Princeton in the News
August 26 to September 2, 1999
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HEADLINE: Mice with extra gene get smarter
DATELINE: London, September 2
In an achievement that one day may be applied to enhance human intelligence, U.S. researchers have genetically modified mice to be better at learning and remembering. the researchers, from Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University, found that adding a single NR2B gene to mice significantly boosted their ability to solve maze tasks, learn from objects and sounds in their environment and to retain that knowledge. Their research, published Thursday in the science journal Nature and hailed as a "breakthrough" in memory study, revealed a common biochemical mechanism at the root of nearly all learning. It proved that the NR2B gene is a key switch that controls the brain's ability to associate one event with another, the core feature of learning. ...
HEADLINE: Adding a gene makes for smarter mice, humans could be
next
DATELINE: PARIS, Sept 2
Scientists have boosted the intelligence of mice by adding a gene to the rodents' brains, and it should be possible to do the same in humans one day, according to research published Thursday in the British magazine Nature.
Researchers at US universities found that adding copies of a specific gene to the mice significantly raised their ability to find their way through mazes, learn from objects and sounds and retain their new-found knowledge.
They said the discovery could accelerate the development of medicines for human disorders such as memory loss in old age and Alzheimer's disease.
But it could also sharpen an ethical debate about creating so-called "designer children" with enhanced intelligence.
The smarter mice have been nicknamed Doogie after a child prodigy character in the US television series "Doogie Howser, MD".
Princeton University neurobiologist Joe Tsien, working with teams at Massachusetts Insitute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis was quoted in the magazine as saying: "They're learning things much better and remembering longer. They're smarter."
He concluded: "Our results suggest that genetic enhancement of mental and cognitive attributes such as intelligence and memory in mammals is feasible." ...
HEADLINE: Scientists find gene to create smart mice
BYLINE: By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
SCIENTISTS have used gene technology to create super-smart mice, an achievement that will trigger renewed debate about the possible use of genetics to enhance human attributes such as intelligence.
In recent years, many scientists have been sceptical that simple genetic changes could have much effect on intelligence, pointing out that the human brain depends on the activity of about 30,000 genes.
But mice have been made demonstrably smarter by adding a single gene, suggesting that genetic improvement of intelligence and memory in mammals is now feasible. The work offers a striking glimpse of how genetic technology may affect society in the next century and will stimulate ethical debate about how it should be used to enhance people.
In the short term, the study will also be of major interest to researchers trying to understand and treat human disorders, notably dementia, that involve the loss of learning and memory.
The creation of GM mice with improved learning and memory is reported today in the journal Nature by a team from Princeton University, led by neurobiologist Dr Joe Tsien, and colleagues in MIT and Washington University.
Adding the single gene to mice significantly boosted the animals' ability to solve maze tasks, learn from objects and sounds in their environment and to retain that knowledge. "They're learning things much better and remembering longer," Dr Tsien said. ...
The work is most relevant to memory research and reveals a common biochemical mechanism at the root of nearly all learning. If two signals arrive at nerve cells at the same time - maybe one from seeing a lit match and the other results from a sensation of pain - then a memory is formed by strengthening connections between these cells.
The research proves that the gene, called NR2B, is a key "switch" that controls the brain's ability to associate one event with another, the core feature of learning, a process that is triggered when charged calcium atoms surge into brain cells. One of the pioneers in research in this field, Dr Tim Bliss of the National Institute for Medical Research, London, commented that the enhanced ability of the mice in certain tasks appears genuine. "But just how this translates into intelligence is another matter." ...
HEADLINE: Current Quotations
--"This points to the possibility that enhancement of learning and memory or even IQ is feasible through genetic means, through genetic engineering." - Joe Z. Tsien, the professor of molecular biology at Princeton University who led a team of scientists who genetically engineered "brainy mice," pointing the way for research that could lead to human babies with higher IQs as well as drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease and stroke.
NOTE: One of three quotes for the day worldwide.
HEADLINE: Altered genes produce smart mice, tough questions
BYLINE: By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff
Scientists say they have genetically modified mice to make them smarter. The report raises anew provocative questions of when or if such genetic enhancement of normal abilities should ever be attempted in humans.
After using gene implants to create a strain of mice having double the normal amount of a memory protein in their brains, the researchers found that the animals learned significantly faster and remembered longer than their counterparts.
Moreover, the added gene prevented the normal decline in memory and learning with advancing age in both mice and humans.
The finding, being reported today in the journal Nature, is certain to attract wide interest and stimulate debates over how society should use the growing power of genetics. ...
The gene-altered mice outdid unmodified rodents in a series of tasks that measured how fast they could learn something (like the location of a submerged platform in a pool of water) and how long they could retain information they had learned.
However, specialists pointed out, creating improved memory and learning ability is not the same as boosting intelligence, the hard-to-define property that many measure with IQ tests. ...
The report today in Nature came from the laboratory of Joe Z. Tsien at Princeton University and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University. Ya-Ping Tang of Princeton is the lead author.
The researchers came up with the name Doogie for the strain of brainy mice, a nod to the TV series "Doogie Howser, M.D." about a precocious boy who is only 10 when he graduates from college - Princeton, in fact.
The discovery might be applicable to humans because the mechanism that the scientists tinkered with in the mice is fundamentally the same one that creates memory in animals from sea slugs to humans. Memories - representations of thoughts - are stored in networks of brain cells in many places in the brain, but indexed in a structure called the hippocampus. ...
The Tsien group at Princeton created the smarter mice by adding extra copies of a gene called NR2B (which makes a protein for the NMDA receptor) to normal mouse embryos. The resulting newborn mice had about twice as much NR2B activity as normal mice, and this extra dose meant their brains were more open to new information in a shorter time.
As a result, the genetically modified animals were able to remember associations, like whether an object in their cage was new or had been there previously, for several more days than the normal mice. ...
TYPE: Commentary
HEADLINE: Scientists Are Able to Increase Intelligence in Mice By Inserting an Extra Gene
REPORTERS: CHARLES OSGOOD
Charles Osgood on the CBS Radio Network.
We always knew that human beings could create a smarter mouse. Walt Disney did it years ago. But Mickey and Minnie were only on paper and then on celluloid. They aren't real flesh-and-blood mice. At the Disney parks, they're flesh and blood humans inside a Mickey Mouse suit. But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about are mice genetically engineered to be smarter by human science. That has now been done, inserting an extra gene. The resulting mice have grown up with greater learning ability and memory than their fellow mice. Could we produce smarter humans that way, too? The answer is: Probably yes. But the question is: Should we? Stand by. ...
OSGOOD: By adding a gene that produces increased levels of a brain protein called NR2B, Princeton University molecular biologist Joe Tsien and his colleagues have produced a strain of mice that recognize a Lego piece that they've encountered before. They've learned the location of an underwater platform and recognized cues that they're about to receive a mild shock. Now these are things that no ordinary mouse can do. And furthermore, they can pass their heightened learning ability along to their offspring. ...
HEADLINE: Building a better brain?
BYLINE: Alex Salkever, Special to The Christian Science
Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
HIGHLIGHT: Scientists alter mice genetics to increase intelligence, raising
In a breakthrough with important implications for science and ethics, a team of researchers announced yesterday they have produced more intelligent mice by altering the animals' genetics.
The mice, named after the precocious TV doctor Doogie Howser, exhibited superior learning and memory skills after scientists altered a gene for a crucial protein in their brains.
The research marks the first time that scientists have genetically manipulated mammals to augment basic skills that are the building blocks of intelligence.
What's more, these results were achieved by adding a single gene to the DNA of mice embryos. This simplicity implies that big shifts in biology can be wrought through relatively small changes in a complex organism's genetics.
The research may provide key clues to ameliorating disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer's, researchers say. But it also represents a new threshold in the ethics of genetics, as scientists move closer to being able to alter core human capabilities. ...
The gene that makes "Doogie" different is named NR2B. Found in mice, monkeys, and humans, as well as in other mammals, NR2B is believed to be a key part of memory because it helps the brain forge a connection between two distinct neurological stimuli. For example, it helps humans associate the sensation of cold and the image of an ice cube, scientists say.
"This receptor is a molecular coincidence detector, an essential feature to implement learning and memory in the brain," says Joe Tsien, a Princeton University neurologist and the lead researcher on the project.
In their research, Dr. Tsien and his colleagues inserted an extra gene that produces NR2B into the DNA of mice embryos. Throughout their test, the Doogie mice handily outperformed the unchanged control group, often learning a task or making an association between two separate stimuli in half the time. They could recognize a Lego block they'd seen before, for instance. ...
HEADLINE: Genetics may boost brain power
BYLINE: By Clive Cookson, Science Editor
Genetic improvement of human intelligence and memory is feasible, US scientists say today. Their claim is based on experiments in which the transfer of a single gene boosted learning and memory in mice.
The transgenic mice, created at Princeton University in New Jersey, performed far better than normal animals in various mental tasks, such as finding their way around a maze. They remembered the shape of objects four to five times longer.
These Doogie mice (named after a precocious character in the US television show Doogie Howser, MD) have extra copies of a gene called NR2B. It is a molecular receptor - or docking point - for chemical signals in the brain. The Princeton scientists, led by neurobiologist Joe Tsien, say their research "reveals a promising strategy for the creation of other genetically modified mammals with enhanced intelligence and memory".
The study, reported in the journal Nature, is the second recent example of mouse genetic engineering that could have a profound implications for human society in the next century. Two weeks ago, scientists at Emory University, Atlanta, reported the creation of a more sociable and less promiscuous strain of mice, by transferring another brain receptor gene.
In both cases, the first human applications would not be able to change or enhance mental attributes in healthy people but could treat mental disorders.
The Princeton research suggests that the human NR2B gene could be a good target for drug companies seeking to rescue the minds of patients with dementia. However, it would take many years to develop a memory-improving drug or gene therapy - and such treatment would not be free of risk. ...
HEADLINE: Extra gene leads to brainier mice, study says
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
By giving lab mice a single extra gene, scientists have created smarter mice - animals that learn faster, remember more and excel at the equivalent of rodent intelligence tests: finding their way out of watery mazes.
In a report in today's issue of the scientific journal Nature - and at a well-attended press conference at Princeton University, where the work was done - scientists claimed the research proved nearly all learning and memory in mammals was based on a single chemical event and that similar genetic tools might one day boost human intelligence.
''This points to the possibility that enhancement of learning and memory or even IQ is feasible through genetic means,'' said Joe Z. Tsien, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton who led the study.
Critics immediately said that while the new experiment was interesting, claims that the work was a breakthrough in learning research or that it could someday be used to improve human intelligence were vastly overstated.
The experiment involved a gene that regulates NMDA receptors on the surfaces of brain cells, which react only when the cell receives two separate signals. They are thought to be key to most learning in mammals because they enable the brain to link two phenomena, such as fire and pain, and to remember their relationship.
In the new experiment, the extra gene made adult mice more responsive to learning by making their NMDA receptors stay open twice as long as normal, like those in young animals, which are better at taking in new information. This explains why kids can run computers, program VCRs or learn Spanish better than their elders. ...
HEADLINE: Mice given extra gene become smarter
BYLINE: Tim Radford Science Editor
A quick-thinking, genetically engineered mouse, called Doogie, has led scientists to claim that they may one day be able to boost human intelligence.
Joe Tsien, a neurologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and collaborators at other US universities, report in Nature today that by adding a single gene to mice they have significantly boosted the ability of the laboratory animals to solve maze tasks, learn from the environment and retain the knowledge.
They dubbed the mouse Doogie after an American television show Doogie Howser MD. The addition of the gene, already known to be important in human and other mam-mals' memory capabilities, enabled the engineered mice to stay mentally young; they retained into adulthood certain brain features of juvenile mice. And young mice, like young humans, are better than adults at grasping huge amounts of new information. The re search is described as a 'breakthrough' and confirms that there is a common biochemical piece of machinery at the root of nearly all learning. It is likely to trigger debate about how society should handle the astonishing new power of genetic research.
It also follows a warning from another Princeton geneticist last year that human evolution could undergo a new phase in the next millennium - prompted by the rich being able to buy extra-intelligence genes for their unborn children. ...
HEADLINE: Building A Better ... Mouse
SCIENTISTS CAN MAKE RODENTS SMARTER, SIGNALING POSSIBLE TOOL AGAINST ALZHEIMER'S
BYLINE: WILLIAM HATHAWAY; Courant Staff Writer
Science can't help you remember where you put your eyeglasses -- yet.
But researchers led by a team at Princeton University have engineered a single gene to create a smart strain of mice that learn and memorize much better than their peers, according to research published today in the journal Nature.
That achievement could one day give scientists the ability to combat Alzheimer's disease, boost human intelligence -- or help you find your car keys.
