Op-Ed Contributors: Save the Wolves of Isle Royale National Park

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Moose first appeared on this Michigan island in the first decade of the 20th century, apparently by swimming from the mainland. With no predator to challenge them, the moose population surged (interspersed by two crashes, from starvation) and devastated the island's vegetation in search of food. Then wolves arrived in the late 1940s by crossing an ice bridge from Canada, and began to bring balance to an ecosystem that had lurched out of control.

Today, moose are essentially the only supply of food for the wolves, and wolf predation is the most typical cause of death for moose. But the wolf population is small, and decades of inbreeding have taken their toll. The ice bridges that allow mainland wolves to infuse the island's wolf population with new genes form far less frequently because of our warming climate. With the number of wolves reduced to little more than a handful, they face the prospect of extinction.

The National Park Service is expected to decide this fall whether to save the Isle Royale wolves — a decision that will test our ideas about wilderness and our relationship with nature. This is because the park is also a federally designated wilderness area, where, under federal law, "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." If we intervene to save the wolf, will we be undermining the very idea of not meddling that, since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, has been the guiding principle behind the protection of 109 million acres of federal land?

The park service has three options: conserve Isle Royale's wolf population by taking new wolves to the island to mitigate inbreeding, an action known as genetic rescue; reintroduce wolves to the island, if and when they go extinct; or do nothing, even if the wolves disappear.

As the lead researchers in the study of wolves and moose, we favor conservation or reintroduction. But more important than our view is the reasoning behind it.

Wilderness is conventionally viewed as a place where nature should be allowed to take its course, free of human interference. This is essentially the principle of nonintervention that has guided America's relationship with wilderness areas for roughly 50 years.

Importantly, two of the architects of modern-day thinking about wilderness, the wildlife biologists Aldo Leopold and Adolph Murie, supported the idea of introducing wolves to Isle Royale in the 1940s — to conserve a habitat being overrun by moose — before wolves had arrived on their own.

The principle of nonintervention touches on fundamental conservation wisdom. But we find ourselves in a world where the welfare of humans and the biosphere faces considerable threats — climate change, invasive species and altered biogeochemical cycles, to name a few. Where no place on the planet is untouched by humans, faith in nonintervention makes little sense. We have already altered nature's course everywhere. Our future relationship with nature will be more complicated. Stepping in will sometimes be wise, but not always. Navigating that complexity without hubris will be a great challenge.

These realizations have led a number of environmental scholars to consider new visions for the meaning of wilderness. One is of a place where concern for ecosystem health is paramount, even if human action is required to maintain it.

The future health of Isle Royale will be judged against one of the most important findings in conservation science: that a healthy ecosystem depends critically on the presence of top predators like wolves when large herbivores, like moose, are present. Without top predators, prey tend to become overabundant and decimate plants and trees that many species of birds, mammals and insects depend on. Top predators maintain the diversity of rare plants that would otherwise be eaten, and of rare insects that depend on those plants. The loss of top predators may disturb the nutrient cycling of entire ecosystems. In addition, predators improve the health of prey populations by weeding out the weakest individuals. Also, wolves are a boon to foxes, eagles, ravens and other species that scavenge from carcasses that wolves provide.

Given that moose will remain on Isle Royale for the foreseeable future, the National Park Service should initiate a genetic rescue by introducing new wolves to the island.

In a world increasingly out of balance, Isle Royale National Park is a place with all its parts, where humans kill neither wolves nor moose, nor log its forests. Places like it, where we can witness beauty while reflecting on how to preserve it, have become all too rare.

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Dot Earth Blog: How Technology and Tourism Can Help Sustain Mexico's Sea Turtles

Sea turtles have roamed the oceans for close to 200 million years, surviving assaults that doomed the dinosaurs. Around the world different species now face threats ranging from coastal building to poaching and drowning in fish nets.

The latest hot spot for turtle trouble is Magdalena Bay, an 870-square-mile haven for whales, dolphins, sea birds and five species of sea turtles tucked along the Pacific coast of Mexico's Baja Peninsula north of the tourist hub of Cabo San Lucas. Forces large and small are converging on small-scale fishing operations in the bay, towns like Puerto Adolfo López Mateos (see map), and nearby ocean waters, with the goal of cutting turtle deaths while sustaining incomes.

I encourage you to watch a new 15-minute film, "¡Viva la Tortuga! Meshing Conservation and Culture in Magdalena Bay," to learn more:

This is the third in a prize-winning series of short documentaries on sustainable use of the world's living resources created by Pace University students in a course I co-teach with Prof. Maria Luskay. (I posted on the previous two films, on shrimp farming and cork forests.)

Our latest effort had its debut last night on the Pace campus in Pleasantville, N.Y., and there's a public screening and discussion at the Manhattan campus at 4 p.m. today. You can join a Twitter discussion about the issues and the film using the tag #PaceBaja.

The documentary chronicles how communities that once depended on sea turtle poaching and other activities depleting the region's rich natural resources are now testing a new economic model, one built around fishing with turtle conservation in mind and tourism focused on the area's extraordinary marine life.

The short film provides an intimate portrait of Grupo Tortuguero, a coalition of groups in the region working to balance economic advancement with environmental protection and striving to create a better life for both the community and the endangered sea turtles.

The course blog, managed by Adam Yogel, has covered the students' learning process in shooting and editing the film but also kept track of relevant news, including the decision by United States fisheries officials to single out loggerhead deaths in this part of Mexico in a January report to Congress on improving international fisheries management.

