Scientists find fossil of enormous bug

LONDON - This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.

The study, published online Tuesday in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, means that before this sea scorpion became extinct it was much longer than today's average man is tall.

Prof. Jeorg W. Schneider, a paleontologist at Freiberg Mining Academy in southeastern Germany, said the study provides valuable new information about "the last of the giant scorpions."

Schneider, who was not involved in the study, said these scorpions "were dominant for millions of years because they didn't have natural enemies. Eventually they were wiped out by large fish with jaws and teeth."

Braddy's partner paleontologist Markus Poschmann found the claw fossil several years ago in a quarry near Prum, Germany, that probably had once been an ancient estuary or swamp.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realized there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab. After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw," said Poschmann, another author of the study.

"Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilize it," he said.

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

Braddy said the fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

He said some geologists believe that gigantic sea scorpions evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others suspect they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, fish that had armor on their outer bodies.

Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.

"The competition between this scorpion and its prey was probably like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon," he said. "Hundreds of millions of years ago, these sea scorpions had the upper hand over vertebrates — backboned animals like ourselves."

That competition ended long ago.

But the next time you swat a fly, or squish a spider at home, Braddy said, try to "think about the insects that lived long ago. You wouldn't want to swat one of those."


By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

New Method Equalizes Stem Cell Debate

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research.

Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did not involve killing embryos.

Critics were skeptical. But now that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have apparently achieved what Mr. Bush envisioned, the White House is saying, “I told you so.”

Conservative Republican presidential hopefuls like former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts are breathing a sigh of relief. And opponents of embryonic stem cell research are congratulating themselves.

The discovery that skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells is likely to transform the sticky political debate over the science, a debate that has pitted Mr. Bush against two-thirds of the American public including prominent Republicans like Nancy Reagan and has even helped decide some elections.

The findings have put people on both sides of the stem cell divide on nearly equal political footing. Each side can now say it has fruitful research to pursue.

Each side can even lay claim to the same scientists. The author of the new skin cell studies is James A. Thomson, the University of Wisconsin researcher who extracted stem cells from human embryos in the first place.

Perhaps no one outside the world of science is as acutely aware of this as Mr. Bush. The president and his aides have been quietly monitoring the Wisconsin experiments for months, receiving briefings from Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health.

On Tuesday, senior aides to Mr. Bush said he drove the experiments by holding his moral ground.

“This is very much in accord with the president’s vision from the get-go,” said Karl Zinsmeister, a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush who kept the president apprised of the work. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the president’s drawing of lines on cloning and embryo use was a positive factor in making this come to fruition.”

Mr. Bush’s critics say he should not be so quick to take credit. They note that the reprogramming method has some kinks to be worked out and say the research would never have proceeded without the initial embryo experiments. The critics say that far from encouraging research, Mr. Bush has stood in its way.

In 2001, in a compromise aimed at discouraging the destruction of embryos, Mr. Bush told federal researchers that they could work just on those stem cell lines, or colonies, already in existence. He has twice vetoed bills to ease those restrictions.

“I really don’t think anybody ought to take credit in light of the six-year delay we’ve had,” said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the lead Republican sponsor of the bill that Mr. Bush vetoed in July 2006. “My own view is that science ought to be unfettered and that every possible alternative ought to be explored.”

“You’ve got a life-and-death situation here,” Mr. Specter continued, “and if we can find something which is certifiably equivalent to embryonic stem cells, fine. But we are not there yet.”

Embryonic stem cells are attractive to scientists because they have the potential to grow into any cell or tissue in the body and could, theoretically, be used to treat many ailments. Opponents, including Christian conservatives, say it is immoral to destroy embryos to obtain cells.

Early in the controversy, opponents, including Mr. Bush, often said they supported studies using so-called adult stem cells that involve cells extracted from blood and bone marrow. But those cells have more limited potential than embryonic stem cells, and proponents of embryo experiments said it was like comparing apples to oranges. The reprogrammed skin cells, by contrast, appear to hold the same properties as embryonic stem cells, more an apples-to-apples comparison.

“We now have a situation where, ironically, despite an inability to get political consensus, the science has presented opportunities for a variety of moral views to have an outlet,” Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “Proponents can no longer say that there aren’t any real options.”

The debate has even been a factor in some elections like the Missouri Senate race last year. In that contest, Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, unseated Jim Talent, a Republican who opposed the research. The race drew national attention after the actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease and has been a vocal advocate for stem cell studies, made a commercial for Ms. McCaskill.

The new findings could defuse the issue in the 2008 campaign, or at least that is the hope of candidates like Mr. Romney.

“This will bolster the arguments of folks like Governor Romney, who look at alternative types of research that they believe are more promising and don’t have those same ethical dilemmas,” Kevin Madden, Mr. Romney’s press secretary, said. At the same time, scientists may well begin pursuing reprogramming with vigor, if only because it is easier to obtain federal money for it, said Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is on the president’s Council on Bioethics and opposes embryo experiments.

“I’m sure in their ideal world, we would be pursuing all methods, and that includes embryo-destructive methods,” Professor George said. “Those who want to continue to fight on this will no doubt continue. But the ranks are going to be reduced.”

That is not to say advocates for embryonic stem cell studies plan to give up. Mr. Specter and other supporters of the bill to lift Mr. Bush’s rules say they intend to continue to try to turn that bill into law, if not in this administration, then in the next one.

“None of this feels like it should be one versus the other,” said Representative Diana DeGette, the Colorado Democrat who is sponsoring the bill in the House. “That’s the politicization of science.”


By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: November 21, 2007

The Boy King, Tutankhamun, faces the world after 3,000 years

More than 3,000 years after his death, King Tutankhamun went on display to the public yesterday in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, a slightly bucktoothed boy who died aged 19.
King Tut’s mummified face – which has been seen only by about 50 people since the British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb exactly 85 years ago – was revealed to the world in a climate-controlled glass display case in an antechamber of his own tomb in the valley near Luxor, where generations of Egyptian pharaohs were buried.

“Everyone is dreaming of what he looks like. The face of Tutankhamun is different from any king in the Cairo museum. With his beautiful buck teeth, the tourists will see a little bit of the smile from the face of the golden boy,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s leading expert on the famous boy King.

Dr Hawass expects a huge influx of tourists to see the mummy, to be displayed in the tomb indefinitely. Only the face can be seen, with the body wrapped in linen. It was badly damaged when Carter tried to pull off the golden mask after discovering the tomb – almost entirely intact with all its treasures – on November 4, 1922.

The discovery set off a craze for King Tut and Ancient Egypt that has endured to this day. The circumstances of the pharaoh’s death at such an early age remain unclear. A bone chip found inside the skull led some archaeologists to speculate that he was murdered, ten years after ascending to the throne.

Egypt’s 18th dynasty was enduring “ turbulent times after Tutankhamun’s predecessor Akhenaten – husband of the famously beautiful Nefertiti – abandoned the country’s pantheon of gods and chose to worship just one, the sun-disk Aten.

After Akhenaten’s death, his vizier, Ay, restored the worship of the gods; and some have speculated that Tutankhamun may have been murdered, in 1323BC, for trying to return Egypt to monotheism.

The murder theory has largely been dismissed, however, since scientists carried out a CT scan two years ago which revealed no trauma to the skull. Experts said that the bone chip could have been the result of the embalming process, when morticians removed all the internal organs and placed them in jars in preparation for the afterlife.

