Chancellor Mark Wrighton speaks at the State of the University in April. (Matt Mitgang | Student Life)

Student Life conducted an interview with Chancellor Mark Wrighton after the most recent quarterly meeting of the board of directors on Friday. The discussion involved a review of major events that occurred during the semester. Wrighton commented on the growth of the endowment this quarter, upcoming budget cuts, the debate surrounding clean coal, recent ethical controversies, the University’s position on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the racial discrimination incident at Original Mothers bar in Chicago, and his favorite Michael Jackson song.

Mark Wrighton: Let me just quickly summarize the meeting, and then you can ask me some questions. I’ve made a big mistake in the meeting; I didn’t look at my Blackberry, like I often do in meetings, to find out that at half-time we were winning one to nothing, but on the way here, I just found out that we were tied five minutes ago. So, we’re hoping that we break that tie before the end of regulation play so that we are in the national championship. But I did note to the Board that we were playing at the time that I was giving my remarks, when we were just starting.

But I summarized a number of activities on campus, and initiatives and such, but the Board, at the December meeting, which is the second meeting of the academic year, elected a trustee that is Ethan A.H. Shepley Trustee, and that person is Andrea Grant, a double alumnae of the university from Arts and Sciences and from Law, and her Board service begins now. The first meeting would be in March—the first regular meeting.
And there are a number of things here, but that was one of the key action items. Another key action item related to candidates was appointment or promotion to tenured faculty positions. We had some candidates for those posts, and we also introduced a resolution on the setting of tuition, which is a process that concludes next month with meeting of the executive committee in terms of decision, and then a letter goes to the students and their families later in January.

The big agenda item for the Board in terms of substance for discussion really are plans to deal with the fiscal challenges for next year. At a committee meeting yesterday—the Board committee that is responsible for this—voted to reduce endowment spending by 4%, so university-wide, that is about $10 million reduced in revenue, and that is a complication that we knew about, even though the endowment has recovered quite significantly since July 1. We still feel it would be prudent to reduce spending by 4% next year; that is on top of 4% for the year we’re in. So we spent a fair amount of time—about a little over half an hour, I believe—talking with the Board about the financial planning next year.

Student Life: Since the endowment is down, is it still shrinking?

MW: Well, since July 1st through the end of November, we estimate that the endowment has increased by 13+ percent. We will spend, roughly speaking, 5%. So if we spent the 5% and ended up with the 13% gain, the endowment growth would be 8%. After the first quarter it was up 10%, so if you multiply that by four, we’d be up by 40% then—I’d be happy, but then it is a long year. And with all the certainty in the economy it would be premature to even count on a 13% total return on the investments. We obviously hope for that.

SL: Are there layoffs ahead?

MW: We’re going to be announcing, more broadly, the results of all our financial planning in the month of January, most likely. We have made all the firm decisions about where reductions will occur, but right now, we’re looking at, in just say the central administration, something like $7 million of reductions, and that’s a pretty significant number. But we’ve been working with people; we have some open positions that will not be filled. We’ll obviously try to minimize the consequences. We think that the administration does something, and if you cut, you’ll do less. And what we are trying to do is to, on the one hand, make the reductions we need to be fiscally responsible and also to prepare ourselves for years ahead that we think are not going to be robust in terms of large rates of growth of revenue. It is a different world. If it happens, as I said to the Board, we’ve got these great plans, and if new resources come along to support them, we’ll do new things, and we are doing new things as resources become available. Our scholarship initiative, for example, is an effort that can build resources.

SL: On another note, the University announced over the summer that it is closing the Center for the Study of Ethics and Human values at the end of the year. Meanwhile, University faculty members Jeff Smith and Timothy Kuklo drew national attention this semester for unethical actions; Smith for lying about his role in producing illegal campaign literature, Kuklo for falsifying data in a medical study. How do these events reflect on the state of ethics at Washington University?

MW: We have to reflect that we’re an institution populated by people, with all that that implies. All people exhibit shortfalls. It is regrettable people in positions of prominence and in positions of responsibility exhibit such short falls. You imply a relationship between the closing of the Center for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and fact that we had these shortfalls. I believe that it is the case that the transgressions of these individuals would not have been materially affected by whether or not we had a center in the first place, or whether we closed it, or added 20 million dollars to its budget. I think we have, in fact, a very strong community. We have a very strong culture of what I call—what we call—compliance, that is, an environment where people are informed about the policies of the university, and we have systems in place to review whether we are in compliance. I think, overall, we’re very strong in those regards.

Unfortunately, the constraints we face physically are going to affect all parts of the university. I said we’re reducing expenditure in the central administration, what we called the Central Fiscal Unit. The schools of the Danforth campus will also be experiencing, if not outright reductions, they will be slowing their development of new initiatives, slowing or lowering the number of faculty hired, so everybody will be operating with more financial constraints.

Unlike Student Life, my administration’s paper goes out of print after the December 10th issue. I’m told that will save 87 thousand dollars. I’m also told that there are individuals that are upset that they won’t have a printed Record, but we believe that it is the right decision in the long-term. The transition will be hard. I know people who don’t have computers—it might be hard for you to believe—but people who are fairly sophisticated, and when they do, they don’t read newspaper on them. We’re going to be doing a number of things that, you know, are not necessarily the most desirable things for us to be doing. But I don’t think the closing of the Center for Ethics and Human Values is the major contributor to a culture that I believe is quite robust with high integrity and a commitment to this community’s values and policies.

SL: What effect do these controversies around ethics have on students? On the University as a whole?

MW: I think the institution has broad shoulders—it’s a saying. Obviously, it’s not a positive on our reputation, but these are transgressions of individuals. I think for our part it’s disappointing, sad in a way—disappointing certainly, and for people who know the positive qualities of people who have made mistakes, it’s difficult. So nobody enjoys seeing a person who is found to have made these mistakes and I think for students, many of whom perhaps would have today aspirations not unlike Jeff Smith—people may have looked to him as a role model. We see oftentimes people who are our role models not quite living up to our expectations or the expectations that have somehow surrounded them and those shortcomings have unfortunately been, you know, have involved high profile individuals at the highest levels of the United States government, in the clergy, here in the academia, and certainly in the business world. So it’s something that I think we need to take seriously and we need to encourage a culture of integrity, and I think that we do. And a lot of our academic programs have these components as a part of the curriculum.

SL: One of the really significant events for students this semester was the incident of alleged racial discrimination at Original Mother’s Bar in Chicago. In response to this, you sent a letter to Chicago’s Mayor Daley, and you wrote that the experience of our students reveals “we have much work to do to achieve true racial equality in this country.” Have you heard back from Mayor Daley?

MW: No, I have not. I would have expected at least a courtesy response, something to the effect of: “I have received your letter; we will review what you have written”. You know, something that probably would have come pretty quickly and something in that vein, with no promises, but basically, an acknowledgement of the letter. I do have to say, I am extremely proud of our students, who conducted themselves in a way that makes me very proud to be a part of Washington University. And for the University, I think it frankly led to some very positive attention, and people have come to me about it. It’s been great to see our students conduct themselves so effectively at a time when it could have been emotional. I wasn’t there myself, but I know we had a large number of students there and I thought they responded extraordinarily well. And in the aftermath I think they conducted themselves well, and as I understand it, the outcome in connection with those responsible for that bar have made some commitments that I think will contribute to making their business better.

