"All the news that people bother to send in"
BioSciNEWS Online
Volume 2, Number 4, April 2001
As a member of the search committee for the Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of Graduate School, Jackie Stephens encourages all staff, students, and faculty to participated in the upcoming campus open forum that will be held as part of the interviews of Drs. Kevin Smith, Charles Liotta, and John Reeve.  Information will be forthcoming by way of e-mail.
We commiserate with our colleague John Lynn, who lost much of his library, memorabilia, and historic Alpha Delta Pi materials and records, from an office fire Friday 20 April.  The heat of the fire tripped the sprinkler system and alarm about 5:00 AM, and the small fire confined to the area of the door was quickly extinguished by the rapidly responding Baton Rouge Fire Department.  LSU Physical Plant staff arrived immediately with water vacuums, mops, and lifting ability to help minimize the damage to nearby offices as the water spread across the hall and through the floors.  Some water damage occurred on several floors of the east side of the original Life Sciences Building and the adjacent section of the new annex near his office; the vast amount of the damage, however, was to Lynn's office.  The cause of the fire was not announced by officials, but to the non-professionals helping with the pickup, it appeared to have been set deliberately.  Some of the things badly damaged include a personal diary with recorded impressions of a first trip to Japan, an Alpha Delta Pi scrapbook that recently won a national award, many reprints, and on and on.  The fate of his computer hard drives and numerous backup discs of records, research notes, books, and manuscripts in progress is not known yet.  Before his trial is over, Lynn will have lost many hours of his time that can never be replaced.  On a happier note photographic slides documenting more than twenty years of research survived, albeit in warped condition. 
NATIONAL STUDENT EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR
Katherine (Katie) Grams, a junior zoology major, was selected as the outstanding student worker of the year in the United States. Grams first was chosen LSU Student Employee of the Year at LSU.  From there she went on to become Southern Association of Student Employees (SASEA) 2001 Student Employee of the Year.  Now Grams has been named National Student Employee of the Year. Grams is a Chancellor's Aide student who does research in the laboratory of Mohamed Noor of the Department of Biological Sciences.  She competed against 50 other nominees from departments across campus for the LSU award.
    Grams ' role in the Noor laboratory is extremely diverse.  She is considered the technician of the Noor lab because of her administrative roles, which include overseeing and coordinating all of the student workers, preparing packets for new workers, ordering of all supplies, maintaining all of the solutions, etc.  However, she is also an active researcher herself, examining the genetic basis of mate choice and hybrid sterility in Drosophila species.  As part of a typical week, Grams  will assay Drosophila mating success through repeated 5-minute observations.  She would then take the male flies, and dissect their testes to determine sperm motility.  Grams then prepares the DNA from these flies, and executes polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) to genotype these flies for markers across their genomes.  She then visualizes the products from of reactions following electrophoresis, sometimes using an automated DNA sequencer.  Finally, Grams analyzes all of the data to determine the genetic basis of these traits thought to be important for speciation.
    Her recommendation was very strong, indicating, "It would not be an exaggeration to say that Katie performs at least part of all of the experiments proposed in our half-million dollar NIH grant for an entire laboratory."  Grams presented her research results at the international meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution in the summer of 2000, and received positive feedback from several leading figures.  She also appeared as a coauthor of a paper that was published in the March, 2001, issue of Evolution, and she is a coauthor of several other papers in preparation.  Her work has been exceptional.
    The nomination called for comments on five characters of the nominees: reliability, quality of work, initiative, professionalism, and uniqueness of contributions.  Katie Grams excelled in all of these areas.  Grams then represented LSU in the student employee of the year competition for the southern region, which spans states from Texas to Florida to Virginia, and again, her application rose to the top.  Now, Grams  rose to the top once more as she represented the Southern region in the National Student Employee of the Year competition.  Her competition at the national level brings even more prestige to our department and university, and we are all very proud of her.
See more about undergraduate research at LSU and the Basic Sciences undergraduate awards (March BioSciNEWS).


Press Release
SCHOEFFLER AND SPIKES NAMED GOLDWATER SCHOLARS
[Only two students from Louisiana schools have been awarded prestigious Goldwater scholarships for 2001-2002.  Both are in the Department of Biological Sciences at LSU.  Allyn J. Schoeffler (left) and Ebony A. Spikes (right) have been named a Goldwater Scholar for 2001-2002.]

