6B
Tuesday, October 11, 1994
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Two Americans win Nobel Prize
Their research may help fight diseases The Associated Press
STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Two Americans won the Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for shedding light on how cells communicate to speed the spread of killer diseases like cholera and diabetes throughout the body.
Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Robbell will split the $930,000 prize for determining how a certain group of proteins can help transmit and modulate signals in cells, much like a biological switchboard.
Their discoveries, products of two decades of work, have been "paramount" in helping scientists understand diseases that affect tens of millions of people around the
globe, said Professor Bertil Freedholm of the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Assembly.
The medicine prize was the first of this year's six Nobel awards to be announced. Since 1901 when the first Nobel medicine prize was awarded, 72 of 157 winners have been from the United States, reflecting an American dominance in basic research.
Rodbell, however, deplored what he called today's emphasis on specific goals at the expense of unfettered basic research.
"The world ain't the same," he said at a news conference in suburban Washington, where he was visiting family. "Now everything is targeted, bottom line, how to make a buck."
Rodbell, 68, retired in May from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C., because, he said, his basic
research budget kept shrinking, and he saw there would not be enough money to complete the fiscal year.
"The attention of the Congress and the executive branch always has been toward the end goal," he said. "They are not as willing to take a chance now on people like me in exploring the unknown."
Gilman, 53, is chairman of the department of pharmacology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
"I am awrestruck. I'm more excited than I've ever been," Gilman said after the prize was announced.
Although the scientists worked separately over the years, Fredholm said "one handed the baton to the other," beginning with Rodbell's research in the late 1960s and continuing with Gilham from 1975 to 1985.
WASHINGTON — The 103rd Congress didn't get a lot done, but for most Washington lobbyists that was just fine. It was a largely successful period for the Capital's interest groups, a sign of a new age of defensive lobbying.
The Associated Press
Major health care interests — primarily insurance companies, drug makers and small businesses — took comfort in Congress' failure to pass comprehensive health care reform, which they saw as a threat to their survival.
Lobbyists victorious in fighting legislation
The lobby for trial lawyers, legendary for its clout, beat back efforts to limit damages in product liability and medical malpractice cases. Big oil and energy-intensive manufacturing killed the Clinton administration's proposed energy tax. Lobbyists looking out for themselves stymed new registration and gift rules.
And American business, large and small, managed to kill initiatives it didn't like and prevailed in the area of international trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified after an intense lobbying fight, trade with China and Vietnam picked up steam and new international trade rules appear likely to pass when Congress comes back for a lame-duck session in November.
Ron Shaiko, who studies lobbying at American University and spent the past year watching it up close as a congressional fellow, predicted more and more lobbying would fall into that protective mode.
"On a whole host of issues this year, that's what we saw; people not trying to change things but to keep them the way they are," he said.
Not all groups came out unscathed, however.
Environmental lobbying groups had a disappointing time, watching a Superfund cleanup bill die along with mining law reform and a proposal to promote the Environmental Protection Agency to cabinet rank.
"This was the worst Congress in 25 years on the environment," said Jim Maddy, president of the League of Conservation Voters.
But environmentalists were able to claim some defensive victories.
"We blocked every significant effort to weaken environmental protection," Maddy said.
And Congress' final major act was passing a hard-fought bill giving wilderness protection to a huge expanse of California desert.
Blacks want town big enough for all races
The Associated Press
BATTLEBORO, N.C. — It was too hot for a newborn to sit in a car while police ran a license check. But when Marilyn Powell asked permission to rescue the infant, she said she was roughed up, doused with pepper spray and charged with assault.
Powell is suing the all-white town government, accusing it of giving white police officers "a hunting license for blacks."
Powell, a 36-year-old nurse's aide and substitute teacher, and other African Americans said town officials encouraged harassment to dissuade African Americans from petitioning Battleboro to annex the town's largely African American section.
The mayor dismisses those allegations, and police said Powell started an argument with the officers, who have since left the three-person force.
- This farming town of 527 people
- east of Raleigh is about 45 percent
- African-American. But the mayor, the five-member town commission and
- the two employees in the town hall
- are all white, as was the police force
- until recently.
Roughly 200 more African Americans, including Powell, live beyond the town's city limits and do not vote in town elections.
According to Powell's lawsuit, the officers — Michael and William Strickland — stopped her at a roadblock for a license check on April 20. They let her go, then checked her niece, who was driving with her 3-week-old baby.
Powell asked if she could take the baby out of the car. In the lawsuit, Powell claimed the officers roughed her up, and when she protested, they sprayed her face twice with pepper spray, handcuffed her and left her in the steamy back seat of a patrol car.
Powell said the officers joked while driving her to jail that they should have sprayed more pepper spray and left her with nothing to wipe her face.
Powell's lawyer Jessica Creech said town officials feared that annexation of the African-American neighborhood would upset the local power structure, so they tacitly encouraged the harassment of African Americans.
against Powell.
Both police officers have resigned and don't live in Battleboro. Neither could be located for comment. Prosecutors later dropped the charges
No town officials will talk about the incident because of the lawsuit, including Mayor Curtis Andrews.
The town recently hired an African-American police officer and a female police officer, but Andrews said that was not related to the lawsuit.
Powell said that the frequent license checks by police had become abusive and that blacks were singled out.
Police problems are the most obvious sign of underlying racism, said the Rev. Thomas Walker, an African-American Edgecombe County commissioner.
"They gave one young lady a ticket they said she the windows in her car were too dark," he said. "They gave one guy a 865 ticket for walking across the railroad tracks."
