Science Tuesday - Black History Month, Biomedical Ethics, Wolves, and Climate Change

Percy L. Julian (1899-1975), a pioneering black research chemist.

Reclaiming a Black Research Scientist’s Forgotten Legacy
By FELICIA R. LEE, The New York Times, February 6, 2007

On the day that Percy L. Julian graduated at the top of his class at DePauw University, his great-grandmother bared her shoulders and, for the first time, showed him the deep scars that remained from a beating she had received as a slave during the last days of the Civil War. She then clutched his Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”

Every February, when the curtain lifts on Black History Month, the cast of highlighted lives is often familiar: a Martin Luther King Jr., a Katherine Dunham. But the documentary “Forgotten Genius,” to be broadcast tonight as part of the “Nova” science series on PBS, dramatizes the story of Mr. Julian, a largely neglected black chemist who was nonetheless one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is played by the Tony Award-winning actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and the moment with his great-grandmother is but one in a film full of the echoes of the country’s painful racial history.
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Second Opinion: Girl or Boy? As Fertility Technology Advances, So Does an Ethical Debate
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, February 6, 2007

If people want to choose their baby’s sex before pregnancy, should doctors help?

Some parents would love the chance to decide, while others wouldn’t dream of meddling with nature. The medical world is also divided. Professional groups say sex selection is allowable in certain situations, but differ as to which ones. Meanwhile, it’s not illegal, and some doctors are already cashing in on the demand.
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Idaho's wolf population is now around 650.

For Wolves, a Recovery May Not Be the Blessing It Seems
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, February 6, 2007

HELENA, Mont., Feb. 5 — The news for the wolf last week was the opposite of a cloud with a silver lining. At first glance, it seems like a win for conservation that wolves are now successful enough that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed taking wolves in Idaho and Montana off the endangered species list.

But the price of success may be high. In Idaho, the governor is ready to have hunters reduce the wolf population in the state from 650 to 100, the minimum that will keep the animal off the endangered species list. “I’m prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself,” Gov. C. L. Otter said, according to The Associated Press.
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Essay: On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS, The New York Times, February 6, 2007

In the decade when I was the lead reporter on climate change for this newspaper, nearly every blizzard or cold wave that hit the Northeast would bring the same conversation at work.

Somebody in the newsroom would eye me and say something like, “So much for global warming.” This would often, but not always, be accompanied by teasing or malicious expressions, and depending on my mood the person would get either a joking or snappish or explanatory response. Such an exchange might still happen, but now it seems quaint. It would be out of date in light of a potentially historic sea change that appears to have taken place in the state and the status of the global warming issue since I retired from The New York Times in 2000.

Back then I wrote that one day, if mainstream scientists were right about what was going on with the earth’s climate, it would become so obvious that human activity was responsible for a continuing rise in average global temperature that no other explanation would be plausible.

That day may have arrived.
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Historical Evidence

The lost art of the letter
Robert P Crease, Physics World, January 2007

Until quite recently, letters were the most common way – and often the only way – for scientists to communicate informally with each other. It is not surprising therefore that science historians have long relied on letters as invaluable sources of information.

A dramatic illustration concerns the now-famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark in September 1941 during which the two physicists, talking in private, sought to eke out the other's view on progress towards a nuclear bomb. At first, the principal account of the mysterious visit came from a letter that Heisenberg sent in 1955 to the German science writer Robert Jungk. But among Bohr's papers were several drafts of letters that Bohr wrote but never sent to Heisenberg after reading the latter's account of the meeting. In 2002, when the Bohr family made the drafts public, the letters served as a corrective to Heisenberg's version, showing it to be deceitful and self-serving.

Roles of letters

Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake's startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo's correspondence, that the Leaning Tower event actually happened. And of all the reactions to the discovery of parity violation in 1957, the simplest and most direct expression of shock came from Robert Oppenheimer. After receiving a telegram from Chen Ning Yang with the news, Oppenheimer cabled back: "Walked through door."
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