Spectacularly Safe

Illustration by michael klein

Spectacularly Safe
Doheny Library shines after a two-year earthquake retrofit and deep-cleaning that conservationists call an “exemplary preservation project.”

One of USC’s great architectural treasures, the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, reopened this fall after nearly two years of intricate structural work costing more than $17 million.

“The Doheny Library is simply stunning,” says Jerry Campbell, dean of university libraries. “I am certain that it has not been in such good shape since its original opening.”

When the library’s doors were closed in late 1999 for a seismic retrofit, USC officials took the opportunity to also install fire sprinklers and give the building an intensive cleaning. For the first time in the Doheny’s 69-year history, its exterior was thoroughly bathed. Portions of the library’s 168,000-square-foot interior were also scrubbed and refurbished. A big challenge was removing tobacco and soot stains left after years of cigarette smoking in the library. Workers used cotton swabs and distilled water to wash much of the delicate surfaces and ceilings, including gold leaf details.

The bulk of the project, however, was less aesthetic than structural. For the earthquake upgrades, 17 walls had to be dismantled to make way for stronger concrete shear walls. Delicately crafted veneers – from wood paneling to painted details – had to be removed, then meticulously put back in place. Coffered ceilings with decorative moldings and large plaster flowers were taken down in fragments, then replaced like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

“It was a marvelous feat of engineering and design,” says Campbell. “Remarkably, these tremendous life-saving changes are invisible.”

But Not so invisible as to escape the admiring scrutiny of architectural conservationists. The Los Angeles Conservancy recognized the Doheny upgrade as one of seven “exemplary preservation projects” at its 20th annual Preservation Awards.

“The project has resulted in a reawakening of Doheny Library’s stature, beauty and usefulness as a central campus resource, exemplifying USC’s ongoing commitment to stay in the heart of Los Angeles and reinvest in its historic campus architecture,” says conservancy spokesman Ken Bernstein.
Designed by architect Samuel Lunden, the library was erected in 1932 with a $1 million gift from Edward and Estelle Doheny, given in memory of their son, Edward L. Doheny Jr., who died in 1929.

– Gilien Silsby


Developing Great Quad
A major Chinese collection, including volumes from the Ming and Qing dynasties, finds a permanent home at USC.

Workers have completed a $4.2 million project to reconfigure the area between Leavey Library and the Doheny Memorial Library, including a short stretch of Hoover Boulevard left over from the old off-campus street grid. What had been oddly shaped patches of grass bisected by roadways and surface parking is now 2.2 acres of landscaped green space, anchored by a fountain with reflecting pool and framed by walkways. “This is a stunningly beautiful project that transforms this portion of campus,” says Leavey Library director Charlotte Crockett. “At the same time, it provides for more usable space for student interaction in the very popular area in front of Leavey.” Dubbed McCarthy Quad for the family of USC trustee Kathleen Leavey McCarthy, the project was designed by landscape architects Fong, Hart & Schneider. McCarthy is chairperson of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation.


From the Ashes
Teach-in kicks off USC’s Political Violence Initiative aimed at exploring the roots and repercussions of political violence.

From the Ashes: Students attending the September 24 teach-in.
Photo by Irene Fertik

In the Wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, USC has unveiled a Political Violence Initiative, comprising faculty-led seminars, workshops, lectures, teach-ins and courses geared for students as well as alumni and the neighboring community. The initiative was announced at a September 24 teach-in held on the University Park campus.

“Students need a place to come and discuss the latest developments and share knowledge,” said Joseph Aoun, dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, speaking to a crowd of 600 participants. “Teach-ins at USC will not be a one- or two-time event. They will be here for a long time.” Plans also call for presenting lectures to USC alumni organizations.

“Taking a multidisciplinary approach, we will offer background, analysis and discussion of the psychological, economic, political, legal, historical and sociological aspects of political violence,” Aoun says.

Days earlier, USC President Steven B. Sample had reached out to the university’s Muslim neighbors when he attended a meeting at the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Mosque adjacent to campus.

“As a community comprising numerous cultural, ethnic and religious groups, the university itself is a model for diversity,” says Aoun. “We can show the world that even from the ashes of loss and devastation, tolerance can take root and flourish.”


