PrincetonUniversityOffice of Communications, Stanhope Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544 | Tel 609/258-3601, Fax 609/258-1301
Princeton in the News
October 2 to 8, 1998 | Feedback
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE
Copyright 1998 The Press Enterprise Co. (RIVERSIDE, CA.)
October 8, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Students seek petition signatures; at UCR, it's part of a statewide effort to qualify an initiative that would remove a ban on preferences in college admissions.
BYLINE: Brad Smith, The Press-Enterprise
RIVERSIDEUniversity of California students statewide launched a drive Wednesday to place an initiative on the year 2000 ballot to reverse a ban on college admissions based on ethnicity, race and gender.
Elton Grau, a senior history major at UCR, said some 800,000 signatures are needed by next year to put a proposition before California voters, who dismantled affirmative action in all state programs two years ago.
"Do I think we'll succeed? You never know. It's politics, you know? " said Grau, vice president of external affairs for Associated Students University of California, a group leading the drive.
Grau said California voters failed to understand the issue when they rejected affirmative action. He said negative advertising and deceptive slogans such as "civil rights initiative" helped opponents of preferences succeed in killing the programs. ...
Meanwhile, the petition drive, launched simultaneously Wednesday at UC campuses in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, comes soon after the release of a major new study that concludes affirmative action policies created the backbone of the black middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration.
The study, which challenges conservative thinking and is expected to help lead the charge in a liberal counteroffensive to change the debate over affirmative action, was written by two former Ivy League presidents, William Bowen of Princeton University, an economist, and Derek Bok of Harvard University, a political scientist.
The Record
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. (Bergen County, NJ)October 8, 1998
HEADLINE: COLLEGE COSTS UP 4 PERCENT NATIONWIDE, MORE IN N.J.
SOURCE: Wire services
BYLINE: ROBERT GREENE, The Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
The price of going to college rose an average 4 percent nationwide this academic year, a lesser increase than in previous years but still more than double inflation.
Tuition and fees ranged from $66 higher at a public two-year college to $723 higher at a private, four-year college, according to figures released Wednesday by the College Board. For a public four-year institution, the 4 percent equaled $132, for average tuition and fees of $3,243. ...
At many New Jersey campuses, the increases were even higher. The average tuition at the state's public four-year schools rose nearly 9 percent. The private institutions boosted their tuitions almost 5 percent on average. ...
TUITIONS IN NEW JERSEY
INCREASE
SCHOOL UNDERGRADUATE FROM 1997-98 TUITION TO 1998-99
Fairleigh Dickinson University $13,990 5.3
Montclair State University $3,205 7.5
Princeton University $23,820 3.9 percent
Ramapo College $3,413 8
Rutgers University $4,562 7
William Paterson University $3,104 9.6
Seton Hall University $13,830 6
Bergen Community College $1,962 0
Passaic County Community College $1,905 0
The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 1998 The Richmond Times Dispatch
October 8, 1998, ThursdaySECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: CLASS DISMISSED
If you think Ken Starr is obsessed with sex, then you haven't visited a college classroom lately. On campus they call it "gender," and can't get their minds off the topic. According to a new report, every Ivy League school with the exception of Princeton offers more courses in women's studies than in economics, despite the much larger number of economics majors.
Gender is joined by race and class to make up the three legs of a stool upon which vast reams of "scholarship" are stacked these days. (A July 16 editorial, "English 101 for Pols," discussed the UVa English Department's preoccupation with the topics.) Environmentalism and homosexuality are rapidly gaining a similarly "privileged" status as topics for professorial proselytizing. And Marx is still widely studied, though Nobel Prize-winning economists of the free market - who, unlike Marx, tend to be correct generally are not.
It's all in a new report from Young America's Foundation - "Comedy and Tragedy: College Course Descriptions and What They Tell Us About Higher Education Today." The report's authors found hundreds of classes whose titles are amusing individually and alarming in the aggregate. Space prevents more than a small sampling from a report that itself only samples the leftist excesses of academe. ...
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
October 8, 1998 ThursdayHEADLINE: EX-PRINCETON PRESIDENT OFFERS DEFENSE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
BYLINE: Tim Kane.
DATELINE: CRYSTAL LAKE
The former president of Princeton University, who co-wrote a book that defends affirmative action, was a guest lecturer at the Illinois Board of Higher Education meeting Tuesday morning at McHenry County College.
William Bowen, co-author of "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions," joked with educators that his work is a ponderous tome. He said it is filled with pages and pages of statistics and bar graphs and should be required reading for those who suffer from sleep deprivation.
Bowen, however, was serious about his book's conclusion: Minorities who enter elite colleges and universities through affirmative-action programs receive significant benefits, including high graduation rates, a greater likelihood of graduate study and a stronger commitment to community leadership.
Bowen said he got the idea for the title of his book from Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," in which the steamboat captain travels up and down a river but never really knows the shape of it.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1998 The Atlanta Constitution
October 7, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Q&A ON THE NEWS
BYLINE: Colin Bessonette
Do you have a question on the news - local, national or international? Colin Bessonette will try to get an answer.
Q: What is the educational background of Mike McCurry, who stepped down last week as President Clinton's press secretary? And will he be teaching at some college or university? --- Luke Dak, Atlanta A: McCurry received a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1976 and a master of arts from Georgetown University in 1985. ...
Chicago Daily Herald
Copyright 1998 Paddock Publications, Inc.
October 07, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: State board looks at ways to make higher education more accessible
BYLINE: Bill Cole Daily Herald Staff Writer
Significant student success has come from affirmative action programs at top-ranked colleges, the co-author of a study told Illinois Board of Higher Education members Tuesday at McHenry County College.
According to former Princeton University President William G. Bowen, black students who entered 28 elite colleges through such programs were more likely than whites to earn a graduate degree, and more likely to become community leaders.
The news comes as the state board puts together a "Citizen's Agenda" for Illinois with the goal of making higher education more available, affordable, responsive to the workplace, and accessible - particularly for underrepresented groups.
"One key thing all of us got (from the presentation) was that students who are challenged, and for whom high expectations are set, tend to perform well," said MCC President Daniel J. LaVista. ...