Dr Hawass now believes that the King may have died after he broke his leg and the wound became infected. Until then, the young King had been in good health, with the tests showing that he was a well-fed youth, slightly built and standing at 5ft 6in (1.67m). A recent reconstruction of his face shows a striking looking young man with almond eyes, an aquiline nose and full lips, with his head shaved. He had the pronounced overbite typical of his Royal Family line, and his lower teeth were slightly misaligned.

When the mummy was unwrapped in 1925 it was found to have a wound on the left cheek in the same position as the insect bite that had supposedly killed the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, sponsor of Carter’s excavations, which fuelled speculation that the discovery had unleashed a curse. “Death Shall Come on Swift Wings To Him Who Disturbs the Peace of the King” was the inscription that was claimed to be engraved on the tomb’s exterior.

Over the years the mummy has broken into 18 parts. Dr Hawass was worried that the crush of tourists would have caused irreparable damage had the body been left in the golden sarcophagus. “The humidity and heat caused by . . . people entering the tomb and their breathing will change the mummy to a powder. The only good thing [left] in this mummy is the face. We need to preserve the face,” he said.

The 2005 scan also resolved another mystery: that of the Pharaoh’s missing penis. It had long been thought to have been stolen in 1942, but the scan revealed it to be hidden in sand inside the mummified wrappings.

The public’s unflagging mania for King Tut has been fed by an exhibition that has toured the US and will be opening in the O2 Gallery in Greenwich, London, on November 15. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age, which is partnered by The Times, shows some of the stunning golden artefacts from the tomb that defied looters and the effects of time. It also features the latex reconstruction of the young King’s head based on the scan.

The tale of Tut

- Howard Carter and the 5th Earl Carnarvon, his chief backer, spent six seasons excavating in the Valley of the Kings but found nothing

- Worried about his investment, Lord Carnarvon gave them one final season to dig

- In November 1922 initial reports appeared in The Times, above, announcing that the team had found the tomb of Tutankhamun

- Lord Carnarvon died seven weeks after the tomb was found, probably because of blood poisoning caused by a mosquito bite. Others blamed his death on the “curse of Tutankhamun”

James Hider and Michael Theodoulou

Temple built 4,000 years ago unearthed in Peru

LIMA (Reuters) - A 4,000-year-old temple filled with murals has been unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, making it one of the oldest finds in the Americas, a leading archaeologist said on Saturday.

The temple, inside a larger ruin, includes a staircase that leads up to an altar used for fire worship at a site scientists have called Ventarron, said Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who led the dig.

It sits in the Lambayeque valley, near the ancient Sipan complex that Alva unearthed in the 1980s. Ventarron was built long before Sipan, about 2,000 years before Christ, he said.

"It's a temple that is about 4,000 years old," Alva, director of the Museum Tumbas Reales (Royal Tombs) of Sipan, told Reuters by telephone after announcing the results of carbon dating at a ceremony north of Lima sponsored by Peru's government.

"What's surprising are the construction methods, the architectural design and most of all the existence of murals that could be the oldest in the Americas," he said.

Lambayeque is 472 miles from Lima, Peru's capital.

Discoveries at Sipan, an administrative and religious center of the Moche culture, have included a gold-filled tomb built 1,700 years ago for a pre-Incan king.

Peru is rich in archaeological treasures, including the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in the Andes.

Until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, the Incas ruled an empire for several centuries that stretched from Colombia and Ecuador in the north to what are now Peru and Chile in the south.

"The discovery of this temple reveals evidence suggesting the region of Lambayeque was one of great cultural exchange between the Pacific coast and the rest of Peru," said Alva.

(Writing by Terry Wade; Editing by Peter Cooney)

By Marco Aquino

Comet draws scientific, amateur interest

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - A comet that unexpectedly brightened in the last couple of weeks and is now visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.

Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at the University of Tennessee, is drawing students to the roof of the Nielsen Physics Building for special viewings of Comet 17P/Holmes.

The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies but can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper.

"This is truly a celestial surprise," Lewis said. "Absolutely amazing."

Until Oct. 23, the comet had been visible to modern astronomers only with a telescope, but that night it suddenly erupted and expanded.

A similar burst in 1892 led to the comet's discovery by Edwin Holmes.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness, along the lines of when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter back in 1994," Lewis said.

Scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas.

"What comets do when they are near the sun is very unpredictable," Lewis said. "We expect to see a coma cloud and a tail, but this is more like an explosion, and we are seeing the bubble of gas and dust as it expands away from the center of the blast."

Experts aren't sure how long the comet's show will last but estimate it could be weeks if not months. Using a telescope or binoculars help bring the comet's details into view, they said.

Egypt puts King Tut on public display

LUXOR, Egypt - King Tut's buck-toothed face was unveiled Sunday for the first time in public — more than 3,000 years after the youngest and most famous pharaoh to rule ancient Egypt was shrouded in linen and buried in his golden underground tomb.

Archeologists carefully lifted thae fragile mummy out of a quartz sarcophagus decorated with stone-carved protective goddesses, momentarily pulling aside a beige covering to reveal a leathery black body.

The linen was then replaced over Tut's narrow body so only his face and tiny feet were exposed, and the 19-year-old king, whose life and death has captivated people for nearly a century, was moved to a simple glass climate-controlled case to keep it from turning to dust.

"I can say for the first time that the mummy is safe and the mummy is well preserved, and at the same time, all the tourists who will enter this tomb will be able to see the face of Tutankhamun for the first time," Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said from inside the hot and sticky tomb.

"The face of the golden boy is amazing. It has magic and it has mystery," he added.

Hawass said scientists began restoring the badly damaged mummy more than two years ago. Much of the body is broken into 18 pieces — damage sustained when British archaeologist Howard Carter first discovered it 85 years ago, took it from its tomb and tried to pull off the famous golden mask, Hawass said.

But experts fear a more recent phenomenon — mass tourism — is further deteriorating Tut's mummy. Thousands of tourists visit the underground chamber every month, and Hawass said within 50 years the mummy could dissolve into dust.

"The humidity and heat caused by ... people entering the tomb and their breathing will change the mummy to a powder. The only good thing (left) in this mummy is the face. We need to preserve the face," said Hawass, who wore his signature Indiana Jones-style tan hat.

The mystery surrounding King Tutankhamun — who ruled during the 18th dynasty and ascended to the throne at age 8 — and his glittering gold tomb has entranced ancient Egypt fans since Carter first discovered the hidden tomb, revealing a trove of fabulous gold and precious stone treasures and propelling the once-forgotten pharaoh into global stardom.

He wasn't Egypt's most powerful or important king, but his staggering treasures, rumors of a mysterious curse that plagued Carter and his team — debunked by experts long ago — and several books and TV documentaries dedicated to Tut have added to his intrigue.

Archeologists in recent years have tried to resolve lingering questions over how he died and his precise royal lineage. In 2005, scientists removed Tut's mummy from his tomb and placed it into a portable CT scanner for 15 minutes to obtain a three-dimensional image. The scans were the first done on an Egyptian mummy.

The results ruled out that Tut was violently murdered — but stopped short of definitively concluding how he died around 1323 B.C. Experts, including Hawass, suggested that days before dying, Tut badly broke his left thigh, an apparent accident that may have resulted in a fatal infection.

The CT scan also provided the most revealing insight yet into Tut's life. He was well-fed and healthy, but slight, standing 5 feet, 6 inches tall at the time of his death. The scan also showed he had the overbite characteristic of other kings from his family, large incisor teeth and his lower teeth were slightly misaligned.

