Reporter's Notebook: AAAS Meeting In San Francisco Offered Mix Of Hard Science, Social Ramifications

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), precisely 4,148 scientists, students, and others concerned about "Science and a Changing World"--this year's theme--attended the group's 1994 meeting, held Friday, February 18 through Wednesday, February 23, in San Francisco. The meeting also drew well from Washington, D.C., science-policy circles, with Harold Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health; Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation; and Rep. George Brown, Jr. (D- Calif.), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, among those participating. John H. Gibbons, chief of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, gave the keynote address. As is customary at the annual AAAS meeting, a wide variety of current science-and-society topics were addressed in the sessions. Among these were: the dangers posed by the rapid spread of drug resistance in disease-causing bacteria, the role of science fiction in presenting science to the public, and the ethical questions raised by recent research showing that some men may be genetically predisposed to homosexuality. Following is an account of several of the meeting's more interesting--sometimes curious--moments, taken from this reporter's notes: When speaking in public, scientists--like politicians and others--often use metaphors, parables, and quotations to add that down-to-earth feeling or touch of erudition, as needed. Keynote speaker John Gibbons was exemplary in this regard, incorporating the thoughts of philosopher Machiavelli, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, political thinker Antonio Gramsci, and others into his talk Friday evening, along with several vivid images and informal tales. In one combined flurry, Gibbons began by describing the federal deficit as a "wild card" in science-policy deliberations. A physicist by training, Gibbons paused to recall learning the laws of thermodynamics in graduate school using another card-game metaphor: You can never win, you always lose, and you can't even get out of the game. On the deficit--and society's unwillingness to face it squarely--he quoted Bertrand Russell's observation that mankind would rather commit suicide than learn arithmetic. Gibbons then pursued the topic of deficit spending with his two-part "theory of holes": "If you're in one, stop digging," and "If the hole is deep enough, you have to find a way to climb out." Finally, to bring the deficit point home, Gibbons quoted economist Herb Stein: "That which cannot go on forever must come to an end." While waiting for a Saturday morning session called "The Changing Work-face: Women, Men, and the Dynamics of Inclusion," two married women scientists discussed their lives in the laboratory. "When I was in graduate school 12 years ago, discrimination was out in the open, where you could see it," said one to the other. "People now, I think, don't understand it so clearly." Conversation continued on the difficulty of being a female scientist and of balancing a research career with domestic obligations. "Well, just by being in science, you break one rule," the first woman said. "But by having a relationship, you break another." The difficulties faced by these two are, it would seem, emblematic of certain societal shifts. In the session, Cornell University sociologist Henry A. Walker spoke of the dramatic rise this century in the representation of women in the workplace. He made the further point, however, that while single women formerly dominated this group, the biggest statistical change since World War II has been in the number of married women and women with children going to work. Almost three-fifths of working women are married now, and women with at least one child between the ages of six and 17 are more than two and one-half times as likely to be at work now as in 1950. A somewhat alarmed lunchtime crowd listened on Saturday as Rockefeller University microbiologist Alexander Tomasz detailed the possible collapse of biomedicine's antibiotic arsenal. Multi-drug resistance in disease-causing bacteria is on the rise worldwide, Tomasz said. The genes for resistance, he explained, do not necessarily arise first in dangerous bacteria, but often appear in harmless bacteria and are then transferred among species. Among the innocuous bacteria acting as such "arms dealers" in resistant genes, Tomasz said, might be mouth or gut bacteria "with which we have no quarrel, but who have witnessed the entire host of antibiotics" and have thus developed defenses against those drugs. Of the roughly two dozen antibiotic agents available to combat pneumonia, only two are still effective against resistant strains, Tomasz noted--and the resistance genes for those drugs are already present in other microbes. "A post-antibiotic era in which control of microbial disease would be lost again is no longer science fiction but a very real possibility," Tomasz wrote in an abstract of his work. Perhaps in search of a time slot that would not place him in competition with any other meeting event, George Brown held a wide-ranging 7:30 A.M. news conference on Sunday. Continuing his crusade to ferret out and eliminate pork- barrel science projects, Brown said he is considering legislation that would prohibit institutions that receive research funding congressionally earmarked for a specific project from also receiving any NSF funding. It was not immediately clear how such a link could be legally established or enforced, and reporters' questions on the subject failed to elicit substantial details. In discussing the superconducting supercollider, now destined for dismantling following Congress' refusal to fund the project last year, Brown noted, "There will be a lot of unemployed high-energy physicists for a while, because there just aren't enough jobs for them.... They may have to go into low-energy physics or something." Midway through the six-day session, the scientific deliberations were enlivened by a chilling article in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Examiner: "Death and hideous destruction engulfed the Bay Area in its full horror at first light this morning," the article began. "The long- feared but widely disregarded `Big One,' an earthquake registering 