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Notebook: November 8, 1995
Eric Wieschaus Wins Nobel in Medicine
Eric Wieschaus Wins Nobel in MedicineMolecular biologist studies embryo development in fruit fliesPROFESSOR of Molecular Biology Eric F. Wieschaus, who studies the mysteries of fruit-fly embryos, has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how genes control structural development. What Wieschaus found in fruit flies also applies to other animals and humans. And his work could help scientists explain birth defects and cancers. The press conference, held October 9 in a packed lecture hall in Lewis Thomas Laboratory, at times seemed more like a comedy show than a discussion of scientific discovery, as the animated scientist with large, expressive eyes kept the audience laughing throughout. Wieschaus occasionally seemed overwhelmed by the hoopla-maybe because his day had started with a 6 A.M. call from a man with a Swedish accent whose name he couldn't remember. He shares the Nobel and its $1 million award with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, and Edward B. Lewis, of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, California, who also studied embryo development in fruit flies. His Nobel-the first received by a Princeton professor in the life sciences-was the fifth in three years awarded to someone associated with the university. Wieschaus, who came to Princeton in 1981 and was named the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology in 1993, earned his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame and his PhD at Yale in 1974. Four years later, he joined forces with Nüsslein-Volhard at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, in Heidelberg. The two set out to learn how a newly fertilized egg develops into a segmented embryo-that is, how cells in the embryo "know" to become a brain, an eye, and other parts of the body. They believed it was possible, he explained, to identify genes that controlled development, in effect, he said, by ordering a cell, "You be a head or you be a tail."
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH STUDIES ENDOWEDFINANCIER and philanthropist Ronald O. Perelman has given the university $4.7 million to create a multidisciplinary institute focusing on Jewish studies. The Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Jewish Studies will bring together leading scholars to examine Jewish history, religion, literature, society, politics, and cultures, establishing Princeton as a major center for the study of Jewish civilization.The institute will enable the university, for the first time, to offer undergraduates the opportunity to earn a certificate in Jewish studies. The gift from Perelman, the chief executive officer of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, will also be used to support a senior faculty position-the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies-and a variety of academic and scholarly activities, including courses, lectures, seminars, and conferences that will convene scholars from diverse disciplines to examine a particular aspect of Jewish experience. The activities of the Perelman Institute will be launched this spring, with an international symposium on mes-sianism held in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Study.
Design Work Begins on New StadiumTHE UNIVERSITY has chosen Rafael Viñoly, a New York-based architect, to design the facility that will replace Palmer Stadium. Viñoly has handled commissions which range from private houses to concert halls to office towers. His best-known recent project, the Tokyo International Forum, is a colossal performing-arts and convention center under construction in the heart of the Japanese capital. He has designed notable athletic facilities, such as the 1978 World Cup soccer stadium in Argentina and a gymnasium for Leh-man College in the Bronx.The trustees' committee for grounds and buildings chose Viñoly, said Richard R. Spies *72, the vice-president for finance and administration, because of the breadth of his experience and his vision. A 1994 engineering study determined that the 46,000-seat Palmer Stadium, built in 1914 and suffering from structural decay, cannot be satisfactorily renovated. The only part of the stadium that may be saved or rebuilt is the north end, said Spies. The outer walls of the stadium are "physically impossible to save," he added. Construction may begin after the football season in either 1996 or 1997 and will probably cost more than $30 million, said Spies. Because of the athletics department's hope to accommodate several sports, Viñoly's firm has examined three configurations: football only, with soccer, lacrosse, and track outside the main stadium; football, soccer, and lacrosse, with track outside the main stadium; and football, soccer, lacrosse, and track, all inside the stadium. After using computer simulations to study various options, Viñoly created and his studio built 11 models of varying forms. The university has focused on five of those, in configurations for 25,000 and 30,000 seats. One of the models replicates Palmer's field configuration, but its track forms a wider ellipse and has nine lanes instead of the current six. Three of the models locate the track outside the stadium; two put it south of the stadium, adjacent to Jadwin Gym on what is now Frelinghuysen Field; the third places the stadium next to Jadwin and locates the track north of the stadium. The fifth scheme combines all four sports inside the stadium but uses movable stands that could modify the seating for football, soccer, lacrosse, and track.
PAW Home PagePAW has entered the world of electronic media. This fall the magazine put a home page on the World Wide Web. To access it, readers must have as part of their computer configuration a net browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. The home page can be reached by typing PAW's uniform resource locator (URL), "http://www.princeton.edu/~paw".Once connected to PAW's Web site, you can view the current issue, browse PAW's departments, change your address, send a letter to the editor, read about Tiger sports, request back issues, submit an ad, send information to Books Received, survey Class Notes, and submit information to your class-notes secretary. Soon you will also be able to search the magazine's archives and peruse campus news compiled from several student and university publications. Stay tuned.
