ADMISSIONS

Farewell, Early Decision

STANFORD ADMISSIONS OFFICERS could tell that the pressure was getting worse.

“We’re out there on the road, and we hear a lot,” says Robin Mamlet, dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid. “So many students think that if they don’t apply early somewhere, they’re not going to get into college. So this is one good-faith move that we hope will calm things down a bit.”

Mamlet is referring to the University’s headline-making November decision to change its early-admission program. The new policy, which will take effect this fall, will give students more time to decide on their school of choice.

Under Stanford’s previous, binding early-decision program, prospective freshmen applied by November 1 and were notified of their status by mid-December. They could apply early only to Stanford, and they had to promise to attend the University if accepted. Under the new, nonbinding early-action program, students still will apply early—to Stanford only—and be notified of their acceptance early. But they will have until May 1 to commit to attend, and they may apply to any number of schools under regular-decision timelines.

“I think there are a fair number of talented 17-year-olds who know what their first choice is, but there are far more, who are every bit as bright, who don’t know,” Mamlet says. “And we’re worried about those who don’t know. We at Stanford need to take some responsibility for the effect of our admission policies on the lives of talented high school students nationally.”

Even those who’ve identified a first-choice school may find themselves struggling with the question of whether to apply early. “There were many colleges that I really liked and where I knew I would be happy,” says freshman Stephanie Sud, who was admitted early decision. “I waited about as long as I possibly could before I checked the box on my application for early decision. I finally decided that if I were admitted, there was no way I could possibly regret it.”

Early decision has become increasingly popular with students who think it boosts their chances of acceptance at an elite school because the applicant pool is smaller than during the regular admission period. Many colleges, including Stanford, admit a greater percentage of applicants from their early-decision pool than from their regular-decision pool, and some—like Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania—admit more than 40 percent of their freshmen class early. (Stanford admits about 25 percent.)

As these programs have drawn more applicants, they also have attracted more fire. Critics say early decision favors privileged students who have college-educated parents and counselors to help them understand the process, and who do not need to compare financial-aid offers from multiple schools. Some observers also say early decision gives the most competitive colleges an unfair ability to lock in the nation’s brightest students by limiting their options.

Mamlet thinks some of the debate was whipped up by an article in the September 2001 Atlantic Monthly by former editor James Fallows. “It panned early decision as bad for kids and helpful to institutions,” Mamlet says. “So, at the time that we are asking students to be honest about who they are and what they care about and what they value in their admission applications, you have this dynamic where they’re thinking, ‘But I can’t trust you not to hurt me.’ ”

Then came the demon-wrestling of Yale president Richard C. Levin. In December 2001, Levin, ’68, publicly criticized early-decision programs, and in the spring he asked antitrust officials at the U.S. Department of Justice for permission to talk about the issue with his colleagues at other prestigious universities. He did not receive a definitive response, and on November 6 he announced that Yale would replace its binding early-decision program with early-action admission. Six hours later, Stanford announced that it had independently reached the same decision.

President John Hennessy, provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, and Mamlet had been discussing concerns about early decision for some time. They were considering making a change after the November 1 deadline passed, and the Yale announcement prompted an on-the-spot decision.

Mamlet was host that day to 170 high school counselors, who had come to learn about Stanford’s admission process and how they could help teachers write letters of recommendation. As she was finishing her remarks at the breakfast session, media calls started pouring in—from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle. “My first reaction was to think, ‘No, [the counselors have] come to spend the day at Stanford, and I can’t leave,’ ” Mamlet recalls. “But then I realized I had to go back to my office, and that’s when President Hennessy called and said, ‘This is where we were going—be bold.’ ”

But in stating that students who select the early-action option can apply early only to Stanford, the new policy violates rules set last spring by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). Those guidelines stipulate that students be able to apply to as many early-admission programs as they want. “We really wanted to support the professional thinking,” says Mamlet, who has chaired NACAC committees in the past. “However, we don’t believe that rule is in the best service of students. We don’t want to take away altogether an early option, because we believe that’s an appropriate vehicle for students. But we can’t have early action at Stanford without it being single choice, because we don’t have the staff. If there’s no disincentive to apply early, then our application numbers are going to skyrocket, and that means we have six weeks to make decisions on all of these candidates.”

