She's in the Money

Vinita Kailasanath might want to find a good accountant.

The Stanford sophomore earned a handsome payoff in November when she defeated finalists from USC and Florida State to win the Jeopardy! College Tournament. Kailasanath won $50,000, a new Volvo and a $25,000 general-fund scholarship for Stanford in her quiz show victory, recorded at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and televised November 21.

Although she was comfortably ahead in the championship round, Kailasanath needed to correctly answer the Final Jeopardy question to secure her victory. The category: cities of the world. The answer is: the Portuguese named a Ceylonese city after this famous explorer in 1513.

“I knew that the capital of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, was Colombo,” she says. The correct response “had to be Christopher Columbus.”

Kailasanath, who says her strongest categories are art history and biology, claims she didn’t cram for the competition. “I really didn’t have time. I had too much schoolwork to do.”

Asked what she planned to do with the money she won, Kailasanath told host Alex Trebek: “Pay back my parents.”

Ah, to Be a Freshman Again

SINGING FOR SUPPER: Senior soloist Bob Ryskamp joined his prerecorded Mendicant mates to entertain alumni and guests.

Linda Cicero

They wined, they dined, they read Shakespearean sonnets.

In the biggest alumni gathering this side of Reunion Homecoming weekend, more than 400 alumni and guests attended the University’s premiere of the 12-city “Think Again” tour in Portland on November 4. And they learned something.

“For today, you can think of yourself as a freshman class, and the only freshmen to whom I can say, ‘Welcome back,’” president emeritus Gerhard Casper told the group. Designed to mimic what freshmen and sophomores experience in small, intensive seminar courses, the daylong session included lectures by a dozen Stanford faculty members. Current students were on hand to describe their experiences. The event culminated with a banquet, a multimedia presentation and a speech by President John Hennessy.

By the time the tour concludes in June, approximately 9,000 alumni will have sampled a day in the life of a Stanford student—only with a lot better food.

Nobel Pursuits

PRIZED SCHOLARS: Cornell	Wieman	Sharpless

Soon after Stanford learned that business professor emeritus Michael Spence had become the 17th Stanford faculty member to win a Nobel Prize, word came that three Stanford alumni also had earned some Swedish gold.

Eric A. Cornell, ’85, and Carl E. Wieman, PhD ’77, shared the 2001 physics prize with Wolfgang Ketterle “for creating Bose-Einstein condensation using laser cooling and evaporation techniques.” Cornell is a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and adjoint professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Wieman is a physics professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
And for his work on “chirally catalysed oxidation reactions,” K. Barry Sharpless, PhD ’68, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Sharpless is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

They are the first Stanford alumni to win Nobels since the late John Harsanyi, ’54, won in economic sciences in 1994.

Unwanted Exposure

World-class researchers are used to having their names in the paper, but seldom in the same sentence with “strip club.”

Stanford cardiovascular specialist Simon Stertzer weathered a flurry of publicity last fall after his holding company purchased the all-nude Palomino Club in Las Vegas, with the stated intention of raising money for medical research. When the Las Vegas Sun reported the transaction, other newspapers, including the Seattle Times and Salt Lake Tribune, picked up the story.

“I had no idea it would hit the press at all,” says Stertzer, a professor of medicine who helped pioneer coronary angioplasty in the late 1970s. “The press characterized it in a way I thought was offensive. Ninety-eight percent of my outside business activities are in medical devices, and real estate in Nevada is something that one of my holding companies has been involved with for some time.”

Financing research through private business investments is nothing new to Stertzer, but the adverse national publicity soured the deal.

“The public polemic continues to engender such an unseemly characterization of the plan,” Stertzer told the Stanford Daily on November 21, ”that my attorneys and I have elected to abandon the idea of funding research in this manner.”

According to the Daily, Stertzer sold the strip club and will try to “procure research funding in the more conventional commercial fashion” in the future.

Follow-Up
Outlasting the Taliban

The calls have been coming since September 11: “Is Mary MacMakin okay?”

The answer, as of early December, was yes.

When we last wrote about the 72-year-old humanitarian worker, the ruling Taliban had deported her from Kabul, Afghanistan, and she was running her aid projects from a makeshift office in Peshawar, Pakistan (On the Job, September/October). MacMakin’s five-year-old organization, PARSA, has been helping Afghan women, especially widows and their daughters, by distributing medical supplies to clinics, supporting homeschooling for girls and setting up living-room gift shops where needy women gather to make and sell handicrafts.

MacMakin, ’49, is still in Peshawar, unaffected by the occasional demonstrations there, says her former husband, Robert MacMakin, who runs PARSA’s U.S. office. She continues to direct her projects in Kabul as much as possible through a team of onsite co-workers. “Mary hopes to go up to Kabul soon for a look-see, but not to move the office from Peshawar just yet,” Robert MacMakin says. “There will be so much to do when things settle down and the political beginnings are made.”

Mary, who has spent 40 years on and off living in Afghanistan, considers it her home. In the earlier article she lamented: “As long as the Taliban are in control, I cannot go back.” Now, it seems, her exile is about to end.

For more: www.parsa-afghanistan.org