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BERKELEY
science
reviewSpring 2002 Vol.2 no.1
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FROMTHE EDITORBERKELEYsciencereviewEDITORINCHIEF
Eran Karmon
MANAGINGEDITOR
Temina Madon
ARTDIRECTOR
Una Ren
CONTENTEDITOR
Jessica Palmer
CURRENTBRIEFSEDITOR
Heidi Ledford
COPY EDITOR
Donna Sy
EDITORS
Joel KamnitzerColin McCormick
Jane McGonigalTeddy Varno
ARTAND LAYOUT
Aaron Golub
Dan HandwerkerJinjer Larson
Merek Siu
WEBMASTER
Tony Wilson
SPECIALTHANKS
David PerlmanCharles Petit
PRINTER
Fricke-Parks Inc.2002 Berkeley Science Review. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without express permission of the publishers. Publishedwith financial assistance from the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, the Associated Students of the University of California,
and the UC Berkeley Chancellors Publication Committee. Berkeley Science Review is not an official publication of the University of California, Berkeley, or the ASUC. The contentin this publication does not necessarily reflect the views of the University or the ASUC. *Dollars will be paid in BSR Fun Cash, which is useless.
Dear Readers,
A lots been happening at the BSR. For one, weve fully quintupled our circulation for
Issue 2, up to a healthy 5000. Weve also added two new sections to the magazine.
Turn to Labscope (p. 4) for a lively look at recent Cal-produced breakthroughs, and read
through Biotech Beat (p. 6) for high points of the Bay Area biotechnology industry. Plus,
weve broken new journalistic ground by printing an actual picture of someone actu-
ally naked on the actual South Pole (The Back Page).
Your old favorites are here, too. Probable lunatic Alan Moses is back with his LastAngry Man column (p. 37), this time settling for good any debate over the definition of
Life. And Aaron Pierce has written a wonderful feature (p. 18) about how $350 mil-
lion and a mile-and-a-half deep hole in the ground may tell us how the Sun shines.
The BSR is about bringing science to the public in a way thats understandable and
exciting. Because science is, well, generally pretty exciting. We know it is, because all
of us are active members of Berkeleys research community. Were graduate students
in the sciences, engineering, math, and the humanitiesand the BSR is what we do in
our spare time, because we think people outside the sciences and even outside Berke-
ley should know about what Berkeley researchers do.
Come be part of the BSR. Visit us on the web at http:/ / sciencereview.berkeley.edu to
find out how to become a contributing writer, editor, or designer for what my mom
has called the greatest magazine of the new millennium. Were always looking for
shockingly well written and compelling stories or a spare hand at the Mac when layout
time comes. So come on, tell the world about all the great research that comes out of
Cal. I will give you a dollar.*
All the best,
Eran Karmon
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Features
28 Science IllustratedTraining artists to bring
complex concepts into
living color. By Jessica Palmer and Una Ren
Hunting down the elusive
solar neutrino.
18 The Ghost in the Sun
By Aaron Pierce
BSR Vol. 2 No. 1
BERKELEYscience
review
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Departments
On the cover:
4 Labscope
Controlling computers via aglove interface.
Stamping out tuberculosis in African buffalo.
A silicon Campanile.
Drawing with electrons.
6 Biotech BeatWhats happening in Bay Area
biotech (sorry, no job postings).
17 Book ReviewAnnie Alexander and the UC museums.
27 Weird ScienceKen and Barbie meet Godzilla.
Bacteria that band together.
BSRExclusive:Big ole naked guy on the South Pole!
The Back Page
12 Spin Doctors
The University
W hy more and more Berkeley professors
are splitting time between the lab and the
boardroom.
Perspective
37 Life: Wanted Dead or AliveIs a goldfish alive? W hat about a tub of
margarine? Alan Moses sorts it out.
Artwork by Jennifer Kane, afirst year student in the ScienceIllustration Progam at UCSC.Read about it on page 28.
40 Quanta (heard on campus)
Current Briefs
7 Telling Stories
Why do autistic children have troubledescribing emotions?
Modeling the corneas topographymay lead to improved contact lenses.
8 Correcting Keratoconus
Even in cyberspace, geography
matters.
9 Mapping the Net
Shrinking software for networkeddevices.
10 Tiny OS
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Labscope
ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER
GESUNDHEIT
BERKELEYscience 4r e v i e w
A group led by physics professor Joel Fajans is pioneering ways to trap groups of pure electrons (called electron plasmas) usinmagnetic and electric fields. While previous researchers have generated their electrons by heating pieces of tungsten meta
Fajans uses a photocathode material that emits electrons when exposed to light. By carefully controlling the pattern of lig
exposure, his group can organize emitted electrons into highly complex patterns. The patterns are allowed to evolve for a tim
and are then imaged by a CCD camera on a phosphor screen. Aside from improving techniques for the control of charg
plasmas, this research has led to a better understanding of the flow of two-dimensional fluids, including the behavior of Jupiter
Great Red Spot. Learn more at http:/ / socrates.berkeley.edu/ ~ fajans.
Colin McCormick
Researchers at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center are developing computer control systems small enough to fit on fingernail. Graduate students Seth Hollar, John Perng and Brian Fisher have designed a glove that translates hand gestures in
computer-recognizable symbols. Although the glove is much larger than the 1 mm device the team ultimately hopes to creat
it proves that the technology for a tiny virtual keyboard works. Electronic chips called accelerometers are placed on each fing
of the glove to measure the force and direction of movement of the users hand. These signals are digitized and transmitted to th
computer, which uses special software to match a movement to its database of gestures. In addition to paving the way for th
advent of fingernail-sized digital controllers, the researchers say that potential applications of their glove include virtual music
instruments and American Sign Language interpreters.
Jane McGonigal
Nearly 87 years after its completion, Elliot Hui has figured out how to make the Campanile fifty-two thousand times smaller
Hui, a graduate student in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a researcher at the Berkele
Sensor and Actuator Research Center, has built a miniscule model of Sather Tower to demonstrate a new technique for assem
bling three-dimensional silicon microstructures. The structures are designed to initially lie flat. Then with a single push of a tin
probe, the pieces rise up and precisely arrange themselves, much like the pages in a childs pop-up book. Part of the finisheCampanile is shown at right, standing an impressive 1.8 millimeters tall.
Joshua Garret SILICON POP-UP BOOKS
Bovine tuberculosis (BTB) is raging among Cape buffalo in South Africas Kruger National Park. Berkeley researchers led b
Professor Wayne M. Getz of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management are investigating strategies f
containing the disease. While seemingly benign to its buffalo hosts, BTB is transmissible and harmful to other animals. Pred
tors, particularly lions, are being killed by the pathogen after eating infected buffalo carcasses. Plans for controlling the epidem
have ranged from killing all infected buffalo to building a large fence across the New Jersey-sized preserve. Getzs team is usinmethods from epidemiology, field ecology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), microbiology, mathematical modeling, an
statistics to understand the important ecological processes behind disease spread and to assess possible management plans.
Heidi Ledford
DESIGNER ELECTRONS
Eran Karmon
W RAPPED AROUND YOUR LITTLE FINGER
David Zusmans lab in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology is studying a species of bacteria that really knows how tstick together when times get tough. When food is scarce, tens of thousands ofMyxococcus xanthus cells congregate to form
fruiting body that contains dormant spores capable of surviving the food shortage. Forming a fruiting body is a complex task th
requires extensive communication, movement, and adhesion of cells. To understand how these small bacteria carry out such
monumental task, Zusmans lab has isolated mutant bacteria that are unable to aggregate properly. The lab has found a numb
of gene products that are important for sensing chemical signals in the environment. M. xanthus has nine different signalin
pathways that sense and respond to chemical changes in the environment; the ubiquitous E. coli has only one. By characterizin
these pathways, Zusman and his colleagues are uncovering how these single cells work together to form complex structures.
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Bay Area companies Endocare and Sanarus have developed two new minimally inva
sive breast tumor diagnosis and removal procedures. Sanarus representatives say th
new procedures are less expensive and more reliable than open surgery. Each yea
over a million women require breast biopsies, 80% of which reveal benign tumors
One of the new procedures is for performing breast biopsies, and the other is fo
removing fibroadenomas, the most common form of benign tumor. In the new b
opsy procedure, a small needle is placed into the affected tissue; the tissue is the
stick frozen and removed to check for cancerous growth. The fibroadenoma systemuses cryoablation, a technique in which extremely cold temperatures destroy tissue
to remove benign tumors. Cryoablation has previously been used to treat prostat
cancer. Both new procedures can be performed in the doctors office using only loc
anesthesia, and leave minimal scars.
