Ray Arvidson, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, directs the Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory, which is heavily involved in NASA’s planetary exploration efforts. He is currently exploring the surface of Mars with multiple probes, including the Spirit and Opportunity probes.

“The more we look with the two rovers, the more excited we become for lots of evidence for water in the past, and even continuing occasionally today,” he said.

This April, Obama announced his plan for NASA’s future. The central objective is to shift focus away from returning to the moon and instead aim for an asteroid and Mars.

Arvidson’s group would be instrumental in the exploration to prepare for a Mars landing. The rovers’ finding that there is plenty of ice on the surface, for example, opens the possibility that we might be able to use Martian ice for drinking water and even to help make rocket fuel, Arvidson said.

This strategy, called in-situ resource utilization, would be cheaper than carrying all resources on the spacecraft. And it could be vital to survival, as people would have to stay on the surface for as long as six months before the orbital mechanics of Earth and Mars allowed them to return.

Robotic exploration will likely pave the way for humans on Mars, by exploring and setting up a base before they arrive, he said.

Kirsten Siebach, a junior who has been working on the Mars rovers with Arvidson for more than a year and wants to continue studying planetary science in graduate school, appreciates that the new NASA plan focuses on technology development and unmanned exploration.

“I think you can get a lot more out of those for less expense than you can for manned missions,” she said. “I’m always excited when it sounds like there will be more missions and more data to play with.”

The future of American space travel has undergone some revision in the current administration. In 2004, President Bush announced his vision for the future of U.S. space exploration: a return to the moon by 2020. He also called for the aging space shuttle program to be shut down, since the shuttles have reached the end of their life span.

But we don’t yet have replacements for them, thanks to a lack of planning in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, Arvidson said. For a few years, we’ll have to rely on other countries to take our astronauts to the International Space Station.

“So this plan would build a heavy launch vehicle that gets to lower Earth orbit, and somehow gets to the moon…that is a huge amount of money, and a lot of technology investment,” Arvidson said.

But the program suffered from a lack of funding. It ran far over budget and past scheduled deadlines. To confront these problems, NASA commissioned a report on the costs of continuing with a moon landing and potential alternatives.

They concluded that going to the moon would cost a lot more money, and since we’ve already been there, we might get a better return on our investment if we aimed for a more challenging target. Rather than return to the moon, why not go somewhere new?

“The upshot is to not try to go back to the moon, but rather to invest broadly in technology so we can go to more distant targets, and to involve the commercial sector much more heavily than has been done before,” Arvidson said.

From Arvidson’s perspective, this plan makes good sense. “So [President Obama is] actually investing either $5 or $6 billion more over the next few years than the Bush administration had, but I think in a more realistic way. There’s a lot more technology investment, robotic precursor exploration and moving into deep space instead of going back to the moon. So I think it’s all good… I personally think he had it right.”

The commission identified asteroids as a target worth exploring. “An asteroid is a possible target that’s scientifically interesting. And some come too close to the earth, and someday they’re going to hit the earth, so we need to understand them.”

The University plays a large role in the similar plan of travelling to Mars since Arvidson and his group are already heavily involved in robotic exploration of the planet.

They have been exploring the surface of Mars with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which are both “way out of warranty, but still operating” after seven years. In addition, they also worked on the Phoenix probe, which dug around in the ice on the surface. Now, they’ll be involved in three new proposed probes, including two to explore Venus’ atmosphere and surface.

Arvidson says we know hardly anything about Mars, given that its surface area is similar to the land area of Earth. So far, though, the rovers have uncovered surprising evidence that it was once a warm, wet environment like Earth is now.

“Today it’s incredibly cold. The only thing that’s stable on the surface is water vapor, or snow and ice. But in the past, it was a different place… when you go very, very far back in time, there were standing lakes. There was snow and rainfall and an open hydrologic system.”

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.