The William Allan Memorial Award. Presented to Elizabeth F. Neufeld, Ph. D., at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics Detroit, September 29-October 2, 1982

The opportunity for this presentation provides me with three gratifications. The first and most important is that the scientist being honored is Elizabeth Neufeld. The second is the honor bestowed upon me by being selected to introduce Dr. Neufeld. Finally, the preparation of this introduction has provided me with the opportunity to reconstruct a scientific career from its beginnings to its present exciting momentum, an exercise in which I was helped with great enthusiasm by a number of people who have known Liz during the various phases of her scientific life. I am particularly pleased to note that our awardee is the product of that unique breeding ground of success stories, the special New York education system. After arriving in New York in 1940 at the age of 12 from Paris, a refugee from Nazi persecutions in Europe, Liz Neufeld, like so many other young refugees at the time, qualified for one of the specialized schools in New York--the Hunter College High School. From there she went to Queens College, one of the major high-quality free institutions of higher learning of the New York City college system, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1948. Obviously turned on to a scientific career, she successfully applied for a research assistantship at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she worked with the first of her mentors, Dr. Elizabeth Russell, to this day her good friend and enthusiastic admirer. Her first publications are derived from that experience and are concerned with hematologic genetics of mice.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Is Her Majesty at home?

When Queen Elizabeth is at home in Buckingham Palace, tradition has it that the Royal Standard is raised, so that all may know the fact. Although it is not crucial for most of us to know whether Her Majesty is home, it is in social insects. Endler et al. have recently shown how an ant queen signals her presence to her remote workers: she marks her eggs. This is significant because it provides insight into how queens maintain reproductive monopoly within their colonies.     

A case of 'contagious delusional parasitosis' in an adult pair of twin sisters

In July 1992, a 50-year-old married woman, who was a hospital administrative clerk with an adult daughter, stated that, for over 5 years, she had been parasitised by 'small animals coming out from her skin'. While physical and microscopical examinations did not show either lesions or parasites on the skin, both the patient's medical history and the conviction with which she reported the phenomenon, led to a diagnosis of Delusory Parasitosis, a condition which has been well-defined for over 50 years and considered of prevailingly psychiatric competence. The patient was examined several times during the course of 6 years. She exhibited varying levels of anxiety, and brought with her different species of insects which she had captured 'when she saw them coming out of her skin'. In July 1998 the patient returned with her twin sister, who 'had been infected by her'. Indeed, she too 'had discharged various insects from her skin' for more than a year. The authors provide information on the response of this hallucinatory syndrome to therapy which, as in this case, appears to be resistant to treatment, unless appropriate psychoactive drugs are used.     

Reflections on the United States Military 1941-1987

This article, 'Reflections on the United States Military 1941-1987' written by my grandmother, Mary Mandels, illustrates her passion for life. Her outreach article was considered most appropriate for publication in this forum. Her career activities are outlined in the prior article 'Mary Elizabeth Hickox Mandels, 90, Bioenergy Leader' while her accomplishments were fully recognized, for instance, nationally through the American Chemical Society and through her induction into the Hall of Fame at the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts. As illustrated, along with Dr Elwyn Reese at Natick's Pioneering Research Laboratory, she headed a bioengineering group that is particularly remembered for developing a process for the enzymatic conversion of waste cellulosic biomass into soluble sugars that could be fermented to ethanol for an alternate liquid fuel (gasohol). This technology remains a subject of interest with growing environmental concerns and an oil shortage crisis.     

Latinas,Amniocentesis and the Discourse of Choice

Little attention has been paid to the impact of theincreasingly routine use of fetal diagnosis on howU.S. minority women experience their pregnancies anddecide whether to have their fetuses tested. Usingnarrative analysis, we offer the account of one Latinawho, despite considerable turmoil, ultimately acceptedan offer of amniocentesis. We describe her reasoningin choosing a course of action. Data from interviewswith 147 Latinas who were faced with the same decisionare used to contextualize the case study material. Weseek to illuminate how a blending of Mexican andEuropean American cultural influences helped shape thewoman's experience and define the dilemma she facedwhen she learned her fetus might be born with a graveor incurable condition because she was ideologicallyopposed to abortion.     