The Princeton scientists dubbed the new strain of rodent prodigies "Doogie" after the precocious television character, Doogie Hauser, M.D., who gained a medical degree and reached puberty at about the same time.
"[The mice] are learning things much better and remembering longer," said Princeton neurobiologist Joe Tsien, lead author of the study, which was conducted with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University. "They are smarter." ...
Tsien had previously created memory- and learning-impaired mice by eliminating the gene called NR2B, which produces receptors of biochemical signals transmitted within the brain. Tsien's team created the Doogie strain by increasing production of the receptors, called NMDA.
The genetically enhanced Doogie mice and a control group of normal mice performed several tasks designed to measure learning and memory. The Doogie group shined. ...
Researchers at Princeton said that because a similar gene exists in humans, their work might one day be used to develop drugs to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's and autism. And although there is no evidence that the gene plays a role of similar importance in learning and memory in humans, the Princeton researchers said that it might be time to open a debate about whether or how genetic science could enhance cognitive abilities in people. ...
HEADLINE: Mice Made Smarter WITH GM BRAINS
BYLINE: Steve Connor Science Editor
SCIENTISTS HAVE genetically engineered a breed of "smart mice", which raises the possibility of boosting the intelligence of humans with drugs or gene enhancement.
The research shows it is feasible to improve mental ability by tinkering with the genes involved with producing or interacting with the key neuro- transmitters of the brain - a step towards designer babies.
The study also paves the way to designing drugs that could improve learning and boost memory in people suffering from age-related disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
A team of scientists genetically engineered the genes of the mice to boost levels of a brain protein that acts as a receptor for a key neurotransmitter, called NMDA, which is known to be involved with memory and learning.
The genetically engineered mice performed significantly better than ordinary mice in a range of tests such as learning how to escape from a maze or how to locate a sunken platform in a water tank.
"This points to the possibility that enhancement of learning and memory or even IQ is feasible through genetic means, through genetic engineering," said Joe Tsien, assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, who led the research team. ...
Research published in the journal Nature showed that the enhanced learning and memory abilities of the smart mice were the result of an over-expression of a particular protein sub-unit of the NMDA receptors in the brain. Now that the precise role of this brain protein is known, drug companies can develop ways of interacting with it to reproduce the effect of enhancing cognitive ability, said Tim Bliss, head of neurophysiology at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill in London. ...
HEADLINE: Scientists Create Smarter Mice By Adding Gene
BYLINE: THOMAS H. MAUGH II, TIMES MEDICAL WRITER
By adding a single gene to fertilized eggs, Princeton University researchers have been able to create smarter mice, a feat that could lead to the development of more intelligent animals and that hints at the feasibility of producing so-called designer babies with enhanced intelligence.
The accomplishment demonstrates for the first time that a complex trait like intelligence can be genetically manipulated in mammals. It also reveals a common biochemical mechanism at the root of all learning, a discovery that could eventually be translated into new drugs and treatments for the prevention of memory loss in the elderly, they said.
The added gene enabled the otherwise ordinary mice to learn new tasks more quickly and to remember them longer, a team from Princeton, MIT and Washington University in St. Louis reports in today's Nature. ...
Still, experts cautioned that it will be many years before it can be put to any practical use in humans. ...
The attention surrounds a gene called NR2B, which biologists believe is a key switch that controls the brain's ability to associate one event with another--the core feature of learning. Neurobiologist Joe Z. Tsien and his colleagues at Princeton previously had produced genetically engineered mice lacking the NR2B gene and found that they had impaired learning and memory. Adding new or improved function, however, is a harder task and a more rigorous test of the gene's function. ...
NOTE: Versions of this story also appeared in the Bergen Record (Hackensack, N.J.) and the Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.)
HEADLINE: Smarter Mouse Is Created In Hope of Helping
People
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
In a major test of the brain's most basic mechanism of learning, a scientist has created a smarter strain of mice by manipulating a gene involved in memory formation. He believes his work lays the basis for eventually doing the same in people, whether in helping patients with memory loss, in counteracting the fading of memory in the elderly, or even in making healthy individuals smarter.
Other experts, while praising the technical quality of the work, see its first application as in treating patients rather than in enhancing intelligence. Also, they say, although there are reasons to believe that mice and humans are similar in this respect, the applicability of the work to people remains to be established.
The mice were created in an experiment designed to assess how memories are formed in the mammalian brain. The animals performed better than normal mice in six different tests, a strong indication that the altered gene is indeed involved in learning and memory formation.
The finding, reported in today's issue of Nature, also explains why young animals learn better than older ones, because the manipulated gene is one whose activity is known to fade with age in mice, monkeys and probably people, too.
The smarter mice were created by a team of researchers led by Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, a neurobiologist at Princeton University. ...
For scientists, the importance of Dr. Tsien's paper is that it goes a considerable way toward proving a longstanding idea, known as Hebbs's rule, about how the brain forms the neural associations that are the basis of memory. ...
For others, the interest of Dr. Tsien's work lies in its possible application to people. Though no one yet knows whether the same manipulation would make people smarter, Dr. Tsien said, the DNA sequence of the mouse gene he manipulated is 98 percent identical to that of humans, suggesting that altering it by drugs or gene therapy might also make people smarter.
"It is not a hypothetical question," he said. "It is time for people and the public to begin to discuss these issues." ...
HEADLINE: Building a Better Mouse
BY GENE RESEARCH WITH AN EYE ON HELPING HUMAN
BYLINE: By Robert Cooke. STAFF WRITER
It's certainly tempting to call them Einstein mice; they're extra-smart little critters created through genetic engineering.
The altered animals are now alive and well at Princeton University, though hardly doing equations. They were produced by molecular biologist Joe Tsien and collaborators at other institutions. As high achievers, the engineered mice outperform their ordinary brethren in a whole battery of learning tasks.
"They're learning things much better, and remembering longer. They're smarter," Tsien announced yesterday.
More important, the technology clearly is not limited to mice. It means that the learning ability of any mammal - humans included - might be enhanced someday by manipulating the genetics of brain structure. And, because the gene was inserted into a single-cell mouse embryo, the trait will be inherited by future generations. ...
HEADLINE: Brainy Mice Raise Hopes For Human Memory Drug
BYLINE: Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer
Genetic manipulations targeting a single protein in the brain have produced a strain of extra-smart laboratory mice, scientists reported yesterday, suggesting it may someday be possible to boost human memory in much the same way.
Researchers at Princeton University said they have engineered a strain of mice with abundant amounts of a memory-enhancing substance called NR2B in their brains.
Experiments show that the mutant mice, nicknamed "Doogie" after the brainy title character in the "Doogie Howser, M.D." TV series, have much better long-term memory and learning ability than ordinary mice.
"This does raise some specific options for the pharmacologic treatment of memory disturbances in humans," said Dr. Marsel Mesulam, a neurologist and director of Northwestern University's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago.
For the first time, he added, experimental results point to "a serious possibility that we could have memory-enhancing drugs."
At the same time, medical and legal experts raised a slew of questions about the potential dangers of brain-enhancing drugs based on genetic alterations, emphasizing that it will take many years of research before any human uses might be attempted. ...
Identifying NR2B as a "molecular switch in the memory process," the authors conclude, "has indicated a potential new target for the treatment of learning and memory disorders. This study also reveals a promising strategy for the creation of other genetically modified mammals with enhanced intelligence and memory." ...
But experts credited the Princeton research team, led by molecular biologist Joe Z. Tsien, for producing by far the most convincing evidence that the NMDA receptor is the key player in a so-called "unifying mechanism" of learning. ...
HEADLINE: Mouse prodigy makes the most of smart gene
BYLINE: Nigel Hawkes, science editor
CHANGING a single gene is enough to improve learning and memory, American scientists have shown.
They have produced brighter mice by giving them extra helpings of a gene believed to control the brain's ability to link one event with another - the basis of learning. They say the same could, in principle, be done with human beings.
The smart strain of mice, named Doogie after a child prodigy doctor played by Neil Patrick Harris in the television programme Doogie Howser, MD, also retained into adulthood the juvenile ability to grasp large amounts of new information quickly.
The remarkable feature of the experiment is that a single gene can have such a marked effect on memory and learning. Most scientists interested in the genetics of intelligence believe that a dozen or more genes are likely to be involved.
It also confirms a long-standing theory about how the memory works, and suggests ways in which people with Alzheimer's disease might be treated by gene therapy or drugs to slow memory loss.
A team led by Joe Tsien of Princeton University modified the mice by giving them extra copies of a gene called NR2B. This is responsible for making a receptor - a protein that lies on the surface of brain cells - called the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor.
This receptor is the "socket" into which brain-signalling chemicals plug. It takes two such signals to activate it, and so is fundamental to the formation of memory, which involves associating two events together; touching a hot object and feeling pain, for example.
Dr Tsien had earlier shown that mice without the NR2B gene were slow to learn and had poor memories.
In his latest experiments, reported in Nature, he has given mice extra copies of the gene, enabling them to produce more NMDA receptor. Tests showed that in these mice, NMDA receptor activity had increased.
The mice grew and behaved normally but, when given tests to measure their ability to learn and remember, did much better than unmodified mice. ...
HEADLINE: Smart mice could point way to brainier people
BYLINE: Steve Sternberg
Researchers have genetically engineered a strain of ultra-smart mice, a study released today says, an advance that one day might lead to brainier humans and drugs to treat forms of dementia.
Ultimately, researchers say, the study in today's Nature could be the thread that unravels the mystery of memory.
The mice, nicknamed "Doogie" after the precocious TV doctor Doogie Howser, excelled at navigating mazes, recognizing objects in their environment and sustaining their newfound knowledge, says lead researcher Joe Tsien of Princeton University.
The mice retain into adulthood the mental agility of youth and pass their brainpower on to their offspring.
"Learning and memory are not unique to humans," Tsien says. "All animals possess these features. The question is whether we can do this in humans." ...
The gene, called NR2B, is taken up into every nerve cell in the brain. It holds the blueprint for a key part of the gateway that ferries nerve impulses through the cell wall. The more NR2B there is in a nerve cell, the stronger the cell's link with other nerve cells.
The stronger these biochemical links, known as synapses, the better memory will be.
In short, Tsien says, the gene acts as a switch that controls the brain's power to associate one event with another, a key feature of learning. ...
HEADLINE: Mighty Smart Mice; Scientists Add a Gene, and
Intelligence Soars
BYLINE: Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
For the first time, scientists have created significantly smarter mice by adding a single gene to rodent embryos, showing that a seemingly minor genetic alteration can improve performance on a wide range of learning and memory tasks.
Researchers said their creation of "Doogie" mice -- named after the precocious television character Doogie Howser, M.D. -- could speed development of medicines for various cognitive disorders in people, including age-related memory loss and Alzheimer's disease.
But the finding also brings immediacy to a long-simmering debate about the ethics of making "designer babies" and the appropriateness of offering genetic enhancements that would not simply correct abnormalities but would increase human physical or mental capacities above those currently deemed normal.
The work, which involves a gene that helps the brain recognize patterns of cause and effect, also could help scientists create pets, farm animals or other creatures with unusual capacities to learn and remember, raising novel issues in the animal rights arena.
"We're in an era when breakthroughs in biology and intelligence are outpacing the culture's capacity to deal with the ethics," said Joe Tsien, the Princeton University molecular biologist who led the new effort. "There will be issues of access and who can afford it. Whether the social wealthy class will have the intellectual advantage over poor people, these are real questions coming down the road."
Others, however, warned against interpreting the work to mean that intelligence is a purely genetic trait. Especially in people, they said, intellect is an extremely complex phenomenon, and countless social and environmental experiences influence the way a brain assimilates and organizes information. ...
The new research, described in today's issue of the journal Nature, lends support to a prominent theory about how the brain creates memories and then uses those memories to learn from experience. The work suggests that many different kinds of cognitive skills, such as recognizing something new in a room full of familiar objects or remembering where something is stored, rely on a single underlying molecular mechanism in the brain. ...
In the new experiments, researchers inserted into mouse embryos extra copies of a gene that enhances long-term potentiation. The gene, called NMDA receptor 2B, or NR2B, is present in all mammals, including people. It directs production of a nerve protein that helps the brain recognize that two things are linked, such as the ringing of a bell and the delivery of food. ...
NOTE: Versions of this story appeared in The International Herald Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman.
HEADLINE: Bright future in 'smart' mice
GENETICALLY modified super-intelligent babies came a step closer to reality following a major scientific breakthrough.
Researchers have succeeded in creating a ''smart'' mouse by manipulating a single gene that appears to be the master-key to intelligence and memory.
Not only does the research open the door to new treatments for learning and memory disorders, but it raises the ultimate possibility of genetically enhancing human intelligence.
Ethical considerations may stand in the way of such a ''Brave New World'' scenario. But the American scientists who conducted the research believe one day the technical hurdles could be crossed.
