Notebook

Student employees at three University of California (UC) campuses recently voted to call a strike for the coming fall term. On May 1, members of the Association of Graduate Student Employees/United Auto Workers (AGSE/UAW) voted 77 percent in favor of striking at UC-Berkeley. Similar votes taken on May 14 by the Student Association of Graduate Employees/UAW at UCLA and on May 21 by the Association of Student Employees/UAW at UC-San Diego found 94 percent and 98 percent in favor of striking, respectively. At issue is whether the university should grant bargaining rights to student employees (R. Finn, The Scientist, April 29, 1996, page 1). The matter has been under dispute in California since the early 1980s. Research and teaching assistants (R.A.'s and T.A.'s) are not recognized as employees with collective-bargaining rights at any of the UC campuses. UC-Berkeley administrators recognize only a bargaining unit of student employees who are designated as "readers," "tutors," and "acting instructors." In an October 1995 state Public Employment Relations Board decision, Judge James Tamm ruled that readers, tutors, and acting instructors at the UC-San Diego campus also had collective-bargaining rights. In a parallel proceeding during hearings for the San Diego case, the union argued successfully that the judge should allow evidence on the question of R.A. and T.A. status at UCLA along with evidence on readers, tutors, and acting instructors. Tamm has said he plans to write his UCLA decision before the start of the fall term. Isaac Mankita, an executive board member at UC-Berkeley's AGSE/UAW, asserts that the votes send "a notice to UC that we're serious about this [gaining collective-bargaining rights for all UC student employees]. We haven't left, and we aren't going to go away." Counters Joseph Duggan, associate dean of the graduate division at UC-Berkeley: "The university's position is that it's only going to recognize unions that are entitled to collective bargaining." SO CLOSE: Graeme Bell's team hopes to land a diabetes gene. A multinational team of 33 researchers is homing in on a gene that plays a major role in causing non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) in Mexican Americans. The illness afflicts as many as a quarter of Mexican Americans who are older than 45, and about 5 percent of the general population. "This gene is the largest [NIDDM] risk factor identified to date," says Graeme Bell, Louis Block Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Chicago. Bell notes that the gene, which is located on chromosome 2 and dubbed NIDDM1, may account for between 35 percent and 70 percent of NIDDM cases that run in Mexican-American families. To find the gene, the Chicago team, along with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, Houston, and the Virginia Mason Research Center in Seattle searched the genomes of 330 pairs of Mexican-American adult siblings with NIDDM. The scientists reported their findings this month in Nature Genetics (C.L. Hanis et al., 13:161-7, 1996). The same large-scale screening approach, Bell explains, will likely be used to identify genes implicated in common disorders, such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and other types of diabetes. The NIDDM gene may be identified within two years, Bell estimates. The finding was surprising because there aren't other likely candidate genes in the region on chromosome 2. "The diabetes susceptibility gene that is in this [genetic] region regulates blood glucose levels in a novel and unexpected way," he notes. "I think it will change how we think about regulation of blood glucose levels." The next step is to pinpoint the gene, the protein it encodes, and its role in determining blood glucose levels. 'WHAT NATURE IS': Koji Nakanishi Koji Nakanishi, a Columbia University chemist who has traveled the globe to isolate biological compounds active in nature, is the winner of this year's $300,000 Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry. The award, presented annually by the Houston-based Welch Foundation "for significant contributions to humankind through chemistry," includes a gold medallion and a certificate. Many of the compounds researched by Nakanishi have been put to practical use. His synthesis of an African wasp's venom, for instance, may help scientists understand how brain cells are damaged by oxygen deprivation, perhaps resulting in advances in treating strokes, heart attacks, and neurological diseases such as epilepsy, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's. Nakanishi tells The Scientist that his studies involve finding out "what nature is-the very intricate mechanism-and how clever nature is." He offers a simple example: "Why does sugar taste sweet? You have to isolate the receptor on the taste bud, and how the sugar fits into this particular receptor. And how is that transmitted so you get the sensation of sweetness? How is salt salty? . . . None of these receptors have been isolated." The 70-year-old Nakanishi joined the Columbia faculty in 1969 after teaching for several years in Japan. He was named Centennial Professor in 1980. A previous winner of the Award in Chemical Sciences from the National Academy of Sciences, Nakanishi also has received prizes from the Chemical Society of Japan, the Japan Academy, the American Chemical Society, the Swedish Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the Czech Academy of Sciences. GLOBETROTTERS: Studying Ecuadorean ecology in UC summer research program. A University of California (UC) summer program that matches university researchers with amateur scientists turns 20 this year. As part of the systemwide University Research Expedition Program (UREP), volunteers have crossed the globe, helping UC researchers gather data in some of the world's most remote places. Projects in