Princeton in the News
September 10 to 16, 1999
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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK
HEADLINE:;
A new study sheds light on HOW MEMORY WORKS and raises questions about whether we should use genetics to make people brainier
BYLINE: Michael D. Lemonick , With reporting by David Bjerklie and Alice Park/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick Thompson/Washington
The small, brown, furry creature inside a cage in Princeton University's molecular-biology department looks for all the world like an ordinary mouse. It sniffs around, climbs the bars, burrows into wood shavings on the floor, eats, eliminates, sleeps. But put the animal through its paces in a testing lab, and it quickly becomes evident that this mouse is anything but ordinary. One after another, it knocks off a variety of tasks designed to test a rodent's mental capacities--and almost invariably learns more quickly, remembers what it learns for a longer time and adapts to changes in its environment more flexibly than a normal mouse.
This is a supermouse, no doubt about it, though it didn't get its better brain by coming from another world. It was engineered by scientists at Princeton, M.I.T. and Washington University, who cleverly altered its DNA--or, more precisely, that of its genetic forebears--in ways that changed the reactions between neurons deep within its tiny cranium.
Yet even if Doogie isn't the Einstein of the order Rodentia, as some headline writers have portrayed him, most psychologists and neurobiologists are convinced that its memory and learning ability have indeed been enhanced. That has important implications. It suggests that even though the gulf between mice and men is continent-wide, this sort of research may eventually lead to practical medical results for humans, such as therapies to treat learning and memory disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, a condition likely to afflict more and more people in an increasingly aging population. In fact, the Princeton scientists are talking to drug companies about commercializing their work.
What seems to be a single memory is actually a complex construction. Think of a hammer, and your brain hurriedly retrieves the tool's name, its appearance, its function, its heft and the sound of its clang, each extracted from a different region of the brain. Fail to connect a person's name with his or her face, and you experience the breakdown of that assembly process that many of us begin to experience in our 20s--and that becomes downright worrisome when we reach our 50s.
It was this weakening of memory and the parallel loss of ability to learn new things easily that led Princeton molecular biologist Joe Tsien to the experiments reported last week. "This age-dependent loss of function," he says, "appears in many animals, and it begins with the onset of sexual maturity."
Stanford's Robert Malenka has shown that the NMDA receptor is involved in sensitizing the brain to drugs like cocaine, heroin and amphetamines, and others are investigating its role in triggering chronic pain--two more indications that it may not be wise to try to fool Mother Nature.
It will be a while before such dangers arise, though, and--as cancer researchers have discovered all too often--it isn't even certain that what works in mice will work in people. Tsien and his colleagues believe it's not unreasonable to think it will. "The NMDA receptor in humans is nearly identical to the receptor in mice, rats, cats and other animals," he says. "We believe it's highly likely that it plays a similar role in humans."
Even so, Tsien has no plan to try tinkering with human genes--nor could he under current ethical guidelines. Drugs that can boost the action of the NR2B molecule, however, are not only ethical but already being contemplated. "Princeton has applied for a use patent for this gene," says Tsien, acknowledging his contacts with drugmakers, "although we wouldn't try to patent the gene itself."
HEADLINE: Layoffs: A Tonic for Stocks?
BYLINE: BY GENE KORETZ
HIGHLIGHT: To many investors, they're a plus
At last count, job-cut plans by major employers were up 36% from a year ago, while the Dow Jones industrial average in late August had risen 22% since December. A coincidence? While layoffs are bad news for workers who get fired, some people think they have become good news for the stock market because investors now tend to see them as moves to enhance efficiency.
That isn't quite true yet, but things may be moving in that direction, report Henry S. Farber of Princeton University and Kevin F. Hallock of the University of Illinois. In a study of 3,878 job-cut announcements from 1970 to 1997, the two economists found that the average movement of a company's stock relative to the overall market in the wake of such announcements is still slightly down. But the drop is less marked than in the past, and the share of negative reactions has fallen from 55% in the early 1970s to about 48%.
The researchers did find that more job cuts are now attributed to efficiency motives than in the past. But intriguingly, they also found that negative stock market responses to layoffs blamed on falling business demand have also lessened over time.
HEADLINE: Canadian Universities Lose Top Professors to U.S.
Institutions
BYLINE: JENNIFER LEWINGTON
Ted Magder was busy building a popular program in mass communications at York University here when a call came asking him to do the same thing at New York University.
"We were looking for the best person we could find," says Neil M. Postman, chairman of the department of culture and communication in N.Y.U.'s School of Education. "His name kept coming up, time and time again."
The overture, made in the spring of 1996, both flattered and surprised Mr. Magder. But he was in no hurry to leave Canada.
"At that moment, I did not think I wanted to move from York," he says. "I was not looking for another job, and did not imagine myself moving to the United States." Indeed, his own research, he notes, was on "media imperialism," including the effects of living in the shadow of the American cultural giant.
But six months later, he was on the N.Y.U. faculty, where he was carrying out a mandate to beef up a struggling undergraduate program -- which has since tripled in size.
The University of Toronto had a lesson last year in what it sometimes takes to plug the brain drain. During a "black week" in November, as it is now often described, two top researchers at the university weighed job offers in the United States, while a third, about to return to Canada, wavered at the possible departure of the other two.
The threatened loss would have been a body blow because all three scholars were associated with the university's Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, the country's leading center for research in the field. Only a year earlier, the institute lost its first director, Scott Tremaine, to Princeton University, and the loss of his successor, Richard Bond, would have been devastating. "In the view of all, if we lost Richard Bond, Canada might as well give up its leadership effort" in astrophysics, recalls Mr. Sedra, Toronto's provost.
Mr. Magder notes that U.S. institutions, particularly private ones, have much greater financial flexibility than Canadian universities, which are publicly financed and operate within government-set budgets.
Mr. Tremaine, now at Princeton, says he grew weary of the budget cuts at Canadian universities in the 1990s. According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, government support for Canadian universities has declined a total of $1-billion over the past five years, a 23-per-cent reduction. During the same period, state support for higher education in the United States has generally increased.
"In real estate, they say 'Location, location, location!'" says Mr. Tremaine. "In Canada, it's 'Money, money, money!'" While director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, at Toronto, he recalls, "I was always trying to play catch-up in terms of total budgets for salaries and the resources we could provide, compared to foreign competitors."
HEADLINE: Lab Official Resigns Over Lack of a Ph.D.
BYLINE: ROBIN WILSON
An official of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has overseen construction of a cutting-edge research facility involving lasers and nuclear weapons resigned last month, after it was revealed that he lacks a Ph.D.
E. Michael Campbell resigned as associate director of laser programs after several laboratory officials received copies of an anonymous letter that said he had never earned a doctorate. He is still an employee but has taken a personal leave, and has already been replaced as associate director, according to the laboratory.
Mr. Campbell could not be reached for comment. The laboratory said he had resigned for "personal reasons."
In an interview with the local Valley Times, in Pleasanton, Cal., he was quoted as saying that "personal issues" had prevented him from completing his dissertation 22 years ago, and that the need for a doctorate became insignificant in his mind as he rose through the ranks at the lab. Entries for Mr. Campbell in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Science and Engineering specify that he received a Ph.D. in applied physics and aerospace and mechanical science from Princeton University in 1977. Although he finished the course work necessary to earn a Ph.D., he never completed his dissertation.