Dr. Hans Mark, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, announced today [5 April 2001] that the Trustees awarded 302 scholarships for the 2001-2002 academic year to undergraduate sophomores and juniors from the fifty states and Puerto Rico.
      The Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,164 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. One hundred fifty-seven of the Scholars are men, 145 are women, and virtually all intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their degree objective. Twenty-five Scholars are mathematics majors, 198 are science majors, 26 are majoring in engineering, 6 are computer science related majors, and 47 have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines.  The one and two year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.
      Goldwater Scholars have very impressive academic qualifications that have garnered the attention of prestigious post-graduate fellowship programs. Recent Goldwater Scholars have been awarded 39 Rhodes Scholarships (8 of the thirty-two awarded in the U.S. in 2000 and 6 in both 1998 and 1999), 32 Marshall Awards, 11 Churchill, 10 Fulbright, 30 Hughes, 93 National Science Foundation, and numerous other distinguished fellowships.
      The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.
      The Foundation, in its thirteen year history, has awarded 3,323 scholarships worth approximately thirty-three million dollars. The Trustees plan to award about three hundred scholarships for the 2002-2003 academic year.

Faculty & Staff Help Wanted
The accountants are still having problems with receiving packing slips and invoices.  Please be sure to turn in your packing slips and invoices to the appropriate accountant in the accounting section in LSB 502.  It is so important to do this especially now that we are approaching the end of the fiscal year.  We are not able to accurately account for all expenditures if we do not receive the proper documents.  Please, please cooperate.
Darwin's Theory Again  Rep. Sharon Weston Broome, D-Baton Rouge, has begun an effort to prohibit the teachings of "Darwin's Theory" in the state of Louisiana on the basis that it is has been used to justify racist views, and her house resolution "does hereby condemn the extent to which these philosophies have been used to justify and approve racist practices."  Certainly, no one would fail to condemn the use of any writings in racist arguments, but what may be a round about way to restrict the teaching of evolution is of concern.  At a public session held 17 April at the Old State Capitol, several biologists, including Don Weinell of Gonzales, an environmental scientist, attended to provide evidence. The Baton Rouge daily newspaper, the Advocate (18 April), contacted Mark Hafner and reported:
Mark Hafner, professor of biological sciences at LSU, said in an interview that Darwin's views were typical of the 19th century, "and I suppose one could label them as racist in some ways."  But Hafner said modern scientists know much more about genetics than Darwin did. Hafner said it is unfair to focus on one figure from the 19th century and use modern-day science to criticize him.
Even the Bible has been used for evil purposes by some sects to justify apartheid.  Rather than take books from generations past at face value, perhaps it is best to look at where these classic writings has lead us. From the presentations of early evolutionary belief by Darwin we have progressed to completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and the realization that there is 99.9% genetic similarity of all humankind. Recent evidence also indicates all humans arose from an ancient population of about 20,000 Africans. 
Alumni news
Former student April Goldfinch from the Carman lab did an internship with the Smithsonian last summer before beginning her PhD at Florida State University. A website she helped to develop at that time was deemed to be pretty cool, so much so that her site was picked by USA Today as a "website of  the week." The Smithsonian Institution website, produced by CaduceusWebs' and April Goldfinch can be found under the heading "Galapagos Expedition".  The site concerns the recent IMAX filming of Dr. Carole Baldwin's Smithsonian Expedition to the Pacific's Galapagos Islands. If  ever you’ve wondered how 3-D IMAX films are made, get a glimpse of the process as scientists set off on a research expedition to the remote Galápagos Islands on April’s site.

Steven Cassar has a new position and promotion at Abbott Laboratories in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  He now works in the Pharmacogenetics Department where he is responsible for running genotyping assays to determine genotypes of patients in clinical trials.  The end result of the studies will be to help better understand patient to patient variation in drug response.  Steven really enjoys his work. Jamie, married to Steven, may be remembered for the outstanding seminar posters she designed, is a founding member of an art gallery in Kenosha called the Lemon Street Gallery.

Links to alumni
A partial list is linked here in the hope that more web sites will be added.
Congratulations! Steven M. Pomarico was named the 2001 Outstanding Freshman Teacher from Alpha Lambda Delta (the freshman honor society) last Wednesday, April 11th.  This award has been given yearly for the past ten years "in recognition of superior motivation and instruction of freshman students."

and to Dominique Homberger, who became editor with special responsibility for  vertebrates of the journal Zoologischer Anzeiger. She has been on the Editorial Board of that journal since 1994. 