Be on the lookout for a new, tougher strain of rice. The Plant Sciences division o
genomics-based drug discovery company Exelixis was awarded an NSF grant to iden
tify genes in rice that will boost resistance to stress and disease. Exelixis will use i
gene activation technology to find genes in rice that are responsible for turning on
and turning off physical characteristics of the plant. Development of a new resi
tant strain of rice could improve production of one of the worlds major food crops
A new class of anti-cancer drugs, angiogenesis inhibitors, has proven effective in treatin
kidney cancer. National Cancer Institute trials show that biotech pioneer Genentech
drug Avastin increases survival, or at least slows the progression of the disease. Can
cer cells secrete substances that promote angiogenesis,the formation of new bloo
vessels which deliver oxygen to a rapidly growing mass of tumor cells. Angiogenes
inhibitors like Avastin block this process, thus starving cancer cells of oxygen. Avasti
has also shown positive results in colorectal and breast cancer. It is expected to ente
into phase III clinical trials, the last stage of testing before regulatory approval.
Tough rice
Biotech Beat
Emily Sin ger
BERKELEYscience 6r e v i e w
New kidney cancer drug
New breast tumor biopsy techniques
HERES W HATS HOT IN BAY AREA BIOTECH
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BERKELEYscience 7r e v i e w
TELLING STORIES
For some children, storytelling
doesnt always come naturally.
Everyone knows that you can
learn a lot by listening to chil-
dren. But for Molly Losh, the
way a child tells a story reveals much
more than the narrative itself. A
graduate student in UC Berkeleys
Department of Psychology, Losh
investigates the way children tell stories
so that she can learn more about thebasic skills they use to construct
narratives.
Losh focuses on children with autism, a
disorder that prevents normal develop-
ment of social interaction and communi-
cation skills. Narratives occur fre-
quently in everyday life for children,
such as during bedtime stories, telling a
parent about their day at school, andpretend play with peers,she says.
Difficulties producing or comprehend-
ing narratives may severely restrict a
childs ability to engage in social
interactions. Working together with
her UC Berkeley mentor, the late Lisa
Capps, and with UCLA researcher
Christopher Thurber, Losh recently
completed a study showing that
knowledge and communication ofemotional states are key factors in
storytelling. In addition to providing
information about the linguistic and
cognitive aspects of narrative, Losh
believes that these data could give
psychologists new tools for identifying
and meeting the
special needs of
autistic children.
In the study, Losh and
her team worked
with three groups of
children: children
with autism, children
with milder forms ofmental retardation,
and typically-developing children.
Researchers asked the children to look
through the wordless picture-bookFrog
on His Own and then to recount the
frogs escapades. The researchers
analyzed audio and video recordings of
the childrens stories for grammar,
structure, and six categories of narrative
devices, including sound effects(Thefrog went splash!), attention-getters
(WOW! Look at that!), and hedges
(I think the frog got away).
Losh and her fellow researchers
discovered that the most significant
difference among the three groups is in
their ability to explain the characters
emotions. Although all three groups
used words to describe feelings equallyoften, children with autism and mild
retardation gave a reason for identified
emotions only 7% of the time, com-
pared to 25% of the time for typically-
developing children. Instead, children in
the first two groups tended simply to
state the emotions without
mentioning any cause, as if
the feelings had spontane-
ously arisen. Even when
these children mentioned
the underlying reasons foran emotion, they generally
failed to establish a cause-
and-effect relationship
between the two. An the
baby was crying. The frog
was trying to get away.
Losh and her colleagues also
noted that the autistic
children often talked aboutemotions as external
physical expressions rather than internal
states: The frog ate the bug and made
his mouth sad, and Her face looks
mad. Neither of the other two groups
of children exhibited this tendency.
The difficulties in explaining emotional
states were unexpected, because children
with autism did not experience the samedifficulties when explaining cause-and-
effect relationships for actions in the
story. To explore the implications of her
findings, Losh has started a new research
project with very high-functioning
autistic children. Because their overall
language ability is more comparable to
that of typically-developing children,
Losh expects that differences in their
narrative skills will be more clearly theresult of lack of emotional knowledge
rather than to weaker communication
skills in general.
Jane McGoniga l
Current Briefs
Merek Siu/ BSR
Tell me a story. Molly Losh found
that autistic children have trouble
describing emotions.
The frog ate the
bug and madehis mouth sad.
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Brian Barsky has a problem. Like
millions of others, his vision is
not as clear as it should be.
Unlike most peoples vision problems,
though, Barskys stem from a rare
condition called keratoconus.
Keratoconus results in small bumps on
the cornea that distort vision bydisrupting the path of light through the
eye. Because the bumps are irregular,
and their pattern differs from person to
person, the condition is difficult to
treat using standard corrective lenses.
Like many who suffer from keratoco-
nus, Barsky spent years trying on
various standard contact lenses and
spectacles before being told that his
condition could only be treated withcorneal replacement surgery. Unwill-
ing to accept a risky surgery, Barsky, a
professor of computer science at UC
Berkeley, decided to use his computer
graphics expertise to design contact
lenses that could fit the cornea
perfectly, even in the presence of
aberrations like kerataconic bumps.
From Barskys frustration rose theOPTICAL project, an interdisciplinary
effort between the Departments of
Computer Science and the School of
Optometry. For Barsky, the need for a
union between the two departments
was clear. I went to the medical
library, studied books on contact
lenses, and realized that the mathemati-
cal modeling used in contact lens
design was not as sophisticated as the
techniques used in the geometric
modeling community, he says.
The group began by improving the
modeling techniques used in cornealmeasurement devices called
videokeratographs. A videokerato-
graph measures corneal shape by
projecting a ring pattern onto a
patients cornea and taking video
images of the results. The machine uses
a simple algorithm to compute app-
roximate values for the curvature of
the cornea based on the distortion of
the ring pattern in the images acquired.
OPTICAL researchers demonstrated
that current standard algorithms
produce curvature results that change
based on the direction in which the
patient looks during the exam and the
angle of the corneal bump relative to
the camera. According to Barsky, the
discrepancies in curvature values show
that the instruments are flawed and
produce erroneous measurements of
patients corneas.
To improve upon the standard recon-
struction algorithm, Barskys research
group has created a new algorithm
which starts by guessing a shape, like a
simple dome, for the cornea that has
been scanned. This shape is run
through a simulation of the
videokeratograph system and itera-
tively modified until it produces a scanthat matches that of the real cornea.
Using this new surface, the researcher
can calculate highly accurate values for
curvature and other geometric
properties. The corneal models can
also aid ophthalmologists in planning
delicate corneal surgical procedures.
Eventually, the shape models will be
used to create prototype contact lense
that exactly match a patients eyes.
Although he hasnt yet managed to giv
himself perfect vision, Brian Barsky ha
opened a new path for collaborative
research in computer graphics and
optometry. His work has the potentia
to provide improved vision not only to
sufferers of keratoconus, but to anyone
who wears contact lenses.
CORRECTING KERATOCONUSCorneal shape modeling
for contact lens design.
Learn more about the OPTICALproject at:
http:/ / www.cs.berkeley.edu/ optical/
Big Creepy Eye. Raw data taken from
a videokeratograph machine. The distor-tion in the ring pattern is caused by akeratoconic bump on the patients cornea.
courtesy/ Michael Downes
Michael Downes
Current Briefs
BERKELEYscience 8r e v i e w
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Wherever you go, tyou are. Densitinternet activity in
U.S. is concentratemajor cities (court
Matthew Zook).
In an Internet world
where geographic
boundaries dissolve at
the click of a mouse,
Internet geographer Matthew
Zook is a bit of an oddball.
While most in his field focus on
how the World Wide Web is changing
the global landscape, Zook is intent onproving that physical location still
matters. To address this issue, Zooka
graduate student in UC Berkeleys
Department of City and Regional
Planningcreates maps that test how
closely Internet terrain parallels its
real-world counterpart.
This project arose in response to one
of the great myths of the Internet age,this widespread idea in the mid-1990s
that the Internet was going to bring
about the end of geography or the end
of cities, Zook explains. People made
similar predictions about the tele-phone. So this really was an effort to
provide empirical proof that cities were
in fact a central part of the Internet.