The prime concern is a recent spike in loggerhead losses associated with gill-net fishing in ocean waters near Magdalena Bay. The barrier beach separating the bay and ocean there is sometimes called "Playa de Los Muertos" — the beach of the dead — because it is so littered with turtle remains and other dead marine life.

Mexican officials have been in quiet discussions with American marine fisheries agencies and with some biologists studying turtle deaths in Baja, but publicly have pushed back, questioning whether fishing is the cause of the pulse of recent loggerhead deaths.

Just last week, several Mexican newspapers carried stories quoting officials asserting that other threats, including toxic algae, could be to blame.

As Yogel reported a few days ago, conservation groups have ramped up pressure, petitioning American fisheries agency to impose trade sanctions.

Most exciting to me is evidence that innovation, both in new business models and fishing gear, can make a big difference. Watch the sections of the film on the work of RED Sustainable Travel, which now employs fishermen part of the year to run turtle surveys involving visiting students and tourists. We used this group for our trip and give it high marks. (We paid full price.)

The fishing innovation is stringing LED lights on gill nets, a technique developed and tested by John Wang of the University of Hawaii and studied in the field by Jesse Senko of Arizona State University. (A five-minute version of the documentary focuses on his project.)

Here's an illustration showing that method taken from an animation produced for our film by Lou Guarneri:

There's more to come, including a Google+ Hangout on Air with Wallace J. Nichols, a turtle biologist and founder of Grupo Tortuguero who was a vital source for our project. Also please read the students' reflections on the filmmaking process in an EarthDesk post by team member Megan Spaulding.

[12:52 p.m. | Update | Chris Tackett of Treehugger has given the film a thumbs up.]

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The Week: Celebrating the Web; an Atomic Movie and a Hurricane Over Saturn

Smithsonian Institute/Smithsonian Institution, via Reuters; Don Hurlbert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A facial reconstruction of a 14-year-old girl from the Jamestown colony site in Virginia, whose skull, left, shows evidence that her remains were dug up and eaten.

So many piquant tidbits this week: We were able to see a revival of the world's first Web site (which had no funny cat photos), watch the first movie starring tiny atoms, and view the first images of a surprisingly Earth-like hurricane swirling over Saturn.

Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An image of the first Web site, which was posted April 30, 1993, by a physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Princeton University Art of Science

An inverted hanging shell built with plates of chocolate and welded with liquid chocolate, by Alex Jordan, Sigrid Adriaenssens and Axel Kilian, part of an exhibit at Princeton.

Developments

Computer Science

Happy Birthday, WWW!

The world's first Web site, posted on April 30, 1993, was — fittingly enough — about the World Wide Web itself. The site, bare bones by modern standards, was both a primer and tool kit, giving such information as how to set up Web servers on the Internet, which was well established by then. Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who devised the project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had originally thought to call it "Mesh," but changed his mind while writing the code, which he did on a modest-looking NeXT computer. Last week, on the 20th anniversary of this debut, CERN reposted the original site, which had been taken down at some point, as part of a larger effort to preserve digital history. A journalistic footnote: The first newspaper article to discuss the World Wide Web ran in this newspaper, on Dec. 8, 1993, with Mr. Berners-Lee explaining how he created the Web as a way to share work with fellow physicists: "I realized that if everyone had the same information as me, my life would be easier."

The World's Smallest Movie

Using "thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action," scientists from IBM Research were able to create a brief movie, "A Boy and His Atom," in which the figure of a boy, arranged out of atoms, prances and jumps on a trampoline, also made of atoms. The black-and-white short is low on suspense but technologically breathtaking: Using a microscope that magnifies the atoms more than 100 million times, the researchers painstakingly arranged carbon monoxide molecules and took still images of them, which were strung together to produce the animation. For the most part, IBM plays with atoms to "explore the limits of data storage," as the movie explains, but a short documentary on YouTube shows another side of the story. "If I can do this by making a movie and I can get 1,000 kids to join science rather than going to law school, I would be super happy," says Andreas Heinrich of IBM Research.

Video by IBM

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

Archaeology

Evidence of Cannibalism

Things were indisputably miserable for the early colonists of Jamestown, Va., who sailed from England expecting to find gold and instead suffered famine, disease and attacks from American Indians. There was written evidence that the settlers turned to cannibalism as a last resort, but not until last week did archaeologists step forward with physical corroboration: "Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609," as The New York Times reported. The bones of the girl, whom the archaeologists dubbed "Jane," were found in a trash pit; she was probably not murdered, the scientists say, and most likely arrived at the colony at a particularly luckless moment, in the summer of 1609, right before the period known as the Starving Time. "It appears that her brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles were eaten, with the brain likely eaten first, because it decomposes so quickly after death," Smithsonian magazine noted.

Astronomy

Suddenly, Saturn

The eye of the hurricane is 1,250 miles wide — at least 20 times larger than those typically experienced on Earth — and the winds blow at 300 miles an hour. Fortunately, this storm is far from human habitation, hovering over the north pole of Saturn. "We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology, who works on NASA's Cassini spacecraft team, "but there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale." Cassini, in orbit around Saturn for nine years, has been watching an enormous hexagon-shaped weather pattern over the north pole, but only recently was able to peek inside and see the vortex. "Unlike a terrestrial hurricane, there's no ocean underneath, and that's one of the puzzles we're trying to figure out," NASA explains in a video.

Psychology

Children These Days

"Today's Teens: More Materialistic, Less Willing to Work," announced San Diego State University in a headline that was surely catnip for baby boomers. The conclusions came from a study comparing the attitudes of three generations of American high school seniors, from 1976 to 2007, based on responses to a survey. "Kids surveyed from 2005 were most materialistic and least willing to work hard: 62 percent said that having lots of money was important, compared with 48 percent of those surveyed between 1976 and 1978," as New Scientist put it. "However, only 25 percent said they thought hard work was important, compared with 39 percent of those asked in the '70s." Jean M. Twenge, the psychologist who led the study, offered this take: "That type of 'fantasy gap' is consistent with other studies showing a generational increase in narcissism and entitlement."