Briefly glimpsed in the LSU Union--Marsh Sundberg, former member of the Department of Plant Biology and current Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas, was back in mid March for his wife’s PhD defense.  Marsh is the Editor of the Plant Science Bulletin, a quarterly publication of the Botanical Society of America.
......from the Financial Times [London]
A story related to one included in BioSciNews, Volume 2, Number 2, (see NSF Research Coordination Networks Program) appeared in the Financial Times Limited 2001 (3-4 March 2001). Clive Cookson writes about the Deep Green project and mentions LSU and the work of Russell Chapman, original Deep Green participant: THE NATURE OF THINGS: A project to unravel the ancestry of today's flora has produced a surprise.  If you don't want to read the entire article, the following pertinent parts about Chapman's work are given here:
     "Although a single lineage of green algae, the charophyceae, gave rise to all land plants, it turns out that the other three main groups of green algae conquered the land, too - but they just did not get anywhere.
     "Russ Chapman, a Deep Green biologist at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, is particularly interested in the obscure algal group called trentepohliales, which specialize today in growing above ground on trees, walls and rooftops. Although these algae grow mainly in the tropics, they are also common in the damp and mild conditions of western Ireland, where several species form orange and red mats on stone and tree bark. (The orange colour of the carotenoid pigments in the trentepohliales overwhelms the green of the chlorophyll that is also present.)
     "Chapman hopes that further research will give some clues about the reasons why the trentepohliales - which emerged from the sea rather than fresh water - seem to have hit an evolutionary dead-end." 
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
...and an NSF-Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant  Jason D. Weckstein, PhD student of Fred Sheldon, was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for his proposal "A cophylogenetic analysis of avian hosts and their parasites: toucans (Aves: Piciformes) and chewing lice (Insecta: Pthiraptera).   Jason will receive $8067 to be used for travel and supplies in his research. Abstract. Phylogenetic studies can answer important questions about evolution. One problem faced by phylogeneticists is that, when studying free-living organisms, they often lack information about the history of their groups' habitat and geographic distribution. Thus, a useful first step in phylogenetic studies is to reconstruct this history. Cophylogenetic studies of hosts and their parasites do this by superimposing the parasite phylogeny onto the phylogeny of the host.  Speciation events in the host group are analogous to biogeographic vicariance events. Speciation, or lack thereof, in the parasites represents their response to geographic and ecological changes caused by these vicariant events. For the proposed study, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences will be used to reconstruct the Phylogeny of an avian host group (Ramphastos toucans) and two of its chewing louse genera (Austrophilopterus and Menacanthus). These parasite lineages differ markedly in their ecology, behavior, and morphology. The object of the study will be to determine how groups with different life history strategies (the parasites) respond to identical geographical and habitat perturbations (vicariance and diversification in the hosts). Insights gained in this rather simple system should shed light on patterns of evolutionary change in the more complex systems of free-living organisms.
Class field trips.  Please submit trip requests to Jana Kloss at least 3-4 days in advance of the scheduled field trip.  The students must be covered by student travel accident insurance BEFORE they go on a trip.  This insurance is for the protection of the student since the University assumes no liability in the case of injury to a student as a result of an accident while on a field trip.  If it is impossible to inform Jana days in advance, at least be sure to give her sufficient notice so she will be able to complete and submit the forms to Insurance/Risk Management prior to your departure from the campus. 
Write On Biologist *Undergraduate student authors
Travel and Presentations
The 48th Annual Systematics Symposium of the Missouri Botanical Garden
This year's Missouri Botanical Garden Fall Symposium topic is "Biological Invasions." In addition to six invited daytime speakers, the featured  speaker for the evening grand finale will be Julie Denslow of the USDA Forest Service and adjunct member of the department.  For this high honor Denslow has chosen to speak on the timely topic of "Weeds in Paradise." 
Where are the tiger lilies?  --Spider lily (Hymenocallis occidentalis). Where are the tiger lilies?  Digital images by David J. Longstreth; identification courtesy of Lowell E. Urbatsch.
21 April 2001
Proofreading by Vermar D. Hargrove and Thomas Dietz
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