Neuromancipation

If you thought the embryonic stem cell debate was hairy, wait till the neurochip debate begins. Fasten your seatbelts, warns USC neuropharmacologist Roberta Brinton, as we enter the brave new world of human flesh grown on chips. (William Gibson wasn’t so far off.) In a Boston Globe article, Brinton described her lab’s efforts to develop silicon chips that can communicate with and even stand in for damaged brain and nerve cells. The same technology, she says, might go beyond repairing lost function and lead to superhuman bionics and even “mind control.”

As the boundaries between man and machine erode, scientists like Brinton warn of difficult ethical territory ahead. It’s time, says Brinton, to begin the
public debate on these possibilities.


Underwater Ferraris

Marine biologist Donal Manahan goes where the invertebrates are. Another of his research projects, this one involving Antarctic sea urchins, recently lured him to the bottom of the world. “We found that this creature uses 25 times less energy than normal to make proteins,” says Manahan, a leading authority on biological adaptations of Antarctic marine organisms and director of the NSF’s Biology Training Program in Antarctica. Scientists had expected that sea urchins, which live in the extreme cold, would have a less-efficient metabolism, not more efficient. “We thought the cold would slow them down. Instead, they’re going like little Ferraris,” Manahan says. The research, which was published in Science, has important implications for biotechnology because there may be genes that give organisms the ability to survive on less food and still grow.

– Bob Calverley

Baby, It’s Cold Inside
Marine biologists nurture infant deep-sea worms by keeping them chilly, hungry and under pressure.

“Raising babies, you normally keep them warm, feed them a lot and are careful not to crush them.”
Illustration by Regan Dunnick

Diving to 8,000-foot depths in a miniature submarine, biologist Donal Manahan chased giant tubeworms through a hydrothermal vent in the Pacific Ocean – documenting for the first time how these deep-sea creatures propagate in one of the world’s strangest and least-known ecosystems.

“We proved that the tubeworm larvae can live long enough for the underwater highways that run deep in the ocean to take them from one vent to another,” says Manahan, who is dean of research in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, summing up the findings that were published earlier this year in the journal Nature.

The vents are ephemeral, with old vents shutting down and new ones springing up 50 or more miles away. Each of these belching geysers of hot, sulfurous water is like an oasis driven by geothermal energy – typically surrounded by hundreds of species of marine animals, bacteria and other life forms. The star of this unique ecosystem is the giant tubeworm, a 3- to 6-foot worm whose colonies are often seen waving in television science programs. The tubeworm has no eyes, mouth or intestine. It is sustained by chemosynthetic microbes living inside it – microbes that take sulfur and use it to fix carbon dioxide in a process similar to photosynthesis, only instead of sunlight, the key is heat and sulfur.

Scientists have long wondered how tubeworms, which can’t move around the seafloor, wind up at new vent sites. The key to solving the mystery is the movement of their young. Where these tiny larvae go is determined by deep-sea currents and the larvae’s life span.

To find out how long a journey baby tubeworms can survive, Manahan and his colleagues used the Alvin, a miniature submarine, to gather giant tubeworms deep in the ocean hundreds of miles off Costa Rica. The scientists dissected the adult tubeworms and, by artificial insemination, produced larvae. They kept these babies inside a chamber that maintains a continual flow of 35-degree Fahrenheit seawater at the same water pressure as the deep vents – about 2 tons per square inch.

“When you’re raising babies, you normally keep them warm, feed them a lot and are careful not to crush them,” Manahan says. “To rear these deep-sea babies, we kept them refrigerator cold, didn’t feed them at all and crushed them with 250 atmospheres of pressure.”

Then they performed experiments on the larvae’s buoyancy, on their metabolic rate, and on their internal energy system, as well as field studies on the physical properties of deep-sea currents. They determined that baby tubeworms have an average life span of about 38 days – long enough to travel up to 100 kilometers. The scientists were also able to document some of the giant tubeworm’s life cycle, about which little had previously been known.

Other researchers who participated in the study were Adam G. Marsh, then a post-doctoral fellow in Manahan’s lab; Lauren S. Mullineaux, a scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.; and Craig M. Young, a biologist at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Fort Pierce, Fla. The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

– Bob Calverley

Dough or Die

Photo by Michele A.H. Smith

Bread-lovers will be delighted to learn that the humble loaf may hold the key to the fountain of youth. USC geneticists have discovered that a simple mutation causes baker’s yeast to live three times its normal life span. The mutation involves an ancient gene called “Sch9” that seems to have a similar function in creatures ranging from yeast to worms and flies to mammals – rendering the mammalian version of Sch9 an auspicious candidate for gene-based manipulations to improve human health.

