MAJORS

Interdisciplinary Programs Draw Praise, Criticism

HEATHER PON-BARRY says it usually takes 10 minutes to explain her major—symbolic systems—to friends. And when her parents ask what she’s studying? “Even longer.”

Ezra Callahan has been working on a shorthand description, too. “Basically, sym sys shows you how subjects that seem like polar opposites—computer science, psychology, linguistics and philosophy—relate to each other,” he says. “Instead of seeing 100 steps between Plato and computers, you find bridges that make the distance only about two steps. And the formal theories you learn about philosophy and logic really trip you out.”

Pon-Barry and Callahan, both ’03, are among the more than 140 students who have made sym sys one of the hottest of Stanford’s 18 interdisciplinary programs (IDPs) that grant degrees to undergraduates.

Talk to a major in American studies—which includes courses in history, literature and the social sciences, and sometimes art, drama and religious studies—and you hear the same enthusiam. “I feel like I have a good appreciation for many of the complex problems facing American society that I might later chronicle professionally [as a journalist],” Ramona Shelburne, ’00, wrote for the program’s self-study last spring. “American studies helped me think about inequalities in society,” added Theresa Hwang, ’98.

Interdisciplinary programs are supposed to provide students with a unique course of study they cannot pursue in a traditional department. They’re popular with undergraduates, 25 percent of whom choose one as a major. Some are big (human biology, with 313 majors); some are small (Native American studies and Asian-American studies, each with three). Some are self-explanatory (feminist studies); some are not (science, technology and society—a combination of “ethical, aesthetic, historical, economic and sociological perspectives,” according to the Stanford Bulletin). And they have been a hot button for Faculty Senate discussions this year, as seven of the programs have come up for reauthorization.

The problem, say critics, is that these programs thrive and shrivel according to the level of faculty commitment. They cannot hire faculty, so they must attract more than 1,000 professors each year from departments to teach courses and serve as directors. Also, some faculty say undergraduates should be educated in departments, not programs. “I tend to feel that students are better served intellectually by having to learn techniques and analysis that are associated with a particular discipline,” says history professor Jack Rakove, who teaches many American studies students in his courses. “In IDPs, students are sampling from more disciplines, but arguably mastering fewer, or perhaps none.”

Stanford’s interdisciplinary programs enjoy varying degrees of success. On the one hand, there are programs like symbolic systems, which has high faculty involvement and consistently enrolls about 150 majors who study the nature of intelligence and human-computer interaction. Symbolic systems was born out of a collaboration among philosophers, linguists, psychologists and computer scientists working at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Linguist Tom Wasow, who chairs sym sys, was associate director of the center in 1985, when philosopher John Perry was director. “One day John said to me, ‘You know, it would be really neat to have an undergraduate program that reflected the research interests of what we’re doing here and brought some students over here.’” The result has been so successful that a master’s degree program will be implemented this fall.

On the other hand, there are programs like American studies, which was viewed with skepticism when it came up for reauthorization last spring. Russell Berman, associate dean for undergraduate studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, told the Faculty Senate that the program lacked intellectual focus and a progressive curriculum sequence, and that participation by tenured faculty was “growing thin.” (History professor Barton Bernstein, then director of American studies, disputed these contentions.) Senators voted for a three-year reauthorization rather than the five years recommended by the committee on undergraduate studies—and called for a committee of leading Americanist scholars to look at the perceived weaknesses of the program and propose steps for revitalizing it.

American studies is a historically popular program that graduates about 35 students per year (more than the average of small departments like classics, with eight, or music, with 12). Dick Gillam, one of the coordinators of the program and a senior lecturer who has taught American studies for 16 years, argues that “looking at the difficult enterprise that is America can’t be done within disciplines.” Instead, says Gillam, ’65, PhD ’72, faculty from a number of departments collaborate in examining the “elusive issue of what we have in common as a people and how we differ, over time.”