Anna Fraentzel Celli (1878-1958)

This paper provides a short history of Anna Fraentzel Celli life, from her arrival in Italy in 1898 to her death in 1958, reviewing available documents and written testimonies. Anna Fraentzel was born in Berlin in 1878, third of four daughters from a bourgeois family; her maternal grandfather, Luigi Traube, was a very well known physician, as well as her father Oscar, and she developed an early interest in medicine that she couldn't fulfill: actually after her father's death she was forced to shorten her education, she couldn't enter the medical school, as she would have liked to, and she attended the nursing school, instead, displaying a lot of good practical sense. As a nurse in Hamburg in 1896 she met Prof. Angelo Celli, who was there on a professional visit, and who assisted the young nurse in finding a job at the city hospital. She was much younger than him, who was already a middle aged respected scientist; anyhow, even after his departure, they kept in touch and eventually fell in love. They married in 1899 and she moved to Rome to work at the S. Spirito Hospital joining a brilliant group of physicians and researchers as Tommasi-Crudeli, Marchiafava, Bignami, Bastianelli, Dionisi, Grassi, and her husband Angelo. They had long been studying the mode of transmission of the malaria infection and in 1898 they had identified the mosquito Anopheles as the vector of the malaria parasite. She got enthusiastically involved both in the scientific work and in the antimalarial campaign which Celli promoted in the Agro Romano. The strong personality of Anna Celli, her active involvement in social problems, her passionate dedication to her work, her peculiar way of being feminist, expressed fully her commitment to the struggle against malaria and illiteracy in the Agro Romano and in the Paludi Pontine at the beginning of the twentieth century. She must be credited as a major force in the creation and functioning of the Peasant Schools, as well as in the organisation of the experimental antimalarial health clinics. After her husband's death in 1914 she continued as a promoter of the antimalarial campaign, co-operating with the Red Cross and other institutions. Moreover, she edited the scientific and historical papers which Angelo Celli had collected and written during his life. She was also a prolific writer and lecturer on these issues and gained widespread appreciation both in Italy and in Germany. Toward the end of her life she retired to a nursing home in Rome where she died almost alone in 1958.     

Memoirs of an amnesiac--two years with brain cancer,or the outer space of living with brain tumors.

Alexandra Dane Dor-Ner ("Ali" to friends) was a photographer, writer, and a producer of programs on child development. In February 1989, at the age of 41, she was diagnosed with malignant brain cancer. During the following months she underwent brain surgery, radiation, and implant radiation. Throughout her treatment, she continued to work on a novel and write stores and literary criticism. A volunteer in hospitals before her illness, she now became very active in a support group of brain tumor patients and often served as a first resource and contact for others diagnosed with brain cancer. All was very accomplished; her award-winning photographs have been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and her articles and pictures were published in books, periodicals, and newspapers around the world. A native of Boston, Ali lived for 17 years in Israel, where she joined a group of photographers documenting disappearing neighborhoods in Jerusalem. She was awarded first prize in the "Israel Through the Camera''s Eye" competition in 1977. She also taught English and photography in Israeli high schools. Ali traveled extensively on photographic assignments. Early in their 22-year marriage, she and her husband circumnavigated the globe on a freighter, producing a documentary film of the voyage. "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" was written while Ali was a student at the Warren Wilson College Writers'' Program in North Carolina; she intended to explore the compensatory aspects of her disease. In February 1991, within days of completing the piece, Ali had a third brain operation to remove a regrowth of cancerous tumor cells, as well as necrotic tissue. Two days later, she was again operated on to remove blood clots resulting from the previous surgery. For the next 12 weeks she fought to regain her ability to walk, talk, and write. In May, she underwent a fifth operation to relieve pressure in the brain. She was still in the hospital when she learned, to her great pleasure, that she would be awarded a master of fine arts degree from Warren Wilson College. She died on June 19, 1991.     

COMMENTARY: SCIENCE SCANDAL OR ETHICS SCANDAL? OLIVIERI REDUX

Dr. Nancy Olivieri has become an icon of research integrity for her insistence on publishing adverse data about a drug she was investigating. She has been celebrated world-wide as a hero of biomedical ethics for her bravery in disclosing potential dangers to research subjects, in the face of both drug company threats and coercive pressures from her hospital and university. Like so many other 'whistle-blowers' however, she now faces both personal vilification and disturbing accusations of scientific error. The case against Olivieri is assessed and found to be baseless.     