SL: And what is the University doing to achieve racial equality both here and more broadly in the community and the country?

MW: I think one of the most important things that an academic institution can do is to work hard to have a very inclusive environment as a community, which welcomes people and provides great opportunities. One of your headlines today is socioeconomic diversity. I haven’t read the article, but I saw it, as featured on my Blackberry. I think in an academic institution, and especially even though we are constrained, we should know that we are a wealthy institution. We have $5 billion in the bank, and that’s a lot of money. So we can afford to be proactive in recruiting people from all backgrounds. It’s not just counting noses. It’s really bringing to all members of the community the benefits of diversity. Washington University Students are destined to be leaders. That’s your potential. You’ll be leaders of organizations which are diverse, and it’s important to build a good understanding of all the people you’re going to be working with. I think here I’ve interacted with students who have told me, for example, a Midwestern young woman said to me ‘I came to Washington University and I’d never met anyone who’s Jewish.’ Well, they’d probably never been to New York, which has a very large Jewish population. But also the way we assign housing, you know people living together. We had a presentation at the Board meeting today on the McDonnell International Scholars academy. One of the committees, the committee on educational policy, and Professor Jim Werch, who is the director of the academy, he said ‘We’re building a network of people who get to know each other while they are here, and to understand the different cultures that they themselves represent.’ And you may know that there is tension at times between Japan and Korea. In the McDonnell academy we have partners in Japan, we have partners in Korea, and we have scholars from both countries, and we have a Japanese scholar who has a roommate from Korea. And I think that helps build better relationships and inasmuch as we say, and we hope, they emerge as global leaders, they can help over time address differences that have in the past, at least, created big conflict. And we know in America that racism exists, as evidenced by what went on in Chicago, and I think by having students here interacting with each other from many different backgrounds, that will be a positive in their education. So I think there are a lot of ways that we can help out. And I’ve pointed out to the Board that we’re not, for example, in this time of constraint diminishing our commitment, resolve, resources in our effort to strengthen diversity. That remains a very high priority.

SL:  Many students have criticized the administration’s position on clean coal, especially as relates to its appointment of two new Board members from prominent coal energy corporations and its hosting of an energy conference in support of clean coal. How do you respond to students critical of the University’s stance on clean coal?

MW: Well, first of all, the administration doesn’t appoint the Board of trustees. As was the case today, the Board elects its own members. So as Chancellor, I’m not a voting member of the Board. It is true that I can suggest people to be considered, and the process is one that involves a committee of the Board, the Nominating and Governance committee of the Board, receiving suggestions from people in the administration or other Board members, and there’s a fairly long list of people. The Board looks to recruit new members who will bring the three things we expect of Board group members: Work, wisdom, and wealth. At least two of the three. It’s kind of a funny saying, it’s from Vartan Gregorian, who was at the time he said it I think the president of Brown University. Board members of Washington University come from all parts of America. We look for people who are from major population centers. We look for Board members who are in positions of responsibility where they would have the experience that doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but experience that perhaps suggests that they would have that. Greg Boyce, who is the executive office of Peabody Energy, is by background an engineer and the chief executive officer of the world’s largest privately held coal company. Steve Leer—Greg Boyce is not an alumnus of the University—Steve Leer is a business alumnus of the university, and the CEO of another very large coal company, companies which happen to be headquartered in St. Louis, and companies that are going to be arguably extremely important to the future of the United States. They are major employers, they have major technical challenges, and therefore, they would appear to be in positions to give us guidance on how to address those technical challenges. They are, their companies, are our partners.

So let’s talk about the conference. I don’t rule on who’s a member of the Board. I can’t even overrule. They’re all my bosses. But it isn’t like a corporate board. A not-for-profit board has the interests of the institution. They are the owners of the institution while they’re board members, and they have the responsibility- they have two very important responsibilities. One is to oversee the assets of the university. We talked a little bit about the endowment. That’s a big responsibility of the Board. That’s their responsibility. I don’t tell them how to invest the endowment, the way it works is they say, as they did yesterday, ‘Here’s how much money we’re going to authorize to be given to the administration.’ And what I’m supposed to do is to use the money as wisely as possible. Oversight of the physical assets and the financial assets, that’s a Board responsibility.

The other responsibility is the review the performance of the Chancellor and to select the Chancellor if there’s a need to make a transition. So every year they review my performance, and could say, you know, ‘July 1, you’re done.’ I stand for election every year. And then, in large measure, they abdicate the administration to me, and I recommend to them University officers, and the deans. The University officers are the people who have the title Vice Chancellor, Treasurer, and Secretary to the Board. All of us, Chancellor and all those officers, stand for reelection every year.

But in terms of the actual operations of the University, for first order they say ‘OK, you’re the CEO, you’ve got your officers and your deans, you run the show and we’ll keep an eye on you.’ So some would imply, for example, that two Board members could say, ‘You know, you guys, you have to advocate for coal.’ Virtually never, I would say never, I’ve been here 15 years, no board member has ever said to me, ‘You know, you ought to have this policy.’ We propose policy to them, and they approve or not. And we have no policy on energy. I will state that categorically.

Let me say that again: we have no policy as an institution on whether coal is good or solar is good. The symposium that we convened stems from my involvement as vice-chairman of a national research council committee on America’s energy future. The committee, not Mark Wrighton but the committee, came up with a collection of findings, and if you haven’t read the report you can check this out, but at this meeting I gave a quick overview of the findings. And I emphasized two things, which, now this is Mark Wrighton’s opinion, not the University’s policy. The committee found that there’s a great opportunity in improving energy efficiency. We can reduce the consumption of energy, and especially electrical energy, by deploying known technology. You don’t have to do research, just implement this technology. And yet it costs money. But we say, and this is a University operational activity, wherever we can, we’re making capital investments to reduce the amount of energy we consume. If you’re familiar, we’ve renovated Busch hall here on the quadrangle. We redid the building so that, at least by our reckoning, we should get LEED certification at the silver level. And we deployed capital to reduce energy and we think it’s good because we’re going to save money. That is, our operating expenses on an ongoing basis will be lower. Let’s say for the sake of argument we spent a million dollars to improve the energy efficiency. We believe that in four years, we’ll be saving $250,000 a year in operations. Now that’s 10 average scholarship awards. And it isn’t over in 4 years, that’s going on into the future and we believe – no proof – energy prices will go up. I happen to believe that prices will go up over the long term. So that’s one thing I said.

The second thing I said at the symposium—I said a lot of things. But I emphasized the other big finding and again, my own opinion. The big finding is that coal is a very large resource the United States and many parts of the world. And our committee observed that carbon dioxide is a problem that we have to address. And if coal is to be a part of the future—today it’s 50% of US electricity, 85% of Missouri’s electricity—but if this is to continue to be a part of the future, and you’re worried about CO2, as many people are, than you have to be able to demonstrate at utility plant scale that there’s a technology that you can afford to capture and store carbon dioxide.