“It seems that these very distantly related organisms are regulating aging using similar genes and strategies,” says Valter Longo, a researcher at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. “This is very exciting. It means we’re likely on track to discovering fundamental mechanisms of the regulation of aging.”

Geneticists have identified mutations that extend life span in flies, worms, mice and now yeast. What these long-lived mutants have in common is that their cells are resistant to damage from heat and the corrosive effects of oxidants. The USC team created billions of mutant yeast cells and exposed them to harsh conditions of heat and oxidants. As Longo had hoped, the few whose mutations helped them survive were also the ones with the longest natural life spans. “So this super-yeast is not only long-lived, but it seems to be resistant to just about everything that we expose it to,” Longo says.

In a paper recently published in the journal Science, Longo and USC gerontologist Paola Fabrizio describe two mutated yeast strains that lived 30 percent to 100 percent longer than normal, and one that lived up to three times the normal life span.

The less-long-lived strains appeared in other respects no different from their unmutated cousins, but the super-long-lived one grew at a slower rate. “This seems to indicate that extended longevity in these simple organisms is associated with increased investment in maintenance and repair – in one case, at the expense of growth rate,” says Longo.

“This could have important implications for the treatment of diseases,” says Longo, who holds joint appointments in biology and gerontology. “Whether it’s cancer or Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, a major portion of people who die as adults die because a particular cell or cell type has lost or modified its function due to aging. If we can one day develop drugs that make human cells younger and more resistant to multiple stresses – such as we find in these long-lived organisms – then not only might we extend longevity, we may also protect human cells against a variety of diseases.”

– Matthew Blakeslee


Tears of a Clone

A setback for narcissists who fancy a biological ticket to immortality: Research shows that safe human cloning isn’t exactly around the corner. In July, the Los Angeles Times reported that seemingly healthy cloned mice, grown from embryonic stem cells, develop random life-threatening genetic errors over time. That amounts to an insurmountable safety problem for reproductive cloning, according to USC biomedical ethicist Alexander Capron. “It undermines the claims of those who say that they will be able to select out good cloned embryos from those with abnormalities. This is a false hope,” Capron told the Times, commenting on the MIT-University of Hawaii study. Much more basic science needs to be done before moving on to human subjects, he says.

Shelf Life


Heartsick Journey
‘Speak in haste, repent at leisure’ might be the motto of this new novel exploring premature death, grief and guilt.

Photo by Mark Tanner


Life After Death
By Carol Muske-Dukes
Random House, $23


Every marriage has the occasional raging argument that produces words you wish you could take back. What if, during one such confrontation, you told your spouse to drop dead, and he did? That’s the premise of Carol Muske-Dukes’ third novel, Life After Death.

The book – which Newsday calls “luminous” – opens with heroine Boyd Schaeffer tearing into her husband after he nonchalantly leaves their 4-year-old daughter alone in a public park. A charming and accomplished liar, Russell pleads extenuating circumstances and announces that he believes himself to be terminally ill. Boyd snaps: “You have an incurable disease? Don’t get cured.… I’d prefer you dead.” Russell obliges the next day, collapsing on the tennis court from a heart attack.

What follows is a melancholy meditation on love and bereavement, as Boyd, her mother-in-law Gerda and the local funeral director, Will, must sift through their tortured memories and personal failures to reclaim their lives. The reader becomes a detective, deciphering Muske-Dukes’ poetic landscape in search of an explanation for human suffering. We learn that this wasn’t Boyd’s first fateful encounter with a faulty heart. As a second-year obstetrics resident, she had performed a routine abortion on a woman with an undiagnosed heart condition, and the patient died under the knife. Paralyzed by guilt, Boyd had quit the medical profession and escaped into marriage with the rich ne’er-do-well, Russell. Meanwhile, Will still broods over the premature death of his twin sister, and Gerda voyages back through memory to Russell’s childhood to confront her own guilty secrets.

Muske-Dukes is a poet as well as a novelist, and we hear her lyrical voice throughout the book. A naked body is “the color of gold tea in a clear hourglass.” Russell’s jagged handwriting on a posthumous love letter to his wife jumps out of a stack of condolences on “sharp wings, predator swoops.”