Figuring out how to make the maps
and prove this hypothesis is anything
but obvious.
Assigning geographi-
cal locations to what takes place on the
spaceless Internet is especially
difficult, Zook says. His solution is to
plot WWW domain nameslike
amazon.com and nokia.fion standard
city, state, country, and global maps
based on the postal codes used to
register the names. Zook admits itsnot an ideal method, because his
research shows that a little more than
25% of domain names are actually
registered at a
postal code
other than
where their
activity is
taking place. Nevertheless, he main-
tains that domain names postal codesare the best available indicators for the
location of Internet activity.
So Zook has embarked on a mission to
collect postal codes for millions of dot-
coms, dot-orgs, and dot-nets. Using an
Internet utility program called whois,
Zook strategically gathers sublists of
domain names by requesting the names
of all dot coms starting with a specific
group of letters. For example amaz
returns thousands of results like
amazon.com, amazingrace.com, andamazeyourfriends.com. Once he has a
complete list of names, he uses several
custom-made computer programs to
gather contact information for each
domain. He completed the first round
of data collection in July of 1998, and
now has a full and total account of all
domain names registered through that
date.
Zook uses the data to create maps and
charts of a range of geographical
locations. All of the maps he has made
show that Internet activity is centered
in urban areas. There should be
nothing surprising about this, since
INTERNET GEOGRAPHYIn the digital age,
place still matters.
Cyberspace is actually reinforcing
the dominance of cities.
BERKELEYscience 9r e v i e w
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From their perch on the 13th
floor of the Power Bar build-
ing next to the Berkeley BART
station, David Culler and his students
are preparing a revolution. Culler
(who is currently on Industrial Leave
from Berkeley to build the new Intel
Research Laboratory @ Berkeley) is a
member of the Endeavour Expedi-tion, a collaborative project within the
Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences, whose stated
goal is to achieve nothing less than
radically enhancing human understand-
ing through the use of information
TINY OS
Theres a new kind of radical
in downtown Berkeley.
Jane McGonigal
technology. Cullers role in the
revolution is to network tiny wireless
sensors, enabling applications that
range from monitoring glucose levels
in humans to monitoring weather on
Mars.
Cullers overall mission is to increase
the power and capabilities of networks
of computers while at the same time
shrinking the size of the hardware.
Higher capabilities and smaller size are
what computer technology is headed
towards. If automotive technology
tracked computer technology, cars
today would get 10,000 miles pergallon of gas, theyd move at 20 times
the speed of sound, and they would
also be three inches long, Culler says.
The Endeavour project began in 1998.
Its first goal was developing a mini-
motherboard, with all the basic
hardware components of a regular
computer, sized down to a device
exactly the size of a stack of fourquarters. The hardware was first
developed by a team led by Kris Pister
a professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences. Originally the size of golf
balls, the devices were brought to
Culler and his team, who wrote the
operating system, known as Tiny OS,
for them.
In addition to a tiny computer chip,
each device has a thermometer and a
photocell that allows it to measure the
temperature and light of the environ-
ment it is placed in. It is also equipped
with a radio, which allows it to
Current Briefs
BERKELEYscience 10r e v i e w
Change the World. David Culler has teamedup with Intel to create operating systems for
miniscule networked devices.
Merek Siu/ BSR
cities have always been the primary
source of innovation, Zook says. His
results indicate that cyberspace is
actually reinforcing traditional urban
structure, not making it obsolete as so
many have predicted.
For Zook, its important to keep
reminding people that no matter how
virtual our lives become, real places
continue to matter. Although the
power of the Internet does open up
new possibilities for long-range
collaboration and even new spaces of
interaction within cyberspace,Zook
says, it also exhibits much of the
traditional unevenness that has
characterized urban and economic
development throughout history.
There is a much more complicateddynamic involving the connection of
specific places to global networks.
Zook urges us to remember that we are
both place-rooted and networked at
the same time.
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communicate with the other devices in
its system, and a tiny battery. Some of
the Tiny OS devices have even been
designed with solar cells to replace the
batteries.
Creating a Tiny OS for tiny sensors
represents a special challenge. Operat-
ing systems on this scale have to handle
simultaneous input from multiple
sources. They are limited by their small
size and low power availability. And
their design has to be versatile enough
to handle the wide range of potential
applications possible for microsensors.
Some of these problems were ad-dressed through the hardware design in
Pisters lab. Cullers lab dealt with
software problems by creating a
microthreadingoperating system,
which is able to handle multiple levels
of input, allowing short processing
events to be run immediately by briefly
interrupting long running tasks. The
two teams are now collaborating to
find ways to enhance both the effi-ciency of the hardware and the
capabilities of its operating system.
And, of course, they want to make
them even smaller.
Although still in development, Tiny
OS-linked devices have already found a
practical application. Last spring,
during the height of Californias energycrisis, Culler and his team placed a
number of devices inside Berkeleys
Cory Hall to monitor how much power
lighting and temperature control units
were using, and how much of it was
excessive.
Another application that Culler
foresees is monitoring the condition of
structures. For example, Tiny OS
devices could be scattered on the
surface of the Bay Bridge to monitor
how its movements are affected bytraffic, weather, and earthquakes.
Ideally, says Culler, the bridge would be
fitted with millions of the devices,
which would recognize trouble when,
for example, a crack is forming or
when the structure begins to move in
an unusual way.
Just a small part of the Endeavour
project, Culler and Pisters micro-sensors can be used for an enormous
range of applications. Your imagination
can run with it,says Culler. One can
only imagine the impact of the rest of
the project, whose mission statement
claims it will make possible the
enhanced leverage of human activities,
experiences, and intellect.
Learn More:
Intel Research Laboratory @ Berkeley:
http:/ / www.intel-research.net/
berkeley/ index.htm
The Endeavour Expedition:
http:/ / endeavour.cs.berkeley.edu/
April Mo
BERKELEYscience 11r e v i e w
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BERKELEYscience 12r e v i e w
Ever wonder what your biology professor does in his
free time? Play tennis? Collect stamps? How about
found a multi-million dollar biotech company?
According to Cherisa Yarkin, director of economic research
and assessment at the Industry-University Cooperative Re-search Program, the
number of California
based biotechnology
firms founded by UC
scientists has dramati-
cally increased over
the last twenty years.
Yarkins r esearch
shows that the number of UC Berkeley faculty founding
biotech companies has increased by nearly a factor of fivesince 1980.
W. Geoffrey Owen, chair of the Department of Molecular
and Cellular Biology, and a founder of the digital imaging
company Viasense, is not surprised that many professors have
decided to start their own companies. Beyond the economic
motivation, he says that many of his colleagues see biotech
as a way of developing potentially revolutionary applica-
tions of new biological knowledge on a scale that would be
impossible within the limitations of an NIH grant.
Owen suggests that moving to biotech after a long and dis-
tinguished career in academia is a natural step for some pro-
fessors. He says that many of the same qualities that are
necessary for success in academic science are important in
founding a company. People who do basic research are
people who love to ask questions and find answers. The
must have a strong belief in their own ideas and a very stron
ego. Professors must be willing to act on their ideas an
able to persuade people to give them money to support thos
ideas. He adds that many professors have worked for year
on a technical issue that may have therapeutic uses. Movininto a company tha
is focused on capital
izing on this knowl
edge is a natura
thing to do.
Jacob Mayfield,
post-doctoral fellow
at UC Berkeley who has had several advisors involved in th
biotech industry, agrees with Owens assessment. Its a goothing for scientists to think of applications for their tech
nologies. Its useful to everyone.
Professors trying their hand at biotech are not without sup
port from the University. There is a significant interdepen
dence between the UC system and biotech that encourage
the flux to flourish. Yarkin says that out of 228 Californi
biotech firms studied, 68% have UC founders. UC Berke
ley makes a particularly strong contribution to Californi
biotech research staff, providing 30% of all PhDs employein the states biotech industry.
Another factor that has helped to foster the exchange be
tween the University and biotechnology industry is the Ba
Areas unique investment environment. Carol Mimura, a
sociate director at UC Berkeleys Office of Technology Li
SPIN DOCTORS
Why more and more professors are spinningbiotech companies off of research.Emily Singer
Biotech is a way of developing potentially
revolutionary applications of new biologicalknowledge on a scale that would be impossible
within the limitations of an NIH grant.
