Princeton in the News
September 3 to 9, 1999
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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK
OBITUARIES
NAME: Joe Z. Tsien
HEADLINE: SCIENTIST AT WORK: Joe Z. Tsien; Of Smart Mice and an
Even Smarter Man
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J., Sept. 3
A certain amount of disorder has broken out around Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, the biologist who announced last week that he had created a smarter strain of mouse by genetically altering a gene for memory. Patients call seeking help. Individuals of enhanced imaginations warn that the mice may escape and take over the planet. Television crews patrol the halls. His voice-mail box has overflowed.
But Dr. Tsien, seemingly the only scientist on the Princeton campus who, on a warm summer day, is wearing a tie, ignores the chaos and a phone that rings every couple of minutes. In soft tones he describes the remarkable journey that has led him from Wuxi, a small town near Shanghai, to the position of having made a significant, maybe decisive, contribution to understanding the nature of memory and intelligence.
Dr. Tsien (pronounced chee-YEN) says he did not begin to consider the wider implications of his work until just before his article was published. He engineered his smarter mice for purely academic reasons, to address and perhaps solve the question of how memories are laid down in the brain. But the mice turned out to be smarter as well as having better memories, lending an unexpected new dimension to the experiment.
Although many arguments with psychologists doubtless lie ahead, Dr. Tsien believes that learning, memory and intelligence are all intimately related because, as his smarter mice demonstrate, "a common unifying mechanism underlies them all."
And because mice and people use the same basic mechanism of memory, the smarter mice could well shed much light on the nature of human intelligence. ...
He then moved to another leading neuroscience laboratory, that of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for research on the genetic control of the immune system, and later switched to the study of learning.
In Dr. Tonegawa's lab, Dr. Tsien worked with so-called knock-out mice, animals from which a gene has been deleted. The idea is to learn what a gene does by excising it and seeing what defects the mouse develops. He became interested in the brain cell component, known as the NMDA receptor, suspected of being central to the memory mechanism. The receptor consists of parts made by several genes, the chief part being specified by a gene called NR1.
Using advanced genetic techniques, he decided to create a mouse lacking the NR1 gene in the cells of its forebrain. Creating the mouse took two and a half years and, for a postdoctoral student, was a substantial risk. If the experiment failed, there would be no result worth publishing.
In the end, he was able to knock out the gene in just the cells of the hippocampus, a brain module dedicated to learning and much studied by neuroscientists. "I think a god looked on me very kindly," he said, referring to the element of luck in creating such a valuable research tool. ...
Credit for a discovery is often disputed, particularly when the finding is important. Dr. Tonegawa told reporter for The Star-Ledger of Newark, that Dr. Tsien may have started developing the smarter mice while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and accused him of being uncollegial. If the mice were developed in Dr. Tonegawa's lab, M.I.T. would have rights to them and Dr. Tonegawa could exercise a lab chief's claim to a share of the academic credit.
Dr. Tsien said he was "totally surprised" by Dr. Tonegawa's remarks. His smarter mice experiment was conceived and executed entirely at Princeton, he said. Other scientists have patented the NR2B gene but Princeton has filed for a "use patent," the right to use the gene in ways suggested by Dr. Tsien's work. ...
NOTE: This week's Princeton in the News contains more stories by weekly periodicals about Dr. Tsien's findings, as well as editorials from daily newspapers on the ethical implications of his discovery.
HEADLINE: The Singer Solution To World Poverty
BYLINE: By Peter Singer
(This article appeared in The New York Times Magazine.)
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who later this month begins teaching at Princeton University, is perhaps the world's most controversial ethicist. Many readers of his book "Animal Liberation" were moved to embrace vegetarianism, while others recoiled at Singer's attempt to place humans and animals on an even moral plane. Similarly, his argument that severely disabled infants should, in some cases, receive euthanasia has been praised as courageous by some -- and denounced by others, including anti-abortion activists, who have protested Singer's Princeton appointment.
Singer's penchant for provocation extends to more mundane matters, like everyday charity. A recent article about Singer in The New York Times revealed that the philosopher gives one-fifth of his income to famine-relief agencies. "From when I first saw pictures in newspapers of people starving, from when people asked you to donate some of your pocket money for collections at school," he mused, "I always thought, 'Why that much -- why not more?"'
Is it possible to quantify our charitable burden? In the following essay, Singer offers some unconventional thoughts about the ordinary American's obligations to the world's poor and suggests that even his own one-fifth standard may not be enough.
In the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old to be adopted -- he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.
Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster. She redeems herself only by being prepared to bear considerable risks to save the boy.
At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the world, people who would have been quick to condemn Dora if she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts -- so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.
All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one -- knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?
Of course, there are several differences between the two situations that could support different moral judgments about them. For one thing, to be able to consign a child to death when he is standing right in front of you takes a chilling kind of heartlessness; it is much easier to ignore an appeal for money to help children you will never meet. Yet for a utilitarian philosopher like myself -- that is, one who judges whether acts are right or wrong by their consequences -- if the upshot of the American's failure to donate the money is that one more kid dies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then it is, in some sense, just as bad as selling the kid to the organ peddlers. But one doesn't need to embrace my utilitarian ethic to see that, at the very least, there is a troubling incongruity in being so quick to condemn Dora for taking the child to the organ peddlers while, at the same time, not regarding the American consumer's behavior as raising a serious moral issue. ...
HEADLINE: Accounting for college costs -- it might not be as
bad as you expect
BYLINE: GREG BARRETT; Gannett News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON -- Marlboro College senior Kermit Woods received his annual bill for tuition and fees last month. He owes nothing; a financial aid package so complex he can't recite it, paid it.
Woods needs only the $6,590 required for room and board, and a student loan covers two-thirds of that.
Only 54 of Marlboro's 289 students pay the full annual tuition and fees: $20,325.
Two dramatically different bills. Same small liberal arts college in southern Vermont. Nearly identical educational experiences priced as differently as first-class and coach.
The disparity lies at the heart of a truth in college today: Higher education is increasingly expensive -- particularly for private schools -- but if you navigate a thicket of scholarships, grants and loans, the financial blow is more sting than stagger. ...
"Are colleges doing everything possible to control costs? They are doing a lot; I don't know if they are doing everything they can," says Terry Hartle, vice president for the American Council on Education....
Hartle worries that lower- and middle-income families see such Web sites or media reports of, say, the annual tuition at Princeton University ($23,820) and suffer sticker shock. They fail to realize that one student's tuition is another's financial aid; the former typically balances the latter. And the average freshman grant at Princeton, for example, where all scholarships are based on need and paid by endowments, is $16,500.
Last year Princeton was the first of several elite private schools to retool its student financing in a push to lure top-notch students opting for the lower cost of public universities. It eliminated home value in evaluating the financial need of applicants whose families earn less than $90,000 annually, and it converted student loans to scholarships beginning with the class of 2002.
School loans averaging nearly $4,000 per student just for the first year at Princeton were scaring away good applicants, school officials feared. "The idea was that if loans come out of the school's package, the financial aid is much more favorable," says Don Betterton, Princeton's director of undergraduate financial aid. ...
NOTE: This story appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.
HEADLINE: Add a gene and make a sharp-witted mouse
BYLINE: By Charles W. Petit; Joseph P. Shapiro
HIGHLIGHT: Memory boost could someday help people
Their little brains juiced up on designer genes, mice in a Princeton, N.J., laboratory could be the world's smartest. The creators call the sharper-witted rodent strain Doogie, after the old Doogie Howser, M.D. television series about a fictional teenage prodigy. When just wandering around their cages, the mice look and act normal. But they are whizzes (for mice) on learning and memory tests. In one drill, the genetically engineered animals caught on better than other mice when certain sounds preceded mild electric shocks. They also had better long-term memory of mazes.