Coming Up

Artful Science

A Princeton University art contest, soliciting "images produced during the course of scientific research that have aesthetic merit," mustered some pretty cool stuff: an oblique photograph of an architectural structure built of chocolate, a highly intimate look at cells of the fruit fly ovary, and so forth. An exhibit opens this Friday, with a free reception on campus and the victors receiving their spoils. "The top three entrants will be awarded cash prizes in amounts calculated by the golden ratio (whose proportions have since antiquity been considered to be aesthetically pleasing)," Princeton said, "First prize, $250; second prize, $154.51; and third prize, $95.49."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 9, 2013

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Tuesday with a report in a roundup of science news about the 20th anniversary of the world's first Web site misstated the year the site was posted. As the report correctly noted, it was 1993, not 1983.

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Dot Earth Blog: Exploring Environmental Issues and Communication With Students in Japan

Dot Earth is relatively quiescent at the moment because we're in the final sprint finishing the spring term at Pace University, including preparing for the launch of ¡Viva La Tortuga! Meshing Conservation and Culture in Magdalena Bay, our documentary on sea turtle conservation in Mexico's Baja region (there are public screenings this afternoon on the Westchester County campus and Wednesday in New York City, and of course you'll be able to watch the video here on Dot Earth, as with previous efforts).

In the meantime, I thought some of you may be interested in a conversation I had last week on the environment, journalism, and communication with 10th graders and teachers at the Canadian Academy, an international school that opened in 1990 on Rokko Island in Kobe, Japan. They asked some great questions!

1:54 p.m. | Update |
A great example of the use of Hangouts on Air in learning came via Twitter:

@Revkin Cool! @SCUSolar13 is doing #hangoutsonair with kids- teaching 5th graders all about their new solar house. http://t.co/P9GLH0aWSy

— Marika Krause (@SassyNewsie) 7 May 13

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A Dream of Glowing Trees Is Assailed for Gene-Tinkering

Hoping to give new meaning to the term "natural light," a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

The new project's goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. "We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don't expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0," the project's Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic biology and to "inspire others to create new living things." As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident.

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort.

The project "will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology," the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the "first-ever intentional environmental release of an avowedly 'synthetic biology' organism anywhere in the world." Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the project's organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied.

Antony Evans, the manager of the glowing plant project, said in an interview that the activity would be safe.

"What we are doing is very identical to what has been done in research laboratories and big institutions for 20 years," he said. Still, he added, "We are very cognizant of the precedent we are setting" with the do-it-yourself project and that some of the money raised would be used to explore public policy issues.

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature.

The glowing plant project is the brainchild of Mr. Evans, a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco, and Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist. They met at Singularity University, a program that introduces entrepreneurs to futuristic technology.

Dr. Amirav-Drory runs a company called Genome Compiler, which makes a program that can be used to design DNA sequences. When the sequence is done, it is transmitted to a mail-order foundry that synthesizes the DNA.

Kyle Taylor, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at Stanford last year, will be in charge of putting the synthetic DNA into the plant. The research will be done, at least initially, at BioCurious, a communal laboratory in Silicon Valley that describes itself as a "hackerspace for biotech."

The first plant the group is modifying is Arabidopsis thaliana, part of the mustard family and the laboratory rat of the plant world. The organizers hope to move next to a glowing rose.

Scientists have long made glowing creatures for research purposes, using including one or more monkeys, cats, pigs, dogs and worms. Glowing zebra fish have been sold in some aquarium shops for years.

These creatures typically have the gene for a green fluorescent protein, derived from a jellyfish, spliced into their DNA. But they glow only when ultraviolet light is shined on them.

Others going back to the 1980s have transplanted the gene for luciferase, an enzyme used by fireflies, into plants. But luciferase will not work without another chemical called luciferin. So the plants did not glow unless luciferin was constantly fed to them. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University reported in the journal Plos One that they had created a tobacco plant that glowed entirely on its own, however dimly. They spliced into the plant all six genes from a marine bacterium necessary to produce both luciferase and luciferin.

Alexander Krichevsky, who led that research, has started a company, BioGlow, to commercialize glowing plants, starting with ornamental ones, since it is still impractical to replace light bulbs.

"Wouldn't you like your beautiful flowers to glow in the dark?" he said, invoking the glowing foliage in the movie "Avatar."

Dr. Krichevsky declined to provide more about the products, timetables or the investors backing his company, which is based in St. Louis.

Whether it will ever be possible to replace light bulbs remains to be seen and depends to some extent on how much of the plant's energy can be devoted to light production while still allowing the plant to grow. Mr. Evans said his group calculated, albeit with many assumptions, that a tree that covers a ground area of 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) by 10 meters might be able to cast as much light as a street lamp.

While the Agriculture Department regulates genetically modified plants, it does so under a law covering plant pests.

BioGlow has already obtained a letter from the department saying that it will not need approval to release its glowing plants because they are not plant pests, and are not made using plant pests. The hobbyist project hopes to get the same exemption.

Todd Kuiken, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, who has been studying the governance of both synthetic biology and the do-it-yourself movement, said the glowing plant project was an ideal test case.

"It exposes the gaps and holes in the regulatory structure, while it is, I would argue, a safe product in the grand scheme of things," Dr. Kuiken said. "A serious look needs to be taken at the regulatory system to see if it can handle the questions synthetic biology is going to raise."

