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Hope for Addicts From an Ancient Source
October 2000
According to federal statistics, nearly two million people in the U.S. abuse cocaine, which is one of the hardest drug habits to break. But research at Yale suggests that the ancient Chinese medical practice known as acupuncture may offer a safe and effective way to overcome addiction.
In a study published in the August issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of Medical School investigators, led by Arthur Margolin, a research scientist in psychiatry, demonstrated that auricular acupuncture, a technique in which four needles were inserted into a portion of the ear, helped significantly more people remain cocaine-free than did other treatment methods. The researchers examined 82 cocaine addicts, about 60 percent of whom were male and whose mean age was 37, who were enrolled in a methodone-maintenance program to combat heroin addiction. One group received acupuncture; a second group was treated with “sham” acupuncture—the needles were inserted in a place on the ear that was not considered an effective site—and a third group received a no-needle relaxation treatment.
All were subjected to thrice-weekly urine tests, and at the end of the eight-week investigation, 53.8 percent of the acupuncture group were found to be free of cocaine. By contrast, only 23.5 percent of the sham-acupuncture group and 9.1 percent of the relaxation therapy group had no traces of cocaine in their bodies.
While nobody knows how the acupuncture treatment might work, the Margolin investigation is the first to provide solid scientific evidence that corroborates the success that other drug clinics have already reported with acupuncture, particularly when it is used in concert with other techniques. “Our study shows that alternative therapies can be combined with the arsenal of Western treatments for fighting addiction,” said Margolin.
A Green Guide to Things Blue
In cities throughout the world, you can often spot a tourist by the telltale Michelin Green Guide sticking out of a pocket or backpack. Now, there is a Green Guide to Yale and New Haven.
The 96-page book, which is Michelin’s first guide to a college campus, includes information on hotels, restaurants, transportation, and the history of Yale and New Haven. Also included are walking tours of the campus, the Green, and Wooster Square. The idea for the guide emerged from Yale’s Tercentennial committee, which in 1997 discussed publishing a campus guide that would be, in Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer’s words, “as much like the Michelin Green Guides as possible without infringing on their intellectual property rights.” When committee member and history professor Robin Winks suggested they approach Michelin themselves, the plan was launched.
When Yale offered to supply text and photos for the guide, Michelin was convinced, and a print run of 25,000 was released this summer. The guide sells for $14.95; Michelin is donating one dollar from every sale to New Haven Reads, a local initiative to promote literacy.
Hospital Assumes Control of YPI
On June 23, the Yale Psychiatric Institute ended its 65-year run as a freestanding hospital. In an agreement with the University, Yale–New Haven Hospital absorbed YPI into its psychiatric department and took over the Institute’s building at Cedar and Congress Streets.
Dr. William Sledge, medical director of YNHH’s expanded psychiatric department, says the consolidation was necessary because of the increasing complexity of the healthcare business. “The University is not set up to run a hospital. It doesn’t have the infrastructure to deal with the complex administrative issues.” Sledge also says that because of its small size, YPI “had no clout” and was unable to negotiate favorable rates with insurers, leading to annual deficits in the millions of dollars.
Yale unions vigorously fought the proposal, since it involved replacing YPI’s unionized employees with nonunion hospital employees (“Light & Verity,” May). In trying to persuade state regulators to reject the proposal, the unions argued that the change would compromise patient care. They also objected to the hospital’s proposal to provide fewer total beds under the new arrangement than the hospital and YPI had operated separately. The state granted approval for the consolidation, but required the hospital to maintain more beds than it had proposed.
Papers Offer Peeks Inside the Law
Scholars on the trail of subjects ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dalkon Shield may soon find clues at Yale, thanks to an unusual gift from one of America’s oldest law firms. The New York firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft, founded in 1792, recently gave its archive of case files—some 300 boxes, dating back to 1803—to the Manuscripts and Archives division of Sterling Memorial Library.
While Yale already has strong holdings in legal history, they consist mainly of papers given by individual attorneys. Cadwalader’s gift is the first set of papers given by an entire firm. “I don’t know of any comparable gift of lawyers’ papers,” says Robert Gordon, a professor at the Law School who specializes in legal history. “Most firms destroy them as a matter of routine to make room for new records.”