It’s possible that Stanford’s and Yale’s moves will have national impact. Already, NACAC has asked Mamlet to write a paper explaining Stanford’s thinking. “They genuinely want to know why we made the decision we did,” she says, “and then they’ll look at their policies.”

What's the Difference?

With their November 6 announcements, Stanford and Yale have created a hybrid—less restrictive than early decision, less permissive than early action—that some are calling “single-choice early action.” The differences between the early programs:

MEDICINE

Testing the Smallpox Vaccine

MILITARY VETERANS who want to make a patriotic contribution. Local government officials who might be needed in a biowarfare emergency. Citizens who were touched by the events of September 11, 2001.

Those are many of the 90 people who have signed up to be part of a clinical trial of smallpox vaccine at the Medical Center, says Cornelia Dekker, research associate professor of pediatrics and medical director of the Stanford-Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital vaccine program. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and involving more than 900 people at nine sites in the United States, is designed to test whether diluted doses of the smallpox vaccine will produce adequate immunity in previously vaccinated adults. Smaller NIH studies have shown that a dose of the vaccine diluted to a one-fifth concentration is effective for people who are being vaccinated for the first time.

Although the last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949 and routine immunization ended in 1972, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention kept a limited supply of the vaccine. That agency has assured the public that there is enough vaccine for everyone who would need it in the event of an emergency. The clinical trial Dekker is conducting with Kaiser Permanente will help policy-makers decide how to deal with an outbreak.

The study will compare the effectiveness of undiluted vaccine with one-fifth and one-tenth concentrations. Dekker and her colleagues also will draw blood from the subjects before and after vaccination to assess their antibody levels. “One of the questions people are asking is, ‘How long does protection last?’ ” she says. “I don’t know that we’ll come up with a definitive answer, but we will be looking at what the antibody level is before the [trial] vaccination and seeing how much we can goose that. We can at least say something about whether the body still has any virus-fighting ability left from the old vaccine.

“The tragedy for many of us in the field of vaccines is that this was our biggest success story,” Dekker says. “We developed a vaccine and wiped smallpox off the face of the earth, and now we have to bring back the vaccine, still absent natural smallpox in the world. It is a little depressing, but in these unusual times, it’s important for the government to be prepared.”

Cardinal Numbers

Materials in Archive of Recorded Sound: 260,000

Recordings of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata requested by a Canadian researcher in October 2002: 37

Requests in 2002 for the Stanford Band’s “All Right Now”: 4

Recordings by acclaimed violinist Jascha Heifetz: 70

Recordings by rap star Eminem: 0

Grammy awards won by Heifetz: 4

Grammy awards won by Eminem: 5

Sources: Archive of Recorded Sound; The Recording Academy (grammy.com)

DONATIONS

A Huge Boost to Energy Research

WITHIN DAYS of the November announcement of a $225 million, 10-year collaboration between Stanford and private industry, students were e-mailing and calling the professor of petroleum engineering who will head it.

“Some are dying to get started on projects, and some are concerned that we’ll be biased by the sponsors,” says Franklin M. “Lynn” Orr Jr. “I told them we have a long history of working on things that have practical applications and working with companies in Silicon Valley, and it’s important to the companies that we remain independent, as well.” Orr, ’69, stepped down November 30 as dean of the School of Earth Sciences to guide the new initiative (see Top Jobs).

The Global Climate and Energy Project (G-CEP) will be funded by up to $100 million from ExxonMobil, $50 million from General Electric and $25 million from Schlumberger Limited, a global technology services company. Europe’s largest privately owned energy service provider, E.ON, intends to join the project and contribute $50 million. Orr predicted in November that the first research projects would be underway by early January.

Working with Stanford and other institutions around the world, G-CEP aims to identify and develop energy systems with low greenhouse-gas emissions. The technologies might use hydrogen, electric, biomass fuels, nuclear and renewable power sources. “What we’re trying to do at this point is to keep a very open mind about potential low-greenhouse-emission future scenarios,” Orr says. “We’re trying not to say, ‘We know who the winners are,’ because there might be lots of them.”

