Notebook

Pugwash For The Pros Keeping Current - Sort Of Olympic Trials Peak Conditions Young scientists and other professionals who as students were active in Student Pugwash USA now have a means to stay involved with the Pugwash movement after they graduate. The Student Pugwash office has announced the birth of Professional Pugwash, a new arm of the movement that explores the relationship of science to society (The Scientist, April 2, 1990, page 7). While Student Pugwash is itself a spin-off of the 33-year-old Pugwash society of senior scientists and diplomats, "in senior Pugwash, you have to be asked to join; it's only for eminent scientists," says Mike Smith, Student Pugwash USA's management director. Professional Pugwash, by contrast, "is open to any nonstudent," Smith says. "You don't have to have been active in the Student Pugwash group; you don't even have to have graduated." The Student Pugwash office is now collecting names of those interested in forming Professional Pugwash chapters. "The first step is to get interested people in touch with one another," Smith says. For information, contact the Student Pugwash USA office, 1638 R St., N.W., Suite 32, Washington, D.C. 20009-6446; (202) 328-6555. Science and Technical Writing: A Manual of Style (New York, Henry Holt and Co. Inc.) will be hitting bookstores in August. The book's general editor, Philip Rubens, a professor of technical and visual communication in the graduate program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says that "people doing research who are not [native-born] Americans" are among the intended audience. "Successful communication ... requires the author to develop an accurate profile of an audience and then write for that audience," proclaims the preface of the book, uncorrected galley proofs of which were recently sent to potential reviewers. Maybe the contributors ought to take a closer look at women doing science today. In a section on "Personal Names," the text states that "North American civil practice encourages women to adopt their husband's [sic] surname on marriage," without mentioning the practices of hyphenating a maiden name and a married name or keeping one's maiden name after marriage. "We talk about naming in many different cultures, [and] gender-based conventions throughout the world," says Rubens. "All we're doing is presenting them." So why not mention the nontraditional but now-common practices? "I guess that's something we'll have to do at a different time," says Rubens. Before the start of the 1992 Winter Olympics, female athletes were genetically tested to determine the extent of their "femaleness." Olympic officials screened women athletes for the presence of the Y chromosome, normally only found in males. Under normal circumstances, females carry two X chromosomes and males carry one of each. However, in rare instances a female may have acquired a Y, yet retain the physical characteristics of a woman. Two geneticists at Johns Hopkins University, Claude Migeon and Gary Berkovitz, say the test is discriminatory, since a woman who possesses a Y chromosome but still has female physical characteristics probably does not have the Y gene, which produces the hormones responsible for male strength. Although no one was disqualified in the Albertville games, the testing will be performed at the Summer Olympics as well. A six-member team of Indiana University researchers started up the slopes of Alaska's 20,320-foot Mount McKinley early this month to study calorie intake, energy expenditure, and weight loss at high altitudes. The team, under Joel Stager, acting research director of the university's Human Performance Laboratory, also is researching acute mountain sickness (AMS), especially the common use of the drug acetazolamide to counter symptoms of the disease. Stager's previous research shows the drug may reduce the ability to do exercise by 30 percent. This is the second team Stager has taken up Mount McKinley--the first was turned back by injury, illness, and severe weather without reaching the summit. "It's no piece of cake," says Jayne H. Spencer, a university spokeswoman. "But high-altitude studies have long been a focus at Indiana--which is in the middle of a corn field."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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