you're familiar with cellphones, the
Jitterbug will be a confusing step back for you, even though its free operator
service and comfortable earpiece are pluses. Some people will prefer the Jitterbug's
larger fonts and number keys to the Verizon Coupe's smaller, more stylish
build. Still, the Coupe is a good option for people who have at least some
familiarity with technology and cellphones. Each in its own way does a good job
of sticking to the basic task of handling phone calls.
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For people who find it difficult to
concentrate at work, some scientists suggest the problem is too few
distractions, not too many, New Scientist reports.
Scientists used to think that the act
of concentrating itself might screen out distractions. But researchers such as
Nilli Lavie at University College London believe that making a deliberate
effort to concentrate isn’t enough to filter out irrelevant information.
Instead, the brain becomes more engaged in tasks as the visual demands of the
problem increase and effectively block additional stimuli. In practical terms,
the research could be used to improve children’s textbooks, or to add textured
backgrounds or moving images to enhance dull slide presentations.
Not everyone is persuaded by the
theory. John Duncan, an attention researcher at the University of Cambridge,
says that different areas of the brain that involve hearing or physical cues
such as hunger also play a role in concentration that go well beyond visual
perception.
Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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WASHINGTON — At least four top White
House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency
between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret
interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former
administration and intelligence officials.
The accounts indicate that the
involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction
of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration
officials have acknowledged.
Those who took part, the officials
said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until
early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick
Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January
2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E.
Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.
It was previously reported that some
administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the
emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews,
several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts
as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the
tapes should be destroyed.
Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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In June, biologists at the J. Craig
Venter Institute announced that they had successfully transplanted the genome
of one species of bacteria into another bacterial species. “This was the
ultimate in identity theft,” says Venter, a biologist well known for his
private-sector contribution to the sequencing of the human genome. “The
chromosome [genome] that we put in took over the cell completely, and any
characteristics of the original species were lost.”
HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
The transplant team took several steps
to be sure the transfer was complete. First, they added two genes to the donor
species’ chromosome: one that made the cells resistant to the antibiotic
tetracycline and one that made them turn blue. By dosing all the post-transplant
bacteria with tetracycline and looking for blue colonies, the scientists could
identify which cells had the donor DNA.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Next, they tested all the blue, tetracycline-resistant
bacteria for any traces of the recipient species’ genome. When they found none,
they knew the bacteria must contain only the donor species’ genome. Finally,
they found that all the proteins manufactured by the new bacteria were
characteristic of the donor species.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
This is a critical advance in Venter’s
quest—which he has been pursuing for a decade—to create a fully synthetic
life-form. Now, he says, it could be just a matter of months before a living
cell stocked with a synthetic genome becomes a reality.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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Throughout 2007 in Australia, the
evening news announced the levels of the nation’s reservoirs, billboards posted
water consumption statistics, and the public fretted over reports of a strained
economy. What is said to be the country’s worst drought in a millennium
continues for a seventh year, driving drinking-water reserves to record lows
across the country. Environmental experts warn that Australia’s plight should
be making the whole world thirsty: As global warming continues, many nations
around the world may have to adapt to less water.
Last April, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change warned that water shortages will intensify in
Australia, as well as across Africa, China and other areas of Asia, parts of
Europe, and the United States. Lack of water may affect 3.2 billion people by 2100.
In response, desalination plants for
Australia’s major cities are either under construction or planned. Conservation
incentives and industrial water recycling programs are also helping reduce
demand.
“Australia is the canary in the coal
mine when it comes to the impact of climate change on water resources,” says
Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia.
“Many people thought there would be adequate time to adapt to less water. The
lesson from Australia is that the shift has been very dramatic and has occurred
in a very short period.
HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
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December 17, 2007, 1:42 pm
What the Internet Knows About You
Posted by Ben Worthen
We often wonder why there isn’t more
outrage when companies announce they’ve lost data about customers or employees.
Here’s part of the answer: Most Americans don’t care what information about
them is publicly available. HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
That doesn’t mean Americans aren’t
curious what the Internet knows about them. A new study by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project, a non-profit organization which tracks the Internet’s
impact on society, found that 47% of Americans say they’ve searched the
Internet for information about themselves on the search engine Google, up from
22% in 2002. (While less than half of Americans say they’ve Googled themselves,
72% have looked for information about other people.) Sixty percent of these
searches returned information.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Thirty-five percent of people who use
the Internet say that their home addresses and the name of the company they
work for are available for anyone to see online. Other information available
online includes email addresses (32%), phone numbers (30%), things they’ve written
(24%) and photographs (23%). Eighty-seven percent of searchers say the
information they find is accurate. Twenty-one percent are surprised about how
much information is available. HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
So people are waking up to the fact
that this information is out there and that it’s next to impossible to control.
But most aren’t concerned: Pew says that 60% of the people who took its survey
aren’t worried about the information about them available online. Of those who
do care, only 54% have taken steps to limit the information about themselves
that’s available.
Why aren’t people concerned? Our guess
is that it’s evolutionary. Five years ago, as the study shows, people didn’t
even think to look what information might be available about themselves online
– heck, only half the population does now. Outrage will rise in proportion to
the number of people who find things they don’t like.
00000000
Louis J Sheehan The matter that makes
up everything we can see or touch, either on Earth or beyond, is exceedingly
rare, cosmically speaking. Most of the material in the universe is something
called dark matter, mysterious stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and
doesn’t interact with what we think of as ordinary matter. It reveals its
presence only by its gravitational effects, guiding the evolution of the early
universe and still affecting the motion of galaxies. Earth-based experiments
have attempted to detect dark matter particles, but so far they have drawn a
blank.
Astronomers, however, have had a
better year, continuing to find evidence of the crucial role dark matter plays
in shaping the visible cosmos. Thanks to about a thousand hours of observation
by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have compiled a dark matter map of a
tiny slice of the sky, about two square degrees of the entire sky’s
40,000-square-degree span. The map, which was published in the journal Nature
last January, confirmed a central prediction of modern astrophysics: Galaxies
formed in, and remain bound to, enormous clouds of dark matter.
In the early universe, astronomers
believe, dark matter provided the gravitational scaffolding on which ordinary
matter coalesced and grew into galaxies. According to these dark matter
theories, as the visible galaxies formed, some of the matter surrounding them
should have clumped together into hundreds of small satellite galaxies, most of
which should survive today. But the observed number of satellite galaxies is
only a fraction of what the theory predicts. “We should see about a hundred to
a thousand, but up to 2005, there were only 12,” says Marla Geha, an
astrophysicist at Yale University. Astronomers call it the missing satellite
problem. HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Louis J Sheehan Astronomers had
speculated that the existence of small, dark matter–dominated satellite
galaxies might solve the problem, but there was no evidence that any such
galaxies existed.
Last spring, Geha and Josh Simon, a
colleague at Caltech, used the 10-meter Keck II telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea
to study the mass of eight newly discovered satellite galaxies, detected over
the last two years by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ongoing effort to make a
detailed map of a million galaxies and quasars. Geha and Simon found that these
satellite galaxies were much fainter and smaller in mass than the other known
satellites—and 99 percent of their mass was in the form of dark matter. Given
that the galaxies found by Geha and Simon have such high concentrations of dark
matter, it’s likely that many other satellite galaxies could be 100 percent
dark matter.