The University
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censing, explains, Venture capitalists came to the Bay Area
to invest in Silicon Valley and then stayed for the next wave.
This easy access to investors has spurred the entrepreneur-
ial spirit. If the infrastructure for funding wasnt there,
these companies never would have been able to get off the
ground. Other institutions, like the University of Michi-gan, have asked Berkeley for advice about expanding their
links to biotechnology, but have been less successful because
they lack the venture community. Mimura also notes that
the biotech community in the Bay Area can be a draw to
prospective faculty, who know they will have consulting op-
portunities available to them.
While the biotechnology industry depends on UC scientists
for staff and ideas to turn a profit, the UC system depends
on industry for some of its funding. Because it owns patentrights to all ideas and technologies invented by its faculty,
the UC system can create revenue by licensing technologies
to private companies for development .
Faculty members who want to be involved in the develop-ment of their products can contact the Office of Tech-BERKELEYscience 13r e v i e w
nology Transfer, which helps campus inventors bring their
technology into the commercial sector by facilitating the
patent process and distributing royalties to the inventors
and UC Berkeley. Mimura says the University will choose
to license an idea to the inventor if the patent needs special
know-how to develop. It is often only the inventor whohas the drive and vision to bring the idea to product. Start-
ups take extraordinary risks in taking nothing and turning
it into something.
The university has taken steps to ensure that professors in-
volved in private ventures do not neglect their academic
duties. Mimura says that an employee of a UC can only
have one full time job. The University doesnt want to
have faculty straddling two commitments. Professors need
to take their teaching jobs seriously. Mimura explains thatthere are several polices in place to ensure a professors pri-
mary commitment is to the University. Following the lead
of the NIH, the University only allows professors to consult
with a company for one calendar day per week. This is moni-
tored at the department level, as faculty must report all
outside commitments to their chair. Mimura says profes-
MCB Chair W. GeoffreyOwen. Moving into a com-
pany that is focused on capi-talizing on this knowledge isa natural thing to do. Merek Siu/ BSR
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BERKELEYscience 14r e v i e w
The University
Postdoc JacoMayfield. Its good thing for sc
entists to think oapplications fo
their technologiesMerek Siu/ BSR
sors cannot hold full-time outside positions, such as CEO
or chief scientific officer. Ideally they will act as big pic-
ture strategists without any daily responsibilities.
In addition to this UC-wide policy, a conflict of interest com-
mittee exists to monitor and vote on questionable activi-ties, such as when a company gives a gift of money to a lab.
Mimura says, The University has policies in place, but also
relies on the integrity of the faculty until shown otherwise.
It is a self-regulating process.
Mayfield questions how these restrictions can actually be put
into practice. He says, No faculty member limits him or
herself to a 40-hour week, so how do you assess what one
day per week really means? He also says that because lab
research and company research are so often closely related,it can be difficult to determine the percentage of time spent
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BERKELEYscience 15r e v i e w
From curing cancer to engineering plant genes,
the research goals of Cal professors are now the
industry objectives of Bay Area biotech compa-
nies. Heres a run-down of what some private
companies founded by UC Berkeley faculty in the
past decade are up to.
Tularik, Inc. (1991) uses gene regulation to target
specific disease-causing proteins, enabling re-
searchers to develop oral medications with fewer
side effects.
Cerus Corp. (1991) produces technology that pre-
vents DNA and RNA replication in blood cells,
making the bacteria and viruses in blood harm-
less and transfusions safer.
Exelixis, Inc. (1995) develops drugs to combat
disease-causing genes responsible for diabetes,
obesity, Alzheimers disease, and cancer.
Genteric, Inc. (1997) specializes in creating new
delivery platforms for gene therapies, including
the oral gene pill.
Mendel Biotechnology (1997) researches plant
genes to develop new medicinal and agricultural
products.
Viasense (1997) uses principles from visual neuro-
biology to build software that encodes, stores, and
delivers digital video.
Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc (1998) and DNA Sci-
ences, Inc. (1998) both develop oral drugs to com-
bat chronic diseases through gene therapy.
Syrrx, Inc. (1999) uses cutting-edge robotics and
molecular tools to determine the shapes of pro-
teins encoded by the human genome, informa-
tion that will lead to more effective drugs.
Renovis, Inc. (2000) specializes in the develop-
ment of gene therapies for neurological and psy-
chiatric diseases and disorders.
I t is often only the inventor
who has the drive and visionto bring the idea to product.Start-ups take extraordinaryrisks in taking nothing andturning it into something.
thinking of ideas for the university versus time spent think-
ing for biotech.
With such a close intellectual relationship, have the bound-
aries between academia and biotech become too blurred?
Both Owen and Mimura think academia maintains its atmo-sphere of scientific freedom. Owen says, The boundary is
still well-defined. Academics are anxious to preserve the
boundary because of the negative implications of diminished
academic freedom. Mimura adds that the increasing num-
bers of faculty entering the world of biotech shouldnt
change the culture of the university. Professors are under-
standing of the Universitys mission to foster pure research
environment and dont exploit it.
Mayfield points out that there may be more subtle effects.He feels that the lines are blurred in what the professors
and lab members involvement should be in the company
and technology being licensed. He gives the example of a
PI becoming aware of proprietary technology that can help
lab members in their experiments. If they perform a suc-
cessful experiment with that technology, lab members can
then become confused about what role this company plays
in ownership and use of the results. Mayfield says this situ-
ation brings up an entirely new issue. Working out legalissues isnt something academics had to worry about in the
past. It is difficult right now because there isnt a set policy
on what is acceptable and what is not.
How students are impacted by some facultys double role as
professor and consultant is unclear. Professors are very busy
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Emily Singer received an MS in neuroscienc
from UCSD in July 2 00 1. She is currently
research associate at Exelixis, Inc.
This Internet thing is going to be really big.
sciencereview.berkeley.edu
The University
BERKELEYscience 16r e v i e w
people. Researching and teaching both take time. When
someone spends a day per week away from campus, they
have less time for other duties. I can see the potential for
problems, but as yet I havent seen any evidence, Owen
says.
While the possible negative impact is unclear, there is cer-
tainly a positive implication for students of the biotech-savvy
advisor. Owen feels that this trend has broadened the
professors traditional role. Professors now have the experi-
ence of life outside the environment of the university. Lots of
professors used to see themselves as preparing their students
to be professors, but now they are exposed to alternative ca
reers. He emphasizes, This is a good thing because now
large numbers of companies are doing biotechnology and stu
dents have new opportunities for rewarding careers.
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BERKELEYscience 17r e v i e w
Book Review
Annie Montague
Alexander was a
r e m a r k a b l e
woman. Heir to a fortune
built on Hawaiian sugar,
she founded and funded
for decades both the UC
Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology and the UC Mu-
seum of Paleontology.With her partner Louise
Kellogg, she took to the
field and collected speci-
mens for the museums
from locales as distant as
Egypt and Alaska. At a
time when social norms proscribed
womens activities to the domestic
realm, Alexander built research insti-
tutions and made significant contribu-tions to science.
In On Her Own Terms, Barbara R. Stein
tells the fascinating story of a woman
who, for all her achievements, shunned
publicity throughout her life and has
remained relatively unknown. Using
Alexanders extensive correspondence
with friends and colleagues, Stein ex-
plores the intimate details of her life.Alexanders close professional relation-
ship with naturalist Joseph Grinnell
strongly boosted the young Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology, while her some-
times stormy encounters with John C.
Merriam kept the Museum of Paleon-
tology from reaching its
full potential. Stein does
an excellent job of explor-
ing how Alexander used
her roles as a philanthro-
pist and a naturalist to de-
fine her identity and to
overcome the constrictive
gender expectations of
early twentieth-centuryBerkeley and Oakland.
Alexander was never
comfortable in cities; she
was happiest spending her
days in the natural realm
and sleeping under the stars. From the
moment she watched a three-foot
boulder crush her father at Victoria
Falls in 1904 through her final trip atage eighty to Baja California, the semi-
nal events in Alexanders life occurred
far from the city. Stein, a scientist fa-
miliar with the rigors of the field, has
recaptured Alexander and Kelloggs
numerous expeditions in minute de-
tail and with telling anecdotes. It is
through these portions ofOn Her Own
Terms that we meet the real Annie
Alexander.
The major weakness ofOn Her Own
Terms is that it makes little attempt to
place Stein into her histor ical context.