Financial Times
Copyright 1998 The Financial Times Limited (London)
October 7, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Containing Chernobyl: Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei propose co-ordinated currency market intervention:
As part of the response to global turmoil, the world ought to consider establishing an international stability fund for limited and co-ordinated currency market intervention.
The idea may sound radical, but the G7 governments have often engaged in that kind of action. Countries such as South Korea, Mexico and Thailand have also used intervention to stabilise their currencies. But their interventions have often been ineffective. Unlike G7 countries, emerging markets have limited reserves and thus are prime targets for speculation. Rising unemployment associated with the high interest rates needed to defend a currency often exerts too high a political cost.
An international stability fund, with the single objective of currency market stabilisation, would help overcome these disadvantages by pooling the resources of member countries. It could provide liquidity to, or take it away from, the currency market, depending on the international capital flow to a country.
Like a reservoir, it could buy emerging-market currency when a panic outflow occurs, and sell the currency when foreign capital inflow is strong. With its large pool of capital and co-ordinated action with member governments, the fund could dramatically increase the potential loss for currency speculators.
Thus, an international stability fund would be in a better position than a single government to deter speculation and dampen currency market volatility. While we recognise that it is extremely difficult to determine when and how to intervene, it is also clear that there are times when intervention can be desirable. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 7, 1998, Wednesday, Late Edition - FinalHEADLINE: THE TESTING OF A PRESIDENT: WHITE HOUSE MEMO;
Just 2 Miles Separate 2 Bill Clintons
BYLINE: By JOHN M. BRODER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct. 6
President Clinton's parallel universes have been separated by a mere two miles the past several days, as international financial leaders assemble in downtown Washington hotels to address the spreading global economic crisis while Capitol Hill is consumed by debate over whether to impeach the President.
Mr. Clinton this week convened the top financial policy makers of the leading economic powers to sound the alarm about the growing threat of a global recession. At the very moment on Monday evening that the House Judiciary Committee was completing its debate on authorizing an impeachment inquiry, Mr. Clinton was engaged in a dense discussion on market transparency, the legacy of Bretton Woods and the need for a new global financial "architecture." ...
Among European officials, the spectacle of Congress considering impeachment while the world is looking to the United States for leadership in addressing the rapidly spreading financial crisis was disheartening.
Alan S. Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton University and a former member of Mr. Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, said foreign leaders were angry that Mr. Clinton and Congress were entangled in an obsession with private matters as millions of people around the world were watching their dreams of joining the middle class crumble.
"The main view in the rest of world is they can't believe what the United States is putting itself through," Mr. Blinder said. "They're looking with wonderment, bewilderment at what America is doing to itself and they can't understand why. ...
The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1998 The Providence Journal Company
October 7, 1998, WednesdaySECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: The Gulf War: What a wasteBYLINE: John R. MacArthur
NEW YORK
THREE YEARS AGO last February, the U.S. Veterans Administration established a toll-free telephone number for Gulf War veterans seeking information about their ill-health, presumably caused by participation in the military maneuvers known as Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. As with most other institutional answering systems in America these days, callers are greeted by a recorded voice, in this case that of a woman expressing a willingness to aid them in determining their medical condition.
"Welcome to the Persian Gulf Helpline," she says in a monotone. "The Department of Defense recently announced that a greater number of Persian Gulf War veterans than originally estimated were potentially exposed to nerve agents from the demolition of Iraqi chemical weapons in 1991. . . . While no diagnostic test is available to determine if you were exposed to chemical agents, VA does offer free comprehensive medical examinations and other special health services that can help address your concerns."
I'm profoundly skeptical of nearly everything the government has ever said about the Gulf War, but I'm not yet convinced that Gulf War Syndrome is a real biological illness caused by exposure to chemical weapons. Some very intelligent people with no reason to curry favor with the military have discounted the entire phenomenon. Among them is Elaine Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University, who has written about Gulf War Syndrome in Hystories: Hysterical epidemics in modern media, and argues that it is one of a number of "hysterical epidemics" afflicting contemporary America that include chronic fatigue syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction - as she puts its "real disorders but caused by psychological conflicts rather than viruses, nerve gas, devil worshippers or extraterrestrials."
If Professor Showalter is right, I sympathize deeply with the Gulf War hysterics. How else could they internalize their involvement in a "war" promoted as a crusade against evil that was nothing more than a cynical and violent exercise in realpolitlk? The mad reallty of the Persian Gulf War is enough to make one hysterical. ...
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
October 07, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: 18-INCH RULE FOR REAR ENDS MIGHT BE BEHIND THE TIMES -- SEAT WIDTHS CHANGING WITH EXPANDING' POPULATION
BYLINE: CHRISTINE CLARRIDGE; SEATTLE TIMES STAFF REPORTER
Is growth crowding your personal space?
Well, consider this:
On planes, boats, trains and, yes, Puget Sound ferries, growth can be measured - one rear end at a time.
When a small furor erupted a week ago over overcrowding on a walk-on ferry from Vashon to Seattle, it drew attention to a little talked about but widely followed seating-industry standard - one some say no longer fits our expanding American bottoms: the 18-inch-butt rule.
According to Edward Tenner, a professor at Princeton University, the 18-inch standard goes back some 50 years, probably coming out of a study done for the New Haven Railroad just after World War II.
"It established standards on human sizes and measurements, and it remains very influential," Tenner said. Over the years, the 18-inch rule has come to dictate the size of just about every public seat you can imagine: in buses, stadiums, theaters and even churches. ...
ABC NEWS
SHOW: ABC NIGHTLINE
OCTOBER 6, 1998HEADLINE: THINKING TWICE ABOUT HUMAN CLONING
BYLINE: ROBERT KRULWICH, TED KOPPEL
HIGHLIGHT: DISCUSSION OF CONSEQUENCES OF CLONING
TED KOPPEL, ABC News: (voice-over) All of us, it seems, are frightened of the notion that we could copy human beings like we copy documents.
LEE SILVER (ph): If you can clone a mouse, you can clone a human, period. ...