“We expect some to be undetectable,
with no stars or gas,” says Geha. “There are indirect ways of finding the dark
matter satellites, but it will take more work.”
Some astrophysicists believe that dark
matter particles may occasionally annihilate each other, producing bursts of
high-energy gamma rays. If the Milky Way has dark matter satellites, and if
they do emit gamma rays, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, scheduled
for launch in February, might detect them.
Dark matter may also be responsible
for creating the most awesome objects in the universe: the enormous black holes
believed to lurk in the center of nearly every large galaxy. Tom Theuns and
Liang Gao, astronomers at Durham University in England, used a computer model
last year to study how two types of dark matter, known as warm and cold, may
have influenced the formation of the very first stars in the universe—and the
first giant black holes. HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Louis J Sheehan In their simulations,
Gao and Theuns found that within clumps of cold dark matter, single massive
stars formed, but warm dark matter formed filaments about a quarter the width
of the Milky Way, attracting enough ordinary matter to create some 10 million
stars—and some of these very first stars could still be around. “You could
potentially form low-mass stars,” says Theuns. “And they live very much longer.
They could live for 13 billion years and could be in the Milky Way today. Maybe
we’ve seen them already. Who knows?”
But the most unexpected result of the
model was that the filaments could catastrophically collapse, warping
space-time to form a huge black hole.
The model suggested that collapsing dark matter
could warp space-time to form a huge black hole.
“Even if only 1 percent of the mass in
a filament takes part in the collapse, that’s already 100,000 times the mass of
the sun, a very good start to making one of these supermassive black holes,”
Theuns says. “We know that the formation of these supermassive black holes has
to be very rapid because we can see very bright quasars very soon after the Big
Bang, not much later than the epoch of the first star formation.”
Is there any chance that astronomers
could detect an echo of the primordial cataclysms that birthed these black
holes?
“You would think it’s such a violent
process that something would be left over from that,” Theuns says. “I don’t
have any predictions, but you would think there would be something.”
00000000000000
HTTP://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Voters Signal a Hunger for Change
December 18, 2007; Page A2
Change is the most powerful word in
politics, and it's beginning to appear American voters want to send change
roaring through the system like a gale-force wind in 2008.
We're talking about the kind of change
that doesn't merely adjust the dials but twists them in a decidedly different
direction. The signs that such sentiment is afoot in the land are starting to
multiply.
They can be seen in the rise of Mike
Huckabee among Republicans and Barack Obama among Democrats in the presidential
campaign. The two candidates are gaining ground precisely because they
represent a significant departure from the status quo.
The change imperative is implicit in
all kinds of polling numbers. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll,
two-thirds of those surveyed now regularly say that things are "off on the
wrong track," the highest sustained level of dissatisfaction in 15 years.
The sentiment was evident last week in
the results of a little-noticed special election to fill a House seat in Ohio
vacated by the death of Republican Rep. Paul Gillmor. Republicans should have
kept the seat easily. The Fifth District has been reliably Republican for
decades, and the Republican candidate won more than 60% of the vote in nine of
the previous 10 House elections. But this year, Republicans had to spend
heavily to keep the seat, and new Rep. Bob Latta got just 57% of the vote.
Republicans held back the winds of change.
The change impulse can even be seen in
the success this year of Rep. Ron Paul in the Republican presidential race. His
libertarian message of scaling back government on all fronts once would have
been considered too radical. Yet he already has raised an impressive $18
million this quarter alone, which will make him a force to be reckoned with in
New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary and beyond.
Elections that truly change the
country's direction aren't very common. In fact, they come along perhaps once
in a generation. And, of course, a shocking event such as a terrorist attack
next year could change the equation, compelling voters to value stability over
change.
For now, though, change with a capital
"C" would figure to hurt Republicans most, because they've been in
charge most of this decade. But Democratic incumbents shouldn't be too
sanguine.
The groundwork for a big-change
election this year may have been set in the results of the 2006 election, when
Democrats swept into power in both the House and the Senate.
But often such a congressional
election is followed by a general election in which voters get cold feet about
lasting change. In 1958, for instance, Democrats picked up a whopping 49 seats
in the House and 15 in the Senate in the middle of Dwight Eisenhower's second
term. But the Democratic surge didn't continue; two years later, Democrats lost
20 seats in the House and John F. Kennedy barely won the presidency.
Similarly, Republicans picked up 54
seats in the House and 10 in the Senate in the Gingrich revolution of 1994. But
two years later, Republicans relinquished three of those House seats, and
Democrat Bill Clinton easily won re-election.
Sometimes, though, the tremors in an
off-year election are followed by a true earthquake in a general election. In
1978, Republicans took over 15 House seats and three Senate seats. That simply
set up the Ronald Reagan landslide of 1980, in which Republicans took over the
White House and gained 34 House seats and an unusually high 12 Senate seats,
the biggest Senate swing in two decades.
Politicians themselves often don't see
the signs of an earthquake. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the third-ranking Democrat in
the House, says that in 1980 many Democrats wanted to run against Mr. Reagan,
thinking him too conservative for the country.
The question, of course, is whether
2008 will be another 1980. One intriguing hint of change comes in the behavior
of Republican voters. In recent years, Republicans have tended to act like the
well-behaved kids in school, who walk in straight lines and keep quiet. They
have reliably fallen in behind the establishment candidate.
This year, with no incumbent president
or vice president running, there isn't an obvious establishment favorite, and
Republicans are all over the map -- hence, the rise of Mr. Huckabee, and the
surprising resilience of another unconventional Republican candidate, former
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, atop national Republican polls.
Now, the task for other campaigns is
to show they understand the forces of change. Republican Sen. John McCain has
done better since he's stopped acting like the establishment candidate and
starting acting more like a maverick. The campaign of former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney, who once led comfortably in Iowa and New Hampshire, is seeking to
persuade voters that Mr. Huckabee's occasional collisions with ethics and
reform forces while governor of Arkansas show he isn't the agent of change he
purports to be.
The further Romney message is that
competence is key to changing the system and that their man has proved he has
it. Mr. Romney has led "very large organizations toward success,"
says spokesman Kevin Madden. "He didn't do that by sitting in committee
hearing rooms on Capitol Hill."
And on the Democratic side, the goal
of Hillary Clinton's campaign is to show that she is a change agent as much as
Sen. Obama is. Its message: There would be no bigger change than electing a
woman president. And some experience working within the system, which she has,
makes it easier to change that system.
Write to Gerald F. Seib
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Black holes are weird. Well, duh,
right?
But they do something that surprises
most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also
eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly
the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees.
Picture from Chandra of the active
galaxy pair 3C321
The image above is from the Chandra
X-Ray Observatory, and it’s all about this scary scenario. Let’s take a walk
down the gravity well, shall we?
Basically, as matter swirls down into
the maw of the hole, it forms a flattened disk called an accretion disk.
Friction, magnetism, and other forces heat the disk up. A lot. At the poles of
the disk, all this heat and force can focus twin beams of fury, jets of matter
and energy of unbelievable violence.
Every galaxy has a supermassive black
hole in its core, and if these black holes are actively feeding, they can emit
these beams. They can be so energetic that these galaxies, called Active
Galaxies, are among the brightest objects in the entire Universe!
As you can imagine, it sucks to be in
the path of that beam. All that high-energy radiation pelting you, even from
thousands of light years away, can be enough to do some serious hurt.