In a Cruel case of life imitating art, after finishing this book Muske-Dukes lost her own husband, veteran actor David Dukes, to a fatal heart attack. She had lovingly satirized marriage to a thespian in a March 2000 New York Times Magazine essay titled “I Married the Ice-Pick Killer.” The 55-year-old Dukes collapsed and died while on location filming a television miniseries in October of last year. Life After Death is dedicated to him.

A professor of English, Muske-Dukes is also director of the department’s doctoral program in literature and creative writing. She has published six books of poetry: Camouflage, Skylight, Wyndmere, Applause, Red Trousseau and An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems. The last was chosen as a New York Times Most Notable Book for 1997 in the poetry category. Her previous novels are Dear Digby and Saving St. Germ. A critic as well as an author, she is regular book reviewer for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the author of Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self, Critical Essays.

– Diane Krieger

A Year in the World’s Life

1688: A Global History
by John E. Wills Jr.
W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., $27

A Year in the World’s Life
That single year – 1688 – holds enough adventure for a decade, if not an entire century.
Photo by Michele A.H. Smith

Historian John E. Wills Jr. hesitated before writing a whole book about 1688, but “in the end, the year was just too good to pass up.” That single year holds enough adventure for a decade, if not an entire century, he found. 1688: A Global History takes readers on a voyage that starts in Mexico with Creole poet Juana Ines de la Cruz, a nun who penned love lyrics to the wife of the Spanish viceroy, and ends in London with the composition of Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, organist at the coronations of both James II and his deposer, William III.

“I feared the balance of the book would be swamped by the famous English ‘Glorious Revolution’ of that year, and I would risk looking foolish as an outsider writing about an event that has been so much studied,” says Wills, an expert on Chinese history.

It proved an idle fear.

The book has received critical acclaim, particularly in Great Britain, where 1688 was a watershed year. A reviewer for The Independent of London called 1688 “one of the most fascinating and brilliant works of popular history ever written,” while a Baltimore Sun reviewer calls it an “enchanting and learned volume.”

Lacing some 80 vignettes through 400 pages, Wills crosses every major body of water, offering snapshots of late-17th-century life from the courts of Louis XIV and Peter the Great to the empires of Kangxi and Sultan Süleyman. He journeys through the then-exotic Sonora Desert, Robben Island (off the Cape of Good Hope) and Zumbi’s kingdom of escaped slaves in Brazil.

Serendipity led Wills to some of his best material. In Brussels, he came across an antique globe dated 1688, which led to the story of Father Vincenzo Coronelli, the leading cartographer of his time. One vignette concerns an Anglo-Indian trading official named Elihu Yale and his odd link to a Chinese sea lord. The Englishman was later immortalized for endowing a struggling Connecticut college that gratefully adopted his name.

True to his baroque subject matter, Wills interweaves his multicolored threads. The Jesuit commentaries and translations of Confucian philosophy introduced in one chapter are discovered by a delighted Liebniz in another.

– Gilien Silsby

Words and Music


Toward a Sustainable
Whaling Regime
Edited by Robert L. Friedheim
University of Washington Press, $35

“Both pro-whaling and anti-whaling forces are rocking the boat,” writes international relations scholar Robert Friedheim in the first book to take a critical look at the international management of whales and whaling. “What they do is fuel each other’s paranoia and suspicion.” Friedheim, who died in January, joins USC law professor Christopher D. Stone and eight other experts to explain the politics of whaling.


The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination
by Mark Pesce
Ballantine Books, $24

Web-based toys started in 1998 with Furbys, toys that could interact intelligently with their environment. Since then, new toys have emerged that seem magical by comparison. With this Web-enhanced book, Mark Pesce, chair of the Interactive Media Program in the USC School of Cinema-Television, offers a preview of the brave new world of toys that awaits us all (www.theplayfulworld.com).

Fairies
CD by Rivka Golani and Bernadene Blaha
CBS Records, $17.98

Acclaimed USC pianist Bernadene Blaha teams with Canadian violist Rivka Golani in an all-Schumann program of fantasy, folk tales and romantic adventure. The disc takes its name from two works, Schumann’s “Fairy Tales,” Op. 113, and “Fairy Tale Narrations,” Op. 132. “The playing on this recording is so incredibly expressive and intimate that it is easy to forget that you are not part of a private audience,” writes music critic Peter Amsel for Bay Review.