ROBERT KRULWICH: (voice-over) Just the possibility that somebody maybe soon might clone a human being was so scary most of us instantly hated the idea without bothering to ask what is it exactly that is so frightening and so deeply disturbing about a human clone? We have these images in our heads from the movies, ah, there's the problem. If we do ever clone humans, says Professor Lee Silver of Princeton University, they won't be like these movie clones.
LEE SILVER: The public perception is based on movies and fiction that people have read and looked at and that's where they get this image of cloning as being an exact duplicate copy of a human being. And that is far away from what's really going to happen.
ROBERT KRULWICH: (voice-over) Lee Silver is a biology professor, an expert on genetics and reproduction, he likes a good movie and human clones, he thinks, unlike movie clones, will probably be, he says, very ordinary, fully intact, very normal individuals.
(on camera) Of course, they will look a lot like somebody else because clones after all are clones. But having a clone, said Lee, should be no more frightening than having an identical twin. Still, I wondered. Lee, however, promised me once you get these movie images out of your head and you learn a little bit of science you will think about cloning very differently. ...
The Associated Press
Associated Press
October 6, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Californians may seem happier, but Midwesterners just as content
BYLINE: By JANE E. ALLEN, AP Science Writer
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
The sunny mythology of the Golden State still shines, but researchers say those in chillier climes enjoy an equal measure of happiness and contentment.
Two thousand college students from the Midwest and Southern California were asked to predict which region had the happier student populace. Both groups overwhelmingly chose California as the place most likely to satisfy.
But when asked to rate their own quality of life, students living in the chill of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Columbus, Ohio, turned out to be just as happy as those in the sunshine of Los Angeles and Irvine, Calif.
Why the gap between perception and reality? ...
Schkade and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University presented their study in the September issue of Psychological Science, published by the American Psychological Society. They surveyed students from the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of California at Irvine.
The researchers call the perception phenomenon "focusing illusion."
International Herald Tribune
Copyright 1998 International Herald Tribune (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
October 6, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Russians Have a Giant Rust Belt to Modernize
BYLINE: By Stephen Kotkin; The New York TimesDATELINE: PRINCETON, New Jersey
Yevgeni Primakov, Russia's new prime minister, would seem to have little choice but to pony up back wages owed to millions of Russian workers, some of whom have not been paid in more than two years. But Mr. Primakov's solution, printing a mass of new rubles, has an air of unreality about it.
Money can be printed, but how much of it will reach the unpaid? Rubles transferred by Moscow to the country's 89 regions continue to disappear without a trace, as local officials siphon them off for themselves.
Russia has an inordinate number of state functionaries but no functioning state. This paralyzing circumstance constitutes the essence of the political crisis. No less confounding is the economic crisis, which derives from communism's most enduring legacy, the world's largest-ever Rust Belt.
Heavy industry and mining, spread out in hundreds of factory towns, still employ a majority of the population. Russia more than any other former Communist economy needed not just a decisive break from full state ownership and management, but a strategy for dealing with its Rust Belt - a transition that capitalist economies, with far less heavy industry, made with great pain several decades ago. ...
The writer, director of Russian studies at Princeton University, contributed this comment to The New York Times.
Newsday
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. (New York, NY)
October 6, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: CLONING IS NOT ABOUT REPLICATING HUMAN VALUES
BYLINE: Matthew Carolan and Raymond J. Keating. Matthew Carolan is executive editor of National Review. Raymond J. Keating serves as chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee.
THE IDEA of cloning human beings once fell under the exclusive domain of disturbing science fiction, but no more.
In light of recent developments that brought us Dolly, the world's most famous sheep, Hofstra University Law School presented a thought-provoking symposium on cloning late last week. The gathering featured distinguished speakers, and a discussion of the implications for human beings.
If there was one drawback, however, it was that this conference brought forth a veritable Dream Team on behalf of cloning, but not a single advocate of restriction.
Indeed, it's fair to say that the participants were bowled over by the lucid pro-cloning presentations of John Robertson, from the University of Texas Law School, and Princeton University molecular biologist Lee Silver. ...
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 1998 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
October 6, 1998 TuesdayHEADLINE: VIRTUOSO SHINES WITH NEW ORGAN, FLAWLESS SET
BYLINE: By WILMA SALISBURY; PLAIN DEALER MUSIC CRITIC
"I just love this organ," Joan Lippincott exclaimed as she wrapped her arms around the supporting column next to the new Hradetzky pipe organ at St. Christopher's-by-the-River in Gates Mills.
Lippincott, principal university organist at Princeton University and one of America's most renowned organ virtuosos, had interrupted her dedicatory recital Sunday afternoon to sing the praises of the $200,000 tracker organ. "A new life has come into St. Christopher's," she said, describing the "positively splendid" instrument as "a new member of the parish."
Though heartfelt, Lippincott's words were redundant, for she had already expressed her enthusiasm in exuberant performances of baroque music. To show off the two-manual organ's 15 stops and 18 ranks, she chose works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Daniel Pinkham. Austrian organ builder Gerhard Hradetzky, who had traveled from Europe to attend the dedication, pronounced her repertoire "perfect." ...
Calgary Herald
Copyright 1998 Southam Inc.
October 5, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Departing diplomats blame poor pay
BYLINE: MIKE TRICKEY, CALGARY HERALD
DATELINE: OTTAWA
Frustrated by low wages and the lack of opportunity for career advancement, the cream of Canada's new generation of diplomats is leaving the foreign service.
Under 40, prepared for a diplomatic career with advanced post-grad degrees from Canada's finest universities and imbued with a desire to add to the legend of the most prestigious arm of the Canadian public service, the new breed is quickly becoming disillusioned and looking elsewhere.
Some are returning to school. Some are joining the corporate world. Others are practising law or choosing less glamorous, but ultimately more rewarding, occupations. ...
Among them is Greg Alton, fluent in three languages and bright enough that elite American and European universities were pursuing him for their master's programs after seeing his eye-popping test scores.
Now a graduate student at Princeton University's prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs and Economics, Alton, 30, whose career included two years as a political officer in Moscow, said the poor pay and grinding bureaucracy are driving out the new generation.
"The pay is pathetic. After five-and-a-half years I was making $36,000. Nobody joins the foreign service to get rich but after five years you shouldn't still be having to choose between a social life and a nice apartment." ...