This object is actually two galaxies.
Both have active black holes in their cores, but one of the two is creating
these death ray beams… and the other galaxy is in the way.
The picture from Chandra shows this
drama unfolding. The beams are coming from the lower left, where the more
active galaxy sits. The orange and red colors (from Hubble) represent optical
and ultraviolet light emitted by the galaxy. This generally indicates regions
where stars are being born; it appears as if the beams from the black hole are
compressing gas in the galaxy, collapsing it, and aiding it in forming stars.
Purple represents high-energy X-rays
(seen by Chandra), caused by all sorts of events, but quite a bit is from the
beam slamming into material in the galaxy itself. The blue is lower energy
radio emission. Radio waves (detected by MERLIN) are also generated when the
beam hits the other galaxy in the upper right. You can see how the beam gets
distorted as it rams into the gas in the other galaxy.
The two galaxies are only 20,000 light
years apart (for comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years
across), so the galaxy in the upper right is enduring a world universe of hurt.
Any planets in the path of that beam are being pummeled by all manners of
radiation. It’s not easy to know if that would make them uninhabitable, but it
seems likely; the beams would interact with the air and destroy most of the
molecules in the upper atmosphere. Ozone is very susceptible to this, and it’s
our ozone layer that protects us from damaging ultraviolet light from the Sun.
Without it, the krill and other sea life making up the base of the food chain
on our planet would die.
That would be, to use a scientific
word, a bummer.
By studying the interaction of the
beam from the one galaxy with the other, astronomers can learn just what sorts
of things happen when galaxies go bad. And while this seems far removed from
our everyday life, I have to add that there is a supermassive black hole in the
center of our Galaxy. It’s not currently active, and to be honest there’s no
indication that the beams would be aimed at us that even if it were to start
chomping down on gas clouds and stars; most likely they would be aimed up and
out of the Galaxy, very far from where we are.
Still, forewarned is forearmed. The
more we know about this stuff, the better I feel.
Plus, geez, it’s just so cool! Too bad
they didn’t release this image before I chose my Top Ten images of the year.
And, finally, I’ll note that I talk
about this (as well as black holes in general, and other kinds of killer beams)
in "Death from the Skies!" It’ll be a few more months before it’s
out, but if you like destruction writ large, you’ll have fun reading the book.
ooooooo
Over the past three decades, China has
emerged as an economic colossus, becoming the world’s source of cheaply
manufactured exports. In 2007, numerous reports of contaminated Chinese imports
revealed a nasty downside to this rapid growth.
The first blow came in March, with the
revelation that cat food and dog food were killing family pets across the
United States; it contained wheat gluten, an ingredient imported from the
People’s Republic of China, which was laced with deadly melamine.
In May came the news that some
American hospitals and prisons were distributing Chinese toothpaste tainted
with diethylene glycol, a potentially fatal compound.
The biggest wallop hit over the
summer, when Mattel and other companies announced they’d sold thousands of
Chinese-made toys that were coated with lead-based paint. The businesses
involved juggled recalls and apologies as China’s government scrambled to
repair its industrial reputation.
In August, the crisis prompted China’s
commerce minister, Bo Xilai, to protest that “more than 99 percent” of the
country’s exports “are of good quality and are safe.”
The blowups over tainted products,
however, overshadowed landmark news regarding a far more dangerous Chinese
export: pollution. Back in 2000, China’s economic planners boldly predicted
that the country would double its energy usage by 2020. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, in turn, estimated that China would surpass the United
States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide by that same year.
Propelled by a decade of blistering growth unfettered by environmental
regulations, China managed to hit its energy usage goal in 2007, 13 years ahead
of schedule. And depending on whose estimates you accept, the country has already
taken the carbon-dioxide emissions crown.
Given that China is home to 20 percent
of the planet’s population and a burgeoning, ever more consuming middle class,
it’s not surprising that the country’s footprint on the environment is growing.
What is shocking is the extent to which that footprint is stomping not just
China’s ecology but that of the rest of the planet.
China has become the leading importer
of illegally harvested timber. It is the global hub for endangered wildlife
trafficking. The Chinese are the world’s largest consumers of grain, meat,
coal, and steel. And China is feeding its appetites for those commodities—and
increasingly for oil—by investing in resource extraction in less-developed
areas like Africa. Even in a government not prone to harsh self-evaluation, a
top Chinese environmental official pronounced ominously last year that the
pollution crisis at home “allows for no optimism.”
The statistics are staggering.
Fourteen thousand new cars hit the road each day, and by the year 2020, China
is expected to have 130 million cars. Meanwhile, about 70 percent of China’s
nontransportation energy comes from burning 3.2 billion tons of coal each year.
The nation is building coal-fired power plants—one of the dirtiest forms of
energy production—at a clip of two to three a week. China is also home to 5 of
the 10 most polluted cities on the planet, according to China’s own State
Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA)—including the major coal-mining
city of Linfen, the most polluted city in the world. The World Bank estimated
in early 2007 that air pollution alone causes at least 700,000 premature deaths
in China annually.
The impact of all this extends far
beyond China’s borders. Taken as a group, its coal-fired power plants emit the
world’s highest levels of sulfur dioxide (a major element of acid rain) and
mercury, both of which rise high into the atmosphere and hitch a ride on air
currents circling the globe. One study, published last year in the Journal of
Geophysical Research, calculated that three-quarters of the black carbon
pollution in the atmosphere over the western United States originates in Asia.
It is estimated that as much as 35 percent of all the mercury pollution in the
western United States comes from abroad, and China is most likely the main
culprit. According to the World Wildlife Fund, untreated waste has turned
China’s Yangtze River basin into the single largest polluter of the Pacific
Ocean. “There’s no doubt,” says Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations, “that what China is doing on the domestic
front has an enormous effect on the globe.”
Within China, the devastation is more
intense. One-third of its land has been hit by acid rain, according to the head
of SEPA. One hundred ten of its cities are short of water. Available water is
so polluted that nearly 700 million Chinese citizens drink from supplies
contaminated by human and animal excrement.
The conventional wisdom has long held
that China is merely following the path of the United States and other
developed countries that polluted—and in some cases, continue to do so—on their
way to a wealthier populace and eventual stricter environmental controls. But
the epic pace of China’s development could spawn an ecological catastrophe of a
different order. “What China is facing in terms of environmental challenges,”
Economy says, “is not comparable to anything we have faced in this country.”
Ironically, the environmental goals
set by the Chinese government appear more progressive than those of the United
States. In its latest five-year plan, issued in 2005, the central government
targeted a 20 percent improvement in energy productivity by 2010. The previous
year, it pledged that 10 percent of the nation’s energy would come from renewables
by 2010. This year, it began requiring that new cars meet fuel economy
standards higher than those in the United States.
The problem comes in enforcement.
Local officials, charged with meeting aggressive economic targets for their
region’s industry, tend to ignore national environmental regulations, covering
up spills and building new power plants behind the backs of central government
regulators. Efforts to meet the 20 percent energy-–productivity pledge, for example, are
already well behind schedule.
In late October, China’s environmental
protection agency announced a new policy regarding pollution by export
manufacturers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Any company
found in violation would be forced to close for one to three years.
“I think that the leadership is at a
very important tipping-point moment,” says Orville Schell, director of the
Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “With the Olympics coming
up, a new catalytic element has arisen. They will be getting the mass scrutiny
of the world at a time when they want to show their advantage.”
