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$15 Million for “Next Step” in Genome Research
November 2001
In September, Yale became one of the first two universities to receive a much sought-after, five-year, $15 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to set up a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. (The University of Washington was the other recipient.) Yale’s CEGS principal investigator, Michael Snyder, who chairs the department of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, says that the purpose of the program is to develop new technologies that will be used to understand the vast amount of data that has come from the recently completed Human Genome Project.
“We have finished sequencing the genome, so we have what amounts to a dictionary,” says Snyder. “The next step is to try to figure out how the words are put into sentences.”
At the Center, Snyder and his colleagues, who include biologists Sherman M. Weissman, Richard P. Lifton, Mark Gerstein, and Perry L. Miller, will be determining how certain key genes and groups of genes are turned on and regulated. Understanding regulatory processes is critical in research that is aimed at combatting cancer, a disease whose hallmark is often cellular regulation gone awry, says Snyder. “Mapping out DNA and seeing where the regulatory areas are located and how they work will help us design better cancer treatments.”
Snyder explains that one of the most important tools that Yale’s CEGS will use was invented in his laboratory by Christine Horak, a current graduate student in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, to study the genetic structure of yeast, which, like the fruit fly, is a key organism in this kind of research. “Our goal is to focus on developing new technologies that will ultimately have a strong impact in the fight against cancer and other human diseases,” says Snyder.
Elm City Housing Market Heats Up
The recent economic downturn notwithstanding, New Haven has been enjoying a renewal over the past few years that has both town and gown smiling. But those looking to live in the city are beginning to discover the down side of urban uplift. Incoming graduate students and junior faculty are finding higher housing prices—if they can find a place to live at all.
In late September, there was only one single-family house on the market in East Rock, a neighborhood north of campus favored by Yale students and faculty. Real estate agent Betsy Grauer says the lack of inventory in the city is driving up prices. “Many junior faculty have been priced out of the New Haven market,” says Grauer, adding that the house-hunters are looking to Hamden or other nearby suburban communities.
The increased popularity of urban living is one reason for the higher prices, although real estate agents say New Haven is also attracting new residents from the shoreline suburbs to the east of the city. (Some people in those communities fear massive traffic problems when the bridge that carries Interstate 95 over New Haven Harbor is rebuilt beginning next year.)
The tight market is not affecting only those who wish to buy. Rents are also up after being stable for many years, in part because some rental units are leaving the market. “People have been buying multi-family homes and turning them into single-family homes,” says Grauer, “so there has been some dimunition in the rental stock.”
Lisa Brandes, director of the McDougal Center at the Graduate School, says graduate and professional students are paying more for housing. “The low rents are gone in the desirable areas,” says Brandes. “The availability is still there, but you have to look to a higher price range or move farther out.” Brandes says that the University’s own graduate housing is full.
Will the strong housing market begin to affect Yale’s ability to compete for students and faculty? Grauer doesn’t think so, given the fact that Yale’s peer institutions are mostly in pricier markets. “New Haven still looks like a great value compared with other cities,” she says.
A Promising AIDS Vaccine?
More than 300 years ago, cows played a role in the development of the first vaccine—vacca, in Latin, means cow—against smallpox, and in the modern battle against AIDS, cattle may again prove important.
At the first international AIDS vaccine conference in Philadelphia in September, Yale School of Medicine biologists John and Nina Rose announced that they had successfully tested a new vaccine in rhesus monkeys that worked against simian HIV, a variety of the virus similar to the one which causes the disease that has killed more than 22 million people around world. The raw material for the substance is a weakened form of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a microbe that infects cows, horses, and, occasionally, humans, and results in a relatively mild illness.
The Roses, who are married but had never conducted research together, created their vaccine by stitching AIDS genes into the genetic code of VSV. This was delivered by injection, as oral drops, or as a nasal spray into seven healthy rhesus monkeys, each of which was then infected with the simian AIDS virus. Eight monkeys, which were also deliberately infected, received none of the experimental vaccine.
While all of the animals eventually carried HIV, seven of the eight unvaccinated monkeys developed full-blown AIDS. However, more than a year after infection, none of the vaccinated animals showed symptoms of the disease. The vaccine apparently boosted the recipients' immune systems enough to prevent the onset of the fatal illness.
“We think it is likely this could be an effective AIDS vaccine in humans,” says John Rose, professor of pathology and cell biology and senior author of a paper on the work that was published in the September issue of the journal Cell. It might be especially useful in developing countries, he explained, because “it does not require multiple injections.”
