The Educationally Handicapped Child—The Physician's Place in a Program to Overcome Learning Disability

Under California Assembly Bill 464, special classes may be provided by school districts for children designated as educationally handicapped. An educationally handicapped child is not mentally retarded or physically disabled. He may have neurological handicap or emotional disorder, but he must show impaired achievement in relation to his tested abilities.A physician may be asked to participate in the program, either as a specified member of the admissions committee of the school district or to provide a medical clearance for entrance of one of his own patients into the program.He does a thorough history and physical examination but adds special examination of attention, activity, coordination and attitudes.The educationally handicapped child is helped most by the physician who does not reject the idea of educational handicap even if the medical examination is negative; who treats his minor ills; who medicates, when it is indicated, for hyperactivity, distractibility or extreme anxiety; who cooperates with parents and school personnel.     

Personality Factors Associated with Frequency of Marijuana Use

A number of personality and style-of-life variables were found to be significantly related to frequency of marijuana use, in a study of 1215 students on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus. Compared with the non-user, in composite the typical marijuana-user is somewhat depressed, more inclined to doubt his emotional adjustment. He likes to take risks and seeks stimulation; he has strong political opinions; he believes in punishment for law-breakers, but he is more likely to question it. He is not religious; he is less well identified with parents, and he has a lower opinion of their marital adjustment. He is not decisive about career goals; he is a fine arts or liberal arts major. He uses alcohol, sometimes in combination with marijuana; he first tried marijuana after entering college and is not increasing his use. The typical marijuana-user in the sample uses it infrequently, twice a month or less often, and is not likely to be using other drugs. The frequent user probably uses other drugs.     

Q & A

Leslie Orgel is a Professor and Senior Fellow at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California at San Diego. The first part of his career was devoted to the theoretical inorganic chemistry of transition metal ions. This led to the publication of a book on Ligand-Field Theory. Since 1964, he has concentrated on aqueous solution chemistry that might be relevant to the origin of life. He has authored or co-authored two books on the origin of life.     

Jordan Raff

Jordan Raff is a Cancer Research UK funded group leader at the Wellcome/CR-UK Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London, and he worked as a Post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry, University of California, San Francisco. He is currently a Director of the Company of Biologists, and on the committee of the British Society of Cell Biology. He has studied centrosomes and cell division in fruit flies throughout his scientific career.     

Direct physical formation of anatomical structures by cell traction forces. An interview with Albert Harris by Lev Beloussov

Albert Harris was educated at The Norfolk Academy, Norfolk, Virginia, USA (1961). He then earned a Batchelor of Arts Degree in Biology from Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, USA (1965), followed by a Ph.D. in Biology (1971) from Yale University, where his Dissertation Advisor was the great John Phillip Trinkaus. He held a Damon-Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cancer Research in 1970-72, under Michael Abercrombie, FRS, at the Strangeways Research Laboratory of Cambridge University, England. Then he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Zoology Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. USA. In 1977, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Zoology, and in 1983 was promoted to Full Professor of Biology. In Oct.-Nov. 1991 he was honored to be Distinguished Visiting Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Davis.     

The manzanar project: Towards a solution to poverty, hunger, environmental pollution, and global warming through sea water aquaculture and silviculture in deserts

Summary Dr. Gordon Sato is a former Editor-in-Chief of In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology, President of the Tissue Culture Association (now Society for In Vitro Biology), and Director of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center (now Adirondack Biomedical Center). He began pilot experiments on the Manzanar Project at test sites in the Salton Sea while a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego and continued the project in the laboratory at the Cell Center in Lake Placid, NY and at Eritrean test sites during their war of independence. Since 1994, he spends up to 10 mo. per yr in Eritrea where he directs the Manzanar Project and trains young Eritrean scientists in the field in the area of what he refers to as “low-tech biotech.” The name of the Manzanar Project was inspired by the camp in California where Dr. Sato and his family were interned during World War II.—The Editor     

Q & A: Alexander Varshavsky

Alexander Varshavsky is Smits Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He moved to Caltech in 1992, after 15 years at the MIT's Department of Biology. He was born and educated in Russia, and was 30 at the time of his emigration to the U.S. in 1977. In Russia, and for a while at MIT, he studied the structure and replication of chromosomes. Over the last 24 years, the work of his laboratory focused on the ubiquitin system and closely related fields. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Gairdner Award, the Lasker Award, the General Motors Sloan Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Horwitz Prize, and the Wilson Medal.     