The unveiling of Tut's mummy comes amid a resurgence in the frenzy over the boy king. A highly publicized museum exhibit traveling the globe drew more than 4 million people during its initial four-city American-leg of the tour. The exhibit will open Nov. 15 in London and later will make a three-city encore tour in the U.S. beginning with the Dallas Museum of Art.

The Egyptian tourism industry is hoping to capitalize on that interest and draw tourists to Luxor to see something they couldn't in traveling exhibit — the mummy itself.

The number of tourists who visit Tut's tomb is expected to double to 700 a day now that the mummy will be on display indefinitely, said Mostafa Wazery, who heads the Valley of the Kings for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Most of Egypt's other identified mummies are on display in museums in Luxor and Cairo.

But not every tourist was eager to find out that Tut's mummy was being moved to a modern, see-through case.

"I really think he should be left alone in quiet, in peace," said British tourist Bob Philpotts after viewing Tut's tomb before the mummy was moved on Sunday. "This is his resting place, and he should be left (there)."

Hawass said experts will begin another project to determine the pharaoh's precise royal lineage. It is unclear if he is the son or a half brother of Akhenaten, the "heretic" pharaoh who introduced a revolutionary form of monotheism to ancient Egypt and was the son of Amenhotep III.

Sunday's unveiling ensured the boy pharaoh would remain eternal, said Hawass.

"I can assure you that putting this mummy in this case, this showcase, can make the golden boy live forever," he said.

By ANNA JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

Cold spot could be relic of Big Bang

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A cold spot in the oldest radiation in the universe could be the first sign of a cosmic glitch that might have originated shortly after the Big Bang, British and Spanish scientists said on Thursday.

They think this spot -- detected on satellite maps of microwave radiation -- might be a cosmic defect or texture, a holdover from the universe's infancy. But they said their theory would need confirmation.

Such defects or textures, they theorize, reflect a flaw in the pattern of the universe as it formed -- think of a snag in pantyhose or a flaw in a diamond.

"If the cold spot is indeed proven to be a texture, it will completely change our view of how the universe evolved following the Big Bang," said Mike Hobson, of the Astrophysics Group at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, whose study appears in the journal Science.

Hobson, Neil Turok and colleagues at the Institute of Physics at Cantabria based this theory on an analysis of a large cold spot in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is basically the heat glow left over from the formation of the universe.

The cold spot was discovered in 2003 by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, and its presence has been the subject of many theories, said Al Kogut of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Kogut, who did not work on the paper, said if this texture theory is proven, it would offer a window into the universe shortly after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, showing places where the universe was expanding and cooling.

"If you imagine water cooling down in an ice cube tray, it will make a transition from a liquid state to solid crystal," Kogut said in a telephone interview.

If that occurs very slowly, he said, that transition goes very smoothly, producing crystal clear ice. But if it goes very fast, the crystal aligns in different directions. Where they don't agree, a crack appears, he said.

This paper "is basically saying this cold spot is a relic of high-energy physics that occurred immediately after the Big Bang," Kogut said.

"They're claiming they've found one of these things and it could be the tip of the iceberg," he said.

But Kogut, like the study's authors, said he would like more proof. "The evidence is encouraging, but far from compelling," he said.


By Julie Steenhuysen

25 Secrets of Mona Lisa Revealed

New images uncover 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including proof that Leonardo da Vinci gave her eyebrows, solving a long-held mystery.

The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which will feature new research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debut in the United States at the Metreon in San Francisco. The Mona Lisa showcase is part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius."

Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multi-spectral Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his contemporaries.

"The face of Mona Lisa appears slightly wider and the smile is different and the eyes are different," Cotte said. "The smile is more accentuated I would say."

Mona Lisa mysteries

A zoomed-in image of Mona Lisa's left eye revealed a single brush stroke in the eyebrow region, Cotte said.

"I am an engineer and scientist, so for me all has to be logical. It was not logical that Mona Lisa does not have any eyebrows or eyelashes," Cotte told LiveScience. "I discovered one hair of the eyebrow."

Another conundrum had been the position of the subject's right arm, which lies across her stomach. This was the first time, Cotte said, that a painter had rendered a subject's arm and wrist in such a position. While other artists had never understood da Vinci's reasoning, they copied it nonetheless.

Cotte discovered the pigment just behind the right wrist matched up perfectly with that of the painted cover that drapes across Mona Lisa's knee. So it did make sense: The forearm and wrist held up one side of a blanket.

"The wrist of the right hand is up high on the stomach. But if you look deeply in the infrared you understand that she holds a cover with her wrist," Cotte said.

Behind a painting

The infrared images also revealed da Vinci's preparatory drawings that lie behind layers of varnish and paint, showing that the Renaissance man was also human.

"If you look at the left hand you see the first position of the finger, and he changed his mind for another position," Cotte said. "Even Leonardo da Vinci had hesitation."

Other revelations include:

-Lace on Mona Lisa's dress
-The transparency of the veil shows da Vinci first painted a landscape and then used transparency techniques to paint the veil atop it.
-A change in the position of the left index and middle finger.
-The elbow was repaired from damage due to a rock thrown at the painting in 1956.
-The blanket covering Mona Lisa's knees also covers her stomach.
-The left finger was not completely finished.
-A blotch mark on the corner of the eye and chin are varnish accidents, countering claims that Mona Lisa was sick.
-And the Mona Lisa was painted on uncut poplar board, contrary to speculations.

In the larger picture, Cotte said when he stands back and looks up at the enlarged infrared image of Mona Lisa, her beauty and mystique are apparent.

"If you are in front of this huge enlargement of Mona Lisa, you understand instantly why Mona Lisa is so famous," Cotte said. He added, it's something you have to see with your own eyes

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com

3 Americans Win Nobel in Economics

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was awarded to three American economists today for creating and developing a sophisticated explanation of the interaction among individuals, markets and institutions.

Their work, called mechanism design theory, has influenced thinking on a wide range of problems in economics and political science, from the design of government bond auctions to patent systems to voting procedures.

Leonid Hurwicz, 90, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, initiated the field of mechanism design theory, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the award citation. His work was further developed by two 56-year-old economists who are sharing the prize — Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Eric S. Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

Mr. Hurwicz, who was born in Moscow, started his work in the postwar years at a time when economists and others were heatedly debating whether socialist reforms were possible without a loss of economic efficiency. Those debates tended to be deeply ideological.

Mr. Hurwicz was a pioneer in trying a more rigorous, mathematical analysis to those kinds of issues. Last year, in a lecture last year to honor Mr. Hurwicz, Mr. Myerson explained, “Over many years and decades, Leo Hurwicz has worked to show how mathematical economic models can provide a general framework for analyzing different economics institutions, like those of capitalism and socialism, as mechanisms for coordinating the individuals of society.”

The field of mechanism design theory strives to take into account the realities of economic life systematically. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is a powerful metaphor that describes how the market, in theory, will always efficiently allocate scarce resources. Yet real-world conditions tend to complicate things. Competition is not completely free, consumers are not perfectly informed, optimizing private production and consumption may have social costs, and institutions can strongly shape economic bargaining.

The work begun by Mr. Hurwicz, and advanced by Mr. Maskin and Mr. Myerson, gave economists and policy makers new intellectual tools to address questions like those listed in the academy’s citation: “How well do different such institutions, or allocation mechanisms, perform? What is the optimal mechanism to reach a certain goal, such as social welfare or private profit? Is government regulation called for, and if so, how is it best designed?”

The institutional focus of this year’s laureates, economists say, is an important contribution. “Economists’ most lasting influence comes from the design of institutions,” said Robert J. Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University. “It is these mechanisms we use day to day that really matter to our lives.”