Writing in the scientific journal Nature, the researchers led by neurobiologist Joe Tsien, from Princeton University, New Jersey, said: ''Our results suggest that genetic enhancement of mental and cognitive attributes such as intelligence and memory in mammals is feasible.''
The study centred on a gene called NR2B, a key switch that controls a core feature of learning, the brain's ability to associate one event with another.
A number of laboratory mice were genetically modified to have extra copies of the gene by injecting DNA into fertilised egg cells. The scientists named the genetically engineered animals ''Doogie'' mice after a character in an American television show, Doogie Howser, MD.
When Doogie mice were put through a series of tests they showed significantly enhanced learning and memory abilities in a wide range of situations.
HEADLINE: A CLOSER LOOK
BYLINE: NED POTTER, CHARLES GIBSON
HIGHLIGHT: Genetic Engineering for Better Brains
CHARLES GIBSON: We're going to take "A Closer Look" tonight at how you're thinking. Are we stuck with what's between our ears, or can science make us smarter? There have been remarkable advances of late in understanding the human brain -- how it works, how we think. The very latest is the study out tomorrow in the journal Nature. And it suggests that genetic engineering eventually might give us better, smarter brains. Here's ABC's Ned Potter.
NED POTTER, ABC News: (voice-over) Why is it that some children become Mozarts or Einsteins? And why do some seniors descend into the fog of Alzheimer's? We may find answers in these genetically engineered mice.
JOE TSIEN, Princeton University Microbiologist: These animals are able to learn quickly, and also they are able to remember longer.
NED POTTER: (voice-over) Remember four or five times longer in some tests.
JOE TSIEN: Can you see this nucleus?
NED POTTER: (voice-over) Dr. Joe Tsien put the mice under the microscope when they were still single-celled embryos. Then he used a tiny hollow needle to inject a single gene called NR2B. ...
NED POTTER: (voice-over) Watch the payoff in this test. Mice are given five minutes to poke around two toys. Then one toy is changed. A normal mouse seems not to notice. But a mouse with the extra gene goes straight to the new toy because, unlike other mice, he's capable of remembering that he already explored the old one.
(on camera) This experiment advances our knowledge of how the brain works. But more importantly, it shows how we can change it, without that much effort, to work the way we want.
(voice-over) And where might that lead? Well, imagine a treatment that people can get someday to prevent the memory loss that comes with aging, that a child can be given to overcome a learning disorder. Imagine further, genetic therapy to create smarter babies.
JOE TSIEN: I think the question is not whether it will happen, it is when it is going to happen.
HEADLINE: Scientists genetically engineer smarter mice
BYLINE: JEFF BARNARD
Scientists have genetically engineered brainy mice, pointing the way for research that could lead to human babies with higher IQs as well as drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease and stroke.
Inserting an extra gene, researchers produced a strain of mice that excelled in a range of tasks, like recognizing a Lego piece they had encountered before, learning the location of a hidden underwater platform and recognizing cues that they were about to receive a mild shock.
The improved learning and memory came from increased production of a brain protein called NR2B. The mice carried the enhanced abilities into adulthood, when learning ability and memory naturally taper off, and passed their heightened learning abilities on to their offspring.
''This points to the possibility that enhancement of learning and memory or even IQ is feasible through genetic means, through genetic engineering,'' said Joe Z. Tsien, the assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University who led the research team.
The findings, published in the Thursday issue of Nature, indicate a common mechanism lies at the root of all learning, identify the protein NR2B as a key to brain function, and could lead to a drug to treat memory disorders, such as Alzheimer's, by increasing NR2B levels, Tsien added. ...
The prospect of genetically engineering smarter babies raises big ethical questions. ...
Using a tiny glass needle, the scientists injected a gene carrying a blueprint for the protein NR2B into the nucleus of a fertilized mouse egg, then implanted the resulting embryo into the uterus of a mother mouse.
Mice born with the extra gene made more NR2B than usual in their brains.
That extra production boosted mental abilities by enhancing the function of brain-cell switches called NMDA receptors. The results confirm the idea, proposed in 1949, that these switches play a key role in learning. ...
NOTE: Versions of this story appeared in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, The Telegraph-Herald (Dubuque, Iowa), the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, and The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) among other newspapers.
HEADLINE: New Studies on Mice Show That Genetic Altering of the Brain Could Assist People
IN EXPANDING THEIR KNOWLEDGE AND MEMORY
ANCHORS: ROBERT SIEGEL
REPORTERS: JOE PALCA
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Researchers from Princeton University say they've created a smarter-than-average mouse by altering a single gene. And since the same gene exists in people, the work raises the tantalizing possibility of improving human learning and memory. But as NPR's Joe Palca reports, that may be wishful thinking.
JOE PALCA reporting:
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have struggled to understand how the brain makes and stores memories. In recent decades, a popular theory has been that changes in the strengths of connections between nerves cells are at the heart of the process. One of the molecules in the brain that regulates the strength of these connections is something called the NMDA receptor.
Using the tools of genetic engineering, Princeton University scientist Joe Tsien and his colleagues created mice with a particular alteration in the NMDA receptor, an alteration that allows a nerve cell to remain open to change longer than it typically would in an adult mouse brain.
Mr. JOE TSIEN (Princeton University): In a way, we produced the adult brain with certain features of juvenile brains.
PALCA: Tsien's theory goes that since the juvenile brain is sopping up new knowledge at a tremendous rate, giving adults similar features should enable them to do better at learning new tricks. So he tested the mice on a variety of tests. In one, the researchers measured how long it took the genetically altered mice to associate a tone with a shock. The second test looked at how long it took to unlearn that association. Yet another explored their ability to navigate a maze. In the current issue of the journal Nature, Tsien describes how the mice with the altered NMDA receptors did.
Mr. TSIEN: In all these tests, these animals are able to do much better than their control animals. This really suggests to us the NMDA mediator to the process represents a common underlying mechanism for a variety of forms of learning and of memory. ...
PALCA: In other words, too much memory may not be a good thing. Neuroscientist Larry Squire of the University of California at San Diego says the NMDA receptor is involved in much more than just memory, so tinkering with it could have unintended consequences. What's more, some studies show that when overstimulated, the NMDA receptor can kill brain cells. Squire says that raises all sorts of questions about Joe Tsien's mice. ...
HEADLINE: Eight Steps to a New Financial Order
BYLINE: Alan S. Blinder; ALAN S. BLINDER is Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Director of Princeton's Center for Economic Policy Studies. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 -- 94 and as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve from 1994-96.
BACK TO BRETTON WOODS
FINANCIAL CRISES once made most people's eyes glaze over; they were subjects of intense interest to only a limited clientele, many of whom wore green eyeshades. Not any longer. The topic has unfortunately acquired a mass audience in the second half of the 1990s. Stunning currency collapses in Mexico (1995), southeast Asia (1997), Russia (1998), and Brazil (1999) have pushed the subject to the front page. Financial conflagrations have become too frequent, too devastating, and too contagious to be ignored.
As the World Bank's chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has put it, when so many cars run off the road, you start wondering whether the road itself might be the problem. And indeed, many questions are now being raised about the global financial architecture. Much of the discussion centers around the concept of "moral hazard," an awkward phrase that economists borrowed years ago from the world of insurance. In the financial context, it means that people (or banks, or governments) who are shielded from the consequences of their actions may take imprudent risks -- hoping they will be bailed out if things go wrong.
But there is a vastly more important hazard of much greater moral urgency: the fact that financial crises afflict literally hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders who play no part in the speculative excesses but nonetheless suffer when the bubbles burst. The present global financial system manifestly fails to protect these poor people from extreme hazards. This failure is the chief reason to seek reform. Those who bet wrongly in financial markets should suffer losses. And borrowers should repay their debts, even when they are onerous. But citizens who take no part in the game should be shielded from the consequences of financial collapse to the maximum extent possible. This is plainly not happening now. How did we get into such an awful mess? ...
But we should recognize the blemish for what it is. The current system breeds too many crises that are too severe. Much of the non- Western world has suffered through one or another such malady in the past few years. ...
Principle 1: Don't fix your exchange rate. ...
Principle 2: Borrow less in foreign currency. ...
Principle 3: Don't rush to open capital markets. ...
Principle 4: Follow sound macroeconomic and financial policies. ...
Principle 5: Austerity is not always the right medicine. ...
Principle 6: Devote more resources to protecting innocent by standers. ...
Principle 7: Agree on some procedures for orderly debt settlement. ...
Principle 8: Prevention is better than cure. ...
HEADLINE: Missing the Mark; The Truth About Inflation
Targeting
BYLINE: Ben S. Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic S. Mishkin, and
Adam S. Posen;
BEN S. BERNANKE is Harrison and Beck Professor of Economics and
Public Affairs and Chair of the Department of Economics at
Princeton University.
James K. Galbraith takes our book, Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience, as the jumping-off point for a screed against obsession with price stability ("The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts," January/February 1999). He does Foreign Affairs readers a disservice by misrepresenting our argument and, as a result, leaves them uninformed about perhaps the most important current debate on the conduct of monetary policy.
DEMOLISHING A STRAW MAN
Inflation targeting -- and our "manifesto" in favor of it (to use Galbraith's characterization) -- is not so much about the objectives of monetary policy as about its implementation, particularly the way in which monetary decisions are made and explained. Neither the inflation-targeting regimes adopted by countries such as Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom nor the arguments advanced in our book commit inflation targeters to a destructive, single-minded focus on inflation in the short term. To the contrary, the features that accompany such systems -- namely, the added transparency and accountability of central banks that have publicly announced inflation targets -- are the best guarantees against policy mistakes. This is why the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Board should adopt these measures.
Galbraith is too concerned with demolishing a straw man to pay much attention to what our book actually says. He asserts, for example, that "the authors of Inflation Targeting do not discuss the Humphrey-Hawkins Act," the U.S. legislation most closely addressing the Fed's mandate and accountability. If Galbraith had glanced at our index, he would have seen that we actually have a three-page discussion of Humphrey-Hawkins in the context of our recommendations for enhancing the transparency of the Fed's operations. A little later, he dismisses our argument that inflation-targeting countries have enjoyed improved economic performance: "A fair evaluation of this claim would require a comparative perspective, which the authors do not provide." Yet our book contains 9 country studies spread over 163 pages, plus a chapter comparing the economic performance of 4 inflation-targeting countries to that of 4 nontargeting countries. What does this provide if not "a comparative perspective," and a fair one at that?...
HEADLINE: Surfing in the executive suite
BYLINE: Scott McCormack
HIGHLIGHT: Don't be embarrassed if you've been slow to plunge into the World Wide Web. You've got distinguished company.
ARE OUR BUSINESS leaders on the Internet a lot? Some are. But many prefer to let their staffs do their surfing for them. ...
Burton Malkiel Author, A Random Walk Down Wall Street; economics professor, Princeton University Malkiel tracks his stocks on Yahoo's finance site, where he closely monitors news stories about insiders' sales. He also follows the travails of the Boston Red Sox on the Boston Globe's on-line edition.
TOP PICKS: Boston Globe sports page (www.boston.com/sports/ redsox); Yahoo Finance (http:// quote.yahoo.com).
HEADLINE: The Death of Pierrot
The centenary of Aubrey Beardsley's death in 1898 did not pass unnoticed. In London last fall, the Victoria and Albert mounted a major retrospective; and quite a few new books have appeared, among them a monograph by Stephen Calloway, who organized the V&A show, and a new biography by Matthew Sturgis. Still, I find it difficult to escape the impression that this centenary has come and gone without much more than a whimper. Could it be that Aubrey Beardsley, who was a scandal in the 1890s and a sensation in the 1960s, is humdrum in the 1990s? Could it be that this master draftsman's deliciously unsettling conjugations of sexual daydream, theatrical fantasia, and near- abstract visionary design have lost their appeal?
Even in our own jaded '90s, Beardsley's illustrations for Lysistrata might be expected to get people talking. What other artist has dared to bring such a dashingly elegant tell-it-like-it-is approach to images of a cupid gloatingly aroused as he powders a lady's huge behind, or a shriveled old man cheerfully fingering the shoulder-high erection of a long-haired young hunk? Male pubic hair was nothing new in art when Beardsley was working on Lysistrata in 1896, but only Beardsley had the wit to render that hunky Spartan Herald's dark hair as a rococo abstract silhouette. What gives Beardsley's designs their edge--and make no mistake about it, the edge is still sharp--is his way of literally dotting every I and crossing every T as he plots the twists and turns of his fantasies. The shock is not that this is porn; the shock is that Beardsley trumps the porn and achieves his own kind of zany plangency. His lucidity is spooky. ...