Although it’s easy to view China as
some sort of ecological evil empire, its fate is entwined with the U.S.
appetite for consumption and growth. The United States still holds the title as
the world’s biggest consumer of world resources and largest emitter of all
greenhouse gases. Our per capita emissions dwarf those of China, or any other
nation for that matter. An estimated 7 percent of China’s carbon-dioxide
emissions derive from U.S. consumption of goods made in China. “People are
becoming much more aware that a lot of the pollution reaching the United States
arises from manufacturing the goods we buy,” says Barbara Finamore, head of the
Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) China Clean Energy Program. “I think
just like with toy safety, we are going to see a lot more demand that the goods
are not just safe in and of themselves to use but also come from factories that
are complying with China’s environmental laws.”
Some nongovernmental organizations in
China have been pushing for reform over the last decade. Members of these
grassroots outfits, often operating at the risk of arrest or harassment, press
for environmental improvements through public demonstrations and the limited
legal action allowed. “On the positive side, you have demonstrations, you have
marches, you have hundreds of thousands of people writing letters to complain
about pollution and request that something get done about it,” says Economy.
“On the other hand, you also have citizen activism such that when Beijing said
we are going to shut down the factories in advance of the Olympics, factory
managers are coming back and saying no.”
Louis J Sheehan The good news is that
overhauling outdated technology might easily rein in the devastating pollution.
Much of China’s industry uses energy-guzzling equipment from the 1970s, and the
NRDC estimates that by using existing technology and enforcing simple building
codes, the country could cut its energy demands by half or more in the next
decade.
“There is no other country in the
world as dynamic and rapidly changing as China,” observes Alex Wang, an NRDC
attorney who directs the council’s China Environmental Law Project in Beijing.
“It really is a country where things can be dramatically different from one day
to the next.”
Just as quickly as China became the
world’s leading polluter, it could find a greener path to development. But if
it fails, the outcome will be more than just a public relations nightmare.
xxxx
Olmert: Israel risks South Africa-like
struggle
By Josef Federman, The Associated
Press
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert warned in a published interview Thursday that "the state of
Israel is finished" if a Palestinian state is not created. He said the
alternative is a South African-style apartheid struggle.
The explosive reference to apartheid
came as Olmert returned from a high-profile peace conference in the USA, hoping
to prepare a skeptical nation for difficult negotiations with the Palestinians.
WHAT'S NEXT?: Navigating path to peace
will still be tricky
Though Olmert has long said that the
region's demography works against Israel, the comments published in the Haaretz
daily newspaper were among his strongest. Israeli officials have long rejected
any comparison to the racist system once in place in South Africa.
Olmert and Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas agreed this week at a summit in Annapolis, Md., to resume peace
talks after a seven-year freeze.
The two leaders pledged to try to
reach an agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of next
year.
In the interview, Olmert said it is a
vital Israeli interest to create a Palestinian state because of the growing
Arab population in the area.
"The day will come when the
two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for
equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz. "As soon as that happens,
the state of Israel is finished."
The interview was published on the
60th anniversary of the historic United Nations decision to partition
Palestine, setting up separate Jewish and Arab states. The vote led to a war,
and the Palestinian state was not created.
The Palestinians want to form their
state in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem — areas Israel captured in the
Mideast war in 1967.
Jews are a solid majority inside
Israel — roughly 76% of the population of 6.4 million. However, if the West
Bank and Gaza are included, Arabs make up about half the population.
To ensure Israel can maintain its
character as a democracy with a solid Jewish majority, Olmert supports a
withdrawal from much of the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem, following
Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005.
Israel's Arab citizens have the right
to vote, but about 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not
have Israeli citizenship or rights.
Olmert, a hard-liner earlier in his
career, has repeatedly warned in recent years that Israel cannot remain both
Jewish and democratic if it holds on to the West Bank and Gaza. He has never
used the South African analogy in public.
The Israeli leader received an
important boost Thursday when police recommended that prosecutors drop an
investigation into whether Olmert illegally intervened in the government's sale
of a bank two years ago. The threat of indictment in the case cast a cloud over
Olmert for months, but police decided there was insufficient evidence.
The decision, coming after months of
investigations, including two interrogations of Olmert himself, was forwarded
to the attorney general, who makes the final decision on whether to indict.
That decision is weeks or months away, but an indictment is unlikely.
Police are still conducting two other
corruption investigations against Olmert, who has denied any wrongdoing.
Two polls published in Israeli
newspapers Thursday showed the Israeli public to be highly skeptical of the
fledgling peace process.
The polls, conducted by the Dahaf
Institute and Dialog agency, found that fewer than one in five Israelis say they
believe the Annapolis conference was a success, and more than 80% of the public
says the Israeli and Palestinian leaders will not meet their goal of reaching a
deal in 2008.
Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
The
polls each questioned about 500 people and had margins of error of +/—4.5
percentage points.
The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly.
A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be
swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt
cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph,
scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that
isn’t a comet,” he says.
In
Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked
across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New
Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after.
Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed
into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life
on the planet. What’s more, he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are
hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups
around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many
different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What
scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of
craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been
identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70
percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of
the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that
Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have
suspected.
Masse’s epiphany came while poring over
Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they
might reveal about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements
and create new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are
often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to
actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for
the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian genealogies. The
result: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them
in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse theorizes, hold similar clues.
Masse’s
biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice
swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar.
The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against
the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and
aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat
and moisture blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that
pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into
the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of
the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal
event in history.
0000
The
Web has helped home buyers find places to live for years, through real-estate
agencies' sites and classified listings. But now a number of sites have emerged
that provide a raft of information beyond price, location and photos.
Among
other things, these sites allow house hunters to screen prospective neighbors,
evaluate school districts and see how members of the community rate a street's
Internet connectivity and cellphone service. Shoppers can keep abreast of the
news in a neighborhood they're considering, and get alerts when houses list for
sale or restaurants open -- or when a registered sex offender moves to the
area. Consumers can find energy-efficient homes and compare locations by levels
of toxic waste or drought conditions. And both buyers and sellers can join
discussions with others who are in the market and real-estate professionals.
All
of this information can be particularly helpful in turbulent real-estate
markets like today's, when many people would welcome greater assurance that
they're making the right decision.
Here's
a survey of what's out there.
"You
can see just about any type of information about a house on Trulia.com,"
says Matthew Orr, a Long Beach, N.Y., resident who used the site to find the
home he and his fiancée are due to close on this month.
For
starters, users can enter a city, town or ZIP Code and see a listing of every
home for sale, sortable by price, address, number of bedrooms or bathrooms,
broker or type of home (single-family or multi-family). They can also narrow
the search by establishing parameters for location, size and property type. Mr.
Orr says he and his fiancée used Trulia.com, which is owned by San
Francisco-based Trulia Inc., to zero in on houses with big yards for their
dogs, and he recommends the site's home-comparison features.
Clicking
on a listing brings up a page with a more-detailed description of the home,
including how long it has been on the market, and photos. This page also offers
lists of similar homes for sale and similar recently sold homes, with links to
pages for each of those homes; charts comparing the home's price to those of
the similar homes and to the average listing and sale prices in the area; a
sales history for the home, drawn from public records; and a link to a
real-estate guide for the area that includes information on market trends,
schools, crime statistics, income levels and commuting times.