It’s Robo-Surgeon!
Vaughn Starnes and a robot named “da Vinci” perform mitral valve repair, in a process he calls “truly the next advance in heart surgery.”

Surgeons recently pulled off a Southern California first – the regional debut of robotic heart repair. On April 27, a team of cardiothoracic surgeons led by Vaughn Starnes fixed the mitral valve of patient Lotte Henderson using the “da Vinci” Surgical System.


USC surgeons adjust the da Vinci robot arm. The machine allows surgeons to operate remotely, using minimally invasive technology.
Photo by Alicia Di rado

“Robotic surgery is going to revolutionize cardiothoracic procedures,” says Starnes, who made medical history in 1993 after performing the world’s first double-lobar lung transplant from living, related donors. “This is truly the next advance in heart surgery.”

The da Vinci system allowed Starnes to operate remotely, using controls on a computer console. Surgical instruments were inserted through small holes in the patient’s side. Traditional mitral valve surgery involves a long incision, and surgeons must split the breastbone to reach the heart. Even using advanced techniques, the incision can be 4 inches long. But through the small punctures and tiny instruments involved in robotic surgery, patients experience shorter incisions, less pain and trauma and a quicker recovery time.

During the procedure at USC University Hospital, Starnes sat at a console about 8 feet away from the patient, while a three-armed, 1,000-pound robot was positioned beside her. Starnes grasped and moved highly sensitive instruments at the console while viewing Henderson’s heart – greatly magnified – on a screen. The robot precisely matched Starnes’ natural hand and wrist movements, translating them to the tiny instruments placed inside the patient through small puncture incisions. So deft is da Vinci’s touch that it can place sutures the thickness of a human hair.

In Henderson’s case, the minimally invasive procedure required three small incisions between the ribs, two for the insertion of interchangeable instruments and another for a thin, cylindrical video camera, called an endoscope. Starnes shaped and sutured tissue into place, shortening a cord (a sort of “heart string”) that supports the heart valve. He also stitched in a shoelace-like ring to brace the valve.

Though the robot operated silently, it created quite a buzz in the hallway outside the operating room, where other surgeons, physicians and nurses crowded around a monitor to watch the procedure. Some peered through operating room windows to try to get a better look.

“Mitral valve repairs technically are among those requiring the most skill from a surgeon,” says Daniel Schwartz, a Keck School of Medicine surgeon who assisted in the procedure. “This is a procedure not many people across the country do, even without a robot.”

Starnes notes that the robot is a spin-off of defense technology. The California-based company Intuitive Surgical developed the da Vinci system at the urging of the Pentagon, which was seeking a way for military surgeons to perform operations remotely on the front lines or at sea. USC is one of several sites in a Food and Drug Administration-approved trial to evaluate the use of da Vinci to repair the heart’s mitral valve.

– Alicia Di Rado

In a Delicate Condition

photo by Michele A.H. Smith

Obstetricians have long recognized that women with diseased heart valves seem to have difficult pregnancies, but until now no one had measured the risks to mother or baby. USC physicians recently completed the most extensive study to date on pregnant women with valvular heart disease. Principal USC researcher Uri Elkayam led an interdisciplinary team of Keck School of Medicine cardiologists and obstetricians who looked at 66 pregnancies in women with valvular disease, comparing them to another 66 pregnant women with healthy hearts. The women with moderate to severe valve trouble, they found, were more likely to experience congestive heart failure and arrhythmias, and more likely to need to begin taking heart medications (or increase their dosage) or be hospitalized during pregnancy. Fetal health was also adversely affected. Women with heart disease were more likely to deliver babies prematurely, and even with full-term pregnancies were likelier to have low-birth-weight babies or babies that hadn’t developed properly in the womb. The researchers went on to meticulously measure the effects of pregnancy on different kinds of valvular heart disease – mitral, aortic and pulmonic stenosis – at varying degrees of severity. Ideally, they conclude in an article for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, women with severe valvular stenosis should consider having it repaired before becoming pregnant. Failing that, they recommend close maternal follow-up and fetal surveillance in pregnant patients with moderate or severe aortic or mitral stenosis.