In the short run, the research bolsters a theory about how brain synapses make connections and store knowledge. More important, it fans speculation that genetic adjustment of memory and other intellectual attributes eventually will be possible in a wide range of animals, including humans--which gives some people the willies. Project leader Joe Tsien of Princeton's department of molecular biology recognizes that nobody should try this on people without extensive ethical debate first. "Every responsible citizen in every society should come together," Tsien says, "to establish universally accepted guidelines." ...
In their experiments, Tsien and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis inserted an extra, modified copy of a natural gene for a protein called nr2b into mouse embryos. The protein promotes formation of connections among neurons that are being simultaneously stimulated. It is abundant in the brains of young mice, and in a slightly different form in most other mammals, but dwindles toward adulthood. The researchers previously had shown that deletion of the natural gene creates mice that have a hard time learning anything. The latest research, reported in the journal Nature, shows that an extra, perpetually active nr2b gene keeps mouse gray matter primed for new connections through a lifetime. ...
HEADLINE: New medical technique sheds light on how the lungs
work
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
In a laboratory at the University of Virginia, a handful of patients inhaled a deep breath of helium and watched their lungs light up.
Scientists are exploring a dramatic new way to peer into patients' bodies: using specially treated gases that let doctors watch, for the first time, how breath flows through the lungs.
But the technology isn't just for lungs - it promises to light up other organs now difficult to see with conventional scanning. Researchers are poised to try it as a colon cancer test, and say it might also offer better images of the brain or a woman's reproductive tract, without the discomfort or radiation of some of today's tests. ...
These so-called hyperpolarized gases are still highly experimental, experts caution. But radiologists compare the black blob an MRI pictures as a lung with the brightly lit image of helium-filled lungs, and say the need is great. ...
Scanners like magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, provide incredible illumination of parts of the body. But they don't image some organs well. They don't picture airflow through the lungs, for instance. Tracking airflow could help treat emphysema, cystic fibrosis, asthma, even monitor how well a transplanted lung is adapting. ...
Molecules of substances like gas normally spin randomly. Physicists can fire a laser at certain gases, and the molecules temporarily spin in the same direction, called hyperpolarization.
Two Princeton University physicists were researching hyperpolarized gases for the military when one of them needed an MRI - and wondered if the research might also help medicine.
Experiments showed the lined-up molecules of hyperpolarized helium-3 produced an MRI signal thousands of times stronger than today's technology. ...
HEADLINE: KETBALL COUNTDOWN: High school basketball is still three months away, but Delaware County fans will get a preview on Saturday.
The Youth Interlook Society will sponsor will hold eight games in the Midnight Madness basketball tournament that will feature the top players from the southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and southern New Jersey.
The tournament has some interesting twists that go well beyond basketball. The highlight: the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) will be given on-site by a professor from Princeton University.
SECTION: EDITORIAL/OPINION
Headline: Lawmakers: Build A Better Mousetrap
From Princeton University comes a fascinating report that inserting an extra gene into mice produces smarter squeakers. Now, if only it could be spliced into legislators contemplating continuing Ohio's bone-headed scheme for enforcing auto-insurance laws.
Instead of simply making all drivers prove they're insured before getting or renewing license plates, Ohio sends letters demanding that randomly chosen motorists prove they're insured. At most, just one in 20 drivers is checked yearly. Also, those who don't reply face 90-day suspensions and $75 fines - even if they are insured. Some complain that the letters never came, but the state lifted their licenses anyway. ...
HEADLINE: Smarter-mouse trap
BYLINE: Thomas O'Dwyer
So scientists have created smarter mice. It's a start, but have a look around at East Timor, the Middle East, Russia, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Colombia, or Serbia, and ask yourself if it's more intelligent rodents we need.
As Albert Schweitzer noted, we already have a clever animal; it's called man, and "it behaves like an imbecile."
Princeton University researchers last week reported creating smarter mice by adding a single gene to fertilized eggs, showing for the first time that mammal intelligence can be genetically manipulated. By performing a number of repeatable tests, the team said, the mice remembered objects four to five times longer than normal mice.
"They're learning things much better and remembering longer," said Princeton neurobiologist Joe Tsien, the research team leader. "They are smarter."
The extra gene boosts brain receptors that are known to be involved in associative thinking, which is the basis of learning. These twin receptors allow humans to make associations such as "cold" and "ice cube" - or in lab mice "sound" and "electric shock." Learning appears to be based on associating pairs of facts or events. ...
Being smarter or being created by genius geneticists didn't save the bright mice from being named after a dumb television series, Doogie Howser MD. Tsien called his creation "Doogie mice." Bad things happen to good science, and it won't be long before some pushy yuppie parents will begin asking how soon they can start producing high-octane babies clever enough to start their careers at the age of three. ...
HEADLINE: Seven not-so-secret secrets for fathers
Seminar highlights responsibilities for being effective dads
BYLINE: ERIC ADLER, The Kansas City Star
It's a concept so basic even a child can grasp it: Kids need their dads, good dads.
The problem, says Ken Canfield of the National Center for Fathering in Merriam, is that too few dads have learned this lesson.
That's why on Friday and Saturday, the center and the Fathering Initiative of Wyandotte County are sponsoring a free seminar designed to help fathers reconnect with their kids. ...
Other studies show similar effects. In a 14-year study released earlier this year, Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University looked at 6,000 males, ages 14 to 22, and found that boys with absentee fathers are twice as likely to be incarcerated as those from traditional two-parent families, regardless of their race, income and parents' education. ...
HEADLINE: Andrew Tobias Launches New - Free! - Internet
Service; Calculates Full Cost Burden for Over 11,000 Mutual Funds
... With Surprising Results
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 8
A new site that calculates the true cost of mutual fund ownership -- and that will take the breath away from owners of some of the country's most popular funds -- has been launched today by financial writer Andrew Tobias in association with Personal Fund, Inc.
Andrew Tobias' Mutual Fund Cost Calculator can be found at www.personalfund.com. It is a free service. ...
... Burton Malkiel, professor of economics at Princeton University and famous for his classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street, now in its 7th edition, adds that "the costs of owning mutual funds have an enormous influence on the net after-tax returns investors receive. Wise investors will use Andrew Tobias' excellent web-site to get the cost information they need to make good choices." ...
Headline: Miss N.J. Hopes To Overcome The Jinx
Byline: John Curran, The Associated Press
Dateline: Atlantic City
The Jersey jinx? Miss New Jersey Victoria Paige laughs at it.
Yes, she knows that in 78 years of Miss America pageants, only one woman representing New Jersey has won the crown.
Yes, she knows that that contestant, Miss America 1937 Bette
Cooper ran off with her chaperone in one of the weirdest pageant
scandals ever.
Paige, 20, of Sparta, is unfazed. In fact, she's hoping a little
piece of Cooper memorabilia will help her break the jinx in the
79th annual Miss America Pageant.
Arriving in Atlantic City along with the other 50 contestants Monday, Paige was wearing a diamond-studded lapel pin that once belonged to Cooper. The pin was lent to Paige by Amy Fissel, Miss New Jersey 1992. ...
Paige, who beat out 20 other women for the state crown in competing as Miss Watchung Valley, believes she has what the pageant wants.
"I can be a positive role model for the Miss America program because I combine all of what they're looking for, including higher education and passion for my platform,"Paige said.
A junior at Princeton University who won a full academic scholarship, Paige plans to get a law degree and then a master's in business administration. ...
HEADLINE: Labor Day rally stresses benefits of unionizing
BYLINE: By Martin S. Johncox
SOURCE: The Idaho Statesman
With union membership nationwide shrinking, unionizing low-paid workers needs to be a priority, said Idaho workers who rallied at the Statehouse on Monday in acknowledgment of Labor Day.
