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Bearing down on Sacramento
Opinions vary on how good a deal UC President Robert Dynes recently struck with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for funding the University. Students and Democratic legislators like Mark Leno opposed the compact, which accepts current cuts and raises fees but allows for future budget growth. Leno says it could "devastate our higher education infrastructure" and "destroy the dreams of hardworking students." But UC Assistant Vice President Michael Reese argues it stops the bleeding of the last few years and sets a floor, not a ceiling, for future funding. "It's unrealistic to achieve all we want under current fiscal restraints," he says.
What all parties can agree is that, without the powerful new Cal Advocacy program, in which alumni voiced their opposition to further cuts, the deal would have been far less favorable. UC alumni sent 7,200 messages, over half of them from Cal, following the first online alerts coordinated by the California Alumni Association. They reached all but two members of the Senate and Assembly as well as the governor. "In meetings, legislators and members of Schwarzenegger's staff recited words we used in our messages back to us verbatim," says Reese. "It was one reason the governor was even willing to enter into negotiations." Reese ran into one senator in the capitol hallway who joked, "Okay, you can call off your dogs." Says Reese: "It means she got the message."
But, he adds, this budget battle isn't over, and future ones are likely to be just as tough. Translation: Bears will have to keep on fighting for Cal. To join in, go to www.caladvocacy.berkeley.edu.
 | Photo by Brian Lanker |
Blue and Golden: Three-time NCAA and Pac-10 Swimmer of the Year Natalie Coughlin finished her amazing Cal career by winning 11 individual NCAA titles and breaking six world records and 35 American records. This spring she was named Sports Illustrated on Campus “Female Athlete of the Year” and won the Pac-10 Medal, given annually to the most outstanding senior student-athlete. This summer, she could make an even greater splash in Athens at the Olympic Games.
Also this spring, the world of rugby righted itself when Cal won the national championship with a 46-24 victory over Cal Poly. It was the 20th time in the 25-year history of the USA Rugby national championships that Cal has earned the gold, and ended a one-year drought. Said coach Jack Clark ’78: “I learned a long time ago to never, ever count out the boys in blue and gold, but this was an unexpected and beautiful ride.”
Building a better mouse
The 8th International Biotech Summit, held at the Berkeley Art Museum in mid-May, alternated sky's-the-limit optimism regarding biotech's scientific and financial horizons with pessimist pronouncements about its vulnerability to fundamentalist and activist opponents. Chaired by Berkeley chemistry professor Graham Fleming, who directs UC's California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, the conference brought together about 200 top scientists and business leaders to discuss cutting-edge developments and the future of these technologies. The two-day program, featuring the field's stars, was conducted in the old Pacific Film Archive theater, whose long hallway of movie posters ended with a large white vinyl banner featuring logos of the sponsors, which included a real estate firm, a bank, a handful of research companies, and 12 venture capital groups.
M.R.C. Greenwood, the recently-appointed provost for academic affairs at UC, struck the first cautious note, warning that the $500 million in cuts UC has sustained in the last four years, combined with a 16 percent increase in enrollment, threatens what many believe will be California's future economic engines: bio-, info-, and nano-technologies, or BIN. The U.S. is now losing the scientific advantage it has held since World War II to Asia and Europe, which are producing equal or greater numbers of Ph.D.s, she said. New restrictions on visas for foreign students also retard American leadership in these technologies.
Former Berkeley chemistry professor Peter Schultz, now at Scripps, led off the scientific presentations by describing his team's work to create non-natural amino acids--"what God would have created if he had worked on Sunday," as he put it. The teams discovered how to add new amino acids to E. coli and yeast, and more recently to mice in vitro. They've designed mice that can eat a diet of McDonald's french fries without spiking their cholesterol, and others that resist cancers or regenerate tissue--one slide showed mice whose punctured ears had grown back.
Such breakthroughs in basic and applied science dotted the panel discussions during the day, broken into sections on engineered biology, synthetic biology, computational biology, and nano-biology. George Poste gave the evening's keynote address, "Risk, Reward, and Regulation." Poste directs the Arizona Biodesign Institute, and chairs the military task force on bioterrorism. His aggressively delivered speech predicted that biotech would surge ahead: genetically modified humans and a change in the nature of human identity are inevitable, he said. He cautioned against the widespread "retreat from reason, led," he claimed, "by populists, activists, terrorists, fundamentalists, romantics, regulators, the media, deconstructionists, litigators, and myopic politicians." Poste derided in particular the "spectacle of [African dictator] Robert Mugabe condemning genetically modified foods," a remark that drew loud applause.