The three economists will share the prize money, 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.56 million. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was not one of the five original prizes — physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace — that Alfred Nobel specified in his will, and were first awarded in 1901. The first economics prize was awarded in 1969.


By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 15, 2007

Al Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.

The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.

Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said, referring to the issue of man-made climate change. The United Nations panel, a network of 2,000 scientists organized in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.

In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the panel, said he was overwhelmed by the decision, adding it was “not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams.”

Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored and planned to donate his half of the $1.56 million award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group he serves as board chairman.

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

He said the “award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis — a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years.”

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday night at a fund-raising event for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow Democrat.

Ms. Kreider said Mr. Gore would hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate Protection in San Francisco today and return to his home in Nashville over the weekend.

Dr. Pachauri, in an interview in New Delhi today in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, where he is director-general, cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on the effects of human activities on climate change.

“The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the I.P.C.C. has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change,” he said

Dr. Pachauri said he thought the award would now settle the scientific debate on climate change and that governments would now take action.

He said it was “entirely possible to stabilize the levels of emissions but that climate change and its impact will continue to stalk us.”

“We will have to live with climate change up to a certain point of time but if we want to avoid or delay much more serious damage then its essential that we start mitigation quickly and to a serious extent,” he said.

The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the Nobel committee tried to minimize after its announcement today.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of the Bush administration.

He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.

"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge all of them to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming,” he said. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”

He said the peace prize was only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”

In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.

In Washington, a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “Of course we’re happy for Vice President Gore and the I.P.C.C. for receiving this recognition.”

Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more public attention.

The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of the human effect on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources.”

“Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A Web site, www.draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.

The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida.

“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”

The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.

Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.

Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist who has participated in the periodic climate assessments since the early days of the I.P.C.C. panel, described the work of the committee, which includes both scientists and government officials, as “a beautiful example of a largely successful experiment in people coming together to improve government.”

“The reward reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason, and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized,” added Dr. Oppenheimer, who is now at Princeton University and previously worked for Environmental Defense, a private advocacy group.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.

“We can recommend ways for policy makers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C. data being there, this would be next to impossible,” Mr. de Boer said. He said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.

"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. "We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders were in conflict with farmers because the changing climate had brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

From the 1980s onward, many scientists and international affairs experts considered the prospect that long-lived gases from human activities could warm the earth to be a threat to global security as well as the environment.

The first large scientific meeting on the issue, the Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, was held in Toronto in 1988. It was also the first meeting to bring together scientists and government officials on a large scale to discuss research pointing to dangerous warming from a buildup of greenhouse gases.

The conference concluded with a statement saying: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”

Its “call to action” included a recommendation that the main heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, be cut by 2005 to 20 percent below 1988 levels — a target far more ambitious than anything later discussed in United Nations climate-treaty talks and missed long ago.

The intergovernmental climate panel was formally convened after the conference.

Its four reports, the first published in 1990, have provided the underpinning for international negotiations leading to the first climate treaty, with only voluntary terms, in 1992 and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first accord with binding terms but with limited support and a 2012 expiration date.

Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Andrew C. Revkin from New York, and James Kanter from Paris.



By WALTER GIBBS
Published: October 13, 2007

German Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A German scientist whose studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces have implications for the environment won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today.

Gerhard Ertl’s work in surface chemistry has applications across a broad array of fields, and helps explain the processes in manufacturing computer chips, in the function of automobiles’ catalytic converters and on the surface of stratospheric ice crystals that have implications for global warming.

The $1.5 million prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Dr. Ertl’s 71st birthday, and he said in remarks broadcast from Stockholm that winning the prize “is the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.”

In an interview with the Associated Press from his office in Berlin, he said, “I am speechless.” He is an emeritus professor at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. “I was not counting on this,” he said.

In a statement released early today, Catherine T. Hunt, the president of the American Chemical Society, congratulated Dr. Ertl, calling him a “spectacular scientist” working in a field “that often receives little public attention, and yet has transformed lives in so many ways.” She said, “In the future, this research will help us tap new sources of renewable fuels, for instance, and produce smaller, more powerful electronics products.”

The Nobel prizes are being announced this week. On Monday, the prize that recognizes achievement in “physiology or medicine” went to Mario R. Capecchi, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University in Wales, for their work that led to the technique of manipulating the genes of mice.

Tuesday’s award, in the field of physics, went to Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, whose work in magnetics led to the development of the kinds of hard drives that have allowed computers and music players to shrink to tiny dimensions.

The awards are to be handed out by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.


By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Physics of Hard Drives Wins Nobel

Two physicists who discovered how to manipulate the magnetic and electrical properties of thin layers of atoms to store vast amounts of data on tiny disks, making iPods and other wonders of modern life possible, were chosen as winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday.

Albert Fert, of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of the Institute of Solid State Research at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, will share the $1.5 million prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

They will receive the money in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Dr. Fert, 69, and Dr. Grünberg, 68, each working independently in 1988, discovered an effect known as giant magnetoresistance, in which tiny changes in a magnetic field can produce huge changes in electrical resistance.

The effect is at the heart of modern gadgets that record data, music or snippets of video as a dense magnetic patchwork of zeros and ones, which is then scanned by a small head and converted to electrical signals.

“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Börje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy, said, according to The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”

In remarks broadcast over a speakerphone at the academy in Stockholm, Dr. Fert said: “I am so happy for my family, for my co-workers. And I am also very happy to share this with a friend.”

Experts said the discovery was one of the first triumphs of the new field of nanotechnology, the science of building and manipulating assemblies of atoms only a nanometer (a billionth of a meter) in size.

The scanning heads in today’s gizmos consist of alternating layers only a few atoms thick of a magnetic metal, like iron, and a nonmagnetic metal, like chromium. At that small size, the strange rules of quantum mechanics come into play and novel properties emerge.

The Nobel citation said Dr. Fert and Dr. Grünberg’s work also heralded the advent of a new, even smaller and denser type of memory storage called spintronics, in which information is stored and processed by manipulating the spins of electrons.

Engineers have been recording information magnetically and reading it out electrically since the dawn of the computer age, but as they have endeavored to pack more and more data onto their machines, they have been forced to use smaller and fainter magnetic inscriptions and thus more and more sensitive readout devices.

It has long been known that magnetic fields can affect the electrical resistance of magnetic materials like iron. Current flows more easily along field lines than across them. The effect was useful for sensing magnetic fields, and in heads that read magnetic disks. But it amounted to only a small change in resistance, and physicists did not think there were many prospects for improvement.

So it was a surprise in 1988 when groups led by Dr. Fert at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides and by Dr. Grünberg found that super-slim sandwiches of iron and chromium showed enhanced sensitivity to magnetic fields — “giant magnetoresistance,” as Dr. Fert called it. The name stuck.

The reason for the effect has to do with what physicists call the spin of electrons. When the magnetic layers of the sandwich have their fields pointing in the same direction, electrons whose spin points along that direction can migrate freely through the sandwich, but electrons that point in another direction get scattered.

If, however, one of the magnetic layers is perturbed, by, say, reading a small signal, it can flip its direction so that its field runs opposite to the other one. In that case, no matter which way an electron points, it will be scattered and hindered from moving through the layers, greatly increasing the electrical resistance of the sandwich.

As Phillip Schewe, of the American Institute of Physics, explained, “You’ve leveraged a weak bit of magnetism into a robust bit of electricity.”

