Notebook

NICOTINE FOE: Richard Johnson, right, professor and director of neurology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, welcomes former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to the podium for his talk on the tobacco agreements. While President Bill Clinton praised research and denounced tobacco in one breath during his February 13 speech at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting, his exhalations failed to mention that his plans for stoking one depend on snuffing the other. "We must seize this moment to strengthen our nation for the new century by expanding our commitment to discovery-increasing our support for science, pressing for progress in the war against cancer and other diseases, protecting our children from public health dangers, most especially from the deadly addiction of tobacco," Clinton said during his address to a crowd of about 5,000. Clinton also called for taxes on cigarettes to increase by $1.50 a pack over the next 10 years. Later that day, Harold E. Varmus, National Institutes of Health director, also spoke of smoking and funding but avoided mentioning the relationship between the two, instead simply noting, "Many cancers can be prevented by avoiding the use of tobacco products." C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general, questioned the appropriateness of using projected funds from the tobacco industry for unrelated science. Clinton's budget for FY 1999 specifies that $25.3 billion for science and medical research from 1999 to 2003 will come from the tobacco industry, although no settlement between the government and the industry has yet been reached. Koop cited his "basic uneasiness" for using any money from the tobacco industry for anything other than tobacco prevention education and research into nicotine addiction and tobacco-related illness. He also noted that Clinton has "prematurely" spent the money from a tobacco settlement that "has practically unraveled." STEPPING UP: University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute's Rita Colwell received President Clinton's nod for the NSF directorship after earlier being named a candidate for the agency's deputy director position. During his address at the AAAS annual meeting, President Bill Clinton announced the resignation of John H. Gibbons, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). "His ability to build bipartisan coalitions on contentious issues from nuclear testing to cloning to climate change has strengthened our nation immeasurably," Clinton said of his science adviser, who is retiring. Clinton then announced his intent to nominate Neal F. Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, to the OSTP post. Lane has headed NSF since 1993. Clinton also announced his intent to nominate Rita R. Colwell, president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, to replace Lane as NSF director. Clinton had previously announced his intent to nominate Colwell for the NSF deputy director position (Notebook, The Scientist, Feb. 2, 1998, page 31). In an effort to get students involved in its annual meeting, AAAS encourages them to volunteer as aides to lend a hand during the scientific sessions. This year, however, speakers received a memo prior to the meeting-held this year in Philadelphia-detailing everything the session aides could not do: Aides were not allowed to touch or operate the audiovisual equipment, load slides into carousels, change the overheads, or even dim the lights. "When I read the memo, I thought maybe I was back in the Soviet Union," says Yuri Lazebnik, an assistant investigator at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., who paticipated in a cell death session February 16. Actually, the edict sprang from Philadelphia union rules. "It seemed a little bizarre," acknowledges AAAS scientific program director Michael Strauss. But union rules prevented AAAS from placing their own projectionists in the sessions. To avoid spending $10,000 on union workers, AAAS encouraged the speakers to help one another with slides. So what did the session aides do? "They recorded how many people were present at the beginning and end of every session and how the discussions went," says Strauss. Without the stress of having to listen vigilantly for that "next slide" request, he adds, "they had more time to spend counting." More than two years after he received a baboon bone marrow transplant, why is AIDS activist Jeff Getty still hearing the predictable attempts at humor? Immediately following the 1995 procedure, Getty recalled at a AAAS press briefing on February 14, he heard "a lot of baboon jokes," such as references to "why I like to eat bananas, and my friends at the zoo. This was lighthearted and good-natured for some time." But, he continued, "what was surprising was that these did not go away." He suspects that the joking continues because his xenotransplant crossed a "deep-seeded psychological barrier . . . we're not ready yet to have humans be part animal." While many people opposed to xenotransplantation cite concerns about the spread of zoonoses, Getty believes that uneasy feelings about creating "a new species of animal-humans" may be "tainting the debate"; he asserted that safe-sex practices among xenotransplant patients could prevent the spread of such diseases. In April 1996, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), under the aegis of the White House, established a panel charged with producing a definition of research misconduct that would be accepted by all federal agencies supporting science. The effort was spawned by disagreement over definitions developed in prior attempts. With the NSTC panel at work for nearly two years, why is there still no definition? Sybil Francis, senior policy analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and OSTP's representative on the panel, identified several "challenges" at a AAAS session on February 13. First, she noted, conflicting "legal" and "scientific" approaches to a definition make consensus difficult. Second, practices for data collection and other activities differ. Third, many favor a narrow definition of research