So I advocated for that demonstration project. I didn’t tell you I think coal is what we should be using. I believe in fact it was a mistake, if you listen to other things I say, it was a mistake for Missouri to not do something proactive that would have encouraged Ameren to build another nuclear power plant here. By basically making it difficult for Ameren to build the nuclear power plant, we have no option other than the combustion of coal, so we have to learn to work with it in a way that will not add to the detrimental consequences from CO2, and that’s to develop technology to deal with it. I’m a scientist. I’ve actually done a fair amount of work in energy conversion—fuel cells, solar energy conversion, catalysis—so I’m familiar with the language at least, I haven’t done anything important in at least 15 years in the actual science. But my own favorite, frankly, is solar and I said this at the meeting. There’s a huge super abundance of solar energy, we just have to capture it and that’s a fundamental research activity that I think we should be involved in. And we are. The largest grant ever to the Danforth campus came from the Dept. of Energy in April for work on photosynthesis. It’s a little more—they’ve decorated it more in their title, but it’s photosynthesis work that would give fundamental understanding that could help you use plants as models or actually use plants to generate fuel and that’s renewable. So I’m for it. But coal is with us today and our committee observes that renewables are likely in the next 10 years, which is a part of our charge, what’s going to happen in a decade, that renewables, much as we would like them perhaps to be a bigger part, they’re not going to be a big part of the energy picture for the United States in fractional terms. But wouldn’t you like to have the company that generates 1% of US electricity? You’d be affluent and influential. You could be a member of the board of trustees. But we know that it’s very hard to get to a new energy technology that delivers a significant fraction of US electricity. Moreover, we know as a matter of fact, it’s not what we wish or want necessarily but we know as a matter of fact that the developing world, especially China and India, are today deploying old technology, at best current technology, that uses much more coal tomorrow than they’re using today. And it’s almost literally tomorrow. Missouri has a population of roughly 5 million people. China has a population of over a billion. And there are many parts of China that don’t have access to the amount of energy that we do, and yet they’re growing rapidly. China became the largest producer of automobiles in the world last year, over a million automobiles per month. No exports. All domestic. So China, with 80% of their electrical energy from coal, with a prediction that it will still be 80% 10 years from now. Don’t we have a moral responsibility, not only to the United States but to the rest of the world, to work to develop technologies that will work to mitigate the consequences of the combustion from all that coal? That’s why we’re working on clean coal. I mean our, it isn’t something that I’m sitting in my office and I’m saying ‘Hm, we’ve got these big companies, let’s advocate for coal.’ We’re using coal. The rest of the world is going to use coal. There’s a lot of it and our faculty—not Mark Wrighton, I didn’t do coal research, I did solar energy—but our faculty said ‘We have some ideas that we’d like to pursue, do you think Arch Coal and Peabody Energy and Ameren would be willing to fund our research?’ Well those companies, obviously, they have a vested interest in clean coal and they’re investing. And the biggest investments are not in fact with us. Peabody Energy, for example, is investing in China more money than they’re investing with us…

We’re going to be announcing some ambitions in terms of the university operations that relate to the consumption of energy, but overall, we don’t have a position on what’s the best technology. And going back to our committee, I was the messenger at this meeting, not the policymaker, not speaking about whatever we’re going to do, but the committee—properly, in my view; since I’m vice chair I had my say in that—said ‘You know, we’re going to have a whole bunch of energy technologies, and all that are sensible will be used. Wind, geothermals, solar, photovoltaic, hot water from sunlight—everything is going to be used that makes sense.’ And it’s two words: makes sense. We might be able to take carbon dioxide from coal fired power plants and store it, but if it costs more than some number, it’s a losing proposition and it would make coal more expensive than, say, photovoltaics with storage, you know, with electrical storage, like batteries. You have to do what’s technologically feasible and economically viable.

And one other thing about the symposium, because I think you’d written that we didn’t have anything but coal on the agenda. We had a prominent presentation by—two presentations by outstanding women. Maxine Sabbots gave the keynote talk on energy efficiency, and we had Martha Schlicker of Monsanto, who is Vice President for Biofuels, a renewal energy, and we had an Ameren utility representative. Utilities are basically the people who convert one form of energy into electricity. They don’t have a dog in the hunt either, so to speak. They’d be happy for photovoltaics, and they’re under some mandate to do more in that arena. And we had a policy leader from the Brookings Institution. We had two people from coal, but two of the largest coal companies in the world are here, and we’re their partner.

SL: Students have decried a lack of student input in administrative decisions over the last year. In particular, students have criticized the university’s implementation of a smoking ban without student input and its investment of the endowment in a non-transparent manner. What is students’ role in administrative decision-making?

MW: Well, the board has the responsibility for the endowment. So it’s not a lack of transparency, I don’t actually know what the students would like to know more about. And yet, it’s a board responsibility. We have no secrets. We’re not secretly investing in Cuban companies that make cigars and sell them, while we’re introducing a smoking ban. There’s no—the board has formed an internal company called the Washington University Investment Management Company. The chairman of the board is the former chairman and chief executive officer of the country’s largest pension fund, TIAA-CREF, that’s John Biggs, and we hired to be the Chief Investment Officer a woman by the name of Kim Walker, and there’s a small board on this investment management company, and they oversee the investment of the endowment. They take their cues in part from what’s called the Asset Management Committee, which is another Board of Trustees committee, that sets the spending rule.

Do you have a savings account somewhere? If I said to you, ‘You can spend 10% per year,’ do you think you could keep your savings at that level by making wise investments? I bet you can’t. That’s what the experts say. I’m not an expert, but that’s what the experts say. You can’t spend 10% of your endowment and be safe, and have some high probability that you’ll still have your savings account. There are risky investments that promise you high returns. If you want high returns, you have high risk. And we try to—here’s our goal: Whatever spending from the endowment, we have the goal that the buying power grows a little bit with time. So that means whatever we take out every year, we’d like to be able to increase it at least by inflation plus a little bit. And that’s our goal. So what’s your guess about inflation? It’s maybe 3%. We’d also like to be spending about 5%. So that means 3% plus 5%, that’s 8% total return. And our historic return is 9%. But if you took out 10%, just to spend it, you’d soon run your endowment down or you’d be in such risky investments that in a time like we’ve experienced in the last 15 months, the endowment would be gone. So we have professionals who look at all that—there are no secrets. IN fact, it’s sort of like watching paint dry, you know, it’s not that interesting. We don’t actually—there’s no one—I have to be careful, because I’m not intimately involve din it, but I don’t think we have people who are getting the annual reports of publicly traded companies and saying, ‘I think we ought to invest in Monsanto,’ or Peabody energy, or any other company. The work is done with investment managers, and it’s key to listen to the strategy of these investment managers and then to hire them and then say, ‘We’ll give you $200 million dollars of our endowment, and we’re going to be watching you. How did you perform?’ And it’s financial. I don’t know how to be more transparent, but ask me any question.

What was the other thing—oh the smoking. Yeah. Completely an administration decision, and the right one. Completely black-and-white. Why should we form a committee when we know what the answer is? Washington University was a forefront institution in terms of relating smoking and lung cancer. That was years ago, and over time there’s been an extraordinarily compelling science case for eliminating the use of tobacco products, and I think it’s the right thing. Even secondhand smoke has been proven to be a challenge to public health. SO here we are, an institution at the forefront of medical science, and I think we shouldn’t permit smoking on our property. So I’ll take the spears on that one.