In BriefTRUSTEES: Eight people joined the board of trustees on July 1: James A. Baker, III '52, secretary of state under President Bush; Frank J. Biondi, Jr. '66, the president and CEO of Viacom Inc.; Brian A. Rosborough '62, founding president of Earthwatch; Sejal A. Shah '95, a management associate for Met Life; Dennis J. Brownlee '74, the founding head of Advance Inc., a communications and information-systems company; Annalyn M. Swan '73, an editor and writer in New York City; Robert S. Murley '72, managing director of CS First Boston's investment-banking department; and Paul Morrison Wythes '55, the founding general partner of Sutter Hill Ventures, in Palo Alto, California.
Class Act: Maladies of the MindSTUDENTS in Ronald J. Comer's perennially popular course in abnormal psychology learn about a field that touches everyone in one way or another. Although the course is called abnormal psychology, many of the disorders covered are familiar to most people: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and drug and alcohol-related abuse, as well as more severe behaviors, including schizophrenia and memory and identity problems.Students often take the course to gain some insight into themselves or friends and relatives. "It isn't just a course on strange behavior," says Comer, "it's a course on the human condition," and it attracts students from many different areas of study. The field of abnormal psychology has an enormous influence on our "very overpsychologizing society," says Comer, the director of clinical psychology studies in the psychology department. If there's one thing he wants his class to take away from the course, it's to understand the limitations as well as the strengths of the field. There's an awful lot that isn't understood about mental disorders, he says, and the field has done "terrible things" unintentionally. Only by making people appreciate the mistakes "can a field catch itself when it's doing things like lobotomies [the now discredited procedure of surgically severing the frontal lobe] or putting people out on the street" (as occurred in the deinsti-tutionalization movement that began in the 1960s), he says. "It's a field that has to be kept in check." Friendly and approachable, Comer keeps his students interested throughout his lectures by weaving in two-to-four-minute bursts of videotapes, anecdotes drawn from his clinical practice, and humor. "This is uncomfortable material," he says. The humor "breaks some of the tension," although he only uses it when appropriate, and never to laugh at someone's pain. By using videotapes, lectures, readings, and films to show how flawed this field has been, Comer hopes students will learn to look critically at psychological theories and understand the importance of careful research. In addition to conveying the importance of research, Comer outlines the models used to understand abnormal behaviors-biological, psychoanalytic, humanistic-existential, behavioral, cognitive, and social-cultural. Abnormal psychology is a field "filled with competing schools of thought," he says. "And each school often says that the other school is dead wrong and is harming people." The content of his course changes over time because of emerging research. "Each year at least one third of the course is new," says Comer, who has been teaching abnormal psychology since coming to Princeton in 1975. "The field doesn't even resemble the field when I started teaching this course." The course has become increasingly popular as more and more students, it seems, want to learn about eating and mood disorders and schizophrenia. In response to demand, Comer this year increased the enrollment by 150 students. Comer doesn't take credit for the popularity of his course: "It would take a lot of skill," he says, "to make this material uninteresting." -Kathryn F. Greenwood
ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, SCHIZOPHRENIAA reading list by Professor Ronald J. ComerFear and Courage, by Stanley Rachman (W. H. Freeman, 1990)-A look at anxiety and how to cope with it. Obsessive-Compulsive, by Steven Lev-enkron (Warner Books, 1991)-Covers the nature and treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron (Random House, 1990)-A memoir of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's struggle against severe depression. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David D. Burns (New American Library, 1980)-Mood problems and leading cognitive techniques for dealing with them. Helplessness, by Martin E. Seligman (W. H. Freeman, 1992, 1975)-A classic discussion of the role that perceptions of helplessness may play in the onset and maintenance of depression. Medicine and Mental Illness, by Marvin E. Lickey and Barbara Gordon (W. H. Freeman, 1991)-An overview of drug therapies for various psychological disorders. Listening to Prozac, by Peter D. Kramer (Penguin Books, 1994)-Extolls the virtues of the new antidepressant medication from one clinical theorist's point of view. The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz (Hoeber-Harper, 1961)-A classic attack on the legitimacy of the concept of mental illness. Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill, by E. Fuller Torrey (Harper & Row, 1988)-A powerful account of how tens of thousands of persons with severe psychological disorders have become society's forgotten people. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964)-A novel about an adolescent suffering from schizophrenia. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey (Penguin Books, 1977, 1973)-A novel about life in a mental institution. |