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World Briefing | Africa: Disease Is Ravaging Continent’s Staple

Scientists say a disease destroying entire crops of cassava has spread out of East Africa into the heart of the continent, is attacking plants as far south as Angola and threatens to move west into Nigeria, the world's biggest producer of the potatolike root that helps feed 500 million Africans. Africa, which suffers debilitating food shortages, is losing 50 million tons a year of cassava to the cassava brown streak disease, said Claude Fauquet, a scientist and co-founder of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century. He said the results could be catastrophic if nothing is done to halt the disease.

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The Week: Celebrating the Web; an Atomic Movie and a Hurricane Over Saturn

Smithsonian Institute/Smithsonian Institution, via Reuters; Don Hurlbert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A facial reconstruction of a 14-year-old girl from the Jamestown colony site in Virginia, whose skull, left, shows evidence that her remains were dug up and eaten.

So many piquant tidbits this week: We were able to see a revival of the world's first Web site (which had no funny cat photos), watch the first movie starring tiny atoms, and view the first images of a surprisingly Earth-like hurricane swirling over Saturn.

Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An image of the first Web site, which was posted April 30, 1983, by a physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Princeton University Art of Science

An inverted hanging shell built with plates of chocolate and welded with liquid chocolate, by Alex Jordan, Sigrid Adriaenssens and Axel Kilian, part of an exhibit at Princeton.

Developments

Computer Science

Happy Birthday, WWW!

The world's first Web site, posted on April 30, 1993, was — fittingly enough — about the World Wide Web itself. The site, bare bones by modern standards, was both a primer and tool kit, giving such information as how to set up Web servers on the Internet, which was well established by then. Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who devised the project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had originally thought to call it "Mesh," but changed his mind while writing the code, which he did on a modest-looking NeXT computer. Last week, on the 20th anniversary of this debut, CERN reposted the original site, which had been taken down at some point, as part of a larger effort to preserve digital history. A journalistic footnote: The first newspaper article to discuss the World Wide Web ran in this newspaper, on Dec. 8, 1993, with Mr. Berners-Lee explaining how he created the Web as a way to share work with fellow physicists: "I realized that if everyone had the same information as me, my life would be easier."

The World's Smallest Movie

Using "thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action," scientists from IBM Research were able to create a brief movie, "A Boy and His Atom," in which the figure of a boy, arranged out of atoms, prances and jumps on a trampoline, also made of atoms. The black-and-white short is low on suspense but technologically breathtaking: Using a microscope that magnifies the atoms more than 100 million times, the researchers painstakingly arranged carbon monoxide molecules and took still images of them, which were strung together to produce the animation. For the most part, IBM plays with atoms to "explore the limits of data storage," as the movie explains, but a short documentary on YouTube shows another side of the story. "If I can do this by making a movie and I can get 1,000 kids to join science rather than going to law school, I would be super happy," says Andreas Heinrich of IBM Research.

Video by IBM

A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

Archaeology

Evidence of Cannibalism

Things were indisputably miserable for the early colonists of Jamestown, Va., who sailed from England expecting to find gold and instead suffered famine, disease and attacks from American Indians. There was written evidence that the settlers turned to cannibalism as a last resort, but not until last week did archaeologists step forward with physical corroboration: "Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609," as The New York Times reported. The bones of the girl, whom the archaeologists dubbed "Jane," were found in a trash pit; she was probably not murdered, the scientists say, and most likely arrived at the colony at a particularly luckless moment, in the summer of 1609, right before the period known as the Starving Time. "It appears that her brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles were eaten, with the brain likely eaten first, because it decomposes so quickly after death," Smithsonian magazine noted.

Astronomy

Suddenly, Saturn

The eye of the hurricane is 1,250 miles wide — at least 20 times larger than those typically experienced on Earth — and the winds blow at 300 miles an hour. Fortunately, this storm is far from human habitation, hovering over the north pole of Saturn. "We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth," said Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology, who works on NASA's Cassini spacecraft team, "but there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale." Cassini, in orbit around Saturn for nine years, has been watching an enormous hexagon-shaped weather pattern over the north pole, but only recently was able to peek inside and see the vortex. "Unlike a terrestrial hurricane, there's no ocean underneath, and that's one of the puzzles we're trying to figure out," NASA explains in a video.

Psychology

Children These Days

"Today's Teens: More Materialistic, Less Willing to Work," announced San Diego State University in a headline that was surely catnip for baby boomers. The conclusions came from a study comparing the attitudes of three generations of American high school seniors, from 1976 to 2007, based on responses to a survey. "Kids surveyed from 2005 were most materialistic and least willing to work hard: 62 percent said that having lots of money was important, compared with 48 percent of those surveyed between 1976 and 1978," as New Scientist put it. "However, only 25 percent said they thought hard work was important, compared with 39 percent of those asked in the '70s." Jean M. Twenge, the psychologist who led the study, offered this take: "That type of 'fantasy gap' is consistent with other studies showing a generational increase in narcissism and entitlement."

Coming Up

Artful Science

A Princeton University art contest, soliciting "images produced during the course of scientific research that have aesthetic merit," mustered some pretty cool stuff: an oblique photograph of an architectural structure built of chocolate, a highly intimate look at cells of the fruit fly ovary, and so forth. An exhibit opens this Friday, with a free reception on campus and the victors receiving their spoils. "The top three entrants will be awarded cash prizes in amounts calculated by the golden ratio (whose proportions have since antiquity been considered to be aesthetically pleasing)," Princeton said, "First prize, $250; second prize, $154.51; and third prize, $95.49."