There is a sizable body of work on the
history of women in science and the
ANNIE ALEXANDER AND THEUC MUSEUMS
TeddyVarn o is a 1 st year gradua te
student in the History of Science
and Technology program at UC
Berkeley.
Teddy Varno
On Her O wn Terms: AnnieMontague Alexander and
the Rise of Science in theAmerican W est, Barbara
R. Stein (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press,2001), 397 pp.
history of the professionalization of
science that Stein could have drawn
from to place Alexanders life in com-
parative context. This was not, how-
ever, Steins intention. Her main goal
was simply to narrate the life of one ofthe most important figures in the his-
tory of science at Berkeley, and in this
she has succeeded.
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The best place to figure out how
the Sun shines is two kilometers
under the cold, hard ground.
BERKELEYscience 18r e v i e w
Two kilometers beneath
the slag heaps oSudbury, Ontario, grea
science is afoot. Physicists an
engineers have spent the las
decade in a working nicke
mine building one of th
worlds most sophisticated par
ticle detectors. The quarry is tha
most elusive of fundamental par
ticles, the ghostly neutr ino. Thwork at the Sudbury Neutrino Obser
vatory (SNO) is at last starting to pay big
dividends. SNOs first results were revealed las
June and have already shed some light on a thirty
year-old puzzle about how the Sun shines.
Aaron Pierce
GHOSTTHE IN THE SUN
Feature
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BERKELEYscience 19r e v i e w
trol over, but there are some you dont. You have to run
away from those. We ran as far as we could. The SNO
experiment ran underground, and
went deeper than all the other re-
search groups in North America.The next deepest experiment is
located in the Homestake gold
mine in South Dakota, at a depth of 1500 meters.
Homestakes problems with spurious signals from cosmic
rays are ten times worse than those at SNO.
Neutrinos are difficult to study because they have extraor-
dinarily weak interactions with normal matter. Roughly a
hundred billion neutrinos pass through your fingernail ev-
ery second, with no effect. Neutrinos have no electriccharge, and consequently are unaffected by the electric and
magnetic fields used to detect less exotic particles like elec-
trons and protons. The only force that does affect neutr inos
is known to physicists as the weak interaction. True to its
name, this force is so miniscule that as often as not, a neu-
trino could barrel through a block of iron a light-year in
The SNO detector was completed two years ago.
It stands over ten stories tall, weighs more than
8000 tons, and cost more than $50 million to build.
Over 100 researchers from 11 institutions in the
United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom
collaborate on SNO. Among the collaborator s is ateam of a dozen physicists, engineers, and students
from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(LBNL) and UC Berkeley. Berkeley involvement
reaches back to 1989, when the project was in its
nascent stages.
SNO is focusing on a long-standing puzzle about
the Sun known as the solar neutrino problem. For
over fifty years astrophysicists have known that the
Sun generates energy through fusion reactions,which create neutr inos as by-products. The Sun
produces neutr inos prolifically, and is far and away
the biggest source of neutrinos that strike the
Earth. By combining the physics of these reactions
with complex computer models of the Sun, astro-
physicists have calculated the rate at which solar-produced
neutrinos should strike the Earth. Despite the high preci-
sion of these calculations, the observed rate of solar neu-
trino arrival is only half of the expected value. There simply
are not enough neutrinos.
The unique location of SNOa full 2000 meters below the
surface of the Earthis crucial in investigating the solar neu-
trino problem. Layers of rock between the SNO detector
and the Earths surface shield the experiment from cosmicrays, particles that are constantly bombarding the Earths
atmosphere. If these cosmic rays were to reach the experi-
ment, they would result in minute flashes of light that would
give a false signal of neutrino detection. Dr. Kevin Lesko,
the leader of the LBNL SNO group, explains, There are
many [potential sources of false signals] that you have con-
Underground. The SNO detector nestled in its subterranean hall. It is over 10
stories tall (see workers for scale), weighs 8000 tons, and has 9200 ultra-sensitivelight detectors packed into a dense, spherical honeycomb pattern.
Aneutrino could barrel through a block of iron a light-yearin length and emerge completely unscathed.
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BERKELEYscience 20r e v i e w
The Idea. Artists conception of the SNO detector. The inneracryl ic sphere is filled with heavy water. The sphere is surrounded
by a geodesic dome frame, which holds thousands of sensitivelight detectors (courtesy/ SNO ).
Such a major discrepancy would
imply that astrophysicists are verywrong about how the Sun shines.
Excavation. More than 60,000 tons of rock were blasted away and caried to the surface 2 kilometers above to create the experiments hall (cou
tesy/ Lorne Erhardt, Queens University).
Feature
length and emerge completely unscathed. The vast major-
ity of neutrinos that enter a detector like SNO simply pass
right through it, leaving no trace. However, a small handfuldo leave a calling card: a tiny flash of light in the SNO de-
tector. By carefully hunting for flashes of light inside the
otherwise darkened detector, the scientists at SNO can in-
fer the presence of a neutrino.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Locating an experiment deep in a mine creates a very strange
work environment. According to Alysia Marino, a Berkeley
graduate student working on the SNO experiment, access-ing the detector is an arduous process for participating physi-
cists. Before enter ing the mine, scientists must don stan-
dard mine gear. Decked out in a hard hat, steel-toed boots,
and headlamps, they wait for an elevator to take them down
a darkened mineshaft to the level of the experiment. The
descent can take nearly fifteen minutes, as the elevator stops
at various levels of the mine to drop off miners. The eleva
tor car, not much larger than a typical freight elevator, is th
only route into and out of the experiment, and well ove
10,000 tons of materials were taken down it during SNO
construction phase. Excavating the hall itself was a feat o
civil engineering. It is over 20 meters in diameter, and re
quired that more than 60,000 tons of rock be blasted an
moved to the surface.
Without the intervention of some serious air-conditionin
the experimental level itself would be far less hospitable tha
the elevator. As Marino explains, Once you go below 100
feet, the temperature begins to rise, because of the Earth
molten core. By the time you reach the level of the exper
ment, the ambient temperature would be 100 degrees [Fah
enheit]. Fortunately for the SNO workers, the experimen
tal hall must be kept at a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenhe
to keep the electronics working properly.
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The Main Event.Output of a com-
puter model showinga neutrino event within
SNOs heavy watertank. The neutrino in-teracts with a heavy wa-
ter molecule, creating aburst of light (courtesy/ LBNL).
BERKELEYscience 21r e v i e w
Skeleton. SNO before light detectors were installed (courtesy/ SNO).
Something strange is happeningto solar neutrinos during their
eight-and-a-half-minute flight
from the Sun to the Earth.
How Does the Sun Shine?
The goal of SNO is to distinguish between two pos-
sible solutions of the solar neutrino problem. The
first explanation for the dearth of solar neutrinos is
that astrophysicists computer models are drasticallywrong, and that they have grossly overestimated the
number of neutr inos coming from the Sun. This is a
highly troubling option, as the models are built on
well-tested physics. Such a major discrepancy be-
tween theory and observation would imply that as-
trophysicists are very wrong about how the Sun
shines.
Ignoring the neutrino discrepancy, there are good reasons
to believe that the solar computer models are correct. Themodels are based on well-understood fusion interactions,
which occur at rates determined by the temperature and
elemental composition of the Sun. Once a solar model speci-
fies the composition of the Sun and its temperature, it is
straightforward to calculate fusion interaction rates. The
most widely accepted solar model was developed over the
past three decades by Dr. John Bahcall, a physicist at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a UC Berke-
ley alumnus. The theory, described by many physicists as
how the Sun shines, predicts many solar properties to high
accuracy. The first and most obvious of these is the observed
brightness of the Sun. Others involve a field known ashelioseismology, which studies how sunquakes travel
through the body of the Sun. Think of the Sun as a giant
bellby studying the way in which the bell rings, we can
learn a lot about what makes up the bell, Bahcall says. We
confidently know the interior of the Sun better than we know
the interior of the Earth. Sophisticated satellites have stud-
ied the way that the Sun rings, and they find that Bahcalls
model is in excellent agreement with observations.