It is significant, I think, that the most important centenary event in the United States, a beautiful show in the Princeton University Library, received barely a mention in the press. Princeton's holdings, the bulk of which were assembled early in this century by the art collector A.E. Gallatin, made for a powerhouse of an exhibition, but since this show was designed to satisfy only the small circle of people who care for rare books, there was no reason to expect that it would be brought to the attention of a wider audience. Which is perfectly fine. Certain artists may make the move from sensation to immortal only under the cover of a general mood of indifference. And that is what is happening to Aubrey Beardsley. One hundred and one years after his death, the shouting is finally over, but his art is still very young; and the pierrots of the future are going to walk into the museums and the libraries and discover his glory, in much the way that he once discovered the glory of Utamaro and Mantegna and Watteau.
HEADLINE: Is that the real price?
BYLINE: By Ben Wildavsky
HIGHLIGHT: As college costs have risen, so has the size of financial aid awards. You may pay far less than you think
Last year, Mike McPherson of St. Paul, Minn., tried to interest some of his 17-year-old son's friends in applying to Macalester College, a well-regarded liberal arts school in the city. Most simply balked at its $26,000-plus yearly price tag, even after he told them that freshman financial aid packages average more than $17,000. "I think of myself as a pretty strong information source," says McPherson, a noted expert on the economics of student aid, who also is Macalester's president. But many families are guided largely by the sticker price, he says, and refuse to even consider Macalester.
It's no wonder that many collegebound students and their parents experience sticker shock. Since 1980, the average tuition at four-year institutions has more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, while the median family income for the parents of college-age children has increased just 12 percent. But the reality for many families, explored in these pages, is that the actual cost of college today is much less than they fear. ...
Some expensive private universities are changing the way they calculate need in an effort to place less financial strain on middle-class families. In January 1998, Princeton University announced that for most families with incomes below $90,000, the school would no longer consider the value of the family's home when calculating ability to pay. Middle-income students could also expect more grants and fewer loans. MIT and Stanford, among other schools, have followed with similar measures. "Students' families were saying, 'We're squeezed,' " says Robert Kinnally, Stanford's dean of admission and financial aid. "We don't want anybody to shy away from us because it's too expensive." Students receiving aid at Stanford enjoy an average discount of 54 percent . ...
HEADLINE: Great schools at great prices
BEST VALUES
A RANK
B SCHOOL NAME (STATE)
C PERCENT RECEIVING GRANTS BASED ON NEED
D AVERAGE COST AFTER RECEIVING GRANTS BASED ON NEED
E AVERAGE DISCOUNT FROM TOTAL COST (PERCENTAGE)
A B C D E
NATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
1. Univ. of Missouri-Columbia 31 $ 7,227 59
2. California Institute of Technology 57 $ 16,615 44
3. Harvard University (MA) 48 $ 15,747 53
4. Stanford University (CA) 40 $ 14,944 54
5. Rice University (TX) 34 $ 13,021 43
6. U. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 32 $ 11,401 38
7. Columbia University (NY) 39 $ 15,562 53
7. Princeton University (NJ) 40 $ 16,440 50
9. University of Texas-Austin 48 $ 11,159 35
9. University of Virginia 22 $ 12,561 43
11. Yale University (CT) 41 $ 17,000 49
12. Cornell University (NY) 45 $ 16,193 50
13. Case Western Reserve Univ. (OH) 60 $ 14,191 45
14. Brigham Young Univ.-Provo (UT) 28 $ 9,360 12
14. Texas A&M Univ.-College Station 21 $ 10,489 29
14. University of Chicago 54 $ 17,529 47
14. University of Rochester (NY) 62 $ 15,300 50
18. Johns Hopkins University (MD) 37 $ 17,255 46
19. Dartmouth College (NH) 44 $ 17,929 46
19. Washington University in St. Louis 52 $ 17,852 44
HEADLINE: After years, fusion still evades researchers
It has been the dream of nuclear physicists to harness the fusion process that powers the sun. Sustainable fusion would give a limitless supply of energy with none of the dangerous radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission or the pollutants associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
Fusion involves the joining together of two light atomic nuclei into a single heavier one and is accompanied by the release of neutrons and energy. In fusion reactors, the neutrons act as the primary source of heat by interaction with the reactor walls.
Fusion takes place on the sun under tremendous heat and pressure.
On Earth, the process has been duplicated only briefly during the detonation of a hydrogenbomb. As James Glanz reports in a recent issue of Science, attempts to produce a sustainable fusion process are making allies out of once bitter rivals.
There are two approaches to initiating, and containing, a fusion reaction. Researchers in the field of magnetic fusion
energy, or MFE, have spent the last 30 years designing machines called tokamaks. At temperatures where fusion can take place, atoms are stripped of their electrons resulting in a gas of charged atoms called a plasma. The tokamak is a device that generates a strong magnetic field to contain the plasma. It is within this "magnetic bottle" that physicists try to achieve the temperatures needed for fusion to occur.
Tokamaks are hugely expensive to construct and maintain. The major one in the United States, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton University, was shut down in 1997, never having come close to the conditions needed for a sustainable fusion reaction.
In 1998, Congress withdrew support from an international tokamak project because of the $10 billion price tag. MFE researchers now are scrambling to come up with smaller, less expensive versions of tokamak models. ...
HEADLINE: Bid to First Lady for Spy's Release Puts President in
Awkward Spot
BYLINE: By Charles Babington; Washington Post Service
DATELINE: NEW YORK
The pressure by a New York group on Hillary Rodham Clinton to lobby her husband on behalf of a convicted Israeli spy is the clearest example yet that the first lady's Senate race could create awkward moments for President Bill Clinton.
The pro-Israeli group, which held a rally Sunday in New York City, says it hopes to use Mrs. Clinton's candidacy as leverage on the president to release Jonathan Jay Pollard from prison.
Under their strategy, the first lady either urges her husband to abandon his administration's policy on Mr. Pollard or she risks alienating some Jewish activists who could be vital to her Senate bid in New York. ...
''It is a pressure point; it is a vulnerability,'' said Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. Lobbying groups have sought to influence other presidents through relatives, he said, citing Libya's courtship of President Jimmy Carter's brother Billy. ''But none of them are quite the same thing'' as wooing the first lady, he said. ...
SECTION: EDITORIAL/OPINION
HEADLINE: Without Skill and Craft, There is No Art
BYLINE: PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN
After a controversial "performance art" display by the Art Gallery of Windsor, whereby 250 jumbo boxes of cornflakes were dumped in a park as a symbolic gesture of returning to the Earth something that was taken from it, the artist himself wrote an article in the Windsor Star explaining why this was "art."
Les Levine, who got $1,500 for his efforts, caused a similar controversy in Edmonton 30 years ago, when he first did the cornflakes gig. Even in those flower-child times, few were persuaded that cornflakes on the ground was art.
Those who follow my occasional ramblings on art know that while I'm the essence of open-mindedness about practically everything, I'm cursed with too much good taste to accept a lot of avant garde stuff as real "art." ...
Writing in The American Scholar, Edward Cone, professor of music at Princeton University, deplores the denigration of standards in the arts. He's appalled that something titled Poeme Symphonique, which consists of 100 metronomes ticking away until they run down, is called modern music.
He recalls some creations that are classified as "art," including 150,000 square feet of polypropylene fabric spread over a Rhode Island beach by an artist called Christo. ...
NOTE: This story first appeared in The Toronto Sun.
HEADLINE: Poverty Debunking Myths About Welfare
BYLINE: Philip Lee
For the past seven years, hundreds of welfare recipients in New Brunswick and British Columbia, mostly single mothers, have been quietly showing us how to break out of the welfare trap.
Thanks to a groundbreaking research program, we might now have a recipe for moving people from welfare to work and reducing poverty.
The recipe is based on a simple premise - people will leave welfare if they can make more money working full time. The welfare recipients in New Brunswick and in British Columbia are participating in a large-scale social experiment called the Self-sufficiency Project, now in its seventh year. ...
Most welfare recipients who re-enter the job market must accept low wages. Therefore, they often face the untenable prospect of earning less than their welfare payments when they take a job. And so they are caught in the classic welfare trap - governments pay people not to work and they remain dependent. The brave few who choose to break out of the trap often face a financial penalty.
The self-sufficiency project asks this fundamental question: What happens if work pays more than welfare? To find out, the project supplemented the earnings of single parents on welfare. ...
Here's what we know so far about what happened.
About one in three (35 per cent) of the participants in the supplement group left welfare to take a full-time job in the first year. By the fifth quarter, 29 per cent of the project members were working full time compared to 14 per cent in the control group. ...
The research continues as the project tracks what happens to the families at the end of the three-year supplement period. The self-sufficiency project has attracted the attention of social policy groups in Canada and the United States. The data has been analyzed by researchers Princeton University, the University of Miami and the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a highly regarded research group based in New York City and San Francisco. ...
HEADLINE: Freshman Look Fab
BYLINE: LANCE HORNBY, TORONTO SUN
DATELINE: KITCHENER
If Nikolai Antropov needed a lesson on how to impress the Maple Leafs coaches, he got one last night from some of his fellow rookies.
Eventually, Toronto's hulking first-round pick from 1998 got the message as he joined Adam Mair, Syl Apps III, Frantisek Mrazek and Jonathan Gagnon with strong two-way games in a 5-3 win over the Carolina Hurricanes to open the Leafs' rookie tournament at Memorial Auditorium. ...
Apps, the grandson of the late Leafs Hall of Famer Syl Apps, had his father -- a former NHLer -- his mother and two sisters among the crowd of 3,300 last night.
"This is so much different than college hockey," the former Princeton University co-captain said. "But we're all doing what we have to do to get to the (main) camp." ...
HEADLINE: Tragic Accident Claims the Life of U.S. Space Pioneer
The American space industry suffered a tragic loss on Thursday, 8 July 1999. Former astronaut Charles P. "Pete" Conrad, the third man to walk on the moon, died from internal injuries sustained after his 1996 Harley Davidson motorcycle skidded out of control in Ojai, California. He was 69 years old.
Conrad made history on 19 November 1969 when, as commander of the Apollo 12 mission, he and fellow astronaut Alan Bean set the lunar module Intrepid down on the moon's Ocean of Storms. When Conrad set foot on the moon's surface, he exclaimed, "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me," referring to Neil Armstrong's historic "one small step" statement four months earlier.
Following his graduation from Princeton University in 1958, Conrad entered the U.S. Navy and attended test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland. ...
HEADLINE: AIAA Award Recipients
The following awards were presented at the 34th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, 1-5 August 1999 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. ...
Chung K. Law, Robert H. Goddard professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, received the 1999 AIAA Energy Systems Award, "For outstanding contributions to the science and technology of combustion in chemical energy systems." The award is presented for significant contributions in the broad field of energy systems, specifically as related to the application of engineering sciences and systems engineering to the production, storage, distribution and conservation of energy.
HEADLINE: Lab: Largest laser delayed by design problems
DATELINE: LIVERMORE, Calif.
Two design problems have left the project to build the world's largest laser with cost overruns and delays, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory officials say.
A Department of Energy oversight team and outside reviewers met with officials from the National Ignition Facility on Tuesday to discuss problems that could push the laser project significantly over its $1.2 billion budget and delay its planned 2003 start date, said George Miller, newly appointed head of the lab's laser program.
Over the last month, the lab's external reviewers had "developed concerns about the schedule and cost of the project," Miller said.
Those concerns include fears that the current construction process allows too many small dust particles into the clean environment essential around the laser beams. These particles can get stuck to the large glass optics and require more frequent maintenance, said Bill Hogan, lead lab scientist for the project. ...
Last week, the laser program's well-respected manager, Michael Campbell, stepped down after acknowledging that he had never finished his dissertation to complete his doctorate requirements at Princeton University.
Both lab officials and Campbell said his resignation had nothing to do with NIF. ...
HEADLINE: After Belgrade bombings, basketball diplomacy
BYLINE: By John Donnelly, Globe Staff
BELGRADE - They were here to play basketball for an Italian team, here to compete in a preseason tournament, three games packed into four days.
But there was a little twist of fate: Sydney Johnson and Lee Nailon are Americans - among the first Americans other than journalists to come to Belgrade since the end of the Kosovo war.
Whose idea was this, anyway? Americans shooting hoops in Belgrade, two months after US pilots were dropping bombs on the city? Doesn't more time need to pass between bombs and basketball games?
The players were wondering just that.
"I must admit I was really nervous about coming," said Johnson, 25, a Princeton University graduate, a few hours after his arrival last week. He was sitting in the opulent Hyatt Regency hotel lobby that swarmed with other basketball players on his team, Milano Olympia. "I called my girlfriend, called my brother. He told me to be careful."
Johnson, who graduated with a degree in history, looked around the lobby, anchored on one end by a statue of the Greek god Zeus lifting a brass clock above his head. "It is kind of weird to be here," he said. ...