The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 1998 The Richmond Times Dispatch
October 5, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: GEORGE MODLIN DIES AT 95;
AS PRESIDENT OF UR, HE HELPED SECURE ROBINS GIFT
BYLINE: Ellen Robertson and Jennifer Hoyt; Times-Dispatch Staff Writers
George Matthews Modlin, whom Richmond News Leader Editor Douglas S. Freeman predicted would be "the man of all men to fulfill the great future of the University of Richmond" died Sunday at his home. He was 95.
Dr. Modlin, the school's fourth president and its chancellor emeritus, fulfilled Freeman's prophecy in 1969 during a meeting of the executive committee of the UR board of trustees. When pharmaceutical giant E. Claiborne Robins asked him what it would take to make Richmond a truly great university, Dr. Modlin told him: $50 million.
The resulting gift of that amount from Robins and his family was then the largest gift from a living benefactor in the history of American higher education, and it transformed the university. ...
He received his master's degree in economics from Princeton University in 1925 and stayed on as a graduate assistant from 1927 until 1928 and as an economics instructor from 1928 until 1933 while he worked on his doctorate. He earned that degree in 1932 with a dissertation that was a pioneer report on industrial old-age pensions. ...
U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1998 U.S. News & World Report
October 5, 1998HEADLINE: Scouting the storm
SERIES: WeatherBYLINE: By William J. Cook
HIGHLIGHT: Improved tracking reduces the peril from hurricanes;
It was midday Wednesday, just east of Cuba, and Kermit, a lumbering, 23-year-old WP-3D weather-research plane, was searching for the eye of Hurricane Georges. The vicious storm was in the midst of killing more than 300 people on its rampage through the Caribbean, with more missing, and inflicting $2 billion in damage on Puerto Rico alone. Georges had dumped so much rain on Hispaniola as it crossed over that island's 10,000-foot mountains that the usually gin-clear sea near Haiti's river mouths, glimpsed between breaks in the clouds, was stained the color of cafe au lait by tons of sediment. The question facing those aboard the plane, and millions on the ground: Where would the killer storm strike next?
Already residents of South Florida, recalling the $25 billion of devastation caused by Andrew in 1992, were cleaning out grocery stores, boarding up windows, and streaming out of the Keys, which appeared to lie directly in Georges's path. Officials base their hurricane evacuation orders on the information gathered by the crew of Kermit and other federal weather-research planes. A bad tracking forecast can cause millions to be needlessly driven from their homes--or leave people in the path of deadly peril.
But thanks to new measuring tools and improved computer models, meteorologists for the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say they now can improve their forecasts of where hurricanes are likely to go by 15 to 30 percent compared with just two years ago. Meteorologists had long figured they were doing well if a hurricane was within 100 miles of where they said it would strike land in 24 hours. Now, says Hugh Willoughby, director of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, "we like to think it's about 75 miles." ...
Dropwindsonde information from the flights was sent to Suitland, Md., home of NOAA's global computer model, to improve the model's wind circulation patterns. That computer also generates data consumed by a specialized regional hurricane prediction model developed by a team led by Yoshio Kurihara at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. Kurihara, who has been working on hurricanes since the 1970s, explains that his model calculates weather conditions on a grid with points less than 20 miles apart, compared with about 60 miles in the global model. Thus Kurihara's model paints a much-higher-resolution picture of the area around the storm than does the global model, making it more likely that the formulas will act like the real thing.
Kurihara believes that hurricane tracking can be improved even more. Within a decade, he says, data and computer models should be good enough that forecasters should be able to raise the accuracy of hurricane-track projections from today's 70 to 75 miles in 24 hours to perhaps 35. ...
The Virginian-Pilot
Copyright 1998 Landmark Communications, Inc. (Norfolk, VA)
October 5, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: MCPHEE HAS EARNED HIS ROCK-SOLID WRITING REPUTATION
BYLINE: Larry MaddryJOHN McPHEE - who writes of thundery and colossal shifts in tectonic plates beneath the earth's surface as easily as the insomniac observes the undulations of his turning legs beneath a quilt - may be America's best non-fiction writer. A bearded scribbler of diminutive stature but towering reputation, McPHee is among the talented writers appearing at Old Dominion University's literary festival beginning tomorrow.
He is also living proof that it is not merely acceptable, but commendable, for a writer to have rocks in his head McPhee - who leaves a gap of inadequacy in the psyche of most writers as wide as the Grand Canyon - writes beautifully and meticulously of pine barrens, oranges, basketball players, Alaska, whatever. With his deeply probing curiosity, he mines treasures in places most writers presume barren, and with a flair approaching genius. But in the past 20 years, he has chiseled four books about rocks - each dealing with American geology. They are ''Basin and Range'' (1981), ''In Suspect Terrain'' (1983), ''Rising From the Plains'' (1986) and ''Assembling California'' (1993). This summer, the four books appeared in a single 700-page volume called ''Annals of the Former World'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35). McPhee has never been one to sit on his hands, so he has written 25,000 new words to accompany it - in what he calls a ''Narrative Table of Contents'' - and a fifth section entitled ''Crossing the Craton.'' The author is a professor of journalism at Princeton University. He graduated there, and is a son of a physician who, for years, doctored athletes on that university's sport teams. ...
The Morning Call
Copyright 1998 The Morning Call, Inc. (Allentown)
October 4, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: OH, BABY!;
WHO SHOULD PAY FOR QUADS' UPBRINGING WHEN BIOLOGICAL PATERNITY IS AT ODDS WITH;
LEGAL PATERNITY?; THE COURTS MUST DECIDE
BYLINE: KATIE WANG; The Morning Call; Morning Call librarian Ruth Burns contributed to this report.
A year ago, Michael and Debbie Turczyn were busy making adjustments to their Salisbury Township home to accommodate their newborn quadruplets.
Now, the estranged couple is embroiled in a court battle that could redefine parenthood in Pennsylvania and bring the law up to date with the medical field's high-tech babymaking procedures.
It is a case where biological paternity is at odds with legal paternity.
Attorneys for both sides agree that the Michael Turczyn is not the biological father of Angela, Dominic, Tera and Walker Turczyn. They agree that the babies were conceived artificially using donor sperm from a California sperm bank in November 1996.
