Princeton in the News
October 15 to 20, 1999
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HIGHLIGHTS
HEADLINE: Brain May Grow New Cells Daily
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
In a new challenge to the longstanding belief that adults never generate new brain cells, biologists at Princeton University have found that thousands of freshly born neurons arrive each day in the cerebral cortex, the outer rind of the brain where higher intellectual functions and personality are centered.
Though based on research in monkeys, the finding is likely to prove true of people, too. If so, several experts said, it may overturn ideas about how the human brain works and open new possibilities for treating degenerative brain diseases.
If the new brain cells, or neurons, are involved in memory and learning -- perhaps with each day's batch of new cells recording that day's experiences -- scientists will have to make major revisions in the longtime view that the adult brain's neurons are static in number and that memory is stored only in the way they interconnect.
In addition, if the brain's cells are in constant turnover, as the new finding suggests, physicians may discover ways to use the brain's natural regeneration system for replacing cells that are lost in diseases of aging.
The discovery, by Dr. Elizabeth Gould and Dr. Charles G. Gross, is reported in today's issue of the journal Science.
The belief that the adult brain does not make new cells rested on careful, well-known studies by Dr. Pasko Rakic of Yale University, who looked for the formation of new neurons in the monkey brain and found none.
But the Princeton work is likely to be convincing, because it builds on previous reports of brain cell turnover, notably by Dr. Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, who showed that canaries grow new neurons to learn new songs, and recent studies showing that new cells are formed in the hippocampus, a brain region where initial memories of faces and places are formed. ...
Dr. Gould, who has studied new cell formation in the hippocampus, and Dr. Gross, an expert on the cerebral cortex, injected macaques with a chemical that is incorporated in the new DNA formed when a cell divides.
They found that a stream of new neurons were generated in the monkeys' brains in a zone just above the brain's fluid-filled central chambers. This zone was recently identified by other scientists as the home of the brain's stem cells, the source cells from which an organ is replenished.
The new neurons migrated toward the cortex, matured and sent out axons to make connections with other brain cells, the Princeton biologists found.
The researchers looked for new neurons in four areas of the cortex, and found them in three areas where memories are known to be stored: the frontal cortex, used for decision-making, and two areas on the side of the brain used for visual recognition. No new neurons were detected in the fourth area, the striate cortex, a region at the back of the head that simply processes visual information from the eyes and passes it on to other parts of the cortex.
Whatever the new cells are doing in the cortex, they affect regions of the brain that are cntral to human thought and identity. The Princeton work, said Dr. Ronald D. G. McKay, an expert on brain stem cells at the National Institutes of Health, "places new neurons in the region of the brain involved in the highest level of personality: it's the frontal cortex that is important in determining who you are in a very human way." ...
HEADLINE: Study Suggests Nerve Cell Growth
BYLINE: David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer
Researchers at Princeton University have evidence that adult monkeys produce a small but steady trickle of new nerve cells, a finding that challenges the classical assumption that after early childhood the brains of humans, apes and other primates can only lose cells, not gain them.
The finding raises the possibility that ways might be found to turn the trickle into a torrent, stimulating the replacement of cells killed off by such calamities as stroke or Alzheimer's disease. At the moment, however, it's unknown whether the new cells are even functional.
Large-scale turnover of adult brain cells occurs in birds, fish and some other lower vertebrates. And in mammals, some specialized cells, such as those involved in the sense of smell, may regrow. Until now, however, there's been little evidence that cells of the cerebral cortex--the vast outer mantle of the brain where thinking occurs--can be replaced=2E
"The assumption has been for over a hundred years that there are no new neurons added," said Charles G. Gross, a psychologist and co-leader of the study, which is reported today in the journal Science. "We have shown they are added, and to the regions of the brain involved in the highest cognitive functions."
During fetal life, nerve cells in the brain form in one place and migrate to distant regions, where they make connections to other cells. To see if that process occurs in adult life, neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould injected a dozen adult macaque monkeys with a biochemical taken up by newly formed cells. She followed that with markers that specifically identify nerve cells (also called "neurons"), and with tracers that sketch their paths.
The researchers found that neurons were being born continuously along the shores of the lateral ventricles, two huge lakes of fluid lying deep in the brain. The cells then migrated along well-known paths to the frontal, parietal and temporal cortexes, a trip that took more than a week.
Once in the cortex, the cells sent out "axons," the tendrils that actually establish the signal-carrying connections to other neurons. This suggests--but doesn't prove--that the new cells had found a useful place in the brain's long-established circuitry. ...
NOTE: These are two of the most prominent reports on the nerve cell growth study that appeared in Science. Additional stories appear below in this digest. In addition, versions of the Associated Press story on the research, which was included in the October 14 digest, appeared in several major U.S. newspapers.
HEADLINE: Study: Earth's heating to be most stifling in humid
regions
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
Global warming will cause the most discomfort in humid regions such as the Southeast and mid-Atlantic states, Princeton University climate researchers have concluded.
Though scientists expect humid areas of the United States to experience lower temperature increases than in arid places, a study conducted by Princeton's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory predicts that increased moisture will magnify the harm.
New Jersey's July heat index, which measures human stress by combining air temperature and humidity levels, could soar by 10 degrees over the next 50 years, the researchers said. ...
The Princeton research is outlined in the October edition of the journal Climatic Change. The scientists used a computer model to simulate what would happen if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to double between 1765 and 2065.
The simulation considers interactions among the atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice.
The greater heat index elevation in moist regions would bring more severe stress on inhabitants there, because they would have greater difficulty releasing heat through perspiration.
"That's why, when we evaluate the potential impact of future climate change on human health and comfort, the moisture in the air as well as the surface air temperature must be considered," said Thomas Delworth, the study's main author.
Employees who work outdoors and low-income families who cannot afford air conditioning would be most at risk, Louria said. ...
HEADLINE: Dow Board Member Shapiro Named Outstanding Corporate Director By Director's Alert DATELINE: MIDLAND, Mich., Oct. 18
Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University and a board member of The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW), has been named one of the year's outstanding directors in corporate America by the publishers of Director's Alert, which reports news and strategic insights related to corporate boardrooms. Shapiro is one of nine corporate directors being recognized nationwide.
In recognition of the award, Dow's board of directors adopted a resolution of tribute to honor Shapiro.
Nominees of the award were identified initially through a polling of Director's Alert readers, which include CEOs and directors of Fortune 1000 companies. An advisory panel of 27 leading CEOs and board members determined the final recipients following a series of in-depth interviews with the nominees' fellow directors. The September issue of Director's Alert notes that Shapiro won praise from his director peers "for the single-minded dedication" he brings to his endeavors.
According to Frank Popoff, chairman of Dow's board of directors, "Harold possesses a superb mind and an ability to look at the economic, social, and political aspects of any situation. He has been instrumental in shaping many of Dow's actions, including the decision to privatize the BSL manufacturing site in East Germany." He added, "Toward the end of any debate, people start looking to Harold for his opinion."
Shapiro is trustee and chairman of the board of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society as well as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, The Universities Research Association, and the Educational Testing Service. A member of Dow's board of directors since 1985, Shapiro also has served on the boards of Kellogg Company and Unisys Corporation. He is a former president of the University of Michigan. ...
HEADLINE: Feds Name New Auto Safety Chief
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Rosalyn G. Millman has been named acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the agency announced Thursday.
Transportation Department Secretary Rodney Slater made Millman acting head of the agency this week after the recent departure of the former administrator, Dr. Ricardo Martinez.
The agency is in charge of federal regulation of the auto industry.
Millman had joined the agency in the No. 2 slot as deputy administrator in September.
Millman served the past six years as transportation economist for the Democratic staff of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Millman graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1983 and received her master's degree in economics and public policy from Princeton University in 1988. ...
HEADLINE: Business briefs from around New Jersey
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
New York billionaire financier Carl C. Icahn has donated $20 million to his alma mater, Princeton University, to build a research facility that focuses on the study of genes.
The new Carl C. Icahn Laboratory will include classrooms and high-tech laboratories designed to support pioneering research on genomics and related biological studies. Construction will begin next summer and be completed by early 2002.
"I can think of no more exciting area of research than genomics, which holds the promise of giving us new insight into the nature of life itself," Icahn said in a prepared statement. "And with Princeton's long reputation for innovations in science, I can think of no more appropriate location for this groundbreaking new research center."
The gift was made by The Icahn Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization that often funds projects for abused and neglected children.
HEADLINE: Brown University becomes member of opposing
groups
DATELINE: PROVIDENCE, R.I.
Brown University said it will continue its membership in the Fair Labor Association, despite the fact the school has recently joined a similar group with a conflicting view point.
In March, the school joined the FLA, a nationwide organization of apparel manufacturers, retailers and non-governmental agencies aiming to improve the working conditions in impoverished countries.
This week, the school said it will also become a founding member of the Worker Rights Consortium, a national, student-led organization which targets poor working conditions, but opposes including manufacturers in the process. ...
Robert Durkee, a Princeton University spokesman involved with the FLA, said his group is not company-controlled. And he is not adverse to joining the WRC, but said it would not replace the FLA.
"There's a lot still to learn about the WRC," he said. "We are interested in learning more, but not if anyone thinks it's an alternative to the FLA." ...
HEADLINE: Teams of investigators descend on Livermore lab
BYLINE: By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: LIVERMORE, Calif.
A super laser designed to simulate the power of a nuclear explosion is generating a different kind of heat this week with two teams of investigators trying to determine why the project is over time and over budget.
Investigators from the General Accounting Office arrived at the lab Monday and a team from the University of California, which manages the lab under contract to the Department of Energy, visited Tuesday and Wednesday. ...
Officials also want to know more about former laser programs director, Michael Campbell. He stepped down in August after lab officials learned he did not have a doctorate from Princeton University, although he had completed the class work and research. Campbell is on personal leave.
HEADLINE: Oates earns big bucks for Monroe book
BYLINE: Celia Mcgee, Knight Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Some like it Joyce Carol Oates.
It's taking more than $1 million US and Marilyn Monroe to make a hot Hollywood property out of the Diet Coke- swilling, paper-thin, prolific novelist, Joyce Carol Oates.
CBS and producer Robert Greenwald have won this week's big Hollywood battle -- the rights to Oates' forthcoming Monroe novel, Blonde.
The book, due out in April, will be a four-hour mini-series on CBS instead of a feature-length movie, as had been expected.
This is Oates' second big payday thanks to the woman who was born Norma Jean. In June, the Princeton University creative writing professor left longtime publisher Dutton for Ecco Press, the small literary publishing company her friend Daniel Halpern had just partnered with Rupert Murdoch's deep-pocketed HarperCollins. ...
HEADLINE: CLIMATE CHANGE: Princeton Study Predicts U.S. Conditions
The impact of global warming throughout the United States will vary in each region, but some significant changes can be expected, according to a Princeton University study.
The researchers say regions that are already hot and humid in the summer, such as the Southeast and parts of the mid-Atlantic, will likely be hardest hit, though they won't experience the biggest temperature increases. But the regions will suffer greater "heat index" effects because of increased moisture in the air.
Thomas Delworth, the study's main author, said that within 50 years the July heat index for New Jersey and similar areas should be about 10 degrees higher than current levels (Kitta MacPherson, Newark [NJ] Star-Ledger, Oct. 20). -- MB
HEADLINE: Princeton vice president edits, then signs, pact to
weigh new sweatshop code
BYLINE: By Richard Just, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Demonstrating a flare for political theater, six Princeton University anti-sweatshop activists used a noon appointment yesterday with Vice President for Public Affairs Robert Durkee '69 to obtain a promise that the University will consider joining the newly formed Worker Rights Consortium.