zoology, archaeology, earth sciences, and conservation biology have taken participants to the coast of Kenya, the rainforests of Belize, and the islands of French Polynesia. One herbal-medicine project scheduled for this summer will involve observing and conducting field experiments on the "fur-washing" behavior of Costa Rican monkeys. Primatologists think that these monkeys select certain plants to rub on their fur as insect repellents and to heal wounds. The UC program-which, according to the school, is the first and only one of its kind based at a university-has mounted more than 1,000 trips since 1976. The program has expanded from primate and archaeological studies in the 1970s to include new biomedical projects such as tracking the epidemiology of AIDS in London and Amsterdam, says UREP director Jean Colvin. Each participant contributes a tax-deductible donation to cover the cost of the expedition. For more information, contact Colvin at the University Research Expedition Program, UC-Berkeley, 2223 Fulton St., Berkeley, Calif. 94720-7050; (510) 642-6586. World Wide Web address: http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/urep. National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Richard Klausner has an admittedly bold vision: a cooperative effort between NCI and scientists throughout the United States to offer genetic testing for cancer susceptibility in a research setting. NCI ran a workshop in April in which a newly formed Cancer Genetics Working Group laid out an action plan for creating such a network. The group of scientists from both within and outside NCI established three subcommittees to develop the network's future mission. At a news conference on May 19 at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Philadelphia, Klausner discussed the need for the national cancer genetics network: "It's in response to individuals demanding a right to know and the medical community realizing that genetic testing without information-knowing how to interpret test results, for example-is like giving a drug without knowing the dose and possible side effects." Klausner sees a network consisting of thousands of health-care providers who will have access to counseling, up-to-date clinical information, and opportunities to take part in various protocols. Referring to "the sudden profound change in the nature of medicine," he points out that genetic testing is frequently costly, time-consuming, and difficult to do. "It's not that the access [to testing] is being limited-it's a fear that it will be," Klausner states, alluding to concerns about workplace and insurance discrimination based on genetic susceptibility. He hopes private testing companies will offer their services through the network, which is expected to be in operation in the fall. While he calls the network "unprecedented in its scope," for now, he notes, it exists only on paper. SMALL WONDER: A vial containing leptin, the focus of a new clinical trial The biotech industry has taken a giant step toward entering the multibillion-dollar weight-loss market. Late last month, Amgen Inc., a publicly traded firm in Thousand Oaks, Calif., announced that it launched the first human clinical trials involving leptin. This potential drug is a recombinant form of a human protein produced by the ob (obese) gene and is thought to play a role in regulating appetite and metabolism. Amgen's first trial-conducted at several medical centers in North America-will evaluate the safety and tolerability of leptin in people in a variety of weight categories. These participants were selected because they have no other medical complications such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. The trial comes less than a year after reports describing leptin's weight-reducing capabilities in transgenic mice (M. Pelleymounter et al., Science, 269 :540-3, 1995). In those studies, leptin also reduced glucose, insulin, and lipid levels in animals with diabetes and lipid disorders such as hyperlipidemia. Amgen acquired the rights to develop and market leptin-based products from Rockefeller University. The ob gene was discovered by a team led by Rockefeller molecular geneticist Jeffrey Friedman. The study is expected to be completed early next year. ART OF THE MATTER: Freeman J. Dyson New York-based Rockefeller University annually awards its Lewis Thomas Prize to a scientist in honor of his or her artistic achievements. This year's honoree is Freeman J. Dyson, 72, a professor, emeritus, of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., whose nonfiction work has been published in the pages of the New Yorker and Scientific American. Winner of the Wolf Prize in physics in 1981 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dyson has written several books, including a 1979 autobiography, Disturbing the Universe (New York, Harper and Row). He has been lauded for both his scientific and literary accomplishments and was given a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1984 for Weapons and Hope (New York, Harper and Row), an examination of nuclear weapons. Rockefeller president Torsten N. Wiesel praises Dyson's work for its "intellectual range and stylistic elegance." Dyson, who has been with the Institute for Advanced Study for 43 years, discussed labor leader Samuel Gompers and poet William Blake during a May 22 ceremony on campus. He is the fourth Lewis Thomas Prize-winner. Previous recipients were physicist and science writer Abraham Pais; Nobel laureate, molecular geneticist, and author Francois Jacob; and Thomas himself, the late author and scientist who was dean of the New York University School of Medicine and the former president and chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

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June 1996

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