But they disagree if Michael Turczyn is the legal father of the 16-month old babies.
The difference could mean millions of dollars in child support to raise the quads until age 18.
On a larger scale, the case will also test the state's definition of parenthood in an era where medicine is finding more creative ways to produce babies. State law presumes that a child born to a married woman is a byproduct of the marriage. It is up to the husband to prove otherwise. ...
These advances also evoke ethical questions about whether the government should regulate the fertility industry or treat it like any other business.
"This is new technology and we've yet to develop social mechanisms to try to concern ourselves with the best interests of the children who are to be born," said Harold Shapiro, chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and Princeton University president. "There are no regulations at all and they have no legal responsibility to do anything and I think that's a void in our social institution."
Shapiro stopped short of recommending full-scale government regulation of the fertility industry.
"I'm worried about the hand of bureaucracy telling families how to form families," he said. "Procedures for adoption are also very cumbersome that they leave wonderful parents without any other options." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 4, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Streetscapes / Park Avenue South and 25th Street; Turn-of-the-Century HQ of Louis Comfort Tiffany
BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
THOUSANDS of people are visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibition of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, which is filled with the artist's striking leaded glass, lamps, vases and other decorative pieces. At the same time, thousands are walking unaware past a three-building complex that was once the headquarters of the artist's decorating firm, at 25th Street and Park Avenue South, where a few traces of 19th-century glass, woodwork and trim survive, testament to one of the most fertile minds in American design.
Charles Lewis Tiffany established his silver and jewelry firm in 1837 and a quarter-century later had become so successful that his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, did not need to work for a living. Louis studied painting in Europe in the 1860's, but became convinced that he could reach people more effectively as a decorative artist. ...
In 1897 Cecelia Waern, writing in International Studio magazine, reported 40 to 50 young women artisans at work in the building and described the mild disarray of the artist's inner sanctum on the fifth floor: "Here choice pieces of blown glass lie around, awaiting attention from Mr. Tiffany."
The writer said that the back stairs were littered with half-completed projects. On view were stained glass, mosaic tile and other artworks destined for the Chicago Public Library, Princeton University and unspecified projects in Columbia, Miss., and Kansas City, Mo. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 4, 1998, SundayNAME: Peter C. Bunnell
HEADLINE: IN PERSON The Art of the CameraBYLINE: By BARRY SCHWABSKY
DATELINE: PRINCETONPHOTOGRAPHS as museum treasures? And as subjects for art historians' Ph.D. dissertations? These concepts seem normal now, but Peter C. Bunnell remembers when they were almost unheard of.
In 1972, Mr. Bunnell was appointed to the nation's first endowed professorship in the history of photography, the David Hunter McAlpin Chair of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. He is also curator of photography at the university's Art Gallery, where a special exhibition, "Photography at Princeton: Celebrating 25 Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography," opened yesterday.
In 1964, when Mr. Bunnell was a graduate student in art history at Yale University, he became the first student there to undertake a dissertation on the work of Alfred Stieglitz, the great American photographer and promoter of modernism. His department nominated him for one of the prestigious fellowships offered by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to support dissertation research. The foundation replied that its mission was solely to underwrite research in the fine arts -- the implication being, of course, that photography was no such thing.
Since then, the Kress Foundation has changed its view of photography, but Mr. Bunnell never completed his dissertation, having been sidetracked by a job offer from the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The fact that photography is no longer seen as the poor stepsister of the arts is due in part to the efforts of a few pioneering scholars like him. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 4, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: THE NATION: PANIC STATIONS;
The Fine Art of Hurricane Hype
BYLINE: By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
IN the days before Hurricane Georges struck the Gulf Coast last week, storm forecasters faced one of their most trying responsibilities: predicting the inherently uncertain behavior of a hurricane in time to move people out of harm's way.
The basic problem is that even though experts have improved their ability to forecast the track of a hurricane by 30 or 40 percent in the last decade or so, the predictions are still off, on average, by about 200 miles 72 hours before the storm's expected landfall. In extreme cases, it takes 72 hours to carry out a mass evacuation. Even 12 hours ahead, the error is still 40 to 50 miles.
When it comes to predicting the intensity of a storm when it reaches land, forecasters admit they have even less skill. And they have almost none in forecasting how large an area the hurricane will affect once it comes ashore. "We're back in the dark ages relative to that," said Jerry Jarrell, the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "I'm not sure anyone knows where to begin to attack that problem."
So what do forecasters do?
"The cardinal rule is that you can't afford to get people killed because you're underprepared," Mr. Jarrell said as the center began to wind down from its encounter with Georges late last week. "So you have to overprepare. It's just that simple." ...
With hurricanes, "There is always error in the forecast, and always will be" said Dr. Jerry Mahlman, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. "The trick is to pound the error down."
Dr. Mahlman's laboratory has played a major role in reducing the margin of error. Its global computer model of hurricane behavior, in operation since 1995, is largely responsible for the recent improvement in forecasting hurricane tracks. It is now the official lead prediction model -- first among a group of models -- used both by the National Hurricane Center and the Navy. Thirty-six hours before Georges hit land, the center correctly predicted that the storm would curl to the northeast of New Orleans. ...
Newsday
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. (New York, NY)
October 4, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: COURT NOMINATION OK'D
BYLINE: Associated Press
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who grew up in a South Bronx housing project and went on to become a federal judge, was confirmed Friday by the Senate to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Her confirmation had been stalled for months by Republicans who had put an anonymous hold on the process. The Senate voted 68-28 to approve the nomination. Sotomayor, the daughter of a tool-and-dye maker and a nurse, worked her way out of the projects to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton University. She went on to Yale, where she edited the Yale Law Journal, and then became a federal prosecutor.
She will sit on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 1998 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
October 4, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: SKILLED VETERANS BATTLE FOR GOVERNOR; WELL-HEELED TAFT ISN'T FAZED BY DIGS AT 'NERDY' DEMEANOR
BYLINE: By JOE HALLETT; PLAIN DEALER POLITICS WRITER
Newspaper columnists have not been kind to Bob Taft. They have used words like "dull" and "boring" to describe him. One called him "a geek." Another said he was "bumbling."