The six members of Students for Progressive Education and Action arrived in Durkee's Nassau Hall office wearing stickers that said "Sew it up, Princeton," and bearing an oversized poster reaffirming the University's commitment to guarantee that companies manufacturing its licensed apparel employ fair-labor practices.
Seeking to seize on Monday's announcement that Brown Univer-sity will become the first school to sign on to the WRC, group spokesman Brian White '00 asked Durkee to endorse the new labor code and sign SPEAC's statement.
Durkee initially balked, however, saying that he objected to specific language in the statement. But after 20 minutes of congenial negotiation during which Durkee and SPEAC agreed to tone down the language so that Durkee would only be committing to consideration of the WRC, Princeton's point-man on the sweatshop issue put his signature on the poster. ...
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Taking risks, taking leads
BYLINE: Staff Editorial, The Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
By signing on to the newly founded Workers Rights Consortium, Princeton University can advance the fight against sweatshop abuse in the manufacturing of college athletic apparel.
Yesterday University Vice President for Public Affairs Robert Durkee '69 signed an agreement drafted by the Students for Progressive Education and Action only to "seriously consider" such a formal affiliation.
The University should do more than just consider this choice.
At the moment, the University already has an affiliation with the Fair Labor Association, but there is nothing mutually exclusive about signing on to a similar organization, as well. (Brown University, for instance, agreed to join last week.) Belonging to the consortium does not jeopardize the University's ability to work within the FLA for broader worker protections. Rather, the move would pressure the company-backed FLA to adopt a more stringent code of conduct and a more objective factory monitoring system ? two positions advocated by the consortium. ...
HEADLINE: Moving Giving off the Dime
BYLINE: THOMAS J. BILLITTERI
The Central Union Mission here opened its doors to the homeless and hungry in 1884, and over the years the charity has weathered the contrary ways of American donors.
During the Great Depression, giving to Central Union rose. "People had more sense of urgency about helping other people," says David Treadwell, the charity's executive director. But today, as America rides the crest of a prosperity wave, Central Union must struggle to persuade small, one-time donors to become major, committed ones. "People read about how great the stock market is doing and they're afraid to miss out," Mr. Treadwell says.
He has put his finger on one of the troublesome aspects of private giving in America. Despite a record peacetime economic expansion, charitable giving in some ways remains stuck in neutral.
While the total dollar amount of giving has been increasing, for three decades Americans have never given more than 2.1 per cent of their annual pre-tax income to charity. Not only that, but giving by individuals has not exceeded 1.6 per cent of gross domestic product, which measures the nation's output of goods and services. ...
"With wealth going up, when we already consume a good deal, and when our economy is good enough that savings seem less important, one would expect that more of that surplus would go to charity," says Julian Wolpert, a Princeton University professor who studies patterns of charitable giving. ...
HEADLINE: Konte Gets His Start As Goaltending Coach; Ex-Service
Star Played At Princeton
BYLINE: Danny Martin; Daily News Reporter
James Konte had no college coaching experience when Mark Dennehy recently called the former Service High player about coaching goaltenders for Fairfield University.
But Konte's reputation as a goaltender for Princeton University was good enough for Dennehy.
''Putting together a staff was one of the important things to me, especially for goaltending,'' Dennehy said. ''Unless you have played the position, it is hard to coach. My former boss (Princeton head coach Don Cahoon) spoke highly of Jimmy as an athlete, and he was the first guy I called.''
Dennehy was a Princeton assistant coach for the past three seasons before he became the head coach of Fairfield. Fairfield is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Athletic Conference, which is in its second season as a Division I conference. Konte manned the nets for Princeton from the 1992-93 to 1995-96 seasons, and he's still ranked in the top three in four career categories for the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference program. ...
HEADLINE: A veteran prosecutor takes over
NAME: Robert W. Ray. AGE: 39. EDUCATION: Princeton University, degree in history, 1982; Washington and Lee University School of Law, 1985.
EXPERIENCE: Assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, 1989 to 1995, handling public corruption, organized crime and narcotics trafficking cases.
-1995-98, the investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, who was acquitted for accepting illegal gifts from companies he regulated. Successfully prosecuted a Tyson Foods executive and a Tyson lobbyist in the probe of Espy.
-1999, joined Kenneth Starr's office and was on the legal team that prosecuted Webster Hubbell for allegedly concealing his and Hillary Rodham Clinton's legal work in a fraudulent Arkansas land deal. Hubbell pleaded guilty to a felony but maintains he knows of no wrongdoing by the first lady.
FAMILY: Wife, Kristen; three children.
QUOTE: "We shall do our best to be thorough, and fair; to discharge the weighty mandates that have been given our office; and to continue the work of this investigation in a prompt, responsible and cost-effective manner."
HEADLINE: Politician Was Raised In Appling
GEORGIA'S GOV. GEORGE CRAWFORD REPENTANT AFTER KILLING A CONGRESSMAN IN A DUEL IN 1828
BYLINE: Charles Lord; Special to The Chronicle
Columbia County native George Walker Crawford's star was destined to shine in the political arena. In the rotunda's pictorial gallery of the state's chief executives at the Capitol in Atlanta, his portrait is on display along with Georgia's other governors.
Gov. George Crawford was the son of a well-known pioneer family who served Columbia County with distinction. Born on Dec. 22, 1798, he enjoyed a notable career on the state and national scene in later life.
His primary schooling was received at home and at the old Kiokee Academy in an outlying district of Appling. He graduated from Princeton University and began practicing law. He rose to prominence rapidly and was for a time solicitor in a local judicial circuit.
But, unfortunately, his early life had a dark side.
A foe's harsh remarks about his father instigated a confrontation that lead to a duel in 1828 during which Crawford killed Congressman Thomas Burnside. This would haunt Crawford for the rest of his life. In self-repentance, he gave money under the cloak of secrecy to the Burnside family. Nevertheless, the tragedy did not impede Crawford's political aspirations. ...
HEADLINE: I'm glad to learn more brain cells are coming
BYLINE: Jack Mabley
If you listen carefully, you might hear thousands of new brain cells arriving every day in your head.
Not really. They aren't audible, but they're arriving.
Science magazine reports a Princeton University discovery that newborn neurons arrive each day in the cerebral cortex.
That's certainly good news for older people and others who plan to become old.
It's been a given that as we grow older, we lose millions of brain cells.
As an experienced old person, my take on aging is the joints and knees and assorted innards wear out, but the brain does just fine as long as you keep it busy.
Bum knees can inhibit physical exercise, but there is no natural deterrent to exercising the brain. ...
HEADLINE: Benefits Of Switching To Unleaded Gas Are Predictable -- Study
A study by researchers from Princeton University says it is possible to predict how switching from leaded to unleaded gasoline will reduce the lead content in humans' blood. Many countries have yet to stop using leaded gasoline.
The study will appear in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology (American Chemical Society release, Oct. 19). -- RP
HEADLINE: Princeton Study Predicts U.S. Conditions
The impact of global warming throughout the United States will vary in each region, but some significant changes can be expected, according to a Princeton University study.
The researchers say regions that are already hot and humid in the summer, such as the Southeast and parts of the
mid-Atlantic, will likely be hardest hit, though they won't experience the biggest temperature increases. But the regions will suffer greater "heat index" effects because of increased moisture in the air.
Thomas Delworth, the study's main author, said that within 50 years the July heat index for New Jersey and similar areas should be about 10 degrees higher than current levels (Kitta MacPherson, Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, Oct. 20). -- MB
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: Leave Your Memory Alone
BYLINE: ARTHUR HOPPE
I THINK I'LL HAVE another martini to celebrate," I said to my dear wife, Glynda, the other evening in the deepest tone I could muster.
"There go another 50,000 brain cells," she said. "Celebrate what?"
"The findings of a group of Princeton University biologists that we create thousands of vigorous new brain cells every day," I said smugly.
"I don't see your memory improving any," said Glynda.
"Nor do I want it to," I said. "I'm perfectly happy with my memory the way it is. I've trained it to remember only the good things in the past, like that birdie I got on the fourth hole only last year."
"I'll bet you can't even remember that nice compliment cute little Lotus Tutwillert paid you at the Fullertons' on New Year's Eve."
I scowled. "Maybe not," I admitted, "but usually my well-trained memory forgets only the bad things I've done, if any." ...
HEADLINE: Princeton considers dropping A+
BYLINE: By Stella Maria Baer, The Dartmouth
SOURCE: Dartmouth College
DATELINE: Hanover, N.H.
A committee concerned with grade inflation at Princeton University recently proposed the abolition of the A+ and released new data revealing a quarter century-long trend of rising grades amongst Princeton's professors.
Princeton's newspaper -- The Daily Princetonian -- reported that the average grade at Princeton has risen steadily from a 3.05 to a 3.34 over the last 25 years, and Nancy Malkiel, chair of the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing at Princeton, is making every possible effort to reduce grade inflation at the University.
The committee's proposals are geared toward raising professors' consciousness of the grades they give with an eye towards a gradual deflation. One recommendation of the report is to change the grade of A+ to "A with Distinction" or A*, keeping the grade-point value at 4.0 but including with it a written evaluation of the student's exceptional performance.
The recommendation, according to Malkiel, stems from the inconsistency with which various academic departments and divisions award the A+. Generally, Princeton faculty teaching science and engineering courses more frequently award the A+ than do their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. ...
HEADLINE: HMO love affair over? Relationship between money,
health hits skids
BYLINE: Julie Appleby
Employers' recent love affair with managed care -- a slimmer, younger, less expensive version of traditional insurance -- has wound up like many affairs: with blame and recrimination.
The romance began at the beginning of the decade. By decade's end, it had soured, with managed care the butt of jokes, the villain in Hollywood dramas and the favorite whipping boy for politicians and lawyers.
Managed care promised to be the perfect partner for employers wanting to escape from double-digit health inflation -- and for insurers fearing a government-run medical system. So what went wrong?
For one thing, employers wanted a bargain, and market-hungry insurers initially were eager to give them one. ...
"In almost every other area of life, Americans are being offered more choice, in telephone services, in financial services, in grocery stores," says Paul Starr, professor of sociology at Princeton University. "But in health care, employers have been asking people to accept fewer choices." ...
HEADLINE: MEECO - aiming to be first in moisture analysis.
AUTHOR-ABSTRACT: THIS IS THE FULL TEXT: COPYRIGHT 1999 AII Report Ltd. Subscription: $595.00 per year. Published semimonthly. P.O. Box 78, E. Grinstead, West Sussex RH19 2YW., United Kingdom
MEECO Inc. (Warrington, PA) was founded in 1948 by Dr. Gustav Bergson, a Harvard-trained physicist. Known as Manufacturers Engineering and Equipment Company, its products were used to measure physical properties such as colour, radio frequency and vapour pressure; and chemical composition, e.g. oxygen in gases.
By the 1950s, an arrangement with E.I. DuPont de Nemours
enabled MEECO to start its pioneering work on instruments for
measuring trace moisture content. Early applications for these
analyzers included pipelines and compressor stations installed in
the growing US natural gas network. Gas utilities still depend on
continuous, accurate moisture readings to maintain BTU ratios,
which are a key element of the price they receive for gas. Since
their introduction, over 10,000 'MEECOs' have been sold in the
USA's 'Oil Patch'
In 1983, Lisa Bergson took over the management of the business
from her father. Talking to AII Report, she reflected, "previously
a journalist, I more or less fell into the business when my father
was too sick to carry on. Having covered company strategy for
Business Week, I recognized that we were dangerously dependent on
one market, not to mention one product .=2E. some 80 percent of
our sales were of moisture analyzers primarily for the natural gas
industry".