There
are also discussion boards, and users can arrange to have email alerts sent to
them when properties within their search parameters are listed or sold. The
site can also send alerts when the price of a particular house changes or the
house is sold.
Similar
features are available on the site owned by Seattle-based Zillow.com5. Boulder, Colo., resident Melanie
Fredericks says that when she and her husband were considering selling their
house and buying a new home closer to their jobs, they used Zillow.com to
"gather all the information before even heading to a real-estate agent,
and decided to wait for a better time to sell." One feature she found
helpful was what the site calls Zestimates, which are Zillow.com's estimates of
the value of homes, including homes that aren't listed for sale.
Another
interesting feature of Zillow.com is that people whose homes aren't on the
market but who would consider selling at the right price can post a "Make
Me Move" price to see if there's any interest worth exploring.
Users
of these and other real-estate sites should keep in mind that the data the
sites use can sometimes be dated. For instance, information on the number of
bedrooms and bathrooms may not reflect recent renovations. And the census
figures the sites use for demographic profiles may be years old, so they may
not reflect recent trends in rapidly changing neighborhoods or towns.
One
way to supplement the statistical information on real-estate sites and to get
help with particular questions or concerns is to seek input from others in the
market and from real-estate professionals on the sites' discussion boards. Both
Trulia and Zillow say these are their most popular features.
Lisa
Suarez, an insurance broker from San Leandro, Calif., turned to a discussion
board on Trulia.com recently after months of failing to find a buyer for her
home.
Ms.
Suarez posted a message on Trulia Voices at 2 a.m. asking if anyone had any
suggestions on how to speed up the process of selling her home. Within minutes,
she says, she was contacted by a real-estate agent who offered some advice that
Ms. Suarez liked, and the two agreed to meet. Ms. Suarez hired the agent, Cindi
Hagley of Windermere Real Estate Services Co. in San Ramon, Calif., and within
three weeks had two offers for her house that she is considering. "In this
devastating market, it means everything that you can reach someone out there
that's listening," she says.
Other
sites are designed to give users a look at neighborhoods through the eyes of
the people who live there. On recently launched StreetAdvisor.com6, based in Melbourne,
Australia, buyers can look for input from residents of a particular street
about their neighbors, local services and more.
For
instance, potential buyers looking at a home on North Carlyn Ave. in Campbell,
Calif., can read a review of life on the street written by Tom Huggett, who has
lived there for 21 years. He notes that the first houses were built before
World War II, and readers can practically feel the shade of the mature
sycamores, redwoods, oaks and fruit trees he describes. The people range from
infants to seniors, he says, and are "friendly but not nosey and helpful
but not pushy." And he notes that it's only about three blocks to a
"newly vibrant downtown" with a lot of bars, restaurants and shops.
Reviewers
also rate their street for its overall "vibe," which includes
neighborly spirit and night life, among other factors; for its Internet and
pay-TV access and cellphone reception; for its "health," which
includes factors like cleanliness, noise levels and traffic; for the cost of
living and real-estate values; and for services and amenities like public transportation,
medical facilities, schools, child care, and parks and recreation. Users can
post pictures and videos as well.
One
drawback of the site is that it hasn't had the time to build up much content.
Mr. Huggett is the only contributor from his street, for instance, and users
will find no comments for many streets.
For
a different take on neighborhood life, house hunters can check San Diego-based RottenNeighbor.com7. This site lets users
post complaints about their neighbors, so it can serve as a warning about
frictions in a neighborhood. One recent user in Chicago wrote that the
"guy on the top floor of this building plays his stereo all day and night.
It's so loud....He's why I'm moving."
Again,
while such sites can be useful, there is a caveat. There is no way for sites
that depend on user-generated content to verify the vast majority of
information that people post, and of course such comments are largely, and
often entirely, subjective.
Several
sites cater to house hunters' concerns about energy efficiency and the
environment. Walkscore.com8, started by
Seattle-based Front Seat Management LLC in July, rates the walkability of a
neighborhood by the proximity of stores, restaurants, schools, parks, libraries
and more to an address the user submits.
In
the wake of a recent rash of brush fires, water shortages and other drought
conditions around the country, Sperling's Best Places of Portland, Ore.,
launched DroughtScore.com9 last month. By entering
a ZIP Code, town or city, users can see a graph showing the past 13 months of
drought levels in an area, based on statistics from the National Climatic Data
Center.
For
a broad view of the environmental conditions in a neighborhood, the best
resource is the Environmental Protection Agency. At EPA.gov10, house hunters can
click on the "Where You Live" tab to learn about levels of air and
water pollution, hazardous-waste sites and releases of toxic chemicals in a
given city, county or ZIP Code.
At
EnergyStar.gov11, a joint site of the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, users can find
builders working with the EPA to build homes that meet the government's Energy
Star standards for energy efficiency. Another site, EcoBroker.com12, owned by EcoBroker
International, Evergreen, Colo., can also help users find homes with
energy-efficient and environmentally friendly features.
Other
sites specialize in information on school systems and crime statistics, areas
that some real-estate agents aren't inclined to talk about because of concerns
that their comments could be construed as steering people away from or toward
certain neighborhoods.
"I'm
very careful as to what I tell buyers when they ask those questions," says
Toni L. Medjuck, owner of Beach to Bay Realty in Seminole, Fla. "I'd
rather refer them to where they can find the information."
For
Sergey Krasnovsky and his wife, planning a move to Seattle meant using GreatSchools.net13 to narrow their search
to two school districts for their 8-year-old son. Only then did they look for a
potential home to buy. "The site lets you analyze each school not only
based on [statistical ratings] but also on real feedback from parents,"
Mr. Krasnovsky notes.
The
site gives information for both public and private schools, including test
scores, the ethnicity of students, student-teacher ratios and spending per
pupil. In addition to written reviews, parents rate schools for principal
leadership, teacher quality, extracurricular activities, parent involvement,
and safety and discipline. The site is owned by GreatSchools Inc., a nonprofit
organization based in San Francisco. Another site, SchoolMatters.com14, a service of the
Standard & Poor's division of McGraw-Hill
Cos., provides information on public schools only.
For
crime statistics, Las Vegas-based AreaConnect LLC lets users compare data for
more than 8,000 cities at www.AreaConnect.com/crime15. Family Watchdog LLC,
based in Indianapolis, provides the addresses and pictures of registered sex
offenders at FamilyWatchdog.us16. The site also will
send email and cellphone alerts if a registered offender moves into a given
neighborhood.
For
a much broader scope, YourStreet.com17, owned by San
Francisco-based YourStreet Inc., lets users find recent news reports and
commentary from blogs for any location in the U.S. The material includes crime
reporting but also covers the full spectrum of community news. Users can also
initiate or join discussions about local events. "We look at news as the
foundation of what is really going on in a local community," says James
Nicholson, YourStreet's CEO and founder.
0000
Jim Hammond is an elite athlete. He works out
two hours a day with a trainer, pushing himself through sprints, runs, and
strength-building exercises. His resting heart rate is below 50. He’s won three
gold medals and one silver in amateur competitions this year alone, running
races from 100 to 800 meters. In his division, he’s broken four national racing
records. But perhaps the most elite thing about Hammond is his age.
