Notebook

Twenty-five years after the notorious Tuskegee study came to light, the United States government will formally apologize to its unwitting participants. The White House announced in early April that President Clinton soon would issue an apology to the 399 African American men whose syphilis was observed from 1932 to 1972 as part of an experiment by the U.S. Public Health Service. Despite the discovery in 1947 that penicillin cures syphilis, researchers neither treated the men nor told them they had the disease. The study is often cited as a primary reason for minority people's mistrust of science and scientists (T.W. Durso, The Scientist, Feb. 17, 1997, page 1), and observers feel an apology should help rebuild trust. "For the president to say that this has been an affront against part of the human race is really important qualitatively, because it makes a threshold after which nobody can deny that this happened," remarks Shiriki Kumanyika, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology and head of the department of human nutrition and dietetics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. "Because of that threshold, it opens the door for researchers, black and white, but primarily white, to accept the fact that this happened and stop trying to push it under the rug or see it as an inconvenience that black people still have on their minds." Reginald Sykes, president of the Chicago-based clinical-trial management and recruitment firm Quality Research Systems Inc., says that while an apology would be good for both the participants and the country, it "still does not address what we are going to do about women and minorities not being included in sufficient numbers in all the clinical trials that are being conducted." Photo: Miller Photography PICKING A WINNER: Beth Israel’s Don Des Jarlais thinks that the Wall Street Journal’s AIDS coverage A controversial AIDS article in the Wall Street Journal was one of 10 cited in the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Last May, a Journal article (A. Bennett, A. Sharpe, May 1, 1996, page 1) challenged Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tactics in telling the public that anyone can get AIDS. Its authors claimed that CDC exaggerated the threat to the general population to garner funding support from Congress, and that misdirected public funds for prevention were neglecting the main at-risk populations-homosexual men and intravenous drug users. The story caused a substantial stir in the AIDS-prevention community (S. Benowitz, The Scientist, June 10, 1996, page 1). Many prevention specialists noted that when CDC's campaign began in 1987, no one was sure if AIDS would spill over in large numbers to other groups in the population. But they also acknowledge that CDC could improve its prevention target-ing efforts. Don Des Jarlais, director of research at the Chemical Dependency Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, comments that the article was "mostly accurate," though the authors may have been "guilty of some overinterpretation" of CDC's motives. Still, the article "pointed to some real problems in how AIDS was discussed in the media, how funds were allocated, as well as how federal officials felt about AIDS." Des Jarlais praises the paper's overall AIDS coverage: "If anyone deserved the Pulitzer Prize, the Journal did." Photo: Frank J. Sulloway VICTORIOUS: An appeals court upheld whisteblower Carolyn Phinney's judgment against the University The tab owed by the University of Michigan (UM) to psychologist Carolyn Phinney has risen to $1.75 million. The latest tribunal to agree that she was the victim of both scientific misconduct and retaliation is the Michigan Court of Appeals, which upheld a lower-court ruling awarding her $1.5 million in damages. The appeals court on April 4 added a $250,000 fee as interest due on the damages. In 1989 Phinney, then a Michigan research associate, accused psychology professor Marion Perlmutter, head of a lab at the university's Institute of Gerontology, of stealing her ideas to obtain grant support; she also accused institute director Richard Adelman of threatening, harassing, and suspending her in response to the complaints (F. Hoke, The Scientist, Sept. 4, 1995, page 1). Phinney tells The Scientist that her experience is not unique, especially among young scientists. She adds: "I hope this $1.75 million judgment will strike some fear in the hearts of those who are contemplating the theft of a junior scientist's intellectual property, and the universities that cover up." Lisa Baker, Michigan's associate vice president for university relations, states: "We disagree with both the decision by the court of appeals and the earlier decision. We continue to stand behind UM personnel who are involved in the matter and believe that they acted appropriately." No decision has been made on further appeals, she notes. It's in the genes, man: Whether or not a person feels good after smoking marijuana is influenced in part by genetics, indicate the findings from a recent survey of twins. Identical male twins were more likely than fraternal male twins to answer similarly to a series of questions about what they sensed after taking the drug, such as if they experienced paranoia or a mellow feeling (M. Lyons et al., Addiction, in press). Identical twins share all of their genes, while fraternal twins share about half of their genome. Though factors such as peer pressure or personality type are important, the results point to a role for a genetic predilection for continued drug use, says Michael Lyons, the study's principal investigator and