After instituting new quality and service procedures, she then focused the company on new product development. "Diversifying our product line has proven to be a real challenge, but in the past 15 years, MEECO has introduced a full complement of over 25 analyzers, measuring from parts-per-trillion to percent levels".
Today, despite its recent sporadic growth, the semiconductor industry is MEECO's largest customer; other key end-user sectors are the industrial, natural gas and petrochemical markets. ...
Discussing her plans for the future, Bergson adds, "we're developing new laser-based analyzers, under an exclusive licence with Princeton University, and we'll soon fulfil our goal of diversifying into other types of measurements, ranging from medical applications such as breath analyzers to hard-to-trace contaminants, like phosphine and silane, in semiconductor gases".
HEADLINE: The family cottage and the new Whitewater
prosecutor
BYLINE: By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
As a young attorney not long out of law school, Robert Ray once went all the way to the highest court in the state of New York in an eight-year legal battle to save his family's mountainside cottage.
Now the Princeton University graduate and Rumson, N.J., resident is taking on an even more grueling challenge - to bring closure to the Whitewater probe.
The saga of the Ray family cottage in Fishkill, N.Y., shows that "there are a few attorneys smarter than Bobby is, maybe some more eloquent," but "I don't know of any who make more of a habit of winning," says his brother, Russell, a lawyer who now has his own firm in Alexandria, Va.
Ray's arguments in a trial before a local court were so compelling that the judge drove out to the mountain in a blizzard and went up in a four-wheel-drive vehicle to take a look at the Rays' cottage for himself.
"The best trial attorneys are good storytellers" and "Bobby has a knack of ... making you identify with his point of view; you trust him," said Russell Ray. "We wouldn't have won that case unless Bobby let that judge become almost part of the family." ...
HEADLINE: Exchange Teachers Also Learn A Language
BYLINE: By Andrew Horvat; International Herald Tribune
DATELINE: TOKYO
In 1993, Trevor Hill, dissatisfied with what he called the ''academic Japanese'' he had learned at Princeton University, exiled himself to rural Japan, where ''if I didn't know how to speak Japanese I would starve.''
The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program, administered jointly by three Japanese government ministries, gave Mr. Hill the opportunity he was looking for: three years in a fishing village on Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island.
Mr. Hill now works as a trading management analyst at the Tokyo branch of Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. He credits the JET program with having given him a foot in the door into finance. ''When I left Hokkaido, my Japanese had gone from passable to fluent.'' ...
HEADLINE: DNA yields clues; Mystery Of The Vanishing Birds; Tracking migration could help scientists aid survival
SOURCE: EXAMINER ENVIRONMENTAL WRITER
BYLINE: JANE KAY
For a century, ornithologists using the time-honored tools of leg bands and binoculars have tried and failed to track the migration routes of songbirds.
Unable to solve this mystery, where songbirds go to feed during the winter, environmentalists have been stymied in reversing a decline in their numbers.
Now along comes evolutionary biologist Thomas B. Smith, associate professor at San Francisco State and director of the Center for Tropical Research. Three years ago, he was one of the first to use genetic markers to link populations of songbirds as they breed in the north and winter in the south.
Today, using a bird's feather or a few drops of blood, Smith and his colleagues are beginning to trace the seasonal flight paths of the sweet- voiced Wilson's warblers, Swainson's thrushes and MacGillivray's warblers from Alaska and Canada south as far as Ecuador.
Once perfected, their technique should allow researchers to map the migration patterns of hundreds of songbird species, potentially leading to ways to prevent extinction. ...
In 1989, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey showing that the numbers of most migrant bird species that breed in the forests of the eastern United States and Canada had declined over the past 20 years after a period of stable or increasing populations.
That year, John Terborgh, now at Duke University, then at Princeton University, published "Where Have All the Birds Gone?"
He raised the questions of loss of wintering habitat because of tropical deforestation. That year, at a Woods Hole, Mass., symposium on tropical migrants, scientists concurred that songbirds were in decline. ...
HEADLINE: Brentano Quartet plays with skill, but needs a bit
more lyricism
SOURCE: CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC
BYLINE: Valerie Scher
The Brentano String Quartet is named after the mysterious Antonie Brentano, the woman who was most likely Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," the subject of his celebrated love letter.
But that doesn't mean the 7-year-old group limits itself to Beethoven's music. Far from it.
On Sunday at UCSD's Mandeville Auditorium, the Brentano Quartet opened the 1999-2000 season of the Robert & Sonia Hamburger Family Endowment Chamber Music Series by showcasing music of Mozart, Schumann and Chinese-born, New York-based composer Tan Dun.
The Tan Dun work was "Eight Colors," a set of musical miniatures dating from 1986, long before he became the attention-getting composer he is today. And even if you didn't love his "Colors," you had to admire the vivid design, as well as intensity with which the Brentano Quartet presented the works. ...
Whether the sounds were intriguing, abrasive or both, there was no doubting the skill of violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory and cellist Nina Maria Lee. They showed their true "Colors," and proudly.
Yet the group, which is a resident ensemble at Princeton University and New York University, was somewhat less persuasive in Schumann's String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 41, No. 1 and Mozart's String Quartet in G Major, K. 387. ...
HEADLINE: Hot, speedy Internet2 failing to excite
researchers
SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
BYLINE: Katie Hafner
Thirty years ago this fall, the Internet got its start as the Arpanet, a federally financed computer network for universities and military sites. That network has gradually morphed into today's Internet, which 200 million people around the world use, misuse, cherish and curse.
About three years ago, a project called Internet2 began. It involves a new high-speed data backbone connecting universities, much like the way they were connected in the original Arpanet.
It is one of several attempts to steer a future course for the connected world, a reinvention of the Net meant to feed new technologies to the public eventually.
But opinion is divided on whether it is the bridge to the 21st century or an expensive dead end.
Proponents of the Internet2 project, whose users are almost exclusively at universities, say it is a unique sandbox in which researchers can conduct experiments in areas like advanced videoconference techniques, virtual reality and telemedicine. ...
"Internet2 was built largely on a field of dreams -- if you build it, they will come," said Ira Fuchs, the vice president for computing and information technology at Princeton University, an Internet2 member. "The hope was that you build the infrastructure, make it available, and there will be applications." ...
HEADLINE: Yale anti-sweatshop activists urge disclosure of
factory sites
BYLINE: By Jennifer B. Wang, Yale Daily News
SOURCE: Yale U.
DATELINE: New Haven, Conn.
Jessica Champagne '01, the principal organizer of Yale Students Against Sweatshops, had reason to break out the champagne Monday -- but the victory cigars will have to wait.
According to a letter released Monday from Yale President Richard Levin to SAS, the University will officially require public disclosure of the factories that make Yale clothing, joining a group of universities that includes Brown University, Cornell University and Princeton University. The change in University policy comes two days before the student rally against sweatshops on Oct. 20 and over a year after discussions first started between administrators and the Students Against Sweatshops.
The policy change is independent of the Fair Labor Association, a group to which Yale belongs that includes apparel companies, human rights groups and universities. ...
HEADLINE: National report suggests universities should track
minority academic achievement
BYLINE: By Jennifer Maloney, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Members of the public and private sectors should take action to up the number of high-achieving minority college students, according to a report released Sunday by a national task force organized by the College Board.
Focusing on the academic achievement of minority students, the report, titled "Reaching the Top," proposes a new strategy called "affirmative development" to raise the achievement levels of black, Hispanic and Native American students.
One of the key problems addressed in the report of the National
Task Force on Minority High Achievement is the "overprediction
phenomenon," explored by former Princeton president William
Bowen GS '58 and Derek Bok in their recent book, "The Shape of the
River."
"Thanks in part to Bill Bowen, the former president of
Princeton University, there is research going back a long
time showing the overprediction phenomenon," said Scott Miller,
director of the task force. "At a given SAT level, the tendency is
for black and Latino students not to do as well GPA-wise [in
college] as Asian-American and European-American
students."
To combat this phenomenon, the report suggests policy changes in institutions of higher education, particularly at historically white universities. ...
HEADLINE: Mundell's ideas shunned for political reasons: Princeton University economist Peter Kenen calls Nobel winner Robert Mundell 'the finest mind in our profession.'
BYLINE: Michael Campbell
Years ago, I did a half-hour talk show on CJOR that aired just before legendary hot-liner Pat Burns took to the mike in the evening. One of my jobs was to be sure that Pat was ''in condition'' to broadcast, which meant that I had to listen to the first part of his show.
One night there was a classic Burns moment after a woman had called in extolling the virtues of communism.
Burns paused, and then barked back: ''Ma'am, ma'am, I don't often get stumped on this program, but right now, I don't know whether to call you ignorant or stupid.''
Last week's awarding of the Nobel Prize in economics to former UBC undergraduate Robert Mundell reminded me of that night.
My guess is that people don't appreciate the degree to which economic policies in this country and province have been made by totally unqualified people who, based on their performance, deserve to be called both ignorant or stupid.
It's not a crime to be unsophisticated in economic matters, but I'm amazed at how people who have no background in the field feel qualified to make economic policy. ...
Mundell received the Nobel Prize because he ''established the foundation for the theory, which dominates practical policy considerations of monetary and fiscal policy in open economies.''
But his observations about monetary and fiscal policies and their relationship to exchange rates and capital flows were more than theory, as acclaimed scholars from around the world have noted: they were proven right when put in practice.
Princeton University economist Peter Kenen calls him ''the finest mind in our profession,'' while one of the best-known economists in the world, Arthur Laffer, declared that Mundell deserves to be recognized as the best economist of the century.
But his ideas have not been good enough for Canadian policymakers. Left-wing and right-wing governments all over the world have taken to heart Mundell's warning that ''taxes are the arterial sclerosis of the economy.'' ...
HEADLINE: Flood plain, mitigation need re-examining, scientists say
RALEIGH -- In eastern North Carolina, people won't brook much talk about 100-year or 500-year floods these days. Recently, it seems they come every two or three years.
"If this is a 500-year flood, then we're aging very quickly," Goldsboro resident Cora Sedlacek said last month as she watched the floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd rise in her yard.
In the aftermath of the flooding, some residents wonder why their neighborhoods weren't designated as flood plain areas, which would have made them eligible for federally subsidized flood insurance.
Some scientists, however, suggest flood plain designations and the flood-mitigation methods may need re-examination as asphalt spreads and wetlands shrink.
"We are really only beginning to learn how to deal with these natural disasters," says Richard Allen, a Princeton University researcher. "As time goes on, we realize that the way we've gone about doing it isn't perhaps the best long-term solution."
SECTION: Brandweek people
Baldanza Now Operates' at US Airways
Having a nice balance of operations management and marketing experience is what B. Ben Baldanza likes most about his background. In addition, US Airways' new svp of marketing has been in the world of privately held international carriers like Grupo Taca in El Salvador and trekked in the arena of big U.S. carriers, handling the evp of marketing post for Continental Airlines, internal staffing and management duties for United Parcel Service and financial and yield management chores for Northwest and American airlines. ...
