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review
Spring 2002 Vol.2 no.1
 BERKELEY
science FROM THE EDITOR
review
EDITOR–IN–CHIEF
Dear Readers,
Eran Karmon

MANAGING EDITOR A lot’s been happening at the BSR. For one, we’ve fully quintupled our circulation for
Temina Madon Issue 2, up to a healthy 5000. We’ve also added two new sections to the magazine.
Turn to Labscope (p. 4) for a lively look at recent Cal-produced breakthroughs, and read
ART DIRECTOR through Biotech Beat (p. 6) for high points of the Bay Area biotechnology industry. Plus,
Una Ren we’ve broken new journalistic ground by printing an actual picture of someone actu-
ally naked on the actual South Pole (The Back Page).
CONTENT EDITOR
Jessica Palmer Your old favorites are here, too. Probable lunatic Alan Moses is back with his Last
Angry Man column (p. 37), this time settling for good any debate over the definition of
CURRENT B RIEFS EDITOR “Life.” And Aaron Pierce has written a wonderful feature (p. 18) about how $350 mil-
Heidi Ledford lion and a mile-and-a-half deep hole in the ground may tell us how the Sun shines.

COPY EDITOR
The BSR is about bringing science to the public in a way that’s understandable and
Donna Sy
exciting. Because science is, well, generally pretty exciting. We know it is, because all
EDITORS of us are active members of Berkeley’s research community. We’re graduate students
Joel Kamnitzer in the sciences, engineering, math, and the humanities—and the BSR is what we do in
Colin McCormick our spare time, because we think people outside the sciences and even outside Berke-
Jane McGonigal ley should know about what Berkeley researchers do.
Teddy Varno
Come be part of the BSR. Visit us on the web at http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu to
ART AND LAYOUT find out how to become a contributing writer, editor, or designer for what my mom
Aaron Golub has called “the greatest magazine of the new millennium.” We’re always looking for
Dan Handwerker shockingly well written and compelling stories or a spare hand at the Mac when layout
Jinjer Larson time comes. So come on, tell the world about all the great research that comes out of
Merek Siu Cal. I will give you a dollar.*

WEBMASTER
All the best,
Tony Wilson

SPECIAL THANKS
David Perlman
Charles Petit Eran Karmon

P RINTER
Fricke-Parks Inc.
©2002 Berkeley Science Review. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without express permission of the publishers. Published
with financial assistance from the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, the Associated Students of the University of California,
and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Publication Committee. Berkeley Science Review is not an official publication of the University of California, Berkeley, or the ASUC. The content
in this publication does not necessarily reflect the views of the University or the ASUC. *Dollars will be paid in “BSR Fun Cash,” which is useless.
BERKELEY
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Features
18 The Ghost in the Sun
Hunting down the elusive
solar neutrino.

By Aaron Pierce

28 Science Illustrated
Training artists to bring
complex concepts into
living color.
By Jessica Palmer and Una Ren
 On the cover:
Artwork by Jennifer Kane, a
first year student in the Science
Illustration Progam at UCSC.
Read about it on page 28.

Departments
Current Briefs
7 Telling Stories
Why do autistic children have trouble
describing emotions?
Perspective
37 Life: Wanted Dead or Alive
Is a goldfish alive? What about a tub of
margarine? Alan Moses sorts it out.

8 Correcting Keratoconus The University

Modeling the cornea’s topography
may lead to improved contact lenses. 12 Spin Doctors
Why more and more Berkeley professors
9 Mapping the Net are splitting time between the lab and the
boardroom.
Even in cyberspace, geography
matters.
The Back Page
10 Tiny OS BSR Exclusive:
Shrinking software for networked Big ole’ naked guy on the South Pole!
devices.

4 Labscope 6 Biotech Beat

Drawing with electrons. What’s happening in Bay Area
biotech (sorry, no job postings).
Stamping out tuberculosis in African buffalo.
Controlling computers via a
17 Book Review
glove interface. Annie Alexander and the UC museums.

A silicon Campanile. 27 Weird Science

Ken and Barbie meet Godzilla.
Bacteria that band together.
40 Quanta (heard on campus)
 Labscope
Joshua Garret SILICON POP-UP BOOKS.
Nearly 87 years after its completion, Elliot Hui has figured out how to make the Campanile fifty-two thousand times smaller.
Hui, a graduate student in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a researcher at the Berkeley
Sensor and Actuator Research Center, has built a miniscule model of Sather Tower to demonstrate a new technique for assem-
bling three-dimensional silicon microstructures. The structures are designed to initially lie flat. Then with a single push of a tiny
probe, the pieces rise up and precisely arrange themselves, much like the pages in a child’s “pop-up” book. Part of the finished
Campanile is shown at right, standing an impressive 1.8 millimeters tall.

Jane McGonigal WRAPPED AROUND YOUR LITTLE FINGER.

Researchers at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center are developing computer control systems small enough to fit on a
fingernail. Graduate students Seth Hollar, John Perng and Brian Fisher have designed a glove that translates hand gestures into
computer-recognizable symbols. Although the glove is much larger than the 1 mm device the team ultimately hopes to create,
it proves that the technology for a tiny virtual keyboard works. Electronic chips called accelerometers are placed on each finger
of the glove to measure the force and direction of movement of the user’s hand. These signals are digitized and transmitted to the
computer, which uses special software to match a movement to its database of gestures. In addition to paving the way for the
advent of fingernail-sized digital controllers, the researchers say that potential applications of their glove include virtual musical
instruments and American Sign Language interpreters.

Eran Karmon GESUNDHEIT!

Bovine tuberculosis (BTB) is raging among Cape buffalo in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Berkeley researchers led by
Professor Wayne M. Getz of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management are investigating strategies for
containing the disease. While seemingly benign to its buffalo hosts, BTB is transmissible and harmful to other animals. Preda-
tors, particularly lions, are being killed by the pathogen after eating infected buffalo carcasses. Plans for controlling the epidemic
have ranged from killing all infected buffalo to building a large fence across the New Jersey-sized preserve. Getz’s team is using
methods from epidemiology, field ecology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), microbiology, mathematical modeling, and
statistics to understand the important ecological processes behind disease spread and to assess possible management plans.

Heidi Ledford ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER.

David Zusman’s lab in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology is studying a species of bacteria that really knows how to
stick together when times get tough. When food is scarce, tens of thousands of Myxococcus xanthus cells congregate to form a
fruiting body that contains dormant spores capable of surviving the food shortage. Forming a fruiting body is a complex task that
requires extensive communication, movement, and adhesion of cells. To understand how these small bacteria carry out such a
monumental task, Zusman’s lab has isolated mutant bacteria that are unable to aggregate properly. The lab has found a number
of gene products that are important for sensing chemical signals in the environment. M. xanthus has nine different signaling
pathways that sense and respond to chemical changes in the environment; the ubiquitous E. coli has only one. By characterizing
these pathways, Zusman and his colleagues are uncovering how these single cells work together to form complex structures.
Colin McCormick DESIGNER ELECTRONS.
A group led by physics professor Joel Fajans is pioneering ways to trap groups of pure electrons (called “electron plasmas”) using
magnetic and electric fields. While previous researchers have generated their electrons by heating pieces of tungsten metal,
Fajans uses a photocathode material that emits electrons when exposed to light. By carefully controlling the pattern of light
exposure, his group can organize emitted electrons into highly complex patterns. The patterns are allowed to evolve for a time,
and are then imaged by a CCD camera on a phosphor screen. Aside from improving techniques for the control of charged
plasmas, this research has led to a better understanding of the flow of two-dimensional fluids, including the behavior of Jupiter’s
Great Red Spot. Learn more at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fajans.

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 Biotech Beat

HERE’S WHAT’S HOT IN BAY AREA BIOTECH

New kidney cancer drug
A new class of anti-cancer drugs, angiogenesis inhibitors, has proven effective in treating
kidney cancer. National Cancer Institute trials show that biotech pioneer Genentech’s
drug Avastin increases survival, or at least slows the progression of the disease. Can-
cer cells secrete substances that promote angiogenesis, the formation of new blood
vessels which deliver oxygen to a rapidly growing mass of tumor cells. Angiogenesis
inhibitors like Avastin block this process, thus starving cancer cells of oxygen. Avastin
has also shown positive results in colorectal and breast cancer. It is expected to enter
into phase III clinical trials, the last stage of testing before regulatory approval.

Tough rice
Be on the lookout for a new, “tougher” strain of rice. The Plant Sciences division of
genomics-based drug discovery company Exelixis was awarded an NSF grant to iden-
tify genes in rice that will boost resistance to stress and disease. Exelixis will use its
gene activation technology to find genes in rice that are responsible for “turning on”
and “turning off ” physical characteristics of the plant. Development of a new resis-
tant strain of rice could improve production of one of the world’s major food crops.

New breast tumor biopsy techniques

Bay Area companies Endocare and Sanarus have developed two new minimally inva-
sive breast tumor diagnosis and removal procedures. Sanarus representatives say the
new procedures are less expensive and more reliable than open surgery. Each year,
over a million women require breast biopsies, 80% of which reveal benign tumors.
One of the new procedures is for performing breast biopsies, and the other is for
removing fibroadenomas, the most common form of benign tumor. In the new bi-
opsy procedure, a small needle is placed into the affected tissue; the tissue is then
“stick frozen” and removed to check for cancerous growth. The fibroadenoma system
uses cryoablation, a technique in which extremely cold temperatures destroy tissue,
to remove benign tumors. Cryoablation has previously been used to treat prostate
cancer. Both new procedures can be performed in the doctor’s office using only local
anesthesia, and leave minimal scars.

