A Report on Discoveries and Achievements at the University of California
Volume 7, Number 4, January 1999

The following is a glimpse of some recent achievements by the faculty, students and staff of the University of California.

In The News

$42 Million from FEMA . . . UC Berkeley has received a $42 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to design and build seismic retrofitting for four campus buildings that are vulnerable in a major earthquake. They are Barrows, Hildebrand and Latimer halls and the Samuel Silver Space Sciences Laboratory.

Oceanographer Elected . . . Douglas Inman, a UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor emeritus and a leading expert on coastal oceanography, has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The distinction is bestowed annually to a select number of its members "whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its application are scientifically or socially distinguished."

Breakthrough of the Year . . . The journal Science has named the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s work on the accelerating universe as the "Breakthrough of the Year." The laboratory's researchers have concluded that the galaxies of the universe are flying apart at ever-faster speeds. As part of that research, the scientists have recently discovered the most distant supernova ever seen.

Three Decades Of Black Studies . . . UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Black Studies, one of the nation’s oldest ethnic studies programs, celebrates its 30th anniversary this academic year. It enrolls about 4,000 students each year and offers undergraduate majors an honors program that includes year-long engagement with original research. The department envisions offering a doctoral program.

Health and Nutrition

Cancer and Colds . . . Physicians at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center have launched an experimental treatment for inoperable pancreatic cancer using a form of a virus that causes the common cold. The treatment relies on a genetically engineered adenovirus -- ONYX-015 -- that attacks only cells with alterations in or an absence of a gene called p53. J. Randolph Hecht is the study’s lead investigator.

Chinese Herbal Therapy . . . UC San Francisco researches are recruiting patients for the first study in the United States that will determine the feasibility of using Chinese herbal therapy to alleviate the side effects of chemotherapy in women with early stage breast cancer. The study aims to scientifically evaluate a 21-herb Chinese formula that is widely used by herbalists for cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.

Same-day Pap Smears . . . UC Irvine researchers have been awarded $2.7 million by the National Institutes of Health to study a new approach for the early detection of cervical cancer that involves Pap smear screening, diagnosing and treating patients all in one visit. Alberto Manetta and Hoda Anton-Culver hope the new approach will reduce the incidence -- and the death rate -- of one of the most common cancers affecting women.

Developments and Discoveries

Remember This . . . Some people can remember facts better than others because the area of their brains that processes memories is better at "getting it," says a study by UC Irvine researchers Michael Alkire, James Cahill, James Fallon and Richard Haier. Test participants whose brain PET (positron emission tomography) scans showed more activity in an area of the brain known for processing memory were better at remembering a list of words read to them while they were undergoing the scan. The findings eventually could result in more effective drugs and therapies to improve memory.

Rats and Sound . . . UC San Francisco researchers report that they have significantly increased the speed with which adult rats process sound, offering important new evidence that the basic rate at which the brain responds to information can be sharply altered by experience. Their findings pave the way for studies aimed at understanding, and perhaps manipulating, the mechanisms that cause the slow sound-processing difficulties associated with language impairments and dyslexia in children, and such disorders as autism and stroke.

Phantom Limbs and the Brain . . . For some amputees, the loss of an arm or leg is often followed by a lifetime of pain and phantom-limb effects. Edward Jones, director of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, and Tim Pons, professor of neurosurgery at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, studied the brains from monkeys in which the nerves in one arm were severed at the spinal column. The marooned nerve cells in the brain that no longer received information from the arm shrank by almost half, and the space was filled by neighboring nerve cells that normally carried information from the face. Sensory messages from the face were carried to the part of the brain that normally receives sensations from the arm. The findings could point to new means of preventing or treating post-amputation problems.

Neutrino Mass . . . UC Riverside physicists have contributed to a growing body of evidence that neutrinos do indeed have mass, a finding that could address the puzzling issue of dark matter -- why visible stars account for only a small fraction of the total mass of the universe. Physicists in Gordon Van Dalen's lab spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s proton beam accelerator watching for evidence that muon neutrinos -- natural decay products of the pions created when the proton beam hits water -- shifted identities to become electron neutrinos, an oscillation that could only occur if neutrinos had mass, according to current theory.