Biotech, he argued, will be a powerful force for good or malevolence--to cure fatal diseases or to create new weapons of terror, to spread its benefits widely or to exaggerate social inequities with technologies available only to the wealthy. Like physics when it unleashed the power of the atom, "biology has lost its innocence," Poste said. Scientists must honestly assess and reveal the risks associated with new technologies, and advocate a regulatory regime that is global (as are "WMD and disease"), transparent (who pays and the trade-offs for failure), uniformly enforced, and based on social justice--"unless we want to live in a Blade Runner world." --Kerry Tremain
Distinguished Teachers: This spring, five faculty members joined the elite of Berkeley's teachers when they were honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award. Chosen by the Berkeley Academic Senate's Committee on Teaching, and awarded with funding from the California Alumni Association, the 2004 winners are (left to right): Michael Christ, professor of mathematics; H. Mack Horton, professor and chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Hubert Dreyfus, professor of philosophy in the graduate school (who is featured here); Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric, and director of the Film Studies Program; and Robert Jacobsen, associate professor of physics.
In addition to its support of the Distinguished Teaching Awards, this spring the CAA initiated monetary awards for outstanding Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) and departments. "GSIs are responsible for much of the teaching experience of Cal's undergraduate students," noted CAA President Nadesan Permaul. "Any way that we can enhance the quality of that teaching will benefit wide numbers of undergraduate students." The first awards went to Martin Berman (theater, dance, and performance studies), Michael Clancy (computer science), Kevis Goodman (English), Stephen Tobriner (architecture), and to the College Writing Program.
Silent streams?
It's been said that nuts have an outsized influence on California's environment. The state's largest export crop is almonds--last year, growers harvested over a billion tons of them.
 | Chemical cloud: Spraying insecticide on almond trees near Bakersfield. (Photo by George D. Lepp/Corbis) |
At that quantity, the insecticides growers choose to spray on almond trees, as well as several other crops, significantly affects the health of California's people and wildlife. Increasingly, those insecticides belong to a class of chemicals called pyrethroids (pronounced pie-REE-throids and often recognized by names ending in "-thrin", like permethrin). But regulators may have significantly underestimated both the staying power and toxicity of these chemicals, according to a recent study led by Berkeley biologist Donald Weston.
Since the 1970s, the most commonly used insecticides have been organophosphates (malathion is one example), which animal and human health studies linked to multiple debilitating or fatal conditions. Because they are considered more benign for humans, pyrethroid compounds began replacing many organophosphates in the 1980s. Also, unlike water-soluble organophosphates, which easily make their way into California's rivers and lakes, pyrethroids do not remain long in water.
"That's because pyrethroids bind to sediment, not water," explains Weston. As a result, the state's water sampling does not provide an accurate measure of the concentration or toxicity of the insecticides, he says. Weston's study exposed two species of bottom-dwelling animals, a midge and an amphipod--the "lab rats" for these kinds of studies--to sediment samples collected from 42 stream sites near Central Valley farms. After 10 days, more than a quarter of the samples were lethal to one or both of the species; in over two-thirds of those cases, the pyrethroids were at high-enough levels to account for the deaths independently of other chemicals present in the samples. "It's a cliché, but these animals are a kind of canary in the coal mine as far as the health of these streams," Weston says.
Because pyrethroids bind to sediment, certain remedies may be possible, like creating soil buffer zones around fields to absorb the insecticides. But those fixes won't occur unless the concentration and toxicity of the chemicals is accurately measured. In the past, the Environmental Protection Agency has allowed chemical companies to provide environmental information about only a representative pyrethroid, cypermethrin, which is rarely sprayed in California. Pyrethroid compound toxicity can differ by two orders of magnitude, Weston says. He recommends a broader evaluation--and in the sediment, not water: "The main message is that we've had a group of compounds in use for 20 or more years--increasingly of late--and we have virtually no information about them in sediment, where they concentrate." --K. T.
 | Children's author Beverly Cleary, '38 was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor for artistic excellence. Her books include Dear Mr. Henshaw and Ramona Quimby, Age 8. |
Four professors, A. Paul Alivisatos (right), chemistry and materials science; Raymond Jeanloz, earth and planetary science; George F. Oster, cell and developmental biology; and Peter H. Quail, plant biology, were elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April. |  |
 | Former Cal football coach and All-American quarterback Joe Kapp '59 became the 21st Bear to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Kapp led the Bears to the 1959 Rose Bowl and was head coach from 1982 to 1986. |
Three professors won 2004 Guggenheim fellowships. Neil Fligstein, a sociologist, is writing on the E.U., Lorna Hutson (right) on Shakespearean realism, and German scholar Niklaus Largier on stimulation of the senses in literature. |  |
 | Berkeley computer scientist Richard Karp was awarded the Franklin Medal honoring lifetime achievement in science. Previous winners include Albert Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, and Stephen Hawking. |
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June 2004
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