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Maurice Hilleman, M.M.R. Vaccine’s Forgotten Hero

We live in an epidemiological bubble and are for the most part blissfully unaware of it. Diseases that were routine hazards of childhood for many Americans living today now seem like ancient history. And while every mother could once identify measles in a heartbeat, now even the best hospitals have to call in their eldest staff members to ask: "Is this what we think it is?"

To a remarkable extent, we owe our well-being, and in many cases our lives, to the work of one man and to events that happened 50 years ago this spring.

At 1 a.m. on March 21, 1963, an intense, irascible but modest Merck scientist named Maurice R. Hilleman was asleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill when his 5-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, woke him with a sore throat. Dr. Hilleman felt the side of her face and then the telltale swelling beneath the jaw indicating mumps. He tucked her back into bed, about the only treatment anyone could offer at the time.

For most children, mumps was a nuisance disease, nothing worse than a painful swelling of the salivary glands. But Dr. Hilleman knew that it could sometimes leave a child deaf or otherwise permanently impaired.

He quickly dressed and drove 20 minutes to pick up proper sampling equipment from his laboratory. Returning home, he woke Jeryl Lynn long enough to swab the back of her throat and immerse the specimen in a nutrient broth. Then he drove back to store it in the laboratory freezer.

The name Maurice Hilleman may not ring a bell. But today 95 percent of American children receive the M.M.R. — the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella that Dr. Hilleman invented, starting with the mumps strain he collected that night from his daughter.

It was by no means his only contribution. At Dr. Hilleman's death in 2005, other researchers credited him with having saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century. Over his career, he devised or substantially improved more than 25 vaccines, including 9 of the 14 now routinely recommended for children.

"One person did that!" said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a longtime friend of Dr. Hilleman's and now director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Truly amazing."

As a young man in Montana, Maurice Hilleman had intended only to become a manager at the J. C. Penney store. He turned out not to have the perfect retail personality. (Asked later in life what he was proudest of in his career, he replied, "Being able to survive while being a bastard.")

After getting a Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Chicago, he went on to spend most of his career at Merck, but the corporate personality also eluded him. He had a sailor's vocabulary, and his brand of peer review often included shipboard expletives (though he used them "in a constructive way," Dr. Fauci said with a smile).

But everyone recognized Dr. Hilleman's genius at discovering and perfecting vaccines, which he pursued, Dr. Fauci said, with a rare combination of "exquisite scientific knowledge" and an "amazingly practical get-it-done personality."

Vaccines are tools for coaxing the immune system to resist a disease without producing the actual symptoms, and making them was as much an art as a science. "It's not like there was a formula for this," said Dr. Paul A. Offit, a Philadelphia pediatrician, vaccine developer and the author of "Vaccinated," a 2007 biography of Dr. Hilleman.

The general practice was to isolate a disease organism, figure out how to keep it alive in the laboratory, then weaken or "attenuate" it by passing it over and over through a series of cells, typically from chicken embryos, until it could no longer reproduce in humans but could still elicit an immune response. Other steps followed, particularly for Dr. Hilleman, who was obsessed with safety and with stripping away unwanted side effects.

That spring of 1963, the Food and Drug Administration also granted the first license for a vaccine against measles. Much of the early work on the virus had been done in the laboratory of John F. Enders at Boston Children's Hospital, but the vaccine still commonly produced rashes and fevers when Dr. Hilleman began to work on it.

Under pressure from public health officials to stop a disease then killing more than 500 American children every year, Dr. Hilleman and Dr. Joseph Stokes, a pediatrician, devised a way to minimize the side effects by giving a gamma globulin shot in one arm and the measles vaccine in the other. It was the beginning of the end of the disease in this country.

Dr. Hilleman then went on to refine the vaccine over the next four years, eventually producing the much safer Moraten strain that is still in use today. As always, he kept himself in the background: The name stands for "more attenuated enders."

One other crucial event in the development of M.M.R. happened that spring of 1963: An epidemic of rubella began in Europe and quickly swept around the globe. In this country, the virus's devastating effect on first-trimester pregnancies caused about 11,000 newborns to die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An additional 20,000 suffered birth defects, including deafness, heart disease and cataracts.

Dr. Hilleman was already testing his own vaccine as the epidemic ended in 1965. But he agreed to work instead with a vaccine being developed by federal regulators. It was, he later recalled, "toxic, toxic, toxic." By 1969, he had cleaned it up enough to obtain F.D.A. approval and prevent another rubella epidemic. Finally, in 1971, he put his vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella together to make M.M.R., replacing a series of six shots with just two.

Or rather not finally. In 1978, having found a better rubella vaccine than his own, Dr. Hilleman asked its developer if he could use it in the M.M.R. The developer, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, then of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was momentarily speechless. It was an expensive choice for Merck, and might have been a painful one for anyone other than Dr. Hilleman.

"It's not that he didn't have an ego. He certainly did," Dr. Plotkin recalled in a recent interview. "But he valued excellence above that. Once he decided that this strain was better, he did what he had to do," even if it meant sacrificing his own work.

Given Dr. Hilleman's obsession with safety and effectiveness, it came as a bitter surprise toward the end of his life when his vaccine was at the center of what Dr. Offit called "a perfect storm of fear." In 1998, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, published an article alleging that M.M.R. had caused an epidemic of autism.

The lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, became a media celebrity, and some parents began to balk at having their children immunized; the vaccine's very success had made them forget just how devastating measles, mumps and rubella could be. Dr. Hilleman, who might reasonably have been expected to win a Nobel Prize, got hate mail and death threats instead.