Shuttering the program would be an unusual step—in fact, a report issued last year by an ad hoc advisory committee on interdepartmental programs suggested that administrators are hesitant to eliminate those that don’t measure up. But Berman says deans are determined to take a hard look at programs’ academic vitality. “The issue is really intellectual dynamism,” he says. “I think IDPs should remain part of the landscape, but that doesn’t mean we will always have the same list. Some may grow old, and we should be able to end them as new ideas come on the horizon.”

The committee that will consider whether American studies has grown old is chaired by economist Roger Noll, who also will serve as the program’s director this year. Noll, a longtime director of the public policy program, is an admitted fan of interdisciplinary programs. American studies “is not a program that lacks faculty support,” he says. “But it offers flexibility for students to take almost anything, and that is seen as a red flag by faculty who think it lacks structure and coherence.” History professor David Kennedy, ’63, says the committee is thinking of developing two tracks—a “social sciences” track that would “embrace the notion of some kind of national culture” by focusing on American law and institutions, and an “identities” track that would examine topics such as race, ethnicity and gender within American society, which Kennedy calls “a bundle of subjects that is viable in its own right as a concentration.”

Noll adds that seven or eight friends of his, in several different departments, joined the faculty because they would have an opportunity to teach in interdisciplinary programs. “There has always been at Stanford an attitude of intellectual playfulness and entrepreneurship,” he says. “And that’s a good thing.”

Many Are Called

One-fourth of Stanford’s undergraduates major in interdisciplinary programs. A breakdown:

Program Majors

AMENITIES

For Graduates, a New Campus Home

EVERY NOW AND THEN,the members of the Stanford Alumni Club of Palo Alto get together and write out a check to their alma mater. It’s not a huge sum—usually about a thousand dollars for music scholarships or unrestricted financial aid. Still, you’d think such a loyal band could find a room on campus for its wine-and-cheese gatherings without having to cut through yards of Cardinal-red tape. “We really have to scrape around to find places for our group to meet; sometimes I end up calling the Episcopal Church out on Sand Hill Road,” says Glenna Violette, MA ’69.

Neil Menzies, ’97, MA ’98, has had similar problems booking space for the Bay Area Cardinal Young Alumni. At one recent on-campus seminar, he says, “we had people sitting on the floor and the windowsills.” Finding adequate and affordable meeting rooms “is just a pain.”

The Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center should solve such problems. The three-story facility at the corner of Campus Drive and Galvez Street, on the site of the old Band Shak, will have its grand opening Saturday, October 13, during Reunion Homecoming weekend. About 30,000 square feet on the first floor are reserved for graduates of the University, while the upper two stories house 300 staff members from the Stanford Alumni Association and the Office of Development. The alumni amenities include a living room for drop-in conversation, a library where visitors can peruse books by alumni authors, several conference rooms, an indoor-outdoor café, a ballroom for dinner parties, lectures and the like, a business center, lockers, showers, a special services officer to answer questions—even bicycles to borrow (see special section).

“This is a place that will allow us to do [the kinds of] alumni programming that we just found so difficult to do before,” says Alumni Association vice president Carolyn Manning, ’78. “We can host reunion dinners in the great hall. We can have informal faculty talks in the café in the evening. We can do all sorts of things that will draw people back to campus, because now we have the space.”

Led by John Arrillaga, ’60, donors provided approximately 90 percent of the cost of the $37 million facility. The center is named for Arrillaga’s late wife, who served on the Alumni Association’s executive board.

And it’s a building with a message, says Manning: “Alumni are truly welcome on campus. There’s a place for them here.”

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

The Faculty Connection

NEARLY 20 YEARS AGO, Anthony Oro found a mentor—and a career—in a Stanford biology lab. He arrived on the Farm thinking he would major in chemical engineering. But after answering an ad in the undergraduate research opportunities office, he ended up studying the gene mutations of maize corn in the lab of biological sciences professor Virginia Walbot. Inspired by Walbot, ’67, and her work, Oro entered a program that trains doctors to be both clinicians and laboratory researchers.