SL: Moving on, the University recently began a search for a new dean for the engineering school. First of all, when will we have a new dean?

MW: July 1st.

SL: And how will this dean be different from the last?

MW: Don’t know yet. We’ll see who it is. Ask me that question in the process. Provost Macias is responsible for conducting that process. It’s just been launched and we’re focusing our search on internal search, by that I mean a person from the academic community of Washington University. In a time like this, I think it would be a little harder to effect a transition from outside, and I think we really need a person that understands us.

SL: Are there specific qualities that you have in mind that would be different form what we had before?

MW: I think our expectation is what we look for for all our academic leaders, people who have themselves a demonstrated record of academic achievement. In this position, of course, we would want evidence of administrative experience and effectiveness overall, a person who can not be overly frustrated by a constrained economic environment, which we know we’re going to have. I’ve been, as I noted before, I’ve been here about 15 years, and we never had a year where we had no compensation increases materially, and where we had a downturn in the endowment. Al the years I’ve been here the endowment always went up until the year we’re in. And you know, that can be very, it is very disappointing, but you don’t want to let it cripple you. Our challenge continues to be the need to be the institution that seems to be and actually is on the move. And I think we can do that. I’m sure you noticed if you have friends at other institutions—they have big problems, bigger than ours.

SL: The student-led gay rights movement The Right Side of History has made LGBT civil rights a major political issue on campus this year. The leader of the movement, David Dresner, has asked University deans to send letters to students explaining why the University allows military recruiters on campus despite the military’s policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which conflicts with the University’s non-discrimination policy. This came one year after the university began an annual James Holobaugh LGBT awards ceremony, which honors the legacy of an ROTC military cadet who was discharged from the military after he came out as gay. What is the university’s position on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?

MW: I’ve been involved in this issue since I was provost at MIT, which actually has ROTC programs with the Navy, the Air Force and, I think, the Army. I may be wrong on that, but I’ve had a fair amount of experience. My father was in the US navy, career navy man, so I know something about how the military works. There is no evidence that sexual orientation has anything to do with performance, meaning that gays or lesbians are going to perform just as any other person. And the military understands that. I think the military is prepared to change their policy. Unfortunately, I think political leaders are frankly not as understanding of the reality here. And I think I would strongly like to see the United States change its policy. And there are a couple of ways to do that. The president of the United States could order it, in principle. And I think President Clinton was trying to find a path that didn’t create so much political problems that he couldn’t move forward. The Congress could vote and change that policy for the Defense Department, and the courts could, in principle, do something, according to my understanding. So I’m hopeful that the policy will be changed. I believe it should be. And there is a conflict between Washington University’s view and policy and my view, and that of the U.S. government. It’s a problem that we’ve been working on for quite some time. I think there’s growing understanding, and you hear that from military leaders or former military leaders, people who are, I believe, in a very good position to know, and I believe that over time the government will change its policy.

SL: Can we ask you a fun one on the way out?

MW: A fun one?

SL: What is your favorite Michael Jackson song?

MW: Name a few to remind me of them.

SL: Thriller, Billie Jean, Beat It, Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.

MW: I’d have to hear them. I didn’t listen that much to Michael Jackson. My wife accuses me of just having been in the laboratory too long.

Ten students comprised Washington University’s first-ever team to enter the premier undergraduate competition in synthetic biology, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM). They spent the summer working together to create a photosynthetic bacterium that would vary its productivity based on the amount of light available.

For their efforts, they came home from the annual iGEM conference, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the end of October, with a gold medal.

Synthetic biology is a blossoming field that takes advantage of the wealth of genetics and molecular biology expertise that scientists have amassed in the last few decades. The goals of synthetic biologists are to manipulate existing organisms to do new tricks or work more efficiently, or even create totally novel organisms.

“What I like most about it was the applicability…I’ve done research before, but it’s all been very basic science,” senior Stephanie Chang said.

The tools and methods used in synthetic biology are run-of-the-mill, but the implications are major. Synthetic biology may be used to produce biofuels and medicines, but in theory, it could also be used to make more potent biological weapons.

Current applications range from the efficient sunlight harvester the iGEM team is creating, to entirely new organisms, such as the synthetic bacterial genome designed by J. Craig Venter in 2006.

Senior Jacob Rubens, a biology major, initiated the project while he was doing research in the laboratory of biology professor Robert Blankenship.

“I really want to study this stuff in grad school, and I didn’t really have a name for my interests…until I discovered synthetic biology, so iGEM really presented me with the opportunity to really go farther with that and try my hand at bioengineering,” Rubens said.

Other team members are biology majors and biomedical and chemical engineering students. Blankenship advised the students, along with professors Yinjie Tang and Chris Kirmaier, as well as several graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

The team started out with the goal of doing something with bioenergy applications and a library of genetic parts at their disposal.

“We decided to work with an organism that is relatively simple, Rhodobacter sphaeroides. And that was a bit of a challenge for us because it has never been worked with before in synthetic biology or iGEM,” Rubens said.

Their project depended on the fact that many photosynthetic bacteria and algae put out light-harvesting antennae to collect sunlight more efficiently. These organisms have evolved to grow large antennae, but this is actually a problem for humans who want to use them to make biofuels: in low light, the antennae are longer than they need to be, so some cells absorb more light than they can turn into energy, resulting in lower efficiency overall.

Other researchers have tried to solve this problem by making cells with smaller antennae. But the iGEM team thought they could do better. They designed a set of genes that would allow bacteria to expand and retract their antennae according to how much light is available.

They are the first people ever to do so, according to Blankenship.

“The thing I thought was unique, and that was the brainchild of the iGEM team, was the fact that they were engineering in this dynamic response,” Blankenship said. “I don’t know of any scientists doing anything quite like that.”

To accomplish this, they relied on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a catalogue of gene sequences with known functions, or “biological Lego pieces,” that they could mix and match with standard techniques, Chang said. The parts they cobbled together constitute a genetic machine. Any cell expressing this DNA sequence would respond to high levels of light by building a larger light-harvesting antenna.

Their project is still underway, and they are hoping to publish a paper with their results in the future.

The bacterium they chose is not used in commercial biofuel research and development, but they took advantage of its simplicity to show that their idea works. In the future, people could adapt their genetic construct to work in other species.

Sigma Aldrich and the Office of Undergraduate Research sponsored the team.

Last Wednesday, local non-student Christians handed out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” with a new introduction containing creationist arguments against evolution.

They were carrying out one arm of a national campaign called “Origin into Schools,” organized by Ray Comfort, an evangelical minister and television host who wrote the introduction to this “150th Anniversary Edition” of the text. The introduction presents counter-arguments to evidence of evolution, as well as draws lines between Darwin and Hitler and alleges that Darwin was a misogynist. It is available to read online.

Eleven people coming from as far away as Hannibal, Mo., stood in small groups at three locations: intersection of Forest Park Parkway and Skinker, Melville just off campus, and near the South 40.

They distributed around 1,000 copies at Washington University alone, and legions of other volunteers distributed 194,000 copies at 100 U.S. universities this month, according to Comfort’s Web site, livingwaters.com.