Emily Singer
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 Current Briefs
TELLING STORIES
For some children, storytelling
doesn’t always come naturally.
veryone knows that you can
E learn a lot by listening to chil-
dren. But for Molly Losh, the
way a child tells a story reveals much
more than the narrative itself. A
graduate student in UC Berkeley’s
Department of Psychology, Losh
investigates the way children tell stories
so that she can learn more about the
basic skills they use to construct
narratives.
Losh focuses on children with autism, a
disorder that prevents normal develop-
ment of social interaction and communi-
cation skills. “Narratives occur fre-
quently in everyday life for children,
such as during bedtime stories, telling a
parent about their day at school, and
pretend play with peers,” she says.
“Difficulties producing or comprehend-
ing narratives may severely restrict a
child’s ability to engage in social
interactions.” Working together with
her UC Berkeley mentor, the late Lisa
Capps, and with UCLA researcher
Christopher Thurber, Losh recently
completed a study showing that
knowledge and communication of
emotional states are key factors in
storytelling. In addition to providing
information about the linguistic and
cognitive aspects of narrative, Losh
believes that these data could give
psychologists new tools for identifying
“ T he frog ate the
bug and made
his mouth sad.”
and meeting the
special needs of
autistic children.
In the study, Losh and
her team worked
with three groups of
children: children
with autism, children Tell me a story. Molly Losh found noted that the autistic
that autistic children have trouble
with milder forms of describing emotions.
mental retardation,
and typically-developing children.
Researchers asked the children to look
through the wordless picture-book Frog
on His Own and then to recount the
frog’s escapades. The researchers
analyzed audio and video recordings of
the children’s stories for grammar,
structure, and six categories of narrative
devices, including “sound effects” (“The
frog went splash!”), “attention-getters”
(“WOW! Look at that!”), and “hedges”
(“I think the frog got away”).
Losh and her fellow researchers
discovered that the most significant
difference among the three groups is in
their ability to explain the characters’
emotions. Although all three groups
used words to describe feelings equally
often, children with autism and mild
retardation gave a reason for identified
emotions only 7% of the time, com-
pared to 25% of the time for typically-
developing children. Instead, children in
the first two groups tended simply to
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state the emotions without
mentioning any cause, as if
the feelings had spontane-
ously arisen. Even when
these children mentioned
the underlying reasons for
an emotion, they generally
failed to establish a cause-
and-effect relationship
between the two. “An’ the
baby was crying. The frog
was trying to get away.”
Merek Siu/BSR Losh and her colleagues also
children often talked about
emotions as external
physical expressions rather than internal
states: “The frog ate the bug and made
his mouth sad,” and “Her face looks
mad.” Neither of the other two groups
of children exhibited this tendency.
The difficulties in explaining emotional
states were unexpected, because children
with autism did not experience the same
difficulties when explaining cause-and-
effect relationships for actions in the
story. To explore the implications of her
findings, Losh has started a new research
project with “very high-functioning”
autistic children. Because their overall
language ability is more comparable to
that of typically-developing children,
Losh expects that differences in their
narrative skills will be more clearly the
result of lack of emotional knowledge
rather than to weaker communication
skills in general.
Jane McGonigal
 Current Briefs
CORRECTING KERATOCONUS
Corneal shape modeling
for contact lens design.
rian Barsky has a problem. Like
B millions of others, his vision is
not as clear as it should be.
Unlike most people’s vision problems,
though, Barsky’s stem from a rare
condition called keratoconus.
Keratoconus results in small bumps on
the cornea that distort vision by
disrupting the path of light through the
eye. Because the bumps are irregular,
and their pattern differs from person to
person, the condition is difficult to
treat using standard corrective lenses.
Like many who suffer from keratoco-
nus, Barsky spent years trying on
various standard contact lenses and
spectacles before being told that his
condition could only be treated with
corneal replacement surgery. Unwill-
ing to accept a risky surgery, Barsky, a
professor of computer science at UC
Berkeley, decided to use his computer
graphics expertise to design contact
lenses that could fit the cornea
perfectly, even in the presence of
aberrations like kerataconic bumps.
From Barsky’s frustration rose the
OPTICAL project, an interdisciplinary
effort between the Departments of
Computer Science and the School of
Optometry. For Barsky, the need for a
union between the two departments
was clear. “I went to the medical
courtesy/Michael Downes
Big Creepy Eye. Raw data taken from
a videokeratograph machine. The distor-
tion in the ring pattern is caused by a
keratoconic bump on the patient’s cornea.
library, studied books on contact
lenses, and realized that the mathemati-
cal modeling used in contact lens
design was not as sophisticated as the
techniques used in the geometric
modeling community,” he says.
The group began by improving the
modeling techniques used in corneal
measurement devices called
videokeratographs. A videokerato-
graph measures corneal shape by
projecting a ring pattern onto a
patient’s cornea and taking video
images of the results. The machine uses
a simple algorithm to compute app-
roximate values for the curvature of
the cornea based on the distortion of
the ring pattern in the images acquired.
OPTICAL researchers demonstrated
that current standard algorithms
produce curvature results that change
based on the direction in which the
patient looks during the exam and the
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angle of the corneal bump relative to
the camera. According to Barsky, the
discrepancies in curvature values “show
that the instruments are flawed and
produce erroneous measurements of
patients’ corneas.”
To improve upon the standard recon-
struction algorithm, Barsky’s research
group has created a new algorithm
which starts by guessing a shape, like a
simple dome, for the cornea that has
been scanned. This shape is run
through a simulation of the
videokeratograph system and itera-
tively modified until it produces a scan
that matches that of the real cornea.
Using this new surface, the researchers
can calculate highly accurate values for
curvature and other geometric
properties. The corneal models can
also aid ophthalmologists in planning
delicate corneal surgical procedures.
Eventually, the shape models will be
used to create prototype contact lenses
that exactly match a patient’s eyes.
Although he hasn’t yet managed to give
himself perfect vision, Brian Barsky has
opened a new path for collaborative
research in computer graphics and
optometry. His work has the potential
to provide improved vision not only to
sufferers of keratoconus, but to anyone
who wears contact lenses.
Michael Downes
Learn more about the OPTICAL
project at:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/optical/
INTERNET GEOGRAPHY
In the digital age,
place still matters.

n an Internet world

I where geographic
boundaries dissolve at
the click of a mouse,
Internet geographer Matthew
Zook is a bit of an oddball.
While most in his field focus on Wherever you go, there
how the World Wide Web is changing you are. Density of
internet activity in the
the global landscape, Zook is intent on U.S. is concentrated in
major cities (courtesy/
proving that physical location still Matthew Zook).
matters. To address this issue, Zook–a “Assigning geographi-
graduate student in UC Berkeley’s cal locations to what takes place on the
Department of City and Regional ‘spaceless’ Internet is especially Internet utility program called “whois,”
Planning–creates maps that test how difficult,” Zook says. His solution is to Zook strategically gathers sublists of
closely Internet terrain parallels its plot WWW domain names–like domain names by requesting the names
real-world counterpart. amazon.com and nokia.fi–on standard of all dot coms starting with a specific
city, state, country, and global maps group of letters. For example “amaz”
“This project arose in response to one based on the postal codes used to returns thousands of results like
of the great myths of the Internet age, register the names. Zook admits it’s amazon.com, amazingrace.com, and
this widespread idea in the mid-1990s not an ideal method, because his amazeyourfriends.com. Once he has a
that the Internet was going to bring research shows that a little more than complete list of names, he uses several
about the end of geography or the end 25% of domain names are actually custom-made computer programs to
registered at a gather contact information for each
C yberspace is actually reinforcing postal code
other than
domain. He completed the first round
of data collection in July of 1998, and
the dominance of cities. where their now has a full and total account of all
activity is domain names registered through that
of cities,” Zook explains. “People made taking place. Nevertheless, he main- date.
similar predictions about the tele- tains that domain names’ postal codes
phone. So this really was an effort to are the best available indicators for the Zook uses the data to create maps and
provide empirical proof that cities were location of Internet activity. charts of a range of geographical
in fact a central part of the Internet.” locations. All of the maps he has made
Figuring out how to make the maps So Zook has embarked on a mission to show that Internet activity is centered
and prove this hypothesis is anything collect postal codes for millions of dot- in urban areas. “There should be
but obvious. coms, dot-orgs, and dot-nets. Using an nothing surprising about this, since