Today, as an assistant professor of dermatology, Oro is providing the same sort of inspiration to another generation of Stanford undergraduates. In his lab, junior Jamie Hui is working on sequencing a gene, trying to figure out whether it is involved in growing basal cell carcinoma. She says Oro and others on the research team have helped her learn to handle delicate DNA samples and taught her that research often involves mistakes. “Undergraduate biology classes involve lots of memorization,” Hui says. “In research you have so many questions, and there is never an answer right in front of you. You have to take all these indirect pathways to figure out what is right.”

Hui is one of hundreds of beneficiaries of the recently expanded and renamed undergraduate research programs. When its predecessor began in 1974, Laura Selznick ran it alone, posting openings on a bulletin board in the basement of Old Union. In 1985—Oro’s senior year—the office provided $74,000 in grants to 54 students. Last year, the beefed-up programs awarded $724,000 to 433 students, according to Selznick, MA ’75, who is now associate director.

Administrators see research as a way to continue undergraduates’ exposure to senior faculty, which often begins in freshman and sophomore seminars. Last year, the office expanded both in size—it now boasts a staff of seven—and in focus. Instead of just providing students with grants and information on how to contact faculty, the program now encourages departments and individual professors to design research projects suitable for undergraduate participation. During the 2000-01 academic year, the office gave $1.3 million for programs involving 450 students, according to director Susie Brubaker-Cole.

Offering grant money to faculty, Brubaker-Cole says, benefits both professor and student. Faculty gain a fresh voice asking challenging questions—and sometimes making major breakthroughs. And the faculty-led projects make getting started easier for students. “Sometimes students don’t have entrepreneurial spirit yet or an understanding of what it means to do research,” says Brubaker-Cole. “This is putting the initiative into faculty and department hands.”

Research also pushes students to use creative skills that may not get tested during class. One, Anne-Marie McReynolds, ’99, put together a photography exhibit showing the social connections the Harlem YMCA fosters among blacks in New York City. Another, junior Terence Chia, helped develop a fluorescence catheter that may be used to detect plaque in arteries or cancer cells in intestines. Desperate for a visual aid the night before a presentation, he obtained a sausage from the Florence Moore dining hall, drilled a hole in it and fashioned it into a makeshift artery.

Chia pursued his work through the Summer Research College, in which 165 students live together in a dorm while working on University-funded projects. He calls the college a “very horizon-broadening experience. During the day you go to the lab and do research. You come back and talk to people who have diverse interests and are very passionate about them,” he says. “You can see how people could devote themselves to any given field based on what they thought and what they felt was important.” Even sausage making.

Cardinal Numbers

Student housing fee for one year in Lagunita: $4,178

Cost per night: $17.85

Cost per night at a Big Basin campground: $12

Meals in full board plan, per week, at Lagunita’s Lakeside dining hall: 19

Cost per week: $126

Nineteen Big Mac Extra Value Meals at McDonald’s: $75.81

Cheapest antacid at Tresidder Express: $.85

Sources: Housing Assignment Services; University Dining Services;www.reserveamerica.com/usa/ca/bigb/parkfees.html;
Tresidder Express

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FACULTY

Retirement? What Retirement?

THEIR RESEARCH cuts impressive swaths, from the granitic depths of the earth to the flamboyant courts of 17th-century France. Although they’ve retired—in some cases, 20 years ago—they still teach, and they are visible, vocal participants in departmental gatherings. As 72-year-old music professor emeritus Albert Cohen puts it, “I’m active, living history.”

Cohen and Konrad Krauskopf, professor emeritus of geological and environmental sciences, are among the 101 of Stanford’s 664 emeriti scholars who were recalled to active duty for some part of the past academic year. Members of this hardy band maintain office and lab space on campus, participate in seminars and mentor graduate students. Krauskopf, at 90, must hold the attendance record at his department’s morning coffee klatch.