He is 93. And really, there’s nothing much
wrong with him, aside from the fact that he doesn’t see very well. He takes no
drugs and has no complaints, although his hair long ago turned white and his
skin is no longer taut.
His
secret? He doesn’t have one. Hammond never took exceptional measures during his
long life to preserve his health. He did not exercise regularly until his fifties
and didn’t get serious about it until his eighties, when he began training for
the Georgia Golden Olympics. “I love nothing better than winning,” he says.
“It’s been a wonderful thing for me.” Hammond is aging, certainly, but somehow
he isn’t getting old—at least, not in the way we usually think about it.
They say aging is one of the only certain
things in life. But it turns out they were wrong. In recent years,
gerontologists have overturned much of the conventional wisdom about getting
old. Aging is not the simple result of the passage of time. According to a
provocative new view, it is actually something our own bodies create, a side
effect of the essential inflammatory system that protects us against infectious
disease. As we fight off invaders, we inflict massive collateral damage on
ourselves, poisoning our own organs and breaking down our own tissues. We are
our own worst enemy.
This paradox is transforming the way we
understand aging. It is also changing our understanding of what diseases are
and where they come from. Inflammation seems to underlie not just senescence
but all the chronic illnesses that often come along with it: diabetes,
atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, heart attack. “Inflammatory factors predict
virtually all bad outcomes in humans,” says Russell Tracy, a professor of
pathology and biochemistry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine,
whose pioneering research helped demonstrate the role
of inflammation in heart disease. “It predicts having heart attacks, having
heart failure, becoming diabetic; predicts becoming fragile in old age;
predicts cognitive function decline, even cancer to a certain extent.”
The idea that chronic diseases might be caused
by persistent inflammation has been kicking around since the 19th century. Only
in the past few years, though, have modern biochemistry and the emerging field
of systems biology made it possible to grasp the convoluted chemical
interactions involved in bodywide responses like inflammation. Over a lifetime,
this essential set of defensive mechanisms runs out of bounds and gradually damages
organs throughout the body.
When you start to think about aging as a
consequence of inflammation, as Tracy and many prominent gerontologists now do,
you start to see old age in a different, much more hopeful light. If
decrepitude is driven by an overactive immune system, then it is treatable. And
if many chronic diseases share this underlying cause, they might all be
remedied in a similar way. The right anti-inflammatory drug could be a panacea,
treating diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and even cancer. Such a wonder drug
might allow us to live longer, but more to the point, it would almost surely
allow us to live better, increasing the odds that we could all spend our old
age feeling like Jim Hammond: healthy, vibrant, and vital. And unlike science
fiction visions of an immortality pill, a successful anti-inflammatory
treatment could actually happen within our lifetime.
For the last century and a half, the average
life span in wealthy countries has increased steadily, climbing from about 45
to more than 80 years. There is no good reason to think this increase will
suddenly stop. But longer life today often simply means taking longer to
die—slowly, expensively, and with more disease and disability. “If you talk to
many old people, what they are really desperate about is not the fact that
they’re going to die but that they are going to be sick, dependent, have to
rely on others,” says Luigi Ferrucci, chief of the longitudinal studies section
at the National Institute on Aging and director of the Baltimore Longitudinal
Study of Aging, the nation’s longest-running study of old age.
Biologists have known for a while that
inflammation increases with age, but until recently, given everything else that
slumps, spikes, or goes off the rails as we get old, it didn’t seem especially
important. Some researchers on aging still think that way.
But a big clue linking inflammation with aging
came in the late 1990s, when Tracy and his colleagues showed that C-reactive
protein (CRP), an inflammatory protein, is an amazingly accurate predictor of a future heart attack—as
good as or better than high blood pressure or high cholesterol. At least in
heart disease, inflammation isn’t just a bystander. What’s more, we could do
something to decrease it. Aspirin, which was already known to help people with
heart disease, seems to work primarily by reducing inflammation.
So
why should our own immune system rely on such an apparently dangerous mechanism?
The answer lies in the fact that infectious disease has historically been the
number one killer of human beings, and responding to this threat has profoundly
shaped our biology. Possessing a fierce and ferocious immune response primed to
keep us alive long enough to reproduce was an evolutionary no-brainer.
.
PARADIGM LOST
As Drug
Industry Struggles,
Chemists Face Layoff Wave
Lipitor
Pioneer Is Out
At Doomed
Pfizer Lab;
A
Blockbuster Drought
By AVERY JOHNSON
December 11, 2007; Page A1
ANN
ARBOR, Michigan -- In January, Pfizer
Inc. announced it was closing its storied research laboratories here, laying
off 2,100 people. Among the casualties: Bob Sliskovic, a 23-year lab veteran
who helped create the world's most successful drug.
The
closure and Dr. Sliskovic's abrupt change of circumstances are emblematic of
the pharmaceutical industry's declining fortunes. It was at the Ann Arbor
facility in the late 1980s that Dr. Sliskovic first assembled the chemicals
that make up Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug that has generated about
$80 billion in sales since its launch and ranks as the bestselling
pharmaceutical product ever. Today, Lipitor is nearing the end of its patent
life, and Pfizer hasn't been able to come up with enough promising new drugs to
replace it.
Following
that initial breakthrough some 20 years ago, Dr. Sliskovic worked on several
other research projects, but none panned out. His losing streak mirrors the
industry's. A byproduct of the late-19th-century chemical business, pharmaceutical
research thrived for more than a century by finding chemical combinations to
treat diseases. But after contributing substantially both to human health and
drug-industry profits, it has failed to produce significant innovations in
recent years.
High
failure rates have long plagued chemistry-based drug research. Between 5,000
and 10,000 compounds are tested for every drug that makes it to market. In
recent years, the problem seems to have gotten worse. Despite spending tens of
billions of dollars more on research and development, pharmaceutical companies
have fewer and fewer drugs to show for it. In 2006, the industry received Food
and Drug Administration approval for just 18 new chemical-based drugs, down
from 53 in 1996. Moreover, many of those drugs are variations of existing
medicines.
Robert
Massie, president of the American Chemical Society's database of chemistry
research, says some researchers are questioning how many more chemical
combinations there are that are useful against diseases. "It's like how
coming out with metal drivers in golf was a huge innovation, but now it's
incremental. You're just coming out with drivers that are a little longer or
rounder," he says.
As
pills like Lipitor made out of elements from the periodic table prove harder to
come by, pharmaceutical research is being superseded by the newer field of
biotechnology. The latter relies mostly on biologists who make proteins from
live cells.
The
shift is exacting a human toll, as big drug companies like Pfizer lay off
thousands of chemists, casting a pall over what was once a secure, well-paying
profession. "When I started in this industry in the 1980s, you didn't
worry about things like this," Dr. Sliskovic says of the lab closure.
It
isn't clear how many chemists have lost pharmaceutical-company jobs. But
overall, 116,000 chemists were employed in 2006, down from 140,000 in 2003,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the same period, employment
of biologists rose to 116,000 from 112,000. Just as the rise of biotechnology
is contributing to an economic boom in Northern California, the decline of
chemical-based research is hurting the Michigan cities of Ann Arbor and
Kalamazoo, along with some regions of New Jersey and Illinois.
Dr.
Sliskovic, a 50-year-old with a mustache and the scattered air of a scientist,
was raised in Doncaster, a coal-mining town in northern England. His father, a
refugee from the former Yugoslavia, found work there after World War II. As a
child, Dr. Sliskovic says he was fascinated by such things as the properties
that "make a mint minty."