Optimal Transmission Radius for Flooding in Large Scale Sensor Networks

One of the principal characteristics of large scale wireless sensor networks is their distributed, multi-hop nature. Due to this characteristic, applications such as query propagation rely regularly on network-wide flooding for information dissemination. If the transmission radius is not set optimally, the flooded packet may be holding the transmission medium for longer periods than are necessary, reducing overall network throughput. We analyze the impact of the transmission radius on the average settling time—the time at which all nodes in the network finish transmitting the flooded packet. Our analytical model takes into account the behavior of the underlying contention-based MAC protocol, as well as edge effects and the size of the network. We show that for large wireless networks there exists an intermediate transmission radius which minimizes the settling time, corresponding to an optimal tradeoff between reception and contention times. We also explain how physical propagation models affect small wireless networks and why there is no intermediate optimal transmission radius observed in these cases. The mathematical analysis is supported and validated through extensive simulations.Marco Zuniga is currently a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru in 1998, and his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2002. His interests are in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks in general, and more specifically in studying the interaction amongst different layers to improve the performance of these networks. He is a member of IEEE and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor society.Bhaskar Krishnamachari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), where he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science. He received his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering with a four-year full-tuition scholarship from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1998. He received his Masters degree and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1999 and 2002, under a four-year university graduate fellowship. Dr. Krishnamacharis previous research has included work on critical density thresholds in wireless networks, data centric routing in sensor networks, mobility management in cellular telephone systems, multicast flow control, heuristic global optimization, and constraint satisfaction. His current research is focused on the discovery of fundamental principles and the analysis and design of protocols for next generation wireless sensor networks. He is a member of IEEE, ACM and the Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu Engineering Honor Societies     

Will hospital closures mean physician unemployment in Ontario?

Dr. Duncan Sinclair, the former dean of medicine who heads the commission charged with restructuring Ontario''s health care system, said something dramatic was needed to revamp the system. He wasn''t kidding. His commission recently called for the closure of 3 hospitals in Ottawa and 10 more in Toronto. In a wideranging interview with Charlotte Gray he talks about the commission''s goals and their potential impact on physicians.     

Jonathon Howard.

Jonathon 'Joe' Howard (Fig. 1) is Group Leader and Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics; he and his research group moved to Dresden, Germany, in July 2001. Howard received his PhD in neurobiology in 1983 from the Australian National University in Canberra. He did postdoctoral research there and also at the University of Bristol, UK, and at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1989, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington. His book "Mechanics of Motor Proteins and the Cytoskeleton" was published earlier this year. [interview by Mari N. Jensen]     

Bacterial rhodopsins: evolution of a mechanistic model for the ion pumps

Walther Stoeckenius received a MD degree at the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1950. After 18 months of clinical work as an intern, he began postdoctoral work on the development of pox viruses at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg using mainly electron microscopy techniques. After two years he moved as Assistant Professor to the Department of Pathology at the University of Hamburg and became Docent for Pathology in 1958. In addition to teaching and routine pathology work, he continued to use electron microscopy to explore the fine structure of cells and developed an interpretation of the triple-layered appearance of membranes in electron micrographs in terms of molecular structure and the chemistry of osmium tetroxide fixation. In 1959 he obtained a position as Research Associate in Keith Porter's laboratory at Rockefeller University. This was changed after a few months to Assistant Professor and he stayed there, later as Associate Professor, for eight years. The work on membrane structure continued, and a model was developed that described the membrane as a lipid bilayer with embedded protein domains. In efforts to isolate such domains, the purple membrane and bacteriorhodopsin were discovered. In 1966, the lure of California became irresistible and Dr. Stoeckenius accepted a professorship at the University of California at San Francisco. The work on bacteriorhodopsin continued there with the emphasis changing from electron microscopy to spectroscopy and biochemical techniques. He is now Professor Emeritus there in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Cardiovascular Research Institute.     

