Notebook

Cold Spring Harbor NEW PROGRAM AT COLD SPRING HARBOR Next fall, five students will begin a new Ph.D. program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island that promises to be both faster and more flexible than the typical graduate school experience. The private, nonprofit research and educational institution has been home to such bioluminaries as Barbara McClintock and James Watson. Although it has welcomed grad students from the nearby University at Stony Brook for many years, until now it hasn't nurtured its own Ph.D.s-to-be. "The idea has been in genesis since the mid-1980s. Most of our efforts in education have not been degree granting," says director Bruce Stillman. In addition to offering rigorous coursework, teaching in the lab's high school programs, and rotation through several labs, the new program hopes to avoid the familiar problem of principal investigators' need to accomplish research conflicting with students' need to learn. "The mentoring system is two-tiered. The academic mentor is responsible for the intellectual development of the person as a scientist, providing a broader vision. The research mentor is more focused," says Stillman. And in response to the recent National Research Council report supporting alternatives to the traditional academic trajectory for beginning scientists, the program will explore other career options, such as law, journalism, and business, through intense courses that bring in outside experts as well as tap inside talent. The program is expected to take about four years to complete, compared to the five to seven years at most institutions. CALL THE PRESIDENT'S LAWYER President Bill Clinton's inability to recall certain interactions with Monica Lewinsky may have a physiological basis, suggest two hematologists in a recent short publication (C.V. Dang, L.B. Gardner, The Lancet, 352:1557, Nov. 7, 1998). Clinton may have been the victim of the Valsalva maneuver, they suggest. "This is a process in which an individual contracts his abdominal muscles and forcefully expires against a closed glottis, producing increased intrathoracic pressure. The maneuver is used in heavy lifting or straining to defecate," says Chi Van Dang, director of the division of hematology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Transient elevations in blood pressure in French-horn players have been blamed on the Valsalva maneuver, and it is used intentionally to treat hiccups. Earlier this year, the maneuver was proposed as a cause of transient global amnesia (S. Lewis, The Lancet, 352:397, Aug. 1, 1998). The current report in The Lancet takes the association one step further. It reports that two men in their 70s were taken to the hospital shortly after sexual intercourse with their wives, suffering from disorientation and amnesia evidenced by their inability to name the current president. And that president, Dang and Gardner suggest, might have suffered the same fate. Says Dang, "This form of amnesia results in a complete inability to recall what happened during the period of confusion. A presidential Valsalva maneuver during each of his recent escapades may have legally allowed him not to recall specific events." HOMEOBOX GENES AND SPECIATION Nematodes, flies, mammals, and even flowering plants use similar "homeobox" genes to control the pattern of their parts. When Chung-I Wu, chair and professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and postdoctoral fellow Chau-Ti Ting and coworkers discovered a homeobox gene with a "surge of amino acid changes" between two sibling species of Drosophila, they knew they were seeing accelerated evolution (C. Ting et al., Science, 282:1501-4, Nov. 20, 1998). Fifteen of the 62 amino acids in the homeobox domain of the OdsH gene differ between sibling species D. simulans and D. mauritiana, but the rest of the gene remains similar. The fact that the researchers discovered the gene in a search for the causes of sterility in males that result from crossing sibling species may explain the hidden evolutionary clues. OdsH is expressed in the fly's testis, which suggests that it disrupts the germline in a way that impairs fertility. Wu hypothesizes that natural selection is acting on the gene in a positive way, perpetuating the difference as a mechanism to keep the flies on separate species paths. He adds that the gene appears to have duplicated from a more ancient gene that affects neural tissue in nematodes and mammals, the newer gene somehow acquiring a function in male fertility. "We don't know the function, but it is important for spermatogenesis. But regardless of the normal function, in closely related species the function is changed so substantially that they are incompatible," Wu says. ESSENTIAL CONCEPTS Evolution was the word at the Nov. 4-7 convention of the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) in Reno, Nev. Rodger Bybee of the National Research Council led a workshop on a recent National Academy of Sciences publication, "Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science" (www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/evolution98/). The report was assembled