VOL.101.NO.137
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
ADVERTISING:864-4358
TUESDAY,APRIL 21,1992
(USPS 650-640)
NEWS:864-4810
Students caught out in the cold
While waiting for a bus to GSP-Corbin Hall, Emily Nelson, Evergreen, Colo., freshman, left, Heidi Kraus, Barrington, Ill., freshman, and Susan Cipolla, Blue Springs, Mo., freshman, find shelter from unexpected snow yesterday.
Sudden chilly temperatures, snow surprise many at KU
By Ranjit Arab Kansan staff writer
Guy Jacobs stood unprepared yesterday afternoon as he waited for the bus outside Snow Hall.
Dressed in a white long-sleeve shirt, a floral print tie, blue pinstriped shorts and brown leather shoes, the sockleac Jacobs was ready for spring weather.
Jacobs, Dayton, Ohio, graduate student, was just one of many students on campus yesterday who were caught by surprise by the unusually cold temperatures and snow flurries.
"When I left my apartment at 6:30 this morning it was chilly and there was a light drizzle," he said. "I rode my bike up here. I'm taking the bus home."
William Barlow, forecaster at the National Weather Service in Topeka, said yesterday's noon temperature of 33 degrees was less than half the normal high temperature for April 20, but not a record low for the day.
The record low in Lawrence for April 20 was 29 degrees in 1953.
Barlow said the snow was a result of a fairly intense low-pressure system that made its way from northwestern to northeast Kansas yesterday.
Barlow said snow this late in April was unusual for northeast Kansas.
"It is not strange for snow to fall in early April, but to have it occur this late in the month is unusual." he said.
Although Barlow said the light snowfall might continue today, the pressure system should move on and temperatures should reach the middle to upper 60s by Thursday.
"If we can make it past the next couple of days, we should be back to our springtime temperatures," he said.
Michael Pietrorico, a student forecaster at the KU Weather Service, said previous reports showed snow had fallen in Lawrence as late as the first week of May.
He said he thought the snow was unusual because of this year's warm winter.
"For the type of mild winter we had, you would consider this unsu-
al," Pietronicco said.
Unusual was not the term Ina Robertson, Bikenfeld, Germany, graduate student, used to describe the weather as she waited for a bus
outside Stauffer-Flint Hall.
She said she had been in Kansas nine months and still could not predict the weather.
Researcher finds source for drug that fights cancer
By Jay Williams Kapsan staff writer
AKU researcher has led the discovery of how a Himalayan tree can be used to help cancer patients beat the deadly disease, the University announced yesterday.
Lester Mitscher, professor of medicinal chemistry, said comparatively large amounts of a drug thought to be cancer-fighting in the needles of the Taxus baccata, or Himalayan yew, tree. The tree grows in the Himalayas in central Asia.
Taxol can help fight advanced cases of ovarian, breast and other cancers. Short supplies have slowed research on the drug.
Before the Himalayan discovery, the only taxol source researchers knew of was the Pacific Northwest yew tree.
Mitscher said that ecological concerns made the Pacific Northwest yew's use undesirable. He said the entire tree had to be destroyed to make the drug because the taxol had to be extracted from the bark of the tree. Supplies of the tree were dwindling in the Northwest.
Scientists can take the taxol drug from the Himalayan yew tree's needles without destroying the whole tree, he said.
Mitscher said the ecological concerns were important because supplies of the drug were short.
The National Cancer Institute says it takes the taxol from three trees to treat one cancer patient, meaning about 38,000 trees a year would have to be destroyed just to treat ovarian cancer patients in the United States.
Mitscher said members of the research team traveled to India two years ago to conduct research and went back three times. Except for those trips, all of the work was done at the University of Kansas.
He said earlier research on the Himalayan yew trees by other scientists had found that the tree needles did not contain enough taxol for medical use.
But the research took place after the needles were returned to the United States, Mitscher said. If the needles are processed immediately, there is
enough taxol to use
A plant has been established in India to process taxol from the yew tree's needles, he said.
Lester Mitscher
Increased production of the drug should
occur in 12 to 24 months.
Now, the research at the University concentrates on improving how the drug works and on speeding up the production process.
Richard Himes, professor of biochemistry and biological science, tests the different forms of taxol created in laboratories.
He said taxo attacked certain structures of a tumor's cancerous cells and prevented the cancerous cells from dividing and reproducing. The cancerous cell then dies naturally.
The research group also includes KU graduate students.
Xiaozhong Liang, Beijing graduate student, said the most difficult part of the research was developing a method extracting the taxol from the needles.
He said it took one month to refine taxol because the material had to be treated with extreme care.
Qingmei Ye, Beijing graduate student, said processing was difficult because only small quantities could be derived from the needles.
Mitscher said research on finding different taxol sources began two years ago when he and 100 other researchers went to Washington, D.C., to start the search for sources other than the Pacific Northwest vew.
One kilogram of needles yields 10 milligrams of taxol. she said.
Mitscher, a 17-year KU faculty member, said he had been involved in anti-cancer research at various times during the last 20 years.
For Mitscher, some of the cancer research is personal, he said. His mother and grandmother died from ovarian cancer.
"I derive great satisfaction in doing something to fight back," he said.
The Associated Press contributed information to this story.