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 Current Briefs
cities have always been the primary
source of innovation,” Zook says. His
results indicate that cyberspace is
actually reinforcing traditional urban
structure, not making it obsolete as so
many have predicted.
For Zook, it’s important to keep
reminding people that no matter how
virtual our lives become, real places
continue to matter. “Although the
power of the Internet does open up
new possibilities for long-range
collaboration and even new spaces of
TINY OS
There’s a new kind of radical
in downtown Berkeley.
rom their perch on the 13th
F floor of the “Power Bar” build-
ing next to the Berkeley BART
station, David Culler and his students
are preparing a revolution. Culler
(who is currently on Industrial Leave
from Berkeley to build the new Intel
Research Laboratory @ Berkeley) is a
member of the “Endeavour Expedi-
tion”, a collaborative project within the
Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences, whose stated
goal is to “achieve nothing less than
radically enhancing human understand-
ing through the use of information
interaction within cyberspace,” Zook
says, “it also exhibits much of the
traditional unevenness that has
characterized urban and economic
development throughout history.
There is a much more complicated
dynamic involving the connection of
specific places to global networks.”
Zook urges us to remember that we are
both “place-rooted and networked at
the same time.”
Jane McGonigal
Merek Siu/BSR
Change the World. David Culler has teamed
up with Intel to create operating systems for
miniscule networked devices.
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technology.” Culler’s role in the
revolution is to network tiny wireless
sensors, enabling applications that
range from monitoring glucose levels
in humans to monitoring weather on
Mars.
Culler’s overall mission is to increase
the power and capabilities of networks
of computers while at the same time
shrinking the size of the hardware.
Higher capabilities and smaller size are
what computer technology is headed
towards. “If automotive technology
tracked computer technology, cars
today would get 10,000 miles per
gallon of gas, they’d move at 20 times
the speed of sound, and they would
also be three inches long,” Culler says.
The Endeavour project began in 1998.
Its first goal was developing a mini-
motherboard, with all the basic
hardware components of a regular
computer, sized down to a device
exactly the size of a stack of four
quarters. The hardware was first
developed by a team led by Kris Pister,
a professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences. Originally the size of golf
balls, the devices were brought to
Culler and his team, who wrote the
operating system, known as Tiny OS,
for them.
In addition to a tiny computer chip,
each device has a thermometer and a
photocell that allows it to measure the
temperature and light of the environ-
ment it is placed in. It is also equipped
with a radio, which allows it to
communicate with the other devices in
its system, and a tiny battery. Some of
the Tiny OS devices have even been
designed with solar cells to replace the
batteries.
Creating a Tiny OS for tiny sensors
represents a special challenge. Operat-
ing systems on this scale have to handle
simultaneous input from multiple
sources. They are limited by their small
size and low power availability. And
their design has to be versatile enough
to handle the wide range of potential
applications possible for microsensors.
Some of these problems were ad-
dressed through the hardware design in
Pister’s lab. Culler’s lab dealt with
software problems by creating a
“microthreading” operating system,
which is able to handle multiple levels
of input, allowing short processing
events to be run immediately by briefly
interrupting long running tasks. The
two teams are now collaborating to
find ways to enhance both the effi-
ciency of the hardware and the
capabilities of its operating system.
And, of course, they want to make
them even smaller.
Although still in development, Tiny
OS-linked devices have already found a
practical application. Last spring,
during the height of California’s energy
crisis, Culler and his team placed a
number of devices inside Berkeley’s
Cory Hall to monitor how much power
lighting and temperature control units
were using, and how much of it was
excessive.
Another application that Culler
foresees is monitoring the condition of
structures. For example,Tiny OS
devices could be scattered on the
surface of the Bay Bridge to monitor
how its movements are affected by
traffic, weather, and earthquakes.
Ideally, says Culler, the bridge would be
fitted with millions of the devices,
which would recognize trouble when,
for example, a crack is forming or
when the structure begins to move in
an unusual way.
Just a small part of the Endeavour
project, Culler and Pister’s micro-
sensors can be used for an enormous
range of applications. “Your imagination
can run with it,” says Culler. One can
only imagine the impact of the rest of
the project, whose mission statement
claims it will “make possible the
enhanced leverage of human activities,
experiences, and intellect.”
April Mo
Learn More:
Intel Research Laboratory @ Berkeley:
http://www.intel-research.net/
berkeley/index.htm
The Endeavour Expedition:
http://endeavour.cs.berkeley.edu/
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 The University

SPIN DOCTORS
Why more and more professors are spinning
biotech companies off of research.
Emily Singer
ver wonder what your biology professor does in his people who love to ask questions and find answers. They

E free time? Play tennis? Collect stamps? How about

found a multi-million dollar biotech company?
must have a strong belief in their own ideas and a very strong
ego. Professors must be willing to act on their ideas and
able to persuade people to give them money to support those
According to Cherisa Yarkin, director of economic research ideas.” He adds that many professors “have worked for years
and assessment at the Industry-University Cooperative Re- on a technical issue that may have therapeutic uses. Moving
search Program, the into a company that
number of California is focused on capital-
based biotechnology B
“ iotech is a way of developing potentially izing on this knowl-
firms founded by UC revolutionary applications of new biological edge is a natural
scientists has dramati- knowledge on a scale that would be impossible thing to do.”
cally increased over within the limitations of an NIH grant.”
the last twenty years. Jacob Mayfield, a
Yarkin’s research post-doctoral fellow
shows that the number of UC Berkeley faculty founding at UC Berkeley who has had several advisors involved in the
biotech companies has increased by nearly a factor of five biotech industry, agrees with Owen’s assessment. “It’s a good
since 1980. thing for scientists to think of applications for their tech-
nologies. It’s useful to everyone.”
W. Geoffrey Owen, chair of the Department of Molecular
and Cellular Biology, and a founder of the digital imaging Professors trying their hand at biotech are not without sup-
company Viasense, is not surprised that many professors have port from the University. There is a significant interdepen-
decided to start their own companies. Beyond the economic dence between the UC system and biotech that encourages
motivation, he says that many of his colleagues see biotech the flux to flourish. Yarkin says that out of 228 California
“as a way of developing potentially revolutionary applica- biotech firms studied, 68% have UC founders. UC Berke-
tions of new biological knowledge on a scale that would be ley makes a particularly strong contribution to California
impossible within the limitations of an NIH grant.” biotech research staff, providing 30% of all PhDs employed
in the state’s biotech industry.
Owen suggests that moving to biotech after a long and dis-
tinguished career in academia is a natural step for some pro- Another factor that has helped to foster the exchange be-
fessors. He says that many of the same qualities that are tween the University and biotechnology industry is the Bay
necessary for success in academic science are important in Area’s unique investment environment. Carol Mimura, as-
founding a company. “People who do basic research are sociate director at UC Berkeley’s Office of Technology Li-
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censing, explains, “Venture capitalists came to the Bay Area
to invest in Silicon Valley and then stayed for the next wave.”
This easy access to investors has spurred the entrepreneur-
ial spirit. “If the infrastructure for funding wasn’t there,
these companies never would have been able to get off the
ground.” Other institutions, like the University of Michi-
gan, have asked Berkeley for advice about expanding their
links to biotechnology, but have been less successful because
they lack the venture community. Mimura also notes that
the biotech community in the Bay Area can be a draw to
prospective faculty, who know they will have consulting op-
portunities available to them.
While the biotechnology industry depends on UC scientists
for staff and ideas to turn a profit, the UC system depends
on industry for some of its funding. Because it owns patent
rights to all ideas and technologies invented by its faculty,
the UC system can create revenue by licensing technologies
to private companies for development .
aculty members who want to be involved in the develop-
F ment of their products can contact the Office of Tech-
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MCB Chair W. Geof frey
Owen. “Moving into a com-
pany that is focused on capi-
talizing on this knowledge is
Merek Siu/BSR a natural thing to do.”
nology Transfer, which helps campus inventors bring their
technology into the commercial sector by facilitating the
patent process and distributing royalties to the inventors
and UC Berkeley. Mimura says the University will choose
to license an idea to the inventor if the patent needs special
know-how to develop. “It is often only the inventor who
has the drive and vision to bring the idea to product. Start-
ups take extraordinary risks in taking nothing and turning
it into something.”
The university has taken steps to ensure that professors in-
volved in private ventures do not neglect their academic
duties. Mimura says that an employee of a UC can only
have one full time job. “The University doesn’t want to
have faculty straddling two commitments. Professors need
to take their teaching jobs seriously.” Mimura explains that
there are several polices in place to ensure a professor’s pri-
mary commitment is to the University. Following the lead
of the NIH, the University only allows professors to consult
with a company for one calendar day per week. This is moni-
tored at the department level, as faculty must report all
outside commitments to their chair. Mimura says profes-
13
 The University
sors cannot hold full-time outside positions, such as CEO
or chief scientific officer. “Ideally they will act as big pic-
ture strategists without any daily responsibilities.”

In addition to this UC-wide policy, a conflict of interest com-

mittee exists to monitor and vote on questionable activi-
ties, such as when a company gives a gift of money to a lab.
Mimura says, “The University has policies in place, but also
relies on the integrity of the faculty until shown otherwise.
It is a self-regulating process.”

Mayfield questions how these restrictions can actually be put

into practice. He says, “No faculty member limits him or
herself to a 40-hour week, so how do you assess what one Postdoc Jacob
Mayfield. “It’s a
day per week really means?” He also says that because lab good thing for sci-
research and company research are so often closely related, entists to think of
applications for
it can be difficult to determine the percentage of time spent Merek Siu/BSR their technologies.”