Subsequently, Stuart Parkin, now of I.B.M., came up with an easier way to produce the sandwiches on an industrial scale. The first commercial devices using giant magnetoresistance effect were produced in 1997.

Dr. Grünberg was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic and obtained his Ph.D. from the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany in 1969. He has been asked many times over the years when he was going to win the big prize, and so was not surprised to win the Nobel, according to The A.P.

He said he was looking forward to being able to pursue his research without applying for grants for “every tiny bit.”

Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, and received his Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sud in 1970. He told The A.P. that it was impossible to predict where modern physics is going to go.

“These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say, ‘Wow, he’s using something I put together in my mind,’” Dr. Fert said.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

3 Win Nobel in Medicine for Gene Technology

Two Americans and a Briton won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for developing the immensely powerful “knockout” technology, which allows scientists to create animal models of human disease in mice.

The winners, who will share the $1.54 million prize, are Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales.

Other scientists are applying their technology, also known as gene targeting, in a variety of ways, from basic research to the development of new therapies, said the Nobel Committee from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that selected the winners.

The knockout technique provided researchers with a superb new tool for finding out what any given gene does. It allows them to genetically engineer a strain of mice with the gene missing, or knocked out, then watch to see what the mice can no longer do.

After the first decoding of the mouse and human genomes in 2001 yielded thousands of new genes of unknown function, knockout mice became a prime source of information for making sense of these novel genes.

Most human genes can also be studied in this way through their counterpart genes in the mouse. Mice have been likened to pocket-size humans, because they have the same organs and their genes are about 95 percent identical in sequence. Scientists have developed more than 500 mouse models of human ailments, including those affecting the heart and central nervous system, as well as diabetes, cancer and cystic fibrosis.

Scientists can now use the technology to create genetic mutations that can be activated at specific time points, or in specific cells or organs, both during development and in the adult animal, the Nobel citation said.

Gene-targeting technology can knock out single genes to study development of the embryo, aging and normal physiology. So far, more than 10,000 mouse genes, or about half of those in the mammalian genome, have been knocked out, the committee said.

Researchers can also make conditional knockouts, mice in which a gene of interest can be inactivated in a specific tissue or part of the brain, at any stage in life. Another important variation is to tag a normal gene with a so-called reporter gene that causes a visible color change in all cells where the normal gene is switched on.

Knockout mice are so important in medical research that thousands of strains are kept available in institutions like the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me.

“The technique is revolutionary and has completely changed the way we use the mouse to study the function of genes,” said Dr. Richard P. Woychik, the lab’s director. “When people come across a novel human gene, one of the first things they think about is knocking it out in a mouse.”

The three laureates, who are friends but work independently, also shared a Lasker Award in 2001. They began their work in the 1980s, and the first reports that the technology could generate gene-targeted mice were published in 1989. The reports involved a rare inherited human disease, the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, in which lack of an enzyme causes fits of self-mutilation.

The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who said he lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.

Dr. Capecchi’s mother, the daughter of an American, had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had had a love affair.

When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.

Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.

At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in the home of a Quaker family in Pennsylvania.

The family put Mario in the third grade, where as a means of communication his teachers told him to draw murals. As he did, he slowly learned English. Because of the street smarts he developed in Italy, he became a class leader and the boy who beat up the bullies.

He went on to study political science at Antioch College, alternating periods of work and studies. Then he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

When he decided to leave the Harvard faculty in 1973 because members of the department did not get along, he said, and did not recruit sufficient younger scientists, Dr. Capecchi went to Utah. Colleagues told him, he said, that he was “nuts” to leave Harvard’s Ivy League splendor. But Dr. Capecchi said Dr. Watson told him he could do good science anywhere.

Dr. Capecchi said the main advantage was that he could work on long-term projects more easily in Utah than at Harvard, where there was a push to get results quickly.

Dr. Capecchi said that when he reapplied to the N.I.H. in 1984 for the grant it had rejected in 1980, he was told, “We are glad you didn’t follow our advice.”

After learning he had become a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Smithies told Agence France-Presse that “it’s actually a rather peaceful feeling of culmination of a life of science.”

Dr. Smithies has credited his interest in science to his boyhood love for radios and telescopes, and for a comic-strip inventor whom he wanted to emulate. He earned a scholarship to Oxford, then dropped out of medical school to study chemistry before moving to the University of Wisconsin. Because of a visa problem, Dr. Smithies worked in Toronto for about seven years before returning to Wisconsin. He became a geneticist and moved to the University of North Carolina 19 years ago.

Dr. Smithies is a licensed airplane pilot and is fond of gliding.

Dr. Evans had planned to have an “ordinary day” off work cleaning his daughter’s home in Cambridge, England, where he was visiting when he learned he won the prize. It was “a boyhood dream come true,” Dr. Evans told Agence France-Presse.

Like Dr. Capecchi, Dr. Evans said his scientific career was an upward struggle. In an interview with the Lasker Foundation, Dr. Evans said recognition was important to him because he often was a lone scientist who cried out against the consensus. In applying for grants, he said he was told many of his ideas were premature and could not be done.

“Then five years later,” he said, “I find everyone is doing the same thing.”

Nicholas Wade contributed reporting.


By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

GENETIC PIONEERS Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine for work on creating “knockout mice.” The larger one lacks a gene that limits muscle growth. From left, the Nobelists are Martin Evans of Cardiff University, Wales; Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah; and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.

At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.

Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.

So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?

“We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning,” Dr. Haidt said. “No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty.”

He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.

Dr. Haidt developed a better sense of the elephant after visiting India at the suggestion of an anthropologist, Richard Shweder. In Bhubaneswar, in the Indian state of Orissa, Dr. Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior.

On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.

The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt’s view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed “through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,” Dr. Haidt said.

He is aware that many people — including “the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology” — equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain.

The idea that morality and sacredness are intertwined, he said, may now be out of fashion but has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology.

Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. “If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,” he said. “We’d still be just small bands roving around.”

Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. “Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,” he said.

Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. “I first found divinity in disgust,” he writes in his book “The Happiness Hypothesis.”

The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.

“Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Haidt writes, “where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggie style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.”

He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.

Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. “Educated liberals are the only group to say, ‘I find that disgusting but that doesn’t make it wrong,’ ” Dr. Haidt said.

Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)

They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.

Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.

Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories.

Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group’s traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups.

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. “A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,” he said. “I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco — most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.”

Other psychologists have mixed views about Dr. Haidt’s ideas.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said, “I’m a big fan of Haidt’s work.” He added that the idea of including purity in the moral domain could make psychological sense even if purity had no place in moral reasoning.

But Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said he disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s view that the task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems.

“For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take,” Dr. de Waal said.

He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness.

“It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good — safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor — that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives,” Dr. de Waal said.

That alignment also bothers John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University. Dr. Jost said he admired Dr. Haidt as a “very interesting and creative social psychologist” and found his work useful in drawing attention to the strong moral element in political beliefs.

But the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Dr. Haidt’s principles — do no harm and do unto others as you would have them do unto you — means that those are good candidates to be moral virtues. The fact that liberals and conservatives disagree on the other three principles “suggests to me that they are not general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values,” Dr. Jost said.

In defense of his views, Dr. Haidt said that moral claims could be valid even if not universally acknowledged.

“It is at least possible,” he said, “that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.”


Many people will say it is morally acceptable to pull a switch that diverts a train, killing just one person instead of the five on the other track. But if asked to save the same five lives by throwing a person in the train’s path, people will say the action is wrong. This may be evidence for an ancient subconscious morality that deters causing direct physical harm to someone else. An equally strong moral sanction has not yet evolved for harming someone indirectly.