An abnormal facial gesture in an estrous mare

A 24-year-old mare exhibited abnormal behavior only when she was in estrus. She was subordinate to other mares. During diestrus she aggressed against an approaching stallion as a normal non-receptive mare would, but during estrus she flexed her limbs, clamped her tail and opened and closed her mouth when a stallion approached. The facial expression appeared when she first noticed the stallion or heard his neighs. The limb flexing occurred only when a stallion was in close proximity. The facial expression closely resembled snapping (also known as champing or tooth-clapping) of immature equids and jawing of receptive zebra and donkey mares.It is hypothesized that the mare's expression, the snapping of foals and the facial expression of donkeys and zebras are the same expression — one that indicates that the animal is in an approach—avoidance situation. In this case, the mare may have been both fearful of, and attracted to, stallions.     

Epilogue: Luria's Psychological Symphony

A finely worked bronze dog has been standing on my desk for twenty years now. Aside from the books with their dedicatory signatures, it is the only material thing I have in memory of Aleksandr Romanovich Luria. A week after he died, Lana Pimenovna, his wife, asked if I could drop in to see her. I thought that the reason for her call—to ask me to enlarge, reproduce, and frame some photos she had made of Aleksandr Romanovich in various years during his lifetime—was only a pretext: the publisher's in-house photographer or any other photographer could have done this.     

The transformative power of story for healing

One of our goals in this session was, not just to talk about the healing power of narrative, but to experience it as well. Louise Profeit-LeBlanc is one of the presenters we invited specifically because of her skills as a storyteller. She has been heavily involved for several years as both an organizer and a participant in the Yukon Storytelling Festival, held every year in late May in Whitehorse. Woven into her presentation is a useful framework for differentiating various kinds of stories. As she tells us a series of stories, she takes us through a wide range of emotions from grief and loss to laughter and awe. For each of her stories, she gives us some personal contextual information that adds to the story’s meaning and helps us appreciate its significance. Her final story, in particular, is the kind of traditional story that has probably existed for a very long time. Such stories may be told with slightly different emphases, depending on the occasion, but they carry wisdom and value for every generation that hears them.     

Louisa May Alcott: her mysterious illness

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), famous in her own time and immortalized in ours as a major figure of the "American Renaissance," died at the age of 55 after intermittent suffering over 20 years. Her illnesses evoked intense interest in her time and in ours. Alcott tracked her signs and symptoms (in letters and journal entries), which included headaches and vertigo, rheumatism, musculo-skeletal pain, and skin rashes; in her final years she recorded severe dyspepsia with symptoms of obstruction, and headaches compatible with severe hypertension. Her death came suddenly with a stroke. Standard biographies propose that her illnesses were due to acute mercury poisoning from inorganic mercury medication she received for a bout of typhoid in 1863, a cause she herself believed. We have reviewed Alcott's observations, as well as those of others, and have determined that acute mercury poisoning could not have caused her long-term complaints. We propose instead that Alcott suffered a multi-system disease, possibly originating from effects of mercury on the immune system. A portrait of Alcott raises the possibility that she had systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).     

Raissa L. Berg's contributions to the study of phenotypic integration,with a professional biographical sketch

Raissa L. Berg had a remarkable career in many respects and an impact on the study of phenotypic integration that continues to increase over 50 years after the publication of her seminal paper in that area. She was born and lived most of her life in Russia, with most of her research focused on measuring spontaneous mutation rates in Drosophila. She was forced to abandon this work during the height of Lysenko''s power in Russia, so she turned temporarily to the study of correlation patterns in plants; ironically, this work has had a more enduring impact than her main body of research. She showed that floral and vegetative traits become decoupled into separate correlation ‘pleiades’ in plants with specialized pollinators, but floral and vegetative traits remain correlated in plants that have less specialized pollination. Unfortunately, her plant work is often mis-cited as providing evidence for increased correlations among floral traits due to selection by pollinators for functional integration, a point she never made and one that is not supported by her data. Still, many studies of correlation pleiades have been conducted in plants, with the results mostly supporting Berg''s hypothesis, although more studies on species with generalized pollination are needed.     

Anna Meyer and the distinction between grades and clades in early models of gastropod evolution

Abstract. Anna Meyer published her first (and apparently last) scientific paper in 1913, in which she reported, in part, on the organization of the renogenital systems in the "Diotocardia" and "Monotocardia," and the evolutionary signal present in this character suite. Meyer's phylogeny broke with conventional wisdom of her time and she reconstructed early gastropod evolution as a sequence of branching events rather than a continuous grade. Her phylogeny was ignored because it did not correspond to the well-ordered grades that came to dominate gastropod systematics for over 75 years, but her schematics of renogenital configurations have been featured in the literature for over 55 years, sometimes without citation and redrawn to show a different set of relationships. We hope that the translation of her paper from German into English ( http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/collections/archdat.html ) will make her contribution more accessible to workers.     