Orr already has enlisted the support of faculty from a wide range of departments—petroleum, chemical, civil, environmental and mechanical engineering, geophysics, and management science and engineering. Christopher Edwards, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, will serve as deputy director of the project. Orr expects about half of the research over the next decade to be done on campus, and the other half by scientists around the world. “This is a very exciting opportunity to unleash the creative talents of Stanford faculty and students on a problem that really matters,” he says.

Concerned about the acidity of the upper ocean and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has risen by one-third since the industrial revolution of the mid-19th century, researchers will look at carbon sequestration, or ways to capture and store or reuse the gas. “What we’re talking about is the idea of putting some of the carbon dioxide back into rocks or underground reservoirs, like depleted oil and gas reservoirs and coal beds,” says Orr, a specialist in oil recovery.

He acknowledges that similar work is being done elsewhere in the world, but says that no one is taking as broad an approach as G-CEP. “It’s a huge challenge, and we need all the players we can get to work on these problems.”

PROJECTS

Reading Dickens Aloud

WITH MULLED WINE and lots of Victorian trimmings, students, faculty, staff and community members gathered in Dinkelspiel Auditorium in December to begin reading, all together now, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Marco Barricelli, a repertory actor with San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, read aloud the first several of the 36 chapters that chronicle the life and times of Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, et al. Initial chapters also were published in Stanford Report and the Palo Alto Weekly in December. Succeeding installments are available weekly—as they were serially published in Dickens’s All the Year Round journal—by mail or on the web at dickens.stanford.edu.

“Discovering Dickens: A Community Reading Project” aims to recreate the kind of group reading experience that made Dickens’s serialized novels the Sopranos of the 19th century. “This is what people would talk about from one week to the next,” says Linda Paulson, continuing studies associate dean and director of the master of liberal arts program and a specialist in Victorian novels. “People chewed over the red herrings Dickens left behind each week, and his tense endings.”

Londoners in the 1860s shelled out two pence every week for the continuing saga. Stanford’s serialization, on the other hand, is free to anyone who requests it. The project has a host of producers and supporting players, including the continuing studies program, the Stanford Alumni Association, University communications, and the drama and English departments. Stanford Libraries’ special collections will provide period illustrations by F.W. Pailthorpe and Marcus Stone.

Paulson, whose parents read Dickens to her when she was a child, thinks today’s families might be looking for a similar experience. With the popularity of the Harry Potter books, she adds, “kids have proved to their parents over the last couple of years that they can sit still and listen to a fairly complicated story.”

Stanford’s printed version of Great Expectations uses a green cover similar to that of Dickens’s journal and a facsimile of the original typeface. “But,” Paulson notes, “we’re blowing up the size for 21st-century eyes.”

STUDENT LIFE

A High-Tech Health Center

THOSE GAIETIES WRITERS who used to pen jokes about bare-bones Cowell Student Health Center may have to find a new target. The new Allene G. Vaden Health Center, which opened fall quarter, is a fairly state-of-the-art place. Examination tables can morph into beds comfortable enough to sleep on. Physicians use computed radiography to diagnose fractures in minutes. Several lavatories come equipped with showers where downed cyclists can hose off road-rash gravel.

The two-story, $9.6 million, 30,000-square-foot building not only replaces the 36-year-old Cowell Student Health Center, but also spruces up Campus Drive with its flowering gardens and redwood, fig and olive trees. It sits across Cowell Lane from the former health center, in a portion of the parking lot that serves the Cowell Cluster residences. The old Cowell site has been turned into, well, a parking lot.

On a recent, typically busy Friday afternoon, more than 40 bike racks were filled outside; but inside Vaden, few students were apparent. They might have been seeing mental health professionals, picking up prescriptions or getting anonymous HIV testing. “We’ve definitely created more privacy for students,” says director Ira Friedman. “I don’t think people were aware of what the deficiencies were at Cowell because we had painted it up in recent years.”

Instead of banging into overhead pipes in the basement of Cowell, students being treated for recreational injuries or back strain can now do their stretches in the spacious second-floor physical therapy suite. Anyone arriving with a deep cut is ushered into one of two treatment rooms specially outfitted for suturing lacerations.

The improvements are not just physical. Incoming students filed their medical paperwork online for the first time in June, and within months, the center will unveil a website allowing doctors and patients to correspond confidentially. “What’s really cool,” Friedman says, “is that I can look at X-ray images on the web browser in my office.” High-tech medicine, indeed.