HEADLINE: Counting on Heidi; A Piece of the Net; Kings of
Queens
BYLINE: Stephen Frazier, Sharon Collins, Patricia Sabga, Andy
Serwer, Miles O'Brien, Bruce Burkhardt
STEPHEN FRAZIER, HOST: Welcome to CNN & FORTUNE. I'm at Joe Muggs Newsstand in Atlanta.
Tonight, we begin on the other side of the glass ceiling, in the reaches of corporate management few women have attained so far. Heidi Miller has. She's chief financial officer for Citigroup, the behemoth born of Citicorp's 1998 merger with Travelers. It's number seven on the Fortune 500 list with a million customers in more than 100 countries.
In the first quarter of this year, Citicorp earned more money than any company in the world. Is that because Heidi Miller thinks only of the bottom line all the time? Not at all. Wait until you see where Sharon Collins found her. ...
COLLINS: That's why "Fortune" magazine calls her the third most powerful woman in American business, just behind Oprah Winfrey.
MILLER: I don't go around thinking I'm the third most -- first of all, if they made a list of the most powerful businesspeople in America, I would not be on the list. So it's by virtue of fact that there are so few women, perhaps, that I could reside right after Oprah on a list.
COLLINS: But Miller's modesty understates her success. Just a small percentage of women hold similar positions in Fortune 500 companies, and few of them oversee the bottom line for such a large corporation.
MILLER: I think you should feel very proud indeed, despite the difficulties of merging Solomon Smith Barney, and Solomon Smith Barney and Citigroup, that what we are building is a unique franchise. COLLINS: Miller has been CFO since 1998, when the company was formed with the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group. Her responsibilities range from guarding Citigroup's financial stability...
COLLINS: It was only after volunteering with her and her sons that we were able to get a second interview. If there's one thing Heidi Miller doesn't like to do, it's talk about herself.
BRIAN MILLER, HUSBAND OF HEIDI MILLER: Hard to get her to brag. The attention she's gotten, the awards she's received, she uses those as a platform to talk about issues that she thinks are important, not for self-aggrandizement.
COLLINS: When he first met his wife, Brian Miller was impressed with the fact that she had a degree from Princeton University. Miller was among the first women to attend the school. She credits it with giving her confidence.
MILLER: It taught me how to think; it taught me flexibility, how to adjust to different environments of people. It gave me a great deal of confidence. There's nothing like being able to say to people, you have a Princeton degree.
COLLINS: That confidence his served her well. From a job at Chemical Bank 18 years ago, Miller has risen to become one of the top women in finance, with a reputation for being disarmingly direct. ...
HEADLINE: Dicing With the Daytraders
BYLINE: Andrew Marshall
THERE IS an old joke economists tell to mock one of the central ideas of their profession about financial markets, and as economists' jokes go it isn't bad. A professor of economics and one his students are walking down the street when they see a pounds 10 note on the pavement. The student starts to pick it up but his tutor reproaches him. "If it were really a pounds 10 bill," he says, "someone would have picked it up already."
In the same way, economists have long said there is no such thing as a free lunch, or a free pounds 10, in the stock market. Financial markets are deemed "perfect" markets, where information is readily available to everybody and is immediately priced into a stock.
From this, they deduce that prices move on the basis of irrational factors, and they move erratically in what economists call a "Random Walk". Any systematic movement would be picked up by everybody else, and they would eliminate it. Prices are not predictable with the degree of accuracy to enable anyone to make more money than the market over the long term.
The American economists Andrew Lo and Craig MacKinlay think that is wrong, and that they can prove it. Their book - A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (Princeton University Press) - is for economics specialists, but it has some interesting things to say about financial markets, and important messages for investors. Some of them, ironically, reinforce the basic message of the Random Walk theory: confronted with new methods of predicting the market's movements, caveat emptor.
The Random Walk theory has been a shibboleth of the economics profession for decades, reinforced by hundreds of statistical studies which seem to show it is correct, but like every shibboleth, it has its detractors and critics. ...
The best-known book based on the idea, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street, has a basic message that the best way to invest is to plonk your capital in a stock index fund and let it stay there. You can't buck, or beat the market.
Messrs Lo and MacKinlay started out by testing the theory, as many have done, by examining stock market data from America for the period 1962 to 1985. What they found surprised them. Most of the publicly credited studies said this data proved market prices moved in a random way, but they found discernible patterns. In particular, it was more risky to hold a stock for a year than for a month, more than 12 times as risky. If the Random Walk theory held, the risk should simply have been the accumulation of the risk for each of the 12 months.
Their study - now widely accepted, but then very controversial - implied there werepatterns in the market's movement. "We ran into stout opposition," says Mr Lo. "But over the past few years, people have confirmed our findings." The book is only for those who are at home with the Heteroskedastic Null Hypothesis and Power Against Fractionally-Differenced Alternatives, but that is not to say it doesn't have important real-world implications. ...
HEADLINE: Cracks Appear in Britain's Cherished Ivory Towers
BYLINE: By Tom Buerkle; International Herald Tribune
DATELINE: OXFORD, England
Alan Ryan does not look the revolutionary type.
With his trim beard, graying hair and refined manner, he appears every bit the Oxford don. The philosophy professor has written books on John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, defended the value of a liberal arts education and even supported the British government on genetically modified foods by proclaiming them moral. But Mr. Ryan's latest work is stirring the establishment, revealing turmoil beneath the surface splendor and tranquility of this 800-year-old university.
In a magazine article last month, Mr. Ryan contended that two decades of government funding cutbacks and a raft of regulations had left Britain's universities in a mess. The only way to remain competitive with the likes of Harvard, Yale and Stanford, he said, is to copy the U.S. academic model. ...
That would free Oxford, Cambridge and other institutions to set their own tuition fees, salaries and academic priorities, and steer government funds to students in the form of scholarships and loans. ...
To add insult to injury, British academics have watched with envy as the bull market on Wall Street has swelled the endowments of Ivy League schools and other top U.S. institutions. Harvard University's endowment now stands at $13 billion and produces enough income to finance 26 percent of the university budget, up from 17 percent a few years ago. Princeton University, with more than $5 billion in the bank, has a budget of $600 million. That is nearly the equal of Oxford's, but Princeton educates only half as many students.
Oxford and Cambridge, the only British universities that even approach wealth levels found at U.S. institutions, have endowments of about l1.6 billion and l3.5 billion, respectively. ...
HEADLINE: Follies of the century: In Canadian business, every
national dream of the past 100 years has had an equivalent
nightmare, and every thrill of victory has been matched by the
agony of a foul-up or a fraud
BYLINE: David Olive
In business, as in sports, hindsight is not always 20-20. Today's corporate chieftains are often judged inferior to the giants of the past, a point that may seem obvious if you compare, say, the destructive tendencies of the current generation of Eaton boys with the creative genius of their great-grandfather, Timothy.
But examples don't necessarily prove any rules. It's fairer to say that, over the past century of Canadian business, the number of great successes have at least been matched by the failures. And that for every grand builder, there's been a charlatan, an eccentric visionary or a misguided apostle of hyperkinetic growth. And if the 12 cautionary tales that follow bear any witness, the underachievers and overreachers have as much to teach us as the titans. ...
LINE OF CREDULITY
1965: Atlantic Acceptance Corp., a promising new consumer finance company in Toronto, has the imprimatur of New York financier Jean Lambert, husband of Seagram scion Phyllis Bronfman. On the strength of his reputation for acumen, Atlantic is eagerly bankrolled by such prestigious investors as the Ford Foundation, Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. and Princeton University.
With a minimum of supervision from his New York grubstakers, Atlantic's president, C. Powell Morgan, lends indiscriminately to a proliferating network of subsidiaries. When those loans sour, Atlantic engages in the tactic, still common today, of artfully disguising the losses on its books. Then it writes still more high-risk loans to paper over the bad ones.
In 1965, Atlantic's implosion leads to the creation of Ottawa's Canada Deposit Insurance Corp., which will soon be busy bailing out depositors in other failed financial institutions. For now, though, gilt-edged American investors count their US$50 million to US$70 million in Atlantic losses. ...
HEADLINE: West Side native excited about new role as judge
BYLINE: Melissa S. Monroe; Express-News Staff Writer
"Wow" is the only thing Jo-Ann Sylvia De Hoyos remembers saying when she learned she'd been appointed to the new position of judge in County Court-at-Law No. 11.
Born and raised on the West Side, De Hoyos, 38, will be sworn in today.
In the meantime, she is closing the general law practice she has operated for more than 12 years.
But De Hoyos said she doesn't regret closing her downtown practice because she has important work to do in her new position.
"It's a gift, and I plan to treat it that way," De Hoyos said. "It's an extreme responsibility to make decisions with people's lives, and I hope I can remember every single day that I can either hurt or help someone. I never want to forget that." ...
De Hoyos, a graduate of Burbank High School, Princeton University and New York University Law School, is no stranger to a judge's robe.
For the past 10 years, she has served as an associate master for 289th District Court Judge Carmen Kelsey. ...
HEADLINE: Laser expert resigns over Ph.D. flap
BYLINE: Associated Press
LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) - The director of a program intended to build the world's most powerful lasers has resigned amid questions about his education.
E. Michael Campbell, associate director for lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., left his job Friday after a series of anonymous faxes to his bosses revealed he does not have a Ph.D.
However, he said he was leaving the position for personal reasons.
"I have a young family, and I need to spend some time with them," he told the Contra Costa Times. "My wife has said the lab has sucked the life out of me." ...
Lab spokesman Jeff Richardson said Campbell had allowed lab officials to believe he had a doctorate from Princeton University.
"Mike had completed his Ph.D. course work when he joined Livermore in 1977, but he never finished his dissertation," Richardson said. ...
NOTE: This item also appeared in The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) and in other newspapers.
HEADLINE: Matriculation rate at Yale highest in five years
BYLINE: By Jeff Herzog, Yale Daily News
SOURCE: Yale U.
DATELINE: New Haven, Conn.
The admissions office continues to rack up the class of 2003's recruitment scorecard as statistics released last week reveal that Yale's matriculation rate has increased for the fifth straight year in a row.
Of the 2,134 students admitted to the Class of 2003, 65.2 percent accepted Yale's offer of admission. This figure is up from a 55.2 matriculation rate for the class of 1999.
Other schools in the Ivy League are reporting a similar trend, as high numbers of applications, record-low acceptance rates and increasing numbers of early acceptances have made spots at Ivy League schools increasingly coveted. ...
Along with this trend, Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth reported record-low acceptance rates of 15.9, 11.3, 10.8 and 20.6 percent, respectively. ...
HEADLINE: Accel VII Garners $480M Quickly
BYLINE: Shawn Neidorf
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Accel Partners in early August closed Accel VII on $480 million, with commitments from several new endowments and all of the firm's previous backers, said Managing Partner Jim Breyer.
The fund was launched in June, seeking $350 million from financial investors and $150 million from entrepreneurs and strategic corporate backers (VCJ, August, page 21). The communications and Internet/Intranet-focused vehicle features 70%/30% carried interest split.
Breyer could not be reached about limited partners, but previous Accel funds have been backed by the Princeton University endowment, known as Nassau Capital, Hewlett Packard pension, Horsley Bridge Partners, HarbourVest Partners, J.P. Morgan, General Motors' pension, the State of Delaware, Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center and the Kresge Foundation.
HEADLINE: U.S. Laser Program Faces Cost Overruns; Director
Quits to Tend 'Personal Issues'
BYLINE: Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Department of Energy's $1.2 billion program to build the world's most powerful laser is facing cost overruns and delays as well as an embarrassing revelation about the academic credentials of its former director, officials at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said yesterday.
The acting director of the laser program, George Miller, said he could not speculate on the size of the cost overruns or delays for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a 192-beam laser designed to help study the thermonuclear properties of nuclear weapons without actually testing them.
"A very thorough management and technical review [of the laser program] with Department of Energy personnel is underway as we speak," Miller said in a telephone interview from the California facility.
The department's review follows the sudden resignation Friday of the program's former director, Edward Michael Campbell III, after faxes and e-mail messages were sent to congressional offices and the Department of Energy's headquarters alleging that he was using the title of "doctor" even though he does not have a PhD.
A Livermore employee for more than 20 years, Campbell came to the lab in 1977 from Princeton University, where he completed the course work and passed the qualifying exams for a PhD in electrical engineering but did not finish his dissertation. According to one source, he was given until 1984 to finish, but decided that his work at Livermore was too important to be interrupted.
Campbell rose quickly within the Livermore ranks and is a recognized expert in his field. ...
HEADLINE: Losing Sleep Over Y2K?; A surprising number of
investors are considering shifting assets.