"For a long time, it was, 'We got ours,' and that was it," said Jon Lewis, a volunteer with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America. " We didn't reach out enough."
Lewis was one of about 100 people who showed up at the rally. Through song and speeches, the audience celebrated how unions have paved the way for improvements for workers, such as a 40-hour week, overtime pay, and paid vacations and holidays.
But only about 10 percent of the nation's private work force is unionized, compared with about 30 percent in the mid-1970s, according to Henry Farber, a labor economist at Princeton University. At the same time, the number of minimum-wage jobs has increased, and few of them are unionized. ...
HEADLINE: Health Tips
LIDIA WASOWICZ UPI Science Writer
GENETIC BOOST TO INTELLIGENCE: Genetic enhancement of mental and cognitive attributes such as intelligence and memory should be ''feasible,'' according to Joe Tsien of Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. The conclusion comes from a study of the behaviour of mice genetically engineered to produce more than the usual amount of part of a receptor for a neurotransmitter called NMDA in their forebrains. This led to the enhanced activation of forebrain NMDA receptors generally. As a consequence, the mice exhibited ''superior ability in learning and memory in various tasks.'' What is the link between enhanced NMDA-receptor function and cognitive ability in these mouse masterminds? In 1949, Donald Hebb proposed that learning and memory were based on modifications of synaptic strength among neurons that were simultaneously active. This implies that improved synaptic 'coincidence detection' would lead to better learning and memory. It so happens that the NMDA receptor works as a coincidence detector, so enhanced signal detection by NMDA receptors should enhance learning and memory. Tsien said in the article in the journal Nature.
HEADLINE: Montero takes new Brown U. Vice President post
BYLINE: By Sudeep Reddy, Brown Daily Herald
DATELINE: Providence, R.I.
Janina Montero, dean of student life at Princeton University, has been named the new vice president for campus life and student services at Brown.
President Gordon Gee created the position in February to strengthen leadership in the area of student affairs and improve coordination of student services.
Montero, whose appointment begins on Jan. 3, 2000, will oversee the Office of Student Life, the Chaplains' Office, University Food Services, the Office of Residential Life, Athletics and Physical Education, the College Admission Office, and the Office of Financial Aid.
"This is a real coup for us - she is a first-rate academic, she's a Hispanic scholar, and she herself is a Latina," Gee said.
"She was very successful at Princeton in organizing a very student-centered advocate system," Gee said. "She has a track record starting a new job, having a new portfolio, and being very successful in creating a sense of community among all of the disparate elements that report to her." ...
Montero said she was attracted to Brown by the possibilities for greater coordination among various departments and the opportunity to provide better services to students.
"The desire and openness to experimentation is tremendously attractive," she said. ...
Montero's arrival at Princeton in 1993 brought her into a new role, similar to the new position at Brown. She is the first dean at Princeton to directly oversee a broader range of student services beyond student life - including the offices of athletics, health services, and religious life - in addition to policy responsibility in matters involving student housing and dining services.
Among her projects at Princeton, Montero was involved in administrative reviews of athletics, the residential life program, alcohol abuse, and the construction of a new campus center with libraries, classrooms, and a learning center. ...
HEADLINE: Capitals Begin With a Healthy Outlook; After Losing 511 Man-Games to Injury Last Season, Team Opens Training Camp in Sound Shape
BYLINE: Jason La Canfora , Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Capitals Coach Ron Wilson vividly recalls the optimism of last year. His team was coming off the franchise's first trip to the Stanley Cup finals, brimming with potential, eager to build on that playoff run.
Then the injuries came, and continued to mount. The Capitals never recovered. ...
As for the Capitals' other young players, hopes are high for defenseman Alexei Tezikov, who was acquired late last season from Buffalo for Joe Juneau; Princeton University free agent forward Jeff Halpern, who is from Potomac; and forward Glen Metropolit, who finished in the top 10 in scoring in the International Hockey League last season. ...
HEADLINE: Triplex-Based Repair of the Sickle Cell Mutation.
Sickle Cell Disease
"Triplex-Based Repair of the Sickle Cell Mutation." Olga Amosova, Steven L. Broitman and Jacques R. Fresco. Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
(CW HENDERSON PUBLISHER www.newsfile.com) -- According to an abstract submitted by the authors to the NATO Advanced Studies Institute Conference titled Targeting of Drugs: Strategies for Gene Constructs and Delivery, held June 24 - July 5, 1999, in Marathon, Greece, "Sickle cell anemia is one of the most common inherited blood disorders, affecting approximately 100,000 newborns each year. It is caused by a structural aberration in the essential oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin that leads to malformation of the red blood cells, resulting in painful episodes and early death. This malformation is the result of a single amino acid substitution (glutamic acid -> valine) at position 6 of the beta-globin chain, which, in turn, is due to an A -> T transversion mutation on chromosome 11. Correction of this mutation even at the somatic gene level can effectively prevent the disease, and partial correction is enough to dramatically ease the symptoms. The goal of this project is to develop a sickle cell gene repair approach that takes advantage of the specificity of nucleic acid third-strand binding to deliver a reactive moiety, e.g., UV photoreactive psoralen adjacent to the T residue of the mutant base pair. T->A transversion at the mutation site can then be triggered via recognition and excision of the psoralen adduct by the cellular DNA repair system.
A high degree of such directed psoralen modification can ultimately result in replacement of the mutant base pair by a wild-type one with sufficient efficiency to restore satisfactory levels of normal beta-globin synthesis. Specific third-strand binding and photo-adduct formation, the first step towards the desired goal, has already been achieved in vitro using a 40 bp linear DNA model of the mutant sequence of the sickle beta-globin gene. This binding was successfully extended to a plasmid containing the full beta-globin target sequence. The experiments are now in progress on enzymatic repair of the photo-modified plasmid both in vitro and in vivo. This technology could then be exploited in human hematopoietic stem cells ex vivo. At the same time, methods for third-strand delivery into other cell lines will be investigated. In addition, this research will require assessment of normal hemoglobin expression and efficiency of gene correction. By these different steps, it is hoped to develop a complete gene repair system particular to the sickle cell hemoglobin target, ultimately in hematopoietic stem cells. This technology is potentially applicable to other inherited human hemoglobin-based anemias and a range of other point mutation-based diseases."
HEADLINE: App Security Vaults To Fore
BYLINE: Rutrell Yasin
Security flaws discovered last week in two popular Internet software programs-Microsoft's Hotmail and Internet Explorer-reinforced the need for enterprises to provide comprehensive security for e-business apps.
Flaws in the free Hotmail messaging system gave hackers unauthorized access to more than 40 million e-mail accounts, while a bug in IE's Java Virtual Machine demonstrates that encryption and firewalls aren't enough to shield e- commerce systems from attacks, according to users and security experts.
Application-level hacks exploit flaws in internally developed code, the widely deployed Common Gateway Interface (CGI), or software such as Web and application servers.
While encryption can protect transactions, and firewalls can secure access to servers, these tools can't insulate enterprises from hackers exploiting flaws such as "programming code left open," said Jupiter Communications analyst Preston Dodd. ...
The Java Virtual Machine bug, discovered by the Princeton University Secure Internet Programming team, would have let hackers attach a hostile applet to an HTML page to gain control over a user's computer system running IE.
After being contacted by the Princeton team, Microsoft issued a fix for the problem. ...
Headline: L.A. Area Now A Model For Labor Revival
Byline: Nancy Cleeland, Times Staff Writer
Three years into a historic push to organize the region's multiethnic work force, Los Angeles labor unions have begun to see results, adding more than 85,000 members this year alone and building a network of political and community allies that is paying off in new laws and public support.