WEEKENDS

A Good Time Was Had by All

A RECORD NUMBER of attendees (7,190). A record number of events (446). Reunion Homecoming 2002, held October 17 to 20, included something for everyone. There was, of course, the social scene: Friday night parties, tailgates, minireunions and more. Sports fans got to watch a football victory—one of two this season—over Arizona, followed by a big-screen World Series telecast. There were tours, film fests, dances and concerts. And the intellectual offerings were legion: Classes Without Quizzes, a book discussion, an undergraduate research symposium, a roundtable, a reargument of a historic case about presidential power before Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ’48, MA ’48, JD ’52, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52, and former University President Gerhard Casper. The educational components allow people to “reconnect with the reason they came to Stanford,” says Leslie Winick, the Alumni Association’s director of classes and reunions. “When else would you go back and take a course on Shakespeare?” Or fluid mechanics, or Mayan inscriptions, or motion-picture technology. Yes, something for everyone—or maybe every facet of everyone.

To view photos from the weekend, visit the Reunion Photo Galleries.

RESEARCH

Using Linguistics to Fight Housing Discrimination

JOHN BAUGH made the first phone calls in 1988. He had arrived as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on campus, and he called four landlords who were advertising apartments in local papers. But when Baugh—a professor of education and linguistics who is African-American—arrived to look at the properties, he was told they were no longer available.

“An attorney told me to sue,” Baugh recalls. “But I thought, why don’t I do some research?”

For the next year, Baugh tested his theory that landlords were discriminating against prospective tenants on the basis of linguistic profiling—that is, because of how they sounded on the phone. He selected five cities with varying racial compositions: San Francisco, Oakland, East Palo Alto, Palo Alto and Woodside. Every time he called a landlord, Baugh would say the same thing: “Hello, I’m calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.” But he used three different accents and kept meticulous notes. When he spoke with an African-American or Latino accent, his calls routinely were not returned, or he was told apartments or houses were no longer available. When he telephoned using what he calls professional standard English, Baugh generally was invited to see the properties.

Since that informal pilot study, Baugh has focused much of his research on what he calls “one of the most interesting intellectual problems” he’s ever encountered. Last year, he won a $500,000, three-year grant from the Ford Foundation to study linguistic profiling and how it relates to housing discrimination. “The National Fair Housing Alliance has found that landlords use answering machines and screen calls racially,” Baugh says. “Their ‘testers’ have found that in many different parts of the country, white callers get returned phone calls, and black callers do not.”

Baugh is now teaching Introduction to Linguistics for Educational Researchers, a new seminar about linguistic analyses of minority populations. His research has implications for the continuing debate about how to pursue educational reform for minority children, and whether to teach them to “talk white.” Because African slaves in the United States were not allowed to go to school, Baugh says, “history did a lot of linguistic pruning.” The verb “to be” is one of the last things many African-American mothers teach their children, he says, and that’s why some school-age children tend to say phrases like “he running” instead of “he is running.”

“Some teachers treat that as a mistake, but the child is conforming to the rules of his heritage language and applying them to [standard] English,” Baugh told students in a recent seminar session. He praised teachers who understand the necessity of helping minority children make the transition to standard English, yet also “want students to not feel a sense of linguistic shame, and to value their heritage language.”

Baugh also has formed a graduate-student research group that will examine issues related to linguistic profiling and launch a national American linguistic heritage survey. Law student Dawn Smalls plans to propose a standard for courts to consider in cases that focus on voice identification, while education and economics student Ashlyn Amaral is looking at patterns of discrimination in West Coast housing.

Linguistics students H. Samy Alim and Renae Skarin are on the phone each week, digitally recording voice samples from “testers” at the National Fair Housing Alliance and from volunteers at state historical societies, to get a representative sampling of dialects and accents from all 50 states. They’ll then put them on a website, where visitors will be asked to fill out an online survey, providing their perceptions of the speakers’ age, region, ethnicity and race.

Baugh’s long-term hope is to compile the results into a database to use in conjunction with expert-witness testimony in antidiscrimination cases—for example, if a landlord claims he couldn’t have discriminated against a particular individual because he had only talked with him on the phone and therefore didn’t know he was black. “The statistical evidence that we plan to generate,” he says, “may make a crucial difference in cases where discrimination is alleged—but concealed by denial.”