One columnist said Taft was a look-alike for nerdy Ernie from the old television show "My Three Sons."
Taft, a gangly 6 feet 3 with a toothy grin and reticent manner, has learned to take such descriptions in stride. In his campaign to become Ohio's 66th governor, the 56-year-old Republican often jokes about the unflattering portrayals, assuring audiences that he is "not relying on charisma alone" to win the governorship. ...
Raised in Republican refinement and educated at the best schools, including high school at the prestigious Taft School in Connecticut, Taft did something that at the time may have seemed very un-Republican and un-Taftlike after graduating from Yale in 1963. Inspired by a Democrat, President John F. Kennedy, Taft joined the Peace Corps and taught schoolchildren in Tanzania for two years - an experience that whetted his desire to someday return to teaching - before returning to get a master's degree in government from Princeton University in 1967.
Taft's high school and college roommate, Richard Lapedes, owner of a Dayton-area company that manufactures protective clothing, said he wasn't surprised when Taft joined the Peace Corps.
"The fact that he went to the Peace Corps is key to what he's all about today," Lapedes said. "The Peace Corps was all about being idealistic, about being worldly, about being concerned, and using your skills to help people." ...
The Tampa Tribune
Copyright 1998 The Tribune Co.
October 4, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Elementary school steps over the stumbling blocks;
BYLINE: MICHAEL FECHTER
MILWAUKEE - By the numbers, J.W. Riley Elementary School ought to be a case study in the failure of public education.
Gang activity threatens the neighborhood. Ninety percent of the students meet poverty guidelines for free breakfast and lunch. Dozens come in not speaking English.
And yet, J.W. Riley is considered one of Milwaukee's best. Parental involvement is strong, and attendance is high. Its students have scored at the top of standardized tests in consecutive years.
What's right with this picture?
School officials point to two things: An aggressive principal who has unified parents and teachers around common goals; and a special state grant program that keeps class size at a maximum of 25 students. ...
Math scores among P-5 students increase "equal to those of students in the choice schools and (they have) reading score gains that are greater," Princeton University economist Cecelia Rouse wrote in a paper published last spring.
A study of a class-size initiative in Tennessee found similar results. Rouse hasn't concluded that class size is creating the improvement but says it's worth more study. ...
America
Copyright 1998 America Press Inc.
October 3, 1998HEADLINE: Reconciliation: Lessons From Prison; a woman who teaches at a prison learns lessons about God's forgiveness and love; Brief Article
BYLINE: Phelan, Virginia Burke
BY VIRGINIA BURKE PHELAN
VIRGINIA BURKE PHELAN directs the arts and letters program at Drew University, in Madison, N.J., and lectures at Princeton University. Her book, Praying in Your Own Voice Through Writing, was published by Liguori Press.
New Jersey's Trenton State Prison is a maximum security facility that houses murderers, rapists and other convicted felons--not the sort of place where one expects to do religious education or learn about reconciliation. It is a grim, unfriendly pile of stone that reminds me of the Nazi bunkers in "The Guns of Navarone."
Trenton State is also the last place this convent-schooled woman dreamed of going until Sister Pat Reynolds began to talk about it one day, and I heard myself agreeing to offer the inmates three sessions on writing about the "Spiritual Masters." Three weeks, three visits, and I would be out of there.
That was almost four years ago. Recently the men asked me why I continue to visit every five or six weeks. I gulped, because it was a question I had asked but not answered for myself. When I stalled by saying that I had never expected to be there, Pat, a 67-year-old Irishman, shot back, "Neither did we." (All names have been changed.)
So I told them that I go because, though they find it hard to believe, I learn from them. I am there to teach, but I get taught--at least three lessons. The first thing I learn over and over is to see them not as a group but as individuals. Pat, for example, not only masters comebacks; he also makes hand-drawn greeting cards. He loves the golden oldies and teaches my parents' songs to the other prisoners, so he is always scavenging for lyrics. Last time he was working on "I'm as restless as a willow in a windstorm." ...
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
October 3, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: R. McLean Campbell, 73, key figure in White Marsh development
BYLINE: Frederick N. Rasmussen, SUN STAFF
R. McLean Campbell, who as president and chief executive officer of Nottingham Properties was instrumental in developing White Marsh, died Thursday at Greater Baltimore Medical Center of a stroke. He was 73.
A former longtime Towson resident, he had resided at the Blakehurst Life Care Community since 1993. ...
A 1942 Gilman School graduate, he earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1948. ...
The Capital
Copyright 1998 Capital-Gazette Communications, Inc. (Annapolis, MD.)
October 03, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Richard Carrigan
Richard Mabin Carrigan, 85, of Severna Park, died of Parkinson's disease Sept. 29 at his home after a lengthy illness.
Mr. Carrigan was born in Sanoval, Ill., and graduated in 1935 from the University of Wisconsin. He did graduate studies at Princeton University and taught at Washington and Lee High School in Virginia. ...
Chattanooga Free Press
Copyright 1998 Chattanooga News-Free Press Company
October 3, 1998, SaturdayEDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Of Babies, Pigs And DogsMelissa Drexler pleaded guilty in a New Jersey court last summer to aggravated manslaughter. A year before, she had given birth in a toilet stall during her high school prom. She wrapped the child in several plastic bags and dumped him in a garbage can, then cleaned herself up and returned to the party, dancing while her baby's body cooled.
"The baby was born alive," she told the court. "I was aware of what I was doing at the time when I placed the baby in the bag, and I was further aware that what I was doing would most certainly result in the death of the baby."
Drexler, 20, had faced a minimum of 30 years in prison on a charge of murder. Her plea bargain will have her out in circulation again in three or four years.
A reporter asked her father if he's forgiven her. John Drexler replied, "There's nothing to forgive."
No-fault infanticide. Is that where "pro-choice" America is heading? ...
"A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being. ... If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal."
Those are the opinions of one Peter Singer, an Australian animal rights activist and president of the International Association of Bioethics, who recently was named the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values.