Perhaps more than anywhere in the nation, unions here have embraced the more aggressive, sophisticated approach to organizing promoted by AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney. And with its heavily immigrant, low-wage work force--which many see as ripe for organizing--the region once known for its hostility to labor is being viewed as its next great hope. ...
Only about 10% of the nation's private work force is unionized, compared to about 30% in the mid-1970s, said Henry Farber, a labor economist at Princeton University. Although it trails traditional union cities such as Detroit and New York, Los Angeles is slightly above the national average, with 11.4% of its private employees and about 19% of all workers in unions.
And it is one of the few areas where the rate of unionization has actually grown--albeit slowly--in recent years. Building that growth into a genuine movement is now the challenge for union activists. ...
HEADLINE: School choice attacks often fail accuracy test
BYLINE: JOE WILLIAMS
SOURCE: Journal Sentinel staff
From a Miami television studio, the president of the People for the American Way told CNN's "Crossfire" host Mary Matalin that Milwaukee's school choice program was "our worst nightmare," citing the group's recent complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
The complaint -- alleging serious problems with admissions and other procedures -- caused hardly a blip closer to home, where some 8,000 students this school year are attending private and religious schools at taxpayer expense.
With the issue of school choice heating up nationally recently because of a federal court ruling in Cleveland and the prominent role the issue is playing in Texas Gov. George W. Bush's run for president, hyperbolic descriptions of Milwaukee's growing choice program have become par for the course. ...
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Witte studied the program in 1995 and found that school choice students did not perform any better than their public school counterparts. He went on to write that, "on a positive note, estimates for choice students do not substantially decline as they enter higher grades. This is not the normal pattern in that usually, urban-student average scores decline relative to the national norms in higher grades."
Subsequent studies by researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities -- using Witte's data -- did find some performance gains for choice students. The discrepancy amounts to a high-level academic disagreement over the methodology of the comparisons and, in a heated television debate, tends to be the kind of discussion that prompts viewers to grab for the remote control. ...
Headline: College Transfers Get Ugly Surprise; Counselors Seek
Fix For Credit Problem
Byline: Brian Kladko, Staff Writer
John Pace, a math professor at Essex County College, keeps hearing the same story from former students. It goes like this: Student starts at a New Jersey community college. Student transfers to a four-year school in the state. Student learns that some courses won't count at the four-year school, and he or she will have to retake them.
"People are successful at your college, and then you find out that they're being given all kinds of problems at other places," said Pace, an adviser to a statewide student activist group."And it's kind of frustrating."
The stories are bound to keep coming, as long as certain subjectsare taught differently from one New Jersey school to the next, as long as certain schools are more prestigious than others, as long as students exhibit a certain youthful disinterest in long-term planning. ...
The problem, which affects students from two- and four-year schools, isn't new, and thanks to a growing cooperation among New Jersey schools, it is getting better. ...
Another stumbling block for students: Some schools have more status than others, and are often reluctant to accept credit from those with lesser reputations."It's almost a caste system,"said Robert Messina, the president of Burlington County College. ...
The biggest accommodation came in late 1997, when 49 of New Jersey's 54 colleges signed a treaty that established a set of principles for transferring credit from one to another. The agreement included a controversial concession from four-year schools: Any student who gets a passing grade, even as low as D, in an elective course must be given credit for it by any other participating school.
For some institutions, the agreement represented a lowering of standards for transfer students, and a few schools, including The College of New Jersey and Seton Hall, Drew, and Princeton universities, didn't sign it. Seton Hall intends to join the compact this fall. The College of New Jersey continues to hold out, preferring to rely on agreements with a couple of community colleges. ...
HEADLINE: Odd jobs; In this era of megacorp towers filled with
beige cubicles, a few people still find employment niches that are
unlikely to fit any of the categories in the next census.
BYLINE: Rick Nelson; Staff Writer
The jobs, they are a-changin'. Occupations that were once ubiquitous are rapidly disappearing. When's the last time you saw a milkman? A soda jerk? A carhop? And jobs that once were not even dreamed of --Web masters, day traders, cell-phone technicians -- are all the rage. That's capitalism for you.
But with sweeping change comes a yearning for what once was. The tried and true. The old-fashioned. These three occupational traditionalists may be failing the endurance test, but they're still plenty endearing. ...
Curtain up
Deep under the stage of the Guthrie Theater is a warren of offices, studios and shops. One is the domain of Christopher Sibilia, a costume craftsman who can make, well, just about anything.
That funny donkey's mask that Bottom wore in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? The spats worn by the characters in "Ah, Wilderness!"? The masks for this month's premiere of "Martin Guerre"? They didn't come off some store shelf. Sibilia made them. ...
Sibilia is part of an exclusive fraternity. The Guthrie, along with the Minnesota Opera and the Children's Theatre Company, is one of the state's few performing arts groups to maintain a full-time production staff.
Sibilia, 33, is proficient with an astonishing variety of materials, working with leather, Styrofoam, polyurethane, plaster, metal, rubber and fabric of all kinds. Making molds and casting from them is a big part of what he does, and he also fills in when the carpentry shop needs him. ...
He didn't just tinker at home as a kid and wake up one morning as a costume craftsman, though. He has a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University and a master's degree in technical production from the Yale School of Drama. ...
HEADLINE: Master of Southern comfort is hot stuff on A/C
circuit;
BYLINE: PHILIP MORGAN, of The Tampa Tribune;
ST. PETERSBURG - His friends, having a little fun, call Raymond Arsenault the air-conditioner man.
The University of South Florida professor has written a book on the history of St. Petersburg and is an expert on the civil rights movement, but he is known nationally for his achievement 15 years ago: He was the first scholar to delve deeply into how air conditioning changed the South.
His 32-page article, "The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture," appeared in the November 1984 issue of the Journal of Southern History and is still the most frequently requested reprint from the magazine, says John Boles, the managing editor. ...
Sports also contributed. He was consumed by sports figures and statistics, which led to the history of sports and, from there, history in general. Other youngsters envision being firefighters or police officers; Arsenault knew at age 11 or 12 that he wanted to be a history professor.
He earned his bachelor's degree at Princeton University and his master's and doctorate at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. ...
SECTION: PEOPLE & PLACES
HEADLINE: Rogers State to honor Crowe
BYLINE: DANNA SUE WALKER
Retired Adm. William J. Crowe will be honored with Rogers State University's Constitution Award during a ceremony and luncheon Friday on the university's campus in Claremore.
Crowe, who grew up in Oklahoma City, is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one-time U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
He is now a senior adviser to GlobalOptions, an international crisis management firm in Washington, D.C., as well as the Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University and a trustee of Princeton University. He also is a member of the boards of Merrill Lynch, Texaco, General Dynamics, Norfolk & Southern and Pfizer. ...
He holds a master's degree in education from Stanford University and a doctorate in political science from Princeton. ...
HEADLINE: Survival Of the Savviest; When Was the World Created?
Sometime Before Election Day
BYLINE: Michael Powell, Washington Post Staff Writer
Ah, memories.
Remember long ago--like last February--when some on the religious right had run up the white flag in the culture wars?
Our president had slipped the impeachment posse and taken his victory lap. Nervous Republican leaders told the true-believer right to stifle itself. Christian conservatives counseled abandoning the electoral arena.
Fast forward six months. It's Labor Day and the cusp of the presidential primary season and what are the candidates talking about?
Monkey wars.
The Kansas Board of Education decides to expunge evolution from its public school curriculum and, just like that, everyone stops debating tax cuts and the possible cocaine-sniffing pasts of certain presidential candidates and starts arguing about the Bible and apes turned into humans. Or not. ...
The battle over evolution is a hardy chestnut. In 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in favor of letting public schools teach that God created Earth and man.