Multiple independent studies would eventually demonstrate that there is no link between M.M.R. and autism, and Dr. Wakefield's work has been widely discredited. In 2010, the British medical authorities stripped him of the right to practice medicine, and The Lancet retracted the 1998 article.

It came too late, not just for Dr. Hilleman, who by then had died of cancer, but also for many parents who mistakenly believed that avoiding the vaccine was the right way to protect their children. In 2011 alone, a measles outbreak in Europe sickened 26,000 people and killed 9. Because the disease is contagious enough to pick up from a traveler walking by in the airport, cases still also occur in this country among the unvaccinated.

But Dr. Hilleman would probably still find reason to be encouraged. The Measles and Rubella Initiative, a global campaign organized in 2001, has given the M.M.R. vaccine to a billion children in this century, preventing 9.6 million deaths from measles alone, for less than $2 a dose. According to Dr. Stephen L. Cochi, a global immunization adviser at the C.D.C., the initiative is "on the verge of setting a target date" to eradicate the disease.

In this country, the strain that Dr. Hilleman collected from his daughter that night in 1963 has reduced the incidence of mumps to fewer than 1,000 cases a year, from 186,000. Characteristically, he named it not for himself but for his daughter. Jeryl Lynn Hilleman, now a financial consultant to biotech start-ups in Silicon Valley, turns the credit back on her father.

He was driven, she said in an interview, "by a need to be of use — of use to people, of use to humanity."

"All I did," she added, "was get sick at the right time, with the right virus, with the right father."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2013

An earlier photo caption with this article misspelled the given name of one of Dr. Hilleman's daughters. She is Jeryl Lynn, not Jeri Lynn.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2013

An earlier version of a home page summary on this article misspelled the surname of the girls pictured. It is Hilleman, not Hillemann.

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Psychiatry’s New Guide Falls Short, Experts Say

Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government's most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific "lack of validity."

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research.

"As long as the research community takes the D.S.M. to be a bible, we'll never make progress," Dr. Insel said, adding, "People think that everything has to match D.S.M. criteria, but you know what? Biology never read that book."

The revision, known as the D.S.M.-5 and the first since 1994, has stirred unprecedented questioning from the public, patient groups and, most fundamentally, senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain.

Decades of spending on neuroscience have taught scientists mostly what they do not know, undermining some of their most elemental assumptions. Genetic glitches that appear to increase the risk of schizophrenia in one person may predispose others to autism-like symptoms, or bipolar disorder. The mechanisms of the field's most commonly used drugs — antidepressants like Prozac, and antipsychosis medications like Zyprexa — have revealed nothing about the causes of those disorders. And major drugmakers have scaled back psychiatric drug development, having virtually no new biological "targets" to shoot for.

Dr. Insel is one of a growing number of scientists who think that the field needs an entirely new paradigm for understanding mental disorders, though neither he nor anyone else knows exactly what it will look like.

Even the chairman of the task force making revisions to the D.S.M., Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said the new manual was faced with doing the best it could with the scientific evidence available.

"The problem that we've had in dealing with the data that we've had over the five to 10 years since we began the revision process of D.S.M.-5 is a failure of our neuroscience and biology to give us the level of diagnostic criteria, a level of sensitivity and specificity that we would be able to introduce into the diagnostic manual," Dr. Kupfer said.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and '70s "were real heroes at the time," said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. "They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with 'normal.' But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn't have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don't have five diseases — they have one underlying condition."

Dr. Hyman, Dr. Insel and other experts said they hoped that the science of psychiatry would follow the direction of cancer research, which is moving from classifying tumors by where they occur in the body to characterizing them by their genetic and molecular signatures.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be "reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories" because "patients with mental disorders deserve better." His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Dr. Insel said in the interview that his motivation was not to disparage the D.S.M. as a clinical tool, but to encourage researchers and especially outside reviewers who screen proposals for financing from his agency to disregard its categories and investigate the biological underpinnings of disorders instead. He said he had heard from scientists whose proposals to study processes common to depression, schizophrenia and psychosis were rejected by grant reviewers because they cut across D.S.M. disease categories.

"They didn't get it," Dr. Insel said of the reviewers. "What we're trying to do with RDoC is say actually this is a fresh way to think about it." He added that he hoped researchers would also participate in projects funded through the Obama administration's new brain initiative.

Dr. Michael First, a psychiatry professor at Columbia who edited the last edition of the manual, said, "RDoC is clearly the way of the future," although it would take years to get results that could apply to patients. In the meantime, he said, "RDoC can't do what the D.S.M. does. The D.S.M. is what clinicians use. Patients will always come into offices with symptoms."

For at least a decade, Dr. First and others said, patients will continue to be diagnosed with D.S.M. categories as a guide, and insurance companies will reimburse with such diagnoses in mind.

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the D.S.M., said that the new edition's refinements were "based on research in the last 20 years that will improve the utility of this guide for practitioners, and improve, however incrementally, the care patients receive."

He added: "The last thing we want to do is be defensive or apologetic about the state of our field. But at the same time, we're not satisfied with it either. There's nothing we'd like better than to have more scientific progress."

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E.P.A. Plan to Clean Up Gowanus Canal Meets Local Resistance

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

A plan by the E.P.A. to clean the Gowanus Canal has run into protests from residents in several Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Almost everybody wants the Gowanus Canal cleansed of its toxic gunk.

But a $500 million plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to do just that has run into protests from otherwise environmentally conscious residents in several Brooklyn neighborhoods. They want the canal purged of pollutants like PCBs, lead, mercury and raw sewage, but are fighting the methods the agency has chosen.

