Notebook

Shake-and-Bake Structures JASON Vs. The Volcano Something's Aflutter Is Race Passe? Unimpressed By The Press What Next--Wonderbras? Party Time Unsung Heroines No Accounting For Ethics Researchers at the University of Buffalo and its Hauptman- Woodward Medical Research Institute have developed a computer program--used in conjunction with a software package developed by Houston-based Molecular Structure Corp.--that will solve the structure of large biomolecules. The program is called Shake-and-Bake, after Shake 'n' Bake, the popular one-step cooking preparation, because its creators claim that it can determine the structure of complex molecules on a standard computer workstation with almost no user assistance. (According to institute researchers, the name violates no copyright laws because of the slight spelling change.) "Shake- and-Bake solves molecular structures like a black box, with no human intervention, given data with sufficient resolution," says Nobel chemistry laureate Herbert Hauptman, president of the institute and a professor of computer science at Buffalo, who conceived the software. "Scientists should be able to get an answer just by collecting X-ray diffraction data on a molecule and running it on the computer." Information on the software is available through World Wide Web at URL http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu/SnB or by calling Molecular Structure Corp. at (713) 363-1033. Beginning last week and continuing to March 11, scientists from the JASON Project VI: Island Earth began broadcasting daily science-education programs from lava fields located in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the island of Hawaii. The JASON Project--an "interactive field trip" founded by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher Robert Ballard, who located the Titanic with the help of JASON, an underwater robotic vehicle--mounts annual expeditions to such remote spots as hydrothermal vents in the Mediterranean Sea and ancient Mayan cities. Each year thousands of schoolchildren in auditoriums and classrooms throughout the United States, Canada, Bermuda, the United Kingdom, and Mexico participate live--interacting via telecommunication networks--in the expeditions. Students will be able to watch and ask questions as vulcanologists and on-site student helpers, called Argonauts, measure physical characteristics of lava flows, among other proj-ects. For more information on the JASON Project, contact Madelyn Smith at (703) 276-2772. Have the winter blues? Need a little preview of spring? The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia is offering a respite of sorts to educators, schoolchildren, and the general public. The natural history museum has just opened a new exhibit called "Butterflies: Live and in Color." Its centerpiece is a 900-square-foot corner that has been transformed into a semi-tropical butterfly garden. The courtyard is filled with several species of North American butterflies and moths, and viewers walk among the hundreds of butterflies flying freely around the garden. Currently, four Floridian species inhabit the butterfly house, and as spring progresses, more northerly species will be added. Emerging and experienced lepidopterists can follow and participate in the Monarch butterfly migration by accessing Monarch Watch at dplex@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, or Journey North at jnorth@jriver.jriver.com. Butterfly enthusiasts even have their own electronic mail group:Send the message "sub leps-L" to listserv@yalevm.cis.yale.edu. The museum, which has some butterfly specimens dating from the 1830s, encourages classes to log on. The 1995 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held February 16-21 in Atlanta, had as its theme "Unity in Diversity." In keeping with that motto, a group of scientists declared in a statement at the conference that "old biological concepts of race no longer provide scientifically valid distinctions." On February 20, Solomon H. Katz, director of the Krogman Center for Research in Child Growth and Development at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the document, which describes the findings of an American Association of Physical Anthropologists task force he chaired on the subject. "The use of race is no longer a valid scientific distinction," Katz said at a news conference the day before his talk. He stressed that the researchers were speaking only about genetic distinctions; "we're not commenting on the social side." C. Loring Brace, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, suggested at the news conference that anthropological terms such as "Caucasoid" and "Negroid" be replaced with "the geographic area from which the population came." Added Brace: "If people are perceived [as African American, white, and so forth] and identify themselves this way, that's fine, [but scientifically] it simply isn't appropriate." An unofficial theme of the AAAS conference was "Bash the Media," as participants critiqued coverage, often painting scientific journals and tabloid television with the same brush. Overflow crowds showed up for sessions entitled "The Public, the Media, and Scientific Controversies" and "Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on Media Images of Science and Scientists." Visitors to the Union of Concerned Scientists' exhibit booth received a flier detailing the group's plan to "establish a 'rapid response network' of scientists . . . to reactively counter scientific misinformation in the media"; and at a session on "Dimensions of Public Opinion," Florida State University sociologist Susan Losh decried "advocacy journalism that masquerades as science." At a February 16 science-writers' program, NIH director Harold Varmus got into the act, exhorting the press to print more stories of "science as . . . education, inspiration." Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Blum of the Sacramento Bee noted to Varmus that in those remarks, "I don't hear a strong 'let's get out there and investigate' kind of message." Varmus responded: "I think the issue is . . . whether or nor reporters are trying to get to the bottom of the story as opposed to skimming off the . . . controversy." An always-crowded booth at the AAAS exhibit hall featured a product demonstration. The product in question wasn't a microscope or balance--it was a skin- and nail-care system marketed by an Atlanta company called Nature's Best, which touts its products as "an excellent aid for use in the medical, health, and dental fields." Male as well as female AAAS members took time to have their hands rubbed with an "antimicrobial cross-infectant" and nails buffed with a "micron crystal file." Does the phenomenon have any sociological significance? Says Association for Women in Science executive director Catherine Didion: "People think of scientists in terms of the work that they do--we don't tend to see them as consumers." Another unconventional AAAS exhibitor was the Progressive Labor Party, which denounced E.O. Wilson, professor of sciences at Harvard University, who delivered a plenary lecture on biodiversity on February 17. The party's leaflets called Wilson's 1970s sociobiology theory--which, according to Wilson, postulates a "codeterminancy of biology and behavior"- -"racist" and "a travesty, not an example, of science," linking it to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's 1994 book The Bell Curve (New York, Free Press). The leaflets invited like-minded scientists "to join us . . . to celebrate May Day under the red flags of international communist revolution . . . ." Party member Knut Langsetmo, a molecular biologist, distributed the literature outside the lecture and attempted to do it again on February 18--when AAAS gave Wilson its Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology-- but was stopped by a AAAS staffer, who requested that he confine such activity to his booth. "It's inappropriate for AAAS to be giving him an award," asserts Langsetmo. Wilson, who took one of the leaflets, notes that "back in the '70s and '80s I used to collect all that stuff for the sociobiology archives in the Library of Congress." Wilson says he believes the protest had scientific significance: He calls the appearance of a "radical-left protester" of sociobiology a "rediscovery of what was believed to be an extinct species." Who invented nerve growth factor? COBOL computer language? The Apgar score for assessing the condition of newborn babies? Tetracycline? The branch of math known today as functional analysis? And how many students are aware that all of these inventors are women? AAAS meeting attendees who stayed around for a session on the conference's last day entitled "Contribution of Women's Colleges to Science and Engineering" heard the names of these trailblazers at a talk by Jadwiga Sebrechts, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Women's College Coalition. (In order, the inventors are biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, mathematician Grace Hopper, anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, chemist Gladys Hobby, and mathematician Anna Pell Wheeler.) Incorporating these women's names into class discussions "would provide a little bit of encouragement that everyone would benefit from," Sebrechts said. After her presentation came an emotional speech by one who aims to follow in their footsteps, Roberta Manuelito of the Boulder, Colo.-based American Indian Science and Engineering Society (see Profession, page 16), who described how she had to overcome numerous faculty members' low expectations to study science and engineering at the University of Colorado. Discussions of research ethics were not on the agenda for AAAS this year, despite recent vigorous public debate over the way NIH has handled several high-profile misconduct inquiries and an ongoing investigation of such procedures by a Commission on Research Integrity. A single session entitled "Research Ethics: We're All Accountable, But Who's Accounting?" had been scheduled for the meeting's last day. But the program, which was to have featured NIH ombudsman Howard Schachman; JAMA West Coast editor Drummond Rennie; David J. Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; and C.K. Gunsalus, University of Illinois associate vice chancellor for research, was canceled by organizer Gunsalus. She blames the program change on "scheduling disasters," saying that several of the speakers "developed unavoidable conflicts." The session could not have gone on with substitute panelists, Gunsalus says: "We had seen it as an organic whole, [dependent on] interaction among the speakers." However, she notes, "we are very anxious to do it at another time."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of