But in purely anthropological terms, the views of our Ivy League-educated presidential candidates are perhaps most striking, as evolutionary theory found its first and broadest acceptance in the nation's elite institutions. Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes (Princeton '69) and George W. Bush (Yale '68, Harvard '75) apparently take the view that Charles Darwin is just another dead guy with a theory.
Forbes, a member of Princeton's board of trustees, holds that certain illustrations of evolution in unspecified biology textbooks are "a massive fraud." And he notes that "a lot of what we thought was true, it turns out, science is finding is not true." ...
HEADLINE: HEALTH WATCH: The Week's Top Medical Stories
BYLINE: Staff
Smart mice: Princeton University researchers 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'd encountered before. Findings were reported in the journal Nature.
HEADLINE: On neighborliness
ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS / DAVID WARSH
BYLINE: By David Warsh, Globe Staff
Jane Jacobs first visited Boston's North End at the end of the Great Depression. Like most of Boston, the old hill was looking pretty beat-up. It had been point of entry for many generations of immigrants - first the Yankees, then the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Sicilians. It was badly overcrowded. "The general effect was of a district taking a physical beating and certainly desperately poor."
When she returned in 1959, the neighborhood had been transformed. "Instead of mattresses against the windows, there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint." Enterprises were strewn among the townhouses and apartment buildings: upholstery and carpentry shops, food stores, small factories, restaurants. ...
Jacobs's descriptions of city life in her seminal 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" have become the customary starting point for descriptions of "social capital," a somewhat elusive concept that is intuitively understood to be connected in important ways with economic growth and psychological well-being.
For Jacobs, social capital consisted of "neighborhood networks," favor-banks and webs of expectation capable of accelerating the transformation of whole groups to rich from poor. The social capital in those crowded tenements in 1939 presumably paved the way for the renaissance 20 years later and the prosperity and general well-being that has continued to the present day.
Social capital was introduced more formally by Harvard government professor Robert Putnam in 1995 to mean those various "features of social life - networks, norms, and trust - that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives." ...
After analyzing the information from these relatively simple experiments, sometimes in quite ingenious ways, the authors asserted that they had demonstrated three crucial propositions.
- People vary widely with respect to their ability to trust and be trusted (meaning to commit resources to an activity where the outcome depends on the cooperative behavior of others).
- Simple microeconomic models work pretty well in predicting outcomes of simple experiments. Individuals with greater social connection trusted each other more. People from different races and nationalities behaved in a less trustworthy manner toward one another. High-status individuals earned more in the experiments.
- Private returns to social capital may be quite different from social returns, because there can be negative spillovers as well as positive ones. A slick car salesman may have plenty of individual capital, for example - but he is likely to reduce the social capital of any group that he joins.
The significance of "What is Social Capital?" lies mainly in the identity of the authors. They are all possessors of heavy social capital themselves. Glaeser and Laibson are professors at Harvard University, members of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Norms and Preferences and leaders of the new generation of economists. Scheinkman for nearly 30 years was one of the high priests of the economics department at the University of Chicago, though he moved to Princeton University this year. Soutter, a doctoral student in psychology, is proof of the increasing relevance of that discipline to experimental economics. ...
Headline: A Familiar Setting As Drama, Mystery Unfolds at a High School Reunion
BYLINE: NEIL SCHMITZ; News Book Reviewer
BROKE HEART BLUES
By Joyce Carol Oates
Dutton
369 pages, $24.95
Joyce Carol Oates dedicates "Broke Heart Blues" to John Updike. Her Willowsville (Williamsville) High School alumni narrators, rallying for their 30th reunion, are Updikean characters, village people.
Remember this as you read "Broke Heart Blues": The novel is a mockery of Williamsville.
Old Williamsville, Old Buffalo, probably all of Old Erie County, will no doubt catch every pitched reference to actual people in the novel. Oates is a Lockport girl, a Western New Yorker, though she lives in New Jersey, where she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Local people will truly grasp the novel's local knowledge and local feeling. They'll understand the novel as a Lockportian interpretation of dumb, prosperous Williamsville. They will see that Oates is still in the struggle, Lockport being one sector of meaning, Williamsville another.
I quickly found these Willowsville people loathsome -- too drippy, too gushing. I found the glorifying of John Reddy Heart too constant and finally tiring. ...
HEADLINE: N.C. salaries fare better when all factors
weighed
BYLINE: JEAN P. FISHER The Herald-Sun
North Carolina professors may take home smaller paychecks than many of their Ivy League counterparts, but they get more bang for their buck thanks to the state's low cost of living, according to a new study by a Raleigh-based think tank.
In fact, according to the study, the average salary of a full professor at Duke University tops the average salary of a full professor at Harvard by more than $18,000 when adjusted for cost of living. Full professors at UNC outearn their Harvard colleagues by about $4,000, according to calculations by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The study results are published in the August issue of the Clarion, the center's monthly newsletter. ...
Factoring in cost of living shuffles results considerably. Just three of the top 10 schools in the AAUP survey stay there in the Pope Center study: Princeton University, the University of Chicago and Yale University. And the three schools that paid the highest average salaries according to AAUP - Rockefeller University, Harvard, and Stanford University - nose-dived to No. 19, No. 27 and No. 18, respectively. ...
HEADLINE: Notes
Indianapolis native Chuck DeVoe will be inducted into the United States Tennis Association Midwest Section Hall of Fame on Dec. 4 in Cincinnati. DeVoe is a member of eight Senior World Championship Teams. He won 10 consecutive national doubles titles with partner John Powless from 1987 to 1989. He is currently ranked No. 2 in the United States. in the 65 and over men's singles. DeVoe twice held a No. 1 world ranking in 60 and over men's singles. The former Princeton University standout is the founder and vice president of Indianapolis Racquet Club. ...
HEADLINE: Follow the Money, if You Can
BYLINE: By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
RELAXING in a plush Manhattan hotel room recently, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's wealthiest and most influential businessmen, chatted about theft.
Rampant stealing, Mr. Khodorkovsky conceded, was certainly bad for Russia. "If what we're talking about is sucking the lifeblood out of industry into some personal holdings so that this money will no longer be plowed back into the company, if we word it that way, then yes, it's a huge problem," he said.
But, Mr. Khodorkovsky quickly added, that is not his game -- it is the game of politicians, who, he believes, are responsible for the lion's share of corruption in Russia.
As chairman of Rosprom, the holding company for Yukos Oil, Russia's second-biggest oil company, Mr. Khodorkovsky, 35, said he was determined to build an industrial empire as competitive as any Western enterprise. At times, he allowed, that has meant trying to move control of his companies to places outside Russia -- but only to keep the companies out of the hands of corrupt politicians or nettlesome investors, and always with the goal of rebuilding the Russian economy. ...
Now, the money-laundering investigation of the Bank of New York by United States authorities is examining whether Mr. Khodorkovsky's companies moved funds illegally through the New York bank, authorities say. The Bank of New York examination -- involving at least $4.2 billion and possibly as much as $10 billion -- is the biggest money-laundering investigation in American history and has become a lightning rod for criticism of how the West has carried out foreign policy and conducted business in Russia. ...
The amount of money siphoned out of Russia illegally in recent years is difficult to quantify, because the Government does not track it closely and because much legitimate cash is sent abroad in search of stable banks. Russia's Interior Ministry estimates that anywhere from $50 billion to $250 billion was transferred out of the country illegally from 1994 to 1998. In a recent report, the credit rating agency Fitch IBCA said $136 billion left the country from 1993 to 1998.
"Russians don't recognize that by cheating someone today, they are hurting themselves in the long run," said Stephen Kotkin, director of the Russian studies program at Princeton University. ...
