RONALD F. MAXWELL, the screenwriter and director behind the sprawling, $70 million Civil War epic "Gods and Generals," has devoted the last twenty-five years to dramatizing what Winston Churchill once described as the noblest and least avoidable of all the great conflicts. It has been ten years…

ONE OF THE longest-running and most expensive taxpayer-funded projects at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, has nothing to do with curing cancer.