 The Cutting Edge

Old Dogs and Alzheimer’s . . . Maybe old dogs can’t learn new tricks, but they may show humans a thing or two about Alzheimer’s disease. UC Irvine researchers Brian Cummings and Elizabeth Head are studying a group of aging dogs that don't develop the advanced stages of plaques and tangles in their brains seen in severe cases of human Alzheimer’s. One reason may lie in how differently canine and human immune systems respond to the growth of Alzheimer’s plaques in the brain. The researchers hope to find ways to slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s in humans.

Futuristic Operating Room . . . UCLA Medical Centerhas opened a futuristic operating room for the removal of brain tumors. The revolutionary concept of obtaining new and updated MR scans during surgery allows more complete removal of brain tumors. The ability to see how much tumor was removed, how much remains and the relationship between the remaining tumor and important brain areas increases the efficacy of neurosurgery.Gregory J. Rubino spearheaded the program's development.

Sequencing Gives Hope . . . UC Berkeley researchers and their colleagues report the first complete sequencing of the Chlamydia trachomatis genome. The bacteria infects humans and causes both chlamydial genital tract infections, which are sexually transmitted, and trachoma, a leading cause of preventable blindness, says researcher Richard Stephens. While trachoma is more common in other parts of the world, chlamydial genital tract infections are the most commonly reported disease of any kind in the U.S., Stephens says. The research may help with a Chlamydia vaccine and diagnostics.

Glowing Mosquitoes . . . Taking a gene from a fluorescing jellyfish and inserting into the Aedes Aegypti mosquito,UC Riverside entomologist Peter Atkinson and colleagues have done more than create a glow-in-the dark mosquito -- they have demonstrated the effectiveness of a powerful new research tool that could help isolate genes that play a role in the destructive behavior of insect pests. By inserting a gene that regulates production of a green fluorescing protein at a specific spot in the DNA of the insect that carries yellow fever and dengue, then watching to see what part of its body glows, they could narrow the search for the genes involved in the regulation of the mosquito’s gut cells, for example. It’s knowledge that could be used to disrupt the process by which pathogens move through the insect.

Tiny Helium Waves . . . Cold, stormy waves on a liquid helium sea could open a window onto the quantum phenomena that underlie the strange behavior of superfluids and superconductors. UC Berkeley physicists have succeeded in creating surface waves on a superfluid helium-3 "sea" the size of a coin and only 200 atoms deep -- dimensions too small for waves in normal fluid. The researchers included Seamus Davis and Richard Packard and graduate students Andrew Schechter and Raymond Simmonds.

Not Just For Games Anymore . . . Virtual reality, the domain of computer game aficionados, is fast becoming a vital tool for researchers in human perception and behavior. The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.8 million toUC Santa Barbara researchers to study how virtual reality may enhance learning, provide insight to such behaviors as prejudice and further explain human sight and spatial perception.

Planet and Environment

A Long Look at Earth . . . The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD has been selected by NASA to lead the implementation of the Triana mission that will study the Earth for the first time from a million miles away, offering new insights into how the planet's climate works as an integrated system. Triana is a satellite mission to L1, the Lagrange neutral gravity point between the Earth and the Sun. The $75 million mission will be launched by the start of the new millennium and provide a continuous view of the full disk, sun-lit side of Earth. Francisco P. J. Valero will lead development of the mission.

California’s Water Bill . . . Californians spend so much to maintain their yards and other landscaping each year that the bill adds up to nearly $10 billion, almost half as much as California farms spend to produce the state’s entire food crop, says a new UC Berkeley report. The average amount each California household spends on lawns and landscaping is $310 per year, the report found. Researchers included George Goldman, Scott R. Templeton and Cheryl Brown of Southeast Missouri State University, a UC Berkeley graduate student when the data were gathered.

Tides Don’t Affect Quakes . . . Researcher John Vidale of UCLA and colleagues from UC San Diego and the U.S. Geological Survey that the correlation between earthquakes and lunar tides -- the pull from the moon on the Earth that occurs twice a day -- is barely detectable and of no useful predictive value. They found that the same applies to solar tides, which are not as strong as lunar tides. The findings support the view that earthquakes begin gradually days in advance.