Horace A. Barker (1907-) pioneer of anaerobic metabolism

Dr Horace A. Barker was born and raised in California. He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1933, and became a faculty member at the same campus in 1936. He devoted his research to the study of bacterial metabolism. His contributions include the detailed studies of various aspects of metabolism such as synthesis and oxidation of fatty acids, fermentation of amino acids and purines, and carbohydrate transformations. He isolated and determined the structure and function of some enzymes and coenzymes from bacteria. He also specifically described many anaerobic metabolic pathways. Dr Barker retired in 1976.     

Integrating Art and Aesthetics

Educational quality is a central issue in higher education and music teacher education. In this article, the author discusses problems concerning the development of and research into quality in music teacher education in Western societies' contemporary socio-cultural dynamics. He begins with a presentation of the concept of educational quality, its importance for music teacher education, and traditional designs for this inquiry. Thereafter, he discusses the promotion of educational quality as an external, political initiative, as a meeting between a traditionally modern project and a condition of late modernity, as well as focusing on particularly illustrative areas. The author details challenges inherent in the development of and research into educational quality as a late modern project and presents recommendations and strategies.     

Profile--Richard A. Mathies. Interview by Suzanne Berry.

Richard A. Mathies (Fig. 1) is a professor of chemistry at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. His early work at UC was on the use of resonance Raman and time-resolved optical spectroscopy to elucidate the structure and reaction dynamics of energy and information-transducing photoactive proteins called rhodopsins. His work on the Human Genome Project led to the development of high-throughput platform technologies including capillary array electrophoresis and energy transfer fluorescent dye labels for DNA sequencing and analysis. He has also pioneered the development of microfabricated capillary electrophoresis devices, capillary array electrophoresis microplates and microfabriated integrated sample preparation and detection methods. He is the co-founder of the Center for Analytical Biotechnology at UC Berkeley. Mathies was interviewed at the BIOMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology conference in Columbus, Ohio, 21-25 September 2001, where he gave a talk about capillary array electrophoresis-based microprocessors. Such devices could be used as point-of-care clinical and genetic analyzers, in integrated microfluidic sequencing chips and in DNA-based computing.     

A Statewide Approach to Health Care Personnel Maldistribution—The California Area Health Education Center System

An Area Health Education Center (AHEC) system has been established in California to address the maldistribution of physicians and other health care professionals. The AHEC program uses educational incentives to recruit and retain health care personnel in underserved areas by linking the academic resources of university health science centers with local educational and clinical facilities. The medical schools, working in partnership with urban or rural AHECs throughout the state, are implementing educational programs to attract trainees and licensed professionals to work in underserved communities. The California AHEC project entered its fifth year in October of 1983 with the participation of all eight medical schools and the Charles Drew Postgraduate School of Medicine, 35 other health professions schools, 17 independent AHECs and more than 400 clinical training sites. Educational programs are reaching more than 22,000 students and practicing health professionals throughout California. We review the current status of the California AHEC system and use the AHEC programs at Loma Linda University to illustrate the effect this intervention is having.     