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 18, 2007

4 Winners of Lasker Medical Prize

Two surgeons who developed prosthetic heart valves that have prolonged the lives of millions of people are among the winners of this year’s Lasker awards, widely considered the nation’s most prestigious medical prizes.

Drs. Alain Carpentier, 74, of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris, and Albert Starr, 81, of the Providence Health System in Portland, Ore., are among three American and one French scientists to win the awards, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced yesterday.

The third, Dr. Ralph M. Steinman, 64, of Rockefeller University in Manhattan, discovered a cell that starts a cascade of immune responses that defend the body against microbes. The cell is now the basis of experimental therapies for cancer and many other diseases.

The fourth winner, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, 66, is an internationally known immunologist who is being honored as the principal architect of two major Bush administration programs: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, and Project Bioshield, which seeks to improve countermeasures against potential bioterror agents.

Dr. Fauci, who has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, marshaled scientific evidence to construct the United States’ responses to these two global crises. The Lasker Foundation also cited Dr. Fauci for his role “in explaining issues of great concern like the science behind emerging biological hazards” to the public.

Mechanical heart valves did not exist 50 years ago. But the valves developed by Drs. Starr and Carpentier and then by others have made such replacements the second most common heart operation in this country, after coronary bypasses. An estimated four million valve operations have been performed worldwide on patients of all ages, and about 300,000 are performed in the United States each year.

Valves control the flow of blood through the chambers of the heart. The valves can become damaged from long-term complications of infections, rheumatic fever and birth defects.

In 1960, Dr. Starr, working with the late Lowell Edwards, an engineer, implanted the first successful artificial heart valve. The patient died 10 years later after falling from a ladder.

Earlier, Dr. Starr and other surgeons and engineers had tested valves designed to mimic the mitral valve’s natural leaflets. (The mitral valve is situated between the upper and lower chambers of the left side of the heart.) But the devices failed because blood clots commonly formed, often leading to strokes.

Dr. Starr and Mr. Edwards chose a different design — a free-floating ball inside a cage that resembled a bottle stopper patented in 1858 — that hardly resembled a real heart valve. To help prevent strokes and other complications, they prescribed long-term anticoagulant drugs.

The two scientists and other researchers also went on to develop newer valves with leaflets instead of a caged ball.

Mr. Edwards founded what is now Edwards Lifesciences of Irvine, Calif., to make the valves. It was a time when the Food and Drug Administration did not regulate devices.

Because the inventors wanted accurate information about the safety and effectiveness of their valve, they created what the Lasker Foundation said was the first clinical-research tracking system for long-term follow-up of patients carrying implanted medical devices. The researchers restricted sale of the valve to medical centers specializing in heart surgery. The centers, in turn, reported any adverse reactions.

A few among the initial recipients of the valves lived for at least 40 years with those valves, the foundation said.

In part to overcome the need for anticoagulant drugs, Dr. Carpentier began research on use of human cadaver valves and adapting pig valves for human use in 1964. He also earned a Ph.D. at the University of Paris to learn ways to strengthen animal valves to increase their durability.

Dr. Carpentier found that a liquid chemical, glutaraldehyde, was better than other substances in sterilizing the tissue, reducing its propensity to cause adverse immunologic reactions and lengthening the valve’s use. He also combined the animal tissue with a Teflon coating to create a device that could be produced in large amounts and kept on hospital shelves and that can avoid the need for anticoagulant drugs.

Animal tissues account for an increasing percentage of valve replacements that almost equals mechanical ones, the Lasker Foundation said.

Dr. Carpentier went on to devise a ring that stabilizes and reshapes the area around the damaged valves so they can be repaired, not replaced.

In the 1970s, when most scientists were studying how the body reacted after an invasion by a microbe, Dr. Steinman began focusing on the initial steps of invasion. He discovered a rare cell in mouse spleens that moved in a distinctive way under laboratory conditions. The cell acted differently from other immune cells. For example, long projections emerged from the cells and floated before they retracted, creating a starlike pattern. He named them dendritic cells after the Greek word for tree.

Although dendritic cells comprise only 1 percent of mouse spleen cells, Dr. Steinman found that they were the most powerful cell in priming the immune system. The dendritic cell can adjust the body’s defenses by stimulating different T immune cells.

“No one had anticipated that any cell could so efficiently goad T cells into action,” said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, the chairman of the Lasker jury and a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Dr. Steinman found that as dendritic cells mature, they migrate from the skin and other tissues to nearby lymph nodes. He and other scientists found that dendritic cells provide a safe haven for the AIDS virus and can transmit it to lymph nodes, helping to spread H.I.V. instead of killing it.

Scientists have found ways to produce large numbers of dendritic cells and are testing their use among cancer patients in 70 trials, Dr. Goldstein said. Scientists are also exploring use of dendritic cells for allergies, autoimmune diseases and in preventing rejection of transplanted organs and tissues.

Dr. Steinman and Dr. Fauci will each receive $150,000 and Dr. Starr and Dr. Carpentier will each receive $75,000.



By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Possible mastodon carving found on rock

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - They aren't certain, but underwater archaeologists say they may have discovered a boulder with a prehistoric carving in Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay.

The granite rock has markings that resemble a mastodon — an elephant-like creature that once inhabited parts of North America — with what could be a spear in its side, say divers who have seen it.

They came across the boulder at a depth of about 40 feet while searching for shipwrecks in June, said Mark Holley, a scientist with the Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve Council.

"When you see it in the water, you're tempted to say this is absolutely real," Holley said Tuesday during a news conference with photos of the boulder on display. "But that's what we need the experts to come in and verify."

Specialists shown pictures of the boulder have asked for more evidence before confirming the markings are an ancient petroglyph, said Holley, an underwater archaeologist who teaches at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City.

"They want to actually see it," he said. Unfortunately, he added, "Experts in petroglyphs generally don't dive, so we're running into a little bit of a stumbling block there."

Among those withholding judgment is Daniel Fisher, curator of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, who has studied human interactions with mastodons. He has examined a couple of the photos and is waiting for more.

"The difficulty I saw was that the features of what's interpreted as an engraving were so subtle, and they're not the only thing on the boulder," Fisher said in a phone interview.

Also, he said, mastodons are not known to have ranged into northern Michigan, although fossil remains have been found in the southern part of the state. They became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

It's possible that ancient peoples familiar with the beasts migrated north, Fisher added.

"It's conceivable" that the image on the rock is a petroglyph, he said. "I'm intrigued enough to take another look."

The boulder is within the 32-mile-long bay, Holley said, but the exact loction will be kept secret to prevent vandalism or theft.

Students of Holley's and divers with the preservation council found the boulder on the flat, sandy lake floor, which is strewn with algae and zebra mussels.

It was part of a row of stones of varying sizes that might have marked the shoreline 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, Holley said.

Some — although not the boulder — were arranged in a circle. That could indicate human manipulation although it's unclear, said Rob Houston, a geology instructor at the college who has inspected the site.

The boulder with the markings is 3.5 to 4 feet high and about 5 feet long. Photos show a surface with numerous fissures. Some may be natural while others appear of human origin, but those forming what could be the petroglyph stood out, Holley said.

Viewed together, they suggest the outlines of a mastodon-like back, hump, head, trunk, tusk, triangular shaped ear and parts of legs, he said.

"We couldn't believe what we were looking at," said Greg MacMaster, president of the underwater preserve council.