an associate professor of psychology at Boston University. "Clearly there's not a gene for taking a joint and lighting it up and inhaling it," he remarks. "We're trying to fill in some of the blanks between the genome and complex behavior." Participants were drawn from the Vietnam Era Twin Registry. More than 8,000 male twins took part in the study. Within this group, 577 sets of twins reported having used marijuana more than five times. Earlier this month the education division of the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS), an animal rights group based in Jenkintown, Pa., hosted a workshop at the National Science Teachers Association's (NSTA's) annual meeting in New Orleans. The aim of the workshop, called "Preparing Students for a Career in Medicine: The Dissection Controversy," was to stir up discussion of the practice of animal dissection in high school biology classes. One of the society's overall goals is the reduction and eventual elimination of the use of animals in classroom dissection. Katherine Lewis, AAVS's education director, says there was a "lively" question-and-answer period following workshop presentations on such alternatives to dissection as models and computer programs. As a convention exhibitor, AAVS paid an additional fee-on the order of several hundred dollars-to sponsor its workshop, states NSTA associate executive director Marily DeWall. According to DeWall, attendees know that such seminars are more commercial and "self-serving" than non-exhibit-related talks, and NSTA's policy is to allow organizations like AAVS to have equal time as long as they don't infringe on the rights of other exhibitors. The Coriell Institute for Medical Research of Camden, N.J., awards its Coriell Medal annually to a biomedical researcher who is accomplished in both clinical and basic science. This year's winner was Victor A. McKusick, the University Professor of Medical Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. McKusick, according to Coriell president David P. Beck, helped to "re-create" the field of genetics by providing it with a scientific foundation and helping to eliminate its unsavory connection with eugenics. McKusick once chaired Hopkins' department of medicine and was physician-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. McKusick's work on genetic diseases has focused on connective tissue disorders and dwarfism, and Beck praises him as "always a physician and a scientist." For his part, McKusick says the award is especially meaningful because it came from Coriell, whose bank of cells and DNA greatly helps scientists researching genetic disorders. "What the Coriell Institute does in contributing to the infrastructure of the Human Genome Project and for medical genetics research in general is very important," McKusick comments. STAR POWER: The insights and teaching techniques of Harvard's E.O. Wilson will be on a new College faculty and students will have access to the insights of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, thanks to a $50,000 grant awarded by the National Science Foundation. The grant will enable Washington, D.C.-based Island Press, which co-published Wilson's 1994 autobiography, Naturalist (along with Shearwater Books of Covolo, Calif.), and graphics software pioneer Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., to join with Wilson in developing a CD-ROM-based curriculum package. The package, called "Teaching Tools for Biology," will include computer simulations, animation, and slides. It is designed for courses in introductory and mid-level biology to discuss basic concepts in evolution, biodiversity, and conservation biology. Due in early 1999, it will contain video clips of Wilson, as well as many of his teaching materials. Island Press president Charles Savitt explains that he regretted being unable to audit Wilson's undergraduate course on evolutionary biology-which the entomologist and sociobiology pioneer taught for 35 years-while he was a graduate student. After seeing a videotape of the class, he realized "what an extraordinary teacher and scientist" the now-retired Wilson was. Savitt hopes that such "multimedia technology will be used to teach science more effectively." RAW MATERIAL: Dolly's introduction has kept the Biotechnology Industry Organization busy. Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Juliette Binoche, and Marie Curie-yes. Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor-no. Those were the tongue-in-cheek human-cloning recommendations of the Biotechnology Industry Organization's (BIO's) board of directors, according to BIO president Carl B. Feldbaum. Speaking at the annual symposium of the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Association and the Biotechnology Council of New Jersey, held in Philadelphia earlier this month, Feldbaum described BIO's response to the news that researchers had cloned an adult lamb. The organization's main strategy was to play up the benefits that genetic information has delivered while calling for a ban on any copying of people. Feldbaum said BIO was largely successful in communicating its position, with a single exception: In one of its dispatches, the Associated Press reported that Feldbaum had said that "human clothing should be prohibited." As a result, he cracked, "we subsequently got E-mail from nudist groups all over the world." The typo, Feldbaum suggested, also may be responsible for the high number of early registrations for BIO's annual conference, to be held this year in Houston.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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