Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world

How Blonds Evolve

Roger Dobson and Abul Taher report in The London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) on a study suggesting blonds began having more fun in the Ice Age.

According to the study, North European women evolved blond hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in Northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding, and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St. Andrews. However, the future of the blond is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organization found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the W.H.O. study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

THE WORLD Correction: March 12, 2006, Sunday An excerpt in the Reading File column last Sunday from an article published last month in The Times of London about the evolution of blond hair included a reference to a study, attributed to the World Health Organization, that predicted that blond hair would become extinct in 200 years. In 2002, after the first news reports about the study, W.H.O. said it had never done research on the subject and that it had no knowledge of how the reports originated.