Krauskopf came to Stanford in 1935 with a doctorate in chemistry from a certain public university across the Bay, outwitting the Depression economy by earning a second doctorate in geology in 1939 and establishing his niche in the fledgling field of geochemistry. For years he explored the Sierra Nevada with hammer and hand lens, and he once came close to outsmarting a stubborn mule, which he recounts in an essay titled “Nine Days with Annie.” Krauskopf also is the author of several widely used textbooks, including Fundamentals of Physical Science, The Physical Universe and Introduction to Geochemistry, and he’s known as a down-to-earth scientist who can talk rocks in French, German and Portuguese.

Like many emeriti, Krauskopf and Cohen have been called on to teach Stanford Introductory Seminars. Krauskopf, a former member of a National Research Council advisory board on radioactive waste management, brought that experience to discussions about the “nasty problem” of nuclear waste. Cohen, who taught a course on French music after he retired in 1999, still gets jazzed when students demonstrate their engagement: “I thought I’d really made it one day when a kid walked out of class whistling a medieval tune by Guillaume de Machaut, the poet and composer of the 14th century.”

A masterful performer on both violin and treble viol, Cohen is a graduate of Juilliard and former Guggenheim fellow who is juggling five different research projects while also contributing articles to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. It’s a tranquil pace compared to the 14 consecutive years he spent as chair of the music department, raising funds for, designing and launching Braun Music Center. Across campus, Krauskopf keeps up with stacks of professional journals and pursues the same quests that sent him clambering over outcroppings in his native Wisconsin as a lad. “What I would like to know about is the origin of granites,” he says. “We still don’t have the necessary instruments, but I’m convinced we will find some way of investigating what is happening at deep levels in the earth.”

Krauskopf and his fellow emeriti also serve as sources of campus wisdom. As a newly appointed dean who needed to know how the School of Earth Sciences operated, Lynn Orr says one of the first people he contacted for help was Krauskopf. “I sat down with Konnie and said, ‘I need to understand a lot,’” recalls Orr, ’69. “Emeritus professors like Konnie have a combination of historical perspective, the wisdom of having worked with many students over the years and the ability to rise above the daily fray. They occupy a niche that is invaluable to us.”

Will these emeriti ever really retire? “Please don’t push!” says Cohen. “In truth, I should like to continue being active in the field so long as my energy, my interest and my mind remain reasonably secure, and my work maintains its value.”

ASTRONOMY

Wishing Upon a Star

HIGH IN THE FOOTHILLS, between the Dish and the golf course, there’s a white structure that looks like the giant, disembodied head of a Star Wars stormtrooper.

Welcome to the Stanford Teaching Observatory, where faculty and students research distant objects of the cosmos. On this clear summer night, working by the light of three red bulbs, one lab team is trying to photograph a galaxy. A graduate student in aeronautics and astrophysics types a string of computer commands, and the monster Cassegrain/Newtonian telescope rotates into the designated viewing position while a shutter opens overhead.

“You’re nailing it,” teaching assistant Tim Braje tells a high school student tapping on another keyboard, as galaxy M100 comes into sharper focus. “Now press ‘calibrate.’ And let’s expose again.”

Members of the lab team whistle “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and trade ghost stories while they wait an interminable 10 minutes for colored filters to capture individual features of the spiral galaxy—the yellow aging nucleus and the younger, swirling blue arms with their red knots of stars in the process of being formed. When the image is finally unveiled, the students are starstruck. “Oooh,” says Teresa Miller, a usually pragmatic aero/astro master’s student who has her sights set on a career at Boeing or Lockheed. “It’s so beautiful.”

Pretty pictures are only part of the fun, says physics associate professor Roger Romani, a specialist in pulsars and black holes. Students also learn to measure redshifts in quasars and gauge the distances to planets, supernovas and exploding stars.

It helps to have an up-to-date observatory, and that’s been Romani’s priority over the past two years as he supervised the renovation of the telescope and the installation of a new dome. (The observatory was built in the 1970s by undergrads who secured physics department support and acquired the original dome—a Cal cast-off.)