– Alicia Di Rado

A Metabolic Mystery

Obesity is increasing across all ethnicities in the United States – up some 60 percent since 1990 – but statistically more African Americans (27 percent) are obese than whites (18 percent). Why? USC researcher Michael Goran has shed some new light to the metabolic mystery. Goran, a professor in the Keck School of Medicine, recently analyzed data from a longitudinal study of schoolchildren in Alabama. For seven years, Goran and his colleague have followed the cohort of 92 white and 64 African-American children.

During childhood there had been no difference in the kids’ metabolisms, but toward the end of puberty the black children began to show a slower resting energy expenditure – meaning they burned fewer calories while at rest. (The study also showed that by age 10, 38 percent of the African-American girls were overweight.) The findings appeared in a recent issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Intriguing as this is, Goran maintains that the slower rates of resting metabolisms do not necessarily correlate with fat gain, since metabolism is determined by body lean mass (organs and muscle mass) and doesn’t vary much from day to day. “If you have more muscle, you’ll have a higher metabolic rate. If you have less, you have a lower metabolic rate,” Goran says. “It’s like saying Shaquille O’Neal, who has a lot of muscle, has a high metabolic rate. That doesn’t mean he won’t become obese if he stops exercising and starts eating a lot.”

Other environmental factors like caloric intake and physical activity levels may be more significant when it comes to obesity, Goran believes. “We know from earlier studies that black kids have a lower level of fitness to begin with, and a lower level of fitness is a risk factor for fat gain,” he says. “That’s something that may be contributing to the greater obesity among African Americans.”

For many years, the public has been told that a low metabolism rate leads to weight gain. “We’re simply not finding that in our research,” says Goran. “It’s an important message, and one people might not want to hear. It’s much easier to attribute weight gain to your metabolism, because there’s nothing you can do about your metabolism. But you can change the amount you eat and the amount you exercise and these changes may have important benefits.”

– Monika Guttman


Lovers

Adding fuel to the journalistic-ethics firestorm leading up to Timothy McVeigh’s June 11 execution, public radio producers announced they would air tapes of past public executions. Critics called it twisted, but USC communications scholar Martin Kaplan called it only human nature. “The truth is that throughout history executions have been used as public entertainment,” Kaplan said in a May 2 interview on PRI’s “Marketplace.” “Certainly the [battles of] gladiators were a kind of execution. In the 18th century, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell reported in their journals about going to public executions in London. The upstairs rooms of public houses … overlooking the gallows were rented out for a year’s income in order for spectators to watch.”


People Watch


Teacher’s Pet Project

“In the past, too often we have succumbed to the temptation to try to be all things to all people.”
Photo by Michele A.H. Smith

A year into her term as education dean, Karen Gallagher dreams of a No. 1-ranked USC Rossier School where the sky’s the limit.

As Karen Gallagher gazes down from her 11th-floor office in Waite Phillips Hall, she sounds more like a contractor than dean of the USC Rossier School of Education.

Words like “redesign, reconfigure and build up” pepper her sentences. The veteran education scholar, reformer and past public school teacher isn’t talking about bricks and mortar. She’s talking about mission, about goals – like her remarkably bold one of making USC’s Rossier School the nation’s No. 1 graduate school known for urban education. (The most recent U.S. News & World Report ranking put it at 38th.)

Toward that end, Gallagher, who came on as dean in August 2000, recently gave her 42-member faculty a pretty difficult homework assignment: create a clear vision that sets the USC Rossier School apart from the hundreds of other education schools across the country.

“My goal is to involve everyone in this process. It’s an inefficient but inclusive process,” Gallagher says. “We all need to be involved in any changes we propose – even if we don’t all agree on the specific changes themselves. Involving everyone will make the changes that much stronger and more effective.”

The ultimate goal, she says, is to identify the USC Rossier School’s “signature” and how that relates to its mission. “We need to pick fewer academic areas and provide excellent programs within them, rather than offer many degrees at mediocre levels,” she says. This may be tricky given the school’s all-inclusive history. “In the past, too often we have succumbed to the temptation to try to be all things to all people,” Gallagher says. “We have practically ended up with a separate program for every faculty member. We lack a sharp focus.”

Her ongoing “redesign” meetings involving a range of USC Rossier School stakeholders are beginning to bear fruit. Faculty have already narrowed down what they feel should be the school’s four key academic emphases: leadership, accountability, diversity and learning in urban settings.