"We're going to focus on leveraging the strength of US Airways to reach a common goal by using all the brands strategically to reach the same objectives," said Baldanza, who holds an economics degree from Syracuse University and a masters in public affairs, specializing in transportation and economics, from Princeton University.
HEADLINE: SCIENCE UPDATE
Study backs theory of growth of cells in higher brain areas
* You can teach an old monkey brain new tricks, scientists have reported.
The "trick" is the ability of adults to grow new cells in the part of the brain used for the most advanced mental functions, like learning and making decisions. Because monkeys' brains are very similar to humans', it's possible that the same is true for people.
For years, scientists had thought that no new cells could grow in the brains of adults. Studies in the last few years have overturned that notion with findings that some areas of the brain could generate new cells.
But those areas govern primitive functions, like the sense of smell and the formation of memories. In a new study in the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University show that adult macaque monkeys continually produce new cells in the cortex. This region of the brain gives more advanced animals their higher mental abilities.
The new findings add to the idea that the adult brain might be capable of repairing itself. If scientists learn enough about this, they might be able to exploit these natural abilities in treating brain diseases.
The new study also raises questions about how the brain can store memories if it is always growing new cells.
- Sue Goetinck
HEADLINE: Few aware of morning-after pill
A push is under way to raise awareness and availability of such
emergency contraceptives
BYLINE: Susan Kreimer
SOURCE: Register Staff Writer
A cover story in Time magazine caught Summer Kriegshauser's attention about six years ago.
She was only a teen-ager, but she wanted to know how emergency contraceptives work. The issue wasn't mentioned in her high school sex-education classes, nor did it come up in college classrooms or dormitories.
"I really don't know why it hasn't been brought to more people's attention," said Kriegshauser, 20, a speech communication major at Iowa State University. "More people should be told about this."
In the past few years, there has been a push to raise awareness and availability of emergency contraceptives: high doses of birth-control pills that can reduce a woman's chances of becoming pregnant by about 75 percent - if they're taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse and repeated 12 hours later.
Still, only 11 percent of women ages 18 to 44 have heard of emergency contraceptives, know they're available in the United States and are aware of the time frame for use, according to a 1997 national survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent health-care philanthropy based in Menlo Park, Calif. Even fewer women -1 percent -have ever used them.
That may change since the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a new emergency contraceptive, Plan B, which is less likely to cause nausea than the pills already on the market, such as Preven.
The chances of pregnancy decrease by 89 percent with Plan B, compared with 75 percent with Preven, when either is taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex, according to Princeton's University's Emergency Contraception Web site. ...
HEADLINE: Yes, Fresh Daily: New Brain Cells
BYLINE: By Nicholas Wade; New York Times Service
DATELINE: NEW YORK
In a new challenge to the long-standing belief that adults never generate new brain cells, biologists at Princeton University say they have found that thousands of freshly born neurons arrive each day in the cerebral cortex, the outer rind of the brain where higher intellectual functions and personality are centered.
Though based on research in monkeys, the finding is likely to prove true of people, too. If so, several experts said, it may overturn ideas about how the human brain works and open new possibilities for treating degenerative brain diseases.
If the new brain cells, or neurons, are involved in memory and learning - perhaps with each day's batch of new cells recording that day's experiences - scientists will have to make major revisions in the view that the adult brain's neurons are static in number and that memory is stored only in the way they interconnect. In addition, if the brain's cells are in constant turnover, as the new finding suggests, physicians may discover ways to use the brain's natural regeneration system for replacing cells that are lost in diseases of aging.
The discovery, by Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross, was reported in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Science.
The belief that the adult brain does not make new cells rested on careful, well-known studies by Pasko Rakic of Yale University, who looked for the formation of new neurons in the monkey brain and found none=2E But the Princeton work will probably be convincing, because it builds on previous reports of brain cell turnover, notably by Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, who showed that canaries grow new neurons to learn new songs, and on studies showing that new cells are formed in the hippocampus, a brain region where initial memories of faces and places are formed.
''The scientific community can easily believe something it is 50 percent ready to absorb, but not something that comes out of left field,'' said Eric Kandel, a leading neuroscientist at Columbia University. ''But here, we are prepared for it.'' ...
HEADLINE: White Man Talking
BYLINE: Jason Zengerle
HIGHLIGHT: Chocolate City's vanilla candidate.
In mid-september, Bill Bradley starred in a "Spike Lee Joint." Only Bradley's cameo wasn't in a movie; rather, it was at a Washington reception thrown in the presidential candidate's honor by Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Cornel West, and a host of other African American glitterati. ...
It wasn't until Bradley got to Princeton University, though, that, in his words, "racial discrimination became the ultimate evil for me." He took a course on the Civil War, which broadened his understanding of the history of race in America. In 1964, as a college intern in the Senate, Bradley watched from the gallery as the Civil Rights Bill was passed; it was that vote that persuaded Bradley, until then a Republican like his banker father, to become a Democrat.
But more formative than any college course or Senate vote was Bradley's basketball experience. Although all of his Princeton teammates were white, Bradley played in all-star competitions at which his roommates were often black. Then, a few years later, when Bradley joined the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association--65 percent of whose players at the time were black--he entered into, as he puts it, a "black world" and, in his mind, at least, acquired a special understanding about race. "Nothing then, not even a careful reading of American history," Bradley wrote in his 1976 book about basketball, Life on the Run, "had prepared me for the impact my teammates have made on me." ...
HEADLINE: Obituaries / Jean Shepherd, Prolific Author, Master Raconteur Byline: The Associated Press
Jean Shepherd, the prolific author and radio and television personality whose storytelling has been compared with that of Mark Twain, died of natural causes Saturday near his Sanibel Island, Fla., home, his longtime friend and business adviser Irwin Zwilling said.
Marshall McLuhan once called Shepherd "the first radio novelist," Zwilling said. "Jean was an avid Chicago White Sox fan, and hated the Yankees, but nonetheless was probably glued to the television this week=2E" Shepherd had been working on a new film in recent years even as his health was failing. Shepherd had remained out of the public eye in recent years except for isolated live appearances on a WFAN radio show, including one in September, 1996, hosted by Zwilling and Ann Ligouri. ...
He carried his talent for storytelling to Carnegie Hall, which he sold out, and numerous one-man shows at corporate conventions, meetings and college campuses.
Among his favorites was a series of appearances each year at Princeton University in the 1970s and 1980s as well as on numerous other campuses. ...
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: BRIEFLY PUT ...
GRADE-INFLATION is no longer a concern merely in America's elementary and high schools.
Guardians of academic standards are putting their foot down at Princeton as well.
A faculty committee at the prestigious university has proposed to dispense with A-plus grades, now counting 4.3 points, to be replaced by "'A' with distinction," which would award a mere 4.0 points.
Many students, worried about their competitive edge after graduation, are not pleased. They'll at least be on equal footing with their Ivy League counterparts at Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale, which also struggle by without A-pluses.
Things somehow have a way of working out.
HEADLINE: Forbes stops university cash over 'infanticide'
professor
BYLINE: Damian Whitworth
In one corner stands a billionaire Republican presidential candidate who says that he would start a war against abortion on his first day in the White House. In the other is a highly controversial professor who advocates infanticide.
Caught in the middle is one of America's most prestigious universities which suddenly finds itself becoming considerably poorer because of a row over bio-ethics.
Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher and one of America's richest men, is withdrawing the massive financial support his family gives to Princeton, his alma mater, because of his opposition to Peter Singer, the Ivy League college's bio-ethics professor who is a lightning rod for controversy.
Mr Singer, an Australian philosopher whose first seminars this year were greeted by protests in which students compared him to Hitler, believes that parents should have the right to put to death severely handicapped infants. He is also in favour of euthanasia for terminally ill adults and was a founder of the animal rights movement, challenging the idea that a human life is worth more than an animal's.
An anti-abortion conservative struggling to gain traction in the presidential race despite using his personal fortune to finance his campaign, Mr Forbes said that Princeton would not receive another cent from him until Mr Singer is removed. ...
The university has not said how much Mr Forbes has given it but admitted that the family had donated "many millions" over the years and the withdrawal of funding would have an adverse effect. Robert Rawson, chairman of the Princeton board of trustees, on which Mr Forbes sits, expressed his anger at the candidate's decsion to attack an appointment approved by the trustees.
"Any trustee individually is certainly entitled to express his or her opinion on any matter affecting Princeton," Mr Rawson said.
"But the trustees collectively have a special and overarching responsibility to advance and protect the core values of the university which include the essential principles of academic freedom. ...
HEADLINE: Keeping Talent At Home
In a global economy based on knowledge, countries with the best ideas will prosper the most. The best ideas, in turn, will come to those who put the greatest effort into research.
As Prime Minister Jean Chretien pointed out this week, ''Worldwide competition for (the best researchers) has never been so fierce.''
Canada has produced many great researchers, including a number of Nobel Laureates, only to lose them to American universities which have the advantage of huge endowments and funding from wealthy private foundations.
We could keep these kind of people - and attract top researchers from other countries - if we gave them the kind of opportunities they find in countries like the U.S.
And that's precisely what Chretien has committted his government to doing. The federal government has talked a lot about the need to keep our researchers in Canada, but this is the first time its initiatives have matched its rhetoric. ...
The impact of such a concerted attempt to invest in research talent is illustrated in a new biography of 1994 Nobel Prize winner John Nash, which traces the development of Princeton University in the 1930s from a mediocre school to one of the leading research institution in the world.
With a large grant from the Rockefeller foundation, Princeton set out to attract the best scientists and mathematicians in Europe. Within a decade, its faculty included Albert Einstein and John Von Neumann, possibly the best mathematician of the 20th Century.
It should be also be noted that another of the math stars that Princeton attracted at the time was a young Canadian named Albert Tucker, who gained international prominence. ...
HEADLINE: Study shows academic dishonesty on the rise
BYLINE: By Robert Kelley, The Chronicle
SOURCE: Duke U.
DATELINE: Durham, N.C.
Facing mounting research proving that cheating at college is on the rise, university administrators nationwide are focusing more attention on issues of academic integrity. This weekend, Duke hosted the ninth annual conference of the Center for Academic Integrity, a Duke-based consortium of 200 colleges and universities that includes Stanford and Princeton universities and the University of North Carolina, among others.
Titled "Identifying and Mobilizing Resources for Academic Integrity," the three-day conference attracted more than 190 administrators, faculty and students from 75 different schools, conference coordinators said.
The current technology boom's strain on ethics was a central theme for much of the conference. "The speed of our society and the demands for more and more accelerations of speed are damaging to civility," said keynote speaker Gary Pavela, director of the University of Maryland's student conduct office. ...
HEADLINE: International: Bush wore 'God save the Queen' boots
to royal dinner
BYLINE: by DAVID WASTELL in Washington
THE leading Republican presidential candidate George W Bush once told the Queen that he was "the black sheep of the family".
He made the admission after being deliberately seated at the far end of the table from her by his mother for a White House lunch, according to a biography published this week.
Barbara Bush, then First Lady, told the Queen, who was on a state visit to Washington in 1992, that she had ordered her eldest son not to speak to members of the Royal Family.
When the Queen asked why, Mrs Bush said it was because he always said what he felt and wore what he wanted - including cowboy boots with "Texas" or "God Bless America" on them. Asked by the Queen which he planned to wear at that night's lavish state dinner, Mr Bush replied: "Neither. Tonight's pair will say 'God save the Queen'."
