Indian premier visits quake area by Pamela Constable The Washington Post January 29, 2001 AHMADABAD, India - Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee Monday toured areas hit hardest by Friday's powerful earthquake and pledged that no expense would be spared to rebuild the affected re gion as soon as possible. "I have never seen a natural di saster of such fury," Vajpayee said after a tour of the devastated city of Bhuj and an aerial inspection of rural areas here in India's Gujarat state. Official tallies put the death toll of Friday's 7.9-magnitude quake at 6,287 people confirmed dead and 15,481 injured, but other estimates have put the number of fatalities as high as 20,000. Vajpayee's visit came on a day when hopes dwindled for rescuing further survivors from thousands of collapsed buildings and questions were being raised about the promptness of government relief efforts. Leaders of a Swiss rescue team, which has been using sniffer dogs since Saturday to locate buried vic tims, said they had found only a handful of people still alive and ex pected that the vast majority of those still trapped are now dead. "We couldn't hope to save more than a few lives, with a quake of such magnitude with so many ru ral areas where small houses col lapsed instantly," said Toni Frisch, the 52-member team's spokesman. "At least 95 percent of those who survived were the ones who ran outside right away." Frisch said a large part of his team's assistance was psychologi cal rather than physical. He said the dogs were able to detect with cer tainty if buried bodies were dead, thus giving closure to relatives' anxieties, and that saving even one life among thousands gave a mo rale boost to the stricken commu nities. "In Ahmadabad we saved two people in three hours, with hun dreds of people watching us in the dark. They gave us a standing ova SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Study: Rodents' higher IQ might come at painful price by Rick Weiss The Washington Post January 29, 2001 It hurts to be smart That's one conclusion from the latest study of so-called Doogie "smart" rodents that are ge netically engineered to have en hanced memory and learning skills. Along with those extra IQ points, researchers have found, comes an added sensitivity to some kinds of pain. The new work offers a sobering lesson about the difficulty of en hancing certain brain functions without simultaneously taking a toll on others. It might temper any momentum to engineering genetic enhancements into people. "Beware what you ask for," said James L. McGaugh, a neuroscien tist at the University of Califor nia at Irvine. "And when you get it, look carefully and see what else mice - you got." Doogie mice, named after the precocious television character Doogie Howser, MD, made a big splash when they were introduced to the world in September 1999. Having been endowed with extra copies of a gene involved in memory formation, the animals outperformed their normal coun terparts on a variety of tasks. They were better at recognizing objects they had seen before, re membered painful experiences longer, recalled with greater accu racy the location of submerged platforms in milky water and were better at "unlearning" old associa tions that were no longer true. Some scientists sniffed at the suggestion that the mice were par ticularly brainy, noting intelli- tion and brought us tea," he said. "We really motivate people by showing solidarity with them." But in small towns and villages where no official rescue crews have yet arrived, residents were ex pressing anger and frustration. Of ficials with some foreign relief agencies here also said they had noticed a "lack of urgency" on the part of some local authorities after the quake. "The star players are the Indian military and the Swiss rescue people. Government action is not visible," said C.S. Reddy, an offi cial with CARE International. "The army responded immedi ately, and the (civilian) officials we met were cooperative, but I did not feel a sense of urgency. This is day four, which is an eternity to us, but the government still seems shellshocked." The national director of India's Border Security Force, Gurbachan Jaggat, said Monday that "the trag edy is much bigger than we ini tially thought." Jaggat estimated that as many as 97 villages and towns throughout Gujarat state have been "virtually flattened." Vajpayee said he was "fully sat isfied" with government rescue and relief efforts, but he acknowl edged that because Friday was a national holiday and official atten tion was focused elsewhere, "it took some time to get settled and move forward." He said the gov ernment was "looking into" com plaints of slow action and would "expedite our efforts." During his tour of Ahmadabad, where 553 people have been con firmed dead, Vajpayee was taken to an apartment building where an army team had tunneled beneath several stories to save seven people. Army officers called the operation a major success. "We found one lady who refused to come out. Her child was dead but we told her he was still alive, and that motivated her to come out," said Maj. J.S. Sandhu, who directed the operation at the Siddhi apartments. "The public was very happy." gence is much more than a col lection of four or five mental skills. Nonetheless, the work was the first to show that by adding a few extra copies of a single gene to an embryo, researchers im prove an animal's performance on a range of memory and learning tasks. Some suggested drugs de signed to mimic the gene's effects might help Alzheimer's patients or even make sharp people sharper. The new work hints it won't be that easy Min Zhou and his colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis assessed how Doogie mice responded to tissue damage and inflammation. They suspected that sensations