TOP JOBS

Earth Sciences Dean Digs In

SHE'LL HAVE TO STEP DOWN from a couple of other administrative posts, but Pamela Matson, the new dean of the School of Earth Sciences, won’t be walking away from any of her research projects. She’ll continue to study land-use changes in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, and she’ll keep collecting data in Hawaii on the effects of anthropogenic (human-influenced) agents such as acid rain.

After all, Matson points out, she’ll be shepherding “a small school, with fewer than 50 faculty, and a very collegial school.” She succeeds Lynn Orr, ’69, who stepped down after eight years as dean to lead the Global Climate and Energy Project (see Donations).

As the newly named Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Matson, 49, also plans to continue teaching freshman seminars and doing some lecturing. A biogeochemist who studies the processes that link physical systems —bedrock, soils and water—with biological systems, Matson earned her doctorate in forest ecology from Oregon State University in 1983. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997, she was a professor of ecosystem science at UC-Berkeley. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and a 1995 MacArthur “genius” grant recipient.

For the past two years, Matson directed the popular undergraduate interdisciplinary program in earth systems, which the Faculty Senate last winter renewed for eight years, instead of the typical five. “I think the program is so successful because people recognize how important it is for our future, given that environmental problems are not simple and straightforward,” she says. “They require people who can think in many dimensions, who can understand all sides of an issue and who don’t assume that there’s a good guy and a bad guy.”

Last year, Matson helped launch the interdisciplinary graduate program in environment and resources. As dean, she plans to strengthen the school’s computational geosciences, which enable students to use remote sensing, geostatistical analyses and mathematical modeling to study earth processes.

And in her downtime? Matson and her husband, biological sciences professor Peter Vitousek, head to their second home in Hawaii with their children, Mat, 14, and Liana, 7. With all those intriguing new soils and substrates forming from hot lava, it’s hard to tear herself away from collecting data, but Matson also investigates hiking and snorkeling.

Campus Notebook

Overseas Studies, Down Under

Students who have completed introductory coursework in biology will soon have the opportunity to meet some new mates. This fall, Overseas Studies will unveil a program in coastal Australia. A collaboration between Stanford and the University of Queensland, the program will enable 48 students and their instructors to travel along the northeastern coast of the continent, studying marine biology, coastal ecology and resource management of the Great Barrier Reef. Among the highlights: examining the interactions between dugongs, seagrass and humans on one of the world’s largest estuarine bays, exploring mangrove and rainforest biodiversity, and conducting anthropological studies of indigenous culture.

For Next-Generation X Ray, a Green Light

The Department of Energy has okayed a $220 million next-generation X-ray laser project at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The Linac Coherent Light Source, a multi-institutional collaboration, “will produce flashes of X rays 10 billion times brighter and 1,000 times shorter than any existing source,” says project director and SLAC researcher John Galayda. It will be used to determine the locations and properties of atoms in solids and liquids, and has applications in the chemical, materials and biological sciences. Full operation is expected by September 2008.

Will National-Security Laws Impinge on Research?

The Faculty Senate in November expressed widespread worry about the implementation of several provisions of congressional legislation passed in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Of particular concern: what will be defined as “select agents,” or biological agents and toxins that have the potential to pose threats to public health and safety; how the requirement to register those agents with the government will be enforced; and who will be allowed to conduct research with them. “It may be that no foreigner under any circumstances can work on any of these agents,” said biowarfare expert Steven Block, a professor of applied physics and biological sciences. “That’s very much in flux at the moment, I might add.”

The Father of the Home Satellite Dish Dies at 70

Electrical engineering research professor emeritus H. Taylor Howard, who worked on NASA science teams for the Apollo, Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager and Galileo space missions, died November 13 when his single-engine plane crashed shortly after takeoff from the Calaveras County (Calif.) airport. An award-winning engineer who built the first home satellite dish in his backyard in 1976, Howard, ’55, never earned a master’s degree or a doctorate. An obituary will be published in the next issue of STANFORD.

