Science & Technology

Alexander Calandra, Ph.D., professor emeritus of physical science in physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, died Wednesday, March 8, 2006. Calandra, who joined WUSTL in 1947 and retired in 1979, was nationally known for his work in science education. He was 95.

She’s executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

A member of WUSTL’s cosmic ray research group, he was involved in some of the world’s most successful studies of the composition of galactic cosmic rays.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (above) is poised to go into orbit around Mars in March, then spend about six months aerobraking to place the spacecraft in a low circular orbit by this fall.Two Mars orbiter missions — one from NASA, the other from the European Space Agency (ESA) — will open new vistas in the exploration of Mars through the use of sophisticated ground-penetrating radars, providing international researchers with the first direct clues about the Red Planet’s subsurface structure. Roger Phillips, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, is participating in both the Mars Express (ESA) and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) missions by lending his expertise in radar. Phillips says that the combination of the radars on the two missions will provide important and unique data sets that will directly map the structure of the upper portions of the interior of Mars. More…

Jan Amend sampling shallow marine vent fluids in 2005 at Ambitle Island, Papua, New Guinea.Curiosity about the microbial world drove Jan Amend, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to Vulcano Island, Italy, a shallow hydrothermal Shangri-la near Sicily. There, Amend and his collaborators managed to examine the environment in depth, design a gene probe, and discover new life-which could have some big implications for the origin and presence of life on Earth. More…

Nobody completely understands superconductors. So fathom how James S. Schilling, Ph.D., led a team that makes the phenomenon work better. Schilling, a professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, collaborated with recent doctoral graduate Takahiro Tomita and scientists at Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory to determine whether one region in superconductors, called grain boundaries (GB), are oxygen deficient. Such oxygen deficiency impairs superconductor performance. The group developed a technique that estimates how much oxygen is present in a critical region of superconductors called grain boundaries. More…

Concerns over biopiracy have fueled urgent calls for a new system of legal protection for indigenous biological materials and knowledge. Detractors of the current patent systems say that the knowledge of traditional cultures and communities does not readily fit into the industrialized world’s definition of intellectual property (IT); critics argue that existing laws basically promote the interests of the industrialized world. However, intellectual property and technology law expert Charles McManis, J.D., disagrees. More…

KlarmannCosmic-ray astrophysicist Joseph Klarmann, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006, at St. Mary’s Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., of complications from a bicycle accident in Forest Park last September. He was 78.

Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, provided an overview of the study of “Stardust in the Laboratory” Monday, Feb. 20, 2006, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held in St. Louis. He also participated in the AAAS “Exploring a Dusty Cosmos” press briefing that morning.

Biotech innovations pop up every day. From medicines developed by large companies to ingenious solutions worked out by individuals in university labs, new technologies are poised to enter the marketplace. The question is, are patents helping or hurting this process? “Patents are essential to bring biotechnology innovations from everyone — not just well-funded corporations — to the people,” says F. Scott Kieff, J.D., associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Without patents, the biotech marketplace in basic science takes on the nature of something like an old boys’ club in which personal attributes such as fame, prestige, and even gender and race, govern what exchanges take place; and the addition of patents gives many more people a way to play in that game.”