HEADLINE: Ideas & Trends: Running on Empty; So Much
Work, So Little Time
BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
THE much-acclaimed economic expansion, now in its ninth year, has blessed Americans with a cornucopia of good things -- rising incomes, the lowest jobless rate in three decades and Wall Street prices going through the roof. Many Americans have used the good times to renovate their kitchens or take that trip to Tuscany, but others are still finding the boom a lot less satisfying than might be expected.
For many Americans this Labor Day, the sentiment seems to be, we're earning more, but enjoying it less.
The reason is simple: too much work. With the economy going like gangbusters and with a labor shortage in much of the country, many Americans are reluctantly clocking 60-hour weeks to do the mountains of work that need to be done -- designing that Web page, getting out that legal brief, finishing those architectural renderings. For many Americans, the 40-hour week has become a fond memory. ...
Some economists question whether Americans are working more hours per week, saying the statistics rely too much on workers' own accounts. Many economists also say it has grown harder to measure how many hours people work because of the explosion of beepers and cell phones as well as computers and faxes at home.
"Nowadays you go to a social gathering and you see a lot of people wearing beepers, and at a baseball game you see all these people with their cell phones, in many cases still connected to work," said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University labor economist. "It's gotten far more difficult to measure where work ends and leisure begins."
ALLEN H. JOHNSON
Headline: Fall Colors: UNCG Takes A Bold, Provocative Look At Difficult Questions
At a time when many of our thoughts turn to football and new TV shows, UNCG has chosen to march - not tiptoe - into a thicket of tough questions and thorny issues.
A year-long symposium called ''Who R We?'' opened Sunday with a provocative art exhibit called ''Looking Forward, Looking Black.'' The work of 16 African-American and white artists and photographers is an eclectic mix of caricature and protest, dignity and denigration. It can make you think and it can make you mad.
The programs will span the entire academic year, and will delve into the psychology of race and prejudice, images and stereotypes. Portions of the series will look back unflinchingly at the 1979 Klan-Nazi shootings at Greensboro's Morningside Homes.
Nov. 3 of that year is very much to Greensboro what Vietnam until recently has been for the nation - a memory so painful and disturbing that much of the city has suppressed it until time and distance have allowed for more meaningful reflection. Twenty years later, a play, called ''Greensboro: A Requiem,'' will revisit the event, which brought the kind of national attention the city could have done without. An armed-to-the-teeth caravan of Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen opened fire at an anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers Party, killing five people and injuring nine. ...
The play, written by Emily Mann and scheduled for performances from the 20th anniversary of the shootings on Nov. 3 through Nov. 7, will deal with sensitive issues and deep wounds that for some of us are still raw. Mann researched the play in Greensboro, talking to survivors and studying courtroom transcripts from the three trials that followed the killings. The play debuted at Princeton University in 1996, but has never been performed in Greensboro. ...
HEADLINE: WEEK IN REVIEW
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Of mice and men
Princeton University researchers have created significantly smarter mice by adding a single gene to rodent embryos.
Scientists 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.
HEADLINE: Eureka
Thanks to science, mice could soon be living the Ally McBeal dream - much slimmer and more intelligent.
Researchers in America have found a new method of treating obesity in mice that could have implications for overweight humans.
Most weight control regimes concentrate on reducing appetite, but the new method, developed at the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Denver, involves a gene called POMC. The team discovered that POMC has a significant role in weight regulation. ...
In separate research, scientists at Princeton University have created smart mice by the addition of a single gene.
The gene, known snappily as NR2B, is responsible for making a receptor, a socket into which brain chemicals can plug. It plays an essential role in the formation of memory and the association of two separate events.
Joe Tsien, a neurobiologist at Princeton, reports in the current edition of Nature that adding the gene to mice significantly boosted the ability of the rodents to learn from the environment and to retain that knowledge. ...
Headline: Scientists' ''Smart'' Rodents Breach Fine Line That
Separates Mice From Men
BYLINE: Dave Addis
There can be but one response when you pick up a newspaper, as I did Thursday, and see this headline: ''Scientist Creates A Smarter Mouse.''
It is: ''Hey, the mice are smart enough already. Please don't encourage them.''
It's bad enough that a mouse can figure out how to chew his way into a sealed Tupperware container and eat half your rice while contaminating the rest with a sprinkling of dainty little calling cards.
Now, thanks to diligent scientists, we face the day when the mice will be able to run the electric can opener and heat up a little Dinty Moore for dinner. ...
The ''smart'' mice were developed in a laboratory by a Princeton University scientist who managed to manipulate their genetic coding in a way that lets them learn more quickly and remember things longer.
''They are quantitatively smarter,'' said one scientist familiar with the maxi-mice, ''but they are not Einsteins.'' ...
HEADLINE: Amazon.com appoints new executive to oversee
warehouse expansion
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Amazon.com named a new executive to oversee its ambitious plan to expand its shipping and distribution operations.
The Seattle-based Internet merchant named Jeffrey Wilke as its head of logistics Friday.
He replaces Jimmy Wright, a former operations expert at Wal-Mart who plans to return to retirement.
Wilke comes to Amazon.com from Allied Signal, where he was in charge of the company's pharmaceutical fine chemicals unit. He was directly responsible for 15 plants/distribution centers in the United States, Europe and Asia. ...
Wilke formerly worked in the information technology group at Andersen Consulting. He is a graduate of Princeton University and did his graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ...
NOTE: This item appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.
HEADLINE: And another thing ...
Scientists at Princeton University have genetically engineered smarter mice, a stunning breakthrough they say someday could lead to the production of smarter people. That's great, but in the meantime shouldn't somebody get cracking on that better mousetrap?
SECTION: Editorial
HEADLINE: Mighty Mouse
It's much to be doubted that the world needs a better mouse, but that's what a team of researchers claim to have done. In a report in Nature magazine, a team led by Princeton University neurobiologist Joe Z. Tsien says it altered mice genes in a way that led to improved learning and memory. The mice consistently performed better at getting out of mazes than "normal" mice.
Dr. Tsien points out that the DNA sequence of the mouse gene is about 98 percent similar to that of humans. This raises the specter of a "master race" of humans. Gene therapy on humans "is not a hypothetical question," Dr. Tsien told the New York Times. "It is time for people and the public to begin to discuss these issues."
Cloning of sheep and other animals already had launched such a discussion, of course. But genetic manipulation may be of more immediate concern than replication of entire human beings. Federal and private scientific efforts to "map" the entire genetic makeup of humans is already well along. The main purpose is to improve medicine's ability to anticipate and treat diseases with a genetic base. But pressure to use the information to improve human beings generally will be intense.
That raises profound moral and ethical questions. Tinkering with what most Americans would probably view as God's highest creation could be viewed as subversive of revealed religion, for example. Then there is the question of who would be allowed to benefit from genetic manipulation, which would probably be very expensive. Should only the rich be able to have their wiring adjusted to make them smarter? ...
HEADLINE: Bubble trouble
HIGHLIGHT: Should central banks ever try to prick asset-price
bubbles? Not all central bankers agree
IN 1994, at a conference to celebrate the tercentenary of the Bank of England, Alan Greenspan, chairman of America's Federal Reserve, raised the delicate question of whether central banks should worry more about asset-price bubbles. He concluded: "I would much prefer to be in an area where I could ask that question rather than answer it." Five years later, discussing the same issue at the annual symposium last weekend of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he was still searching for an answer. ...
Indeed, the general consensus among central bankers is that monetary policy should not try to respond directly to share prices. There was therefore huge relief that the paper on asset prices and monetary policy commissioned for the Jackson Hole conference fully supported this view. Ben Bernanke of Princeton University and Mark Gertler of New York University concluded that central banks should focus solely on consumer-price inflation; share prices should never be a direct target of monetary policy. They should raise interest rates in response to a rise in asset prices only if it spills over into excessive demand -- and hence threatens higher inflation. The authors used an economic model to simulate the impact of an asset-price bubble on the economy and found that if a central bank aims directly at asset prices it can create more not less instability. ...