HEADLINE: More Points for 'Strivers': the New Affirmative
Action?
BYLINE: BEN GOSE
Virtually every selective college pays attention to students who achieve beyond expectations: The student who scores 1,100 on the SAT despite coming from a poor family and attending a rundown school will often have a better chance of admission than the child of investment bankers who posts the same score.
But unlike test scores and grades -- which fit neatly into a college's admissions criteria -- measuring "disadvantage" has long been more art than science. Does a low-income kid who attends a good high school deserve a bigger preference than a rich student whose parents never went to college? Such decisions are sweated out at meetings of admissions committees, but only those inside the room know why one applicant gets in and another doesn't.
Now, researchers at the Educational Testing Service and elsewhere are developing methods that could help admissions offices measure disadvantage in a more systematic way. The service, which administers the SAT, is working on a system that would identify as a "striver" any student who scores more than 200 points above the average score of students with a similar background. The scale takes into account 14 variables, such as family income, parents' education, and the rigor of the high-school courses pursued by the student. A race-blind version has been created, along with one that considers race and ethnicity.
Thomas J. Kane, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, says the strivers model may be most useful in distilling the various aspects of disadvantage into a single variable. "It simplifies the process of comparing kids who differ on more than one family-background or school characteristic," he says.
He cautions, though, that students with low test scores should not be expected to shine in the classroom, even if they are identified as strivers. The authors of The Shape of the River (Princeton University Press, 1998), a widely cited book that explains and defends the use of affirmative action at 28 selective colleges, found that black students whose SAT scores were in the same range as those of white students subsequently earned worse college grades.
HEADLINE: Queen Noor of Jordan says all must benefit from
global economy
DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS
Queen Noor, widow of Jordan's King Hussein, urged business, government and grassroots organizations to put aside their suspicions and join forces to bring the benefits of an increasingly global community to people everywhere.
Governments can be more flexible like business, she said Wednesday, and business can be more attuned to social and ecological problems like voluntary organizations.
The U.S.-born Queen Noor, 47, earned a degree from Princeton University before marrying King Hussein in 1978. He died of cancer in February at age 63.
HEADLINE: Forbes Campaign Update.
Forbes Won't Cut Ties To Princeton Despite Controversial Professor. The AP (9/14) reported Steve Forbes has "criticized Princeton University for hiring a professor who says parents should be allowed to euthanize severely handicapped newborns." But Forbes "this week rejected entreaties from allies on the issue to cut ties to his alma mater and withhold charitable contributions unless the professor, Peter Singer, is removed." In a letter to Princeton Students Against Infanticide, Forbes said, "I know how difficult it is to work for change from within a system and a culture that has rejected what we know is the first freedom, the freedom to be born and the right to life." But he added, "To withdraw from the system or the culture you are seeking to transform only marginalizes your voice.
SECTION: WHITE HOUSE 2000
HEADLINE: Forbes Won't Nix Princeton
$$OVER EUGENICS FLAP
Steve Forbes has decided against withdrawing his funding of Princeton Univ. over the school's hiring of an Australian
professor "whose advocacy of the killing of disabled human infants has been compared to Nazi eugenics." A Princeton student group protesting the hiring of prof Peter Singer had asked Forbes, a member of Princeton's board of trustees, to withdraw his millions in financial support. Forbes responded, writing "Withdrawing from the very culture you are seeking to change, though appealing at times, will not effect lasting change. It is times such as these that cry out for courageous leadership on every front. I urge you to continue this effort." The students questioned Forbes' commitment to pro-life issues. Forbes urged Princeton Pres. Harold Shapiro earlier in '99 to rescind Singer's appointment, calling his Singer's views "bizarre."
HEADLINE: Panel Supports Use of Stem Cells for Research
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
A strong endorsement of research on human embryonic stem cells has been issued by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 10 months after President Clinton asked the group to weigh the ethical pros and cons of the new technique.
The research has provoked dissent because the principal way of deriving the cells is from the surplus human embryos created in fertility clinics. The embryos, a few days past the fertilized egg stage, are destroyed in the process. But the cells derived from them can develop into any of the body's tissues, and biologists hope they could be used as an all-purpose repair kit.
In one point of departure from the institutes' approach, the Presidential commission rejects the implied ethical separation between deriving the cells and using them. The commission, whose chairman is Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, the president of Princeton University, said that much further research was required on derivation, and that it was a "mistaken notion" to divide derivation and use of the cells between two distinct groups of scientists.
It said both types of research should be eligible for Federal funding, and it also recommended establishing a national review panel to oversee all human embryonic stem cell research.
SECTION: Editorials
HEADLINE: Ethicist argues some lives are not worth living
INFANTICIDE: New Princeton professor suggests profoundly
disabled infants be considered subjects for euthanasia
BYLINE: Nat Hentoff
Authority on First Amendment and Bill of Rights
Last year, while I was teaching at Princeton University on the politics of journalism, a lot of class time was devoted to a debate on the appointment of Princeton's very first full-time tenured professor of bioethics, Peter Singer.
An Australian, Singer was a principal founder of the animal-liberation movement and is a former president of the International Association of Bioethics. What led to our discussion in class -- and to various protests outside the university against his appointment, which starts this month -- is that he is also an advocate of infanticide. Not of any infant, but of severely disabled infants.
In class, nearly all of us agreed that in a university, a credentialed scholar should not be banned, no matter how controversial his views.
But some of us wondered why Princeton chose this renowned apostle of infanticide and certain forms of euthanasia for so influential an endowed seat at, of all places, the university's Center for Human Values.
NOTE: This column first appeared in The Washington Post.
HEADLINE: Designer genes; New science's ethical battle
BYLINE: Henry Miller
In experiments widely seen as awful news for cats, scientists using "gene therapy" have created significantly smarter mice, demonstrating that a minor genetic alteration can improve performance on a wide range of learning and memory tasks. These improvements result from the insertion of extra copies of a gene for a nerve cell protein that helps the brain recognize that two events are linked, such as the ringing of a bell and the delivery of food.
Gene therapy, the insertion of normal or modified genes into an animal or human, can be performed for two kinds of reasons. The more common is to correct genetic or acquired disorders via the synthesis in the body of missing, defective or insufficient gene products. Thousands of patients in almost three dozen countries are currently undergoing gene therapy for diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis to cancer and AIDS. Virtually no one has raised serious objections to these clinical trials.
But gene therapy can also be used for non-therapeutic purposes, even including attempts at genetic "enhancement" that would not correct abnormalities or disease but would treat conditions like baldness, or even increase human physical or mental capacities above those currently deemed normal.
The smart mouse experiments, therefore, bring to the fore a long-simmering debate about the ethics of making "designer humans." "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 mouse improvement research. "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."
There is no obvious basis for invoking more discriminatory and restrictive regulation for gene therapy, or subjecting it to more societal scrutiny, than is in place for analogous experimental therapies. Arguments against testing gene therapy for enhancement should be weighed against society's permissiveness toward experimental medical and surgical interventions in general, and those intended for non-therapeutic purposes in particular.