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thinking of ideas for the university versus time spent think-
ing for biotech.
With such a close intellectual relationship, have the bound-
aries between academia and biotech become too blurred?
Both Owen and Mimura think academia maintains its atmo-
sphere of scientific freedom. Owen says, “The boundary is
still well-defined. Academics are anxious to preserve the
boundary because of the negative implications of diminished
academic freedom.” Mimura adds that the increasing num-
bers of faculty entering the world of biotech “shouldn’t
change the ‘culture’ of the university. Professors are under-
standing of the University’s mission to foster pure research
environment and don’t exploit it.”
Mayfield points out that there may be more subtle effects.
He feels that the lines are blurred in what the professor’s
and lab members’ involvement should be in the company
and technology being licensed. He gives the example of a
PI becoming aware of proprietary technology that can help
lab members in their experiments. If they perform a suc-
cessful experiment with that technology, lab members can
“ I t is often only the inventor
who has the drive and vision
to bring the idea to product.
Start-ups take extraordinary
risks in taking nothing and
turning it into something.”
then become confused about what role this company plays
in ownership and use of the results. Mayfield says this situ-
ation brings up an entirely new issue. “Working out legal
issues isn’t something academics had to worry about in the
past. It is difficult right now because there isn’t a set policy
on what is acceptable and what is not.”
How students are impacted by some faculty’s double role as
professor and consultant is unclear. “Professors are very busy
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From curing cancer to engineering plant genes,
the research goals of Cal professors are now the
industry objectives of Bay Area biotech compa-
nies. Here’s a run-down of what some private
companies founded by UC Berkeley faculty in the
past decade are up to.
Tularik, Inc. (1991) uses gene regulation to target
specific disease-causing proteins, enabling re-
searchers to develop oral medications with fewer
side effects.
Cerus Corp. (1991) produces technology that pre-
vents DNA and RNA replication in blood cells,
making the bacteria and viruses in blood harm-
less and transfusions safer.
Exelixis, Inc. (1995) develops drugs to combat
disease-causing genes responsible for diabetes,
obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.
Genteric, Inc. (1997) specializes in creating new
delivery platforms for gene therapies, including
the oral “gene pill.”
Mendel Biotechnology (1997) researches plant
genes to develop new medicinal and agricultural
products.
Viasense (1997) uses principles from visual neuro-
biology to build software that encodes, stores, and
delivers digital video.
Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc (1998) and DNA Sci-
ences, Inc. (1998) both develop oral drugs to com-
bat chronic diseases through gene therapy.
Syrrx, Inc. (1999) uses cutting-edge robotics and
molecular tools to determine the shapes of pro-
teins encoded by the human genome, informa-
tion that will lead to more effective drugs.
Renovis, Inc. (2000) specializes in the develop-
ment of gene therapies for neurological and psy-
chiatric diseases and disorders.
15
 The University
people. Researching and teaching both take time. When
someone spends a day per week away from campus, they
have less time for other duties. I can see the potential for
problems, but as yet I haven’t seen any evidence,” Owen
says.
to be professors, but now they are exposed to alternative ca-
reers.” He emphasizes, “This is a good thing because now
large numbers of companies are doing biotechnology and stu-
dents have new opportunities for rewarding careers.”

While the possible negative impact is unclear, there is cer-

tainly a positive implication for students of the biotech-savvy
advisor. Owen feels that this trend has broadened the
professor’s traditional role. “Professors now have the experi-
ence of life outside the environment of the university. Lots of
professors used to see themselves as preparing their students
Emily Singer received an MS in neuroscience
from UCSD in July 2001. She is currently a
research associate at Exelixis, Inc.

This Internet thing is going to be really big.

sciencereview.berkeley.edu
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 Book Review
history of the professionalization of
ANNIE ALEXANDER AND THE science that Stein could have drawn

UC MUSEUMS from to place Alexander’s life in com-

parative context. This was not, how-
Teddy Varno ever, Stein’s intention. Her main goal
was simply to narrate the life of one of
nnie Montague tology from reaching its the most important figures in the his-

A Alexander was a
remarkable
woman. Heir to a fortune
full potential. Stein does
an excellent job of explor-
ing how Alexander used
tory of science at Berkeley, and in this
she has succeeded.

built on Hawaiian sugar, her roles as a philanthro-

she founded and funded pist and a naturalist to de- TeddyVarno is a 1st year graduate
for decades both the UC fine her identity and to student in the History of Science
Museum of Vertebrate overcome the constrictive and Technology program at UC
Zoology and the UC Mu- gender expectations of Berkeley.
seum of Paleontology. early twentieth-century
With her partner Louise On Her Own Terms: Annie Berkeley and Oakland.
Montague Alexander and
Kellogg, she took to the the Rise of Science in the
field and collected speci- American West, Barbara Alexander was never
R. Stein (Berkeley: Univer-
mens for the museums sity of California Press, comfortable in cities; she
from locales as distant as 2001), 397 pp. was happiest spending her
Egypt and Alaska. At a days in the natural realm
time when social norms proscribed and sleeping under the stars. From the
women’s activities to the domestic moment she watched a three-foot
realm, Alexander built research insti- boulder crush her father at Victoria
tutions and made significant contribu- Falls in 1904 through her final trip at
tions to science. age eighty to Baja California, the semi-
nal events in Alexander’s life occurred
In On Her Own Terms, Barbara R. Stein far from the city. Stein, a scientist fa-
tells the fascinating story of a woman miliar with the rigors of the field, has
who, for all her achievements, shunned recaptured Alexander and Kellogg’s
publicity throughout her life and has numerous expeditions in minute de-
remained relatively unknown. Using tail and with telling anecdotes. It is
Alexander’s extensive correspondence through these portions of On Her Own
with friends and colleagues, Stein ex- Terms that we meet the real Annie
plores the intimate details of her life. Alexander.
Alexander’s close professional relation-
ship with naturalist Joseph Grinnell The major weakness of On Her Own
strongly boosted the young Museum of Terms is that it makes little attempt to
Vertebrate Zoology, while her some- place Stein into her historical context.
times stormy encounters with John C. There is a sizable body of work on the
Merriam kept the Museum of Paleon- history of women in science and the
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 Feature

THE GHOST IN THE SUN

The best place to figure out how
the Sun shines is two kilometers
under the cold, hard ground. Aaron Pierce

wo kilometers beneath

T the slag heaps of

Sudbury, Ontario, great
science is afoot. Physicists and
engineers have spent the last
decade in a working nickel
mine building one of the
world’s most sophisticated par-
ticle detectors. The quarry is that
most elusive of fundamental par-
ticles, the ghostly neutrino. The
work at the Sudbury Neutrino Obser-
vatory (SNO) is at last starting to pay big
dividends. SNO’s first results were revealed last
June and have already shed some light on a thirty-
year-old puzzle about how the Sun shines.
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The SNO detector was completed two years ago.
It stands over ten stories tall, weighs more than
8000 tons, and cost more than $50 million to build.
Over 100 researchers from 11 institutions in the
United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom
collaborate on SNO. Among the collaborators is a
team of a dozen physicists, engineers, and students
from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(LBNL) and UC Berkeley. Berkeley involvement
reaches back to 1989, when the project was in its
nascent stages.

SNO is focusing on a long-standing puzzle about

the Sun known as the “solar neutrino problem.” For
over fifty years astrophysicists have known that the
Sun generates energy through fusion reactions,
which create neutrinos as by-products. The Sun
produces neutrinos prolifically, and is far and away
Underground. The SNO detector nestled in its subterranean hall. It is over 10
the biggest source of neutrinos that strike the stories tall (see workers for scale), weighs 8000 tons, and has 9200 ultra-sensitive
Earth. By combining the physics of these reactions light detectors packed into a dense, spherical honeycomb pattern.
with complex computer models of the Sun, astro-
physicists have calculated the rate at which solar-produced trol over, but there are some you don’t. You have to run
neutrinos should strike the Earth. Despite the high preci- away from those. We ran as far as we could.” The SNO
experiment ran underground, and
A neutrino could barrel through a block of iron a light-year went deeper than all the other re-
search groups in North America.
in length and emerge completely unscathed. The next deepest experiment is
located in the Homestake gold
sion of these calculations, the observed rate of solar neu- mine in South Dakota, at a depth of 1500 meters.
trino arrival is only half of the expected value. There simply Homestake’s problems with spurious signals from cosmic
are not enough neutrinos. rays are ten times worse than those at SNO.

The unique location of SNO—a full 2000 meters below the
surface of the Earth—is crucial in investigating the solar neu-
trino problem. Layers of rock between the SNO detector
and the Earth’s surface shield the experiment from cosmic
rays, particles that are constantly bombarding the Earth’s
atmosphere. If these cosmic rays were to reach the experi-
ment, they would result in minute flashes of light that would
give a false signal of neutrino detection. Dr. Kevin Lesko,
the leader of the LBNL SNO group, explains, “There are
many [potential sources of false signals] that you have con-
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Neutrinos are difficult to study because they have extraor-
dinarily weak interactions with normal matter. Roughly a
hundred billion neutrinos pass through your fingernail ev-
ery second, with no effect. Neutrinos have no electric
charge, and consequently are unaffected by the electric and
magnetic fields used to detect less exotic particles like elec-
trons and protons. The only force that does affect neutrinos
is known to physicists as the “weak interaction.” True to its
name, this force is so miniscule that as often as not, a neu-
trino could barrel through a block of iron a light-year in
19
 Feature

Excavation. More than 60,000 tons of rock were blasted away and car-
ried to the surface 2 kilometers above to create the experiment’s hall (cour-
tesy/Lorne Erhardt, Queen’s University).

at various levels of the mine to drop off miners. The eleva-

The Idea. Artist’s conception of the SNO detector. The inner
tor car, not much larger than a typical freight elevator, is the
acrylic sphere is filled with heavy water. The sphere is surrounded only route into and out of the experiment, and well over
by a geodesic dome frame, which holds thousands of sensitive
light detectors (courtesy/SNO). 10,000 tons of materials were taken down it during SNO’s
construction phase. Excavating the hall itself was a feat of
civil engineering. It is over 20 meters in diameter, and re-
length and emerge completely unscathed. The vast major-
quired that more than 60,000 tons of rock be blasted and
ity of neutrinos that enter a detector like SNO simply pass
moved to the surface.
right through it, leaving no trace. However, a small handful
do leave a calling card: a tiny flash of light in the SNO de-
Without the intervention of some serious air-conditioning,
tector. By carefully hunting for flashes of light inside the
the experimental level itself would be far less hospitable than
otherwise darkened detector, the scientists at SNO can in-
the elevator. As Marino explains, “Once you go below 1000
fer the presence of a neutrino.
feet, the temperature begins to rise, because of the Earth’s
molten core. By the time you reach the level of the experi-
Journey to the Center of the Earth
ment, the ambient temperature would be 100 degrees [Fahr-
enheit].” Fortunately for the SNO workers, the experimen-
Locating an experiment deep in a mine creates a very strange
tal hall must be kept at a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenheit
work environment. According to Alysia Marino, a Berkeley
to keep the electronics working properly.
graduate student working on the SNO experiment, access-
ing the detector is an arduous process for participating physi-
cists. Before entering the mine, scientists must don stan-
dard mine gear. Decked out in a hard hat, steel-toed boots,
Such a major discrepancy would
and headlamps, they wait for an elevator to take them down imply that astrophysicists are very
a darkened mineshaft to the level of the experiment. The wrong about how the Sun shines.
descent can take nearly fifteen minutes, as the elevator stops
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 How Does the Sun Shine?