A petition drive to get Battleboro to annex the African-American neighborhood has begun. Walker and Powell said the neighborhood is part of the town in every other sense and should be legally incorporated.
"It's not a slum," Walker said. "These are hard-working people. Any city would be happy to have them."
Although women remain barred from the priesthood, they should participate in the highest levels of the Vatican, including the group that selects the pope, an African bishop proposed Monday.
Roman Catholic women seek leadership powers
The appeal by Monsignor Ernest Kombo of Owando, Congo — made before Pope John Paul II and hundreds of clergymen from around the world — capped a series of increasingly direct demands for a greater role in church affairs for nuns and women religious workers.
THE NEWS in brief
VATICAN CITY
The future of women in all aspects of the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as one the principal debates at a monthlong bishops' synod, called to discuss possible changes in the structure and outlook of religious orders and lay groups.
Smoke over Iraq, Kuwait spark questions from astronauts
The Associated Press
For centuries there was no rule that cardinals be members of the clergy. But Vatican code was changed in 1918 to require that all members be priests.
Astronaut Thomas Jones, who used to work for the Air Force and CIA, reported smoke in southern Iraq marshes as well as what appeared to be small, black plumes of smoke rising from the Iraq-Kuwait border.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Endeavour's astronauts saw smoke rising from the Iraq-Kuwait border yesterday as the shuttle soared 127 miles overhead on a radar-mapping mission. The source of the smoke was not immediately known.
Diane Evans, a project scientist on the ground, said she did not know what might be burning. Smoke usually rises from Kuwait's oil fields as waste is routinely burned off.
Kombo suggested that rules can be changed or the Vatican can establish another level of lay cardinals that may not have the same duties as cardinals from the clergy.
Hours after U.S. troops landed in Kuwait yesterday to counter an Iraqi buildup along the border, Iraq announced it was pulling its forces back.
Besides, the $366 million radar isn't capable of picking out details like
Endeavour is carrying an air-pollution monitor and a powerful radar system for mapping the Earth's surface in detail. The astronauts on the environmental study mission are also photographing the planet.
Evans said the Pentagon made no requests for radar images or photographs of Iraq and Kuwait. The shuttle's survey of that area was planned long before the military action there, she said.
troops and tanks, Evans said.
Endeavour and its crew of six are scheduled to land at 11:37 a.m. today at Kennedy Space Center, although rain and low clouds were forecast. NASA could send the shuttle to Edwards Air Force Base in California later in the day.
Yesterday, 10 days into the flight, the radar instruments had collected enough data to fill 67 miles of tape, officials said. The radar was used largely to examine volcanoes, forests, deserts, oceans and rivers.
Scientists hope to learn more about global change and to create extraordinarily detailed maps with all the radar images.
Women comprise about two-thirds of the 900,000 people in Roman Catholic religious vocations and work, such as nuns and missionaries.
WASHINGTON
Pentagon says bases are still closed
A report claiming military bases ordered closed are quietly reopening with new names or missions is inaccurate, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday.
The report by the Business Executives for National Security states that 26 out of 67 major bases ordered closed since 1988 remain open in one form or another—either as bases for reserve units or housing different federal agencies.
"It's full of errors," said Defense Department spokesman Glenn Flood. "Things are working out — we're closing bases. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it's going to continue to happen."
Among errors cited by Flood, seven of the 27 "reopened" bases cited in the report were never slated to close but were to be given new, sometimes reduced missions.
Pentagon officials acknowledge that it takes five to six years to close down a military base. In many cases, local National Guard and reserve units occupy some of the space vacated by the departed active-duty force, and federal regulations allow other government agencies first
NEW YORK
Abortion by drugs utilized by physician
Dr. Richard Hausknecht, a New York gynecologist and abortion rights advocate, said he is sidestepping medical custom to make "a political point."
American women who have been barred access to the French abortion pill RU-486 still can end their pregnancies with drugs, according to a doctor who gives patients that option.
The treatment combining two readily available drugs, although given without Food and Drug Administration approval, is apparently legal, The New York Times reported yesterday.
The alternative technique has two steps. Patients get an injection of methotrexate, a tissue-growth inhibitor used to treat cancer, arthritis and psoriasis. Four days later they use a vaginal suppository containing misoprostol, an ulcer medicine that also hastens labor.
WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina
Cigarettes without the stench available
For all those people sneaking smokes in the restroom, R.J. Reynolds may have just the product — a cigarette that doesn't leave you smelling like you just smoked one.
The trick, said Reynolds representative DeeDee Whitt, is in the paper, which is treated with an ingredient to eliminate the stale odor.
The slogan of the new Salem Preferred cigarette: "I love what you're not wearing."
Reynolds came up with Salem Preferred after asking smokers what, besides the price, they would change about their cigarette.
"They said they would change it to get rid of the lingering stale smell." Whitt said yesterday. "We're addressing a growing social concern that perhaps some people don't like the smell of cigarettes in their clothing, car and hair."
Teachers strike to dispute pay
Risking jail and $100-a-day fines, Denver's public teachers went on strike yesterday for the first time in 25 years.
The state demanded a court order forcing the teachers back to work. But the hearing was postponed until today to give teachers time to prepare their case.
About 3,000 of the district's 3,800 regular teachers stayed from class, said Leonard Fox, representative for the teachers' union.
Teachers called the strike Sunday after rejecting a one-year contract that would have given them a $1,001 raise. Denver teachers make an average of $35,004 per year.
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