Myron Dembo, a professor of educational psychology, is optimistic about the next step. “If we have done a good job, the nature of graduate instruction in our classes should be radically different from our competitors,” he says. “And the nature of instruction can become a critical reason why students want to study at the USC Rossier School.”

Gallagher has Key priorities of her own. She aims to quadruple the school’s level of funded research from its current $3 million a year to $12 million by 2003 (a feat she pulled off at the University of Kansas, where as dean she brought grants up from $4 million in 1995 to $18 million in 1999).

The first step: Gallagher has hired a staff of professional grant administrators. Before this, education professors were responsible for managing their grants, in addition to conducting their research and teaching their students. “Having a grant was seen almost as punishment by some faculty members,” she says.

Another top priority is working hand-in-fist with the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve urban schools. For starters Gallagher proposes offering continuing ed in many subjects for LAUSD teachers. “The way to impact the system is not only with new teachers but teachers already in the classrooms,” she says.

Looking out her window, Gallagher is serenely sanguine about the future. “As a team, I think we can make some incredible accomplishments,” she says.

– Gilien Silsby


A Blow for Science

Illustration by John Cuneo

Jim Merritt indisputably has the “hottest” job at USC. He directs the university’s glass shop, crafting the one-of-a-kind flasks, specialized devices and glass apparatus that researchers require to carry out their experiments. “Whatever they draw up, I try to do,” says the 38-year-veteran glassblower, squinting at a hand-drawn diagram. Common glass is made by heating a mixture of lime, soda and sand. Test tubes and other laboratory glassware, however, are made from a more temperature-resistant formula that incorporates some boron oxide. Pyrex begins to soften at 1508 degrees Fahrenheit, but Merritt works his magic at about 2260 degrees – blowing air through a long rubber tube attached to the molten glass he rolls over an oxygen and natural gas flame. When researchers need apparatus that can withstand even higher temperatures, they ask for quartz – a crystalline form of silica that starts to soften at 2150 degrees. Merritt heats the quartz to almost 3200 degrees to work it. “That gets miserably hot,” says the man with the hottest job at USC.

– Bob Calverley


Yes, She Is a Rocket Scientist

Illustration by John Cuneo

Amy Green ’00 won’t be donning a flight suit, but her invention may well orbit the Earth someday. Seizing on a hot trend in aerospace engineering, she has designed a tiny engine that can maneuver miniature spacecraft. Called MEMS (that’s micro-electro-mechanical systems), these gadgets are pivotal in the push to build smaller satellites. Green’s device began as an ambitious senior project for AE 441, a lab course taught by engineering professor Tony Maxworthy. Her paper and prototype won the USC School of Engineering’s Laufer Award for best student project. Next it snagged the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ western regional undergraduate prize; eventually she took home the gold medallion at the AIAA nationals.

Now a graduate student in USC’s astronautics program, Green was selected to represent her country at the international Astronautical Congress in Rio de Janeiro, where she won the award for the best technical student paper. You go, rocket-girl.

– Bob Calverley


Abreast of Change

Photo by Michael Chiabudo

Mel Silverstein knew there was a better way to fight breast cancer, so he pioneered a think-tank approach to attacking the disease.

Each time a woman gets a mammogram, she should say a little ‘thank you’ to Mel Silverstein. He was the first to design and build a freestanding breast center, a place where all the patient’s needs are met under a single roof. The concept was pivotal to the seamless experience that is today’s standard of care.

There are now more than 300 national centers fashioned after Silverstein’s model, including the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Lee Breast Center, where he is medical director. Silverstein’s vision earned him the 2001 Impact Award for lifetime achievement, presented at the 11th Annual National Interdisciplinary Breast Center Conference.

Prior to such centers, women with breast cancer passed through many hands for diagnosis, image enhancement, genetic counseling, treatment, reconstruction and post-surgical follow-up. This scattershot approach often resulted in fragmented communication among radiologists, clinicians and surgeons. Open dialogue is one of the most important advantages of being treated at a breast center, says Silverstein. “The physicians are all thinking and talking about breast cancer, so the level of practice improves,” he says.

Silverstein’s crusade for better breast cancer patient-care continues. His current research on ductal carcinoma in situ, a prevalent and noninvasive form, shows that lumpectomy alone may often be sufficient treatment.That finding has translated into less invasive and less costly breast cancer treatment for women with DCIS.