of pain caused by those types of in jury might be controlled by the same "NR2B receptor" that Doogie mice are overendowed with and that gives the animals their superior memories. NR2B receptors are proteins that act as "coincidence detec tors" in the brain. They recognize, for example, when a certain sound is linked to the arrival of food and help consolidate such coinci dences into learned associations. The researchers subjected the mice to stimuli that cause either short-term or long-term pain. They heated the animals' tails, poked their foot pads with stiff fibers and injected their paws with irritating solutions. Then they used molecular and neuro logical tests to see how the ani mals' brains responded and tracked the animals' behavior - measuring, for example, how long they licked the site of injury. Those tests indicated that, com- WORLD & NATION Hospital illegally took dead children's organs, report says by Marjorie Miller Los Angeles Times January 30, 2001 LONDON - One of the leading children's hospitals in Britain illegally harvested hearts, brains, eyes and other organs from thousands of dead children without the consent of their parents, according to a government re port published Tuesday. The report blamed a rogue patholo gist at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool for systematically re moving "every organ from every child who had a post- mortem" between 1988 and 1995. ut investigators also found stock piled body parts, in cluding the head of an 11-year-old boy, at the hospital and a Liverpool Univer sity research center that predated the term of Dutch pa thologist Dick van Velzen. And a sepa rate or!an census is- sued by the Health Department on Tuesday indicated that removing body parts without "in formed consent" is common in En glish hospitals. The revelations come on the heels of admissions by Alder Hey, Birming ham Children's Hospital and London's Great Ormond Street Hos pital for Children that they have sold live tissue removed from children during surgery to pharmaceutical companies for drug production - again, without the knowledge of par ents. The collection of organs for medi cal research is common in many coun tries, including the United States, and many of the Alder Hey families said they would have given their permis sion if they had been asked. They said they resented that their children's bod ies were "taken apart like scrap from old cars" without regard or respect for the family's feelings. "As far as I'm concerned, it's like grave robbery," said Tracy Fabiani, who lost a baby at the Liverpool hos pital and was given the body back mi nus organs. The organ scandals have fueled pared with normal mice, Doogie mice are equally sensitive to short-term pain. But chronic in flammatory pain, such as that caused by the injected irritants, lasts significantly longer in Doogie mice. "Our results suggest that a ge netic manipulation confering en hanced cognitive abilities may also provide unintended traits, such as increased susceptibility to persistent pain," the team reports in Monday's issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. Joe Tsien, the Princeton scien tist who led the creation of Doogie mice, said he wasn't convinced the mice feel more pain. The molecu lar, physiological and behavioral responses Zhou's team observed in the mice could be caused by en hanced memories of the painful experience, he said, not enhanced pain. "The worst thing would be to say smarter mice are more miser able," Tsien said. Other scientists conceded it's difficult to know what mice are experiencing because they cannot talk. Even in people, physical and cognitive components of pain are deeply integrated. Still, several scientists said, the new study of fers strong substantiation that a Doogie mouse's pain is real. "This is very convincing evi dence" that the mice have pro longed chronic pain responses, said McGaugh, who directs U.C. Irvine's center for the neurobiol ogy of learning and memory. The finding makes sense, he said. "Most of our brain regions are multipurpose. These things are all intertwined." public distrust in the National Health Service, already rocked by the case of Dr. Harold Shipman, a beloved small town doctor who authorities say may have murdered as many as 200 of his elderly patients in a career spanning 25 years. Shipman was convicted last year of killing 15 patients in the Manches ter suburb of Hyde and is in prison. A government inquiry is to be held to determine how the killings continued undetected for so long. Health Secretary Alan Milburn con demned the NHS this week for its anachronistic attitudes and called for a mentation of the organs was 'shocking - spectful.'One entry relating to a 9- week-6 d fetus said: 'lnflated monster. Humpty Dumpty.' They were stored in jars and stacked in a dingy basement foryears." "revolution" in a medical culture that has put the word of a doctor and the needs of researchers above the rights of patients and parents. Speaking to Parliament on Tuesday, Milburn apologized to the families of more than 2,000 children whose organs were removed at Alder Hey. He blamed van Velzen for ordering the "unethical and illegal" collection of organs and accused the pathologist of having lied to parents and falsified or stolen medi cal records to cover up his activities. The case has been turned over to po- lice, he said Van Velzen, an expert on sudden in fant death syndrome, is on leave from his current job at a Dutch hospital and has been unavailable for comment. He is wanted by Canadian authorities in connection with a stash of children's organs discovered in Nova Scotia, where he worked after leaving Liverpool. Milburn told lawmakers that more than 2,000 children's hearts, a large number of brain parts, eyes taken from fetuses, more than 1,500 fetuses or bodies from