Henry Miller is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
HEADLINE: Forbes remains Princeton patron; Rejects the request
of pro-life students
BYLINE: Andrea Billups; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Presidential candidate Steve Forbes will not withdraw his financial support to Princeton University to protest the hiring of an Australian philosopher whose advocacy of the killing of disabled human infants has been compared to Nazi eugenics.
Princeton Students Against Infanticide, a university group that has led several campus rallies against the appointment of Peter Singer, wrote to Mr. Forbes, a member of the school's board of trustees, last month asking him to withdraw his millions from his alma mater.
In a letter written Monday to Christopher Benek, a student who heads the student group, Mr. Forbes said to withdraw his financial support of Princeton over the hiring of Mr. Singer might help his campaign temporarily, but "would be counterproductive and actually further harm our mutual efforts." He urged the students to stay in school and continue their fight.
"Withdrawing from the very culture you are seeking to change, though appealing at times, will not effect lasting change," Mr. Forbes wrote. "It is times such as these that cry out for courageous leadership on every front. I urge you to continue this effort."
In an article in the Sept. 6 issue of the New Yorker magazine, Mr. Shapiro, who heads President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Committee, said Mr. Forbes should not have been surprised that Mr. Singer was coming to Princeton to teach since members of the board of trustees must approve the hiring of all tenured professors.
The New Yorker article noted that the publicity surrounding Mr. Singer's hiring - much of it negative - forced Princeton to take elaborate security measures to protect him when he arrived on campus July 1. Mr. Shapiro has received death threats himself, the New Yorker said.
Mr. Shapiro, in a column this spring for the Daily Princetonian, defended the hire, saying Mr. Singer was internationally "revered," and would spark a vigorous debate among students.
"An important part of our purpose as a university is to ask the most difficult and fundamental questions about human existence, however uncomfortable this may be," he wrote.
HEADLINE: Wilson Had Pretty Generous Firends, Too
BYLINE: PHYLLIS LEE LEVIN
This may come as a surprise, but before there were F.O.B.s there were F.O.W.s, and they may have been far more generous.
Terry McAuliffe, whose financial help is enabling the Clintons to buy a $1.7 million Dutch Colonial home in Chappaqua, N.Y., may well have set a new standard in the competition for first friend of the Clintons, but he falls short of the presidential friends of the Woodrow Wilson era.
After all, McAuliffe, who has put up $1.35 million to secure the Clintons' mortgage, will presumably get the money back with interest, whereas there were no banking strings attached to the checks that Wilson's friends gave him for two limousines, two-thirds of the price of his retirement home and a yearly annuity of $10,000.
One limousine, a Pierce-Arrow, had originally been leased by the White House in 1919. Wilson's doctor, Cary Travers Grayson, suggested to "five old stalwart Princeton supporters" - as they called themselves - that they purchase the touring car for the president's use after his term expired in March 1921.
The men sent Grayson a check for $3,500 for the car, which was slightly redecorated: The seal of the United States was painted over, orange stripes were added to the body and the spokes, and a model of a Princeton tiger - Wilson was a former Princeton University president - replaced the classic hood ornament.
HEADLINE: Forbes won't cut ties to Princeton University over
controversial hire
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Republican presidential hopeful Steve Forbes has criticized Princeton University for hiring a professor who says parents should be allowed to euthanize severely handicapped newborns.
But Forbes this week rejected entreaties from allies on the issue to cut ties to his alma mater and withhold charitable contributions unless the professor, Peter Singer, is removed.
"I know how difficult it is to work for change from within a system and a culture that has rejected what we know is the first freedom, the freedom to be born and the right to life," Forbes wrote Monday to a group called Princeton Students Against Infanticide.
But he added: "To withdraw from the system or the culture you are seeking to transform only marginalizes your voice.... I have credibility and standing, in part, precisely because I am a member of the Board of Trustees."
Singer, widely considered the father of the international animal rights movement, began work in July as the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at Princeton's Center for Human Values.
Forbes, a 1970 Princeton graduate, has made opposition to abortion a central tenet of his second campaign for the White House.
In May, Forbes wrote to Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro that Singer's appointment "sends a dangerous and debilitating message that anything goes, that there are no bounds when it comes to questions of life and death."
HEADLINE: Professor Daniel Tsui, Nobel Laureate in Physics from Princeton University, and Professor Baruch Fischer, Dean of Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Join MRV Board
DATELINE: CHATSWORTH, Calif.
Sept. 13, 1999--MRV Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:MRVC) today announced the appointment of two new members to its board of directors. Professor Daniel Tsui and Professor Baruch Fischer will join the board effective Sept. 15, 1999.
Tsui, Arthur Le Grand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Tsui was a recipient of the American Physical Society 1984 Buckley Prize, the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Medal and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Tsui is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is currently engaged in research activity relating to properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid state physics. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1967 and for 13 years was with Bell Laboratories before joining Princeton University, where he spent the last 16 years.
ALLAN DODDS FRANK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Web site for Princeton Economics Institute once featured videos of speeches by its boss, Martin Armstrong, but they've been deleted now, apparently by the company, as Armstrong faces a criminal securities fraud complaint unsealed by the U.S. attorney Monday, accusing him of what may be a $1 billion investment swindle.
The complaint alleges Armstrong used Princeton Global Management and other companies affiliated with his institute to sell $3 billion worth of unregistered securities to Japanese institutional investors during the last two years. He called them "Princeton notes," although his companies are not associated with Princeton University.
HEADLINE: Tweaking and tucking, Miss America makes a few
adjustments
BYLINE: KARYN D. COLLINS; Asbury Park Press
Are you a closet Miss America watcher?
You know who you are: the type who swears you have no plans to watch the televised festivities but somehow ends up watching anyway. Somehow, when you channel-surf each year, you just happen to end up watching. Again.
And if we're really going to be honest, then let's talk about a certain sparkly piece of headgear you've insisted on hanging onto all these years.
But because it is that time of year, why not just give in and indulge yourself one more time.
At stake is the chance to be crowned Miss America and snag a $45,000 scholarship. Runners-up and winners of interview, platform issue, swimsuit and talent segments receive scholarship awards, too. Each contestant also receives a minimum $3,000 scholarship.
For Princeton University student Victoria Andrews Paige, winning the title of Miss New Jersey meant a $10,000 scholarship, the use of a car for a year and the chance to earn more money through public appearances.
"I'm a pretty conservative girl when it comes to this kind of thing," says Miss New Jersey, a former competitive rower for Princeton University. She plans to wear a silver, one-piece swimsuit with heels.
HEADLINE: Peter Singer: 'The Dangerous Philosopher'
The New Yorker profiles Peter Singer, the Australian bioethicist and euthanasia advocate whose appointment to a tenured position at Princeton University has been the locus of controversy in medical ethics circles since spring. Singer argues, in a contemporary utilitarian vein, that "euthanasia and infanticide are obvious necessities of the modern world."
Discussing treatment of the hopelessly ill, he said, "The notion that human life is sacred just because it's human life is medieval. The person that used to be there is gone. It doesn't matter how sad it makes us. All I am saying is that it's time to stop pretending that the world is not the way we know it to be."