On his Web site, Comfort said he wrote the introduction “to give an alternative perspective” on “The Origin of Species.” But the volunteers said their goal was not to address evolution per se, but to spread Christian beliefs.

“My purpose for going there—I think it’s Living Waters’ purpose as well—is not necessarily to speak out against evolution, but to get the Gospel in the hands of students,” said Tom Burgee, who organized the University distribution with his wife.

Why not hand out Bibles? “Truthfully, with ‘Origin of Species’, it’s something that people are going to take, and it’s something they’re going to read,” Burgee said.

Senior Eddy Lazzarin, president of student atheist group the Washington University League of Freethinkers (WULF), read the introduction and spent time talking with Burgee.

“They were acting as if they were just promoting ‘The Origin of Species,’ with an introduction you might ordinarily expect with such an important book,” Lazzarin said. “They weren’t disclosing the fact that the introduction had been specifically prepared with the intent to slant, to argue against natural selection and common ancestry with dishonest, false evidence. Fortunately, any Wash. U. student is going to be able to find shockingly silly interpretations of commonly accepted data.”

WULF, a club committed to the application of science and reason to understandings of the universe, had planned to hand out counter-informational materials created by the National Center for Science Education. But the date of distribution of the Origin of Species was changed from the 24th to the 18th.

Christian Beaulé, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience, said the introduction contains typical creationist arguments.

“I think it’s funny…because it’s not the way scientists are trained to think and to analyze written material, so the arguments that are made sometimes don’t logically make sense,” Beaulé said. “I can see how if you’re not trained in the sciences, these arguments might make sense with a gut feeling.”

Students on campus did not participate in the distribution.

This campaign highlights the central features of the conflict between creationism and evolutionary biology. On one hand, Ray Comfort and his supporters aim primarily to increase belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and consider scientific evidence tangential to that cause.

“I’d say that the Bible is my primary source of truth,” Burgee said. “I would say that…everybody that believes in evolution that hasn’t had a full perspective on the Bible is missing information. Otherwise I believe that God would change their hearts and they would see the truth.”

On the other hand, those who support evolution respond with scientific evidence. The National Council for Science Education launched a campaign called “DontDissDarwin.com” that includes posters and fliers with analysis of Comfort’s argument, for example.

Burgee said he sees his role in disseminating information about the Gospel as comparable to saving people’s lives.

“If you look at it from my point of view…How much would I have to hate you guys to not want to share the Gospel with you? If you were walking towards a cliff, how much would I have to hate you not to tackle you, if need be, to keep you walking off that cliff?” Burgee said.

Correction: For the Record (11/23/09)
An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that the copy of “The Origin of Species” handed out on campus was abridged; in fact, it was a complete copy of the text with a new introduction.

Lewis Wall of the Washington University School of Medicine has led a multi-pronged campaign to repair obstetric vesicovaginal fistulas—ruptures in the wall between the bladder and the vagina that can result from obstructed childbirth. This tends to occur in young mothers with underdeveloped birth canals who do not have access to Caesarean sections. It’s an easily repaired injury that, if left untreated, can cause incontinence, which sometimes makes the victim an outcast for life.

“The thing that draws me to it is…the paradigm of innocent suffering. These women have this condition as a result of no fault or behavior of their own,” he said. Rather, it is the result of poor obstetric care.

Fistulas are not a concern Western mothers face because at-risk pregnancies are delivered through C-sections. But C-sections are not available in much of Africa, and since girls frequently marry as young as 14, obstructed labor is more common. The delivery can last days, result in a stillborn baby, and leave lasting damage to the mother.

Because they typically smell of the urine and sometimes feces that constantly trickle from their vaginas, these women are often divorced by their husbands, cast off from their villages, and find themselves unable to find steady work. In short, their lives are ruined by an injury that can be prevented by decent health care and cured by a $300 surgery.

But this problem has received little attention in the past “because the victims are the most voiceless of the voiceless,” as Nicholas Kristof, a prominent New York Times columnist, wrote in a blog post about his Sunday column on Nov. 1 about Wall’s new fistula hospital plans.

Wall is changing this state of affairs. The government of Niger recently approved his proposal for a fistula hospital. Once $850,000 has been raised, the 40-bed facility will be built next to an existing hospital for lepers.

“One of the reasons we’re working with this leprosy hospital is that a lot of the patients require significant psychosocial and economic rehabilitation,” much like with leprosy patients, he said.

In addition to fixing fistulas, the hospital will both educate women on ways to rebuild their lives once they leave the hospital, and run a microfinance program.

Women may also need physical rehabilitation for lower limb paralysis that can occur during obstructed surgery, called “foot drop,” and sometimes require treatment for malnutrition because of their prior poverty.

The foundations of the hospital are already in the ground, and fundraising and construction are underway. Wall expects to be there in December to perform surgeries in the small fistula unit already in operation in the leprosy hospital.

Building the hospital is far from the end of his campaign, however. Wall has also drawn up a plan to build 30-40 fistula hospitals worldwide that would cost $1.2 billion over 12 years. The goal is not just to repair fistulas, but also to improve obstetric care to prevent them from occurring.

To advance this plan, a meeting convened in Washington, D.C., last Sunday and Monday of not-for-profit and charitable organizations “interested in putting fistula on the government’s foreign aid agenda in a much more substantive way than in the past,” Wall said. “It’s in the early stages, but it’s a broad, bipartisan coalition to push that forward that’s starting to form.”

In addition, he is active in the Washington University community. In the spring, he will be teaching the undergraduate courses Anthropology of Human Birth and Anthropology of Maternal Death. In the past, he has taught courses such as The Female Life-Cycle in Cross-Cultural Perspective and Anthropological Perspectives on the Fetus.

Mitch Jenkins is a pre-med senior who took Anthropology of Human Birth with Wall in the spring of 2009. The course covered the physiology and public health aspects of maternal health issues.

“It definitely showed me how prevalent an issue maternal health is,” he said. “I don’t think I grasped how big of a problem that is.”

Wall also works at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, runs a practice focusing on reconstructive gynecological surgery, teaches medical students and residents, and serves on the hospital’s ethics committee. He is also president of the Worldwide Fistula Fund, which has already funded fistula surgery centers.

Wall’s interest in women’s health began not as a doctor, but as an anthropologist. After graduating from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he spent time in Nigeria working as an anthropologist on a Fulbright Scholarship. But this initial foray into the field convinced him that he there was more urgent work to be done as a doctor, and he entered medical school at age 27. Now, he promotes women’s health on many fronts as an anthropologist, doctor, teacher and activist.

It is not a test for applicants to take, but rather a tool for recommenders meant to complement traditional letters of recommendation. Up to five recommenders rank the student in a series of 24 statements about soft, or non-cognitive, skills on a scale from 1 (below average) to 5 (truly exceptional). Statements include “produces novel ideas,” “meets deadlines,” “works well under stress,” and “is worthy of trust from others.”

The results are distilled into a report on six traits, including knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity. The report also displays recommenders’ comments on each category.

Very few graduate programs have adopted the tool this year. The tool, called the “Personality Potential Index (PPI),” was introduced only this summer, and most schools did not hear of it until September, although Virginia Tech is one school that is using it during this application cycle.