stillbirths, and a number of children's heads and bodies were oh- Leaving empty space at NASA Old life form teems in oceans The Washington Post January 29, 2001 Scientists have long understood that the open seas are teeming with simple mi croscopic life forms, but they thought these organisms were bacteria. Last week, researchers reported that a shocking frac tion of this part of the food chain appears to be made up of odd one-celled organ isms called archaea, which is quite a dif ferent kettle of nonfish. Genetic research had earlier revealed that archaea (a name derived from the Greek word for "ancient") make up a third domain of life, distinct from bacte ria and plants and animals. But until now they were considered a "failed" life form that had adapted poorly to changes in the planetary environment and therefore was confined to certain extreme environments reminiscent of the infant Earth that spawned its earliest ancestor, such as high-temperature volcanic vents on the sea floor and highly acidic waters. Instead, a year-long study of archaeal abundance in the Pacific, from the sur -information in a 500-page report about Alder Hey Children Hospital tained without consent Documentation of the organs was "shocking and disrespectful," accord ing to the report. One entry relating to a 9-week-old fetus said: "Inflated monster. Humpty Dumpty." They were stored in jars and stacked in a dingy basement for years. The 500-page Alder Hey report said the store of organs remained largely unused for research or education. It said the government should consider disciplinary action against managers of the hospital. The Liverpool hospital apologized Tuesday and an- nounced suspen sions of high-rank- Alan Jarvis, whose 4-year-old son, Matthew, died at Alder Hey in 1990, said he had no idea until late last year that son's heart, brain, lungs and testes were re moved after his death. "We thou Matthew was cre mated as a whole body, not a part body," Jarvis told BBC radio. "But the essence of Matthew is left behind in a bucket in Alder Hey to this day." In issuing the separate Health De partment organs census, the government's chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, said current law governing the removal and retention of organs from dead patients in Brit ain is "unclear, ambiguous and aging." He said many organs are taken with out consent and that some hospitals may have "ignored and deviated from the law" by keeping body parts for de cades for no purpose. Donaldson said 100,000 hearts, brains, lungs and other organs are held by hospitals and medical schools across England, many of them taken without the knowledge of the dead patients' families. In many cases, grieving relatives weren't told that by signing a consent form for a post-mortem examination, they also were agreeing to allow pa thologists to remove organs. He urged major changes in the law to ensure that patients and relatives were giv ing "informed consent." "This remarkable new insight will have a major impact on our view of how the oceans function ecologically," -Phil Taylor, director of biological oceanog raphy for the National Science Foundation face to depths of almost 16,000 feet, shows such high concentrations that the organisms could make up 50 percent of the life, or "biomass," in the open ocean, according to David Karl of the Univer sity of Hawaii. Karl, with UH colleague Markus Karner and Edward DeLong of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, reported the findings in the Jan. 24 issue of Nature. J3lq• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2001 Napster party ends this summer, says Beitelsmann chief by Billy O'Keefe TMS Campus January 30, 2001 The party may still be raging,. but the cops are on the way. German publishing conglomer- ate Bertelsmann announced this week that it will introduce this summer a subscription plan re quiring surfers to pay for Napster, the popular online music-swap ping service that attracts more than eight million users a day. Neither Bertelsmann nor Napster disclosed information regarding how much a subsoil: tion to the service, currently nt existent, would cost, what limi tations it might carry, or exactly when the new plan takes effect. Additionally, no information was available on what music Napste,r would offer subscribers. Bertelsmann owns music pub lisher }CMG Music, but plans for the involvement of Other major and independent labels are still in question. ht that "I'm convinced we can intro duce in June or July of this year a subscription model, with a real working digital rights manage ment system," said Bertelsmann Chief Executive. Thomas Middelhoff, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Swit zerland. Napster forged a partnership with Bertelsmann in October of last year after more than a dozen breach-of-copyright lawsuits from music publishers, BMG in cluded, threatened to pull the eothpatrY 'Under'. lviiddelhoff said that he does not expect a significaht decline in Napster's user base once the sub scription takes effect. He referred to a survey of 25,000 of the service's more than 55 million us ers, in which 70 percent said they would be willing to pay; up to keep the downloads coming. Ed Stone, the chief of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is prepar ing to retire, played a key role in vastly adding to the knowledge of our solar system's outer planets. "This remarkable new insight will have a major impact on our view of how the oceans function ecologically," said Phil Taylor, director of biological oceanogra phy for the National Science Foundation, which funded the research. To the extent that archaea function differently from bacteria, he said, current theories on a va riety of processes such as carbon recy cling should be reevaluated.
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