The advent of Singer's professorship comes with "clouds of controversy" because he argues, without "recourse to euphemisms or other semantic sleights-of-hand, the moral justification of some homicides, including infanticide," writes Newsweek columnist George Will. Will sides with the critics of Singer's unanimously-approved appointment, who note that a "university's passion for intellectual diversity is today much more apt to encompass advocacy of infanticide than of protection of the unborn," and that Singer's views will become more prestigious due to his Princeton connection. Will concludes, "Still, Singer, three of whose grandparents died in the Holocaust, brings to his vocation the earnestness of one who knows that ideas have consequences. ... He will do more to stimulate serious reflection -- and more to stimulate opposition to his (literally) homicidal ideas -- than he will to make his ideas acceptable" (9/13 issue).
HEADLINE: THE WHITE HOUSE Vice President Al Gore names Lisa
Brown new Legal Counsel
DATELINE: Nashville, TN
Vice President Al Gore announced today that he has named Lisa Brown as his new Legal Counsel. Ms. Brown will replace Charles Burson, who was named the Vice President's new Chief of Staff in August.
"Lisa is an incredibly talented attorney, whose knowledge and advice I know I can rely on and trust," the Vice President said. "I am very pleased that she has decided to take on this new responsibility."
"Lisa Brown will be an invaluable asset first to the Vice President and then to me as Chief of Staff," said Charles Burson. "She combines great experience, a sharp legal mind and an understanding of how public policy and law intersect."
Ms. Brown graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in Political Economy in 1982. She received her law degree with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1986. After Law School, she clerked for the Honorable John C. Godbold on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Montgomery, Alabama. She then had a one-year fellowship as a Staff Attorney at the Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles, California.
HEADLINE: PERSONAL HEALTH; Viewing Organs, With Lasers and
Helium
BYLINE: AP
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Sept. 13
In a laboratory at the University of Virginia, a group of patients took a deep breath of helium and watched their lungs light up. And doctors, for the first time, were able to see how the patients' breath flowed through their lungs.
The scientists were using a new process. In it, gases are treated with laser beams to illuminate organs that are difficult to see with conventional scanning. Researchers now are ready to try it in testing for colon cancer, and they say it may also offer better images of the brain or a woman's reproductive tract without the discomfort or radiation involved in other tests.
These hyperpolarized gases are still highly experimental. But radiologists say they hold great promise. "It's a new idea and a new technique" that provides "very striking" images, said James MacFall, a Duke University medical physicist who also has tested the gases.
In hyperpolarization, molecules of gas are bombarded with lasers so they all spin in the same direction, rather than at random. Two Princeton University physicists, researching hyperpolarized gases for the military, discovered that the lined-up molecules of hyperpolarized helium-3 produced an M.R.I. signal thousands of times stronger than today's technology.
Helium is benign: divers routinely breathe it. The isotope helium-3, a byproduct of the tritium used in hydrogen bombs, can be hyperpolarized. Those being tested simply gulp a lungful and hold their breath for 10 seconds while the M.R.I. scans.
HEADLINE: Brown U.'s Gee to lead Council of Ivy Group
Presidents
BYLINE: By Jackie Delamatre, Brown Daily Herald
SOURCE: Brown U.
DATELINE: Providence, R.I.
The "President" in front of Gordon Gee's name will serve a double purpose for the next two years.
Gee is taking over for Richard Levin, the president of Yale University, as president of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents.
"The purpose [of the organization] is to set rules and regulations governing an athletic and non-athletic relationship among the eight members," Gee said.
"My role is to chair the meetings and to work closely with the executive director, whose office is in Princeton," Gee said. "I make sure that work is done expeditiously and in accordance with the rules."
HEADLINE: Polls set Penn State in top ten
BYLINE: By Nick Falsone, Daily Collegian
SOURCE: Pennsylvania State U.
DATELINE: University Park, Pa.
A statistical formula was recently used to rank colleges in the United States. The rankings, which were published in U.S. News and World Report, considered academic reputation, retention of students and numerous other factors to construct the results.
Penn State ranked 40th.
However, putting statistics aside, when average people were simply asked to identify the best university in the nation, Penn State ranked fifth.
Princeton University released the results of its Gallup Poll List of Best Universities last month.
Penn State came in fifth place, tied with Yale University, University of Notre Dame, Duke University and UCLA. The first four colleges were Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The perceptions of top schools varied widely depending on the region of the country, according to a Princeton press release.
HEADLINE: Philosopher Prattle at large
BYLINE: Bruce Fein
He teaches ethics on the hallowed grounds of Princeton University, which catapulted Woodrow Wilson and his soaring vision of international morality into the White House.
He has written in "Should the Baby Live?": "It does not seem wise to add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children."
And the provocative philosopher, Peter Singer, has recently prattled in the New York Times Magazine (Sept. 5) about an ethical imperative to donate at least the $200 needed to rescue one impoverished child from preventable disease, malnutrition, or death. Mr. Singer further amplified: "In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening. That's right: I'm saying that you shouldn't buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children's lives." He emphatically denies that moral judgments should be trimmed or guided by public opinion or human nature; they are revealed and eternal truths received from utilitarian heavens, not matters of degree.
HEADLINE: An AP member exchange feature - Brother, sister win
world rowing medals
BYLINE: DON DOXSIE
DATELINE: BETTENDORF, Iowa
It's just this puny little thing. It's not much larger than a half dollar, with a flat gold finish and a couple of little grooves in it, attached to a cloth strap.
It doesn't look like much.
But to Sara and Eric Den Besten, it is the sweet fruit of nearly a decade of hard labor. The Den Bestens, born in Fulton, Ill., and raised in Bettendorf, each won gold medals recently at the FISA World Rowing Championships in St. Catharines, Canada.
Eric won his gold in the lightweight men's eight. Sara did it in lightweight women's quadruple sculls. They are believed to be the first brother-sister duo ever to win world championships in the same year.
Those early workouts were here on the Mississippi River. The folks, Ron and Nancy Den Besten, still live in northeast Davenport, but the kids have moved closer to the rowing action.
Eric lives in Princeton, N.J., where the U.S. men's team is based. He works "almost full-time" for Prudential Preferred Financial Services while also doing his workouts.
Sara lives in the same area for part of the year, working in research for Princeton University's psychology department. She also spends a portion of the year in San Diego, where the U.S. women's team is headquartered.
HEADLINE: Building a Smarter Mouse
BYLINE: EDITED BY CATHERINE ARNST
A TEAM OF ACADEMIC SCIENTISTS has created a strain of supersmart mice by adding a gene that boosts their ability to learn and memorize. Plus, the mice's brains don't slow down as they age.
The research, reported in the Sept. 2 issue of Nature, proves that genetic improvement of intelligence in mammals is feasible, say the scientists. In the near term, drug companies could try to develop memory-enhancing medicines that target that same gene in humans.
The smart mice -- a strain named Doogie after Doogie Howser, M.D., a TV show about a child genius -- carry extra copies of the NR2B gene, which controls the brain's ability to associate one event with another. The gene programs a protein called NMDA that serves as a receptor in the brain for signals associated with memory. The receptor needs two signals -- such as a lit match and a sensation of heat -- to create a memory. In young mammals, the NMDA receptor makes such connections very quickly, but it slows down after adolescence, and learning and memorizing become harder.