Survey Says

COOL QUOTIENT: Stanford ranked fourth in Seventeen magazine’s survey of the “50 coolest colleges” for girls, behind Rice, Yale and the University of Texas-Austin. Factors in Stanford’s favor: windsurfing for credit, the liberal stop-out policy and “the hunks snapped in the tabloids with Chelsea Clinton [’01].”

YIELD SIGNS: In an analysis of 27 top-ranked schools by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Stanford had the highest yield rate—or percentage of those accepted who choose to attend—of African-Americans last year. At 64.4 percent, the University edged out Harvard (60.5 percent), which took first place in 2001. Among the schools surveyed, Stanford has the second-highest percentage of African-American undergraduates (11.6), behind the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Medical Rounds

ADULT BEHAVIOR: Just how versatile are adult stem cells? As scientists around the world explore this question, pharmacology professor Helen Blau and graduate student Mark LaBarge have demonstrated that tissue damage may trigger adult stem cells’ transformation into other cell types. The researchers injected mice with whole bone-marrow cells engineered to make a green fluorescent protein. In mice whose bone marrow had been destroyed through irradiation, the green fluorescent marrow generated muscle-specific “satellite” stem cells, but it did not do so in mice without bone-marrow damage. A subgroup of irradiated mice that then sustained muscle damage manufactured replacement muscle fibers that contained the green protein. Blau cautions that the satellite and muscle cells may not have originated from a stem cell, but from a different bone-marrow cell.

SCIENCE

Giving Away Knowledge

BIOCHEMIST PATRICK BROWN was among the first researchers to learn how the AIDS virus replicates in healthy cells. He also invented the DNA microarray, a slide upon which scientists can inexpensively print thousands of bits of DNA. Today, the Medical School professor has joined forces with former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus and UC-Berkeley assistant professor Mike Eisen on a new project: getting published research into the public domain, where they think it belongs.

STANFORD: What’s at stake in scientific publishing?

Something on the order of $40 billion a year in federal funds goes to support nonclassified scientific research in biomedical and other fields, and the explicit purpose is to make new discoveries and generate new knowledge for the public good. Scientists carry out their research and when they have something useful to report, they write a paper and publish it.

What’s wrong with the current system of publishing those papers?

Let’s say you’ve just been diagnosed with some kind of cancer and you want to find out what your tax dollars have paid for in terms of research. It typically costs $15 to $30 just to look at one article. Information paid for by billions of dollars of public money is privately owned by publishers who have complete control over who has access to it and under what terms.

Two years ago, you circulated a letter that was signed by more than 30,000 scientists who pledged to publish only in journals that would make their work available publicly after six months. What did that tell you?

The statement the letter made was quite strong. It was kind of like an invitation to publishers: change your business model and we’ll get behind you. But it was seen by most publishers as more of a threat than an invitation, and the bottom line was that there were very few publishers that actually came around to adopting the model we proposed.

What’s your latest approach to the problem?

For the past year, we’ve been working on a business plan and trying to raise money to launch a nonprofit scientific publisher called the Public Library of Science. Published work will be freely available so anyone can download it, reproduce it, reprint it or load it into databases, and it will be accessible to anyone, worldwide, who has an Internet connection. This stuff is incredibly valuable, and why should someone in Addis Ababa be completely disenfranchised when the whole purpose of research is the public good?

What about “publish or perish”? How will publishing in an online journal affect tenure decisions?

What journals you publish in matters a lot in terms of your career advancement, and that’s an issue we’ve been very sensitive to. We’re making great efforts to recruit the necessary editorial people to see to it that the journal we launch, from the word go, will be regarded as a very prestigious place to publish scientific work.

For more: www.publiclibraryofscience.org

IN PRINT

How to Stay Free of Heart Disease

JOHN COOKE tosses almonds and walnuts on his salads. He also runs a lot. And pops the occasional dietary supplement. All of which ensures that his endothelium is pumping out steady doses of nitric oxide to keep his body healthy.

Endo-what?

That would be the thin film that lines the insides of blood vessels. If you flattened a person’s endothelial cells, they would cover six tennis courts; if lumped together, they would constitute the body’s largest organ. “The endothelium is a hot topic right now in cardiology,” says Cooke, an associate professor of medicine and director of Stanford’s vascular medicine program. “People are beginning to realize that it exerts tremendous control over vascular tone and vascular structure.”