That
interest led him to pursue a doctorate in chemistry. In 1982, his Ph.D. adviser
told him of a friend who worked as a consultant for a pharmaceutical company in
New York. The company was looking for chemists to do postdoctoral research.
Raised with a passion for American comic books, Dr. Sliskovic says he jumped at
the opportunity to come to the U.S.
Two
years later, his research completed, he received a job offer from
Warner-Lambert Co.'s Ann Arbor labs. "Holy cow! I accept," he
remembers saying.
Dr.
Sliskovic was hired as the pharmaceutical business entered a golden era of huge
profits. Its labs churned out drugs for chronic conditions such as heart
disease and depression, while its armies of salesmen promoted them through
aggressive marketing. Warner-Lambert assigned him to a team of three other
chemists investigating a new idea: whether lowering cholesterol -- the soft,
waxy substance that can clog arteries -- would help people avoid heart attacks.
Other companies were at work on similar projects.
Dr.
Sliskovic's new boss, Bruce Roth, had invented a chemical structure that he
thought would work. In the late 1980s, Dr. Sliskovic fine-tuned the compound,
isolating its potent part. An early version of the compound wasn't absorbed
well by the body, so the team brainstormed about how to modify it to get more
of it into the bloodstream. "We sat around the table and said 'You try
this, you try that,' and they said, 'Bob, why don't you look at salt formation?'"
Dr. Sliskovic recalls.
A
calcium salt he tried solved the problem, and Lipitor was born. Though it would
reach the market in 1997 after several rival drugs, Lipitor would turn into a
blockbuster because it was more potent.
Its
runaway success sparked Pfizer's $116 billion hostile takeover of
Warner-Lambert in 2000. Ahead of the takeover, Pfizer suggested one of Warner's
main appeals was its research-and-development force. "We would like to
keep them all," Pfizer's then-research chief, John Niblack, told The Wall
Street Journal in 1999. "You need a big staff to run this strategy.
Warner-Lambert offers us a nice instant fix."
With
the acquisition, New York-based Pfizer inherited the Ann Arbor labs where Dr.
Sliskovic worked and continued to base much of its pharmaceutical research
there. Between 2001 and 2006, it invested $300 million to expand the
facilities.
By
that time, Dr. Sliskovic had moved on to other projects. As Lipitor traveled
down the long road of animal and human testing in the early '90s, he led a group
of chemists developing drugs to prevent cholesterol from being absorbed by the
body and stored in arteries. Lipitor, by contrast, works by reducing the amount
of cholesterol the liver produces.
One
compound, called avasimibe, seemed to work well in animals. Despite skepticism
from higher-ups, Dr. Sliskovic and his team persuaded Warner-Lambert to take it
into human testing. For a while, it looked as though avasimibe could be a
contender to succeed Lipitor. But it failed in an intermediate stage of clinical
testing, and the company abandoned it.
Dr.
Sliskovic had devoted about six years to the drug. He recalls needing pep talks
from his boss about picking up and starting over. He blocked out
disappointment, he says, by throwing himself into the day's science rather than
thinking about the odds of creating a marketable drug. "You've got to
develop the hide of a rhino," he says.
In
the mid-90s, he tried to develop compounds to counter inflammation in the
heart, which some scientists think can cause heart attacks. Those projects also
flopped but got him interested in another area of research, inflammatory
arthritis.
Dr.
Sliskovic took on the challenge of finding a drug that would repair the
cartilage that can break down between bones and cause arthritic pain. But the
several compounds he concocted didn't meet testing requirements. In 1999, Dr.
Sliskovic was promoted to a management role that took him away from the
day-to-day work of drug discovery. He says his new job required him to teach
his scientists how to remain excited in the wake of failure. "It was me
who started telling them, 'Oh well, never mind. What can we do about this other
project?'" he says.
But
over time those failures added up. In December 2006, Pfizer killed torcetrapib,
the cholesterol compound the company had placed its hopes on, because it was
associated with too many deaths in clinical testing. It was a huge setback
because Pfizer didn't have much else in its research pipeline to replace
Lipitor's sales. The company relies on Lipitor for more than a quarter of its
revenues, and the drug could face generic competition as early as 2010.
The
company has had some successes: Pfizer appears to have a rich cancer-drug
pipeline and has come up with two notable new chemical-based hits recently, the
antismoking medicine Chantix and a pain drug, Lyrica, which was discovered in
Ann Arbor. The company's new chief executive, Jeffrey Kindler, has emphasized
biotech after taking over some 16 months ago. In October, Pfizer opened a new
biologics center in San Francisco.
By
January 2007, Mr. Kindler was promising to do something radical to shake the
world's biggest drug maker out of its worsening slump. Rumors of layoffs were
swirling at Pfizer. Few imagined anything as drastic as closing the
half-century-old Ann Arbor labs, where Pfizer was just finishing the $300
million expansion.
Dr.
Sliskovic says he learned of the closure on Jan. 22, in a morning meeting with
the site's top managers. The room went silent, he says.
After
the meeting, Dr. Sliskovic called his wife on her cellphone to tell her the
news. She thought he was kidding. Realizing he was serious, she offered to
increase her hours at her part-time job at a pet-food store. Later, at home
over lunch, his 19-year-old daughter asked whether they would have to sell the
family's three horses.
The
announcement also took Michigan officials by surprise. The state, which has the
country's worst unemployment rate, was already reeling from auto-industry cuts.
Pfizer was also Ann Arbor's largest taxpayer, contributing $14 million a year
into city coffers. At a press conference later in the day, local officials
pledged to fight for scientists to stay in the area. Later, they pledged $8
million in interest-free loans for start-ups run by laid-off scientists or existing
companies that hire them. A state-budget deadlock delayed the money for months,
but it is now being handed out to scientists.
Pfizer
offered about half of the Ann Arbor researchers internal transfers, mostly to
its other big research facility, in Groton, Conn. But a higher proportion of
those offers went to biologists than to chemists, former lab employees say.
Though it is far from abandoning chemistry-based research, Pfizer has been
increasingly outsourcing chemistry work to contract research organizations,
some in India. Pfizer declined to comment on which scientists were offered
transfers.
In
April, about 80 laid-off Pfizer chemists from Ann Arbor traveled to nearby
Detroit to hear a talk by career consultant Lisa Balbes. Ms. Balbes told them
the story of a former chemist who now uses her skills to enhance acoustics in
stereo systems. Her message: Start thinking about different career paths.
As
winter turned into spring, Dr. Sliskovic found himself going to a parade of
goodbye parties for colleagues. Dr. Roth, his former boss, left in April for
Genentech Inc., the biotech pioneer based in South San Francisco. Dr. Sliskovic
organized the send-off. In early May, David Canter, the head of the Ann Arbor
site, threw a dinner party for other departing employees. A band played songs
parodying Pfizer and the executive who symbolized headquarters'
decision-making: John LaMattina, Pfizer's Connecticut-based head of research.
To the tune from Evita, they sang, "Don't Cry for Me, LaMattina."
A
few weeks later, Dr. LaMattina himself announced his retirement, as part of Mr.