If Bahcalls solar model is indeed correct, why are too few
neutrinos observed? The alternative explanation to the so-
lar neutrino problem is that something strange is happening
to solar neutrinos during their eight-and-a-half-minute flight
from the Sun to the Earth. Somehow neutrinos that are
produced in the Sun disappear en route. Physicists have
proposed that neutrino oscillation causes this disappear-
ance. There are three varieties of neutrino: the electron neu-
trino, the only kind produced by the Suns fusion reactions,and the more rare muon and tau neutr inos. The theory of
neutrino oscillations postulates that solar
neutrinos, once produced, trans-
form back and forth be-
tween their original
electron versions and
one of the other two
varieties. When
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BERKELEYscience 22r e v i e w
Feature
Way Down. SNO researchers decked out in protective gear head tothe elevator for the 15 minute, mile-and-a-half ride down. (courtesy/
Bob Stokstad, LBNL).
compared to SNO, previous detectors have been relatively
insensitive to the non-electron neutrino varieties. As a conse-
quence, any muon and tau neutrinos that may have been cre-
ated when electron neutrinos oscillated were undercounted by
previous experiments. Thus the neutrino oscillation theory pro-
poses that the solar computer models are correct, but that wecount fewer neutrinos than expected because some have trans-
formed into less detectable varieties.
Thats Heavy
Past neutrino experiments have all used reactions in huge
tanks of water to observe the passing of neutrinos. In ordi-
nary water there is only one kind of neutrino reaction that
can occur, and it is heavily biased towards the electron neu-
trino. SNO, on the other hand, uses a rare form of waterthat is dubbed heavy.
It is this heavy water that makes SNO uniquely suited t
detect all three varieties of neutrinos. The composition o
heavy water allows several neutrino reactions, one of whic
is equally likely with the three types of neutr inos. Thu
heavy water affords SNO an unprecedented sensitivity t
reactions involving the more-difficult-to-see muon and taneutrinos. By comparing the rates of these different reac
tions, SNO scientists can determine not only the number o
electron neutrinos coming from the Sun, but also the tota
number of neutrinos. This is the key to showing that neu
trino oscillations are the solution to the solar neutrino prob
lem. If the total number of neutr inos is the number of elec
tron neutrinos predicted by the solar model, then the sola
models are correct, and the neutrinos are simply transform
ing en route.
SNOs first results, released last June, seem to indicate tha
neutrinos from the Sun are in fact oscillating. SNO scien
tists used two reactions to come to this conclusion. On
reaction, new to SNO, looks exclusively at the number o
electron neutrinos. A second reaction, while biased toward
electron neutrinos, is sensitive to all three types. By sub
tracting the rates for these two reactions, SNO scientis
determined that the harder to see component appears t
be present. They hope to confirm this hypothesis by look
ing at additional interactions that have even better sensitivity to the muon and tau neutrinos.
One reason previous detectors have not used heavy water
because it is a rare and expensive substance. A molecule o
ordinary water, H2O, contains two hydrogen atoms and a
oxygen atom. The hydrogen atom is composed of a sing
proton and a single electron. In heavy water, D2O, the ord
nary hydrogen is replaced by a rare hydrogen isotope know
as deuterium. In contrast to ordinary hydrogen, deuterium
contains a proton, an electron, and a neutron. The mass othis extra neutron in each deuterium atom makes heavy wa
ter about ten percent heavier than ordinary watera dif
ference, according to Marino, which is readily discernible
you try to lift a liter of each. A single liter of heavy wate
would cost nearly $100, a far sight more than even the trend
est bottle of Evian. Marino notes that the SNO experimen
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W hen it rains it pours
The SNO experiment has recently undergone a minor transformation. In May of 2001, over two tons of
table salt were dumped into the heavy water by SNO scientists, creating a br iny solution. The presence of
chlorine in the salt makes the detector four times more likely to interact with neutrinos which have oscil-lated. The results from this phase of the experiment will provide the defini tive test of the neutrino oscillation
hypothesis, and are expected within the next two years. Since the SNO collaboration promised to return
the loaned heavy water just as they received it, all 1000 tons of the heavy water will have to be fed through
an extensive puri fication system which will utilize reverse osmosis to remove the salt. New techniques in
water purification were developed by scientists to allow this to be done effectively.
BERKELEYscience 23r e v i e w
Building in a clean room environment at the
bottom of a mine was simply unprecedented.
uses heavy water on loan from
the Canadian government. Nor-
mally, it is used in Canadian
nuclear reactors of a particular
design. At present, Canada has
more heavy water than it needs for nuclear power, so thegovernment has agreed to let SNO borrow 1000 tons of the
material, valued at $300 million, with the understanding that
it will be returned at the conclusion of the experiment.
Without the Canadian governments largesse, the entire ex-
periment would have been financially impossible.
Twinkle, Twinkle
When a neutrino enters the SNO detector, it is overwhelm-
ingly likely to pass right through, leaving no trace. How-ever, it will occasionally collide with an atom in a molecule
of the detectors heavy water. When this happens, the neu-
trino imparts a substantial portion of its energy to an elec-
tron in that atom. This energy can be very high, since the
neutrino usually enters the tank moving close to the speed
of light. The impacted electron then zooms off through the
heavy water, emitting light through a process known as
Cherenkov radiation, which continues as long as the elec-
tron is moving faster than the heavy-water speed of light.
(Since light travels more slowly in mater ials than in vacuum,it is possible for particles to travel faster than light speed in
mattere.g. heavy watereven though nothing can exceedlight speed in vacuum.) Cherenkov radiation is analogous
to the sonic boom that occurs when a plane goes faster than
the speed of sound. Just as with a sonic boom, the light-
boom from the speeding electron spreads out in a cone
around the direction the electron is traveling. By detecting
this cone of light, SNO scientists can infer the presence of a
neutrino.
The instruments used to detect the light are called photo-
multipliers. Photomultipliers take extremely dim light andconvert it to strong electrical signals. One of the contr ibu-
tions of the LBNL group was to design and build an enor-
mous stainless steel geodesic dome that holds the 9,500 pho-
tomultipliers used in the experiment. The dome was ini-
tially constructed at a site near Petaluma, California, to test
the design in 1993. According to Dr. Lesko, [The dome]
was visible from the freeway, [and] attracted a great deal of
attention from passing motorists on Highway 101. After
the design proved successful, the dome was assiduously pack-
aged into 21 semi-trucks and driven to the SNO site inOntario, where it was reassembled in the experimental hall,
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BERKELEYscience 24r e v i e w
Whens lunch? Hard at work in the SNO control room. Operatorswear ultra-clean suits and hairnets to reduce dirt and dust. Even aspeck could cause a false signal wi thin the detector.(courtesy/ QueensUniversity).
Feature
two kilometer s beneath the surface. Dr. Lesko says that the
58,000 lb. dome was designed to allow the photomultipliers
to be packed in as densely as possible. This increases the
efficiency of the detector in picking out whatever flashes a
neutrino might leave behind.
To accurately measure the number of incoming solar neutri-
nos, SNO scientists must be able to distinguish between light
flashes caused by neutrinos and those that come from other
sources. While locating the experiment underground elimi-
nates flashes of light from cosmic rays, it can potentially lead
to a different source of spurious flashes: dirt. At SNO, the
obsession with cleanliness goes beyond a desire to keep elec-
tronic equipment in working order. Ordinary dirt can con-
tain minute traces of radioactive elements such as uranium
or thorium. When these elements decay, they emit particlesthat can cause light flashes in the detector. Just like the cos-
mic rays from above, the mere presence of dirt at SNO can
lead to false signals that could be mistaken for neutrinos.
A mineshaft is not a traditional sterile laboratory environ-
ment. While she didnt expect the mine to be spotless,
Marino still was surprised to see how different it was from
home. Coming from the halls of Lawrence Berkeley Labo
ratory, it is a shock to see all the mud and the dirt associate
with a mining environment. It is not what someone no
mally expects from a physics experiment. SNO scientis
have worked very hard to create and maintain an ultra-cleaenvironment. Once workers have reached the level of th
experiment, two kilometers below the Earths surface, the
must pass through an airlock-style door that protects th
experiment from the mud and dirt of the mine. As the
pass through this buffer zone, they are required to remov
their mining gear, shower, change clothes, and change int
clean-room attire before entering the experimental hall.
The real challenge was constructing the experiment unde
these same rigid standards of cleanliness. According to DLesko, the construction of the detector was like building
ten-story apartment building at the bottom of a mine, pro
ducing only a handful of dirt in the entire process. He add
Building in a clean room environment is something tha
you can learnit has been done before; but building in
clean room environment at the bottom of a mine was sim
ply unprecedented. The detector itself is made out of ex
traordinarily pure mater ials. Ordinary steel, for example
contains minute traces of radioactive elements, just like dir
The building materials were all custom-made to be free othese trace radioactive materials, and LBNL took the lead i
carefully surveying each piece of the detector after its fabr
cation. Only after LBNL scientists had pronounced a com
ponent radioactivity-free was it cleared for use in the ex
periment.
