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August 4, 1997
Headliners
The July 21 dedication of the state's new Oiled Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center drew slick coverage from media throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood and Gary Griggs, director of UCSC's Institute of Marine Sciences, appeared in many of the reports. Coverage included TV stations KRON, KPIX, KNTV, KION, and KSBW, radio stations KSCO and KLIV, and the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Santa Cruz County Sentinel, among other papers (photos of the dedication).
Several science and medical reporters covered a study by biologist Gary Silberstein and others on a possible link between a kidney cancer gene and breast cancer. The Boston Globe carried a front-page article, and the Associated Press ran the story on its wire. Other mentions appeared in Science online, the Portland Oregonian, and the Sentinel.
Our own John Wilkes, director of the Science Communication Program, represented the mass media in a National Public Radio discussion of author Elaine Showalter's book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. Showalter asserts that Gulf War syndrome, recovered memories, and other "hysterias" of the 1990s are much like the 1690s witch-hunts, and are fostered by the media. To hear Wilkes's thoughts on the topic, go to NPR's World Wide Web site at http://www.npr.org and look up Talk of the Nation on July 21, 1997. You'll need to download the free Real Audio player.
The international science journal Nature covered a new National Research Council report, chaired by seismologist Thorne Lay, on the uses and potential abuses of data collected under the auspices of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The military should allow unlimited scientific access to all of the data, Lay's panel urged.
A dramatically illustrated New York Times article on great white sharks spotlighted marine biologist Burney Le Boeuf's attempts to learn about their feeding behaviors. Le Boeuf and colleagues are attaching acoustic tags to sharks and elephant seals, their blubbery prey, near Ano Nuevo.
The Central California Writing Project's (CCWP) workshop for principals and administrators was featured in a recent story in the Santa Cruz County Sentinel. The Sentinel reporter spoke with CCWP founder and director Don Rothman, who leads the workshop, as well as many participants who found the 12-hour workshop inspiring and even transformational.
The Los Angeles Times checked in with computer scientist Kevin Karplus about his devotion to recumbent bicycles. An avid lifelong cyclist, Karplus switched to the unusual-looking recumbent bike after 30 years of pedaling in an upright fashion, in part to relieve wrist strain.
When the UCSC Fire Department joined the California Department of Forestry and other local firefighters to burn 55 acres of meadowland on campus in July, the Sentinel, KSBW, and KSCO radio covered the event (photos).