The book, by the Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio, discloses how Mr Bush left his "wild youth" behind him and set out to tame his temper as he painstakingly prepared for a presidential bid. Some of the incidents described are likely to be seized on by his opponents to cast doubt on his suitability for high office. ...
Mr Bush twice got into trouble with the police. He was charged with disorderly conduct after taking a Christmas wreath from the front of a shop, but the charge was dropped and he now recalls it as a harmless prank. On the second occasion, he was picked up by police after crowd trouble during a football game at rival Princeton University, but was released with a warning and told to leave campus by sundown. ...
HEADLINE: Keeping track of Shore athletes; Area's history includes Olympians, world records in running and field events
BYLINE: ELLIOTT DENMAN; STAFF WRITER
College try: Shot put and discus champion Robert Garrett would headline the Princeton University delegation to Athens that comprised a large share of the pioneering 1896 U.S. Olympic team.
And Princeton athletes, like mile record-holder Bill Bonthron, and the late Larry Ellis, who coached the 1984 men's Olympic team, and current coach Fred Samara, a 1976 Olympic decathlete who now leads the national decathlon program, have kept Princeton in the forefront of the sport ever since. ...
HEADLINE: Health Watch; THE WEEK'S TOP MEDICAL STORIES
BYLINE: From staff and news services
Food for thought: The brain is constantly churning out new neurons for its learning and memory center, according to research that could lead to novel ways to treat brains damaged by injury or diseases such as Alzheimer's. In studies using monkeys, researchers at Princeton University have for the first time traced the path followed by neurons that are created in one part of the brain and then migrate to the neocortex, the center of the mind's ability to reason and think. Once the new neurons arrive in the neocortex, they plug in and become a new part of the brain's central circuitry, said Elizabeth Gould, head of a Princeton brain research team. ''This shows that there is a naturally regenerative mechanism'' in the mature brain, said Gould.
SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. 3H
HEADLINE: Bill Is Unrelated To Pro-Life Politics
Because of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, Congress is being unfairly criticized as "anti-choice" for its admirable attempt to severely punish a person who attacks a pregnant woman.
The problem is the basic fallacy from which all pro-choice legislation is derived, namely, that the fetus is not a human being.
This Unborn Victims of Violence Act has nothing to do with pro-life politics, as is suggested in a recent News editorial. Rather, it was inevitable given that Roe vs. Wade was based upon a politically driven ignoring of the truth.
Science has provided ample, irrefutable evidence of the truth: that from the very first stages of development, the fetus has all the human characteristics, for example, brain waves, heartbeat and fingerprints. ...
Ignoring science and leaving the decision of who is a human being to public opinion is not only illogical but extremely dangerous.
A horrific example of this was Hitler's "Final Solution." Slavery and racial bigotry exist when one "pro-choice" class of persons decides to play God and declare who is a human being and who isn't.
The bioethics professor at Princeton University justifies the killing of severely handicapped infants by claiming that the child is not fully human until a month after it is born. It is sad to note that most people are outraged by his words, yet can't see the connection to pro-abortion rhetoric and deception. There is little difference. ...
MARY TOWSLEY Amherst
HEADLINE: October 10-16; Daily Cell Growth in Brain
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS WADE
Biologists at Princeton University have found that the brain generates a daily stream of new cells that migrate into the cerebral cortex, the area that harbors higher intellectual functions.
Though it's too early to tell what the cells are doing, they could be part of the brain's mechanism for learning. The discovery was made in monkeys and is expected to prove true of people too. It caps a series of findings that refute the longstanding view that no new cells are formed in the adult brain. NICHOLAS WADE
HEADLINE: ON THE MAP; Behind the Woolens, an Einstein
Museum
BYLINE: By KAREN DeMASTERS
Albert Einstein lived and worked the last 22 years of his life on Mercer Street in Princeton, where he was commonly seen shuffling between his home and the stores and the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet there is no statue, museum or memorial to Einstein in Princeton; there is not even a plaque to mark his house. There is only a 10-by-12-foot corner in the back of a clothing store on Nassau Street where the public can see a few artifacts, photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and copies of calculations and doodles.
The store is Landau's. Robert Landau, one of the owners, has become an Einsteinabilia expert almost in spite of himself. He recently talked about his unofficial museum. ...
Q. How did you set this up?
A. Most of what we have done is not quite museum-quality, but it is the best we could do. Gillett Griffin lent a lot of things. The Arts Council of Princeton helped curate the exhibit because I didn't know how to do it. The Art Museum at Princeton University lent the display cases. The Institute for Advanced Study has lent us a raft of photographs that people do not normally see. The Trenton Times made quality reproductions of pictures from newspaper files. We are going to expand the space we have. But what I would really like is to see all of these things in a permanent, public place. ...
Q. Why is there no museum?
A. A lot of people say he would not have wanted it because he specifically requested that his house not be turned into a shrine. But he made provisions for his estate to get royalties from all the commercial uses of his image, which now appears on everything from coffee mugs to T-shirts to calendars. His estate funnels that money to the Hebrew University. So he knew that was going to happen.
HEADLINE: On Politics; Running Stealth Campaigns, If Not Always
by Choice
BYLINE: By Paul Zielbauer; Paul Zielbauer reports from Trenton for
The New York Times.
DATELINE: TRENTON
New Jersey voters are basking in the silence of the October dead zone, the political season when nothing interesting crosses their radar, and even if it did, polls suggest they probably wouldn't care.
The barbed anonymous-fax wars between the dueling Democrats for United States Senate, Jon Corzine and Jim Florio, have paused, for now, while both campaigns stock up on fresh boxes of ink cartridges. The shock of Governor Whitman abdicating from the United State Senate race last month has also subsided, and the crop of aspiring Republican replacements have stayed off the airwaves and out of the headlines.
Which leaves the statewide Assembly elections on Nov. 2 as the next big thing, an event the overwhelming majority of voters don't even know about. ...
Third, blame the news media, which habitually glom onto the sexiest or seediest political stories and ignore the mundane stump fests popular during the October dead zone. Last Sunday, for example, when Mr. Florio debated another Senate candidate, Steve DeVos, at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, most reporters didn't bother to cover it.
HEADLINE: A Haunting City -- And A Haunted One
BYLINE: BY LEIGH PRESSLEY; Special to the News & Record
DATELINE: CHARLESTON
From a gentleman ghost who hops into bed with ladies at a local inn to a woman in white searching an overgrown cemetery for her lost love, Charleston probably has as many ghosts as it does historical landmarks.
That prompted Julian Buxton III, his brother Jim and his partner Edward Macy to form the Ghosts of Charleston tour company in September 1996. The 90-minute walking tours of the historic area highlight ghost sightings, supernatural occurrences and spooky settings.
''We want people to have fun, but we also want them to hear stories about people that really did exist in a point of Charleston's history,'' says Julian Buxton III, a Charleston native and history major at Princeton University.
Buxton started the company with Edward Macy after the two men researched, wrote and gave historical tours for several local companies. They also are writing a book about Charleston's ghosts.
''We want people to come to understand the character of Charleston through stories about people who lived here,'' Buxton says. ...
HEADLINE: Living Wages; Should Congress Boost The
Minimumwage?
SOURCE: Wire services
BYLINE: MERRILL GOOZNER
CONGRESSIONAL DEBATE is now underway on a nearly 20 percent raise in the minimum wage, but the situation is far different from the last time Congress confronted the issue in 1997: The soaring economy has taken the sting out of most of the arguments against an increase.
Opponents have traditionally argued that giving a raise to the nation's least well-off workers will cost jobs to teenagers and the unskilled. But since the minimum wage was last raised to $5.15 an hour in 1997, job opportunities paying at or near the minimum have soared, welfare rolls have plummeted, and unemployment among teens has plunged to its lowest level since 1969. ...
Studies and surveys by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and David Card of the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, have suggested not only that a minimum-wage increase does not cost jobs, but may actually increase employment. The implication is that businesses forced to raise wages for their least-skilled workers look for ways to become more productive, and that opens up new business opportunities for them. ...
SECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: "A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE."
SOURCE: William Warren Bradley: "A Sense Of Where You Are.";First In A Series Of Four.
BYLINE: John McPhee; Copyright 1965, 1978, All Rights Reserved.
In 1965, The New Yorker magazine published a profile of a college basketball player at Princeton University, written by John McPhee. The basketball player was a young man from Crystal City, Mo., named William Warren Bradley. McPhee's profile grew into the book "A Sense of Where You Are," published in 1965. ...
Today we begin a four-part series of excerpts from the book for several reasons. Bill Bradley is a native son. We want to get reacquainted with who he was. ...
BILL BRADLEY is what college students nowadays call a superstar, and the thing that distinguishes him from other such paragons is not so much that he has happened into the Ivy League as that he is a superstar at all. For one thing, he has overcome the disadvantage of wealth. A great basketball player, almost by definition, is someone who has grown up in a constricted world, not for lack of vision or ambition but for lack of money; his environment has been limited to home, gym, and playground, and it has forced upon him, as a developing basketball player, the discipline of having nothing else to do. Bradley must surely be the only great basketball player who wintered regularly in Palm Beach until he was thirteen years old.
His home is in Crystal City, Missouri, a small town on the Mississippi River about thirty miles south of St. Louis, and at Crystal City High School, despite the handicap of those earlier winters, he became one of the highest-scoring players in the records of secondary-school basketball. More than seventy colleges tried to recruit him, nearly all of them offering him scholarships. Instead, Bradley chose a school that offered him no money at all. Scholarships at Princeton are given only where there is financial need, and nearly half of Princeton's undergraduates have them, but Bradley is ineligible for one, because his father, the president of a bank, is a man of more than comfortable means. ...
Now his Princeton years are coming to an end, and lately he has been under more recruitment pressure -- this time, of course, from the National Basketball Association. In September, however, on the eve of his departure for Tokyo, where, as a member of the United States basketball team, he won a gold medal in the Olympic Games, he filed an application with the American Rhodes Scholarship Committee. Just before Christmas, he was elected a Rhodes Scholar. This has absolutely nonplussed the New York Knickerbockers, who for some time had been suffering delusions of inv incibility, postdated to the autumn of 1965, when, they assumed, Bradley would join their team. Two years ago, when the Syracuse Nationals wanted to transfer their franchise and become the Philadelphia '76ers, the Knicks refused to give their approval until they had received a guarantee that they would retain territorial rights to Bradley, whose college is one mile closer to Philadelphia than it is to New York. Bradley says he knows that he will very much miss not being able to play the game at its highest levels, but, as things are now, if Bradley plays basketball at all next year, it will be for Oxford. ...
HEADLINE: Grit proves fertile medium for Banks
BYLINE: LAURA POPE Sunday News Arts Correspondent
Russell Banks has made a career out of crafting hard-edged characters living in difficult times.
On Monday, Banks returns to New England College, site of an earlier teaching stint, to read from, "The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Short Stories." HarperCollins plans to release the book next spring. The event, which starts at 7:30 p.m. in the Simon Center Great Room, is free and open to the public. ...
After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the bearded author began his college teaching career. In the '70s to early '80s, Banks taught creative writing at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and New England College. His very first position as an English instructor was at Emerson. More impressive teaching stints followed at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia and New York universities and most recently Princeton University when his novels were becoming literary and silver screen hits. ...
HEADLINE: Jordan's Queen Noor visits centre for landmine
victims in Vietnam
DATELINE: HANOI, Oct 16
Jordan's Queen Noor on Saturday visited a care centre near Hanoi for victims of landmines left over from the Vietnam War.