Dean Richard Smith of Washington University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences said that the University is not adopting it until it is clear that the index is a good indicator of success in graduate school. He agreed with the intended goals of the test but is waiting for empirical results before adding to the difficulty and expense of graduate admissions.

“They are attempting to deal with a real problem, and that problem is that success…as an undergraduate is a rather poor predictor of success in Ph.D. programs that, like ours, which are deeply research focused, [are] designed to train people to do independent, creative scholarship,” he said.

Another goal of the test is to systematize the recommendation process, he said, since recommendation letters have suffered from inflation recently.

“So if you say in the letter, this is a very good student, you’re damning by faint praise,” Smith said. “The percentage that are in the top 1 to 5 percent greatly exceed 1 to 5 percent.”

But the PPI would mean more work for students, recommenders and admissions committees, so Smith noted it is important to do a cost-benefit analysis if evidence that the tool works does emerge.

The test has met with more skepticism from some. Erik Herzog, associate professor of biology, who has served on graduate admissions committees, questioned the utility of the PPI. He said individual schools’ recommendation forms often ask for similar rankings, but he strongly prioritizes GRE scores and letters of recommendation over them.

Washington University personality psychologist Robert Krueger said the test had the potential to be useful based on his experience, though he has not encountered it yet as a recommender. But like Smith, he is reserving judgment until its predictive power is better known.

Krueger studies the links between individual personality and risk for mental health problems. For instance, people with a more stress-reactive personality, or those who react poorly to stress, are at greater risk of developing depression and anxiety disorders.

In his work, he develops his own measures of personality in addition to using standard tests in the discipline. These include self-report inventories and reports from others, not unlike the basic idea underlying the PPI. Questions are often written in anticipation of the expected responses—he may write statements that he expects anxious people to endorse, for example—in an attempt to figure out if he’s measuring what he thinks he’s measuring, and getting it reliably.

The validity of a given personality test is its success at predicting an outcome, Krueger said. And the more systematic it is, the more predictive it will be.

“It seems like they’re trying to accomplish some kind of organized way of extracting the kind of information you would get from a recommendation…It forces people to consider all of the domains systematically…and my guess is that that’s going to be helpful,” Krueger said.

Students had mixed opinions. David Rheinstrom, a senior planning to apply for M.F.A. programs in a year, said he thought it sounded comparable to other types of application materials and had the potential to be useful or useless.

“I would be inclined to think that somebody’s personality would influence how well you do in grad school,” he said. “It’s probably just another thing to do, but who knows.”

This year’s fall Undergraduate Research Symposium saw a record number of participants and, according to the program coordinator, an unusually diverse variety of topics. It packed student research, internships, art and even a lunchtime dance performance together in one forum for peers, teachers and parents to experience.

Just one week later, it was followed by another research symposium equally diverse in another way. University students presented their work side by side with students from 12 other Midwestern colleges in a weekend-long symposium hosted by the Midstates Science and Math Consortium.

According to Kristin Sobotka, special programs coordinator for the Office of Undergraduate Research, which hosted the event, there was a record number of around 250 undergraduate posters, 10 high school students with posters, and 10 undergraduate talks. More presenters meant higher traffic.

“The word’s just kind of out. People know what it’s all about,” she said.

Fall symposia tend to see a higher density of biomedical research conducted by students over the summer and funded by Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURFs). In the spring, psychology and political science majors and other students typically present their honors thesis work. But Sobotka said this year was unusual.

“This fall we definitely had a larger number of non-life-sciences presentations, just because I think again the awareness level is rising among everybody,” Sobotka said. “More students who are doing a variety of different things know about it and just say on their own, ‘Hey, can I present at the symposium?’”

This year also saw the inception of a partnership between the art school and the Office of Undergraduate Research. Art students set up tables outside the building, where they sold prints of the Central West End, clay sculptures, and more.

“We helped support it and helped make it happen, but it was really the students in the art school that came up with the idea, and basically it was their show,” Sobotka said. “They came to us to ask if we could help them, and we did…We just want to keep that partnership and keep that happening each year.”

Saad Hasan, a senior, presented his thesis research at the undergraduate research symposium.

Hasan studies fish that create weak electric fields to sense their surroundings and communicate with one another, much in the same way that bats use echolocation. He made inferences about the evolutionary history of these fishes’ electric communication by comparing the volume of key brain structures across several species.

“The pretty big finding is that there are two subfamilies of the mormyrid family [of weakly electric fish], and there’s a dramatic difference in the size of what’s called the EL…between the two families,” he said. So the subfamilies show “a subspecialization of interpretive function” in the way they communicate.

Hasan said he received a “decent amount” of traffic, including professors and parents, and appreciated the way posters of different topics were all mixed in together.

“It was also interesting the way it was done, because you’re more likely to look at the [poster] right next to you, [which] could be anything,” Hasan said.

The weekend after the symposium, several Washington University students presented their work at a three-day conference in the Central West End hosted by the Midstates Math and Science Consortium, a collaboration between 13 Midwestern schools. Washington University and the University of Chicago take turns hosting an undergraduate biology and psychology conference, as well as a physics and chemistry conference each year.

About 90 students were in attendance, including five from Washington University, as well as faculty representatives from all 13 schools. The students attended poster sessions, plenary lectures, a panel on graduate school admissions, and social events in the evenings, including hands-on group neuroscience demos and a trip to the City Museum.

Senior Alejandro Akrouh gave a poster presentation about his research on a mutation that causes neonatal diabetes. He studied a mutation that was found in an infant patient that turned out to be a problem with ATP-dependent potassium—or KATP—channels. These channels regulate ion balances in the cell membranes of pancreas cells that are responsible for secreting insulin when blood sugar is too high.

“We found that the loss of function is due to inactivation of the KATP channel,” he said.

His work, which he pursued full-time during a year and a half off from classes, has led to two publications, two more that will appear in the next month, and a fifth currently in progress. But he said that since he has been very focused on his project, the most helpful part of the symposium was seeing a wide variety of research.

“Oftentimes, when you’re very focused on a project you can lose sight of what your academic peers are doing.”

This blitz of student presentations seems to have saturated students’ needs, and some opted to skip out on the consortium. While the Undergraduate Research Symposium attendance did not seem to be affected, some attendees said Washington University was under-represented at the Midstates Consortium conference.

“We could always do better with Wash. U. turnout,” said Erik Herzog, professor of biology and the Washington University representative to the consortium.

“The students that I’ve asked have generally said they’ve had enough opportunities to present. So it’s less about the location and more about that they have other things they need to do,” he said.

The Global Harvest Alliance (GHA) is a three-way collaboration between the Danforth Plant Science Center, the St. Louis Children’s Hospital and the pediatrics department in the School of Medicine.

Led by Mark Manary, professor of pediatrics at the medical school, the three groups have formalized an already working relationship in July 2009.

The project is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Roger Beachy, professor of biology and director of the Danforth Plant Science Center, said the relationship grew out of the complementary goals of the three institutions and the conviction that “we can do more together than we can alone.”

The group also collaborates with African scientists. Some members of the GHA are currently working with government agricultural agencies in Kenya and Nigeria.

“Almost everything we do, we do with African scientists in African institutions,” Beachy said.