Effect of a birth on the behavior of a family group of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at Dublin Zoo

Elephants in the wild live in herds of related females from several generations. Zoos, therefore, tend to house elephants in female groups, consisting where possible of related individuals. This type of group structure is very beneficial as it allows group members to experience events such as births in the group, and means that natural social interactions can take place between the group members. The behavior of four related female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at Dublin Zoo was recorded before and after the birth of a calf, to examine what effects it would have on the behavior and associations in the elephant group. The mother of the calf significantly decreased the amount of time she spent walking after the birth and the aunt of the calf showed significant decreases in both walking and standing. The mother spent the majority of her time closest to her calf after the birth, but the proportion of time she spent with each of the other individuals in the group did not change. The associations of the aunt also did not change after the birth. The older sister of the newborn calf increased the proportion of time she spent nearest to her mother after the calf was born, and reduced the time she spent close to another young elephant in the group. The new calf seems to have been successfully assimilated into the elephant group.     

Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau

“Profiles of Pioneer Women Scientists: Katherine Esau” tells the story of a noted botanist, plant anatomist, and electron microscopist who was born in the Russian Ukraine (in 1898), forced to flee the Bolshevik Revolution with her family—her father a mayor of Ekaterinoslav under the Czar—to Germany, where she received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, education she put to good use in America. Beginning in a sugarbeet field in Salinas, California, she progressed through the doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) and there began her exceptional research on plant anatomy and plant viral diseases. Her textbookPlant Anatomy became known among college students as “Aunt Kitty’s Bible,” and all of her textbooks have gone into second, and some to third, editions. Transferring to the University of California at Santa Barbara (with its new Chancellor, V. I. Cheadle) only two years before retirement, she blossomed anew, producing some of her best work there and obtaining National Science Foundation support for a new electron microscope and other research funds through her 89th year. Katherine Esau started accruing awards and honors at a relatively early age (Faculty Research Lecturer at age 50, election to the National Academy of Sciences at 59) and has never stopped (the President’s Medal of Science at age 91, a UC Santa Barbara building named for her at age 93). It has been her good fortune to live to enjoy these honors. The short autobiography of her father, a truly enterprising engineer, is included here, as are the recollections of Celeste Turner Wright. Celeste, who arrived at UC Davis the same year as Katherine Esau, became an acclaimed poet, and chaired the English Department for many years. She has added a lively reminiscence of the days she and Katherine spent at UC Davis. The introduction to the book by one of Esau’s former graduate students, Ray Franklin Evert, himself a renowned plant pathologist, provides a heartfelt tribute to his greatly admired professor.     

Nora Volkow: motivated neuroscientist

Nora Volkow claims to have always been curious about the workings of the human brain. Even as a medical student in her native Mexico, she investigated animal behavior with the ultimate goal of understanding human motivation. Upon completing her medical studies, in the early 80s, she moved to the U.S. to take advantage of emerging neuroimaging technologies, first during her psychiatry residency at New York University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and then as a faculty member at the University of Texas in Houston. In Houston, Volkow embarked on seminal studies into human drug use and the functioning brain, which she continued to pursue, again at Brookhaven, during the subsequent two decades. Volkow established herself as an eminent researcher and proponent of neuroscience, and her insights into the brain have greatly advanced our appreciation of human behavior and motivation. In 2003, she took up her present position as Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.     

Life, death, and humor: approaches to storytelling in Native America

Edith Turner has been studying healing as a sensitive, spiritually attuned participant-observer for a long time. Despite her academic background, experiential learning and knowing are important parts of Turner’s approach to research. Her efforts to understand healing have taken her on journeys to Africa, Mexico, Ireland, and more recently, Alaska’s North Slope. In these contexts, she has experienced healing offered by others, and learned to heal in various traditional ways herself. In her book, The Hands Feel It (1996), Turner focuses on the role that touch and spirit presence have in healing in a North Slope I?upiat community. However, her book makes clear that narrative and storytelling are important parts of the healing process, as well. In this paper, Turner elaborates on some aspects of the connection between narrative and healing based on her North Slope experience.