King Hussein's widow has been in Vietnam since Friday as part of the international campaign against landmines of which she became the figureheard after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
On Saturday she travelled to the province of Bac Ninh, near the capital, to a centre housing 150 people left disabled and mutilated by the war. ...
The Queen, who protested against the US role in the Vietnam War during her college days at Princeton University, was scheduled to meet Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam. ...
HEADLINE: Global warming nearing point of no return, scientist
warns
BYLINE: NANCY KEARNEY; CORRESPONDENT
WEST LONG BRANCH - A doubling of carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere is almost certain to cause higher temperatures and sea levels in the next century, because not enough has been done to combat global warming, a leading atmospheric scientist said.
"We have implicitly set up a situation where we do not know how to keep the carbon dioxide from doubling in the next century," Dr. Jerry D. Mahlman, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton University, said Thursday night. "We have potentially the defining problem of the 21st century."
And, he warned, "We're on a social path, population path and energy consumption path to quadrupling the amount of carbon dioxide."
Outlining the consequences of global warming, Mahlman was the guest speaker at Monmouth University's annual Norman J. Field Lecture in Science. ...
HEADLINE: FITCHBURG; Plain And Simple; The Often Overlooked City Has It All: Nature, Culture, And Location;
DAY TRIP
BYLINE: By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff
FITCHBURG - On luminous fall days of slanting sunshine and lengthening shadows, central Massachusetts is often awash in visitors who pick apples, sip cider, and heft pumpkins at the many orchards and farmstands that dot the countryside.
Few visitors to the nearby rolling orchards stop in Fitchburg, a rather plain little Massachusetts city with no pretentions of grandeur. But maybe they should change their plans. There's a raft of interesting things to see and learn about right in Fitchburg, including its architecture and, yes, its culture. ...
And here is a useful Fitchburg factoid for you: Fitchburg is one of just 50 cities and towns in the whole country picked to have an original musical composition written about it for the new millennium, courtesy of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (It is being billed as a "march to capture the essence of the city," composed by Princeton University's Barbara White.) ...
HEADLINE: Medical Research Makes The News In Studies Of Brain Cells, Weight Loss And Baby Walkers
ANCHORS: DAWN STENSLAND
REPORTERS: Dr. BERNADINE HEALY
DAWN STENSLAND, co-host:
A research breakthrough made medical news this week, offering hope for patients suffering with brain injuries or maybe disease. For many years now, doctors have believed that once we reach adulthood, our brains actually stop making new cells and growing new connections.
But Princeton University researchers working with monkeys like these found new cells growing in the cerebral cortex. That's the same part of the brain humans use for reasoning and remembering. The study, published in the journal Science, says that if the same process occurs in humans, it could lead to treatments for brain damage from strokes and head injuries and to preventative measures for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. ...
HEADLINE: Can adults grow new brain cells?
BYLINE: By New York Times News Service
In a new challenge to the long-standing belief that adults never generate new brain cells, biologists at Princeton University have found that thousands of freshly born neurons arrive each day in the cerebral cortex, the outer rind of the brain where higher intellectual functions and personality are centered.
Though based on research in monkeys, the finding is likely to prove true of people, too. If so, several experts said, it may overturn ideas about how the human brain works and open new possibilities for treating degenerative brain diseases.
If the new brain cells, or neurons, are involved in memory and learning -- perhaps with each day's batch of new cells recording that day's experiences -- scientists will have to make major revisions in the long-standing view that the adult brain's neurons are static in number and that memory is stored only in the way they interconnect.
In addition, if the brain's cells are in constant turnover, as the new finding suggests, physicians may discover ways to use the brain's natural regeneration system for replacing cells that are lost in diseases of aging. The discovery, by Dr. Elizabeth Gould and Dr. Charles Gross, is reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science. ...
HEADLINE: Princeton Univ. denies any connection with
Cresvale
DATELINE: TOKYO, Oct. 16 Kyodo
Princeton University of the United States has denyed any connection with the 'Princeton bonds' sold by the Tokyo branch of the U.S.-based Cresvale International Ltd. suspected of defrauding investors through the sale of the bonds.
Robert Durkee, vice president for public affairs at Princeton University, based in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, issued a statement Wednesday which was sent to Kyodo News.
According to Japan's Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA), Cresvale International's branch in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, sold a corporate client privately placed bonds, managed by its Princeton-based parent, Princeton Economics International Ltd., in October 1998 by showing the client a document containing false information.
The document erroneously said the product was authorized by the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan, the FSA said.
The allegation, if proved true, would constitute a violation of the law governing foreign securities houses in Japan.
Durkee's statement said, 'Princeton University hopes that none of your readers believes there is any relationship whatsoever between our university and the recent financial scandal involving something called 'Princeton bonds.' These bonds have absolutely no connection to Princeton University.' ...
'We certainly would not want the good name of our university to be in any way besmirched by someone else's unfortunate use of the name of the town in which we are proud to be located,' it said. ...
HEADLINE: Nuclear Weapons Testing May Use Supercomputer
Simulations
ANCHORS: NEAL CONAN
REPORTERS: RICHARD HARRIS
NEAL CONAN, host:
This past week the US Senate defeated the comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which became the first international arms control agreement to be rejected by Congress. One of the arguments cited by critics of the treaty was that testing is essential to ensure that the US nuclear arsenal is safe and effective. NPR's Richard Harris reports that many experts believe that regular inspections and computer simulations can address those concerns without testing. ...
RICHARD HARRIS reporting:
The US government has conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests over the years. Chris Paine, a test-ban treaty advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says in recent history almost all those tests were to develop new designs, not check existing ones. ...
HARRIS: Weapons experts can remove the plutonium core from a weapon and test all the electronics and the high explosives that are needed to trigger the nuclear blast. To maintain confidence in the nuclear core of a weapon, engineers periodically cut one open and inspect it. Donald McCoy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory says that nuclear material at the core of a warhead doesn't last forever.
Mr. DONALD McCOY (Los Alamos National Laboratory): It actually doesn't just sit there. It actually sits in a--it's radioactive so it emits radiation particles. The chemicals that surround it are affected by that radiation. So over time we expect the materials to actually change in a weapon. ...
Mr. McCOY: It turns out the plants have been downsized so I can't go in and just remanufacture every component for every nuclear weapon if I do indeed find a problem.
HARRIS: McCoy says it's a tradeoff: Build huge new supercomputer centers to make better judgments about aging nuclear weapons or build more weapons factories in order to replace more weapons' components.
The Energy Department, which funds nuclear weapons design, is counting on the supercomputers. But Frank Von Hippel, an arms control expert at Princeton University, says the new programs aren't aimed simply at proving that existing weapons still work.
Mr. FRANK VON HIPPEL (Arms Control Expert, Princeton University): They would like to be able to design new types of weapons, variations of weapons, without testing. And they would also--they also want to keep a cadre of experts ready to start designing new weapons if the test-ban regime breaks down. ...
NAME: Harvey Mansfield
HEADLINE: The Mentor Conservatives Turn to for Inspiration; A
Gadfly and Confessor To a Harvard Lineage
BYLINE: By LYNDA RICHARDSON
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
It is the first day of the semester, and Harvey C. Mansfield has once again drawn a standing-room-only crowd of Harvard students to his course on the history of ancient and medieval political philosophy.
Courtly and serious in a dark gray suit, Mr. Mansfield paced in front of the blackboard, gazing sternly into the faces of the more than five dozen students who showed up, most of them white and male.
"This course is trans-millennial," he began, gently ridiculing the faddishness of millennium-related discussions. "We're interested in the permanent significance. We're interested in what belongs to every millennium."
The statements are as much of an introduction to his course as they are to his world. At 67, Mr. Mansfield is probably best known around the Harvard campus as a popular government teacher and a famously conservative nag. He strongly opposes affirmative action. He has warned against the dangers of not respecting manliness and declared that homosexuality would undermine civilization if it was made respectable. Indeed, the current issue of Harvard Magazine dubs him "Prince of the Conservatives"; on the cover, Mr. Mansfield adopts a Tom Wolfe-like pose, wearing a panama hat, a cream-colored blazer and a slight smirk. ...
They include people like William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a former adviser to Vice President Dan Quayle; Alan Keyes, a Republican Presidential contender and former Reagan Administration diplomat; Gary Rosen, associate editor at the conservative monthly Commentary; James Ceaser, a government professor at the University of Virginia, and Nathan Tarcov, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.
"I consider myself very lucky to have run into him when I was 18 years old," said Mr. Kristol, who was a student of Mr. Mansfield's in the early 1970's. "He really helped me understand how the questions of political philosophy relate to practical political issues today."
Even Sean Wilentz, a liberal Princeton University historian who drew harsh criticism from Mr. Mansfield for his defense of President Clinton during impeachment proceedings, admitted, "Some of us would give essential body parts for that kind of influence." ...
October 16, 1999, Saturday
HEADLINE: Mothering / Can Babies Be'Defective'?
BYLINE: Fern Kupfer. Fern Kupfer is a novelist and professor of
writing at Iowa State University.
THE HEADLINE I read in this morning's paper was provocative by any standard: "Anger Greets Idea of Killing Disabled Babies." Last week there were protesters demonstrating this anger. Many were disabled people themselves, their wheelchairs blocking entrances to the administration building on the campus of Princeton University. The target of the anger was Peter Singer, a tenured professor at the university's Center for Human Values. Singer's expertise is bioethics, a hot field in today's research universities. In his book, "Practical Ethics," Singer discusses his views on euthanasia: "Killing a defective infant," he writes, "is not morally equivalent to killing a person.
Sometimes it is not wrong at all." Singer has hypothesized that a severely disabled infant could be killed to end its suffering and to increase the family's own chances for happiness.
As a mother once, of a "defective" infant - Zachariah, a boy I loved and whom I considered a "person" - my response to Singer is both personal and complicated.
It is easy to rail against Singer's inflammatory statement and respond that all human life is equally valuable. Shouldn't we treat all human beings with the same attention and respect? I'd like to believe that the answer is that simple.
But in today's world of medical marvels, it ultimately compels the believers - mostly the guilt-ridden and grieving families of the dying and the disabled - to do everything we can to maintain and sustain life because we can.
Zachariah died at the age of 16, now more than seven years ago, from Canavan's disease, an auto-somal recessive genetic disease similar to Tay-Sachs. I've written a lot about Zach's life, about family life with him and what it means to have a severely disabled child. Zach never walked or talked or sat up by himself. Although I did not know the terrible prognosis at his birth, I do know that the medical decisions Zachariah's father and I made were agonizing and fraught with complications that do not fit easily into either philosophical utilitarianism or with religious reverence for the sanctity of all life. In fact, there was little either utilitarian or sanctified about the choices we had to make. ...
Do we "kill" a "defective" infant? I can't believe that even Professor Singer agrees we should. It's the job of philosophers to ruminate, to challenge and to pose these questions, though not necessarily to set public policy. I'm grateful for the chance to write again about these issues. Singer said that killing a "defective" infant is not the same as killing a person. Of course, the language here is outrageous and will serve mainly to elicit one-upmanship in the games intellectuals like to play=2E But I believe - and I hope the academic community at Princeton supports this - that putting out this very extreme position can only nurture dialogue about complicated ethical problems. ...
HEADLINE: Study finds influx of young workers can benefit
states;
ECONOMY: Unemployment rates tend to drop proportionally to youths
entering the job market.
BYLINE: NOAM NEUSNER, Bloomberg News
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, DC
An influx of young job seekers into a state's work force tends to send the unemployment rate there lower, not higher, according to new research by Princeton University economics professor Robert Shimer.