One of New York’s most prominent corporate firms, Cadwalader has a history that includes landmark cases and work for the famous and socially prominent. The firm and its principals were instrumental in the crafting of antitrust law in the early 1900s, and its past client list includes Astors, Vanderbilts (the firm represented Gloria Vanderbilt’s trust in the famous 1934 custody case), Margaret Mitchell, and W.C. Handy. The firm also represented the class-action plaintiffs in the landmark 1980s lawsuit over the Dalkon Shield birth control device.
Gordon says the papers will help illuminate areas of the law that seldom end up in the public record. “It is in lawyers’ advice to clients that the law is made real and effective,” he explains. “A large part of a law firm’s job is keeping the client out of court. So the real gold is in the day-to-day interaction between lawyers and clients.”
Milestone Map for Ribosomes
In an accomplishment with important evolutionary and medical implications, Yale molecular biochemists Thomas Steitz, Peter Moore, and their colleagues have developed the most detailed map to date of the structure of the ribosome, the site in the cell where genetic information is used to manufacture the proteins required for life. The scientists described their findings in two extensive articles in the August 11 issue of the journal Science, and in an accompanying commentary, Thomas Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Sterling Professor of Biology Sidney Altman, hailed the work as a “milestone” of fundamental research.
Cech and Altman were honored for their discovery that the genetic material called RNA could both convey information and help carry out chemical reactions. Using a process called x-ray crystallography, the Steitz-Moore team built on this finding to describe the precise molecular landscape where proteins are assembled.
“You can’t have life as we know it without the ribosome, and clearly RNA was the central player in the origin of life before there were proteins,” says Steitz, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
But the discovery may also give pharmaceutical researchers an important tool for the development of a new strategy called structure-based drug design. “The ribosome is a major target for antibiotics,” says Steitz, “and there are hundreds of compounds that kill bacterial cells by stopping protein synthesis.”
However, resistance to antibiotics is growing, and the medical community is worried that if this trend continues, bacterial infections could re-emerge as a significant cause of death. “Drug development has often been a matter of shooting in the dark,” says Steitz. “But because we can now see how antibiotics bind to the ribosome, we should be able to design molecules to fit its cracks and crevices in new ways and help avoid the problem of resistance.”
Are AP Classes the Road to Success?
In the 1987 movie Stand and Deliver, an inspiring inner-city teacher led an unlikely group of students to success in an advanced-placement (AP) math class. The movie, based on the true story of teacher Jaime Escalante, helped spark a movement to increase the number of and enrollment in AP classes across the country. But a study by physics professor emeritus William Lichten, a fellow at Yale’s Institution of Social and Policy Studies, suggests that the Stand and Deliver story is none too common, and that increasing the budget for AP classes may not be the best use of education money.
In AP classes, high school students are taught college-level material with the goal of allowing them to pass the College Board’s AP exams and earn college credit. But this spring, Lichten published in Educational Psychology Review the results of a study indicating that the vast majority of students in inner city schools are unlikely to pass the AP exams. Lichten came to this conclusion by examining the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores of the inner city students. Lichten says that the College Board, which administers both the PSAT and the AP exams, has data that show that PSAT scores are an effective predictor of performance on the AP exam. Lichten followed up the article with another arguing that the College Board’s scoring of the exams is inflated, and that the scale should be adjusted.
Lichten’s study was quickly condemned by the College Board and by public education officials, particularly in Connecticut, where Lichten’s article was published just as the state received a $516,000 federal grant to provide AP courses in low-income school districts. “We believe that all students are capable of high academic achievement,” said state Department of Education spokesman Tom Murphy.
But Lichten says students without a demonstrated aptitude are unlikely to benefit from AP courses without an exceptional effort like Escalante's, which “only happens once in a while and is not likely to recur in American education.” Indeed, his study says, six years after the events depicted in Stand and Deliver, the number of students passing the AP calculus test at Escalante’s school had shrunk from 85 to 19.
