The physical face of the campus is a-changin'. The latest addition to campus housing, the Vincent and Celia Scully Dormitory, which will hold some 260 beds, is rising by leaps and bounds. Located near Poe Field and Butler College, Scully Hall will be completed in two stages next fall, said Jon D. Hlafter '61 *63, director of physical planning. One hundred fifty beds will be ready for occupancy when students return to campus; the rest of the building will be ready in October.

Designed by Rodolfo Machado of Machado and Silvetti of Boston, the new dorm complex will include approximately 80,000 square feet and will have wings that form three sides of a quadrangle surrounding a central courtyard. The existing 1922 Hall, just west of the court, establishes the remaining side of the quadrangle. Scully Hall is expected to cost $23 million, said Hlafter.

Scully Hall (named in honor of donor John H. Scully '66's parents) will give the university extra bed spaces so that older dorms can be vacated for renovation. Next fall, Patton will be the first dorm to be refurbished, at an estimated cost of $12 million, said Hlafter. Patton will gain an archway at the northern end, where a parking lot is now. That lot will be replaced by a terrace. The arch will lead to the east side of Patton, where pedestrians can continue on an existing walkway that leads to the future campus center. The dorm will also gain an elevator, improved common spaces, and bathrooms distributed into the upper parts of the building, said Hlafter.

Blair Hall is slated for refurbishing in 1999-2000, and Little Hall will be renovated in 2000-2001.

The university expects to begin construction on the Frist Campus Center (named for donors from the Frist family, including U.S. Senator Bill Frist '74) this summer, and complete it by spring 2000, said Hlafter. The university already has started work on its utility infrastructure. To create the new center, the architectural firm of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates will renovate and expand Palmer Hall, built in 1908 to house the physics department. The center will cost $48.5 million.

In the early planning stages is a new social-science building to be located east of Corwin Hall, where a parking lot is now. The new building will house parts of the Woodrow Wilson School and the sociology department. Designing the building is the architectural firm Bohlin, Cywinski, Jackson of Philadelphia. Construction is scheduled to begin a year from now and to be completed by the fall of 2000.

In March, the university, after concluding that one was sufficient, removed three of the four hand railings on the steps of Blair Arch that had been added for safety reasons over winter break.

Ask the Professor: Lee M. Silver, professor of molecular biology

Do we really need to be so worried about human cloning? Should there be a law banning it? Explain how a human being would be cloned.

Much of the worry about human cloning is based on a series of misunderstandings of what the process entails and what the outcome is, and of who will actually use this technology and why. Unfortunately, the word "clone" has a meaning in popular culture that bears no resemblance to its meaning in biology. In biological terms, clones are two or more individuals (animals, plants, or microorganisms) that are genetically identical. The word derives from the Greek word for twig, "klon." The term was first used to describe plants derived from cuttings of other plants.

Human clones have actually been around as long as our species has existed: we call them identical twins, triplets, or quadruplets. These clones emerged from a single early embryo that broke apart into multiple pieces, each of which turned into a human being. Although identical twins carry the same genes, they are not identical. Each one is a unique human being with a unique consciousness, unique memories, and a unique path that is followed through life.

The cloning process that created Dolly, the sheep, begins with a single cell that is taken from a child or adult. This cell is converted into a single-cell embryo by fusing the cell with an unfertilized egg that has had its own genetic material extracted. The egg contains nutrients that reprogram the genetic material in the child or adult's cell back to the embryonic condition. The embryo must then be placed into a woman's uterus for development to proceed to the birth of a child. In genetic terms only, the child will be the later-born identical twin of the person who provided the cell.

The creation of later-born identical twins won't provide custom-designed automatons or immortality. All it will do is allow sterile individuals to have biological children. The children who emerge will not be recognized as clones because every day there are children born who -- just by chance -- happen to look very much like one parent and happen to have one parent's personality to a degree greater than would be expected. And all around us today, there are perfectly normal families with children who are related to only one or neither parent.