This finding suggests that New England states, where birthrates are the lowest in the nation, may run into problems two decades from now.
The opposite could be the case in California, Utah and Arizona, where babies are being born at a faster rate and immigration is on the rise. ...
Shimer's research shows that for each 1 percent increase in the young-adult share of the population, a state's unemployment rate falls 1 percent.
"When there's a lot of young workers in the economy, it's a profitable time for companies to fill jobs," he said. ...
HEADLINE: Public pulse taken on health insurance urgency
BYLINE: ROBERT A. RANKIN; Knight Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Five years after Congress rejected President Clinton's plan to provide health insurance to every American, the plight of the uninsured is re-emerging as an urgent national problem that appears certain to influence the 2000 elections.
The public is more concerned about this than at any time since early 1992, according to a bipartisan poll released this week. Roughly seven out of 10 Americans - including even a majority of Republicans - say they would pay higher taxes to make sure everyone has health insurance, the poll reports.
"People are concerned about this issue. They want something done," said Bill McInturff, a prominent Republican strategist who conducted the survey.
"What we have seen in the last two years is really a remarkable surge in this issue," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic consultant who co-sponsored the poll. ...
"This is a moral question," agreed Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University economist who advised Clinton on his ill-fated plan. "And I don't blame the private market. This is a political failure." ...
HEADLINE: Somalia;
President of Somaliland to Speak at Princeton
BYLINE: Princeton University Office Of Communications
PRINCETON, N.J. - In a rare U.S. appearance, the president of Somaliland, Muhammad Ibrahim Egal, will give a public talk at Princeton University on Oct. 13. Somaliland (the portion of Somalia previously ruled by the British) declared its independence from Somalia in 1991.
While the government, based in Hargeysa, has not been recognized, it receives international aid, provides security for its population, and carries on many of the functions of a sovereign state. Somaliland is appealing for international recognition given that the Somali state, based formally in Mogadishu, has collapsed. Muhammad Ibrahim Egal was a central figure in the struggle for Somali independence and was Prime Minister of Somalia from 1967 to 1969. He was overthrown in the coup that brought Siad Barre to power and was subsequently imprisoned. He was elected President of Somaliland in 1993 and re-elected in 1997. ...
HEADLINE: US scientists discover that monkeys grow new brain
cells every day
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Oct 15
Brain cells in the macaque monkey reproduce daily by the thousands and could overthrow a longstanding theory that human brain cells do not regenerate, biologists at Princeton University reported.
The finding, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, could lead to new treatments for degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
In addition, if the production of brain cells is related to the learning process, as the researchers suspect, it could debunk the theory that memory is stored according to the way brain cells are interconnected, the report said.
Biologists Elizabeth Gould and Charles Gross found that thousands of neurons are formed each day in the cerebral cortex area of the macaque monkey.
While similar research has not been conducted in humans, the scientists point out that physical phenomena observed in monkeys often are duplicated in humans.
The finding confirms previous research conducted by other scientists including Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, who found that when canaries learn new songs they grow fresh neurons.
The Princeton research is likely to be convincing, Eric Kandel, a leading neuroscientist at Columbia University, told commenting on the findings in the New York Times.
"The scientific community can easily believe something it is 50 percent ready to absorb ... we are prepared for it," he added.
SHOW: THE OSGOOD FILE
October 15, 1999, Friday
HEADLINE: Study Disputes Conventional Wisdom That Brain Cells No Longer Grow After Adulthood
REPORTERS: CHARLES OSGOOD
Until now, you could ask any scientist whether we grow new brain cells when the old ones are damaged or worn out and the most learned of brain specialists would say, 'No, we don't.' It has been the long-held belief of everybody that once our brains have reached adulthood, we have all the brain cells we're ever going to get. But now some biologists working with monkeys at Princeton University are challenging that conventional wisdom. They say thousands of newly formed neurons arrive in the central cortex of the brain every day. And they say the monkey brain is enough like ours so that it's more likely than not to be true of us as well. The story after this for Michelob.
(Announcements)
OSGOOD: If what the Princeton University biologists have discovered about the brains of some macaque monkeys turns out to be true of our brains, too, it would open up all sorts of new possibilities for people suffering from various kinds of dementia, including Alzheimer's. In the Princeton studies, the new neurons are produced in the central area of the brain and then migrate to the cortex, the outer layer of the brain where the higher, intellectual functions are carried out. What if those new cells turn out to be, in effect, recordings of that day's experiences and acquired knowledge? It would mean that some of the major premises on which neurology is based will have to be revised. And maybe with a new way of thinking about how we think and remember, it might be possible to reverse brain disorders that we've always thought were irreversible, and some of the things that scientists' own brains have learned may have to be unlearned.
HEADLINE: In Friday's US papers
SOURCE: Chemical News & Intelligence
BYLINE: Patrick Reynolds
DATELINE: Houston
Study suggests nerve cell growth
Researchers at Princeton University have evidence that adult monkeys produce a small but steady trickle of new nerve cells, a finding that challenges the classical assumption that after early childhood the brains of humans, apes and other primates can only lose cells, not gain them. The finding raises the possibility that ways might be found to turn the trickle into a torrent, stimulating the replacement of cells killed off by such calamities as stroke or Alzheimer's disease. At the moment, however, it's unknown whether the new cells are even functional.
HEADLINE: Research supports idea that age doesn't hinder
learning
BYLINE: Alex Salkever , Special to The Christian Science
Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
HIGHLIGHT: Findings reported today give evidence that a key part of the brain
For most of this century, scientists have believed that the human brain grew until a certain age, then stopped - making learning more difficult in later years.
Now, researchers have the clearest evidence yet that the part of the brain most closely associated with complex learning and memory continually regenerates itself.
On one level, the findings reported in today's issue of the journal Science may help researchers working on treatments of brain damage or brain diseases, as well as ways to stimulate learning.
But on a more basic level, they suggest that the mental failings once assumed to be an unavoidable pitfall of aging are little more than stereotypes and have no basis in biological fact. ...
Despite this evidence, many neurologists continued to believe that neurogenesis did not exist in the cerebral cortex of higher-order primates and humans. Their feeling was that the stability of the cerebral cortex was crucial to memory and identity, both of which require a strong degree of constancy.
"People thought: If the cerebral cortex is important in memory, how could it change?" says Charles Gross, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and one of the study's authors. "In fact the opposite view is at least as plausible: If memories are formed from experiences, these experiences must produce changes in the brain."
In the study announced today, Professor Gross and his colleagues at Princeton successfully tracked neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex of a higher order primate, the adult macaques monkey. People and monkeys have nearly identical brain structures, so it is considered likely that the same process may be at work in the human brain, too. ...
HEADLINE: Alumni Offices Use Electronic Media to Forge Closer
Ties With Graduates
BYLINE: WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ
These days, the ties that bind may be hyperlinked. Alumni offices at colleges and universities are pouncing on new technologies, attempting to form tighter relationships with their graduates via e-mail discussion groups, Web sites, Web cameras, on-line courses, and searchable alumni directories.
"Creating an on-line community is the buzzword now," says Andrew B. Shaindlin, executive director of the California Institute of Technology's Alumni Association.
Some institutions, like Princeton University, are focusing on education, presenting electronic seminars and discussions. Others, such as Stanford University, are gearing up their Web sites to become "Web portals," offering a broad array of services, including headlines, customized stock quotes, and financial news.
Still other alumni offices say that their graduates are interested in career-networking possibilities, and are turning to their alma maters for everything from on-line business-card exchanges to e-mail interviews. ...
HEADLINE: Reassessing an NSF Program for Research Have-Nots
BYLINE: JEFFREY BRAINARD
Maine has long ranked near the bottom of all 50 states in the amount of federal research dollars won by colleges -- about $21-million in 1997.
But the picture has been far brighter in Alabama, where colleges received nearly $259-million in federal support that same year. In 1994, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa won a competitively awarded, $2.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation for a new science-and-engineering center in materials science, one of only 24 financed nationwide.
The two states have something in common, however: Both are part of the N.S.F.'s $48.4-million Experimental Program for the Stimulation of Competitive Research (EPSCOR). Sixteen other, mostly rural states, along with Puerto Rico, share in the dedicated pot of EPSCOR money for peer-reviewed proposals from researchers based in those places. Most of the grant money has gone to public universities. ...
That distribution has helped to make EPSCOR popular with members of Congress from small states. They have provided the program with steady budget increases, allowing the N.S.F. program to expand from its original contingent of the five least wealthy states. Congress set up comparable, smaller programs at other federal agencies that finance university-based research, including the Defense and Energy Departments.
The program has both fans and detractors at major research universities in larger states. Some view it as an unjustified set-aside within the N.S.F.'s $3.6-billion budget. "It always seemed strange to us, when N.S.F. talked about funding the very best research, that there was this program," said Allen J. Sinisgalli, associate provost for research at Princeton University. "This is kind of an unnecessary propping up of individual institutions in regional areas." ...
HEADLINE: Experts warn of security hole in Microsoft Java
machine
BYLINE: Sharon Machlis
A German researcher has discovered what some experts call a "serious security flaw" in Microsoft Corp.'s Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The problem appears to affect recent versions of JVMfor Windows, which is used in software such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook and the Eudora e-mail program.
Karsten Sohr at the University of Marburg reported finding the bug in JVM'sbytecode verifier. The glitch allows a code sequence to be put together that improperly puts the values from one Java type into the values of another Java type. Bytecode is the name for compiled Java programs. The JVMverifier is supposed to catch such a transfer of values.An attack applet can exploit the glitch and override JVMsecurity, doing things such as reading private data or modifying and deleting files on a victim's machine, Reliable Software Technologies Corp. (RST) in Dulles, Va., a software-assurance consulting firm, said.Researchers at RST and Princeton University's Safe Internet Programming team have verified Sohr's findings, according to a statement issued by RST. ...
HEADLINE: CBS Like It Oates As Marilyn Goes To TV
BYLINE: BY CELIA MCGEE
It's taking more than $1 million and Marilyn Monroe to make a hot Hollywood property out of the Diet Coke-swilling, paper-thin, prolific novelist, Joyce Carol Oates.
CBS and producer Robert Greenwald have won this week's big Hollywood battle - the rights to Oates' forthcoming Monroe novel, "Blonde."
The book, due out in April, will be a four-hour mini-series on CBS instead of a feature-length movie, as had been expected.
This is Oates' second big payday thanks to the woman who was born Norma Jean. In June, the Princeton University creative writing professor left longtime publisher Dutton for the Ecco Press, the small literary publishing company her friend Daniel Halpern had just partnered with Rupert Murdoch's deep-pocketed HarperCollins. ...
HEADLINE: Chechnya Is About To Engineer A Nuclear Explosion
SOURCE: Segodnya, October 13, 1999, p.2
BYLINE: Mikhail Tolpegin
HIGHLIGHT: INSTIGATED BY SALMAN RADUEV, RUSSIAN SPECIAL SERVICES ARE STRENGTHENING THE DEFENSE OF THE COUNTRY, AS CHECHNYA HAS CONNECTED ITS HOPES WITH PARTISAN AND TERRORIST WARFARE. SECURITY MEASURES AT MAIN NUCLEAR MECHANISMS WERE INTENSIFIED.