The goal of SNO is to distinguish between two pos-

sible solutions of the solar neutrino problem. The
first explanation for the dearth of solar neutrinos is
that astrophysicists’ computer models are drastically
wrong, and that they have grossly overestimated the
number of neutrinos coming from the Sun. This is a
highly troubling option, as the models are built on
well-tested physics. Such a major discrepancy be-
tween theory and observation would imply that as-
trophysicists are very wrong about how the Sun
shines. Skeleton. SNO before light detectors were installed (courtesy/SNO).

Ignoring the neutrino discrepancy, there are good reasons ied the way that the Sun “rings,” and they find that Bahcall’s
to believe that the solar computer models are correct. The model is in excellent agreement with observations.
models are based on well-understood fusion interactions,
which occur at rates determined by the temperature and If Bahcall’s solar model is indeed correct, why are too few
neutrinos observed? The alternative explanation to the so-
lar neutrino problem is that something strange is happening
Something strange is happening to solar neutrinos during their eight-and-a-half-minute flight
to solar neutrinos during their from the Sun to the Earth. Somehow neutrinos that are
eight-and-a-half-minute flight produced in the Sun “disappear” en route. Physicists have
from the Sun to the Earth. proposed that “neutrino oscillation” causes this disappear-
ance. There are three varieties of neutrino: the electron neu-
trino, the only kind produced by the Sun’s fusion reactions,
elemental composition of the Sun. Once a solar model speci- and the more rare muon and tau neutrinos. The theory of
fies the composition of the Sun and its temperature, it is neutrino oscillations postulates that solar
straightforward to calculate fusion interaction rates. The neutrinos, once produced, trans-
most widely accepted solar model was developed over the form back and forth be-
past three decades by Dr. John Bahcall, a physicist at the tween their orig inal
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a UC Berke- electron versions and
ley alumnus. The theory, described by many physicists as one of the other two
“how the Sun shines,” predicts many solar properties to high varieties. When
accuracy. The first and most obvious of these is the observed
brightness of the Sun. Others involve a field known as
The Main Event.
helioseismology, which studies how “sunquakes” travel Output of a com-
through the body of the Sun. “Think of the Sun as a giant puter model showing
a neutrino event within
bell—by studying the way in which the bell rings, we can SNO’s heavy water
learn a lot about what makes up the bell,” Bahcall says. “We tank. The neutrino in-
teracts with a heavy wa-
confidently know the interior of the Sun better than we know ter molecule, creating a
the interior of the Earth.” Sophisticated satellites have stud- burst of light (courtesy/LBNL).

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 Feature
compared to SNO, previous detectors have been relatively
insensitive to the non-electron neutrino varieties. As a conse-
quence, any muon and tau neutrinos that may have been cre-
ated when electron neutrinos oscillated were undercounted by
previous experiments. Thus the neutrino oscillation theory pro-
poses that the solar computer models are correct, but that we
count fewer neutrinos than expected because some have trans-
formed into less detectable varieties.
That’s Heavy
Past neutrino experiments have all used reactions in huge
tanks of water to observe the passing of neutrinos. In ordi-
nary water there is only one kind of neutrino reaction that
can occur, and it is heavily biased towards the electron neu-
trino. SNO, on the other hand, uses a rare form of water
that is dubbed “heavy.”
Way Down. SNO researchers decked out in protective gear head to
the elevator for the 15 minute, mile-and-a-half ride down. (courtesy/
Bob Stokstad, LBNL).
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It is this heavy water that makes SNO uniquely suited to
detect all three varieties of neutrinos. The composition of
heavy water allows several neutrino reactions, one of which
is equally likely with the three types of neutrinos. Thus,
heavy water affords SNO an unprecedented sensitivity to
reactions involving the more-difficult-to-see muon and tau
neutrinos. By comparing the rates of these different reac-
tions, SNO scientists can determine not only the number of
electron neutrinos coming from the Sun, but also the total
number of neutrinos. This is the key to showing that neu-
trino oscillations are the solution to the solar neutrino prob-
lem. If the total number of neutrinos is the number of elec-
tron neutrinos predicted by the solar model, then the solar
models are correct, and the neutrinos are simply transform-
ing en route.
SNO’s first results, released last June, seem to indicate that
neutrinos from the Sun are in fact oscillating. SNO scien-
tists used two reactions to come to this conclusion. One
reaction, new to SNO, looks exclusively at the number of
electron neutrinos. A second reaction, while biased towards
electron neutrinos, is sensitive to all three types. By sub-
tracting the rates for these two reactions, SNO scientists
determined that the “harder to see” component appears to
be present. They hope to confirm this hypothesis by look-
ing at additional interactions that have even better sensitiv-
ity to the muon and tau neutrinos.
One reason previous detectors have not used heavy water is
because it is a rare and expensive substance. A molecule of
ordinary water, H2O, contains two hydrogen atoms and an
oxygen atom. The hydrogen atom is composed of a single
proton and a single electron. In heavy water, D2O, the ordi-
nary hydrogen is replaced by a rare hydrogen isotope known
as deuterium. In contrast to ordinary hydrogen, deuterium
contains a proton, an electron, and a neutron. The mass of
this extra neutron in each deuterium atom makes heavy wa-
ter about ten percent heavier than ordinary water—a dif-
ference, according to Marino, which is readily discernible if
you try to lift a liter of each. A single liter of heavy water
would cost nearly $100, a far sight more than even the trendi-
est bottle of Evian. Marino notes that the SNO experiment
22
uses heavy water on loan from
the Canadian government. Nor-
mally, it is used in Canadian
B
“ uilding in a clean room environment at the
nuclear reactors of a particular bottom of a mine was simply unprecedented.”
design. At present, Canada has
more heavy water than it needs for nuclear power, so the matter–e.g. heavy water–even though nothing can exceed
government has agreed to let SNO borrow 1000 tons of the light speed in vacuum.) Cherenkov radiation is analogous
material, valued at $300 million, with the understanding that to the sonic boom that occurs when a plane goes faster than
it will be returned at the conclusion of the experiment. the speed of sound. Just as with a sonic boom, the “light-
Without the Canadian government’s largesse, the entire ex- boom” from the speeding electron spreads out in a cone
periment would have been financially impossible. around the direction the electron is traveling. By detecting
this cone of light, SNO scientists can infer the presence of a
Twinkle, Twinkle neutrino.

When a neutrino enters the SNO detector, it is overwhelm-
ingly likely to pass right through, leaving no trace. How-
ever, it will occasionally collide with an atom in a molecule
of the detector’s heavy water. When this happens, the neu-
trino imparts a substantial portion of its energy to an elec-
tron in that atom. This energy can be very high, since the
neutrino usually enters the tank moving close to the speed
of light. The impacted electron then zooms off through the
heavy water, emitting light through a process known as
Cherenkov radiation, which continues as long as the elec-
tron is moving faster than the heavy-water speed of light.
(Since light travels more slowly in materials than in vacuum,
it is possible for particles to travel faster than light speed in
The instruments used to detect the light are called photo-
multipliers. Photomultipliers take extremely dim light and
convert it to strong electrical signals. One of the contribu-
tions of the LBNL group was to design and build an enor-
mous stainless steel geodesic dome that holds the 9,500 pho-
tomultipliers used in the experiment. The dome was ini-
tially constructed at a site near Petaluma, California, to test
the design in 1993. According to Dr. Lesko, “[The dome]
was visible from the freeway, [and] attracted a great deal of
attention from passing motorists on Highway 101.” After
the design proved successful, the dome was assiduously pack-
aged into 21 semi-trucks and driven to the SNO site in
Ontario, where it was reassembled in the experimental hall,

When it rains it pours

The SNO experiment has recently undergone a minor transformation. In May of 2001, over two tons of
table salt were dumped into the heavy water by SNO scientists, creating a briny solution. The presence of
chlorine in the salt makes the detector four times more likely to interact with neutrinos which have oscil-
lated. The results from this phase of the experiment will provide the definitive test of the neutrino oscillation
hypothesis, and are expected within the next two years. Since the SNO collaboration promised to return
the loaned heavy water just as they received it, all 1000 tons of the heavy water will have to be fed through
an extensive purification system which will utilize reverse osmosis to remove the salt. New techniques in
water purification were developed by scientists to allow this to be done effectively.