So while the state of New Jersey incarcerates a young baby-killer who extended the "pro-choice" expendability of unborn children to her own newborn infant, that state's Ivy League university will be issuing a handsome paycheck to a "bioethicist" who preaches the very doctine Melissa Drexler put into practice.
A society that honors someone with such views is moving in a very disturbing direction.
The Denver Post
Copyright 1998 The Denver Post Corporation
October 3, 1998 SaturdayHEADLINE: Business owner in Superior wins Rockefeller fellowship
BYLINE: By Kristen Go, Denver Post Staff Writer
Demetri Coupounas, a Superior businessman, believes he can tackle some of the problems of the 21st century.
And that's what the Rockefeller Foundation has asked the 32-year-old to do. Coupounas is one of 24 people nationwide to win Rockefeller fellowships.
"All of our fellows are young, forward-thinking leaders," said foundation spokesman George Soule.
An avid mountain climber, Coupounas is the founder and CEO of GoLight, an outdoor hiking and backpacking equipment company. Before that, he spent more than five years as a lobbyist and policy maker.
That work won him the fellowship. The fellows will participate in the Next Generation Leadership, a two-year program designed to train and develop leaders who can take on the challenges of the 21st century. ...
Coupounas is a graduate of Princeton University and earned master's degrees from Harvard Business School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was raised in Brookline, Mass., and now spends a lot of his time working spreadsheets and designing a business plan for his new company. Some of the other Rockefeller fellows also are business executives; others are instructors, physicians, labor organizers and human-rights activists.
The Economist
Copyright 1998 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
October 3, 1998, U.S. EditionHEADLINE: Commerce and contestability (World Trade survey, 6 of 14)
The marriage of trade and trustbusting
SUSPENDING disbelief, suppose that the world's governments had abolished all barriers to international trade, and allowed foreign investors to set up businesses on the same terms as their own people. Would free trade have arrived?
Probably not. Some markets would still not be open to competition, whether from home or abroad, either because as natural monopolies they could not support more than one supplier, or because entrenched monopolies and oligopolies would keep competitors out. Private barriers to trade might replace those put up by the state.
This is why in many countries the liberalisation of trade and FDI policies has gone hand-in-hand with the establishment of competition authorities. Since 1990, some 30 developing countries and former communist countries have introduced antitrust laws. In all, nearly 80 countries now have such laws (see chart 7, next page).
Yet the actions of a country's competition authority can affect foreign companies' ability to enter its market, or spill over into other countries' markets. Some economists and politicians feel that competition policies need to be more closely co-ordinated internationally; some, indeed, argue that since trade and competition policies have become so intertwined, the WTO should embrace competition policy as well. ...
However, there is one important link between trade and competition policies that neither America nor the EU wants to discuss. The unspeakable practice is anti-dumping. Under WTO rules, countries are allowed to impose anti-dumping duties on imports sold at below "normal value"--which can mean the price in their home market or the cost of production. The fact that the WTO permits anti-dumping may make it sound respectable. It very rarely is.
Its defenders say that it helps firms deal with "unfair" foreign competition, but in reality it is an arbitrary form of protection. The information from which "normal value" is calculated is often sketchy. Trade authorities listen to producers hurt by "dumping", but take no account of the views of consumers, who might well prefer cheaper goods. In a recent study of anti-dumping petitions in America, the EU and Canada in the 1980s, Robert Willig, an economist at Princeton University, set out to establish whether the practice was justified on competition-policy grounds, and concluded that in more than 90% of successful petitions it was not. ...
The Irish Times
Copyright 1998 The Irish Times
October 3, 1998HEADLINE: Biding time for the big time
Keith Duggan finds would-be NBA starter Mitch Henderson honing his hoops with SligoFrom the haunting, legendary metal-fenced blacktop courts which periodically bloom and decline in the inner cities to the desolate barn-yard rims which span the breadth of rural America spring the unmistakable and common rhythms of the game.
The clean swish of net, feet scuffling, the beat of leather against concrete - these sounds sustain youngsters who give themselves to the sport and who invariably, despite ethnic and geographical divides, succumb briefly to the same fanciful notion of superstardom.
"It's definitely every kid's dream to play in the NBA," says Mitch Henderson, a 22-year-old point guard who in June was on the verge of professionalism as he worked out with the Atlanta Hawks and now finds himself preparing for his first game in the Irish Superleague, which begins this weekend.
Henderson hails from Indiana, the spiritual home of basketball. Culver, his home town, has a community of around 5,000 and the local high school team annually play a central role in the lives of most citizens who raise the rafters in the 1,500-seater gym on game nights and assess the fall-out the day after. Everyone has an opinion. ...
At the beginning of the summer, Ireland was a distant afterthought, a shimmering place he someday wanted to visit. Henderson, a 6ft 2in ballhandler with rasping speed, had enjoyed a glittering career at Princeton University and by sophomore year had begun to receive discreet overtures from a number of NBA clubs, particularly the Atlanta Hawks.
"They never approach you directly as that's against NCAA (the National Collegiate Athletic Association) rules. But, you know, they scout games, talk to assistant coaches about you, maybe drop the odd note. They let you know."
And so he packed his bags and left the New Jersey campus in June, an Economics degree in his back pocket and ahead of him a realistic shot of playing in the dazzling, faintly surreal world of the NBA.
He competed at a number of workshops before the draft (the selection process through which NBA teams choose the elite college players) and was then invited to work out with the Hawks. But then, the disagreements between club owners and players over wage agreements escalated, and, as anticipated, a "lock-out" began, leaving a sports-crazy nation facing the prospect of a winter without pro hoops. ...
"Americans love college sport because it sort of retains the innocence, there is no money for athletes. But coaches want to win and it's a tough business. I played in the really great college arenas like the Dean Dome (home of North Carolina) and maybe in places like that I'd imagine players finishing there, where basketball is everything, find it hard to re-adjust to street life. But in Princeton, they stress academics as well, so you leave there as a fairly well-rounded individual." ...
The National Journal
Copyright 1998 The National Journal, Inc.
October 3, 1998HEADLINE: The Ailing AMA
BYLINE: Eliza Newlin CarneyHIGHLIGHT:
The doctors' lobby is struggling to recruit members and retain its status as a Washington powerhouse.