Bedrock May Be Culprit . . . Local geology, not disruptive human activities, may be to blame for elevated nitrate levels in some streams and lakes, report UC Davis researchers. Nitrate contamination is a serious environmental and human-health issue worldwide. Researcher JoAnn Holloway says conventional wisdom has held that high nitrate concentrations in stream water are caused by atmospheric emissions, livestock feeding, agricultural runoff, timber harvest or industrial discharges, but the data from her study point to the naturally occurring bedrock as a source of nitrate in our watershed.

Turning Up the Heat . . . A new environmental technology developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will clean a heavily contaminated industrial site in Visalia within a few years -- not centuries, as would be required using conventional methods. The new technique, called "dynamic underground stripping," heats soil and groundwater to remove underground contaminants and destroy them in place in record time. In its first nine months of use in Visalia, dynamic underground stripping removed or destroyed contaminants that would have taken more than 1,000 years using traditional pump-and-treat cleanup.

Building Islands . . . A massive plume of hot rock rising through the Earth and erupting through the ocean floor has been building islands in the central Pacific including those of Hawaii for at least 80 million years. Now, UC Santa Cruz researchers may have located the origin of the Hawaiian plume at the boundary between Earth’s mantle layer and its metallic core. Sara Russell, an earth sciences graduate student, and Thorne Lay, the chairman of earth sciences, found evidence of the Hawaiian plume at the very base of the mantle, about 1,800 miles beneath the Earth’s surface. Edward Garnero, research seismologist at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, also participated in the research.

Environmental Hazards of Broccoli . . . Broccoli, cabbage and turnips may be good for your diet, but they aren't helping the Earth’s protective ozone layer, says a new study co-authored by UC Riverside plant pathologists. Jim Sims and Howard Ohr found that certain leafy green plants in the Brassica family take up naturally occurring bromide ions in the soil, transforming and releasing them as methyl bromide into the atmosphere. When it reaches the upper atmosphere, sunlight unlocks bromine atoms that contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer.

El Niño and Wildfires . . . Against the backdrop of concerns raised in the aftermath of the recent El Niño weather anomaly, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers have released the first-ever analysis of the potential effect of global climate change on wildfires and the ability to suppress them. In most cases, climate change would lead to dramatic increases in both the annual area burned by California wildfires and the number of potentially catastrophic fires doubling these losses in some regions, the researchers conclude.

Insights on Society

Youth No More Violent . . . A child opens fire on a schoolyard, killing and maiming his peers. A teenager unloads a weapon on his family, leaving them to die. Gang members drive down a neighborhood street, shooting at anyone in their path. There are plenty of such shocking stories in the news, in the public's memory and on the minds of politicians who push for more get-tough policies aimed at wayward youth. But while some leaders, fueled by predictions of a teen population boom, foresee a juvenile crime wave, a UC Berkeley law professor calls those prognostications "science fiction." In his book "American Youth Violence," Frank Zimring provides statistics that suggest while there have been peaks and valleys, American youth over the long term are no more violent now than 20 years earlier.

Overconfidence Hurts Investors . . . Overconfidence that leads to excessive trading cheats investors, especially men, out of better returns on their common stock investments, according to a study from UC Davis Researchers Terrance Odean and Brad M. Barber found that men trade 45 percent more than women and earn annual net risk-adjusted returns that are 1.4 percent less than those earned by women. Single men trade 67 percent more than single women and earn annual net risk-adjusted returns that are 2.3 percent less than those earned by single women.

Investing in Employees Pays Off . . . In a study of "hyper-competitive" companies under extreme pressure to perform, researcher Jone Pearce and colleagues at UC Irvine's Graduate School of Management found, as anticipated, that investment in employees pays off in increased worker satisfaction. What they hadn't expected to find was that the more employers invested in job training and other measures to ensure long-term commitment, the better the employees performed as well. They concluded that the draconian "tough guy" employer ends up with employees who can't get a job at a better place.

Helmets Save Lives -- and Money . . . The California law that requires motorcycle drivers to wear helmets saved the state and its taxpayers a significant amount of money during its first two years, primarily by reducing the number of head injuries associated with motorcycle accidents, a new UC San Francisco study has found. The study shows that total medical costs for motorcycle accident-related injuries were $35 million less in 1993 than 1991, a 35 percent reduction. The total medical cost for motorcycle crash injuries dropped from about $98 million in 1991 to about $63 million in 1992 and 1993.