There are more than a dozen different AIDS vaccine candidates in the development pipeline. Wyeth Lederle Vaccines, a unit of American Home Products, has purchased the license to begin testing the Yale-developed substance in humans, a painstaking and often frustrating process that can take several years or more before a final approval is issued by the US Food and Drug Administration. “In an emergency situation like this, especially in the developing world, I think the whole process of vaccine approval should be accelerated,” said Rose.
Local Pastor Seeks Corporation Post
When David Lee '93MDiv was a first-year student at the Divinity School, his nephew was shot and killed at a drug-dealing spot in Newhallville, just down Prospect Hill from the School. Recalls Lee: “I said to my fellow students, ‘What are we doing up on this hill when people are dying on the streets?' I vowed that if I could ever make a difference in Yale’s relationship with the community, I would.”
Ten years later, Lee, a native of Ansonia who went to Syracuse on a football scholarship, is the pastor of the Varick Memorial AME Church on Dixwell Avenue, and he is trying to make good on his vow by mounting a petition campaign to be elected an alumni fellow of the Yale Corporation. As a representative of the New Haven community, Lee says he wants Yale to accept more responsibility for the welfare of its home city.
The Corporation, Yale’s governing body, includes ten “successor fellows” chosen by the Corporation itself and six fellows elected by alumni to serve six-year terms. Candidates for alumni fellow are almost always chosen by a standing committee of the Association of Yale Alumni, but a candidate may be placed on the ballot if he or she gathers signatures from 3 percent of the alumni electorate. (This method has been employed only twice, in 1964 and 1965 by William Horowitz '29, who was elected on his second try and became the Corporation’s first Jewish fellow.) Lee delivered 4,870 signatures to the AYA on the October 1 deadline, substantially more than the 3,252 required. If the AYA determines that enough of the signatures are valid, Lee will appear on the ballot next spring along with the candidates nominated by the committee.
Lee’s quest is also unusual in that he is actively campaigning for the job. He sent promotional material to 120,000 alumni in support of his petition drive, and he plans to do more such mailings before the election. (He has also set up a Web site at www.yalealum.org.) But Lee is not doing it alone: His first mailing was paid for by Yale labor unions, of which he is a longtime supporter. A better deal for Yale’s unions is part of his platform, along with increased Yale support for New Haven schools. “Yale has done so much for New Haven,” he says, “but there’s so much more we can do.”
WYBC: On Air But Off Campus
For 55 years, aspiring disk jockeys, radio technicians and managers have learned their fundamentals in WYBC’s office and studio on the first floor of Hendrie Hall. But in October, the station moved off campus and across the Green to a commercial building at 142 Temple Street after being forced out of its space by the University.
The move was precipitated by Yale’s decision to renovate Hendrie for the exclusive use of the School of Music. The Associated Student Agencies, which also occupy space in Hendrie, will probably move to another campus location, but administrators said that no University space could be found for WYBC, which paid no rent for its space in Hendrie. The University argues that the station is not a traditional undergraduate organization, since it has paid non-student employees and an advertising sales agreement with Cox Broadcasting, and that it can afford to pay for its own space.
WYBC general manager Katherine Kunz '03 says that having to move was “upsetting” for the station, and that having to pay rent for the first time will cause them financial difficulties. But Kunz also says the new space—which includes offices, four studios, and advanced equipment—will make for a better station. “There are more options for people here now,” she says. “And the excitement is great.”
To help pay its rent, the station renegotiated its contract with Cox, agreeing to drop its hip-hop programming in favor of more mainstream urban music. For the past several years, WYBC-FM has been broadcasting a syndicated “urban contemporary” format with little on-air involvement by students. But in 1998 WYBC bought an AM station in order to give students an opportunity to produce their own shows and get on-air exposure.
A Practical Take on Intelligence
For many years, researchers have been puzzled by the frequent gap between high scores on standard intelligence tests and success in life. Robert Sternberg, the IBM Professor of Psychology and Education, believes he knows why.
“The problem is that traditional IQ and other tests of academic intelligence are too narrow,” says Sternberg, who directs the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise (PACE) Center at Yale, which was dedicated in February.
Instead of attempting to measure such abstractions as IQ, Sternberg has developed a way to test what he calls “practical intelligence,” the kind of common-sense savvy that characterizes people who excel in a wide variety of fields, from carpenters and musicians to athletes and business professionals.
In recent studies, Sternberg and psychologist Elena Grigorenko, the PACE Center’s deputy director, examined the relationship among three aspects of intelligence—the analytical, creative, and practical—and the ability of people in rural Kenya and urban Russia to cope with their environment.