Kant's concept of natural purpose and the reflecting power of judgement

This paper examines how in the 'Critique of teleological judgment' Kant characterized the concept of natural purpose in relation to and in distinction from the concepts of nature and the concept of purpose he had developed in his other critical writings. Kant maintained that neither the principles of mechanical science nor the pure concepts of the understanding through which we determine experience in general provide adequate conceptualizations of the unique capacities of organisms. He also held that although the concept of natural purpose was derived through reflection upon an analogy to human purposive activity in artistic production and moral action, it articulates a unique notion of intrinsic purposiveness. Kant restricted his critical reflections on organisms to phenomena that can be given to us in experience, criticizing speculations on their first origins or final purpose. But I argue that he held that the concept of natural purpose is a product of the reflecting power of judgment, rather than an empirical concept, and represents only the relation of things to our power of judgment. Yet it is necessary for the identification of organisms as organized and self-organizing, and as subject to unique norms and causal relations between parts and whole.     

A Conversation About Health Care Reform

Professor Victor R. Fuchs is the Henry J. Kaiser Jr Professor at Stanford (California) University, where he applies economic analysis to social problems of national concern, with special emphasis on health and medical care. He holds joint appointments in the Economics Department and the School of Medicine''s Department of Health Research and Policy. Professor Fuchs is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the first economist to receive the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research and has also received the Baxter Foundation Health Services Research Prize. Professor Fuchs is president-elect of the American Economic Association. His latest book, The Future of Health Policy, was published by Harvard University Press in 1993.The following edited conversation between Professor Fuchs and Linda Hawes Clever, MD, Editor of the journal, took place on April 8, 1994.     

Paul Ehrlich: Pathfinder in Cell Biology 1. Chronicle of His Life and Accomplishments in Immunology,Cancer Research,and Chemotherapy1: Paul Ehrlich's Recipe for Success: “Patience,Ability, Money and Luck”

The paper reviews the life of Paul Ehrlich and his biomedical accomplishments in immunology, cancer research, and chemotherapy. Ehrlich achieved renown as an organic chemist, histologist, hematologist, immunologist, and pharmacologist. He disliked the formality of school but managed to excel in Latin and mathematics. His role model was an older cousin, Carl Welgert, who became a lifelong friend. Ehrlich studied medicine at Breslau, Strasbourg, Freiburg, and Leipzig, coming under the influence of Wilhelm Waldeyer, Julius Cohnheim, Rudolf Heidenhein, and Ferdinand Cohn. As a medical student, Ehrlich was captivated by structural organic chemistry and dyes. When he was 23, his first paper was published on selective staining. His doctoral thesis, “Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Histological Staining” contained most of the germinal ideas that would guide his future career. Most of his early work was centered in Berlin at Charité Hospital, where he did pioneering studies on blood and intravital staining, and at Robert Koch's Institute for Infectious Diseases, where he undertook important investigations in Immunology. Ehrlich became an authority on antitoxin standardization and developed the “side-chain theory” of antibody formation for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. He became director of an Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt where he continued research in immunology and carried out routine serum testing. He developed new lines of investigation in cancer research and originated the field of chemotherapy. Using principles developed in his early work with dyes, he successfully treated certain experimental trypanosomal infections with azo dyes. His crowning accomplishment was discovering that the compound Salvarsan could control human syphilis. Ehrlich's legacy in immunology and chemotherapy is discussed and an intimate portrait is drawn of Ehrlich the person.     

Kant’s concept of natural purpose and the reflecting power of judgement

This paper examines how in the ‘Critique of teleological judgment’ Kant characterized the concept of natural purpose in relation to and in distinction from the concepts of nature and the concept of purpose he had developed in his other critical writings. Kant maintained that neither the principles of mechanical science nor the pure concepts of the understanding through which we determine experience in general provide adequate conceptualizations of the unique capacities of organisms. He also held that although the concept of natural purpose was derived through reflection upon an analogy to human purposive activity in artistic production and moral action, it articulates a unique notion of intrinsic purposiveness. Kant restricted his critical reflections on organisms to phenomena that can be given to us in experience, criticizing speculations on their first origins or final purpose. But I argue that he held that the concept of natural purpose is a product of the reflecting power of judgment, rather than an empirical concept, and represents only the relation of things to our power of judgment. Yet it is necessary for the identification of organisms as organized and self-organizing, and as subject to unique norms and causal relations between parts and whole.