Cooke and Judith Zimmer recently published The Cardiovascular Cure: How to Strengthen Your Self-Defense Against Heart Attack and Stroke (Random House, 2002). The premise of the book, which advocates changes in nutrition, exercise and medication, is that restoring endothelial health can prevent hardening of the arteries and virtually eliminate cardiovascular disease.

The book explains how nitric oxide, an air pollutant when it’s outside the body, provides a host of benefits inside. As the body’s self-manufactured heart medicine, it relaxes blood vessels and makes the endothelium behave more like Teflon (good, because nothing clings while passing through the blood vessels) and less like Velcro (bad, because white blood cells and platelets may stick).

“When I was a [postdoctoral] fellow, angioplasty was the answer for coronary disease, and if you saw a narrowing, you’d dilate it,” Cooke recalls. “But now I think we have a much better idea of when angioplasty is useful and when it’s not.” Still, he says, “I think there is not enough emphasis on prevention today.”

In Cooke’s book, ounces of prevention are measured in recipes for tofu and bacon scrambler, zucchini frittata, Moroccan red snapper and bulgur pilaf. “I think you can have really nice, palatable, healthy meals,” he says. “It’s not as difficult as an ultralow-fat diet, and more healthy for you than the [low-carbohydrate, high-protein] Atkins diet.”

Do his four children like the meals? “They’re teenagers. Need I say more?”

COSMOLOGY

Predicting the End of the Universe—in Only 10 Billion Years

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde took a vacation to Bora Bora. One night, the husband-and-wife physics professors went for a walk on the beach.

“Suddenly we were looking at the sky, and something was very wrong,” Kallosh recalls. It took her a minute to realize why: she was in the Southern Hemisphere. “It wasn’t the sky we see in Moscow or Geneva or at Stanford.”

For Linde, there was another difference. “The stars were shining, and looking at the sky was exciting, but somehow it was too small,” he says. “What is inside our mental vision is so much greater than what our eye can see.”

Spoken like a true cosmologist. That’s an appellation coming to encompass more and more theoretical physicists, including Kallosh. Instead of ruminating about black holes, the curvature of space and high-energy collisions, many physicists-turned-cosmologists are looking at data from telescopes and satellites and developing computer models of the biggest picture of all: the future of the universe. Which, Linde and Kallosh believe, is short. A mere 10 billion to 20 billion years, give or take.

At 5 p.m. every day, the two sit down at their computers and check out the latest publications in high-energy physics and astrophysics. Over dinner they often confer about their readings—something that would have been impossible when their sons, Dimitri, MS ’00, and Alex, ’00, were growing up and demonstrating their own versions of universal chaos.

The Stanford couple can barely contain their excitement as they talk about findings that are due to be released on January 3, when researchers at Princeton will announce their latest satellite measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation—CMB, as it’s called in the cosmology biz. It may sound like something out of Star Trek, but CMB’s distant glow is what Linde calls “remnants of the primordial cosmic fire” of the birth of the universe.

Linde and Kallosh are hoping the Princeton results will support a new model of the universe that they proposed in August. In the past, most physicists believed the universe would continue to expand exponentially and indefinitely. But in recent years, many scientists have concluded that the universe will die a slow—we’re talking 100 trillion years—cold death. Now, Linde and Kallosh have calculated that there is more “dark energy”—a mysterious, vacuumlike force—than physicists previously recognized. Based on that, they predict that the 14-billion-year-old universe will slow its acceleration, pause and then collapse—ending in a “big crunch” in 10 billion to 20 billion years. To confirm the theory, “we need to have much better instruments and much longer studies,” Linde says.

The Russian-born pair, who worked together at Moscow’s Lebedev Physics Institute before joining the Stanford faculty in 1990, have been searching for a model that takes into account the sometimes-embraced, sometimes-questioned “cosmological constant” that Einstein used in his equations to signify the invisible energy in the vacuum of space. He publicly retreated from it in the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that galaxies were moving away from one another and, consequently, that the universe was expanding. But the cosmological constant, or what scientists now call dark energy, kept appearing in Einstein’s work.