In the Kenya study, published in the journal Intelligence 29, Sternberg compared the scores of 85 schoolchildren on typical academic tests with their knowledge of local plants that were useful in making herbal medicines. “Ninety-five percent of these kids have parasitic infections, so this kind of practical intelligence is serious stuff,” says Sternberg, who found a negative correlation between tests that predict success in school and the plant test, which measures a kind of life-and-death common sense.
“For many people, spending time developing academic skills is lost time,” says Sternberg, who has argued for a broader view of intelligence.
Indeed, a study of 452 Russian women and 293 men, coauthored with Grigorenko and also published in Intelligence 29, suggests that practical intelligence predicts both physical and mental well-being. The researchers administered tests to men and women between the ages of 26 and 60 who were from the Russian city of Veronezh. Sternberg and Grigorenko were interested in the relative importance of various aspects of intelligence in adapting to the rapidly changing environment of the post-Soviet Union era. Of the three types, they found that the practical variety was the best predictor of success.
“We now know that children and adults have important skills that traditional intelligence tests don’t reflect,” says Sternberg.
Turning to the “Tobin Tax”
Many people may dream of having their names live on in history, but being the eponym for a new type of tax probably isn’t what they have in mind. Nevertheless, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics James Tobin is proud to be the father of the “Tobin tax” that is gaining new interest in Europe. He just wishes his idea wasn’t so intimately associated with forces opposed to globalization and free trade.
Tobin, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1972, developed the idea for the tax in 1978 as a response to what he calls “unproductive” speculation in world currency markets. He proposed that nations levy a small (less than 1 percent) tax on currency exchanges to discourage such speculation. The idea did not go far at the time, but the recent volatility of currency markets has caused governments to take another look at the tax. The premiers of France and Germany have endorsed the idea, and European Union finance ministers gave it serious consideration at their most recent meeting.
The tax has also become a cause célèbre for opponents of the new global economy such as those who disrupted World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and Davos. Anti-globalization groups say it would raise money to aid developing countries and, as the French taxe-Tobin advocacy group ATTAC says, “put sand in the gears of speculation.”
Tobin still stands behind his idea, but he has gone to great pains in recent months to distance himself from his admirers. “I’m an economist, and like most economists an advocate of free trade,” Tobin told Der Spiegel. “Moreover, I support the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—everything that these movements are attacking. They’re misusing my name.” Tobin says the tax’s stabilizing influence on the global economy—not the revenue it would provide for international development—is its most important feature.
Sporting Life
Frisbee Teams Uphold “Spirit of the Game”
Not so long ago, the idea of a collegiate frisbee team was absurd enough to inspire a parody article in the pages of this magazine by humorist Calvin Trillin '57. In November 1970, Trillin wrote of a fictional Yale team concerned about injuries, the big game with Hobart, and the “controversial M-wing formation defense.” But whether Trillin knew it or not, a real sport called ultimate frisbee was being developed at just that time. It would surely only be a matter of time before “ultimate” spread to the University whose students first had the idea of tossing Mrs. Frisbie’s pie tins for fun.
Unlike Trillin’s imagined squad of disc-hurling Frank Merriwells, though, Yale’s real ultimate teams reflect the decidedly countercultural nature of the sport. The differences start with the team’s names: No Bulldogs are to be found on the ultimate field. The men’s team is called Superfly, the women’s team Ramona, after the children’s book heroine. (Both teams are among the 35 “club sports” registered with the athletics department.) Another distinction is what players call the “spirit of the game,” which allows players to make their own penalty calls instead of relying on conventional referees.
The basic idea of ultimate is similar to football or other field games. There are seven players on each team who try to pass the frisbee down the field and catch it in the endzone to score. Contact is prohibited. Superfly co-captain Matt Prince '02 says the game requires conditioning (teams may play up to four games a day during tournaments), speed, and intelligence. “Some of the rules are counterintuitive, and you can’t really translate what you know from other sports,” says Prince. “So you have to learn quickly.”
The Ultimate Players Association divides the country into regions for tournament play; 16 of the nation’s best college teams make the national tournament every year. Ramona won the national tournament in 1998, which is the last year Superfly qualified. Both teams say their chances of returning to nationals are strong this year.
Men’s co-captain Ameet Talwalker '02 says that ultimate is becoming a more competitive and athletic endeavor across the country, something that he worries may affect the game’s unique culture. “Even three years ago, teams used to cheer their opponents after the game, and that doesn’t happen anymore,” says Talwalker. “And there are observers now at some tournaments to settle disputes. But for now I think the spirit of the game is pretty strong.”  |