Now, Romani says, students can connect their observations in the Foothills to discoveries made with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope. “Three years ago, we didn’t know whether the universe would end in a big crunch or would live forever,” he adds. “Today we believe that it not only will live forever, but will accelerate its expansion and go into a cold, dark, dim phase in the distant future.” Just how distant? Well, that’s part of what they’re trying to figure out.

PUBLIC SERVICE

'An Integral Part of the Academic Core'

WHEN SHE WAS 3 years old, Nadinne Cruz learned a harsh lesson about the risks of public service. As her physician father was leaving their home to provide medical care to loggers and miners in a remote province of the Philippines, he was shot and killed on the suspicion that he was promoting organized labor. Nevertheless, Cruz has not been afraid to help others. At 18, she left college to document violations of land-reform programs for a national peasant organization. Following graduate studies in the United States, Cruz served as executive director of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs in St. Paul, Minn., and later was a professor of social change at Swarthmore College. She became director of the Haas Center for Public Service in May 2000.

Stanford: The Haas Center sponsors more than 40 volunteer programs that range from constructing houses locally to preventing the spread of HIV in South Africa. How do you define public service education and what’s the goal?

It may sound simplistic, but you learn by doing, and service learning is driven by a desire to do good in the world and to do it effectively. My ideal for the center is that it be a place full of energized people and the exchange of ideas, based not on armchair philosophizing but on the authority of the personal experience of students.

Eighty percent of Stanford students perform some kind of community service by the time they graduate. Where do most students begin?

The most popular volunteer work is tutoring, and I think it would be irresponsible to engage Stanford students in tutoring without raising questions like, “Why is it that a particular school needs so many tutors? What’s the relationship between the economy of the municipality of East Palo Alto and the tax base of Ravenswood school district?” Those kinds of questions [should be] entertained in both informal and formal ways, and our staff waits, in an “on call” mode, for teachable moments.

How does the Haas Center’s work relate to the mission of the University?

We want the center to be an integral part of the academic core rather than seen as something that’s fun to do, like being in the Band. If we’re going to deliver excellence in service and if we want to make a difference—as opposed to remembering how much fun it was to tutor—that means raising the bar on expectations for public service and not just viewing it as a nice extracurricular activity.

How do you evaluate the cumulative good that students do?

The huge, intractable social issues of our times require the most committed people, and thinking about how many thousands of students over the years have been involved in public service gives me great joy. I’m hoping students who come to Haas will discover the questions that will drive them for the rest of their lives.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Uncovering a New Major

THE CHEERS COULD BE heard a hemisphere away. High in the Peruvian Andes, at a ceremonial site dating from the first millennium B.C., anthropological sciences associate professor John Rick and his volunteer crew discovered a chamber tomb in July that held the remains of at least two adults and two children, plus 10 perfectly preserved pots.

“Things have really been popping,” Rick said in a telephone interview from a restaurant in the town of San Pedro de Chavín (population 2,000). “And there’s another find that has us buzzing: a conch shell from the waters of Ecuador that was part of the ritual gear people used in the temples.”

If Rick was elated, the 15 undergraduates who flew to Lima and survived a jolting 10-hour bus ride into the north-central sierra were just as enthusiastic. “Uncovering the jaguar plaques was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” says Parker VanValkenburgh. Also on his top-10 list: exploring underground passageways and pondering what the excavations at Chavín de Huántar suggest about social processes and labor organization. The local chocolate pudding, he adds, is “out of this world.”

VanValkenburgh, ’03, will soon declare Stanford’s newest major: the interdisciplinary program in archaeology. Approved by the Faculty Senate in January, the program brings together professors from anthropological sciences, cultural and social anthropology, classics, geophysics, and geology and environmental sciences. Students can choose from research projects in Sicily and Turkey or at the Stanford mansion on campus and the Presidio in San Francisco.

Research funding from the office of the vice provost for undergraduate education enabled VanValkenburgh and seven others to join the Chavín dig. “Students used to be strapped for money in the field and had to think twice about buying a soft drink at dinner,” Rick says. “Now the project is telling them that they’re valued researchers and workers.”

