of teenagers rather than inherent brain differences. He reasons that if such incompetence and irresponsibility were truly a result of inherent brain differences, then it would be present in all societies and cultures. Historical research In 1988, two researchers from the University of North Carolina, Ronald Rindfuss and J. Richard Udry, submitted a proposal to The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the health-related risk behaviors of adolescents. The study was intended to collect data on the patterns of adolescent sexual behavior that could expose teenagers to sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers designed the study to capture data on a national sample of 24,000 youth from the seventh to the eleventh grade. The American Teen Study had initially been approved by both the National Advisory Council of the NICHD and by other NICHD officials, granting the study funding up to $2.5 million for the first year commencing in May 1991. One month after the approval start date of the study, Secretary Louis Sullivan of Health and Human Services (HHS) cancelled the research study after having been questioned and berated by those that did not believe that research on adolescent sexual behaviors would be beneficial. According to Charrow (1991), this may have been the first time that a previously awarded amount of funding had been revoked. The American Teen Study sought to reveal the importance of investigating the health-related risk-taking behaviors of youth by gathering data across various social contexts such as at home and school. Countless critics had condemned the study by insisting that the issue of teen sex behaviors had been studied excessively. Centers for Disease Control (1991) show that the age of first intercourse for American girls began to decrease from 1985 to 1989. The number of Massachusetts teens who reported engaging in sexual intercourse increased from 55% to 61% between the years 1986–1988. Moreover, it was found that the utilization of condoms by teenagers may decrease when they have multiple sexual partners. The authors (1993) state that the mathematical theory of epidemics reveals two factors about the rate of increasing infections during an epidemic: the first is the probability of an uninfected person contracting aids from an infected person. The transmission of a sexually-transmitted disease such as HIV will depend on the sexual behaviors of individuals, their personal safety practices when engaging in sexual intercourse, and how often they are in contact