Headline: Scientists create strain of smart mice by altering chemical receptor in the brain, raising the possibility of improving human learning and memory
ANCHORS: IRA FLATOW
REPORTERS: JOE PALCA
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 tasks. 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 tasks, 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. ...
HEADLINE: In Fine Print, Punctuation To Puncture Pedants
With
BYLINE: By SARAH BOXER
If footnotes, quotations and marginalia, beloved by pedants and bores, were suddenly to vanish from the planet, you might say: "Yippee! Good riddance to all that received wisdom and tiny typeface. Farewell to the dutiful handmaidens of authority." But not so fast.
Three scholars from three different fields have independently given these tools of scholarly oppression a revolutionary edge. Quotation marks, footnotes and marginalia aren't just the voice of authority: they are actually the apparatus of subversion, sarcasm, irony and nastiness. ...
So quotations have their roots firmly planted in the soil of doubt. And that means they can take their place next to footnotes, which recently have come to be seen as tools of subversion, too. In "The Footnote: A Curious History" (Harvard University Press, 1997), Anthony Grafton, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, calls footnotes "anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity." Sure, he concedes, they are generally regarded as marks of authority, like "the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to." But still, Mr. Grafton insists, footnotes are where all the fun is. ...
HEADLINE: Brain boost
BYLINE: Nell Boyce (Washington DC)
HIGHLIGHT: A new breed of clever mice reveals how neurons pull together
SUPERSMART mice created by a team of researchers in New Jersey seem to be shedding some light on how memories are recalled in humans.
Joe Tsien and his colleagues at Princeton University engineered the mice to test a theory about memories proposed in 1949 by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb. Hebb argued that when memories form, a cluster of neurons strengthen their connections. When a memory is recalled, the neurons activate simultaneously.
So neurons must have a way of "knowing" when others in the cluster are active. Scientists had speculated that this may involve a receptor called NMDA. This will make a neuron fire only if it receives stimuli from two other neurons.
Now Tsien and his colleagues have dramatic new proof that NMDA is indeed involved in memory. They genetically altered mice so that they had more versions of a key section of NMDA receptors than usual. Compared with normal mice, the transgenic mice performed much better in several different tests of learning and memory such as in water mazes, object recognition and association of cages or sounds with mild electric shocks on their feet. ...
Headline: Education Arises As Hip Election Issue; Each
Presidential Candidate Offers Way To Aid Schools
Byline: By Steven Thomma Knight Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
The race for the White House is about to turn into a schoolhouse brawl.
For the first time, major candidates from both political parties are making local education a central part of their national campaigns. Already, they are elbowing one another to be the one with the most innovative, most crowd-pleasing set of changes in the way education is financed, monitored or regulated.
Even Republicans, who just four years ago gave scant attention to the issue beyond a call to shutter the federal Department of Education, are jumping in with detailed proposals to help local schools. ...
"In the past, the Republican message has been single-minded: ending the Department of Education. The signal that sent was that (Republicans) are not concerned about education."
Today, only one of the current candidates, Republican Pat Buchanan, still calls for closing the department.
"The Republicans have basically thrown in the towel," said Princeton University political scientist Robert George. "It's something they can resist only at their peril."
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE
HEADLINE: The genius gene genie
Science has built a better mouse, or at least a smarter one, and like a lot of research today, the experiment is both fascinating and scary.
Who couldn't love "Doogie," the super mouse? Named for the star of the old "Doogie Howser, MD" TV series about a brilliant 10-year-old, the genetically enhanced breed of rodent appears to outthink and outperform its unmodified cousins.
The mouse posing on a platform in a photo-op in yesterday's papers fairly bristles with intellectual firepower as he sniffs at an object in his cage. The ability to discern new objects from old was part of a series of tasks measuring the rodent's ability to learn quickly and retain information. ...
Dr. Joe Z. Tsien of Princeton University, who developed the mice by using gene implants to double the memory protein in their brains, sounds eager to press forward.
"Civilization is based on our extraordinary human intelligence," he said. "That is why our society evolves and civilization evolves, and if there is a way to enhance intelligence, then it may not be surprising to see a change in the evolution of society."
His enthusiasm is understandable, but society should approach such change cautiously, with a sharp eye on the ethics of trying to engineer a genius race. Also, tinkering with one compartment of the brain could unhinge something else or cause medical and psychological problems. No long-term studies have been done on smart mice to see if intelligence comes at too high a price.
Much good might come from Tsien's research. It could provide a breakthrough in treatments for Alzheimer's and other diseases causing memory loss. Eventually, genetic tweaking to ensure strong mental and physical health may be as common as popping a vitamin. ...
SECTION: Editorials
Build better mouse and spring a trap
Scientists have found an intelligence gene, and a team at Princeton University has manipulated it to create a smarter mouse. As soon as they did so, they raised an ethical dilemma: What would happen if they could apply the gene to humans?
Some parents would jump at the chance to have the gene inserted into their baby-to-be. Many parents already seek every avenue to advance their children's opportunities for learning. They might see the "smart gene" as a surefire route for their children's success in life.
To be sure, the thought of applying a smart gene to human beings presents some intriguing possibilities. Generally, history has shown us that humans have flourished in times of enlightenment and floundered when mired in ignorance. We have improved our quality of life over the centuries as we have amassed more knowledge and know-how.
On the other hand, the prospect of applying a smart gene presents some alarming questions. Who would get it? If only the rich could afford it, it could become just one more way of heightening the gap between their children and those struggling to catch up. ...
HEADLINE: EDITORIAL: Of mice and men
SOURCE: STAFF
EVERY so often, science fiction turns into science fact. Two recent studies reported in the British journal Nature remind us of the story ''Flowers for Algernon,'' which was turned into the poignant movie ''Charly'' 30 years ago.
''Flowers'' was about research that resulted in a laboratory mouse becoming superintelligent. Later, the same chemical concoction was used on a dimwitted human, who quickly became a genius. But he wasn't enough of a genius to figure out how to prevent the drug from wearing off - and to prevent his own return to what he had been before.
There's no evidence so far of such a downside - if that's the proper term for a return to normality - among the unusually smart mice created by Princeton University researcher Joe Tsien, or the unusually sociable mice created by scientists at Emory University.
Both experiments involved tinkering with the genetic codes of the subject rodents. Dr. Tsien reports that mice whose DNA was manipulated to enhance certain neural receptors showed marked improvement in memory, and thereby in intelligence. ...
In a way, this altering of the very temperament and social instincts of an animal is even more fascinating, and scary, than improving its physical or mental performance. Will we one day have the ability to guarantee that all little boys grow up to be like Alan Alda? That every little girl will end up with a body like Pamela Anderson's and a mind like Carl Sagan's? ...
Section: Editorial/Opinion
Headline: Of Mice And Men
BYLINE: PAUL STANWAY, EDMONTON SUN
It's the news we've all been waiting for. Scientists have successfully engineered smarter mice, opening the door to the creation of ... a smarter mouse trap?
Seriously, the ability of scientists to enhance intelligence by inserting an extra gene into a family of mice fondly nicknamed Doogie (after the boy genius in the Doogie Howser M.D. television show) opens up some fascinating possibilities.
Not for smarter mice, but for smarter people.
The team at Princeton University in the U.S. used the genetic tinkering to increase production of a brain protein called NR2B, which normally declines with age - in people as well as mice. More of the protein would mean better brain performance, and for a longer time - or so went the theory.
And it seems to work. In mice at least.
Of course, the difference between creating smarter mice and smarter people is "a very, very big jump," points out researcher Robert Malenka. "Nevertheless, it's a jump we can make - and will make, eventually." ...