Different Angles on the Frontier
More than three centuries have passed since Connecticut was part of the American frontier. Still, some of the best scholarship on the American frontier experience has come out of the urbane halls of Yale, much of it the work of former President and Sterling Professor Emeritus of History Howard Lamar. Now, in order to build on Lamar’s work, the University has established the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders.
“It is a way of making permanent Yale’s commitment to the study of frontiers, borders, and the American West,” says Jay Gitlin, a lecturer in history and the new center’s executive coordinator. “We’re about adding resources to an existing strength.”
The Lamar Center will hold an annual conference in addition to lectures and other events. Its inaugural event, held September 8 and 9, featured a lecture by history professor Robin Winks and a panel discussion on America’s national park system. The center will also provide research and travel grants to graduate and undergraduate students, and may support graduate and postgraduate students who are studying frontiers and borders.
While other universities have centers devoted to the study of the American West, Yale’s will look at the frontier as a worldwide historical and cultural phenomenon, just as Lamar did in his book Frontiers in History, a comparative treatment of the American and South African frontiers. The Center’s organizers believe that studying the frontier is of special importance to a more global, multicultural world. “A lot of us feel that Americans need a new history to take us into the 21st century,” says history professor John Mack Faragher, the Center’s academic director. “Frontier history could be that history, as it’s about negotiating borders and complex cultures. Howard was one of the originators of that idea.”
The Center’s initial funding comes from Roland W. Betts '68, a member of the Yale Corporation and a part-time resident of Santa Fe with a special interest in the West.
A Wordless Twelfth Night
You don’t read the script for Trumbull College dean Peter Novak’s new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. You watch it. Novak, a doctoral candidate at the School of Drama, recently led a 16-month project to translate the play into American Sign Language (ASL). The production, which features a cast of 13 actors—seven of them deaf—had its premiere last month in Philadelphia.
Because ASL is a language of its own, with its own syntax and structure, the translation is more complex than simply substituting signed words for spoken ones. Novak and the team that helped translate the play had to come up with ways to restate Shakespeare’s words as elegantly and expressively as he wrote them. Because the audience was not expected to know ASL, the production included actors at the side of the stage speaking Shakespeare’s lines as the actors on stage signed them.
The “script” for the production is a CD-ROM of video segments that Novak made with a grant from Yale’s Digital Media Center for the Arts. Actors learned their lines by reviewing the CD-ROM. (Samples from the script can be viewed at the project’s Web site, www.yale.edu/asl12night.)
Another Kind of Horse Power
Most denizens of University housing move out in the summer. Among the exceptions—along with college masters and officers of the University—are Pete, Gracie, and Dakota, three good-natured horses who live at the Yale Equestrian Center at the athletic fields. They stay behind for summer school: Some 50 children between the ages of 5 and 15 come for a week-long riding camp, which is one of the summer programs run by the athletics department.
The goals of the riding camp, according to director Anne Gallant, vary with the students. With younger children, she says, “I want them to be confident around horses and learn basic safety. They learn to walk and trot. With the older kids, it varies, because there are different levels of experience.” Gallant says the summer program often inspires riders to continue with the riding lessons she offers at the Equestrian Center throughout the year.
Gallant came to Yale through an unusual sequence of events. While she was a horse lover from childhood, she spent 12 years as an attorney before leaving the law to pursue a master’s degree in therapeutic recreation at the University of Connecticut. In 1996, she started a program called Leg Up, which teaches at-risk youth ages 9 to 16 about horses. The program started in a barn in Guilford, but within a year New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. made arrangements with Yale to move the program to the city, where many of the youths in the program live. In the Leg Up program, which is housed at Yale but raises its own funds, about 45 boys and girls who have had run-ins with the juvenile justice system come to the Equestrian Center weekly for a two-hour session in which they learn to ride and care for the horses. “It’s all about basic life skills: self-esteem, the ability to communicate,” says Gallant. “It’s great for these kids to see that this large, strong animal is willing to listen to them. They learn about anger management, impulse control, and their ability to nurture.”
Besides Leg Up, the summer camp, and the riding lessons, Gallant also operates a program called Star Riders that puts people with autism in contact with horses. After a lifetime with the animals, Gallant has seen what horses can do for the soul. “This is just such powerful medicine,” she says.  |