And work they do—digging, screening, cleaning, weighing, bagging and cataloging artifacts alongside 15 fellow travelers on the Alumni Association’s first-ever research expedition. The crew is also learning to operate ground-penetrating radar equipment and is using laser technologies to measure small, dark, enclosed spaces.

In the six years he’s been excavating the site, Rick has unearthed two temple buildings and 26 underground labyrinths that look strikingly like the passageways on Captain Kirk’s starship Enterprise.

The galactic analogy comes from a joke slide in one of Rick’s lectures for Introduction to Prehistoric Archaeology. Listening to the professor talk about his self-described “lifetime love affair” with the subject makes students want to dig right in, VanValkenburgh says. “He could talk about pocket-lint chemistry and I would leave the room wanting to spend the rest of my life committed to it.”

LANDMARKS

Restored to Glory

THE ANGEL OF GRIEF is sizable as mortuary monuments go.

“If she could stand up, she’d be a center on the women’s basketball team,” campus archaeologist Laura Jones says of the statue—a replica of one Jane Stanford commissioned for the family cemetery in the Arboretum as a memorial to her brother Henry Lathrop. “She’s a bigger-than-normal woman.”

Jones ought to know. More than once in the past few years she has clambered onto the statue and tried to duplicate the pathos-laden pose of The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life, carved from a single, seven-ton block of Cararra marble by the Bernieri Brothers of Tuscany. And she’s done it all in the cause of conservation.

To replace the forearm stolen by vandals and repair the damaged wing tips of the memorial—erected after the 1906 earthquake claimed the original—Jones hired architectural conservator David Wessel and sculptor Marcel Machler. Wessel applied a cleansing poultice to the orange-brown bacteria that had accumulated on the marble during decades of neglect, and he designed a stainless-steel pin to hold the replacement arm in place. Machler, using Jones’s draped left arm as a model, fashioned three different clay and plaster extremities before carving the just-right final proportions from his own block of prized Cararra.

There was no official project budget for the renovations to the cemetery area, which includes a cactus garden and the mausoleum where the Stanford family is interred. But three staff members—Jones, associate vice provost for facilities Chris Christofferson and Michael Fox, manager of technology and special projects coordinator for facilities operations—wanted to make sure the University did not neglect its heritage. They cobbled together money over five years, completing the final piece—the angel—in time for Founders’ Day last spring.

“It was funded on a shoestring and coordinated with an enormous amount of volunteer time,” Jones says. “But it’s what we think the Stanford family would have wanted.”

Campus Notebook

Ms. Krueger Goes to Washington
Economics professor Anne Krueger was tapped June 8 to be first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. The new No. 2 will be the first woman in management at the IMF, which aims to promote global economic stability. A former president of the American Economic Association, Krueger was vice president of the World Bank in the 1980s and has written several books on international trade. She isn’t the only economics professor headed for Washington: colleagues John Taylor and Mark McClellan recently accepted posts in the Bush administration—Taylor, PhD ’73, as undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs and McClellan as a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

For Employees, Help with the Kids
The University will launch a $1.7 million child-care assistance program, believed to be the largest such initiative in the country. Administrators expect government regulators to approve the plan, which will take effect in January. Each eligible employee will receive $1,000 to $5,000 in tax-free reimbursements, depending on family income. Lucia Savage, a human resources compliance specialist, estimates that three-fourths of the 1,600 employees with children younger than 6 will receive funding.

Reaffirming the Commitment to Need-Based Aid
The presidents of 28 private colleges and universities, including Stanford, Columbia and mit, adopted a new set of financial aid principles in July. The group reaffirmed its commitment to grant assistance based on need, not merit, agreed to use common evaluation guidelines, and proposed taking into account the cost of living in expensive cities and limiting consideration of home equity. But don’t expect Stanford awards to suddenly increase. The University has “pretty much adhered to the principles in the past,” director of student awards Cynthia Hartley told Stanford Report.

