NEVER A DULL MOMENT AT AAAS ANNUAL MEETING

by Gareth Cook

The nation's largest annual general scientific conference is five days of networking, coffee to go, and talks on subjects that included anthrax, alternative medicine, and the search for other dimensions.

The meeting, held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is always a sprawling affair because it tries to bring together researchers from all the sciences with Washington policymakers and journalists and the general public. It is a quirky crowd that includes people with Nobel prizes and people who sit on the floor and knit while a speaker pontificates on the future of scientific research. Here is some of what the Globe's science team saw and heard.

Friends forever

Eric Lander of the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute delivered a lecture on the future of genomics to a standingroom only crowd and briefly thanked "our colleagues at Celera." An hour later, only a few rooms away, J. Craig Venter, former head of the Celera Genomics Corp., delivered a thought-provoking, yet uncharacteristically soft-spoken, talk on how human racial differences have
proved to be genetically negligible.

What a difference a year makes

On that very day, one year earlier, Venter and his staff at Celera published their historic paper, the rough draft of the human genome, in the British journal
Nature. A day later, the government-financed Human Genome Project, led by Lander, would publish its version of the genome in Science, Nature's American rival and sponsors of the conference. There had been bad blood between the groups for years, with Lander and Venter frequently trading barbs on the accuracy and efficiency of each other's work. It was the most heated scientific competition in a generation.

But, [now], there was nary a bad word exchanged. In fact, it was Venter's wife, Claire Fraser of The Institute for Genomic Research, who took center stage
at the conference, speaking on her efforts to map the genome of the suddenly popular bacteria B. anthracis, better known as anthrax. This could be used to pinpoint the source of the anthrax used in last year's attacks.

Venter was recently forced out of Celera, whose board of directors wanted a more profit-savvy chief. And Lander, in his talk, detailed his group's work on tracing the evolutionary histories of various genes, calling the genome "the most complex history book ever."

Phasers on

Scientists who come to AAAS never know what kinds of questions they will field from the audience. After a talk on the physics of very cold atoms, the
chairman of the Harvard physics department, Gerald Gabrielse, fielded one from a man who has been following his career for years and wanted to know about the possibility of using antimatter as a space weapon. It is theoretically possible, but it will be a long time, Gabrielse said, before physicists can make enough
antimatter.

Other dimensions

The line between science and science fiction is tenuous indeed. One of the most energetic lectures was delivered by Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the Enrico Fermi Institute, in Chicago, who is searching for signs of other dimensions. Modern physics has become stuck, because it has an elaborate theory for how the universe works at the level of tiny particles, but there is no place in the theory for a force that is obvious even to children-gravity. To explain this, physicists have turned to the idea of other dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions and time. Perhaps, some posit, there are another six dimensions but nobody has figured out how to see them.

To solve the mystery, Spiropulu and other physicists send particles smashing into each other at very high speeds and examine the spray of wreckage. They hope to find evidence that some of the spray has gone missing, that it has slipped off into another dimension.

The highlight of the talk was a video called "Physics Walk with Maria," a collection of man-on-the-street interviews that serve as a reminder of how far the reality of physics is from the everyday. Spiropulu asks questions like "How many dimensions are there?" One person answered: "Two, the real and the supernatural."

The last clip shows her asking three men if they know what "string theory" is. They shake their heads, and one says, "We are musicians." They then serenade
her with an opera aria. Heard from someone in the audience after the talk: "She's so cool."

Glass ceiling

We've come a long way, baby, but it's still a struggle, speakers told a mostly female audience gathered to hear about "Women in Science: Shattering the Glass Ceiling."

Women now make up 45 percent of those getting doctorates in the life sciences but a much smaller percentage of those getting advanced degrees in physics and engineering, Mildred Dresselhaus, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the group.

Women have gone from three percent of the physics faculty nationally to nearly six percent over the last 25 years.

Several leading universities have recently committed themselves to recruiting and nurturing more women science faculty, she said, but one quarter of the physics departments granting Ph.D.s nationally still do not have a single woman faculty member. Even in the life sciences, she said, where women have reached critical mass, they have a harder time than men advancing in their careers.

Subtle impediments and differences in socialization contribute to the "glass ceiling," said Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist of science at Harvard University. For example, women are less likely to grandstand in front of colleagues, even though this may help them get ahead, and they may be excluded from networking sessions.

One member of the audience suggested as a partial solution "outing those departments" nationally that are "toxic to women."

Testing ginkgo

Does it really work? Or is it scientific hocus-pocus peddled by avaricious charlatans? It's Stephen E. Straus's job to figure that out. He presides over the federal government's gathering campaign to determine whether alternative medicine does what it promises. And he vowed at the association's meeting that his department at the National Institutes of Health will apply the same scientific rigor that the Food and Drug Administration requires when reviewing pharmaceuticals.

It's estimated that Americans spend $21 billion a year on pill and potions, poking and probing that falls outside the realm of FDA regulation. But an earlier effort by the federal government to review the efficacy and safety of alternative treatments failed to yield definitive evidence, in large part because study grants
were modest, typically $20,000 or $30,000. In the past two years, that has begun to change. This year, Straus's agency is devoting $105 million to evaluating alternative medicine, with individual NIH grants moving toward the range of $10 million to $20 million.

Already, a study of ginkgo biloba, hailed for its memory-enhancing qualities, includes about 3,000 participants. And research on glucosamine and chondroitin-touted for their ability to silence the jab of arthritis-has enlisted about 1,500 participants.

"It actually provides us for the first time the wherewithal to separate the wheat from the chaff," Straus said. "I'm inherently a person who is a skeptical scientist.
I like proof."

The spring collection

There's always the fashion component to science symposiums, specifically T-shirts and ties. Periodic tables, cows doing calculus, and quotes such as "Anything that doesn't matter has no mass," are displayed as proudly as the newest Armani suit on Newbury Street.

A favorite gem seen in the halls of the Hynes:

Einstein proposed that time,
Was flexible and most sublime,
Go near fast as light,
And to your delight,
You'll get home while still in your prime.

T-shirts were even for sale in the exhibition hall, where Mike Folz and his wife were doing a brisk business selling sayings such as "Hey, this is rocket science!" and "Quantum Mechanics for Dummies" with Schrodinger's cat dreaming "Maybe yes, maybe no."

But not all his T-shirts are bought by science geeks. Consider the one with a picture of the Earth with a giant highway running over it. "Pave the Planet, one
world, one people, one slab of asphalt," it states. While environmentalists buy the shirt to poke fun at the obsession to build, the T-shirt also has caught on with
asphalt companies.

An empty feeling

As the conference was wrapping up, it was hard to escape the feeling that this year's just wasn't as good as last year's. Perhaps it was the especially grim interior of the Hynes Convention Center, or perhaps it was the new ritual of checking cars for bombs. The panels seemed less compelling, and the crowds seemed thinner, even though organizers said there were just as many people there as attended last year's.

But maybe there is another explanation. In San Francisco, attendees were practically giddy with the new possibilities of genetics. That very week, scientists
had published the rough draft of the human genome. A year later, the cup seems half empty. To make practical use of the new knowledge, scientists will have to
document all of the proteins that a human DNA can make with its genes. Overall, virtually nothing is known about these proteins, how they work, and how they interact to make the body do what it does.

And scientists still haven't even agreed on how many genes a human has: Is it around 30,000 or more like 70,000? And that makes last year's "rough draft"
seem very rough indeed.

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Gareth Cook is a science writer with the Boston Globe.

"As Scientists Gather in the Hub: Forgiveness, Phasers,
Fashion," Boston Globe, Feb. 19, 2002.

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