The group aims to identify the most effective ways to create and propagate more nutritious foods. Researchers are currently developing a strain of cassava—a staple source of food for 300 million Africans—that will be genetically engineered to produce more nutrients.

Cassava is naturally deficient in protein and other nutrients for a staple food, but the engineered strain contains 30 times more beta-carotene, 10 times more protein and four times more iron.

To make cassava contain more protein, the group was inspired by natural strategies observed in sorghum. Initially, they tried just to load the cells with a healthy protein, but they found that the plant did not have the energy for the added workload.

Then, the team attempted to mimic sorghum’s method of storing protein in clumps. The experiment was successful.

“We’re not smart enough to make up these kinds of things,” Manary said.

Current experiments seek to determine the bioavailability of the additional nutrients they added to cassava—meaning whether the body can absorb them—by feeding the cassava first to a type of intestinal cell grown in a dish, followed by mice and finally humans. It could take two years before human trials begin.

“We know that we can increase the value of the nutrients in cassava,” Beachy said. “That’s what we’ve done for the last three years. Now we need to see if it works.”

Researchers will later travel to Africa to introduce the crop to African farmers and evaluate its efficacy.

Manary heads the GHA and creates a link between the three institutions.

“My lifelong goal is to fix malnutrition in Africa,” he said.

Manary has already made significant strides toward this goal. He developed a peanut butter-based food dense in calories and nutrients that is both cheap and easy to make. Currently, it is a major tool used to combat extreme malnutrition in children.

Another project in the works focuses on enriching folic acid in sweet potatoes. Folic acid is found primarily in vegetables, so it is often lacking from subsistence diets.

“Many of the birth defects come from those areas of the world where people eat only potatoes or other starches,” Beachy said.

In 2010, the team will enter an early stage of testing by growing a variety of sweet potato high in pro-vitamin A in Africa to see how it fares in that climate.

Folic acid is already added to flour, so it is enriched in bread without genetic engineering. This strategy, however, is not helpful for subsistence farmers.

“[Manary’s] experiences over the last 14 years have taught him a lot, and he’s convinced us and his colleagues at the medical school that a sustainable solution to malnutrition will come from foods that Africans themselves grow,” Beachy said.

A similar solution, undertaken 10 years ago by other groups, resulted in “golden rice,” a genetically fortified variety that contained more vitamin A and iron.

“It’s helped save many, many lives and improved the quality of life of those who eat it,” Beachy said.

Beachy noted that the success of this project supports the group’s strategy. He lambasted opponents of golden rice and other genetically modified crops, arguing that the crops are carefully tested for safety. Anti-biotechnology sentiment leading to regulatory snags causes major delays with projects such as the GHA.

“Those who think that biotech is not safer or wholesome with respect to the earth have been quite vocal in their protests against fortified crops and really slowed down efforts there,” Beachy said. “Meanwhile, children continue to suffer.”

Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks in a night. While the study found significant reductions in binge drinking among 12- to 20-year olds since 1984—likely reflecting scarcer availability of alcohol to teenagers—young women maintained the same levels of drinking or, in the case of college women, began drinking more heavily.

The study, led by Washington University’s Richard Grucza, assistant professor of psychiatry, examined a national survey of drinking behavior conducted every year from 1979 to 2006 with a total of more than 500,000 subjects.

“We saw, on the whole, that binge drinking has gone down among individuals ages 12 to 20 considerably over the last 27 years,” Grucza said. “It’s been more or less a steady decline. The most dramatic drop-offs were seen in 15- to 17-year-old boys, whose heavy drinking fell almost 50 percent in those 27 years.”

On the other hand, 15- to 20-year-old females showed no change, and binging in 21- to 23-year-old women grew by about 40 percent.

“We think that probably has more to do with changes in gender roles in general—that is, women in general have started using more alcohol and drugs,” he said.

Betsy Foy, substance abuse specialist at Student Health Services, said the University has closely matched nationwide trends in the 12 years she has worked here. She said, however, that the University deviates from larger trends in some ways.

“Nationwide, varsity athletes tend to be high-risk drinkers,” Foy said. “Here, I haven’t found that. I think it might have to do with that we’re not a Division I NPAA school.”

Prior to 1984, the drinking age varied from state to state. While most states had a 21-year-old limit after the end of Prohibition, many states lowered the drinking age to 18 or 19 in the 1970s, according to James Fell, senior program director of the Pacific Institute for Research & Evaluation.

An increase in fatal alcohol-related traffic accidents involving youths in those states, however, prompted the federal government to incentivize states to set the legal age to 21.

The current study came about in part as a result of a recent coalescence, called the Amethyst Initiative, of university presidents who question the logic of the current drinking age.

“Their claim is that there’s an epidemic of binge drinking on college campuses, and they’re wondering if the minimum age has been effective,” Gruczo said. “We set out to look at some of the factual basis of what their rationale is for wanting to change the drinking age.”

The results of this study, published in The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in July, may not provide a direct answer. The authors say their findings prove that the higher drinking age has been very good for public health.

But the results also support the belief that college campuses continue to cultivate dangerous drinking habits, and they are out of step with the rest of the nation.

So what is different about college campuses?

“A lot of unmarried people, people without children, will tend to have higher rates of binge drinking, and of course they’re concentrated at college campuses,” Grucza said. “And [there is a] mix of legal-age drinkers and non-legal-age drinkers in close physical proximity,” which leads to easier access to alcohol for minors.

Grucza’s research group is interested in early drinking because it is a strong predictor of alcohol dependence later in life. In addition, Grucza pointed out the strong correlation of alcohol use with sexual assault and harassment: about 70 percent of sexual assaults are alcohol related, he said.

“The federal government is actually putting quite a bit of money into researching this because college campuses are a problem environment,” Grucza said.

Foy also believed the higher age is a positive for public health.

“Since they raised the drinking age to 21, the number of DWIs has gone down,” she said. “They’ve shown nothing but good marks since they raised it to 21.”

Proponents of lowering the legal age, meanwhile, argue that countries in Europe and elsewhere enjoy a better drinking culture and fewer alcohol-associated problems as a result of lower drinking ages.

Jean-Charles Foyer, a senior who lived in a small village in Normandy, France, until entering the University, feels that without the excitement of secrecy, young people’s drinking is healthier and more open.

“I feel that drinking culture in European countries might be less focused on getting drunk as fast as possible and more focused on social drinking,” Foyer said. “Of course people will get inebriated but at a more reasonable pace.”

He also noted that drinking games, a known cause of binge drinking, are less popular in France.

Both Foy and Grucza, however, repudiated this perception.

“People will claim that Europe has low drinking rates and they don’t have the same problems, but that’s just not true,” Grucza said.

While fewer DWIs are given in some countries, he noted, this is most likely due to better public transportation and much harsher penalties, in some cases fines in the tens of thousands of dollars.

“But as far as underage drunkenness, underage binge drinking, alcohol poisoning, they have as many, if not more, problems than in the U.S.,” Grucza added.

Most recently, a drunk French 19-year-old took a nap between the rails of a train track on his way back from a music festival. He narrowly escaped death as a train rolled over his unconscious body without harming him. As the police tried to rouse him, Reuters reported, he “gave a one-fingered salute” and went back to sleep.