BYLINE: Jean Sherman Chatzky
Here's one from my e-mailbox: "I want advice regarding the Y2K problem and the stock market. I have worked at the same place for 25 years and have invested in TIAA/CREF since I started working. The majority of my retirement monies are in the stock market. The TIAA/CREF representative has recommended that I move [that money]...into a money-market or real estate fund until we see how the stock market survives the turn of the century and Y2K." I picked up the phone and dialed the author, Eleanor Bisanzio, an X-ray technologist at Princeton University. She said she wasn't overly concerned about Y2K before she sat down with her plan representative. But over the course of their conversation, that changed. "When someone says to me, 'You might want to think about problems with this,' I start to think, 'Why shouldn't I be worried?'"
Bisanzio's TIAA/CREF representative, Karen Cummings, says Bisanzio misunderstood. "I tell people that we don't know what type of effect [Y2K] is going to have," she says. "If people have a lot of money in the market and they're close to retirement, they may want to start rebalancing--whether it's the year 1990, 2000 or 2010." …
HEADLINE: Watchdog unit demands investigation of lab
BYLINE: Lawrence Spohn
A nuclear-weapons watchdog group has called for congressional hearings and a budget investigation into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $1.2 billion military fusion laser.
Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against Radioactive Environments), based in Livermore, Calif., claimed Livermore's National Ignition Facility laser is "$300 million over budget and a year behind schedule."
The costly program has created concerns among staff at the other DOE labs Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico that the NIF has cornered too much of the DOE's budget, squeezing the funding potential for other programs.
The controversial laser, which survived grassroots scientific and legal challenges in 1997, is designed to simulate a nuclear weapons blast in the laboratory and ignite a tiny hydrogen fuel pellet to produce fusion energy the same process that produces energy in the sun and other stars.
Some experts have predicted the laser will fail to reach its goals, while others claim it has little relevance to nation's nuclear weapon Stockpile Stewardship and Maintenance Program, of which it is considered the heart.
Officials at Livermore insisted late Monday that the laser is on schedule, but confirmed that a newly appointed laser program manager is assessing the project and that the Department of Energy is beginning a formal NIF review at Livermore today. ...
Livermore on Monday confirmed that Campbell, a prominent and distinguished military-fusion program scientist, had resigned after lab officials were informed anonymously that he does not hold a doctorate from Princeton University .
After conferring with Princeton, Livermore officials said Campbell, indeed, had not completed his degree program and never was awarded a Ph.D.
Campbell was replaced Friday by Associate Lab Director for Security George Miller who, according to a Livermore spokesman, is trying to assess the project. ...
HEADLINE: Fed determined not to crash the party
BYLINE: The Wall Street Journal
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. -- The Federal Reserve's role in managing the economy, a former chairman once famously quipped, is to 'take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.' But what is the Fed supposed to do about the raucous stock market as it becomes an ever-bigger part of the economy?
The current Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, his colleagues at the Fed and other monetary-policy experts from around the world gathered at a mountain resort last week to answer that touchy question.
The emerging consensus: Leave the punch bowl alone. We may feel there's too much drinking, but who are we to judge? Besides, if we tried, the odds are we would either fail -- which would only embolden the partygoers further -- or we would have to destroy the dance hall to succeed. ...
William Poole, president of the Fed's St. Louis bank, argues that there's an inherent contradiction in the logic of bubblecrushing: If you believe the market is acting irrationally on the way up, you have no way of predicting or controlling how it reacts on the way down. 'We're treading on very, very dangerous ground, and I want to stay away from it,' he says.
The best the Fed thinks it can do with a bubble is to keep its eye on its primary mission: containing inflation in prices for goods and services, not assets. That's the conclusion of a paper presented by two economists, Ben Bernanke of Princeton University and Mark Gertler of New York University and privately embraced by many attending Fed officials. ...
NOTE: This story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal. A version appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
NAME: E. Michael Campbell
HEADLINE: Top U.S. Laser Expert Admits Lack of a Ph.D. and
Resigns
The director of an installation intended to house the world's most powerful lasers resigned his post on Friday after a flurry of anonymous faxes to officials at his California laboratory and at the Department of Energy in Washington disclosed that he lacked a Ph.D. degree.
The official, E. Michael Campbell, associate director for lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., left his position but remains an employee of the laboratory on leave, a laboratory spokesman said. Mr. Campbell is recognized as one of the world's leading experts in ultra-high-energy lasers.
Livermore's director, Dr. Bruce Tarter, said Mr. Campbell's resignation had been for strictly personal reasons.
The Livermore laboratory, operated by the Department of Energy, conducts research in nuclear weapons and nonmilitary projects, including the development of nuclear fusion as a source of power.
Mr. Campbell held a pivotal position at Livermore as director of a $1.2 billion program to build the National Ignition Facility, which will conduct research in weapons and fusion and play an important role in assuring that America's aging nuclear arsenal is ready for a war. ...
Jeff Richardson, a laboratory spokesman, said yesterday that Mr. Campbell had falsely allowed the laboratory to believe he had a doctorate from Princeton University, but that Mr. Campbell's reasons for resigning had nothing to do with the installation.
"In fact," Mr. Richardson said, "Mike had completed his Ph.D. course work when he joined Livermore in 1977, but he never finished his dissertation." ...
BYLINE: COMPILED FROM WIRE REPORTS.
HEADLINE: BIRTH CONTROL INFO (AT-RISK)
Despite the efforts of parts of the medical community, as well as million-dollar ad campaigns by pharmaceutical companies, relatively few women have heard of emergency contraceptives. Some health educators refer to the treatment option as "America's best-kept secret."
To get the name and phone number of emergency contraception providers nearest you, call the national Emergency Contraceptive Hot Line toll free at (888) NOT-2-LATE.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America now allows first-time patients to receive a prescription for emergency contraception pills over the telephone. Many Planned Parenthood sites also have special "EC-to-Go" emergency contraceptive kits that women can take home in case of future need. To contact the Planned Parenthood nearest you, call (800) 230-7526. Or check out the group's Web page on emergency contraception, www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTH-CONTROL/ec.htm.
Information on the Preven Emergency Contraceptive Kit is available by calling the company's toll-free line, (888) 773-8362. Details on Plan B can be found online at www.go2planB.com/
Additional information on "morning after pills" can be found on the Emergency Contraception Web site operated by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, http://opr.Princeton.edu/ec/ec.html
HEADLINE: Singaporean student tops at Princeton
FORMER Hwa Chong Junior College and Raffles Institution student Chong Chan Vee has become the first Singaporean to emerge a valedictorian at Princeton University.
A valedictorian is usually the top graduating student who is asked to make a farewell speech at the school's graduation ceremony.
Princeton is one of the top universities in the US.
Mr Chong, who studied electrical engineering, graduated in June with an average score of 4.247 points. The highest grade average, or an A+, is 4.3 points.
The university's Dean of the College, Ms Nancy Weiss Malkiel, said that his score is considered to be "unsurpassed in at least the last 25 years".
He is an Economic Development Board scholar who will be bonded for six years. The youngest of three children -his father is an auditor and his mother a teacher -he is now doing a Master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Straits Times spoke to him when he was here recently on a vacation attachment at EDB Investments. The outspoken young man said he found Princeton tough-going initially. ...
NAME: LANE KIRKLAND
HEADLINE: Lane Kirkland: A Look Into a Global Future
BYLINE: E.J. Dionne Jr.
When Lane Kirkland died Aug. 14, a lot was said about the former AFL-CIO leader's work on behalf of Eastern European dissidents who brought down communism. Not enough attention was paid to how his work against totalitarianism abroad was intimately linked to his work on behalf of social justice in the United States.
Kirkland was a genuine hero in Poland and may have been better known in that country than in his own. In the early 1980s, when the Solidarity trade union movement launched its challenge to the country's dictatorship, the idea that organized workers could bring down Soviet power was regarded as absurd.
But Kirkland saw the opening for freedom and funneled substantial aid to the rebels of Solidarity. He and like-minded Americans made the case that democratic movements seeking to make changes from the bottom in Eastern Europe would prove to be as important to the spread of freedom as arms and diplomacy. If the workers were leading the fight against rulers who claimed to be running a "workers' state," the Communist ruling class was bound to be discredited. It was.
"In the late 1970s, there was hardly anybody standing up for dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain," says Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University historian. "Lane Kirkland stood fast in giving material aid and comfort to working people abroad in their heroic fight against communism."
The great and sad irony of Kirkland's life, as Wilentz noted, is that "he may have won his greatest victories in Warsaw and in Prague at a time when his own labor movement had entered into a long period of decline." ...
NOTE: This column also appeared in Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), The Denver Post and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
HEADLINE: Bemidji State continues transition to Division I
hockey
DATELINE: BEMIDJI, Minn.
Bemidji State's move toward an NCAA Division I hockey team has already been enhanced by scheduling several marquee opponents for the 1999-2000 season.
And the school would like to add another big name to the list.
Bemidji State and the University of Minnesota are soon expected to finalize a deal in which the Beavers would open their 2000-01 campaign Oct. 13-14 in Minneapolis against the Golden Gophers.
The problem for Minnesota, though, is that trying to squeeze Bemidji in could mean cutting out a game or two against somebody else.
"We're trying to work something out right now," said the Gophers' first-year coach Don Lucia. "There's nothing signed. I have to talk to (men's athletic director) Mark Dienhart about (it)."
The Beavers' transition to Division I will be helped by nine games slated in 1999-2000 against Western Collegiate Hockey Association opponents - North Dakota, Minnesota State-Mankato, St. Cloud State, Minnesota-Duluth and Denver - and another four against Princeton and Ferris State. ...
HEADLINE: Queen state of the state Jennifer Caudle -- cellist,
Princeton grad, future med student -- has a real shot at
Miss America.
BYLINE: Stephania H. Davis
SOURCE: Register Staff Writer
Like any good driver, Jennifer Caudle takes honking horns seriously.
"I'm always wondering, was that a warning that something is wrong with my van? Did I make an illegal turn, cut somebody off?" asked Caudle, 21.
Usually, she's done nothing wrong. It's the "Miss Iowa" splashed across the van's side panels that gets most people's attention. They beep because they want a wave from the queen of the state.
"Old people, young kids, guys in trucks. It amazes me how many people just want me to wave at them. It's really nice," she said.
Caudle takes each honk as a wish of good luck for her appearance in the upcoming Miss America Pageant. The Davenport native will represent the state in the Sept. 18 event and compete against women from all 50 states. Although Iowa has had a couple of entrants make it to first runner-up, there has never been a Miss America from Iowa. Talk about pressure.
"I'd be a darn good Miss America, I know that," she said. "I'll just go and do my best." ...
Playing the cello is an important part of her life. While attending Princeton University in New Jersey, Caudle majored in anthropology and minored in musical performance, taking the train into New York for weekly lessons. After she completes her Miss Iowa duties, she plans to go to medical school to study dermatology.
"But I'll always play in a community orchestra or group wherever I am," she said. ...
Caudle said she wants to be a reflection of the success young people, especially young blacks, can achieve with hard work and education. Caudle is the first black to become Miss Iowa since 1970.
HEADLINE: Top People of the Past 125 Years
Looking back over the magazine's history, ENR editors identified these 125 people for their outstanding contributions to the construction industry since 1874.
Their efforts, singularly and collectively, helped shape this nation and the world. Each pioneered in often uncharted territory, developing new analytical tools, equipment, engineering or architectural designs. Through their companies, they also invented new means and methods for constructing the built environment. ...
DAVID P. BILLINGTON (1927- )
Pioneering the modern-day study of ''structural art,'' Billington persuades readers and students to examine how simplicity and economy in great structures make for art. In books he authored, such as The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering, and The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern, Princeton University engineering professor Billington bridges the chasm between liberal arts and engineering. He was nationally recognized in 1990 for integrating the study of the two disciplines.
HEADLINE: Security bug hits Microsoft Java virtual machine
BYLINE: By Matthew Nelson, InfoWorld Electric
A bug in Microsoft's Java virtual machine (JVM), a part of Internet Explorer 4.0 and 5.0, could give hackers complete control of users' Windows systems, a group of security experts said Monday.
The Princeton Secure Internet Programming team, in collaboration with Drew Dean at Xerox PARC and Dan Wallach at Rice University, discovered a security flaw in the versions of Microsoft's JVM that allows the creation of an attack applet that is attached to a HTML page.
"The bug is in Microsoft's Java virtual machine, so any software that could take Java code off the Net and feed it to that virtual machine would be vulnerable," said Ed Felten, associate professor of computer science at Princeton University.
Through the bug, a mobile code attack could be delivered over the Web via Internet Explorer or by e-mail via Outlook or other mail programs that use Microsoft's Java virtual machine. When the attack applet is executed, it can read, modify, or destroy any data on the computer, insert a virus, insert software to spy on the user's future online activities, or take any other malicious action.