Princeton University neurobiologist Joe Z. Tsien and colleagues from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and St. Louis' Washington University bioengineered the mice with extra copies of the NR2B gene, designed to increase in activity as the mice age. Tsien says the Doogie mice were much better than normal mice at solving maze problems, learning sounds, and retaining knowledge, and their brains retained the biological characteristics of juvenile minds.
HEADLINE: Icahn's Big Bet on Low Rollers
HIGHLIGHT: Are there enough budget gamblers out there to make his mini-empire of ragtagcasinos pay off?
Carl C. Icahn has always loved other people's trouble. So, soon after the Stratosphere casino and hotel headed for bankruptcy court in 1997, just nine months after opening at a cost of $550 million, Icahn sensed opportunity. The famed bottom-fisher shelled out $61 million to buy the Stratosphere's junk bonds at fire-sale prices. That eventually enabled him to wind up with 89.6% of the casino and its 36-story hotel -- with a roller coaster on top.
The Stratosphere is a prominent feature of the fast-rising Las Vegas skyline. But it's in a sleazy part of the Strip known for dives and drug deals, far from the hottest casinos. Yet Icahn, the 63-year-old onetime corporate raider who waged more than a dozen high-profile takeover battles in the 1980s, is making it the flagship of a ragtag gambling empire he has been quietly assembling for the past two years.
Known for his quick investment flips, Icahn seems to be into gaming for at least a while. In July, he turned down an estimated $80 million from Station Casinos for Arizona Charlie's, which would have given him a fast $10 million return. His own personal haunt has so far been the swank Bellagio, where industry sources say he has a $1 million credit line. ''People think of him as a raider,'' says Jeff Silver, his lawyer in the Arizona Charlie's deal. ''But he really seems to like the casino business.''
Icahn certainly knows his way around the gaming tables. Raised in Queens, N.Y., he played chess as a boy with his father, a lawyer and cantor. But after graduating from Princeton University, then dropping out of medical school at New York University, Icahn became an avid poker player during a stint in the U.S. Army, according to earlier published accounts.
HEADLINE: New Jersey Welcomes Brazilian Officials
DATELINE: TRENTON, N.J.
Sept. 13, 1999--Brazilian Governor Anthony William Garotinho of the State of Rio de Janeiro led a trade delegation to New Jersey, discussing the further expansion of trade and industry initiatives between the two states with Governor Whitman and New Jersey Commerce officials. "With the largest economy and population in Latin America, Brazil presents considerable export opportunities for New Jersey in the global marketplace," said Governor Christie Whitman.
The delegation also toured Princeton University and Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton. Governor Whitman will greet Governor Garotinho and the delegation at Drumthwacket this evening.
HEADLINE: David C. Gompert Named New President of RAND
Europe
DATELINE: LEIDEN, The Netherlands
Sept. 13, 1999--David C. Gompert, one of the United States' most distinguished thinkers on Atlantic relations, will become president of RAND Europe, the famous think tank's European subsidiary, effective Jan. 15. James A. Thomson, RAND's president and chief executive officer, announced the appointment today.
A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Gompert earned a master of public affairs degree from Princeton University. He has held teaching and research professorships at the Naval Academy and at the National Defense University, and has published numerous books, articles and research papers on national security, technology and international affairs. "Our expansion plans stem from our belief that the challenges facing the institutions and enterprises of the new Europe demand the kind of rigorous and far-sighted analysis for which RAND is renowned," Gompert stated.
HEADLINE: Foundation naturalist wins award
John Page Williams Jr., senior naturalist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Arnold resident, will receive the 1999 Jan Hollmann Environmental Education Award at an annual awards ceremony this month.
Mr. Williams, who has been with the bay foundation since 1973, was nominated by Dr. Stanley P. Watkins, chief of oncology at Anne Arundel Medical Center. Mr. Williams is a board member of the Severn River Land Trust, a respected environmental author and educator. He also writes the "Chesapeake Notebook" column that appears in The Capital.
He graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in biology, earned a master's degree from Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Virginia and also studied marine science at the University of Maryland.
Through decades of unselfish volunteerism, exceptional professional ser vice, enthusiasm and leadership, Mr. Williams is credited with influencing countless children and adults to protect the bay.
SHOW: BUSINESS CENTER
September 13, 1999, Monday
HEADLINE: Clarification of Earlier Story on Princeton Economics
ANCHORS: RON INSANA
RON INSANA, co-anchor:
A clarification now. Earlier we told you the head of Princeton Economics is facing federal fraud charges. Princeton Economics is not connected with Princeton University.
HEADLINE: THE WHITE HOUSE
Pres names W. Bader as Ass Sec for Educational & Cultural Affairs at Department of State
President Clinton today announced his intent to nominate William B. Bader as Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs at the Department of State.
Dr. William B. Bader of Alexandria, Virginia, is currently serving as Associate Director for Educational and Cultural Affairs at the United States Information Agency. He is a former Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He was on the faculty of Princeton University and served as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
Dr. Bader received a B.A. from Pomona College in 1953, an M.A. in 1960 and a Ph.D. in 1964 from Princeton University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Munich in 1953-1954.
HEADLINE: Add a gene and make a sharp-witted mouse
SERIES: Genetics
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."
HEADLINE: Scientists Seek Key to Make Brain Heal Self
CELL REGENERATION IN BRAINS OF BIRDS, MONKEYS OFFERS HOPE OF NEUROLOGIC; CURES
BYLINE: BY MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK
Don't call David E. Scott if you have Parkinson's disease. If you've had a stroke. If someone you love has suffered brain damage in a car accident.
He would sympathize, of course, but he can't help you.
Not yet, at least.
Scott, a scientist at Eastern Virginia Medical School, is looking for a way to make a damaged human brain repair itself.
A professor in the department of pathology and anatomy, Scott is one of many scientists worldwide taking part in a revolution, working toward a goal that was once considered impossible.
The first challenge to the assumption about brain cell growth came about 30 years ago. But that work was mostly ignored until the 1980s, when a researcher at New York's Rockefeller University discovered that adult birds make new brain cells to replace ones that are dying. Other animal work followed. Neuron regeneration has been seen in mice in the olfactory system, the area responsible for registering smell.
In March 1998, scientists announced a discovery in primates. Researchers at Rockefeller and Princeton University found that marmoset monkeys were making new brain cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with long-term memory.
HEADLINE: Students protest colleges' profiting off sweatshop
garb
BYLINE: Mary Deibel; SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Marion Traub-Werner wants the "no-sweat" movement to heat up on campus this fall so colleges can't profit by selling clothes that carry the school name but are made under sweatshop conditions.
"This grass-roots movement has spread from traditional activist campuses to schools not usually thought of in that mold," says the 22-year-old University of North Carolina senior and Toronto native.
Miss Traub-Werner underscores her point by holding up a Tar Heels T-shirt she said "typified what a woman my age in Guatemala might be paid 10 cents an hour to make."
UNC-Chapel Hill was one of a half-dozen colleges to see "sweat-free" sit-ins last spring that started at Duke University before spreading to Georgetown, Wisconsin, Michigan, Boston University and Princeton University.