Foyer said he believes there is a very practical reason for the effect seen in the United States.

“The reason I think [binge drinking] went down in high school students here is just the fact that [the raised drinking age]  made [alcohol] harder to get for them, whereas college students have easier access because there are people over 21,” he said.

In other words, if teenagers outside of college campuses could obtain alcohol more easily, they would still be binge drinking. The legal age has changed, but the nation’s drinking culture probably has not.

The council has already delivered a report on the H1N1 virus.

President Obama and his team selected Schaal, vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of Biology, along with two university presidents, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and three Nobel laureates.

Washington University biologist Barbara Schaal, pictured above, is one of 18 intellectuals appointed by President Obama to his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The council has already released a report on the novel H1N1 influenza virus.

“We’re also very interested in economic issues, and how science and technology interact with economic issues. We have a number of strong economists,” Schaal said. “What President Obama wanted initially was a very rapid assessment of H1N1, and so we gave that to him when we met in August. That was really done very, very quickly. When the president calls, everybody just drops everything.”

Over the next four years, the group will formulate their best judgments of how the president should proceed on scientific issues, using all the available evidence, Schaal said.

“You make the recommendation, you say this is the best and most objective that we can tell you, and if science doesn’t have a clear answer, you say that as well,” Schaal said.

Schaal says top priorities include STEM (science, technology and math) education, energy and climate change, health-care information technology and evaluating the effectiveness of different medical treatments.

The council determined that the swine flu is a fairly mild type of influenza, but Schaal said, “The real health concern is that it also spreads very rapidly…so even if it’s a mild influenza, if you just have a normal percentage of people that need to be hospitalized, it’s a large number of people.”

The committee was chosen to represent a variety of disciplines and geographic areas. Schaal attributes her appointment to her experience as the vice president of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, she conducts research in plant genetics and diversity with the goal of enriching food crops like rice, an issue receiving global attention.

Schaal noted that there are already striking differences between the Obama and George W. Bush administrations’ PCASTs.

“President Bush’s PCAST wrote a very interesting letter to the new PCAST saying basically, ‘Don’t do it the way we’ve done it.’ Bush’s PCAST had a lot of businesspeople… from technology-based businesses,” she said.

Evidently, the Obama administration took the former group’s advice: The current PCAST contains more scientists, while still representing businesses with appointees like Schmidt.

Despite the current concentration on health-care reform and the economy, Schaal said the Obama administration is paying close attention to scientific issues

“The day after [the election]—I think it was Wednesday November 5th—the National Academy [of Sciences] got a phone call and said, ‘These are the appointments we’re thinking about.’ So at 9 in the morning, already the administration was thinking about it. It blew everybody away,” Schaal said. “And the people who have been appointed, most of us are just ecstatic about them.”

In October, subcommittees will present their assessments to the president at the next formal meeting. Schaal is a member of the STEM, economic and energy subcommittees.

There are many tasks to be addressed, according to Schaal. But she expressed optimism about a number of goals, such as improving health-care information technology.

“Some of the health-care stuff is going to go well,” Schaal said. “And I think that’s because we have such a strong committee. I think there will be progress there.”

One area of health care likely to receive timely attention from the council is how to implement comparative effectiveness research to determine which medical treatments work the best in a given situation. Similarly, the council will address how to identify drug interactions.

“Particularly when you look at an older population, where they’re taking multiple drugs, how would you ever figure out how drugs interact with each other?” Schaal said. “If you’re taking a blood thinner, if you’re taking anti-cholesterol and an anti-depressant, what’s the most effective pain medication?”

Little information is currently available to doctors about complex interactions between drugs or their comparative effectiveness. But this knowledge is within our reach, Schaal said.

“It turns out that there are data out there, but it’s a different way of looking at the data,” Schaal said.

Schaal’s optimism about the committee’s ability to solve these problems comes from her confidence in the quality of the council.

“It’s a really smart group of people,” Schaal said. “The interactions have been very cordial, there’s been a lot of give and take; you don’t see people grandstanding, making speeches. There’s a real sense of trying to get something done.”

The biology and math libraries, previously on the second floor of Rebstock Hall and the lower level of Cupples I, respectively, were targeted because their diminishing traffic did not justify their continued existence, Dean of Libraries Shirley Baker said. Their collections are now housed in Olin Library’s B Level.

Currently, study spaces in those two locations remain open to students, and the biology and math departments have yet to determine the future use of the space.

Slashing the salaries of two employees provided the bulk of the savings. Both of the assistant librarians whose positions were eliminated were re-hired in open positions at the Olin and the chemistry libraries.

Other savings came from eliminating some journal subscriptions, copy machines and other equipment. While computers are still available in the former biology library, printing is not.
The administration has not confirmed any plans to close more satellite libraries, though it remains a possibility if the economy stays poor, said Ruth Lewis, biology and math librarian, who now has an office in Olin.

“What scares me is if we have to cut another 12 percent next year,” Lewis said. “That’s going to be really hard.”

According to Baker, the decision depends primarily on how departmental libraries are used. The biology

The biology library, above, and the math library closed last summer due to budget cuts and decreasing foot traffic. (Matt Mitgang | Student Life)

library was already losing foot traffic dramatically because access to biology journals, previously one of the most important functions of the biology library, is now available online.

The art and architecture library, on the other hand, is unlikely to ever close since print materials are critical for those disciplines.

The chemistry library houses journals that are only available in print, often due to high prices, said Chris Goodman, formerly the assistant math librarian and now the chemistry and engineering assistant librarian.

“Our strategic plan includes downsizing and perhaps even consolidating some libraries because the materials are going electronic and the use is happening elsewhere,” Baker said. “Biology especially had become incredibly quiet.”

The University is not alone in its decision to close satellite libraries. Schools like Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also getting rid of departmental libraries. Others, however, are slower to move, like Harvard, which has 96 libraries.

The widespread use of digital materials is changing the structure of libraries dramatically, pushing them to consolidate and weed out their print materials when online copies become available.
Olin has adapted by creating a digital library team to push the process along. Its staff has also started to use Google Books to give students access to books they cannot find otherwise. In addition, a new catalog will be unveiled this week with more sophisticated search tools, tag clouds and other digitally focused features.

“When we talk about where the libraries will be as we finish our Plan for Excellence, it will probably be fewer physical libraries” Baker said. “The digital collections will grow dramatically; we may even remove some print from the main campus.”

Lewis expressed disappointment with the recent decisions.
“I’ve had a few complaints. People just aren’t generally happy about the decision,” Lewis said. “A few faculty are going to miss 24/7 access—being able to get a journal at 7 a.m. on a Sunday.”
The biology department has been using electronic resources for years, so it happily adapted to the change, Baker said.

“Except for the loss of a piece of [their] identity,” she added. “It’s your departmental library.”

The change may be harsher for the math department, where members still like to browse through books. Graduate students will suffer the most, according to Goodman.
“There’s the occasional undergraduate, but they never really spent much time there,” Goodman said.

All the same resources, however, are still available, even if they are in different formats or locations. Also, the change in structure was designed to match the way faculty and students previously used the departmental library.

“There are some things that will come out of it—undergrads can now get biology books until 2 in the morning now,” Lewis said.