Particularly when the research suggests you only have to do it once, and the advantages (if they can be duplicated in people) would be passed on from generation to generation.
Of course there's a need to be cautious. If we've learned anything from the astonishing medical advances of the past couple of centuries, it's that these things often come with hidden costs - social or medical. Mistakes can be tragic, even lethal. ...
Headline: Gene Therapy Opens Door To Questions
Byline: The Morning Call
A scientific paper published yesterday by a researcher at Princeton University reminds us once again that the sword of technological discovery always has two edges: while advances in laboratory capability enable new achievements, they also can make our heads spin with the ethical implications of what becomes possible.
In this case, a neurobiologist has reported that he has been able to manipulate a gene in laboratory mice to improve their ability to remember what they learn. While the mouse gene is 98 percent identical to a human's, it isn't automatic that this discovery can be transferred to humans. However, there already is speculation about its usefulness.
For instance, people suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other dementias could perhaps be helped by the gene-manipulation technique. And, the Princeton scientist, Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, also has suggested that it also might be possible to stimulate the action of the memory-enhancing gene with drugs. What family member or friend who has watched a loved one suffer from dementia wouldn't want such a pill to be available?
Dr. Tsien's work underscores the theory that human intelligence has a strong physical component. "Nature" always is connected to "nurture" in how intelligence is expressed, but new knowledge about science's ability to buffer or change the ravages of a disease is inviting. Correcting or healing any physical deficiency seems to be entirely positive.
A more difficult question is whether the same techniques or drugs should be used to improve a person. When the issue is genetic manipulation and intelligence, the ethical and social issues are far more complicated than going to a plastic surgeon to change the shape of one's nose. ...
Headline: How smart genetically engineered mice are and whether the intelligence gene is the same in humans
ANCHORS: IRA FLATOW
IRA FLATOW, host:
Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
The nation and the world was talking this week about an experiment done with mice. And because our brain is so complex, many scientists never considered the possibility of finding a single gene that can play an important role in memory and learning. So they were surprised--everybody was surprised--when scientists discovered that by adding extra copies of just one gene to the brains of mice, they could boost their ability to learn things and remembering them. Announcing their results in this week's issue of the journal Nature, Joe Tsien at Princeton University and his colleagues describe the amazing mental abilities of their transgenic mice and the promise they hold for future research.
Now what is this crucial gene? Is it the only one that is responsible for intelligence? And if researchers--I'm sure you're thinking about this way ahead of me. If they can genetically engineer a mouse to be smarter, what can they do for we folks, we human beings? And maybe we don't need the gene. Maybe we just need to know what chemical that the gene makes, and there might be some medicine or some sort of medicinal aid for people like myself, who are losing our minds.
And joining me to discuss the molecular basis of memory and brainy mice are my guests: Dr. Joe Tsien, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Tsien led the study. He's the author of the Nature paper. He joins me by telephone from Princeton. ...
Charles Stevens, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Science in La Jolla, California, and, also, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. And he joins us by telephone from the Salk Institute. ...
FLATOW: Dr. Tsien, you inserted a gene into a strain of mice that made them smarter. How do you know they're smarter?
Dr. TSIEN: Well, we have done a variety of learning and memory tests, and in each of the single tests, what we found is these transgenic animals, those animals that carried this extra dose of the genes, able to outperform their control animals. Those are the ones that do not carry this extra dose.
FLATOW: How does one gene make an animal smarter? Don't we always think the brain is so complex that it would take lots of little things happening there maybe?
Dr. TSIEN: Well, scientists in the field, such as Dr. Chuck Stevens, has been long involved in this notion that there's one kind of gene, class, is like NMDA receptor, as being fundamentally able to perform learning and memory at the cellular level. That is our study--the purpose we designed it for. And the result is positive.
FLATOW: Dr. Stevens, can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Dr. STEVENS: Oh, yes, I can. What Joe did is he started with a phenomenon that people have believed for some time may be related to learning and memory. This is a phenomenon called long-term potentiation, or people in the field call it LTP. What that means is that it's a phenomenon that if you carry out certain procedures, you can improve the communications between nerve calls. The communications between nerve cells happen at a particular point called synapses, and the synapses are a point of contact, a very specialized point of contact, between one nerve cell and another. ...
And what Joe did is he took information, based on our knowledge of how LTP worked, and he rationally engineered mice in a way that would be expected to increase the ability of the synapses to get stronger. He found that was true. And then he tested the mice's behaviorally, and he showed that they actually did better on a bunch of these different tests. So what he did was a completely rational approach to an interesting scientific problem. ...
HEADLINE: Altered gene: Can it also make humans smarter?
By creating smarter mice, research may help patients with memory deficits, or counteract memory loss and even make humans smarter
NEW YORK -- In a major test of how learning works at the level of nerve cells, a scientist has created a smarter strain of mice by manipulating a gene involved in memory formation, which could lead to human babies with higher IQs.
Dr Joe Tsien, a neurobiologist at Princeton University, believes his team's work lays the basis for doing the same in people eventually, whether in helping patients with memory deficits, counteracting memory loss in the aged or even in making healthy individuals smarter.
Other experts, while praising the quality of the work, see its first application in treating patients with memory deficits rather than enhancing intelligence.
Also, they say, although there are reasons to believe that mice and humans are similar in this respect, the work's applicability to people remains to be established. ...
In seeking to understand the basic mechanism of memory -- the forming of an association between two events -- biologists have long focused on the NMDA receptor as it needs two separate signals to be triggered into action.
The NMDA receptor is composed of a variety of sub-units. One such component, known as the NR2B sub-unit, is common in young animals while another, known as the NR2A sub-unit, predominates later in life.
The NR2B sub-unit produces a much stronger effect in the nerve cell, and this is believed to be the reason why younger animals learn more easily. ...
HEADLINE: Of smarter mice and men: Don't panic just yet
Better build that better mousetrap soon. Scientists have already engineered a better mouse, manipulating a gene to improve its memory and make it more intelligent.
The significance of this is easy to overstate. Intelligence is determined by many things besides memory -- environment, for example.
Still, the news reverberates, inspiring a fresh round of ethical worrying. The little mouse with the big brain catches us off-guard and suggests that science is outpacing the nation's ethical consensus. ...
In genetics, the practical issues are far from resolved. Who should own the layout of the human genome, the genetic blueprint that defines the human species? How comfortable are we with the prospect of a society in which people are deliberately engineered?
These hard questions are arriving faster every day, but they aren't arriving all at once, and they don't have to be answered as if they were. The nation will get there as it needs.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, b/w, Princeton University
Headline: Robert Wardrop II; Sewickley Heights leader, PPG executive
Byline: Johnna A. Pro, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
People who knew Robert Wardrop II swore he invented the honor code.
In all he did, Mr. Wardrop was a quiet, gentle man whose quick mind and sense of humor drew others to him in the corporate world, in politics and in the community. ...
In 1935, he earned a degree in political science from
Princeton University. ...
After the war, he joined PPG Industries and began his ascent up
the corporate ladder. ...
HEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Craig Hubbard
Henry Craig Hubbard, 54, of Rehoboth Beach, Del., and a former longtime resident of Severna Park, died Aug. 3 at Rehoboth Beach after a long illness.
Mr. Hubbard was born in Baltimore and was the son of Mary Hubbard, currently a resident of Future Care-Chesapeake in Arnold, and the late Henry Hubbard. He graduated in 1963 from the Severn School and in 1970 from the University of Maryland where he was an outstanding lacrosse player.
One of his passions all through his life was sports, and he played and coached with enthusiasm. He coached at Severn School, the former Wroxeter School, Princeton University, the University of Maryland and several lacrosse clubs ...