Russian security structures have again begun to regard Salman Raduev as a potential organizer of acts of terrorism at Russian nuclear objects. Information agencies have dispersed the statement of the Defense Ministry of Russia saying that he had already "created mobile groups numbering up to 15 people, for the most part appearing Slavic" for this purpose. Raduev himself hurried to state that he "had never planned to organize acts of terrorism at atomic power stations because it might lead to a catastrophe with unpredictable consequences."
Should we believe Raduev? "We have the same information, as the Defense Ministry," officers of the Federal Security Service told our correspondent. "Groups of terrorists sighting nuclear objectives are certainly being formed." According to the information of the security officers, Chechen guerilla groups now include about 100 or 150 Slavs, who are mostly Ukrainians from the Ukrainian National Army and former Russian servicemen who had been taken as captives by Chechens and have accepted Islam. As the FSS holds, they make up the interior structure of the aforementioned terrorist groups.
The FSS prefers to keep silent in regards to the places where terrorists can turn up and to the techniques which they can use. We studied the results of the research recently conducted by scientists of Princeton University (USA) and managed to get a notion of the terrorists' possible plans. It is known that it is sufficient to damage the system by cooling the reactor to destroy its frame. According to the American scientists, the Ural region is the most attractive territory for the terrorists. Apart from the well-known Mayak plant (according to the research, destruction of its mechanisms can be compared to a nuclear explosion) there are numerous radioactive waste storages there and a storage for 30 tons of plutonium, and there is also the Beloyarsk Atomic Power Station not far from Yekaterinburg. ...
HEADLINE: Brain Cells Get Smart Enough To Regenerate
BYLINE: Andy Geller
Princeton University scientists say they have refuted one of the oldest beliefs about the brain - that its cells don't regenerate.
The researchers say the brain constantly produces new cells for the neocortex, its learning and memory center.
The finding could lead to new ways to treat strokes or Alzheimer's disease.
In studies using macaque monkeys, the scientists traced the path of cells that migrated to the neocortex. Once the cells arrived in the neocortex, they become a new part of the brain's central circuitry, head researcher Elizabeth Gould said.
"This shows that there is a naturally regenerative mechanism" in the brain, she said.
Her study appears today in the journal Science.
Gould's team injected monkeys with a compound that cells take up as they make new cells.
Just hours later, the cells in one area of the brain were observed taking up the compound, proving they were dividing and making immature brain cells.
A week later the new cells had migrated, matured and plugged themselves into the neocortex.
Gould said it is unknown if Alzheimer's or other disorders are tied to a failure or a decline of this regeneration process.
HEADLINE: Brain-cell renewal seen even with age
RESEARCH: Growth is observed in monkeys' learning centers, a
promising find for treatment of human diseases.
BYLINE: LEE BOWMAN, Scripps Howard News Service
For decades, researchers have thought that the adult brain is like a computer hard drive that can't be upgraded but that only gradually deteriorates.
In the past few years, however, a series of studies has found that the brains of humans and higher animals are renewing themselves fairly steadily in several structures.
And a new study to be published today shows that new nerve cells are being generated even in the most advanced part of the brains of adult monkeys, and thus probably also in humans, who have basically the same brain structures.
The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for brain
diseases and injuries, and also offer new insights into how the
mind accomplishes such basic functions as problem-solving and
learning.
Princeton University psychologists Elizabeth Gould and
Charles Gross report in the journal Science that the formation of
new neurons takes place in several regions of the cerebral cortex
that are crucial to cognitive and perceptual functions.
The discovery is dramatic, because many scientists still doubted that the process occurred in an evolutionarily newer, higher part of the brain, even after regeneration had been found in other parts of the system that guide our sense of smell and basic memories. ...
NOTE: This story also appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
HEADLINE: Cypress Communications Receives $53.5 Million in Financing; Atlanta-Based Company to Use Funds for National Expansion
DATELINE: ATLANTA, Oct. 15
Cypress Communications today announced the closing of $53.5 in private-equity financing to be used for national expansion purposes.
Investors in this round of financing, the company's third, include current investors: The Centennial Funds, Alta Communications, Beacon Ventures and new investors: Nassau Capital ...
Cypress Communications Investors
* Nassau Capital invests in private equity and real estate on behalf of Princeton University's $6.3 billion endowment. Nassau invests in a variety of investment vehicles and transaction types, including management buyouts, growth equity, recapitalizations and industry consolidations. Other Nassau portfolio companies in the communications industry include: KMC Telecom and Crown Castle International.
HEADLINE: Should We Permit Euthanizing Defective Babies?
SOURCE: Wire services
BYLINE: KATHLEEN PARKER
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE being puzzled about whether killing babies is right or wrong. Yet here we are at the end of the 20th century debating whether infants with disabilities deserve life.
Should parents be allowed to kill their badly formed children within 30 days of birth? Such is the question posed recently by Princeton professor Peter Singer, who, strangely, is charged with guiding a new generation through the moral intricacies of bioethics.
Singer is above all a practical man, as suggested by the title of his 1979 book,"Practical Ethics."In his view, infants under 1 month of age have no human consciousness; therefore, parents should be able to kill a severely disabled child. ...
Protesters, many of them disabled, demonstrated their contempt for Singer's position last month by barricading Princeton University entrances. On Tuesday, protesters attending a forum where Singer debated a blind Wellesley professor on the subject wore signs saying "Singer and Hitler: Great together." ...
Though unpalatable, Singer's opinions are neither new (primitive tribes destroyed damaged children) nor unique (Hitler similarly believed in destroying what he considered to be imperfect humans). Nevertheless, Singer's moment in the spotlight affords us an opportunity to reaffirm the majority belief that human life always matters. Imperfect human life the kind Singer's view would eradicate, may matter most of all.
Several years ago while writing a story on life-and-death decisions in the intensive care nursery, I interviewed a couple who decided against doctors recommendations to let their badly damaged child die.
When I met them, the child, born with severe spina bifida, was 2 years old and a veteran of surgical wards. She faced a certain future of disability and dependence.
It was impossible to ignore the happy spirit of that household. ...
HEADLINE: Pride week's participants discuss changing perception
of gay students at Princeton
BYLINE: By Ryann Manning, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
The Princeton University community celebrated this year's Pride Week, some students took time to reflect on the campus' climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.
While noting that the atmosphere at the University toward LGBT students has improved a great deal since the early 1970s when Gays at Princeton -- the precursor to the Pride Alliance -- was founded, student leaders say there is still a long way to go.
This year's Pride Week was marked by enthusiasm, unlike some past years in which the Pride Week flag was burned as a statement against the celebration. Tonight's "Coming Out" dance at Terrace promises to be peaceful fun, unlike the GAP's first dance on campus in 1973, which prompted threats of violence and required Public Safety's presence.
Nonetheless, there is still discomfort for some students, explained Tim Howe '00, founder of the Firehazards, a performance group dedicated to celebrating diversity.
Howe described five incidents of outward harassment that occurred during the first month of class this fall, including verbal assaults, beer thrown at gay students on the 'Street' and the carving of the word "fag" in the door of a resident adviser in Mathey College.
"In four years here," Howe said, "this is the most unsafe I have ever felt."
Howe said he believes this increased tension has been sparked by the strong presence of issues of sexuality in the national media and public consciousness in general. He said people who feel homosexuality is wrong may be more likely to vocalize that feeling, and even strike out aggressively. ...
HEADLINE: ECOnference draws Princeton students to weigh
environmental issues
BYLINE: By Catherine Holahan, The Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
"How can the planet survive the next millennium?"
Finding an answer to this question is one of the goals of the approximately 2,000 students -- including more than a dozen Princeton University students -- who are expected to convene this weekend at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss environmental issues at "ECOnference 2000."
The three-day conference -- sponsored by more than 50 environmental, health and conservation groups, including Greenpeace, Green Corps and the World Wildlife Fund -- will have more than 50 speakers and feature 150 workshops dedicated to discovering solutions to the ecological problems of the 21st century.
Consumer activist Ralph Nader '55 will be among the primary speakers this evening. Others include Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., author Paul Rogat Loeb and filmmaker Michael Moore. Rusted Root will perform tonight. Workshops will cover topics such as recycling, nuclear power, genetic engineering, the influence of corporations in universities and the future of the environmental movement, according to the organization's Website. ...
HEADLINE: Building Campus Traditions At ODU Is No Easy
Matter
BYLINE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK
Princeton has its ''Nude Olympics.''
Elon College has its saplings.
Texas A&M has its ''Silver Taps.''
Old Dominion University has high hopes.
''There is no real tradition here,'' laments student body president Tommy Smigiel, who made establishing traditions at ODU part of his election campaign last spring.
But Smigiel and a group of ODU student leaders is out to change all that. They took advantage of Thursday's third annual ''University Pride Day'' - an outdoor festival featuring free food, music, demonstrations and just plain hanging out on campus - to jump-start a Monarch tradition or two.
Smigiel's first priority: protecting the university seal. In his office in Webb Center, which overlooks campus, Smigiel winces each time he sees students heedlessly walk across the school seal, a brass medallion set into cement in the center of the university's commons. On Thursday, Smigiel had a sign erected near the seal to remind students that tradition dictates that only alumni may tread on the seal. ...
HEADLINE: Obits
RICHARD V. EDMONDS
Richard V. Edmonds, 82, Leawood, KS, passed away Monday, October 18, 1999. ...
Mr. Edmonds was born December 16, 1916, in Battle Creek, MI. He graduated from Battle Creek, MI, High School and attended Wake Forest University, where he studied Engineering; the University of KS, where his focus was on electronics; then, Ohio State University, studying Mechanical Engineering, and Princeton University. ...
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
BESHEL, JOSEPH JACOB
Joseph Jacob Beshel. On October 16, 1999. Beloved husband of Cynthia E. Beshel. Father of Jeffrey, David, Jonathan and Susan of Princeton, NJ. A Funeral Liturgy will be celebrated at 1:30 PM on Friday, October 22, 1999, at the Princeton University Chapel, Princeton, NJ. Burial will be private. Contributions may be made to Operation Smile, 6435 Tidewater Dr., Norfolk, VA 23509.
NAME: Donald H. Riddle
HEADLINE: Donald H. Riddle, 78; Led John Jay College
BYLINE: By WILLIAM H. HONAN
Donald H. Riddle, who as president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice changed the institution's curriculum to produce "educated cops," died on Monday at an assisted-care center in Newtown, Pa. He was 78.
He had lived in Newtown and died after a long illness, said Richard H. Ward, a close friend and former colleague.
Before Dr. Riddle's presidency, from 1968 to 1975, law enforcement officers were commonly trained as gun-toting security men without much exposure to critical and analytical thinking. Dr. Riddle changed that at John Jay College (a branch of the City University of New York) by introducing required courses in language and the humanities. ...
Dr. Riddle was born in Brooklyn and earned bachelor's and master's degrees and a doctorate from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton, Hamilton College and the Eagleton Institute of Politics before joining John Jay College as dean of the faculty in 1965.
HEADLINE: Obituaries
Norman Pratt
Norman "Jim" Pratt, 88, Longboat Key, died Oct. 13, 1999.
He was born July 29, 1911, in Providence, R.I., and came to Longboat Key 24 years ago. He was an author and retired professor of classical languages and literature. He was a member of the faculty and board of the Education Center in Longboat Key. He was director of the Longboat Key Public Interest Committee and vice president of Sarasota-Manatee Phi Beta Kappa Association. He earned a master's degree and doctorate from Princeton University. He was a Navy intelligence veteran of World War II. He was on the vestry of All Angels By The Sea Episcopal Church. ...