Michigan has only two confirmed petroglyphs, said John Halsey, the state archaeologist. They include sandstone carvings in the Thumb area known as the Sanilac Petroglyphs, and images in an isolated rock in the northern Lower Peninsula. Ancient rock paintings have been found in the Upper Peninsula.

The Grand Traverse Bay group plans further research and consultations with outside specialists.

"We want to get them involved with this project so that we can categorically prove it," Holley said.

___

On the Net:

_Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve: http://www.gtbup.org



By JOHN FLESHER, Associated Press Writer

Archaeologists discover ancient beehives

JERUSALEM - Archaeologists digging in northern Israel have discovered evidence of a 3,000-year-old beekeeping industry, including remnants of ancient honeycombs, beeswax and what they believe are the oldest intact beehives ever found.

The findings in the ruins of the city of Rehov this summer include 30 intact hives dating to around 900 B.C., archaeologist Amihai Mazar of Jerusalem's Hebrew University told The Associated Press. He said it offers unique evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in the Holy Land at the time of the Bible.

Beekeeping was widely practiced in the ancient world, where honey used for medicinal and religious purposes as well as for food, and beeswax was used to make molds for metal and to create surfaces to write on. While bees and beekeeping are depicted in ancient artwork, nothing similar to the Rehov hives has ever been found before, Mazar said.

The beehives, made of straw and unbaked clay, have a hole at one end to allow the bees in and out and a lid on the other end to allow beekeepers access to the honeycombs inside. They were found in orderly rows, three high, in a room that could have accommodated around 100 hives, Mazar said.

The Bible repeatedly refers to Israel as a "land of milk and honey," but that's believed to refer to honey made from dates and figs — there is no mention of honeybee cultivation. But the new find shows that the Holy Land was home to a highly developed beekeeping industry nearly 3,000 years ago.

"You can tell that this was an organized industry, part of an organized economy, in an ultra-organized city," Mazar said.

At the time the beehives were in use, Mazar believes Rehov had around 2,000 residents, a mix of Israelites, Canaanites and others.

Ezra Marcus, an expert on the ancient Mediterranean world at Haifa University, said Tuesday the finding was a unique glimpse into ancient beekeeping. Marcus was not involved in the Rehov excavation.

"We have seen depictions of beekeeping in texts and ancient art from the Near East, but this is the first time we've been able to actually feel and see the industry," Marcus said.

The finding is especially unique, Marcus said, because of its location in the middle of a thriving city — a strange place for thousands of bees.

This might have been because the city's ruler wanted the industry under his control, Marcus said, or because the beekeeping industry was linked to residents' religious practices, as might be indicated by an altar decorated with fertility figurines that archaeologists found alongside the hives.


By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press Writer

In the Genome Race, the Sequel Is Personal

The race to decode the human genome may not be entirely over: the loser has come up with a new approach that may let him prevail in the end.

In 2003, a government-financed consortium of academic centers announced it had completed the human genome, fending off a determined challenge from the biologist J. Craig Venter. The consortium’s genome comprised just half the DNA contained in a normal cell, and the DNA used in the project came from a group of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

But the loser in the race, Dr. Venter, could still have the last word. In a paper published today, his research team is announcing that it has decoded a new version of the human genome that some experts believe may be better than the consortium’s.

Called a full, or diploid genome, it consists of the DNA in both sets of chromosomes, one from each parent, and it is the normal genome possessed by almost all the body’s cells. And the genome the team has decoded belongs to just one person: Dr. Venter.

The new genome, Dr. Venter’s team reports, makes clear that the variation in the genetic programming carried by an individual is much greater than expected. In at least 44 percent of Dr. Venter’s genes, the copies inherited from his mother differ from those inherited from his father, according to the analysis published in Tuesday’s issue of PLoS Biology.

Huntington F. Willard, a geneticist at Duke University who has had early access to Dr. Venter’s genome sequence, said that the quality of the new genome was “exceptionally high” and that “until the next genome comes along this is the gold standard right now.”

Dr. Willard said it was “hugely better” than the consortium’s sequence, at least for his particular research interest.

“I don’t want to fan the fires but I like this, it’s a really good genome,” said Edward M. Rubin, a genome expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Dr. Venter’s race with the consortium began in 1998 when he spotted a quicker method of decoding the human genome. He tried to wrest this rich scientific prize from his academic rivals by co-founding a genome-decoding company called Celera. By June 2000, the two sides were neck and neck preparing a draft sequence of the genome. But in January 2002, Dr. Venter was abruptly fired as president of Celera. The consortium went on to claim victory when it announced its completion of the genome the next year.

But the consortium’s genome, though immensely useful to biologists, was full of gaps and only complete in the sense that it was the best that could be done with existing technology.

Dr. Venter has spent the last five years and an extra $10 million of his institute’s money in improving the draft genome he prepared at Celera. That genome was based mostly on his own DNA, and the new diploid version is entirely so. His critics may accuse him of an egocentricity of considerable dimension, but by analyzing his own genome he has sidestepped the problems of privacy and consent that could have arisen with other people’s DNA when he made the whole sequence publicly available, as he is doing now.

Like James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, whose genome is also being decoded, Dr. Venter believes strongly in making individual DNA sequences public to advance knowledge and hasten the era of personalized genomic medicine.

If other experts find that Dr. Venter’s genome is the best available, could it be said that he won the human genome race after all?

“There is this long history of Craig’s vanity, which for much of the scientific community is irritating,” Dr. Rubin said, declining to give a direct answer.

Asked the same question, Dr. Venter replied: “I’m not sure I’d want to be the one to say that, but we’re not through racing yet. I’ll let you know when we’ve stopped.”

James Shreeve, author of “The Genome War,” said, “I think he already believes he’s the true winner of the genome race for what he did at Celera,” noting that the consortium, too, believed it had won.

Though there are now novel technologies for decoding DNA very cheaply, Dr. Venter’s genome sequence could set a high bar for a long time. It was decoded with an old method, known as Sanger sequencing, that is expensive but analyzes stretches of DNA up to 800 units in length. The cheaper new technologies at present analyze pieces of DNA only 200 units or so long, and the shorter lengths are much harder to assemble into a complete genome.

Dr. Watson’s genome is being decoded with a next-generation machine developed by 454 Life Sciences. But the company’s researchers are putting the pieces in correct order by matching them to the consortium’s genome sequence rather than by doing an independent assembly.

Dr. Venter’s genome could be the gold standard for many years, especially if he continues to improve it. Samuel Levy, who led the J. Craig Venter Institute team that decoded the genome, said that it was a work in progress and that new versions would be published as the remaining gaps were closed. There are 4,500 gaps where the sequence of DNA units is uncertain, and no technology yet exists for decoding the large amounts of DNA at the center and tips of the chromosomes.

Biologists studying variation in the human genome, whether to discover causes of disease or for other reasons, have mostly looked at what are called SNPs or “snips,” which are sites on the genome where a single unit of DNA is changed.

But there are other kinds of variation, all of which can have consequences for a person. One type is called indels, where a single DNA unit has either been inserted or deleted from the genome. Another is copy number variation, in which the same gene can exist in multiple copies. There are also inversions, in which a stretch of DNA has been knocked out of its chromosome and reinserted the wrong way around. Dr. Venter’s genome has four million variations compared with the consortium’s, including three million snips, nearly a million indels and 90 inversions.

“This is the first time that anyone has had an accurate representation of how much variation there is in a human genome,” said Stephen W. Scherer of the University of Toronto, a co-author of the study.

Biologists had estimated that two individuals would be identical in 99.9 percent of their DNA, but the true figure now emerges as much less, around 99.5 percent, Dr. Scherer said.