7.5 on the Richter scale, roared to life along the Hayward Fault at 2:32 A.M. Sunday, causing more damage than any temblor in California history ...." The frightening story ran under a three-inch-high banner headline reading "Deadly Denial." Beneath the headline, in small type, was a disclaimer line: "A major earthquake could strike the Bay Area next week or 15 years from now. When it does, this is the kind of story that will be published." According to an Examiner reporter, the story was written to draw public attention to the dangers posed by the Hayward Fault, smaller than some other regional faults but running through densely populated Northern California areas. On the other hand, San Franciscans can rest assured that their city will be around for many years to come, according to Natalie Foster, an associate professor of chemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Her proof? Twenty- fourth-century cadets, as portrayed on the television show "Star Trek: The Next Generation," train at Star Fleet Academy--located in a still-standing San Francisco. Foster spoke at a Sunday morning session titled "The Science in Star Trek: Bringing Science to a Different Public." She used two "Star Trek" episodes, one from the 1960s progenitor of "The Next Generation" and one from the current series, to point up what she sees as an attitudinal sea change among biomedical scientists in the intervening decades--years marked by researchers' frustration with cancer and AIDS. The episodes ("The Deadly Years" [1967] and "Unnatural Selection" [1989]) both concern premature aging. As the medical team struggles to understand and cure the disease in the first episode, a young doctor named Janice Wallace tells Capt. James T. Kirk, "We know the problem; we know the progress of the affliction. Therefore, once we find the proper line of research, it is only logical that we find a solution." And, indeed, a cure is found by episode's end. In the second episode, the doctors are dealing with a different challenge, the accidental result of a research experiment gone wrong. Here, also, a cure is found. But during the search, the entire crew of a starship, the U.S.S. Lantree, dies, as do several other people. The doctor of the U.S.S. Enterprise, Katherine Pulaski, in her record of the case, writes: "Scientists believe no experiment is a failure, that even a mistake advances the evolution of understanding. But all achievement has its price. For one brief glimpse of the mysterious blueprint of human evolution, the men and women of the U.S.S. Lantree paid with their lives. Their sacrifice is thus noted in this scientist's log." With life-sized cardboard cutouts of current "Star Trek" officers Cmdr. William T. Riker and Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge beside her, Foster said, "I'd like you to contrast that statement of Dr. Pulaski's--`all achievement has its price'- -to Janice Wallace's very confident statement in the 1960s.... Those two quotes, in themselves, underscore the tremendous confidence we had in the 1960s, both as a nation and as scientists, that once we knew the problem, we could solve it. Kate Pulaski is much more circumspect--`all achievement has its price.' That's risk-benefit analysis. And you'll have to agree that's one of the big differences between the 1960s and the 1990s in science." Social, ethical, and scientific perspectives on biological research into sexual orientation were discussed at a Monday morning news conference organized by the National Organization for Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP). Speakers at the conference included sociologist Pepper Schwartz from the University of Washington, Seattle, and Dean Hamer, senior researcher at the National Cancer Institute. Schwartz, a researcher on human sexuality, is also the immediate past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, Mount Vernon, Iowa. Hamer and his research team published findings last summer showing a link between specific DNA markers on the X chromosome and homosexual orientation in some men, suggesting a genetic predisposition in their sexuality (Science, 261:321-7, 1993). Both Schwartz and Hamer expressed hope that such research into the possible genetic bases for aspects of sexuality will not be misinterpreted or misused. According to Schwartz, psychologists speak of an "intolerance of ambiguity" in sexuality, which can lead to misunderstandings of findings such as Hamer's. Even granting a predisposition to homosexuality, Schwartz says, there remain many sociological and psychological influences on sexuality, as well as more diversity in sexuality than is generally accepted. "People don't want a range of sexuality," Schwartz said. "They want to be something or the other, particularly in societies that demand it.... We seem to be overwhelmed with the power of homosexuality, so that we reify in that direction in the same way we do in racist societies, where we say that if somebody has any of the stigmatized color in their biological background, that's the color they are, as opposed to the ratio of colors they might be. ... In our society, one homosexual experience...is likely to reify you in that direction rather than in any other.... There may be different kinds of homosexuality, some of which may be more hard-wired than others." "As we come closer to actually finding genes that are involved, the ethical quandaries are made much more real," Hamer said. For instance, he said, there are concerns that the military, insurance companies, or others might develop blood tests for sexual orientation that they might use without people's permission. Amniocentesis tests might be developed that could lead to a situation where expectant mothers might abort fetuses that they fear may be homosexual. "My own position is very straightforward," Hamer said. "That would be wrong, unethical, and a terrible abuse of the research." After a seven-year effort by NOGLSTP members, the AAAS council voted on Tuesday to recognize the group as an affiliate. NOGLSTP, founded in 1980, has about 200 members currently. Rochelle Diamond, a laboratory manager for two biology labs at the California Institute of Technology, heads the group.

Reporter's Notebook: AAAS Meeting In San Francisco Offered Mix Of Hard Science, Social Ramifications

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