Personality and Depression . . . UC Santa Cruz psychologist Per Gjerde has found that some children -- boys in particular -- exhibit distinct personality characteristics even at age three that correlate strongly with depression later in life. Intelligence turns out to be a key indicator for both sexes, adds Gjerde, whose findings are based on an in-depth study of 100 individuals from the age of 3 to 23.

Dissolving a Marriage . . . Among co-habitating couples who marry later, getting hitched appeared to have relatively little impact on men's tendency to consider dissolving the relationship, while women were much more likely to consider ending the relationship once they were married, UC Riverside graduate student Michele Adams has found. Adams believes the findings challenge the popular notion that men experience a greater conflict between desire for autonomy and the constraints of marriage.

Looking to the Future

New Use for Lasers . . . Someday, reconstructive surgeons may replace their scalpels with lasers to restore damaged cartilage in noses, ears and other parts of the head and neck. Research by Brian Wong at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic has shown that cartilage from pigs can be turned into new shapes with heat from a laser without the damage to cartilage, skin and surrounding tissue that can result from surgery. If future research shows the lasers work safely on humans, they could radically change the way reconstructive surgery is performed on cartilage in the head and neck.

Academe’s Largest Supercomputer . . . The largest supercomputer available to the academic community will be installed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego to help researchers tackle demanding, deep computing problems. The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure will combine with IBM to install the first computer dedicated to academic research that is capable of teraflops performance -- one trillion calculations per second. Delivery of the system is scheduled for the second half of 1999.

Kudos

Honor for Ames . . . Bruce N. Ames, a UC Berkeley professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, is one of nine scientific researchers named by President Clinton to receive the National Medal of Science. The citation spoke of the researchers’ "creativity, resolve and a restless spirit of innovation to ensure continued U.S. leadership across the frontiers of scientific knowledge."

Distinctions for UCI Doctors . . .Thomas C. Cesario, dean of the UC Irvine College of Medicine, and Nick Vaziri, professor of medicine, recently received Mastership awards from the American College of Physicians, the largest organization of internal medicine specialists. The awards are presented to individuals for career achievements in the medical field . . . Frank L. Meyskens, director of the UCI’s Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, was named president of the International Society for Cancer Chemoprevention for a three-year term.

Safer Planes . . . Satya Atluri, UCLA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has received the Federal Aviation Administration's 1998 Excellence in Aviation Award. Atluri's pioneering research greatly expanded the science of structural integrity and damage tolerance of commercial and military aircraft.

Balzan Prize . . . Harmon Craig, professor of oceanography and geochemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, has been awarded the Balzan Prize for his fundamental contributions to the field of geochemistry. The Balzan Prize of the International Balzan Foundation of Milan, Italy, has several times been given in astrophysics and geophysics, but this is the first award in geochemistry.

Investing in Education

Cancer Research . . . UCI has received a $5 million gift from the Robert R. Sprague Family Foundation to help construct a building that will be dedicated to cancer genetics research. The gift will provide support for a new building in the Irvine Biomedical Research Center, where researchers will conduct basic science studies on cancer genetics, neuroscience and infectious disease.

Chancellor Runs . . . UC San Diego Chancellor Robert C. Dynes has led the third annual "Chancellor’s Challenge" five kilometer run/walk to benefit undergraduate student scholarships. Dynes personally donated $5 to the scholarship fund for every person who beat him (he finished 108th) and allocated $30,000 in campus funding to the scholarship fund.

Dental Gift . . . The UC San Francisco School of Dentistry has received a $100,000 pledge to the Clinics Modernization Campaign from Mr. and Mrs. Chien Lee, longtime friends of the university. Encompassing facility refurbishments and equipment replacement in all of the school’s 14 clinics, the Clinics Modernization Campaign recently surpassed the halfway point to its goal of $3 million in private support.

Heart and Dollars . . . Rolf Augustine has put not only his heart into his work at UC Santa Cruz’s McHenry Library, but his personal resources as well. The third most senior employee on campus, Augustine recently donated $100,000 to the library. This is his second gift to the library in recent years and the largest individual gift in the library’s history. His first contribution, in 1996, established the Rolf Augustine Cataloging Endowment.

Compiled  by University Relations. For more information, call (510) 987-9200 or look under "News & Facts" on the UC Office of the President Home Page: http://www.ucop.edu. Written by Charles McFadden, UCOP News & Communication, charles.mcfadden@ucop.edu.