Tuesday, January 26, 1999
Community briefs
Association brings researchers together
At the 1999 meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, one of the presentations discussed a bridge
between biology and physics: using proteins and other biomolecules
as models for studying complex physical systems.
"The next century may indeed be the century of biology, but
physics can contribute in a major way," said Hans Frauenfelder of
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"Proteins are some of the simplest biological systems, but they
are far more complex than the systems used in physics,"
Frauenfelder said. "The idea researchers in this field have been
pursuing is to use proteins as model systems for identifying the
underlying laws of complexity. At the same time, we learn more
about protein functions that feeds back into biology."
Individual protein molecules can assemble themselves in a
variety of different conformations, a range of shapes governed by
interactions among the atoms that make up the protein; this folding
process influences the proteins’ functionality.
Each conformation represents a different energy level; likewise,
it requires energy to shift from one conformation to another.
Silicon Valley likened to Old West by historian
A UC Berkeley expert on mining in the American West sees a
strong parallel between mining boomtowns that sprang up throughout
California and the West in the 1800s, and today’s boomtown of
Silicon Valley.
"When I look at Silicon Valley I see a typical mining
landscape," said Gray Brechin, an architectural historian and
geographer based at UC Berkeley, in a session Friday, at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in Anaheim. "I see the same sort of development with little
planning or sense of civic responsibility.
"Like mining towns in the 1800s, Silicon Valley is characterized
by a boom/bust economy heavily dependent on energy and technology,"
he argued. "And it is populated by transients with no commitment to
the place, which has few amenities anyway.
"The result is all sorts of environmental problems, plus a large
but hidden level of poverty. This is like Virginia City, Nevada,
where there was a great divide between the mine operators who lived
on the hill and the workers who lived below," he said.
UC Irvine receives gift for nutritional study
To ensure that its newly minted physicians are prepared to fight
obesity, UC Irvine’s College of Medicine was being awarded $50,000
from the Weight Watchers Foundation Thursday, to create new medical
education programs in clinical nutrition and obesity
prevention.
The grant will allow UCI to create nutrition education programs
for each year of medical school, including lectures, workshops,
educational software, group discussions and clinical interviews
with patients.
Called the "Clinical Nutrition 2000" curriculum, the program
will prepare medical students to make detailed nutritional
assessments of patients, counsel patients on ways to prevent
nutritional disorders including obesity, and keep up with the
latest research and issues in nutrition.
Only two U.S. medical schools were awarded grants from Weight
Watchers: UCI and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who is the national
spokeswoman for Weight Watchers, presented the award today in Los
Angeles to Dr. Joseph Scherger, associate dean for clinical
affairs, and Dr. Desiree Lie, a specialist in preventive medicine
and nutrition at UCI’s Department of Family Medicine.
Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports
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