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Guns, Germs, and Steel by Mary K. Miller Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond addressed a huge audience at AAAS on Friday, January 22--especially impressive given it was only 8:00 am. Dr. Diamond, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School, had 45 minutes to relate the history of entire human race over the last 13,000 years. His talk was a compressed version of his book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," and he started with a scientific mystery. Why did history unfold so differently for peoples of different continents? At the end of the last ice age, all humans were hunter-gatherers. They moved in small bands and had no writing or metal tools. There are some remnants of that ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle, among the aborigines of Australia and New Guinea. Other geographic areas, such as the Middle East, Central America, and Eurasia, developed complex societies with huge population centers and sophisticated technologies. Some people claim the answer lies in genetic differences between races, but Diamond says it was the result of geography and a favorable environment. It all depended, he says, on the rise of farming, which only sprung up independently in nine places in the world. There were limited geographic areas, such as Asia and Mexico, where there are wild seeded grasses which could be cultivated and large, relatively docile mammals that could be domesticated. But these chance circumstances made all the difference because it allowed people to accumulate food and material possessions, and to support entire communities, including chiefs and other "social parasites." Their larger population centers and material goods allowed the farmers to conquer, kills or displace hunter-gatherers in their way and spread to other parts of the world. The diseases carried by their domestic animals (for which the farmers had immunity) killed off the hunter-gatherers even faster and more efficiently than the farmers' weapons. With their vast resources and firepower, farmers spread from China into Thailand and Southeast Asia, from the fertile crescent of the Mediterranean into Europe and eventually into the Americas. It's the reason, says Diamond, that the lecture hall at AAAS was filled with people of European descent rather than native Americans.
by Mary K. Miller We promised to stay away from the big press conferences and find more off-beat stories, but couldn't resist going to a talk titled "All Creatures Weird and Wonderful: Novel Approaches to Medical Discovery." It didn't disappoint, especially when Harald Sontheimer, from the University of Alabama, starting describing 5-inch scorpions that paralyze their prey with neurotoxin--and just happen to offer hope for treating a particularly lethal, and so far untreatable, form of brain cancer. Professor Sontheimer is a neurobiologist, a scientist who studies the way the brain works. The toxins of many animals, including spiders, snakes, and scorpions, work by preventing brain cells from communicating with muscles and nerves in the body. The toxin from the giant Israeli scorpion targets specific cells in the brain, called glial cells, but by lucky happenstance, the toxin only attaches to brain cells that are taken over by cancer. The scorpion toxin doesn't directly kill the cancer cells, says Sontheimer. Instead chemotherapy drugs or radioactive isotopes are attached to the molecules of toxin and delivered to the tumor cells to finish the job. The novel therapy hasn't been tested yet in humans, but mouse studies show great promise, says Sontheimer. Clinical trials in humans are set to begin later this year.
" Big Science" and International Partnerships by Rob Semper In addition to the talks on different scientific research, the AAAS annual meeting has a number of sessions that focus on related topics. This includes sessions on science education issues, the future of the scientific workforce and the funding of science. There are sessions with the heads of the various governmental science agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Dept. of Energy and NASA where the country's science policy and the next year's science funding budget is discussed. Other sessions provide opportunities for researchers on the sociology of science to discuss the field as a whole. One topic that was the focus of a number of sessions was the internationalization of big science. Big science refers to the large scale projects which because of the scale of the instruments or the investigating endeavor involve large number of scientists and large amounts of dollars. Big science is nothing new (in fact one might argue that the Manhattan Project along with other WWII science projects is one of the first examples of big science.) But recently, big science is getting bigger. Whether it is the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, the Human Genome Project or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built at CERN in Geneva, each of these projects have thousands of scientists working on a particular piece of experimental apparatus. This is a far, far cry from the usual image of a lone scientist bend over a workbench working in their lab at a university. As the scale of these devices has gone up, the international nature of the enterprise has increased accordingly. At the plenary session titled "Science and Technology: Priorities for the 21st Century" Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation, Neal Lane, Head of the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy and Sir Robert May, Head of the Office of Science and Technology for the United Kingdom all stressed the critical nature of the international relationship in scientific research. Not only is it a matter of cost, it is also a matter of good science. The scientific issues facing the world, both in terms of fundamental science as well as applied science, will require a global perspective. Two current big science projects are creating new models for international cooperation. At the session, "Large Hadron Collider: Mega-Science and Mega-Engineering for Everyone" Chris Llewellyn-Smith, former head of CERN (Center for European Nuclear Research) pointed out that for CERN there are 7,700 scientists involved from 52 countries. And at the session, "The International Space Station: Bridging the Earth and the Universe", Arnauld Nicogossian, Head of the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications at NASA pointed out that 16 countries were involved in its construction. These collaborations have fostered new ways of working together (and large numbers of frequent flyer coupons) for the scientists involved. The lack of country boundaries has always been a true feature of scientific discovery. But the joining together of significant resources from many different international partners toward a common scientific goal is clearly a more recently developing trend in science.
© 1999
The
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