One neighborhood fears that the sludge taken out from the canal would poison the air over their ball fields, and others worry that the location of a sewage-processing site needed for the cleanup would destroy a beloved swimming pool.

The disputes illustrate a predicament that often crops up in environmental remediation: those affected see the cure as worse than the disease.

One part of the E.P.A.'s plan for the 1.8-mile canal would require the city to build an eight-million-gallon sewage storage tank so that the area's combined waste and rainwater sewers would not overflow during heavy storms and contaminate the canal. But the site the agency has chosen for the tank would place it under a park that has a popular 3-foot-9-inch-deep swimming pool, fondly known as the Double D pool because it is between Douglass and DeGraw Streets.

Sabine Aronowsky, a local activist and mother, said the pool was not just a place for children to cool off during sweltering summer days, but "one of the last remaining bastions of Brooklyn as I know it, a real community gathering place." Children from Park Slope, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens mingle with those from three nearby housing projects.

"There's nothing like getting into a bathing suit for neutralizing class lines," said Holly White, a mother of two young children who learned to swim at the Double D and caper there much of the summer.

The Bloomberg administration tried to close the pool in 2010 for budgetary reasons, but neighborhood outrage succeeded in saving it.

Construction of the sewage storage tank would close the pool, and possibly an adjoining playground, basketball court and skate park, for years; officials have not said whether they would come up with a temporary alternative. Residents have gathered 700 signatures opposing the tank's location and have suggested an empty Consolidated Edison lot a few blocks away as a more suitable spot. The E.P.A. says that in any case, the pool will one day have to be dug up since it was built above the remnants of a plant that manufactured natural gas from coal and left behind a residue of toxic coal tars.

"Something has to happen to it, and the question is what is that something," said Walter Mugdan, a regional Superfund director for the E.P.A. "Does it include excavation of all the soils in the area? And if it includes excavation, there's going to be a temporary closing of the pool in any event."

The E.P.A. finished taking comments from the affected neighborhoods late last month and plans to publish its final plan before the end of the year. Dredging could begin in 2015 and be completed by 2020.

Once dredging begins, the canal sediment would have to be "dewatered" nearby, on barges or on land. Then, most of the toxic sludge would be shipped out of state for treatment, but some of the leftover could be treated in Brooklyn and blended into concrete to be used as landfill.

The location of the proposed Brooklyn treatment plant is the subject of another protest, this time in Red Hook. The neighborhood has been slowly gentrifying, but gritty industry still has a large presence; it is perennially considered for unpopular uses like garbage-transfer stations.

The chief idea the E.P.A. has been considering is to build the dewatering and treatment plant on a parking lot that is part of the sprawling Gowanus Bay Terminal. But the terminal sits next to ball fields, a large swimming pool and the Red Hook Houses, public low-income housing. Some residents, as well as the owners of popular Latin American food trucks that congregate there, fear the plant — known as a Confined Disposal Facility — could create a noxious stench.

"We're not saying we're opposed to dredging," said Bea Byrd, a longtime resident of the Red Hook Houses. "But how can you have a sludge plant on the other side of where children are playing ball? Never mind the Red Hook Houses where we have to breathe the air. We have residents with asthma and cancer."

John Quadrozzi Jr., who owns the terminal, says the least toxic portion of the sediment would be transported a short distance in enclosed barges to be processed in an enclosed plant and would emerge as a safe concrete mixture. Mr. Quadrozzi wants to use the concrete products in the construction of a pier, near the end of Columbia Street, where oceangoing ships could dock. He and the E.P.A. have tried to build support by offering training at the plant for eventual jobs and promising to build a maritime park, complete with an Intrepid-like museum on a freighter.

But neighborhood activists like John McGettrick, a chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association, have accused the E.P.A. of trying to enrich Mr. Quadrozzi, the owner of several city concrete plants and someone they say has been cited by New York State's environmental agency for illegally dumping in Gowanus Bay. Mr. Quadrozzi said that after years of waiting for state permits to repair a bulkhead, he paid $60,000 to settle accusations brought by the New York agency when the bulkhead collapsed into the bay.

The E.P.A. does have an alternative plan for treating the sludge: Shipping it all to states like Idaho and Texas where existing plants can process it. But that remedy is more expensive.

In an interview, Mr. Mugdan said the agency would not dispose of sludge in Red Hook "unless there is community acceptance." He added, "So far, there's been pretty vigorous opposition."

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Concussion Fears Lead to Growth in Specialized Clinics for Young Athletes

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Brian Lilja is a patient at the Boston Children's Hospital youth sports concussion clinic. His mother, Jennifer, said his injuries caused a "scary" personality change.

BOSTON — The drumbeat of alarming stories linking concussions among football players and other athletes to brain disease has led to a new and mushrooming American phenomenon: the specialized youth sports concussion clinic, which one day may be as common as a mall at the edge of town.

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Isabelle Kindle, center, a hockey player at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, recently returned to the ice after two concussions. There is no standard recommended recovery time for young athletes who have had a concussion. Doctors may consider genetic, biomedical or anatomical characteristics in addition to the severity of the injury.

In the last three years, dozens of youth concussion clinics have opened in nearly 35 states — outpatient centers often connected to large hospitals that are now filled with young athletes complaining of headaches, amnesia, dizziness or problems concentrating. The proliferation of clinics, however, comes at a time when there is still no agreed-upon, established formula for treating the injuries.

"It is inexact, a science in its infancy," said Dr. Michael O'Brien of the sports concussion clinic at Boston Children's Hospital. "We know much more than we once did, but there are lots of layers we still need to figure out."