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 Feature
When’s lunch? Hard at work in the SNO control room. Operators
wear ultra-clean suits and hairnets to reduce dirt and dust. Even a
speck could cause a false signal within the detector.(courtesy/Queen’s
University).
two kilometers beneath the surface. Dr. Lesko says that the
58,000 lb. dome was designed to allow the photomultipliers
to be packed in as densely as possible. This increases the
efficiency of the detector in picking out whatever flashes a
neutrino might leave behind.
To accurately measure the number of incoming solar neutri-
nos, SNO scientists must be able to distinguish between light
flashes caused by neutrinos and those that come from other
sources. While locating the experiment underground elimi-
nates flashes of light from cosmic rays, it can potentially lead
to a different source of spurious flashes: dirt. At SNO, the
obsession with cleanliness goes beyond a desire to keep elec-
tronic equipment in working order. Ordinary dirt can con-
tain minute traces of radioactive elements such as uranium
or thorium. When these elements decay, they emit particles
that can cause light flashes in the detector. Just like the cos-
mic rays from above, the mere presence of dirt at SNO can
lead to false signals that could be mistaken for neutrinos.
A mineshaft is not a traditional sterile laboratory environ-
ment. While she didn’t expect the mine to be spotless,
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Marino still was surprised to see how different it was from
home. “Coming from the halls of Lawrence Berkeley Labo-
ratory, it is a shock to see all the mud and the dirt associated
with a mining environment. It is not what someone nor-
mally expects from a physics experiment.” SNO scientists
have worked very hard to create and maintain an ultra-clean
environment. Once workers have reached the level of the
experiment, two kilometers below the Earth’s surface, they
must pass through an airlock-style door that protects the
experiment from the mud and dirt of the mine. As they
pass through this buffer zone, they are required to remove
their mining gear, shower, change clothes, and change into
clean-room attire before entering the experimental hall.
The real challenge was constructing the experiment under
these same rigid standards of cleanliness. According to Dr.
Lesko, the construction of the detector was like building “a
ten-story apartment building at the bottom of a mine, pro-
ducing only a handful of dirt in the entire process.” He adds,
“Building in a clean room environment is something that
you can learn—it has been done before; but building in a
clean room environment at the bottom of a mine was sim-
ply unprecedented.” The detector itself is made out of ex-
traordinarily pure materials. Ordinary steel, for example,
contains minute traces of radioactive elements, just like dirt.
The building materials were all custom-made to be free of
these trace radioactive materials, and LBNL took the lead in
carefully surveying each piece of the detector after its fabri-
cation. Only after LBNL scientists had pronounced a com-
ponent radioactivity-free was it cleared for use in the ex-
periment.
Massive Consequences
Accepting neutrino oscillations as the solution to the solar
neutrino problem has important consequences. If neutri-
nos do in fact oscillate, this is an indicator that they have a
tiny, but non-zero mass. Because neutrinos are so numer-
ous, this tiny mass adds up: the mass contained in neutrinos
left over from the Big Bang could be roughly equivalent to
the mass of all the stars in the known universe. In the case
of the neutrino, even a tiny mass goes a long way.
24
There goes the competition

On November 12, 2001, neutrino physicists working in parallel to SNO suffered a major setback. The
Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector—located at an underground laboratory in Japan—suffered a terrible
accident. While the experiment’s water tank was being refilled one of the detector’s phototubes exploded.
The explosion caused a shockwave that set off a chain reaction, causing 7,000 other phototubes to also
burst. While the exact cause for the initial explosion is unknown, it is suspected that excess water pressure
during refilling is the culprit. The total cost of the damage is in the $20 to $30 million range. Yoji Totsuka,
director of the observatory where Super-Kamiokande is housed, says, “We will rebuild the detector. There
is no question.” However, this process will certainly take over a year.

Crash! Super-K is a 41.4 meter high cylinder located 1,000 meters underground and lined with 11,200 light detectors (left,
top right). It holds 50,000 tons of pure water. Shards of glass littered the bottom of the chamber after the November 12th
accident caused thousands of detectors to burst. (Courtesy/Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo.)

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 Feature
Although neutrinos have been studied for over fifty years, the thirty year-old solar neutrino problem. Physicists will
the next ten years promise to be particularly fruitful. The then be able to sleep well at night, at last assured that they
SNO experiment was designed to run for ten years, and it is know how the Sun shines.
only a year and a half into data collection so far. Comple-
mentary experiments are underway in Japan and Italy. With
future data, SNO scientists––including many from Berke-
ley and LBNL––hope to show beyond a shadow of a doubt Aaron Pierce is a 4th year graduate student in
that neutrinos are oscillating, finally providing a solution to the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley.

To Learn More
SNO Experiment. http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/
SNO at LBNL. http://snohp1.lbl.gov/
Particle physics for the rest of us. http://ParticleAdventure.org/
Neutrino oscillations. http://www.hep.anl.gov/ndk/hypertext/nu_industry.html
How the Sun shines. http://www.nobel.se/physics/articles/fusion/index.html

Other neutrino experiments:

SuperKamiokande. http://www.phys.washington.edu/~superk/
KamLAND. http://kamland.lbl.gov/

Got a great story?

Write for the Review.
Submission guidelines are at sciencereview.berkeley.edu
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 Weird Science
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The wide world of Drosophila mutants.
ucky the scientist who
L works with Drosophila
melanogaster. While formal
naming conventions limit geneti-
cists working on yeast and worms,
fruit fly researchers can name their
mutants whatever they like.
They’ve come up with some great
ones, like technical knockout ,
sex lethal , flamenco , and
telegraph .
Genes are generally named after the
defects, or phenotypes, seen in
mutant animals. Fruit flies with a
null mutation in white can’t make
red eye pigment, so they have white
eyes. Other names are a little more
creative: super sex combs and
little faint ball , for example. Ken
and barbie mutants, like the dolls,
lack external genitalia. Ether-a-
go-go flies wiggle their legs when
anesthetized by ether, while a
physical shock makes slamdance
flies convulse. Cheapdate flies are
easily intoxicated by alcohol.
Some names require a little back-
ground reading. Tudor flies have
trouble producing heirs. Mutant
scott of the antarctic flies, named
after the doomed explorer, have
defects in structures called “poles.”
tion. Consider godzilla , mothra ,
smaug, lost in space , tribbles ,
and the Monty Python-inspired I’m
not dead yet .
All official fly gene names are
registered with Flybase, the compre-
hensive database of fruit fly research
(http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu).
The fly genome was sequenced last
year, and thousands more Drosophila
genes are being described and
named. If and when their human
counterparts are uncovered, conven-
tion suggests that the human genes be
named after their predecessors.
Imagine pharmaceuticals aimed at
human diseases caused by bang-
Aaron Golub/BSR
senseless , kuzbanian , or big
Shakespeare fans have given us brain . Revenge of the nerds ,
malvolio , miranda , and indeed.
prospero , and an Edgar Allan Poe
mystery nut coined amontillado .
Jessica Palmer
When a gene is found to interact
with other genes, peculiar gene
family trees form. Sevenless , for
example, spawned son of sevenless
and bride of sevenless . The
decapentaplegic gene is fittingly
opposed by mothers against
decapentaplegic . Grim and
reaper work together to mediate
programmed cell death. Whole
cohorts of genes are named after
vegetables (rutabaga, turnip,
okra ) musical instruments (pic-
colo, bagpipe ) and even pickle Interested in writing, editing,
varieties (gurkin , cornichon ). or designing for the BSR?
email
“Sci-fly” names have done little to questions@uclink.berkeley.edu
dissipate geneticists’ geeky reputa-
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 Feature

SCIENCE

ILLUSTRATED
A unique program at UC
Santa Cruz makes science
J ack Laws is sit-
ting at his desk filling
a sheet of paper with row
upon row of tiny, uniform ink
jump off the page.

dots. Laws graduated from UC

Berkeley with a BS in conservation,
then took an MS in wildlife biology
from the University of Montana.
He’s adept at observing songbirds in their native habitats, and
is an experienced educator with the California Academy of
Sciences. But this year, Laws is a student again, one of just
ten admitted to the prestigious graduate program in science
illustration at UC Santa Cruz. And this afternoon, on the
wooded, bird-filled campus of UCSC, Laws is neither teach-
ing nor bird watching. He’s sitting at a desk, dotting.
Laws and his classmates each bring different backgrounds to
UCSC. Some arrived with science degrees and plenty of re-
search experience; others were artists who kept returning to
nature for inspiration. They all share a love for science and
art and now hope to make a career out of science illustra-
Jessica Palmer and Una Ren
tion, the craft of making scientific concepts and data vividly
and visually accessible to a wide audience.
The goal of the program, according to its coordinator Ann
Caudle, is to help students develop individual strengths and
interests and enable them to find a niche in the huge field of
science illustration. The program is an intense one-year im-
mersion in technique, theory, and practical advice. It aims
to fully prepare its graduates for collaboration with scien-
tists, educators, and publishers. In addition to their
coursework, students must complete at least one full-time
internship with an institution such as National Geographic or
Scientific American.

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Tobacco hornworm moth chrysalis, Manduca sexta. (Katura Reynolds)
In today’s tech-hungry society, science illustration is ubiqui-
tous. Illustrators are needed for academic papers, technical
journals, textbooks, field guides, mass-market magazines,
websites, posters, book covers, and museum displays. Op-
portunities are unusual and diverse. For example, UCSC
graduate Emma Skurnick recently illustrated a children’s ac-
tivity book on mussels.
Many illustrators enjoy the varied pace, subject
matter, and flexibility of freelancing. But UCSC
grads have also opted for staff positions with de-
sign studios, multimedia companies, technical busi-
nesses, museums, educational institutions, and
magazines, like 1998 graduate Heidi Noland, the
art director of Scientific American Explorations.
The goal of science illustration is to make difficult
concepts accessible by translating them into visual images.
2000 UCSC program graduate Kimberlee Heldt says, “As a
student, I dissected every drawing—that’s how I retained in-
Eccentric sand dollar, Dendraster excentricus. (Karina Helm)
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formation. So I know how valuable a good illustration is.
They should all be good!” Laws, who has dyslexia, has a
unique perspective on this: “My journals are full of
sketches. I don’t need to worry about spelling—only care-
ful observation of form, color, behavior, and context.
Sketching was crucial to the success of my master’s work. I
was able to sketch free living Lazuli buntings and found that
I could identify individuals from variations in their plumage.
The sketches were essential to consistently identify individu-
als within the study population.”
ome successful illustrators have no science background
S at all. But knowing the language of science can make an
assignment much easier. “Sometimes many hours are spent in
research, asking scientists or experts educated questions, com-
When a successful illustration helps a reader visualize
and understand the science he or she is reading about,
the fusion of art and article seems perfectly natural
and unobtrusive.
paring photographs for accuracy and then
piecing together usable bits for the final
drawing,” says Caudle. Her classroom is
papered with painstakingly inked draw-
ings, many taking ten or more hours to
execute. Insects, pinecones, bones, and
shells are exactingly portrayed, down to
every scale, every pore, and every facet
in a compound eye. Careful observations
are crucial, whether the artist is catalog-
ing new species, creating a field guide,
or resurrecting a dinosaur. Caudle looks
for scientists with a strong visual back-
ground because such observation is al-
ready second nature to them.
Bishop pine, Pinus muricata.
(Mary Sievert)
29
Feature
Paint Them Macho
Emma Skurnick left UCSC in 2000 and now does freelance work from her studio in North
Carolina. Skurnick looks back on the UCSC program as a turning point. “It was one of the
best years of my life, realizing that I could have a job that I loved,” she says.