misconduct, while others favor a broad definition based on community standards. However, Francis said, the panel found "one area where there is consensus": the idea that universities need to take the lead in policing misconduct, with the federal government merely overseeing the process. She said the panel has drafted a proposal that is expected to be released for public comment this spring. Science is largely about reverse engineering-that is, explaining how an existing, complex organism or system functions and what it achieves. So says Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who demonstrated his point by reverse engineering romantic love in an entertaining talk February 17 at the AAAS meeting on "How The Mind Works." Adapting the game theory of economics to psychology, he said a rational approach to courtship involves "finding the best-looking, nicest, smartest, and richest person we can, who will settle for us." But commitment is then a problem, because a rationalist would leave the partnership if a better opportunity came along. Romance strengthens the commitment by acting as a guarantor of promise. This diminution of freedom and rationality benefits the species by ensuring long-term partnerships. Autonomic responses to the beloved, such as a rapid heartbeat and blushing, give perceivable evidence that rationalism is not in control. And Pinker says anthropological studies have demonstrated the universality of romantic love in the world's cultures, disproving the myth that it arose from Hollywood or bad novels. Courtship rituals offer further proof of romantic love's evolutionary importance. People say they'll love someone forever. "You don't say to your beloved, 'You're the best-looking, nicest, and richest so far." Although, of course, that might depend on what sorts of nightspots you frequent. In a talk and a subsequent news conference February 16 at the AAAS meeting, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer emphasized his support for the notion that judges should consider appointing neutral scientific experts to help courts evaluate complex scientific issues in litigation. "Obviously, it is an important thing that legal decisions rest on . . . sound science," Breyer noted. But he recognized that scientists themselves may often be divided on scientific truth. "There are many, many issues in which scientists are not at all certain. And in those circumstances it is not going to be possible to determine the scientific answer. What one would really be working towards is to narrow the range within which a case is decided. . . . The possibility of independent experts has to be viewed as a nudge towards a few more on occasions that might call for it. That isn't a cure-all, and it can't be used widely." Breyer declined to call for the establishment of special "scientific courts," as has occasionally been suggested (A. Kantrowitz, The Scientist, Feb. 2, 1998, page 9), observing that it would be impractical to fit such courts into the United States' current political and legal environment. DEEPENING GRAMMAR: Arguing for Darwinian theories of language, primatologist Barbara King rejects the view that language is an invention unique to humans. Recent discoveries in the life sciences provide enough evidence to overturn a dominant view in linguistics: that language is a unique ability of humans, argued researchers at a February 14 AAAS session. Barbara J. King, a primatologist at William and Mary College, said that many of the movements and gestures she has observed in chimpanzees are the same behaviors from which human language evolved. Skeptical of successes in teaching primates sign language, some psychologists and linguists have questioned if the animals are really producing language or merely mimicking their instructors. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist at Georgia State University, said her research erases those doubts. In double-blind conditions, she found that a young pygmy chimpanzee was able to comprehend and produce novel sentences constructed out of a primitive referential sign language. "Clearly, [the chimpanzee] had rudimentary syntactical ability," she says. Savage-Rumbaugh also has observed complex, language-like communication systems in chimps in the wild. In this system, the chimps mat vegetation in subtle ways to indicate the direction of trails through the jungle. NONDETERMINIST: TIGR's J. Craig Venter derided genetic deterministic predictions based on single polymorphisms. Scientists shouldn't make too many assumptions about the functions of genes-especially how they control human behavior-based on a single polymorphism, J. Craig Venter, president and director of the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Md., warned during his introduction to the two-day Genome Seminar at the AAAS meeting on February 14. Even though scientists have sequenced only about 5 percent of the human genome, "we have developed this genetic determinism," Venter said. Public misconceptions include the idea that one gene can be solely responsible for depression. "I think this is largely hogwash," he said. While introducing Monica Riley, senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., Venter noted that E. coli is genetically the most-known organism. Yet Riley remarked that about a third of E coli's 4,404 genes' functions remain hidden. She, like Venter, warned about oversimplification, adding that early ideas of one gene producing one enzyme aren't always accurate. "We realize it's not always that simple," Riley said. Understanding the interaction of multiple genes and the enzymes they produce will provide a fuller understanding of the genome's function. Riley tells The Scientist that one standard method of determining function, comparing sequence similarities between species, can yield only so much information because of evolution. "The sequences of proteins of similar functions have diverged so far that we can't detect them all." She predicts that scientists will turn to structural models of genes to determine unknown functions.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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