Kindler's broad reorganization of top company executives.Martin Mackay, who
succeeded Dr. LaMattina as research chief and played a major role in the
research restructuring, says the company was "very aware" of its
impact on the community. "We made this decision after very careful and
thorough review of all possible alternatives," Mr. Mackay said in a
statement.
Scott
Larsen, one of the chemists who attended the going-away party, came to Pfizer
four years ago when the company merged with his former employer, Pharmacia
Corp. He applied for a transfer to Groton but didn't get an offer. He tells his
two sons, who are both in college and love science, not to go work for a drug
company.
In
August, Dr. Sliskovic's team stopped doing research and began transferring
projects to other Pfizer sites. The labs are now being cleaned, inspected and
sealed off. The 177-acre campus is a ghost town of empty rooms and boxed-up
equipment.
Dr.
Sliskovic didn't seek an internal transfer. He felt that moving would be too
hard on his family.
As
acting head of chemistry at the Ann Arbor labs, Dr. Sliskovic earned far above
the $112,000 a year paid to the average chemist of his experience level. Dr.
Sliskovic says he will receive severance pay for between 18 months and two
years. With two children in college and another in high school, he says, two
years is the longest he could afford to forgo a paycheck.
Dr.
Sliskovic has already repainted the family kitchen and living room. Now he is
festooning the house and yard with holiday lights. Worried about their
financial future, his wife, Cindy, took a second part-time job at the barn
where they keep their horses. The irony that the drug her husband helped
discover will bring in nearly $13 billion for Pfizer this year hasn't been lost
on her. As a staff scientist, Dr. Sliskovic earned no bonus or royalties for
his work on Lipitor.
Former
Pfizer scientists have founded 23 companies in the area. Dr. Sliskovic says he
would prefer to do the creative work of discovering drugs instead of the rote
chemistry some such companies do for drug makers.
Instead,
he dreams of being involved in another blockbuster. Sometimes, he says, he lies
in bed at night wondering if it will happen. "If the best thing I did was
Lipitor in 1988, it's like being the high-school athlete who was on the
football team and that was that," he says.
22222222222222
Louis J
Sheehan Major Jackson
attended
these gatherings with unfailing regularity, but soon after
his
arrival he drew the line at dancing, and musical parties became
the
limit of his dissipation. He was anything but a convivial
companion.
He never smoked, he was a strict teetotaller, and he never
touched a
card. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
His
diet, for reasons of health, was of a most
sparing
kind; nothing could tempt him to partake of food between his
regular
hours, and for many years he abstained from both tea and
coffee.
In those peaceful times, moreover, there was nothing either
commanding
or captivating about the Professor of Artillery. His
little
romance in Mexico had given him no taste for trivial
pleasures;
and his somewhat formal manner was not redeemed by any
special
charm of feature.
It took
some time for his subordinates to develop a deep and abiding respect for
General Jackson, but after he lead them to numerous victories against superior
forces the bond was established that lasted until his untimely death. One of
the great contradictions in Jackson's life was his steadfast Christian beliefs
contrasted with his unrelenting will to destroy the enemy on the battlefield.
For example, http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
Tate
mentions an exchange between Jackson and his chief surgeon when the surgeon
inquired, "How shall we ever cope with the overwhelming numbers of the
enemy?" http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
After a
long pause Jackson replied, "Kill them, sir! Kill every man." It was
that strength of will that helped make Jackson the hero that he was and is.
Stonewall
Jackson usually thought only in terms of attack. This attitude was exemplified
on December 14, 1862, at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Vastly outnumbered by the
Federals, Jackson was asked by a staff member, ⌠How shall we ever cope with the
overwhelming numbers of the enemy ?■ Jackson▓s reply was to the point, ⌠Kill
them, sir, kill every man!■
General
Jackson.."Kill them, kill them all, sir!"
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
888888
December 9, 2007
Your Child’s Disorder May Be
Yours, Too
BY age 2 it was clear that the boy had a
sensibility all his own, affectionate and distant at the same time, often more
focused on patterns and objects than the people around him.
He was neither naturally social like his mother,
nor an early and gifted reader like his father. Quirky, curious, exuberant, he
would leap up and dance across the floor after solving a problem or winning a
game, duck walking like an N.F.L. receiver posing for a highlight film.
Yet after Phil and Susan Schwarz received a
diagnosis for their son, Jeremy, of high functioning autism, they began to think carefully about
their own behaviors and histories.
Mr. Schwarz, a software developer in Framingham,
Mass., found in his son’s diagnosis a new language to understand his own life.
His sensitivities when growing up to loud noises and bright light, his own
diffidence through school, his parents’ and grandparents’ special intellectual
skills — all echoed through his and Jeremy’s behavior, like some ancient rhythm.
His son’s diagnosis, Mr. Schwarz said, “provided a
frame in which a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated aspects of my own life
growing up fit together for the first time.”
Researchers have long known that many psychiatric
disorders and developmental problems run in families. Children born to parents
with bipolar disorder, in which moods cycle between
euphoria and depression, run about eight times the normal
risk for developing a mood problem. Those born to parents with depression run
three times the usual risk. Attention and developmental disorders like autism
also have a genetic component.
AS more youngsters than ever receive diagnoses of
disorders — the number has tripled since the early 1990s, to more than six
million — many parents have come to recognize that their own behavior is symptomatic
of those disorders, sometimes in a major, but more commonly, in a minor way. In
effect, the diagnosis may spread from the child to other family members,
forcing each to confront family frustrations and idiosyncrasies that they might
prefer to have left unacknowledged.
“It happens very frequently, with all sorts of
disorders, from attention-deficit difficulties to mood problems like bipolar
disorder,” said Dr. Gregory Fritz, a child psychiatrist and academic director
of Bradley Hospital in Providence, R.I., the largest child-psychiatry hospital in the country. “Sometimes
it’s a real surprise, because the child is the first one in the family ever to
get a thorough evaluation and history. The parents are there, and they begin to
see the pattern.”
But diagnosing an adult through his or her child
has its risks, psychiatrists say. In an act of solidarity,
parents may exaggerate similarities between their thinking and behavior and
their son’s or daughter’s. Families desperate to find a diagnosis for a
troubled child are also prone to adopt a vague label — bipolar disorder, say,
which is not well understood in young children — and attribute all variety of
difficulties to it, when the real source may be elsewhere.
But psychological experts say traces of a disorder
in the family tree are very often real, and the stickier issue is what to do
once they surface.
Depending on the family, for instance, one parent
may not want to shoulder the responsibility for having “passed on” the behavior
problem, they say. “The adult may have spent a lifetime compensating for the
problem, as well, and is still struggling with it and would rather not be
identified that way,” said Dania Jekel, executive director of the Asperger’s Association
of New England.
Openness can nonetheless have its benefits, say
parents who have chosen to accept their contribution to a child’s diagnosis.
Self-examination, for instance, may lead to an appropriate diagnosis for the
adult.
Norine Eaton, 51, of Williamsville, N.Y., reared
two boys who were diagnosed with attention deficit disorders. “The younger one
was literally climbing out second-floor windows, climbing bookcases, onto
counters,” she said. “Nothing was safe in the house. It was insanity.”
After the boy and his brother each received a
diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, Ms. Eaton sought treatment at the
Center for Children and Families at the State University at Buffalo, where she
now works. She soon began thinking about her own behavior, past and present.
She had long had difficulty focusing on even simple jobs, like paying bills on
time and remembering and keeping appointments.
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