“I did this illustration for the May-June 2001 issue of American Scientist magazine. It was
used as the opening illustration for an article called ‘Preserving Salmon Biodiversity,’ and
depicts the seven species of salmonids (five salmon and two trout) that inhabit the rivers
and streams of the Pacific
Northwest. The painting
was done in watercolor.
Watercolor is often consid-
ered a delicate medium, be-
cause of its transparency,
but, as the illustration de-
picts spawning males, the
art director of the magazine
asked me to ‘paint them ma-
cho,’ which made me smile.
I did what I could to up the
‘macho quotient’ by adding
pen and ink with the water-
color and using a lot of
bright red for their colora-
tion. The art director and
the authors were pleased,
so I suppose it worked.”

Illustration by Emma Skurnick.

http://destined.to/emma.

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 Katydid, Scudderia sp. (Jennifer Kane)

Despite the need

for precision, science illustration
is very different from science photography.
Although the students are encouraged to take Good science illustrators
photos as references on their many research ex-
cursions, the program does not teach photo- can make an article
graphic technique. “Basically a photo is just a flat
thing—you lose a lot of information in photos,” says jump off the page with a
current UCSC student Cornelia Blik. Illustration can
emphasize important features of the object and yet
capture tiny details, structures hidden in shadow, or
flashy piece of art.
details lying in different focal planes, which could not ap-
pear simultaneously in a photograph. “Illustrators are often
called upon to distill the information from dozens of photo-
graphs into a single accurate illustration with a process that’s
a bit like sleuthing,” says Caudle. “If it could be photographed,
and photographed effectively, why would we illustrate it?”

Laws agrees, “If you look through field guides that use photo-
graphs, up until just recently, none of them are any good.” In
one well-known bird watcher’s field guide, Laws recalls, “they
had this picture of a wrentit, a little bird. The diagnostic fea-
ture is the long tail, but if you look at their wrentit, there is
no tail. The photo was taken from such an angle that the tail
was behind.” Omissions like this, which could mislead a nov-
ice bird watcher, have driven Laws’ own interest in develop-
ing more accurate and accessible field guides.
Sea otter, Enhydra lutris. (Jack Laws)

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Feature

A Scientist at Heart
Kimberlee Heldt, UCSC class of 2000, is currently
illustrating the textbook Human Physiology 4e, by
Rhoades and Pflanzer. Heldt’s forte is illustrating
molecular machinery, a subject without live models
or photographic references. “I love textbook illus-
tration, as I am basically a scientist at heart, not an
illustrator. Working on textbooks keeps my brain
happy, especially when I get to do molecular stuff.
The toughest challenge is, of course, illustrating
something you cannot see. It takes a great deal of
research before you even begin the composition of
the illustration. The whole process, however, is ex-
ceptionally rewarding.”

Heldt, who has a BA in biology from UC Berkeley and a MS in biochemistry, has found breaking away
from scientific precision a challenge. “Ask any illustrator to try and draw a cartoon and they’d look at
you cross-eyed. We are simply too detail-ori-
ented to be able to accomplish this. The answer
came to me one day as I was in the car with my
husband driving over HWY 17. I was trying to
draw on this uneven road, around corners—and,
lo and behold, I was drawing cartoons. The un-
even terrain loosened me up enough to be able
to get the essence of a cartoon!”

“ It took some unconventional approaches to discover the

essence of drawing a cartoon. It is NOT as easy as it looks!”
Kimberlee Heldt, kimheldt@earthlink.net.

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Feature

No Typical Day
Peter Gaede recently took his natural science illustration
skills far afield, traveling across Kenya on assignment with
the National Museum and Nature Kenya in Nairobi. “I
worked on a field guide to the waterbirds of Kenya which
included 123 pen and ink drawings to aid in identifica-
tion,” he explains. “I also painted some of the local flora
and fauna of the Kakemega forest in western Kenya to
promote awareness and conservation.”

Gaede, a 2000 graduate of the UCSC Science Illustration

program, usually freelances closer to home, out of his Cali-
fornia studio. “One of the most rewarding aspects of my
work is that there really is no typical day,” he says. “As-
signments vary from very specific and technical black-and-
white illustrations for scientific papers to full color maga- Black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) in water-
zine art and book covers.” Perhaps his most unusual as- color and gouache, painted from a study skin at the
signment was an illustration sequence portraying copulat- UCSC Natural History Museum.
ing Desert Horned lizards for an academic paper. To accu- Peter Gaede, pgaede@earthlink.net.
rately represent the amorous lizards, Gaede studied pho-
tos, notes, and preserved specimens from UC Berkeley.

As an undergraduate Gaede immersed himself in biological research, but itched to use his artistic talents as
well. UCSC provided such an opportunity. “It used to be that science and art were at opposite ends of the
spectrum. I enjoyed both, but it seemed inconceivable to put them together. Now that I have, it’s a perfect
match, and I have a hard time figuring out what took me this long to see it.”

“In memory of Joseph

Grinnell,” watercolor and
gouache.

“For this project, I accessed

one of Joseph Grinnell’s
original field notes from
1915. He was the first
director of UC Berkeley’s
Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology, serving from 1908
to 1939.”

Peter Gaede,
pgaede@earthlink.net.

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The goal of science illustration is to
make difficult concepts accessible by
translating them into visual images.

Long horned wood

boring beetle. (Clark
A. Eising)

audle’s students start drawing with traditional pen and ink, then progress to watercolor,
C acrylic, colored pencil, and computer programs like Painter™, Photoshop™, and
Pagemaker™. For each illustration, digital or traditional, the mechanics of scanning and repro-
duction are taken into account. In their last quarter, under the supervision of instructor Larry
Lavendel, the students illustrate and design Science Notes, a web-based journal of articles written by
students in the UCSC science writing program. Lavendel teaches the theory of “information
graphics”—how to present information clearly and accurately, in an eye-catching graph or illustra-
tion, then fit it into the larger context of an article.

The UCSC program is all about putting art in context—a scientific context, the context of a
publication, and the professional context of an illustration career. In addition to making valuable
professional contacts in the field, students learn to handle time sheets, billable hours, contracts,
and advertising. It’s the “nitty-gritty side of science illustration,” as one current student puts it.
Graduates love it, because unlike many PhDs, they feel immediately prepared to market them-
selves and take assignments from concept to completion. As Laws puts it, “I want to do field
guides, but what I have done so far is just sketches. I want to learn how to generate a finished
product. That is why I’m here.”

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 Feature
For potential applicants to the UCSC science illustration pro- book illustration never gets te-
gram, Caudle emphasizes that “it’s important for people to dious or repetitive. You dive in,
have looked into science illustration seriously and not just get it done and move on, all
be sampling it.” Many members of the current class have the while learning
previous experience freelancing as medical illustrators, for about new sub-
example. Campus researchers, student publications (like jects and keeping
the BSR), nature centers, and nonprofit groups often need that brain happy.
illustrations and are happy to help an aspiring illustrator start I couldn’t ask for
a portfolio. Caudle also suggests joining the Guild of Natu- a better job to fit my
ral Science Illustrators and reading books on natural science lifestyle and intellec-
illustration and graphic design. tual needs.”

Good science illustrators can make an article jump off the

page with a flashy piece of art, but more often, their work
goes practically unnoticed. When a successful illustration
helps a reader visualize and understand the science he or she
Unidentified
is reading about, the fusion of art and article seems per- shell fragment.
fectly natural and unobtrusive. Peter Gaede, UCSC class of (Alicia Calle)

2000, feels that “my illustration work is my contribution to

science. As an illustrator, I am able to communicate on many
different levels.” Heldt agrees: “Each drawing is a new chal- Jessica Palmer and Una Ren are 4th year
lenge to illustrate a concept so that people will grasp it and graduate students in the Molecular and
learn from it. If you understand your subject matter, text- Cell Biology Program at UC Berkeley.

