrosity was a 12-alarm fire waiting to happen.

I personally do not see anything wrong with the so-called cookie-cutter stadiums. Mr. Gunts' praise for stadiums long gone and for Fenway Park is misguided.

That band box of Fenway is obsolete. It was built in that configuration probably to fit on the available land. I have no nostalgia for such old parks.

Baseball in Baltimore actually started with the Major League Orioles in 1954, and with Memorial Stadium, which then as now can be considered somewhat modern. Let's forget the minor league Orioles of the 1890s.

Harry E. Bennett Jr.

Baltimore

Life and Death

This letter addresses the March 28 article in The Sun concerning the baby with anencephaly. In our society, the definitions of death and murder seem to be changing every month.

In ancient Hebrew law, a man's life would have been forfeited for causing the death of an unborn child. More recently, an $l abortionist would have been imprisoned. However, as we have become more "civilized," a teen-ager's irresponsibilities can be legally erased with Roe v. Wade.

Now someone wants to push for a law that would allow a "defective" newborn's parts to be used. I am not trying to ignore the parents' pain nor their desire for something good. I only wish to impress the idea that new laws are based on old laws.

Do we really wish to continue down this route and see where it ends?

Yvonne W. Williamson

Baltimore

American Values

A commandant of a Nazi prison camp in the novel "Sophie's Choice" reassures a young German doctor who had been questioning himself about what he had been doing: "We cannot be kind if we are to survive." I thought of this as I read John Arquilla's piece in The Sun March 29 defending George Bush's support of Saddam Hussein prior to the gulf war as well as his failure to destroy Hussein at its conclusion.

Mr. Arquilla speaks of the need to support Iraq in order to defend against Iran' hegemonic designs. He does not speak of American values, nor of the loss of lives directly resulting from our policy, nor of our own designs in that region. He certainly does not speak of our overthrow in the 1950s of a popularly supported Iranian government. Iran's antipathy to America is not without reason.

Paranoid personalities create enemies where there are none. They do this to justify their own fears. We fear, as well, those whom we have mistreated. These pathologies underlie much of the foreign policy so attractive to Mr. Arquilla and to President Bush.

Iran is a country we barely understand. For this reason, as well as our mistreatment of it, we fear it. We have defended ourselves against our fear by arming the truly evil Saddam to "balance the power" in the region. This, Mr. Arquilla says, is a "time-honored tradition." What Mr. Arquilla does not say is that in doing this we have spent billions of American dollars, and sacrificed some American young men. We have turned our backs on innocent Kurds, not once but twice. And, most regrettably we have turned our backs on our own values.

It is time this policy, the same one that led us in the past to support Chile's Augusto Pinochet, the murderers of Tiananmen Square and the government terrorists of Central America, stop. President Bush once spoke of a "kinder, gentler nation." It is time we became that nation. It is time we stopped being so frightened.

Stanley L. Rodbell

Columbia

Animals II

Thank you to I.H. Desser for writing, and The Sun for printing, the "Spare the Animals" letter (April 4). People need to understand the fallacies of vivisection.

Non-medical animal research, accounting for 94 percent of all animal research (per the Desser letter), is not required for companies. Cosmetic and household cleaner companies, for example, are not required to perform LD50 tests. (LD50 means that animals, whose physiology is different from humans, are force-fed chemicals, dyes, poisons, etc, until 50 percent of them have toxic death -- i.e., Lethat Dose 50 percent).

There is no relationship between a rat and a human ingesting the same substance.

When humans consume a disagreeable or toxic substance, our systems frequently respond by vomiting. Rats cannot vomit. Rats die. Where is the logic in such experiments?

Neither are the Draize eye "irritancy" tests, that burn and blind rabbits, comparable to people accidentally getting some of the substance into their eyes. If a drop of bleach or a speck of make-up gets into our eyes, the tear ducts flood the eyes in an attempt to rid themselves of the foreign body. We may rub our eyes or flush them with water to aid removal and soothe the irritated tissue.

In contrast, rabbits are repeatedly subjected to the offending substance, prevented from instinctively pawing at their eyes by the stockades engulfing them from the neck down and their eyes are not capable of producing tears the way people do. They must, therefore, endure the burning substance in their eyes. Such torturous experiments do not represent human eye responses.

The medical community wants us to believe it is performing important research for our health and safety.

Saccharine-containing products carry warnings to people that the substance causes cancer in laboratory animals.

This was discovered by force-feeding rats every day the human equivalent of more saccharine than a person could consume in a month. No research shows that saccharin causes cancer in people.

When we project onto humans the test results of other species, we find results fraught with inconsistencies, because of the biological and physiological differences. Consider the proven safety of thalidomide and DES on animals.

Cyanide is safe for ewes, arsenic for sheep. Conversely, asprin and acetaminophen kills cats, penicilllin kills guinea pigs and eye drops can blind animals.

Vivisectors spend more effort and money re-creating human diseases in animals than studying people with the diseases. We all pay the price for animal research, especially the animal subjects and the people suffering with the diseases, who will not be helped in their lifetime because of this irrelevant research.

D.R. ProWom

Baltimore