Students at dozens of other campuses from Harvard to University of California at Berkeley held rallies, launched anti-sweatshop Web sites and circulated no-sweat petitions. University of California-Santa Barbara students staged a mock sweatshop fashion show, and Yale held a "knit-in" as the no-sweat movement marked a sudden upsurge in student activism, much of it labor-related and backed by labor unions and human rights groups.
The Concord Monitor, Concord, N.H.
What's all this about scientists making a smarter mouse? The plain old mice we've got now are smart enough to cause plenty of trouble.
Perhaps you think we are joking. Sadly, no. The disturbing evidence was right there on the front page of The New York Times: "Scientist Creates A Smarter Mouse." It must be true; the story is full of mumbo-jumbo about calcium ions, receptors and neurons. It even comes with a graphic.
The scientist in question is Dr. Joe Tsien of Princeton University. The mice in question have had their brains genetically enhanced by the good doctor. He named them "Doogies," as in Doogie Howser, M.D., a TV show about a teenaged doctor.
Pretty funny. But how would you feel if these mice were smart enough to get the joke? Fortunately, being Ivy League rodents, they probably spend their spare time watching public TV.
HEADLINE: Blacks reap benefits of historic econ boom
BYLINE: By AZELL MURPHY CAVAAN
After years of being bypassed during boom times, blacks are now seizing new opportunities as the prosperity of the nation's economy has finally begun trickling down to those who for years have been left behind.
"We're doing things. We're going to college, getting good jobs, buying homes," said 19-year-old Morris Woods, as he walked through the courtyard at Roxbury Community College to sign up for fall classes.
"Right now, I feel like the sky is the limit. There's nothing we can't do."
Last year, a poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation's first black think tank, reported that for the first time in history blacks were more likely than whites to say they were better off financially than in the previous year.
"Poor blacks never lost their faith in work, education and individual effort," Jennifer L. Hochschild, a political scientist at Princeton University and the author of "Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class and the Soul of the Nation," told The New York Times. "What's different now is that they can do something about it."
HEADLINE: A SMARTER MOUSE
And now, medical science presents . . . Mighty "The Brain" Mouse.
It's no cartoon. The creation of a smarter strain of mice by the manipulation of a gene involved in memory formation represents yet another potentially beneficial, but perhaps equally troublesome, advance in the controversial field of genetic engineering.
Theoretically, the feat could lead to the prevention of memory loss in people. However, it also could foreshadow the development of more intelligent animals, including humans. And that, as with the cloning of sheep and cattle, raises the possibility of genetically enhanced designer babies.
A team from Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University of St. Louis added to mice a gene scientists believe controls the brain's ability to associate one event with another. It enabled otherwise ordinary mice to learn new tasks more quickly and remember them longer, and helped the brains of older mice perform more like those of juveniles.
"This points to the possibility that enhancement of learning and memory or even IQ is feasible through genetic means, through genetic engineering," said neurobiologist Joe T. Tsien of Princeton, who directed the research.
HEADLINE: The Nation; Politics; And the Beat Goes On:
THE CONTINUING POWER OF THE LIBERAL '60S
BYLINE: Michael Lind and Sean Wilentz, Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and, Washington editor of Harper's magazine. Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockton, professor of history at Princeton University
DATELINE: PRINCETON
As the 2000 election campaign approaches, it appears that the 30 Years' War in American politics is over and the spirit of the '60s has won--not the radical '60s, now broadly condemned by the right, but the liberal early '60s. The belated triumph of the tradition of '60s liberalism is one of the remarkable political phenomena of our time. All the more remarkable, perhaps, because it has not been pointed out.
The liberal '60s began, cautiously, under President John F. Kennedy, who came into office with a razor-thin plurality and was initially far more interested in foreign affairs than domestic matters. In our memory of that transformative decade, the radical second half of the '60s, 1965-1970, overshadows the liberal '60s of 1960-1965. But it is amazing how much was achieved in those first years, in conjunction with the 88th and 89th Congresses.
By the end of 1965, using powers of the federal government, racial segregation had been effectively outlawed, and America's racist immigration policy had been transformed, all in the name of the liberal integrationist ideal. Though the effort to provide universal health care was defeated, Medicare and Medicaid helped to round out President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. These epochal reforms were not the work of politicians alone; civil-rights activists, federal judges and ordinary citizens played crucial instigating roles, pushing elected officials to move faster and farther than they were, at first, prepared to go.
Despite the conventional political wisdom on both right and left, the major achievements of '60s liberals are virtually sacrosanct today. Consider three major legacies: federally enforced civil rights (including protection for women under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act); Medicare; and a liberal internationalist foreign policy based on such alliances as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Today, liberals and conservatives debate affirmative action and the merits and extent of racial gerrymandering--but not the basic federal civil-rights protections established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare financing is a subject of contention, but its legitimacy is accepted by both Republicans and Democrats. Just as no mainstream conservative proposes to abolish federal civil-rights protections, none is prepared to repeal the federal commitment to providing health care to the nation's elderly; the debate, rather, is over whether to extend that commitment by having Medicare pay for prescription drugs. No mainstream liberal or conservative proposes dissolving NATO.
COLUMN: On Campus
BYLINE: The Record
MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Joan Ficke has been named assistant vice president of academic affairs for personnel. The Ridgewood resident, who has served as interim vice president for the past 18 months, has been director of the university Women's Center for seven years.
A full professor in the department of health professions, physical education, and leisure studies, Ficke is a Montclair State alumna who has master's and doctoral degrees in school health education and community health, respectively, from New York University.
She was a visiting Faculty Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, where she participated in researching health and education policy issues.
HEADLINE: Bibliography
BYLINE: Christopher Carey
Sources for more information about public funding of and construction for stadiums:
Books
* "Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis," by
Michael N. Danielson, (Princeton University Press
1997).
HEADLINE: Utopia? Let's just make the best of what we've
got
BYLINE: John Carey
John Carey, author of a new study of our quest for the perfect world, says visions of heaven soon turn into a communist hell
Coming up to the third millennium we are as enthralled as ever by the mirage of utopia. We still think there must be some way, if only we could hit on it, of achieving universal happiness. We long for a smiling world with everyone loving everyone else. That is perhaps the most ancient utopian dream, though ideas about how to achieve it have varied over the centuries.
As an alternative to destruction, eugenics has for centuries been the most-favoured method of producing people fit for utopia. In Plato's Republic, males and females were paired off on eugenic lines, and Tacitus, in his utopian account of the German nation, added the admiring observation that they banned intermarriage with foreigners to preserve the purity of the race. Thanks to the Nazis, eugenics became a dirty word for a time after the war. But it is fast regaining ground. The promise that genetic engineering holds out for improving the race represents the most significant utopian advance since nuclear fission. It at last brings into the sphere of the possible the production of real-life utopians - disease-free, super-brainy, super-fit - of the sort that utopian writers have been dreaming about for centuries.
Professor Lee M Silver, of Princeton University, predicts that by 2350 parents wealthy enough to afford it will be able to have designer children, immune to most diseases and carrying synthetic genes that enormously increase their physical and mental powers. The human race will divide into two sub-species: the GeneRich minority, providing the top athletes, scientists, businessmen and artists, and the huge underclass of naturals, doing menial jobs and subject to all the old diseases. Though intermarriage between the two groups will occasionally take place at first, they will increasingly become genetically incompatible.