The attack does not require the user to do anything beyond viewing the Web page or e-mail message, according to the Princeton Group. ...
HEADLINE: Editorials
The Boy Scouts Case
The New Jersey Supreme Court has unanimously barred the Boy Scouts of America from discriminating against a gay assistant scoutmaster. Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, 1999 WL 565900 (N.J.). Chief Justice Poritz opinion holds that the Law Against Discrimination, N.J.S.A. 10:5-1 to -49, is applicable to the Boy Scouts, and does not violate the First Amendment, in the context of the Boy Scouts substantial solicitation of public participation.
Despite front-page coverage, Dale breaks no new ground. ...
In Frank v. Ivy Club, 120 N.J. 73 (1990), Justice Garibaldi wrote for a unanimous Court that a private, selective, non-public-soliciting, all-male eating club, near but not on the Princeton University campus, was required to admit women. Ivy Club was a place of public accommodation because Princeton University is and because some club-selected Princeton students eat and socialize at Ivy. ...
HEADLINE: Princeton Head Leads Bioethics Debate
CHAIRSPRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION
BYLINE: LAURENCE ARNOLD, The Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
When Scottish researchers announced in 1997 that they had successfully cloned Dolly the sheep, a mammal was not the only thing that multiplied. So did the workload of Princeton University President Harold T. Shapiro.
As chairman of a federal advisory commission on biological ethics, Shapiro was thrust into a suddenly pressing public debate about the power of science to change, improve, or undermine human existence.
Taking on tough assignments from the White House, Shapiro has led the commission into a number of intensely controversial areas.
It has issued reports on cloning, the use of human tissue samples, and research involving people with mental disorders. It soon will release a report on research on human embryos, a flash point in the national debate over abortion.
Shapiro said every scientific advancement carries moral and ethical dilemmas.
"How you use your knowledge always has ethical issues with it," he said."Here we have these wonderful scientific advances and the question is, given the society we want to have, how should we deploy this new knowledge, and should we for any reason want to restrict the way we use it?
"What I've been struck by, more than anything else,"he added,"is there's an insufficient number of serious conversations between scientists and everyone else." ...
HEADLINE: Magazine ranks Wash. U.-St. Louis 17th
BYLINE: By Martina Baillie, The Student Life
SOURCE: Washington U.-St. Louis
DATELINE: ST. Louis, Mo.
In its 1999 edition of "America's Best Colleges," U.S. News and World Report ranks Washington University number 17 out of 299 universities. Last year, WU tied with Emory at number 16. ...
Changes in the methodology for calculating results yielded more dramatic results among the top 10 ranked schools. For the first time, U.S. News employed a procedure called "standardization." Instead of accounting only for the differences between universities, the rankings now account for the sizes of those differences. Schools that scored highly in several categories, therefore, gained a more significant advantage over their competitors this year.
The effects of this change, according to U.S. News, were to boost several science and engineering-strong colleges up in the rankings. California Technology Institute stole first place, which was shared the previous year by Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Harvard placed second, MIT third, and tied at four were Princeton and Yale. ...
The results have had caused some ire in the university community. Justin Harmon of Princeton University told CNN television news, "There will always be some number of people who believe the ranking is legitimate, but it is not." ...
BYLINE: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, BILL KRISTOL, COKIE ROBERT, GEORGE WILL
HIGHLIGHT: New Hampshire Focus Group
COKIE ROBERTS: You've probably heard a good deal about focus groups -- those are gatherings of voters used by political campaigns to help candidates shape their messages. Well this week, we decided to show you a focus group in action. We commissioned pollster Frank Luntz to put together a Republican group in New Hampshire and George Stephanopoulos went along to watch.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC News Analyst: (voice-over) With the New Hampshire primary only five months away, we came here this week to listen and learn.
FRANK LUNTZ: You understand how people feel. You understand what motivates them. ...
GEORGE WILL: Well, I know they prettify by it by saying all they're doing is testing and honing and fine-tuning the nuances of the message -- and not get into substance 'cause their convictions, we know how deep they are.
But can you imagine Abraham Lincoln convening on focus groups saying -- having Fred (sic) Luntz of his day saying, "Well, what do you folks think about popular sovereignty in the territories over slavery an issue. We resupply Ft. Sumpter." It's a little odd. Imagine a starchy person like Thomas Woodrow Wilson submitting any of his ideas to a group like that. That's not leadership.
COKIE ROBERTS: Well, he probably didn't want to submit it to the voters either.
GEORGE WILL: Of course, not.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But they would probably talk with more voters in more real settings. And I have to say, George, it did...
COKIE ROBERTS: I'm not sure. I'm not sure that Woodrow Wilson...
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Abe Lincoln?
COKIE ROBERTS:...talk to more voters in more real -- Princeton University.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Maybe not. OK, Woodrow Wilson, I'll accept that. ...
HEADLINE: Fateful justice
BYLINE: By Mitchell Zuckoff, Globe Staff
SHERIDAN, Ore. - Jeffrey MacDonald can barely contain himself. Moments after he enters a cinder block visiting room at the federal prison here, the former Green Beret doctor and convicted triple murderer begins dissecting the long-suppressed evidence he says proves his innocence.
There is the mystery hair clenched in his slaughtered wife's hand, the fingernail scrapings from his slain daughters, the black wool on the club used in the murders, the blond wig hairs, the wax drippings, the confessions of others, and on and on - a torrent of details bouncing off the oddly cheery yellow walls.
"By keeping the pressure on, and constantly fighting and never saying die, the truth will come out," MacDonald boomed. A prison official and a guard seated nearby don't even look up; they've heard it before.
But 29 years after the notorious murders, new hope has emerged for MacDonald. His Boston-based defense team has persuaded a court to order DNA tests on 15 key exhibits, primarily hair samples, that were taken from the crime scene. Most were discovered, long after his conviction, by MacDonald's defenders poring over prosecutors' records. The DNA tests are expected to begin within two weeks, and results are expected by October.
Whatever the outcome, MacDonald knows he is challenging more than his 1979 guilty verdicts in the murders of his pregnant wife and their two daughters. He also is fighting the devastating public image created by "Fatal Vision," the 1983 bestseller that portrayed him as a narcissistic hedonist driven mad by domestic drudgery and diet pills. A television miniseries also made indelible the impression of a psychotic doctor stabbing and clubbing his family, then blaming it on drug-crazed hippies. ...
"At some point somebody is going to have to face the reality, which is that Jeffrey MacDonald is a crime victim, not a crime perpetrator," said Boston lawyer Andrew Good, who has defended MacDonald without pay for the past decade along with his partner Harvey Silverglate, an acquaintance of MacDonald's from Princeton University, and their associate, Phil Cormier. The team also includes Barry Scheck, an expert on DNA evidence who helped defend O.J. Simpson. ...
HEADLINE: Cotter, Neil Strike Gold at World Championships
BYLINE: PAUL STEPHENS; Special to The News
DATELINE: PORT DALHOUSIE, ONT.
The quests of two Buffalo natives with Olympic aspirations gained momentum Saturday as each captured a gold medal at the FISA World Rowing Championships.
On board the winning light men's eight Saturday was St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute graduate Kevin Cotter, 25, who honed his skills at the West Side Rowing Club and is freshman rowing coach at Princeton University.
Another Buffalo native with close ties to the West Side Rowing Club earned a gold medal in a race won by the closest of margins. Jim Neil, 31, a Canisius High graduate who coaches a local community rowing club in Princeton, N.J., won the men's pair with coxswain, edging the German crew by less than three-tenths of a second in the 2,000-meter race.
Despite their success on Saturday, Cotter and Neil will still have to qualify for the United States Olympic team that will compete in Australia next year. ...
HEADLINE: Through thick and thin; Americans lose sense of
proportion in struggling with their weight
SOURCE: Discoveries Editor of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Karen Patterson
Try the word fat on for size.
If it fits, it comes with heavy social baggage. Studies suggest:
* Fat men have fewer romantic prospects.
* Fat women and girls have still fewer; to prospective boyfriends, eating disorders like bulimia tend to be viewed more favorably than obesity.
* Fat young women tend to have lower incomes, and complete fewer years of schooling, than peers with physical deformities or other chronic conditions, such as asthma.
If that weren't enough, fat people are common targets for jest and scorn. Billboards for some San Francisco health clubs proclaimed last winter that when space aliens come, "they will eat the fat ones first."
In the United States, the "fat ones" are everywhere. About 1 in 2 Americans are overweight - and medically speaking, almost 1 in 4 are alarmingly so.
For many, many Americans, losing weight would be a healthy step. But cultural pressure to slim down can also be unhealthy: Witness the stigma that surrounds fat people, and the stress that results from failed attempts to lose weight. ...
Gluttony, of course, had long been denounced in the Christian church. But the focus was greed, not fatness, says R. Marie Griffith, of Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion.
"People might focus on the fact that Jesus fasted, that he gave loaves and fishes to the people but not hundred-course meals . . . that we never see Jesus being a glutton. But we didn't focus on the body," Dr. Griffith says. "In terms of thinness, I think that's definitely an imposition of our cultural ideals." ...
HEADLINE: ART/ARCHITECTURE;
Updating A Brasserie With Pizazz
BYLINE: By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
LAST June, American architecture took a giant step into the present with the announcement that Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, two architects who live and practice together in New York, had been awarded a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. This is the first time that the coveted award has been presented to architects.
The award was beautifully timed. With only a few conventially built projects to their credit, Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio are best known for temporary, mixed-media installations, often commissioned by museums and public art funds. In the last year, however, they have expanded their practice beyond these elite venues. Earlier this year, the pair completed a 100-unit apartment block in Gifu, Japan. They are now working on large projects in San Francisco, at Kennedy International Airport and Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.
Such projects represent a departure for these architects, at least in terms of public recognition. They are already stars in academia. Ms. Diller, 44, is an associate professor at Princeton University's graduate school of architecture. Mr. Scofidio, 63, is a professor at Cooper Union in New York. The two have published their own projects in books like "Flesh" and "Back to the Front" and been written about in highbrow journals like ANY and Assemblage. ...
Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio's updated version offers a salient set of variations on Miesian themes. This will be a snazzy place, with illuminated glass walls, plastic fixtures and a lavish use of video technology. But customers will also get a slice of history. Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio specialize in projects that heighten our awareness of our place in history. Their Brasserie throws a light on the distance from Miess's time to our own. ...
It is apt that Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio's first large-scale New York project is a restaurant interior, that icon of ephemeral design. Fitting, too, that they were recommended for the job by Phyllis Lambert, a Bronfman family member who proposed Mies for the Seagram Building commission more than 40 years ago. Both choices reflect a keen sense of the zeitgeist that have also colored the shows she organized at the Canadian Center for Architecture for Montreal.
The new Brasserie design, for which Charles Renfrew is project architect, retains a few elements from the old. As before, patrons will enter the restaurant through a revolving door. A staircase, a redesigned version of the most memorable feature in Mr. Johnson's scheme, descends from street level to the main dining room. An annex to the right of the entrance opens off the rear of the main dining room. Otherwise, the place will be unrecognizable. And it won't be open around the clock. ...
HEADLINE: JERSEY FOOTLIGHTS;
The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking
BYLINE: By DIANE NOTTLE
A lot of artisans think their work is museum-quality. John Hein of Hopewell knows his is: the Newark Museum has told him so, in the nicest possible way.
In July, the museum was given Mr. Hein's "Coopered Cabinet," completed in 1998, by Robert Alonzo Winters of Hightstown, a retired economics professor at Rutgers University who collects his work. It is now on display in the museum's House and Home Galleries.
The cabinet, 69 inches tall, is made of walnut, Honduras rosewood, pearwood, applewood and bloodwood. "It's something of an experimental piece," Mr. Hein said. Several elements presented challenges, particularly the curved door; he consulted a Princeton University physics professor about hinges that would let it swing open properly. No wonder the project -- "including all the mistakes" -- took him an estimated 500 hours over two years.
Mr. Hein, 44, who graduated from Watchung Hills Regional High School, majored in English at Temple University, but in his craft he is largely self-taught. He must be a good teacher: he is one of only three living Americans in the Design Encyclopedia's list of eminent furniture designers, which puts him in the company of figures like Thomas Chippendale, Frank Lloyd Wright and a fellow New Jerseyan, Gustav Stickley. His pieces sell for $3,000 to $20,000.
HEADLINE: Nonprofits, fund-raising groups discuss Internet's
role in soliciting donors
BYLINE: By RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS
The rise of the Internet has unleashed a torrent of information that nonprofit groups and professional fund-raisers regularly tap into to help them court donors favorable to their cause.
But it's also raised a troubling ethical question: With so much information about prospective donors available online, what information should fund-raising personnel use and which should be off-limits?