Linde already has revolutionized his field by helping to develop the concept of “inflationary cosmology.” He will receive the Dirac Medal for theoretical physics this summer, along with physicists Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton, for conceiving of the universe beginning not with one Big Bang, but expanding in billionths of a second, in a never-ending chain reaction. In 1986 he refined that theory, suggesting that our universe is one among many that constantly self-reproduce. For now, anyway.

If Linde and Kallosh’s new theory is correct, “then we are somewhere in the middle age of the universe now,” Linde says. “We are living happily in a minuscule portion of time, and just as we are enjoying life more and thinking more, then we have to prepare ourselves for inescapable death.”

But how can we care about an event—granted, it’s universal—that won’t happen for at least 10 billion years?

“This is emotionally important for people to know,” Linde says. “Just like it’s important for us to know what is birth and what is death. This is almost a religious question.”

Kallosh nods in agreement, then adds a collegial proviso. “If our version is realized.”

What You Don't Know About Dollies

WHEN STANFORD ASKED to interview one of the five women who dance with the Band, the LSJUMB public relations manager demurred. “The thing with Dollies is that they do tend to come as a set,” noted Mike Huijon, ’99. It turns out that the quintet speaks with one voice on almost everything.

Dollies are not cheerleaders. “We’re in a category of our own,” says junior Nevenka Mattenet. “We don’t cheer and we don’t do stunts. We’re technical dancers.” With more than 40 collective years of lessons in ballet, tap, jazz, hip-hop, flamenco, ballroom, Scottish dancing and beyond, the Dollies say their biggest challenge is melding individual styles into one flawless whole. “People don’t realize how much mental and physical effort it takes to practice a dance repetitively and get the five of us to look identical,” says sophomore Malia Skaer.

Dollies work hard. The Dollies practice for two hours daily and rally at a minimum of three events per week, on campus and for elementary schools, church fairs, alumni birthday parties, weddings, Special Olympics and congressional candidates. They learn traditional Dollie dances—such as “Bill Tell,” a.k.a. the William Tell Overture—and choreograph new ones. The Dollies must be prepared to dash into formation each time the drum major flashes one of his 30 hand signals (and those cues can be hazardously similar—an L for “Livin” and a winking L for “Limelight,” for instance).“We dance to everything from Elvis to Green Day, Band-style of course,” says sophomore Valerie Rozycki.

Dollies are not ditzy. “I’m a student, not Nevenka the Dollie,” says Mattenet. “The five of us came to Stanford for strictly academic purposes,” Skaer adds. The women juggle challenging majors—international relations, human biology, management science and engineering, East Asian studies—and extracurriculars in addition to Dollie duties. Rozycki is a volunteer tutor and production director of the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, and senior Marisa Dye is on staff at a Row house.

There’s an awful lot of Dolliana. First comes Dollie Day, when each woman has to try out, by herself, in front of the entire Band. (“They got yelled at if they threw food directly at us,” senior Erin Christofferson recalls.) Dollies love Dollie Splash, and practice for two months for their debut and dunking at the Claw. A Dollie Blooper? That’s when the football team scores, the Band’s about to strike up “ARN” (“All Right Now”), and you realize you’re not holding your poms. Not to mention Dollie Daddy, the assistant Band manager charged with the general encouragement and well-being of all things Dollie.

Dollies are numbered by height. Dollie 1 is Rozycki, who is 5-foot-4. No. 5 is Dye, at 5-foot-8. The 5-foot-7 1/4 Skaer edges out the 5-foot-7 Mattenet for the fourth spot.

This year’s Dollies are the “sparkly Dollies.” Each cadre has a nickname, and the 2002-03 Dollies get theirs from the Swarovski crystals they’ve added to the traditional empire-waist, flared dresses. Oh, and those are red dresses in the fall, Cardinal dresses in the winter and white dresses in the spring.

The Dollies are categorized as an “accessory” to the Band, along with the Tree. And herein lies the one point of true Dollie disagreement. “I hate that,” says Mattenet. “We’re not.” Counters Skaer: “I think it’s cute, because we don’t play.” Dye chimes in: “An accessory is something that can easily be done away with, like a bracelet.” Skaer gets the final word. “An accessory is something that makes an outfit,” she says. “If we’re talking outfits, we’re more like shoes.”