HEADLINE: Tragic Human Toll of the 'Ideal' Contraceptive That Failed
THEY SAID PERSONA WAS AS RELIABLE AS A CONDOM. IT WASN'T. NOW MOTHERS ARE SET TO SUE
BYLINE: Roger Dobson
WHEN it was launched three years ago it was hailed as the best thing since the Pill - and as safe as a condom.
Women flocked to buy the new computerised device that would tell them when it was safe to have sex without getting pregnant.
Many loved the fact that it didn't involve taking drugs - and the Catholic Church welcomed it for its "natural" qualities.
But now it's a very different story for many who bought the Persona contraceptive device
Two experts have cast doubt on its reliability rate and one claims that it should be marketed as being only 80 per cent reliable. And if they're right, as many as 30,000 women could have had unwanted pregnancies.
Already, around 120 women who became pregnant while using it are poised to launch legal action for compensation against the makers, Unipath - who said it was 94 per cent effective.
Claims that Persona is 94 per cent reliable are based on calculations whose logic is fundamentally flawed, says Professor James Trussell, a world authority on the efficiency og contraceptives.
The way the sums have been done means that the more people who use the device incorrectly, the more reliable it will appear, says the professor of economics at the prestigious Princeton University.
HEADLINE: Ethics Questions Cloud the Waters of Medical Research
BYLINE: Alexandria Berger
The Sept. 13 issue of Time focuses on Princeton University's molecular-biology department's rat research. In conjunction with M.I.T. and Washington University, scientists genetically manipulated your average rodent into a super mouse nicknamed ''Doogie,'' after the precocious TV character, Doogie Howser, MD.
Their success led to a breakthrough discovery in the function of memory and IQ. In turn, this will eventually make the difference between living disabled with brain injury, mental retardation, Alzheimers and other conditions, or receiving corrective gene therapy.
Do you or your child not only want to be cured, but become smarter? How much smarter? What will you be willing to pay? It may be a matter of supply and demand. I'll have a ''tall'' gene, please, so I can see as the ethics battle begins.
HEADLINE: Creation of Black Holes
ANCHORS: IRA FLATOW
REPORTERS: RICHARD HARRIS
IRA FLATOW, host:
This is SOUNDS LIKE SCIENCE. I'm Ira Flatow.
Spanish and American astronomers say they have persuasive new evidence that a black hole can be created when a star explodes. Black holes are massive celestial objects where gravitation is so strong that nothing, including light, can escape the pull. A study in the journal Nature helps explain how at least some of these mysterious objects may form. NPR's Richard Harris has the story.
RICHARD HARRIS reporting:
Ask a theorist how a standard black hole is created, and he or she will say, Easy. Just get a massive star to burn out and collapse on itself, or get a star to explode in a fiery supernova. If the cinder that's left behind is big enough, it's sure to be a black hole.' But ask an astronomer to show you clear evidence of this process, and you'll get some downcast looks and toe-scraping on the ground, until now.
Rafael Rebolo, an astronomer at Spain's Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, says consider the case of Nova Scorpius 1994.
Mr. RAFAEL REBOLO (Astronomer, Spain's Institute of Astrophysics): The object was discovered in 1994 by an X-ray satellite when a strong X-ray eruption took place in some part of the sky close to the Scorpion constellation.
HARRIS: Rebolo figured that if the black hole were the result of an exploding star, he might see the stuff that's produced in this kind of explosion embedded in the companion star. These supernova explosions cook up heavier elements, including oxygen, sulfur, silicon and magnesium. And, sure enough, Rebolo and his colleagues now report that the companion star has 10 times more of these elements than our own sun does, so it apparently weathered a nearby stellar explosion.
Mr. REBOLO: So far there was no evidence for a connection between a supernova and a black hole because there was no observation or evidence. There are some marginal evidences for this, but only marginal. I think we have presented the more-clear evidence for a connection between supernova explosion and black-hole formation.
HARRIS: Other astronomers agree that this research group has made a compelling case. Bohdan Paczynski is an astrophysicist at Princeton University.
Mr. BOHDAN PACZYNSKI (Astrophysicist, Princeton University): These observations clearly demonstrate that, in fact, a lot of matter ejected by supernova stayed on the companion, polluting it in a way. That was the biggest surprise for me.
HEADLINE: Coleman Stepping Down as NL Boss
SOURCE: Wire services
BYLINE: The Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK
National League president Len Coleman, upset with owners proposals to strip his job of nearly all authority, plans to resign after the World Series, several senior baseball officials said Friday.
Coleman, a native of Montclair and baseball's highest-ranking black official, has headed the NL since March 1994.
He had been resisting the efforts of commissioner Bud Selig to switch control of umpires from the league presidents to Sandy Alderson, the executive vice president of baseball operations. He also has fought with Selig over the hiring of minorities.
Coleman, a Princeton University graduate whose annual salary is thought to be in the $600,000 range, had been negotiating a settlement of his contract with Selig's staff but had kept his plans private.
HEADLINE: Teaching the unthinkable
BYLINE: Oliver North
America's next generation of leaders has gone back to school. Classes have resumed throughout our nation's elementary schools, high schools and colleges. The ostensible purpose of their matriculation: to master the tools they will need to "pursue happiness."
And at some schools, that may actually happen. Some students will be afforded an opportunity to study with great scholars, to be exposed to the great ideas in Western civilization, to learn how to use science and math to better their fellow man.
But not everywhere. At Princeton University, the place where James Madison went to study theology, the class of 2003 will have a chance to study something much different: how and why we should be killing "defective" children.
That unthinkable concept springs from the mind, the pen and the lessons of one Professor Peter Singer, one of Princeton's newest "academic acquisitions." The Oxford-educated Mr. Singer, the author of "Animal Liberation," is now a tenured member of the prestigious university's faculty in of all places, Princeton's "University Center for Human Values." He believes parents should have the right to kill their children up to 28 days after birth if the child has "severe disabilities." In another of his books, the horrifically misnamed tome, "Practical Ethics," Professor Singer rationalizes this horrific idea: "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."
Not wrong? Where, when, how could infanticide not be wrong? Mr. Singer defends his position by saying that at a mere 28 days a child doesn't "understand" what it is like to be alive. Mr. Singer offers as an exemplar of justifiable infanticide, the killing of a child with hemophilia. He writes, "When the death of a disabled infant one with hemophilia will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of a happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second."
Mr. Singer's staunchest champion is the man who hired him, Princeton's president, Harold Shapiro, who also serves as the chairman of President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Mr. Shapiro cites the need to offer "a forum for the free and open consideration of ideas, even when some of these ideas make some - or even most - of us uncomfortable."
Uncomfortable? How about repugnant. How about unconscionable?
HEADLINE: A Computer Scientist Cranks Up Electronic
Efficiency
BYLINE: ROBIN WILSON
When he was 6 years old, David I. August helped his father build the family's first computer in the basement of their home. He's still working on computers, but he's moved up from the cellar to Princeton University.
Mr. August starts his first tenure-track job this fall as a new assistant professor there.
For Ph.D.'s in computer science and engineering, the job market is flush with academic and corporate positions. Mr. August's work in computer architecture is considered so hot -- he is helping design the next generation of microprocessors -- that he landed seven job interviews at major institutions and got an offer from each of them: Cornell, North Carolina State, and Purdue Universities, and the Universities of California at Irvine, Texas at Austin, and Wisconsin at Madison, in addition to Princeton.