I don't believe that cloning -- in and of itself -- will have any negative impact on children, families, or society. Thus, I don't believe that cloning should be banned. But, it should not be used until proven safe and effective. (These arguments are developed more fully in my book, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World, published by Avon Books in 1997.)

Class Act: Making sense of dreams

Have you ever awoken from a disturbing dream wondering what the three-headed bird attacking your mother, who had your face but her body, meant for your life? Should you warn your mother? Close your windows? Or just go back to sleep? Students who took Professor of Psychology Joel Cooper's freshman seminar on dreams last fall asked themselves just these types of questions.

The course integrates the psychological interpretation of dreams (what dreams reveal about our emotional health) with the biology of dreaming (the study of brain activity during sleep).

A semester-long assignment required students to keep a dream diary. Although there is great variation in how often people think they dream, says Cooper, we all dream at least four times every night. "How to remember dreams is an art in itself," he says. The students had pencils and paper next to their beds so when they woke up during the night and in the morning, they could jot down what they remembered of their dreams right away. One trick for someone who wakes up without any memory of a dream is to lie in different positions. This can jog the memory, "probably of the dream you were dreaming when you were in a particular position," explains Cooper.

"We never remember dreams as we dream them," he says; rather we construct them in the recalling of them. We describe them as if they were stories, so that the events happen in a more logical time sequence.

Dreams, says Cooper, may serve a variety of functions. They might illuminate matters of grave importance; express trivial derivatives of the previous day; tell us about the future; or "tell us in a somewhat disguised form what we think we should do about a particular problem or relationship," says Cooper. Dream interpretation, he adds, is part guessing game.

The students' recorded dreams were fodder for class discussion. In analyzing them, students used what they learned about Freud, Carl Jung, and J. Allan Hobson's theories of dream interpretation. Freud believed that dreams tell us about our emotions and conflicts. He called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious," explains Cooper. For Jung, he adds, the purpose of dreams is "to express some important facet of what it means to be human." For Hobson, dreams have no meaning, and dreaming is just an epiphenomenon of the way the brain integrates its activities of the day.

Students also studied memory control -- the suppression of memories or desires, which then surface in dreams, albeit in a disguised form, says Cooper. They talked about lucid dreaming: the ability to control the direction of a dream and act in it. For field work they visited the sleep lab at the Medical Center at Princeton.

As a society, we are in the infancy of understanding sleep and the function of dreams, says Cooper, who earned his Ph.D. from Duke in 1969, the same year he came to Princeton. The scientific study of sleep and dreaming dates back only to the 1950s and psychologist William Dement, who operated the first major sleep lab, at Stanford. If you look at sleep from an evolutionary perspective, observes Cooper, "it could be argued that sleeping isn't something we should be doing for the survival of the species," because we are unconscious for some eight hours and can't flee from enemies. This leads one to believe that sleep is important for brain activity, he adds. But what function dreaming plays is more difficult to understand.

-- Kathryn Federici Greenwood

Theories about dreaming: A reading list by Professor Joel Cooper

The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud. Translated by J. Strachey. (Avon Books, 1965) -- Originally published in 1900, this is the "granddaddy" of the psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams.

Dreams, by Carl Gustav Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. (Princeton University Press, 1974) -- One of Freud's major disciples and major critics, Jung examines dreams as evidence of the history of the human race as well as prophecies for the future.

The Dreaming Brain, by J. Allan Hobson (Basic Books, 1988) -- Hobson discusses the neurobiology of the brain; he holds that dreams have no deep psychological meaning but serve an important biological evolutionary function.

Living Your Dreams, by Gayle Delaney '72 (Harper & Row, 1988) -- Only you can interpret your dreams, says Delaney, who delineates a comprehensive technique for doing so.

Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, by William Dement (Freeman, 1974) -- This landmark book was one of the first to understand dreaming by integrating neuroscience and psychology.