During 20 years as a doctor, Stephanie Joan Woolhandler has received a steady stream of mailings inviting her to join the American Medical Association. Woolhandler has yet to fill out an application. It's not that the AMA does a bad job of selling itself. Association literature makes much of the 151-year-old organization's prestigious medical publications, its ambitious public health agenda, its commitment to medical excellence.
But Woolhandler is a doctor at a public hospital, and she believes that the AMA ignores her biggest concerns--chief among them, how to care for the many uninsured and low-income patients who come through her hospital's doors. ...
Of course, any organization as well-rooted as the AMA maintains great strengths even in times of relative weakness. The Journal of the American Medical Association, the association's 350,000-circulation medical weekly, elicits praise even from AMA detractors. ''JAMA is what gives the AMA the prestige that it does have in the nonphysician world,'' said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a political economy professor at Princeton University's Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 3, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: THE MARKETS; Job Growth Turned Slack In September
BYLINE: By SYLVIA NASARJob creation fell in September to the lowest rate in more than two years, the Labor Department reported yesterday -- the most persuasive evidence yet that the financial crisis abroad is slowing the booming American economy.
The Labor Department said the unemployment rate edged up only slightly, to 4.6 percent, from 4.5 percent in August. But payrolls expanded by just 69,000 jobs, a fraction of the 309,000 jobs created in August or the roughly 200,000 that had been expected by forecasters.
Total hours worked dipped, suggesting that production and income were leveling out, and hourly pay barely inched up.
The Labor Department's monthly employment report is considered the most substantial assessment of the economy's health. Coming on top of other signs of weakness -- falling exports, slowing retail sales and weaker business investment -- the data reinforced a view among economists that the eight-year-old expansion was being crimped by the economic problems that began afflicting Asia last year and have since spread. ...
To be sure, the American labor market still remains healthy by any historical measure. The change in the overall unemployment rate, for example, reflected a shift of a few hundredths of a percentage point that was then magnified by rounding. Unemployment among most demographic groups -- at the lowest levels in 25 or 30 years -- has not budged. And the percentage of Americans working actually rebounded to a near-record of 64.1 percent.
"These are still signs of a very strong labor market," said Alan Krueger, a labor economist at Princeton University. "Most people who want jobs are still able to find them." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 3, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Kosovo and Wilson
To the Editor:
William Safire (column, Sept. 28), writing about self-determination in Kosovo, suggests that we will have to wait for a more sophisticated Woodrow Wilson. Yet solutions true to the Wilsonian spirit exist -- see Catalonia (Spain) and South Tirol-Alto Adige (Italy).
There, the respective regions and their central governments have worked out an autonomous status that offers independence in cultural, ethnic and educational policies and fiscal and administrative autonomy, while maintaining the sovereign boundaries of the central government.
Such autonomy is less known than its state-shattering version since the cold war's end. We need to support self-governance in existing states -- to the benefit of democracy and peace, as was Wilson's intention.
WOLFGANG DANSPECKGRUBER
Princeton, N.J., Sept. 29, 1998
The writer directs the program on self-determination at Princeton University.
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
October 3, 1998HEADLINE: Cold War throwbacks get cash lifeline
RUSSIA's weapons scientists will get an extra dollar 20 million to keep them from selling their know-how to the highest bidder. Last week, the US Congress agreed to provide additional funding for the Department of Energy's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP) programme.
In the late 1980s, the engineers who designed the Soviet Union's liquid-fuelled submarine-launched ballistic missiles were threatened with unemployment by the end of the Cold War. Many left for North Korea. There's little doubt that Russian expertise, combined with Chinese help, accelerated North Korea's missile programme, say experts on weapons proliferation.
The Department of Energy uses the IPP to prevent history from repeating. It funds former Soviet scientists who worked in secret military research cities such as Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70, designing chemical, nuclear and biological weapons and refining missile technology. "It searches to see if military technologies have commercial potential," says Paul White, acting director of the Center for International Security Affairs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Last week's grant of dollar 20 million will provide an important boost for the programme, say experts in weapons proliferation. But for the programme to succeed in the long run, Western companies need to show more interest in the technologies on offer. "It's effective in employing senior scientists at Russian institutes, but its ability to actually get commercial joint ventures is more limited," says Frank Von Hippel of Princeton University in New Jersey, an expert on nuclear proliferation. Given Russia's current economic woes, finding Western business partners will remain a tall order. ...
New Scientist
Copyright 1998 New Scientist IPC Magazines Ltd
October 3, 1998HEADLINE: Superhumans
BYLINE: Robert Taylor (Washington DC; Robert Taylor is a science writer in Washington DC)
HIGHLIGHT: Like it or not, in a few short years we'll have the power to control our own evolution. Robert Taylor finds out how
If you put your ear to the tracks, you can hear the train coming.
In conference halls around the world, geneticists and developmental biologists have been gathering to discuss what once was unthinkable - genetically engineering human embryos so that they, and their children, and their children's children, are irrevocably changed. These experts are talking with remarkable candour about using germ-line engineering to cure fatal diseases or even to create designer babies that will be stronger, smarter, or more resistant to infections.
Doctors are already experimenting with gene therapy, in which a relatively small number of cells - in the lungs, say - are altered to correct a disease. Germ-line engineering, however, would change every cell in the body. People would no longer have to make do with haphazard combinations of their parent's genes. Instead, genetic engineers could eliminate defective genes, change existing ones or even add a few extra. Humanity would, in effect, take control of its own evolution. ...
One reason for cold feet is that large-scale genetic engineering could actually rob society of desirable traits. What if the "disease" genes in combination with other genes, or in people who are merely carriers, also help produce such intangibles as artistic creativity or a razor-sharp wit or the ability to wiggle ones ears ? Wipe out the gene, and you risk losing those traits too. And while no one would wish manic depression on anyone, society might be the poorer without the inventiveness that many psychologists believe is part and parcel of the disorder. In his book "Remaking Eden", Lee Silver, a biologist at Princeton University, goes as far as to suggest that a century or two of widespread engineering might even create a new species of human, no longer willing or able to mate with its "gene poor" relations (Us and them, New Scientist, 9 May, p 36). ...