Search for Missing Senior Ends with Sorrow
A three-week search for senior Christina “Minna” Sandmeyer ended in sorrow August 3 when a bird-watcher found her body hanging from a tree in Foothills Park, near Palo Alto. Police considered the death a suicide. An avid cyclist and hiker, Sandmeyer, 22, set off from Los Altos on her bicycle July 13, leaving a note that she was going “oceanwards” and would return by the next day. The civil engineering major from Chicago was a member of the Chamber Chorale and the Redwood Action Team and was scheduled to be the resident assistant at Chi Theta Chi this fall. A campus memorial was held August 8, and friends plan to work together on a project that will exemplify Sandmeyer’s beliefs in environmentalism and social justice.

HEALTH POLICY

For African Students, a Page from Stanford's Peer Counseling Manual

BENJAMIN LAWRANCE has seen firsthand how tragic the AIDS pandemic has become in Africa, where an estimated 22.5 million people are infected with HIV. He’s particularly frustrated that few people work to prevent the spread of HIV among African high school and college students.

Lawrance, PhD ’01, wants to adapt the techniques he learned in his five years working with Stanford’s HIV peer counseling program for universities in sub-Saharan Africa. The Stanford system, which includes anonymous testing and pre- and post-test counseling, has been recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a model. But there are no HIV counseling programs at African universities, Lawrance says, “and I think I have a project that will work.”

He has outlined his approach in a position paper titled “Jeunes pour jeunes: strategies for combating the spread of HIV/AIDS among African students.” The paper cites hurdles to be overcome at African institutions—cultural taboos, institutional dysfunction, lack of technology and threats from the military—and suggests incentives that could be used to enlist students.

Lawrance has published the paper on the web in the hope that African students will read and implement it. He’d also like to attract $15,000 in annual funding to establish a program in Togo, where he conducted research for his doctorate in African history, and where the director of the national HIV and std testing facility has endorsed his project. “There’s nothing more frustrating in terms of development work in Africa than to have people parachute in, organize and leave,” Lawrance says. “That’s why we need an internal program—something that’s run by students for students.”

Head of the Class

Ecological Eminence:The Ecological Society of America named biological sciences professor Paul R. Ehrlich its Eminent Ecologist of 2001. A faculty member since 1959 and board member of the Audubon Society, Ehrlich is best known for books like The Population Bomb and Extinction, which focused public attention on the environmental effects of overpopulation.

Three of a Kind: Stanford professors David M. Kennedy, James J. Sheehan and James G. March are among the 38 new members named to the American Philosophical Society. March holds emeritus professorships in a number of fields, including business, education and sociology; Kennedy, ’63, and Sheehan, ’58, are colleagues in the history department.

MEDICINE

Now, Snails Aren't Such a Pain

THE FILIPINO CONE SNAIL normally spends its days sliding across the sea floor, snaring fish with its venomous, harpoon-like tooth. But if it washes ashore, steer clear. Beachcombers who pick it up or step on it receive a deadly dose of poison. Islanders call it the cigarette snail: the sting leaves you time for one last smoke.

Now, Stanford researchers have shown that an ingredient in the snail toxin can take the sting out of chronic pain. The ingredient, a protein fragment, appears to be a powerful painkiller “in a class of its own,” reports Michael Leong, an assistant professor of anesthesia. “It has great potential for patients who can’t get relief from other drugs.”

Biomedical scientists became intrigued by the killer snail, Conus magus, in the early 1980s. Upon analyzing the toxin, they found it to be a protein that inhibits the central nervous system. A decade later, researchers at Neurex Inc. (now ´Elan Pharmaceuticals) chopped the protein into fragments and administered these to rats, looking for possible medical effects.

In the new study, funded by ´Elan, Leong and his colleagues tested a fragment called ziconotide in people suffering chronic pain from conditions such as AIDS and cancer. “Over half of those treated showed a marked improvement,” he says of the drug, currently under fda review. “Fifty percent may not seem like much, but we’re talking about people for whom nothing worked before.”