To learn more about science illustration as a craft and career check out:

UCSC Science Illustration Program. http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciIllus.html

UCSC Science Illustration summer courses. summers@cats.ucsc.edu, http://summer.ucsc.edu
Science Notes. http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/BackIssues.html

Exhibition: Illustrating Nature

(May 4 - June 9 2002). Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. (831) 420-6119

The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. http://www.gnsi.org

Scientific Illustration: A Guide to Biological,

Zoological, and Medical Rendering
Techniques, Design, Printing, and Display. By Phyllis Wood

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 Perspective
LIFE: WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
The last angry man tries to get one.
Alan Moses
ale crystallographer Tom Steitz will undoubtedly win
Y a Nobel Prize for his recent solution of the com-
plete structure of the ribosome. Knowledge of this
structure quickly led to the realization that the ribosome–
the mammoth complex of RNA and protein that orches-
trates the translation of the genetic code to functional infor-
mation–is in fact, a ribozyme. The crucial enzymatic activ-
ity of the ribosome seems to be carried out not by proteins,
as is typical of cellular machinery, but
rather by the RNA itself. In answer
to one of biology’s classic chicken and
egg problems, this discovery showed
W e may realize that
conclusively that RNA could, in prin- the definition
ciple, have made enzymes without any not entirely binary.
original proteins, and, therefore, that
RNA is almost certainly the more an-
cient of the two components. The long-standing debate over
which molecule came first in evolutionary history is now
solved: there must have been an “RNA World” in which life
existed without the use of proteins.
Of course, to really clinch the Origin of Life, it would be
nice if some lab evolved a simple living creature based only
on RNA–a feat certainly worthy of another Nobel Prize,
while we’re handing them out. Perhaps only somewhat less
satisfying would be an appropriately dated fossil of one of
these creatures, or even a living RNA-only descendant in
the muck at the bottom of Strawberry Creek. Unfortunately,
all living things that have ever been found seem to use DNA
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and proteins as well as RNA to do their business. Well, there
are RNA-viruses, which sort of live without DNA. And what
about transposons and retro-transposons? These “jumping
genes” might be examples of protein-less life. But are they
even alive at all?
The explosion of knowledge about the molecular founda-
tions of biology has brought us tantalizingly close to the
Origin. So close, in fact, that it has
become difficult to say what we are
seeking the origin of. Historically, life
has been defined using a list of char-
of life is acteristics found in every living thing.
Sadly, there always seem to be glar-
ing exceptions to the rules. For ex-
ample, a typical “characteristic of life”
is that living things should be able to reproduce. Obviously,
this is false–it would mean that Bob Dole was dead for twenty
years and then, when Viagra came on the market, was mi-
raculously brought back to life. Classical definitions of life
also require that an organism be free-living and able to me-
tabolize. But in general, there always seem to be examples
of non-living things that have these characteristics, or things
we want to call living that don’t. These “lists of life” do very
poorly in borderline cases (like viruses, or individual cells
in a multi-cellular organism). Furthermore, these sorts of
approaches never make it clear whether they are consider-
ing the definition of “Life,” as in the “Origin of Life,” or “life,”
as in whether or not a particular creature is alive, or dead,
37
 Perspective
or neither. One thing we can say is that if “Origin of Life”
means the circumstances under which the first living thing
appeared, we’d better be able to say what we mean by “liv-
ing thing.”
But wait a minute, telling living from non-living is easy. Chil-
dren can do it. They just use the old I-know-it-when-I-see-
it approach. A goldfish is alive and a tub of margarine isn’t.
I f “Origin of Life” means
the circumstances under
which the first living thing
appeared, we’d better be
able to say what we mean
by “living thing.”
End of story. Though that approach has been successful for
many of our most important concepts (love, justice, etc.),
somehow we expect more from science. Defining living or
not as “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” doesn’t seem adequate.
What is “it” that we “know” when we “see it,” anyway? Need-
less to say, we are now very far from crystal structures and
very close to philosophy. But don’t worry: it’s all a part of
my plan.
tuart Kauffman provides a different way of thinking about
S the definition of life in his recent book, Investigations.
Kauffman provokes the criticism of scientists (he has, in gen-
eral, no conventional evidence for any of his theories), phi-
losophers (he invents and uses ill-defined theoretical lan-
guage), writers (his style is pompous, disorganized and in-
fected with new-age mysticism), and me (see the last three
parenthetical remarks). Still, he is something of a lone voice
when it comes to new ideas about the big picture. He ar-
gues that living things should be thought of as a very special
class of physical system. Specifically, he claims, living things
are physical systems that are “autonomous agents” or that
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have “agency.” He works very hard to define these in more
precise physical terms, namely that “autonomous agents” 1)
are auto-catalytic systems capable of reproduction, and 2)
perform thermodynamic work.
While these may be features of many or even all living things,
focusing on these physical characteristics misses the essence
of what makes something autonomous: having interests and
the ability to act on these interests. As Kauffman puts it, life
comes down to the ability to say “yuck or yum.” This is how
we know that even a single cell can be alive. We can tell that
it has interests, and it makes decisions based on those inter-
ests.
The particular interests and decision-making capabilities that
living things have are the result of natural selection. That’s
why survival is second only to sex in popularity. The reason
death is “yuck” and sex is “yum” for most living things is
because they have been shaped by Darwin’s mechanism. But
it is the ability to make the decision–not the particular deci-
sion you make–that makes you alive. It just turns out that
new decision-making (read: living) things don’t arise very
often. And we usually see only those that happened to pri-
oritize self-preservation and reproduction.
In case all this talk about “decisions” and “intentions” is a
little too anthropomorphic for your taste, and in order to
avoid notions like “free will” rearing their ugly heads and
confusing us, let’s be clear about what it means to have the
“ability to make a decision.” Imagine a single-celled organ-
ism, a bacterium, say, living in a pond. This creature doesn’t
have anything like free will, but it can certainly make deci-
sions. It has various means of sensing its environment, and
based on those observations, it engages in various behav-
iors. Our pond-bacterium might think: if the temperature
is higher on the left than on the right, swim to the right.
For this particular bacterium, hot is “yuck”; it steers away
from hot. This is probably how we’d guess whether the crea-
ture was alive or dead–if it can make the decision, it’s prob-
ably alive, and if it’s oblivious, it’s probably dead (assuming
this type of bacteria doesn’t sleep or get distracted). No-
tice, however, the general form of the decision: if (some
38
combination of observations) then (do some behavior).
When it seems like a bacterium is “making a decision,” what
it really might be doing is just evaluating a series of logical
clauses, and then executing some response–exactly what we
call “computation.” Although computation and information
processing are not entirely well-defined from a physical per-
spective, they are certainly an improvement over the vague
notions like “autonomy” and “agency” that we started with.

Regardless of how important the computational abilities of

living things turn out to be, it seems clear that Kauffman’s
attempt to understand living things as a very special class of
physical system leads to new and interesting ways of think-
ing about the age-old dilemma of the definition of life. As
we inch closer to the Origin of Life, the problem of its defi-
nition will continue to surface. We may realize that the defi-
nition of life is not entirely binary–systems may not simply
be “alive” or “not.” Instead, we could imagine a life param-
eter, L, whose value expresses how alive a given thing is at a
given time in a given environment. This parameter might
be a function of the total number of possible computations
that the system could perform, say Nc, and the associated
change in some “utility” or the “yuck or yum”-ness associ-
ated with each possible decision or computation, say, ∆Uc.
To this end, I conclude with a delightful theorem whose proof
certainly exceeds this narrow margin:

L = k log Nc ∑ ∆U c2,

where the sum is over all the Nc computations, and k is some

constant named after me.

Alan Moses is a 2nd year student in the

Biophysics Graduate Group at UC Berkeley.

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 Quanta (heard on campus)
“All of us at UC Berkeley are government employees. If you
go against the official government dogma on HIV/AIDS, you
might be a free professor, but you’ll never get a student and
you won’t publish in Science. It may not be the best thing to
do to pay the rent or get parking on this campus.”

Peter Duesberg, Professor

Department of Molecular and
Cellular Biology
(and infamous AIDS dissident)
UC Berkeley
November 1, 2001

“A science writer’s job is keeping scientists from

choking on their own jargon.”

Charles Petit, Senior Writer

U.S. News & World Report
November 1, 2001

“Linear systems essentially can’t compute anything. My wife might be at home,

she might be in the office. A linear system would dial the average number.”

John Hopfield, Professor

Department of Molecular Biology
Princeton University
October 15, 2001

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The Back Page Mike Dau
b is a gra
at Cal, wo duate stud
BERKELEY rking with ent in phy
Dear Mom,
Dear Mom,
science
review
1 Holzapfel.
Pole durin
He spent si
g January
Professor
x weeks at
and Febru
Bill “Swil
sics

the South
l”
and return ar
ed there in
that he is, January 20 y of 2001
We attached our ACBAR he keeps h 02. Good so
at the Pole is mom ap n
. prised of li
receiver to the Viper Telescope here at fe
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station a
couple of weeks ago, and now we are taking
data. Everyone in our group has been working twelve-hour days at
the telescope, seven days a week. I’m on the night shift. Well, “night” meaning
from dinner until breakfast. It is actually daylight, and it will be daylight for six
months straight. Weird. The main building of South Pole Station is a geodesic dome
located about 100 meters from the actual Pole. The Viper telescope is about a
kilometer away, a nice little walk across the ice runway.

There’s housing for about 30 people under the geodesic dome. Another 25 can
stay in the “El Dorm,” or Elevated Dorm, away from the dome. There are over 200
people here during the summer, though. Lots of them stay in Summer Camp, which
has Hypertats (metal huts) and Jamesways (Korean War-era tents). I stayed in a
Hypertat last year, and I’m in El Dorm this summer. We eat in the galley, which is
inside the dome. Cooks make four square meals a day: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner,
and Midrats. Folks are working all three shifts, so there are meals around the clock
to feed everybody. The food was my favorite part about the Pole. It reminded me of
dorm food. And there was a lot of it.

And don’t worry about me dressing warm, Mom.

Everyone who goes to the Pole is supplied with ECW
(Extreme Cold Weather) gear on loan from the US
Antarctic Program. They give us a parka, jackets,
insulated Carhartt overalls, thermal underwear,
wool socks, hats, gloves, snow goggles, bunny
boots, and so on. I brought my own insulated
work boots because I prefer them over the bunny
boots for climbing on the telescope. The clothing
they provide is more than enough to keep
everyone warm while they work outside. I only
wish I’d remembered to wear it today .

Love,
Mike