"It's incredible, the speed at which this information is flying at us. There's so many places to look that it's changed the nature of our jobs," said Jon Thorsen, the director of development research at Princeton University. "It's turning us into information analysts, rather than information gatherers."
Thorsen was one of the speakers during a two-day symposium, "The Impact of Technology on Fund Raising", held at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. About 200 fund-raising experts, nonprofit executives, scholars and technology gurus attended the symposium, hosted by the IU Center on Philanthropy.
Thorsen, who spoke at the event, said the Internet has in some cases made life tougher for fund-raisers by creating a sea of data they must wade through. ...
HEADLINE: Mystery lingers 10 years after death of pastor's
scholarly son;
BYLINE: PANKY SNOW, Tribune correspondent;
PLANT CITY - Even as the 10-year anniversary of the slaying of Dillard Sebastian approaches, mystery shrouds the case.
Who killed Dillard Sebastian?
Why would anybody want to murder Sebastian, the son of a Baptist preacher?
Even though it's been 10 years since his life was taken by at least one unknown assailant, the questions linger.
By the time police found his decomposed body Sept. 1, 1989, the former Air Force chaplain and teacher may have been dead as long as three days.
His body was found on the living room floor of his neat little house at 901 W. Baker St., just blocks west of downtown. It was around 12:30 p.m.
Troy Surrency, police chief at the time, said an electrical cord, tied to one of 63-year-old Sebastian's hands, was connected to his other arm. The evidence indicated he had been tied down. ...
Charles Anderson, a retired civil engineer, now living in Hayesville, N.C., grew up in Plant City. Although he was two or three years younger than Dillard, the two often played together.
This week, Anderson recalled that they sneaked in the church and "baptized" a lot of cats in the church baptistery when nobody was looking. And if they knew a real baptism was scheduled, they would turn off the hot water heater to surprise participants with icy cold water.
When he attended Plant City High School, his yearbook notes he played an active role. He was class vice president and chaplain; was a member of the Quester's Club, composed of honor students chosen from senior and junior English classes; played in the band; and was a member of the Library Club, Spanish Club, Victory Corps, Honor Society and Glee Club. He also was a MacBeth Clan leader.
After graduating from the high school in 1944, he received a degree in theology from Princeton University.
He was an Air Force chaplain during the 1950s and taught American literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La., where he also received a doctorate in American literature.
Sebastian left a teaching job at Chipola Junior College in Marianna, in the Florida Panhandle, to attend Louisiana State.
He came back to Plant City in 1985 when his mother died.
But on returning to his boyhood church, he told friends that people didn't seem to take him seriously. Instead, they all wanted to talk about his boyhood mischief. ...
HEADLINE: Greenspan Sounds a Warning; Fed Chief Says Surging
Asset Values Expose Economy
BYLINE: John M. Berry, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: JACKSON HOLE, Wyo., Aug. 27
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said today that the rising value of U.S. assets such as stocks and homes has created a new vulnerability to large, abrupt declines in asset prices that could hurt the American economy.
Greenspan, speaking here at the annual policy conference of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, said economists don't know how to predict -- much less head off -- the type of sudden loss of confidence by investors that can cause such sharp asset price declines.
The economy's vulnerability to such a decline depends in part on how much debt consumers and businesses have taken on to buy stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets, he said. A sharp drop in prices could make such debt far more burdensome.
Greenspan also cited various factors that make it difficult to gauge asset values in today's economy, including corporate accounting methods and investors' expectations about the future. ...
He cited as an example last fall's worldwide financial-market turmoil that developed in the wake of a default by the Russian government on part of its debt. To ease that problem, the Fed cut short-term interest rates and made it clear that it stood ready to supply enough cash to the U.S. banking system to get financial markets functioning smoothly again. The Fed took similar action following the October 1987 stock market crash.
As Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, put it, "You have to watch out when you fall off the cliff. That's when the central bank has to spring into action." ...
NOTE: This story also appeared in The International Herald Tribune.
HEADLINE: Penn still mighty, especially on defense; COLLEGE
FOOTBALL '99 / IVY LEAGUE
BYLINE: By Bob Monahan, Globe Staff
Looks like a repeat for defending champion Penn, with pressure coming from Brown, Harvard, and Yale. Princeton is on the cusp of the top tier, and it looks as if Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell will occupy the bottom three rungs of the Ivy League ladder when the season ends.
But this is the Ivy League, where strange things happen every year and the rule is to always expect the unexpected. ...
Princeton could contend. The Tigers have 11 starters back and excellent young players. Coach Steve Tosches said, "Our goal is to achieve consistency week to week. The quarterback position will be a key, and our pass defense is much improved. We have six home games, and early success and early momentum could go a long way." ...
HEADLINE: Universal Display Corporation Announces Second
Quarter Results
DATELINE: BALA CYNWYD, Pa.
Aug. 27, 1999--Universal Display Corporation (UDC) (NASDAQ:PANL), a developer of flat panel display technology, announced today its unaudited results of operations for the second quarter and six months ended June 30, 1999. Universal Display Corporation had a net loss of $1,677,994 (or $.14 per share) for the quarter ended June 30, 1999 compared to a loss of $631,658 or ($.06 per share) for the same period in 1998. The increase in the net loss was attributed to decreased revenue, increased research and development costs and general and administrative expenses. The Company earned $69,732 from contract research revenue in the quarter ended June 30, 1999 compared to $99,388 for the same period in 1998. The revenue was derived from a subcontract under a 3-year, $3 million contract Princeton University received from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), compared to the same period in 1998, which included DARPA revenue in addition to revenue derived to a $100,000 grant from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology to continue development of the OLED technology. Research and development costs were $509,732 for the quarter ended June 30, 1999 compared to $327,311 for the same period in 1998. Research and development costs were higher in 1999 compared to 1998 primarily because of an increase in research being performed at Princeton University by employees of the Company and increased patent expenses. In 1998, research and development costs consisted primarily of patent expenses and payments under 1997 Sponsored Research Agreement. ...
HEADLINE: STM/Business, U. Press Book Sales Steady In First Half 1999
Sales of STM/business books and university press hardcovers and paperbacks held steady during the first half of 1999, according to data compiled by the Association of American Publishers. Returns were up for STM/business books and university press hardcovers, while university press paperbacks posted a decline in returns during the first half of the year.
Sales of STM/business books increased 27.2% in June 1999 compared to June 1998, boosting the year-to-date increase to 8.2%. University press hardcover sales increased 13.1% in June, compared with June 1998, as year-to-date sales increased 7.9%. University press paperbacks posted a 5.9% increase in sales from June 1998 to June 1999, leading to a 5.1% year-to-date increase. ...
The data reflects results from 13 professional publishers, including Reed Elsevier, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley & Sons, as well as results from 38 university presses, including Cornell University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press and Yale University Press.
HEADLINE: Stanford U. endowment grows to $5.5 billion
BYLINE: By Jed Rose, The Stanford Daily
DATELINE: Stanford, Calif.
Stanford University's total endowment value has increased from $4.4 billion to $5.5 billion for the most recent fiscal year, a growth that reflects wise investing and increased alumni donations, according to the Stanford Management Company.
"[The Development Office] has been doing an exceptional job, and I would expect new gifts to continue to add to Stanford's endowment," said Laurance Hoagland, CEO of Stanford Management Company.
From 1998 to 1999, the endowment fund grew by over $1 billion, up from the previous year's growth of approximately $85 million, according to Nacubo, a non-profit organization that performs studies on university endowments.
According to results of the annual endowment study from Nacubo, the 1998 fiscal year showed an average return of 18 percent.
Last year's totals showed Harvard University with the highest endowment pool in the nation, followed by Yale University, Princeton University and Stanford. The official endowment figures for Harvard, Yale and Princeton are still being tabulated for Nacubo's official report in October. ...
HEADLINE: Albert Einstein speaks from the beaker
BYLINE: Bruce Kyle
The brain of Albert Einstein floats in formaldehyde in a Princeton University storeroom. You probably already know that.
What you may not know -- I didn't until I saw it on the History Channel the other night -- is that the transcendent genius did not plan on donating this most singular organ to science. Such a bequest never, so to speak, crossed his mind.
Turns out, the Princeton physician who performed the autopsy after Einstein's death in 1955 took one look at the newly expired savant, another at the power saw lying nearby and had a brainstorm.
At first, Einstein's family was taken aback by this stunning example of helping oneself, but quickly decided it might be good to find out why their dearly departed was so blasted smart. Alas, except for perhaps a few extra folds in the gray matter and maybe a slight surplus of blood vessels, the mystery of mega-intellect remains. ...
HEADLINE: A SUMMER KICK: Soccer camp gives 250 youth chance to
learn new tricks and play outdoors.
BYLINE: THERESA SALINAS, The Orange County Register
It all started with a vague mission: to help somebody. It soon grew into an event that attracted 250 anxious school children, a world-famous soccer star and dozens of volunteers.
Six Hyundai Motors summer interns at the company's Fountain Valley headquarters were given the task of developing and implementing a plan to help others backed by corporate dollars.
The only catch? Getting the final OK from Hyundai Motor America President Finbarr O'Neill.
"The only direction we were given was 'help somebody. ' We must have come up with 50 ideas until the soccer camp was approved," said Jason Duckworthy, 21, a Hyundai intern and business major at California State University, Fullerton.
The idea quickly snowballed into a three-day Hyundai Youth Soccer Camp, held from Aug. 15 to 18 at Centennial Regional Park, attended by youth from Lowell and Pio Pico schools.
Intern Brian O'Neill, 20, a history major at Princeton University, said the group wanted to help a local community. It
focused on two schools in one of the most densely populated and impoverished areas of the city.
The campers received new soccer cleats, shin guards, T-shirts and shorts _ valued at more than $100 each. ...
HEADLINE: News of the weird; Virtual Yugoslavia? Cyber citizens
unite
BYLINE: Chuck Shepherd
Uh-oh
- In April, the administration at Princeton University reaffirmed its faculty appointment of Australian philosophy professor Peter Singer to a prestigious chair in bioethics, saying that "the strength of his teaching and his research" outweighs "any particular point of view" he holds. One of Singer's points of view is that parents have the right to kill their severely deformed children in the first month of life.
HEADLINE: Residents of Utah Are the Most Generous of People Who
Itemize
BYLINE: HARVY LIPMAN
Americans who itemized deductions on their federal income-tax returns gave a little more than 3 per cent of their earnings to charity in 1997, according to a Chronicle computer analysis of the latest Internal Revenue Service data.
How much those taxpayers gave varied widely both by income level and by where they lived. Among returns of taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of less than $20,000, those who itemized deductions gave an average of more than 10 per cent to charity -- although very few taxpayers in that income bracket itemize.
Among the wealthiest Americans -- those earning $200,000 or more -- the average charitable deduction was 3.6 per cent of their total income. Most of those taxpayers do itemize. ...
Utah's high ranking is a direct reflection of its heavily Mormon population, according to researchers who have studied patterns of charitable giving. Julian Wolpert, a Princeton University professor, notes that Mormons are supposed to give at least 10 per cent of their incomes to charity annually and that "if the percentage falls short, they're not being very good Mormons." ...
HEADLINE: Dr. Walter T. Odell, 71; Professor emeritus at Holy Cross
A funeral service will be held today for Dr. Walter T. Odell of Shrewsbury, professor emeritus of the political science department at The College of the Holy Cross, who died Thursday at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester. He was 71.
Born in Tompkins Cove in New York, he lived in Worcester for many years before relocating to Shrewsbury 20 years ago.
He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University, his master's from Oxford, and his doctorate from Georgetown University.
He taught at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester for more than 25 years, from 1969 to 1995. ...
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
PAGANO, DEBORAH KRAUS
Deborah Kraus Pagano. Deborah, who until retiring to stay home with her children was a banker for over 20 years with the Chase Manhattan Bank, died on August 27 of breast cancer in Avalon, N.J. She was 46 and lived in Manhattan and Upper Black Eddy, Pa. A member of one of the earliest classes of women to graduate from Princeton University in 1975, she was one of the first women to be promoted to a senior management position at Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., a predecessor to Chase Manhattan Bank. Mrs. Pagano was a director of the Creative Center for Women with Cancer, New York, an organization founded on the belief in the healing power of creative activity. She is survived her husband, Vincent, her two sons, Benjamin and William, her parents, Theresa and John Kraus of Mantua, N.J. and a brother, John, also of Mantua, N.J.
HEADLINE: Ex-cotton merchant Baer dies at 73
Ben K. Baer, retired chairman of Allenberg Cotton Co. and a native of Charleston, died Aug. 17, 1999, in Memphis, Tenn., of complications from pneumonia. He was 73.
After serving in the Navy as an ensign in World War II, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and earned a law degree from Yale University. He practiced law in Charleston for seven years.
He was the first U.S. cotton merchant to visit China after relations were opened with the country in 1972. ...