Supreme Court asks for Brown vs. Board of Education review
The Associated Press
The justices told a federal appeals court to restudy its ruling that Topeka school officials have not done enough
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court reopened a school-desegregation dispute in Topeka yesterday, 38 years after it used a case from that city to ban segregated public schools nationwide.
to counter past intentional discrimination against minority students.
That ruling also said racial imbalances in schools resulting from "white
The appeals court was told to restudy its ruling in light of the high court's March 31 ruling that federal courts incrementally may stop supervising previously segregated school districts if racial integration is achieved step by step.
Under Kansas law, Topeka once was allowed to operate separate schools for the city's African-American and white elementary children.
flight' or other factors not caused by school officials are not necessarily unconstitutional even in schools districts previously segregated by law.
African-American residents sued the city school district in 1951, contending that the "separate but equal" dual
system deprived them of equal educational opportunities.
Their lawsuit, unsuccessful in lower courts, reached the nation's highest court as the leadcase among five separate segregated-school disputes granted review.
The court's 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education banished racial segregation from public schools. The historic decision sounded
the death knell for official segregation in the United States.
The original Topeka lawsuit was revived in 1979 by African-American parents — including Linda Brown, who had been an elementary student when lending her name to the famous case.
The 1979 complaint said Topeka's school district still had elements of racial segregation.
U. S. District Judge Richard Rogers ruled in 1887 that the school district had become fully integrated and threw out the 1979 suit.
But the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Rogers' ruling by a 2-1 vote. The appeals court said unlawful segregation still existed in the 14,000-student school district where about one-fourth of the students are minority members.
Bungeeeeeeee!
'Risk is part of what makes it bungee jumping'
Reporter Cody Holt uses a swan-dive technique for his second jump.
By Cody Holt
Kansan staff writer
"Ready for altitude," says Kevin McNally in his most comforting, angelic voice, the one he uses to coax contemplative inmers over the edge
Tim Hoppin, who dreams of turning the sport he loves into a profitable business, begins to crank the hot pink launch pad to 158 feet.
"Don't look at the ground," McNally says, still concerned that I might be one of the few jumpers who return to Earth without taking the plunge.
"Look at the horizon." he says
"What horizon?" I reply. The overcast day has left the horizon-less sky looking more like the inside of a domed stadium.
However, McNally has managed to accomplish his goal of diverting my attention. In this case, to indoor baseball, it's a suitable substitution. I think.
I'm 50 feet into the air and still not
tracing about my virgin leap in the
floor.
In my first bungee jump attempt a week earlier, an electrical storm made raising the metal crane more than 15 stories into the sky a bad idea. Now, as
Five minutes earlier, I was signing a waiver of some sort. I didn't read it. But I assume it said that, if I should die, it would be my own fault.
Two minutes before, I was strapped into the two harnesses that connect me to my umbilical cord: three bungee ropes that are actually military specification shock cords designed to ease the jolt on a parachute when dumping tanks from airplanes.
the crane脱的 glided gazebo to jumping altitude, and McNally trolls for soothing words to induce that jump, I am not afraid.
I haven't had time to be afraid.
Now I am being elevated above pastoral Gardner, above the Johnson County Fairgrounds where Vertical Additions Inc. is operating while it awaits approval or disapproval from the Douglas County Commission on a Lawrence site. The Kansas corn fields seem an unlikely place for the West Coast daredevil sport.
*Check out that cool farm over there,* Mr McNally says as if he had spent some time working the fields before he decided to grow his hair long and live in search of the eternal bungee jumping buzz. "There was some
McNally's idle chatter keeps my mind off the could-be fatal fall.
But, as the cage ascends, I begin to realize that if I should fall out at this altitude, the bungee cords wouldn't protect me much. And, although I have no fear of heights, I decide to take a step back, heed McNally's warning and not look at the ground.
A gust of wind stirs the cage. I get a rush of nervous excitement as I realize for the first time what I am about to do. My stomach, along with a chill running up and down my spine and the erect hairs on my neck, remind me that bungee jumping is probably the riskiest thing I have ever done.
Dying does not even cross my mind.
It's more of a realization that something could go wrong. I don't know what. But when you're more than 100 feet above the ground, attached to a rubber band and ready to step into the sky, certainly something *could* go wrong.
The cold Kansas wind couples with the chill running through my body. As I stand shivering, the cage jaws to a stop. Now there is no turning back.
farmer guy out there the other day working."
"All right, rock steady," McNally says with the enthusiasm he probably feels every time he turns on another thriller-see to the rush of bungee jumping.
As he squares the cage, a rush of adrenaline overwelms my body. I listen to his last-minute instructions in a haze, listening but not hearing as I step to the edge, look to the ground and realize that 155 feet looks more threatening from the top end.
McNally tells me to turn around and jump backward, the scariest way. It would be good to get that trick over with, he advises.
I oblige, thinking that I have to do it the tough way, the male way.
Igonumb.
"Ready man?" McNally says. The next thing I hear is him bellow: "Countdown!"
"Three. . . " A chorus of spectators begins the customary countdown.
"Two...," My breath quickens to just short of hyperventilation. The anticipation and adrenaline are unequaled by anything I have done before. Nothing comes close. The rush of
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