Most of Mr. August's work concerns a part of the computer called the compiler, which until the past few years has been somewhat overlooked, as engineers have concentrated on making silicon chips more efficient. The compiler translates what a programmer has written into directions a computer can follow. By making the compiler more efficient, a computer engineer can take some of the workload off the silicon chip.
HEADLINE: An Anthropologist Finds Indians Lived in
Less-Than-Perfect Harmony With Nature
BYLINE: JEFF SHARLET
In one way or another, Shepard Krech III has spent most of his life looking for American Indians. As a young graduate student, he did so by shouldering his father's Winchester .30-06 rifle and heading north to hunt with an Arctic tribe. Now in his middle age, an anthropologist at Brown University and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, he looks for Indians in their stories, the stories white people told about them, and the stories both tell today.
In his new book, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (W.W. Norton), he is interested most of all in stories about how American Indians changed the land, and how the land changed them.
The "myth" of Mr. Krech's title is the ecological Indian -- the American Indian who lived in harmony with nature before Europeans arrived. The "history" is in the shards of evidence that survive to tell a different tale: Some Indians may have left few marks on the land, but others may have farmed it to exhaustion, set fires that raged beyond control, and hunted species to local extinction.
The Ecological Indian begins and ends not in the wild but on Madison Avenue. It was in the heart of New York City in 1971 that the most famous image of the American Indian was born: a broad, rough-skinned face framed by black braids, a single tear welling out of eyes that seem to see further than our own. "Pollution," declared the ad. "It's a crying shame."
In the jargon of advertising, the Crying Indian made 15 billion "people impressions." In the language of cultural studies, Iron Eyes Cody, the actor who portrayed him, became an icon. Created a few months after the first Earth Day, the ad came to symbolize not only the growing environmental movement, but also several centuries of belief about the people it cast as natural conservationists.
Around the time of the Crying Indian, he argues, the political and moral tide of environmentalism subsumed ecology, the study of how ecosystems work, into a crusade to make the environment better or, at least, prevent it from becoming worse.
Such a perspective is "essentially a secular form of Christian teleology," says Andrew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. In The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (under contract with Cambridge University Press), he sums up the thinking that lies behind the use of buffalo -- or the ecological Indian -- as a symbol of purity: "[H]umankind sinned, fell from grace, and was banished from Eden; repentance, however, will bring a return to Paradise."
HEADLINE: Genetic Alteration Makes Mice Smarter
BYLINE: DAVID L. WHEELER
In research sure to arouse speculation that science will one day create smarter humans, biologists have genetically modified mice so they became better at solving mazes and learning about their environment.
In the short run, scientists believe that the research will open up new avenues to treat conditions, such as dementia, that cause memory loss.
Ways may be found to use drugs to create the same effect achieved with genetic alteration.
In the experiments with mice, the scientists added a single gene, which serves as the blueprint for a receptor in nerve cells for particular chemical signals. That gene is known to exist in humans as well.
Researchers working with the genetically altered mice tested the ability of the animals to recognize an object, to remember the space around them, and to associate fear correctly with relevant stimuli.
Joe Z. Tsien, an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University, in St. Louis, reported their results in the September 2 issue of the journal Nature.
They view their finding as confirmation of a theory posed in 1949 by Donald O. Hebb, a professor of psychology at McGill University, in Montreal, that learning and memory are based on changes in the strength of the connections between simultaneously active nerve cells. The receptor associated with the gene that the scientists added to the mice strengthens synaptic connections.
HEADLINE: An Ivy League Summer Stroll Among the Roses
BYLINE: The Morning Call
Hillary Freudenthal of Cheyenne, Wyo., and Steve Seem of Emmaus, both students at Princeton University, enjoy the last days of summer break at the Rose Garden in Allentown on Thursday.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO by MICHAEL KUBEL, Special to The Morning Call
HEADLINE: Back Channels: The Intelligence Community; Cold War
Spies to Compare Notes in Berlin
BYLINE: Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer
SPY FICTION: With school back in session, Frederick P. Hitz, formerly with the CIA, can be found this fall on Wednesday afternoons at Princeton University teaching a course entitled, "The Myth and Reality of Espionage: The Spy Novel."
A syllabus prepared by the CIA's former inspector general explains that the 12-week freshman seminar "will grapple with the moral questions raised in espionage--the manipulation of other humans; its attempted justification in protecting the national interests of one's country; the long term corrosive effects of deceit and clandestinity on the soul of the spymaster, and the attraction of espionage for its own sake."
Reading material for the course will include some classics, potboilers, Cold War thrillers and post-Cold War fiction. On the list:
"Kim" by Rudyard Kipling (1900); "The Riddle of the Sands" by Erskine Childers (1903); "The Hunt For Red October" by Tom Clancy (1984); "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad (1907); "Thirty-Nine Steps" by John Buchan (1915); "A Coffin for Dimitrios" by Eric Ambler (1937); "Ashenden" by W. Somerset Maughan (1937); "Casino Royale" (1982) and "Dr. No" (1958) by Ian Fleming; "The Day of the Jackal" by Frederick Forsyth (1971); "The Human Factor" by Graham Greene (1978); "The Perfect Spy" by John Le Carre (1986); "Agents of Innocence" by David Ignatius (1987); and "The Untouchable" by John Banville (1997).
AP Online
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
September 15, 1999; Wednesday
HEADLINE: NHL Hall of Famer Quackenbush Dies
DATELINE: NEWTOWN, Pa.
Bill Quackenbush, a Hall of Famer and one of the least penalized defensemen in NHL history, has died at 77.
He died Sunday at Chandler Hall Hospice.
Quackenbush played for Detroit and Boston in a 13-year NHL career. He joined the Red Wings in 1942 and retired in 1956 after seven seasons with the Bruins.
He once went 132 consecutive games without a penalty. In 1949, he became the first defenseman to receive the Lady Byng Trophy for ability and sportsmanship.
He was a hockey and golf coach at Princeton from 1967 to 1985, leading the men's golf team to five Ivy League titles and the women's hockey team to three.
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
HOOG, ARMAND
HOOG-Armand of Barnstable, MA, formerly of Princeton, NJ and Bar-Sur-Loup, France, September 10, 1999. Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, scholar and novelist. Beloved husband of Marie-Jaques (Debrix). Father of Isabelle Hoog Naginski of Concord, MA, Guillaume Hoog of Barnstable and Marjorie Hoog of NYC. Brother of Ginette Van Elsuwe of Pau, France and Isabelle Jeudy of Laon, France. Grandfather of Erika Naginski of Ann Arbor, MI, Julien Naginski of Paris, France, Nicolas and Sasha Brynolfson, both of Concord and Madeleine Hoog and Anina Young, both of NYC. Great-grandfather of Louise Naginski of Paris. Also survived by many nieces and nephews. Memorial services in the Chapel of Trinity Episcopal Church, 81 Elm Street, Concord, Sunday, September 12 at 2 PM. Gifts in his memory may be sent to Sisters of Charity, PO Box 19080, Jerusalem, Israel. An Ancien Combattant, Professor Hoog was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.