The genome is being made publicly available on the database operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information and is free for any use. Dr. Venter said he would add phenotypic information to the version on his own Web site, meaning medical records and other data to help researchers correlate his bodily characteristics with his DNA.

What little is understood about the human genome at present consists mostly of medical variants that put people at risk of disease. So interpreting a genome brings mostly adverse news. Dr. Venter reports that he has variants that increase his risk of alcoholism, coronary artery disease, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, antisocial behavior and conduct disorder.

But these predictions are far from certain. As more individual genomes are decoded, the information from them will become more valuable, Dr. Venter said, provided that people can overcome “irrational fears of even seeing their genetic code.”

Although Dr. Venter has decoded the DNA sequence inherited from both of his parents, he does not yet know which sequences are from his mother and which from his father. The issue could be resolved by analyzing DNA from his mother, who is alive and well, and the matter is under consideration, Dr. Levy said. Dr. Venter has traced his ancestry for three generations and found that his mother’s and father’s ancestors came from England.

Next month, Dr. Venter will publish an autobiography, “A Life Decoded.” The book describes the twists and turns that led him down the unlikely path into scientific research. “Rebellious and disobedient,” as he describes himself, he dedicated his teenage years to the pursuit of young women and the California surf, to the detriment of his academic career.

He was drafted at the time of the Vietnam war and enlisted in the Navy. Because of a high I.Q. score, he was given a choice of any Navy career, from nuclear engineering to electronics. He chose the hospital corps school, because it was the only course that did not require any further enlistment. Only too late did he discover the reason. Corpsmen in Vietnam did not usually survive long enough to re-enlist — the half-life of medics in the field was six weeks, he writes.

Learning how to manipulate the Navy bureaucracy, he got himself assigned to the Navy hospital in Da Nang, where chances of survival were better. But the work was harrowing. He witnessed several hundred soldiers die on his operating table, mostly when he was massaging their heart or trying to breathe life into them.

“I learned more than any 20-year-old should ever have to about triage, about sorting those you can salvage from those you cannot do anything for except ease their pain as they died,” Dr. Venter writes in the autobiography.

He escaped from Vietnam with his life and an interest in medical research. With his lack of academic skills, this was a hard field for him to break into, but by 1975 he had a Ph.D. By the late 1980s, he was starting to make his mark as one of the few scientists who could get useful results out of the first DNA sequencing machines that were then becoming available.

He was the first to sequence the genome of a bacterium, Hemophilus influenzae, even though his grant application was turned down by the National Institutes of Health on the advice of experts who said his method would not work. With the human genome, an even greater prize, the pace of competition was intense, especially when his approach turned out to be more efficient than the one his rivals had chosen.

In the book, Dr. Venter says that detractors badmouthed his work, pressured other scientists not to cooperate with him and tried strenuously to block publication of his report, of which they had earlier maneuvered to be made co-authors.

“Like most human endeavors, science is driven in no small part by envy,” he writes.

Dr. Venter has never fully lost his youthful disrespect for authority and establishments. His investment in himself — choosing his own genome to sequence, naming his laboratory the J. Craig Venter Institute — may come across as vainglorious, but it can also be seen as a signal of survival, defying the establishments he believes have sought to crush him. However nettlesome he may seem to some of his colleagues, he has the charm and the personal skills to have recruited many highly able researchers to his teams.

Another reason for his success has been his skill at raising private finances to achieve research goals after being denied support from the National Institutes of Health. That a scientist of his ability has been forced to work outside the N.I.H.’s peer-review system puts peer review in a strange light. If his diploid human genome should become a standard, the success is one that he will have earned by perseverance and defiance of long odds.


A team led by J. Craig Venter, above, has finished the first mapping of a full, or diploid, genome, made up of DNA inherited from both parents. The genome is Dr. Venter’s own.


By NICHOLAS WADE

China's terracotta tomb site hides mystery building

BEIJING (Reuters) - The tomb of China's first emperor, guarded for more than 2,000 years by 8,000 terracotta warriors and horses, has yielded up another archaeological secret.

After five years of research, archaeologists have confirmed that a 30-meter-high building is buried in the vast mausoleum of Emperor Qinshihuang near the former capital, Xian, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, Xinhua news agency said on Sunday.

Duan Qingbo, a researcher with Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology, said the building might have been constructed for the soul of the emperor to depart.

Archaeologists have been using remote sensing technology since 2002 to study the internal structure of the unexcavated mausoleum.

They concluded that the building, buried above the main tomb, had four surrounding stair-like walls with nine steps each, Xinhua said.

Qinshihuang unified China in 221 BC.

The life-size terracotta army, buried in pits near the mausoleum to guard the emperor in the afterlife, was accidentally unearthed in 1974 by farmers who were digging a well.

Glimpse of Time Before Big Bang Possible

It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say.

Unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of "cosmic forgetfulness."


The Big Bang is often thought as the start of everything, including time, making any questions about what happened during it or beforehand nonsensical. Recently scientists have instead suggested the Big Bang might have just been the explosive beginning of the current era of the universe, hinting at a mysterious past.


To see how far into history one might gaze, theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald at Pennsylvania State University ran calculations based on loop quantum gravity, one of a number of competing theories seeking to explain how the underlying structure of the universe works.


Past research suggested the Big Bang was preceded by infinite energies and space-time warping where existing scientific theories break down, making it impossible to peer beforehand. The new findings suggest that although the levels of energy and space-time warping before the Big Bang were both incredibly high, they were finite.


Scientists could spot clues in the present day of what the cosmos looked like previously. If evidence of the past persisted after the Big Bang, its influence could be spotted in astronomical observations and computational models, Bojowald explained.


However, Bojowald also figures some knowledge of the past was irrevocably lost. For instance, the sheer size of the present universe would suppress precise knowledge of how the universe changed in size before the Big Bang, he said.


"It came as a big surprise that some properties of the universe before the Big Bang may have only such a weak influence on current observations that they are practically undetermined," Bojowald said of findings detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Physics.


One implication of this "cosmic forgetfulness," as Bojowald calls it, is that history does not repeat itself-the fundamental properties of the current era of the universe are different from the last, Bojowald explained. "It's as if the universe forgot some of its properties and acquired new properties independent of what it had before," he told SPACE.com.


"The eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness," he added.


These findings differ from a cyclic model of the cosmos from cosmologist Paul Steinhardt at Princeton and theoretical physicist Neil Turok at Cambridge, which envisions an infinite series of Big Bangs preceding our universe caused by additional membranes or "branes" of reality perpetually colliding and bouncing off each other. Steinhardt said he felt Bojowald's calculations were concrete, but needed further elaboration to include the interplay of different kinds of matter and radiation.


Cosmologist Carlo Rovelli at the Center of Theoretical Physics in Marseilles, France, found it "remarkable" that the new work could delve past the Big Bang. He added the work had to lead to predictions that could be compared to cosmological observations "in order to become credible."

The Strangest Things in Space
10 Confounding Cosmic Questions
You Can't Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say
Original Story: Glimpse of Time Before Big Bang Possible

Visit SPACE.com and explore our huge collection of Space Pictures, Space Videos, Space Image of the Day, Hot Topics, Top 10s, Multimedia, Trivia, Voting and Amazing Images. Follow the latest developments in the search for life in our universe in our SETI: Search for Life section. Join the community, sign up for our free daily email newsletter, listen to our Podcasts, check out our RSS feeds and other Reader Favorites today!



Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
SPACE.com
Sun Jul 1, 1:30 PM ET