Massive Consequences
Accepting neutrino oscillations as the solution to the sola
neutrino problem has important consequences. If neutrnos do in fact oscillate, this is an indicator that they have
tiny, but non-zero mass. Because neutrinos are so numer
ous, this tiny mass adds up: the mass contained in neutrino
left over from the Big Bang could be roughly equivalent t
the mass of all the stars in the known universe. In the ca
of the neutrino, even a tiny mass goes a long way.
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There goes the competition
On November 12, 2001, neutrino physicists working in paral lel to SNO suffered a major setback. The
Super-Kamiokande neutrino detectorlocated at an underground laboratory in Japansuffered a terri bleaccident. While the experiments water tank was being refilled one of the detectors phototubes exploded.
The explosion caused a shockwave that set off a chain reaction, causing 7,000 other phototubes to also
burst. While the exact cause for the initial explosion i s unknown, i t is suspected that excess water pressure
during refi lling is the culpri t. The total cost of the damage is in the $20 to $30 million range. Yoji Totsuka,
director of the observatory where Super-Kamiokande is housed, says, We wi ll rebuild the detector. There
is no question. However, this process will certainly take over a year.
BERKELEYscience 25r e v i e w
Crash! Super-K is a 41.4 meter high cylinder located 1,000 meters underground and lined with 11,200 light detectors (left,
top right). It holds 50,000 tons of pure water. Shards of glass littered the bottom of the chamber after the November 12thaccident caused thousands of detectors to burst. (Courtesy/ Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo. )
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To Learn More
SNO Experiment. http:/ / www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/ SNO at LBNL. http:/ / snohp1.lbl.gov/
Particle physics for the rest of us. http:/ / ParticleAdventure.org/
N eutrino oscillations. http:/ / www.hep.anl. gov/ ndk/ hypertext/ nu_industry.html
How the Sun shines. http:/ / www.nobel.se/ physics/ articles/ fusion/ index.html
Other neutrino experiments:
SuperKamiokande. http:/ / www.phys.washington.edu/ ~superk/
KamLAND. http:/ / kamland.lbl.gov/
Aaron Pierce is a 4 th year graduate student in
the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley.
Got a great story?Write for the Review.
Submission guidelines are atsciencereview.berkeley.edu
Feature
BERKELEYscience 26r e v i e w
Although neutrinos have been studied for over fifty years,
the next ten years promise to be particularly fruitful. The
SNO experiment was designed to run for ten years, and it is
only a year and a half into data collection so far. Comple-
mentary experiments are underway in Japan and Italy. With
future data, SNO scientistsincluding many from Berke-ley and LBNLhope to show beyond a shadow of a doubt
that neutrinos are oscillating, finally providing a solution to
the thirty year-old solar neutr ino problem. Physicists wi
then be able to sleep well at night, at last assured that the
know how the Sun shines.
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Interested in writing, editing,
or designing for the BSR?
BERKELEYscience 27r e v i e w
Lucky the scientist who
works with Drosophila
melanogaster . While formal
naming conventions limit geneti-
cists working on yeast and worms,
fruit fly researchers can name their
mutants whatever they like.
Theyve come up with some great
ones, like technical knockout ,
sex lethal , flamenco , and
telegraph .
Genes are generally named after the
defects, or phenotypes, seen in
mutant animals. Fruit flies with a
null mutation in white cant make
red eye pigment, so they have white
eyes. Other names are a little more
creative: super sex combs and
little faint ball , for example. Ken
and barbie mutants, like the dolls,
lack external genitalia. Ether-a-
go-go flies wiggle their legs when
anesthetized by ether, while a
physical shock makes slamdance
flies convulse. Cheapdate flies are
easily intoxicated by alcohol.
Some names require a little back-
ground reading. Tudor flies have
trouble producing heirs. Mutant
scott of the antarctic flies, named
after the doomed explorer, have
defects in structures called poles.
W HATS IN A N AME?
The wide world ofDrosophila mutants.
Shakespeare fans have given us
malvolio , miranda , and
prospero , and an Edgar Allan Poe
mystery nut coined amontillado .
When a gene is found to interact
with other genes, peculiar genefamily trees form. Sevenless , for
example, spawned son of sevenless
and bride of sevenless . The
decapentaplegic gene is fittingly
opposed by mothers against
decapentaplegic . Grim and
reaper work together to mediate
programmed cell death. Whole
cohorts of genes are named after
vegetables (rutabaga, turnip,okra ) musical instruments (pic-
colo, bagpipe ) and even pickle
varieties (gurkin , cornichon ).
Sci-fly names have done little to
dissipate geneticists geeky reputa-
tion. Consider godzilla , mothra ,
smaug, lost in space , tribbles ,
and the Monty Python-inspired Im
not dead yet .
All official flygene names areregistered with Flybase, the compre-
hensive database of fruit fly research
(http:/ / flybase.bio.indiana.edu).
The fly genome was sequenced last
year, and thousands more Drosophila
genes are being described and
named. If and when their human
counterparts are uncovered, conven-
tion suggests that the human genes be
named after their predecessors.
Imagine pharmaceuticals aimed at
human diseases caused by bang-
senseless , kuzbanian , or big
brain . Revenge of the nerds ,
indeed.
Weird Science
Aaron Golub/ BSR
Jessica Palmer
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BERKELEYscience 28r e v i e w
Jack Laws is sit-ting at his desk fillinga sheet of paper with row
upon row of tiny, uniform ink
dots. Laws graduated from UCBerkeley with a BS in conservation,
then took an MS in wildlife biology
from the University of Montana.
Hes adept at observing songbirds in their native habitats, and
is an experienced educator with the California Academy of
Sciences. But this year, Laws is a student again, one of just
ten admitted to the prestigious graduate program in science
illustration at UC Santa Cruz. And this afternoon, on the
wooded, bird-filled campus of UCSC, Laws is neither teach-
ing nor bird watching. Hes sitting at a desk, dotting.
Laws and his classmates each bring different backgrounds to
UCSC. Some arrived with science degrees and plenty of re-
search experience; others were artists who kept returning to
nature for inspiration. They all share a love for science and
art and now hope to make a career out of science illustra-
tion, the craft of making scientific concepts and data vividl
and visually accessible to a wide audience.
The goal of the program, according to its coordinator An
Caudle, is to help students develop individual strengths an
interests and enable them to find a niche in the huge field o
science illustration. The program is an intense one-year immersion in technique, theory, and practical advice. It aim
to fully prepare its graduates for collaboration with scien
tists, educator s, and publishers. In addition to thei
coursework, students must complete at least one full-tim
internship with an institution such as Nat ional Geographic o
Scient ific American .
SCIENCE
A unique program at UC
Santa Cruz makes science
jump off the page.
Jessica Palmer and Una Ren
ILLUSTRATED
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formation. So I know how valuable a good illustration is.
They should all be good! Laws, who has dyslexia, has a
unique perspective on this: My journals are full of
sketches. I dont need to worry about spellingonly care-
ful observation of form, color, behavior, and context.
Sketching was crucial to the success of my masters work. I
was able to sketch free living Lazuli buntings and found that
I could identify individuals from variations in their plumage.
The sketches were essential to consistently identify individu-
als within the study population.
Some successful illustrators have no science backgroundat all. But knowing the language of science can make anassignment much easier. Sometimes many hours are spent in
research, asking scientists or experts educated questions, com-
paring photographs for accuracy and then
piecing together usable bits for the finaldrawing, says Caudle. Her classroom is
papered with painstakingly inked draw-
ings, many taking ten or more hours to
execute. Insects, pinecones, bones, and
shells are exactingly portrayed, down to
every scale, every pore, and every facet
in a compound eye. Careful observations
are crucial, whether the artist is catalog-
ing new species, creating a field guide,
or resurrecting a dinosaur. Caudle looksfor scientists with a strong visual back-
ground because such observation is al-
ready second nature to them.
In todays tech-hungry society, science illustration is ubiqui-
tous. Illustrators are needed for academic papers, technical
journals, textbooks, field guides, mass-market magazines,
websites, posters, book covers, and museum displays. Op-
portunities are unusual and diverse. For example, UCSC
graduate Emma Skurnick recently illustrated a childrens ac-
tivity book on mussels.