The unusual painkiller is a calcium-channel blocker that works mainly on cells of the central nervous system. These nerve cells use calcium molecules to signal neighboring cells, spreading the pain response. By blocking calcium release, ziconotide dampens that response. Preliminary studies by Leong and his colleagues at the Stanford Pain Management Center suggest that the drug also has a protective effect, desensitizing nerve cells in advance of any signal so that they are less likely to respond.

In contrast, conventional pain drugs such as morphine do not target pain at a molecular level. This difference could be a tremendous asset, Leong speculates, because the two drugs might be given simultaneously and work synergistically on distinct types of pain. Moreover, since ziconotide is not an opiate, it is not addictive and has no narcotic side effects. The Stanford team found that patients receiving it did not build up a tolerance, so there was no need to increase doses over time.

There’s even good news for the snail. Knowing the exact composition of the protein, scientists can now synthesize it—leaving Conus magus to slither back into obscurity.

Inquiring Minds

TAKE A SECOND LOOK: A new study by genetics professor Neil Risch suggests that genes may play a larger role in the occurrence of cancer than previously thought. Risch re-analyzed data from a study in the New England Journal of Medicine of 45,000 sets of twins, examining how often the same cancers cropped up in identical twins compared with fraternal twins. The earlier study agreed with the prevailing hypothesis that most cancers result from environmental factors, but Risch found that simpler assumptions—such as a single gene causing a given cancer—fit the data better. He concluded that rare and early-onset cancers are most likely to run in families.

DRIVING WHILE TIRED: Starting the engine? Make sure you’re awake. Nelson B. Powell, co-director of Stanford’s Sleep Disorders Clinic, and researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine found that sleep-deprived drivers respond about as slowly to performance-course hazards as those with a blood-alcohol level of .089 percent, slightly above the legal limit in most states of .08 percent. “It’s crucial that people stay away from their cars while they’re tired,” Powell says.

BREATHING EASIER: A team of researchers at Stanford’s Center for Human Sleep Research have discovered a genetic marker for sleep apnea, a disorder in which breathing stops repeatedly during sleep. Previous studies have suggested that sleep-disordered breathing may affect up to 10 percent of the U.S. population and is associated with increased risk for heart disease and Alzheimer’s. According to center director Emmanuel Mignot, the gene could explain a “significant portion” of the incidence. The study, published in the June 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to link apnea to a specific gene.

Technology

SCREENING GENES

JONATHAN USUKA is driving his computer, scanning a genome database for irregular areas of dna that could be responsible for causing asthma. With a couple of clicks, images of four of the database’s 19 chromosomes begin to emerge on the screen.

“We know that one set of researchers spent two years identifying chromosomes 2 and 7, and another set took two years to identify chromosomes 10 and 11,” says Usuka, as the four chromosomes take the shape of rectangular, overlapping smokestacks. “And you and I have just spent about 20 seconds identifying all four—2, 7, 10 and 11. That’s the big deal here.”

Working with colleagues at Roche, a pharmaceutical company where he is a part-time consultant, Usuka, a doctoral candidate in chemistry, compiled a database of the 15 most commonly used strains of lab mice. He then developed software that scans for irregularities in mouse dna, which is 80 percent similar to humans’, in an attempt to speed up the search for genes linked to diseases. In June, he and eight co-authors published a paper in the journal Science describing the program, Digital Disease.

“I never touch mice and I’m not thrilled about the whole animal testing thing,” says Usuka, who has nonetheless developed a particular fondness for C57Bl6J, an intelligent, long-living black mouse that likes to guzzle alcohol. Instead, Usuka does computational chemistry, testing his software against known genetic discoveries. So far.

“But in a year or two, instead of just reproducing other people’s results quicker, we are going to do something new and real, and do it computationally,” he says. “We will take a disease that we don’t know the genes or locations for, and we’ll find those genes and locations. And then we’ll have drug targets, and then we’ll cure things.”