by a blue ribbon panel of scientists and educators, and stressed evolution and the nature of science as essential concepts in science education. According to Bybee,"the document represents a statement by the NAS Council that teaching evolution is important." Perhaps the most inspiring yet sobering session featured Susan Epperson and Donald Aquillard, plaintiffs in landmark Supreme Court decisions on evolution (Epperson vs. Arkansas, 1968; Edwards vs. Aguillard, 1987). Aguillard, currently director of management information systems for the Lafayette, La., Parish School Board, reported on his recent Louisiana State University Ph.D. studies of how evolution is taught (or not taught) in local schools. Epperson, the first person to challenge an antievolution law since the 1925 Scopes trial (Tennessee vs. John Scopes) and currently a part-time instructor of biology and chemistry at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, agreed that "the battle is now at the local level and, judging from a few stories I heard at the NABT convention, principals, teachers, and school board members are promoting the teaching of creationism in science classes. I think I knew from the very beginning that ridding Arkansas of the antievolution law would certainly not end the controversy. The best we can try to do is prevent the forced teaching of a nonscience topic in science classes." Epperson was pleased with the National Academy publication on evolution: "I would like to see [it] put into the hands of every biology teacher." THE SHAMAN IS IN Ethnomedicine was also big at the NABT meeting. Mark Plotkin, author with Lynne Cherry of The Shaman's Apprentice (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1998), regaled a large audience with stories of miracle cures and indigenous healers in tropical America. Plotkin spoke with missionary zeal about new sources of antibiotics, an anticoagulant from vampire-bat saliva called draculin, and a nonaddictive pain killer from frog skin that's 80 times more potent than morphine. "Biotechnology makes nature more valuable, not less," says Plotkin. That's why "every major pharmaceutical company has restarted its natural products program." The shamans are savvy, too: "Nobody is selling stuff for beads and mirrors anymore." But Plotkin's message was broader, combining a strong pitch for science with advice for budding bioprospectors and a plea to conserve tropical resources and cultures. Plotkin believes we need new conservation programs. To date, utilitarian arguments have dominated efforts to conserve natural resources: organisms are valuable. But spiritual and ethical arguments should be emphasized: it's wrong to destroy ecosystems. As for the next generation of ethnopharmacologists, besides learning language and economics along with botany, students should "travel, travel, travel; read, read, read"--in other words, "explore and teach yourself." To start them off early, Plotkin has launched a kids' program based on his book. Plotkin wasn't alone on the medicinal plant bandwagon at NABT: Semantha Messier of the Howard Hughes program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, described a series of hands-on exercises for high school students aimed at discovering garden-grown antibiotics and learning science at the same time. Expedition team members excavate an egg cluster at the Auca Mahuevo dig site in the badlands of Argentina (inset). Their finds included the fossilized skin of sauropod dinosaur embryos. SAUROPOD SKIN On Nov. 17, amid much fanfare, archeologists from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York announced the big discovery of some small fossils. AMNH researchers, along with researchers from the Museo Municipal Carmen Funes in Neuquén, Argentina, found the first-ever fossilized embryos of giant plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods. What's more, the embryos were covered with patches of the first-ever unearthed fossilized embryo skin. The find, reported in the Nov. 19 issue of Nature (L.M. Chiappe et al., 396:258-61) and featured in the December issue of National Geographic, included the recovery of more than a dozen in situ eggs and nearly 40 egg fragments encasing embryonic dinosaurs. They suspect that these sauropods, a group that lived 70 to 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, laid the egg clusters in a nesting site that was once a floodplain--an area located in the present-day Patagonian badlands of Argentina. Nearby streams may have overflowed and buried the unhatched dinosaur eggs in layers of mud. Based on the pencil-shaped teeth found in many of the fossils, scientists suspect the dinosaurs belong to the species titanosaurus, the only sauropod with such teeth known to have been alive during the late Cretaceous. According to Luis Chiappe, a research associate at AMNH and a leader of the expedition, the one-kilometer-square nesting site, one of the largest found to date, is relatively unexplored. "There will be decades of finds in Patagonia," he predicts.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Dec 6, 1998

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