Many illustrators enjoy the varied pace, subject
matter, and flexibility of freelancing. But UCSC
grads have also opted for staff positions with de-
sign studios, multimedia companies, technical busi-
nesses, museums, educational institutions, and
magazines, like 1998 graduate Heidi Noland, the
art director ofScientific American Explorat ions.
The goal of science illustration is to make difficult
concepts accessible by translating them into visual images.
2000 UCSC program graduate Kimberlee Heldt says, As a
student, I dissected every drawingthats how I retained in-
When a successful illustration helps a reader visua
and understand the science he or she is reading ab
the fusion of art and article seems perfectly natural
and unobtrusive.
BERKELEYscience 29r e v i e w
Tobacco hornworm moth chrysalis, Manduca sexta. (Katura Reynolds)
Eccentric sand dollar, Dendraster excentricus. (Karina Helm)
Bishop pine, Pinus muricata.
(Mary Sievert)
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Paint Them Macho
Emma Skurnick left UCSC in 2000 and now does freelance work from her studio in N orth
Carolina. Skurnick looks back on the UCSC program as a turning point. It was one of the
best years of my li fe, realizing that I could have a job that I loved, she says.
I did this il lustration for the May-June 20 01 issue of American Scientistmagazine. It was
used as the opening illustration for an article called Preserving Salmon Biodiversity, and
depicts the seven species of salmonids (five salmon and two trout) that inhabit the rivers
and streams of the Pacific
Northwest. The painting
was done in watercolor.
Watercolor is often consid-
ered a delicate medium, be-
cause of its transparency,
but, as the illustration de-
picts spawning males, the
art director of the magazineasked me to paint them ma-
cho, which made me smile.
I did what I could to up the
macho quotient by adding
pen and ink with the water-
color and using a lot of
bright red for their colora-
tion. The art director and
the authors were pleased,
so I suppose it worked.
BERKELEYscience 30r e v i e w
Illustration by Emma Skurnick.
http:/ / destined.to/ emma.
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BERKELEYscience 31r e v i e w
Despite the need
for precision, science illustration
is very different from science photography.Although the students are encouraged to take
photos as references on their many research ex-
cursions, the program does not teach photo-
graphic technique. Basically a photo is just a flat
thingyou lose a lot of information in photos, says
current UCSC student Cornelia Blik. Illustration can
emphasize important features of the object and yet
capture tiny details, structures hidden in shadow, or
details lying in different focal planes, which could not ap-
pear simultaneously in a photograph. Illustrators are oftencalled upon to distill the information from dozens of photo-
graphs into a single accurate illustration with a process thats
a bit like sleuthing, says Caudle. If it could be photographed,
and photographed effectively, why would we illustrate it?
Laws agrees, If you look through field guides that use photo-
graphs, up until just recently, none of them are any good. In
one well-known bird watchers field guide, Laws recalls, they
had this picture of a wrentit, a little bird. The diagnostic fea-
ture is the long tail, but if you look at their wrentit, there is
no tail. The photo was taken from such an angle that the tail
was behind. Omissions like this, which could mislead a nov-
ice bird watcher, have driven Laws own interest in develop-
ing more accurate and accessible field guides.
Katydid, Scudderia sp. (Jennifer Kane)
Sea otter, Enhydra lutris. (Jack Laws)
Good science illustratorscan make an article
jump off the page with a
flashy piece of art.
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A Scientist at Heart
Kimberlee Heldt, UCSC class of 2000, is currently
illustrating the textbook Human Physiology 4e, by
Rhoades and Pflanzer. Heldts forte is illustrating
molecular machinery, a subject without li ve models
or photographic references. I love textbook il lus-
tration, as I am basically a scientist at heart, not an
illustrator. Working on textbooks keeps my brain
happy, especially when I get to do molecular stuff.
The toughest challenge is, of course, illustrating
something you cannot see. It takes a great deal of
research before you even begin the composition of
the illustration. The whole process, however, is ex-
ceptionally rewarding.
Heldt, who has a BA i n biology from UC Berkeley and a MS in biochemistry, has found breaking awayfrom scientific precision a challenge. Ask any illustrator to try and draw a cartoon and theyd look at
you cross-eyed. We are simply too detail-ori-
ented to be able to accomplish this. The answer
came to me one day as I was in the car with my
husband driving over HWY 17. I was trying to
draw on this uneven road, around cornersand,
lo and behold, I was drawing cartoons. The un-
even terrain loosened me up enough to be able
to get the essence of a cartoon!
It took some unconventional approaches to discover theessence of drawing a cartoon. It is NOT as easy as it looks!
Kimberlee Heldt, [email protected].
BERKELEYscience 32r e v i e w
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No Typical Day
Peter Gaede recently took his natural science illustration
skills far afield, traveling across Kenya on assignment with
the National Museum and Nature Kenya in Nairob i. I
worked on a field guide to the waterbirds of Kenya which
included 123 pen and ink drawings to aid in identifica-
tion, he explains. I also painted some of the local flora
and fauna of the Kakemega forest in western Kenya to
promote awareness and conservation.
Gaede, a 2000 graduate of the UCSC Science Illustration
program, usually freelances closer to home, out of his Cali -
fornia studio. One of the most rewarding aspects of my
work is that there really is no typical day, he says. As-
signments vary from very specif ic and technical black-and-
white illustrations for scientific papers to full color maga-zine art and book covers. Perhaps his most unusual as-
signment was an illustration sequence portraying copulat-
ing Desert Horned li zards for an academic paper. To accu-
rately represent the amorous lizards, Gaede studied pho-
tos, notes, and preserved specimens from UC Berkeley.
As an undergraduate Gaede immersed himself in biological research, but itched to use his artistic talents as
well. UCSC provided such an opportunity. It used to be that science and art were at opposite ends of the
spectrum. I enjoyed both, but it seemed inconceivable to put them together. Now that I have, its a perfect
match, and I have a hard time figuring out what took me this long to see it.
In memory of JosephGrinnell, watercolor andgouache.
For thi s project, I accessedone of Joseph Grinnells
original field notes from1915. He was the firstdirector of UC BerkeleysMuseum of VertebrateZoology, serving from 1908to 1939.
Peter Gaede,[email protected].
Black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) in water-color and gouache, painted from a study skin at theUCSC Natural History Museum.
Peter Gaede, [email protected].
BERKELEYscience 34r e v i e w
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BERKELEYscience 35r e v i e w
The goal of science illustration is to
make difficult concepts accessible bytranslating them into visual images.
Caudles students start drawing with traditional pen and ink, then progress to watercolor,acrylic, colored pencil, and computer programs like Painter, Photoshop, and
Pagemaker. For each illustration, digital or traditional, the mechanics of scanning and repro-
duction are taken into account. In their last quarter, under the supervision of instructor Larry
Lavendel, the students illustrate and design Science Notes, a web-based journal of articles written by
students in the UCSC science writing program. Lavendel teaches the theory of information
graphicshow to present information clearly and accurately, in an eye-catching graph or illustra-
tion, then fit it into the larger context of an article.
The UCSC program is all about putting art in contexta scientific context, the context of a
publication, and the professional context of an illustration career. In addition to making valuableprofessional contacts in the field, students learn to handle time sheets, billable hours, contracts,
andadvertising. Its the nitty-gritty side of science illustration, as one current student puts it.
Graduates love it, because unlike many PhDs, they feel immediately prepared to market them-
selves and take assignments from concept to completion. As Laws puts it, I want to do field
guides, but what I have done so far is just sketches. I want to learn how to generate a finished
product. That is why Im here.
Long horned woodboring beetle. (ClarkA. Eising)
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For potential applicants to the UCSC science illustration pro-
gram, Caudle emphasizes that its important for people to
have looked into science illustration seriously and not just
be sampling it. Many members of the current class have
previous experience freelancing as medical illustrators, for
example. Campus researchers, student publications (likethe BSR), nature centers, and nonprofit groups often need
illustrations and are happy to help an aspiring illustrator start
a portfolio. Caudle also suggests joining the Guild of Natu-
ral Science Illustratorsand reading books on natural science
illustration and graphic design.
Good science illustrators can make an article jump off the
page with a flashy piece of art, but more often, their work
goes practically unnoticed. When a successful illustration
helps a reader visualize and under