Deep concern among parents about the effects of concussions is colliding with the imprecise understanding of the injury. To families whose anxiety has been stoked by reports of former N.F.L. players with degenerative brain disease, the new facilities are seen as the most expert care available. That has parents parading to the clinic waiting rooms.

The trend is playing out vividly in Boston, where the phone hardly stops ringing at the youth sports concussion clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Parents call saying, 'I saw a scary report about concussions on Oprah or on the 'Doctors' show or Katie Couric's show,' " Dr. Barbara Semakula said, describing a typical day at the clinic. "Their child just hurt his head, and they've already leapt to the worst possible scenarios. It's a little bit of a frenzy out there."

About three miles away, at Boston Children's Hospital, patient visits per month to its sports concussion clinic have increased more than fifteenfold in the last five years, to 400 from 25. The clinic, which once consisted of two consultation rooms, now employs nine doctors at four locations and operates six days a week.

"It used to be a completely different scene, with a child's father walking in reluctantly to tell us, 'He's fine; this concussion stuff is nonsense,' " said Dr. William Meehan, a clinic co-founder. "It's totally the opposite now. A kid has one concussion, and the parents are very worried about how he'll be functioning at 50 years old."

Doctors nationwide say the new focus on the dangers of concussions is long overdue. Concerned parents are properly seeking better care, which has saved and improved lives. But a confluence of outside forces has also spawned a mania of sorts that has turned the once-ignored concussion into the paramount medical fear of young athletes across the country.

Most prominent have been news media reports about scores of relatively young former professional athletes reporting serious cognitive problems and other later-life illnesses. Several ex-N.F.L. players who have committed suicide, most notably Junior Seau, a former San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots star, have been found posthumously to have had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma.

State legislatures have commanded the attention of families as well, with 43 states passing laws requiring school-age athletes who have sustained a concussion to have written authorization from a medical professional, often one trained in concussion management, before they can return to their sport.

The two Boston clinics, one started in 2007 and the other in 2011, are typical examples of the concussion clinic phenomenon, busy centers of a new branch of American health care and windows into the crux of a mounting youth sports fixation.

"We are really in the trenches of a new medical experience," said Richard Ginsburg, the director of psychological services at Massachusetts General Hospital's youth sports concussion clinic. "First of all, there's some hysteria, so a big part of our job is to educate people that 90 percent of concussions are resolved in a month, if not sooner. As for the other 10 percent of patients, they need somewhere to go.

"So we see them. We see it all."

Uncertainty Among Doctors

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Eleanor R. Adair, Microwave Safety Researcher, Dies at 86

Edward A. Ornelas

Eleanor R. Adair, a scientist who studied microwave radiation, at a test chamber at an Air Force base in San Antonio in 2000.

Eleanor R. Adair, a scientist who spent decades exposing monkeys and eventually people (including herself) to microwave radiation to determine whether it posed serious health risks — she concluded, emphatically and somewhat controversially, that it did not — died on April 20 in Hamden, Conn. She was 86.

The cause was complications of a stroke, her daughter, Margaret Adair Quinn, said.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Adair, who had done her doctoral work in sensory psychology, was pursuing an interesting but not necessarily provocative topic: how people and animals react physiologically to external heat sources. Yet over the next three decades — after her research led her to study heat generated through microwave radiation, which is used in microwave ovens and emitted at low levels by things like cellphones and electrical transmission lines — Dr. Adair became an increasingly prominent and firm voice of assurance that microwave radiation posed no health risk.

"All the emphasis that we need more research on power line fields, cellphones, police radar — this involves billions of dollars that could be much better spent on other health problems," Dr. Adair said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. "Because there is really nothing there."

For some people close to the issue, those were fighting words.

Even as numerous studies have found that microwave ovens are safe and many scientists say there is no evidence that cellphones cause cancer or other health problems, the rising use of cellphones, wireless Internet signals and some medical and military devices has continued to raise questions about their risk. Last year, a panel of the World Health Organization listed microwave radiation as "possibly carcinogenic." In March, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would review its standards for cellphone use for the first time since 1996.

Some scientists do not use the term microwave radiation because they are concerned it is misleading and scares people unnecessarily. Microwave radiation is far weaker than the radiation in X-rays or gamma rays.

Advocates for more research count Dr. Adair in to a camp that focuses too much on heat or thermal effects from microwaves and is too quick to dismiss other ways microwaves might affect health.

"There's something going on, and the question is what that is and whether it's dangerous," said Louis Slesin, the editor of Microwave News, a Web site that is often skeptical of the role industry and the military play in influencing health standards related to the issue. "Don't let anyone tell you they know the answer to that question."

Although Dr. Adair said she did not receive money from cellphone makers or industries whose products released microwave radiation, she served for five years late in her career as a senior scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory in San Antonio. The Air Force uses radar that emits microwaves.

Dr. Adair was indisputably an innovator in studying microwave radiation, work she began in the mid-1970s while a fellow at the John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven. First with squirrel monkeys and then with human volunteers, she placed subjects in a chamber into which she released relatively high levels of microwaves for about 45 minutes, followed by a cool-down period. She focused on what impact the heat generated by microwaves might have — and she said she never found much more than perspiration. She said the monkeys and the people mostly enjoyed the experience.

"Particularly if the environment is cool, they love it when the field comes on," she told The Times. She said: "It is very easy to sense it and it feels good. If they are in a warm environment, and the field is strong they may start to sweat and they may feel quite uncomfortable. They always have an option of getting out of the chamber at any time, saying, 'I've had enough.' "

Richard A. Tell, who consults for cellular companies and other industries and who served with Dr. Adair on a committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that helps set standards for permissible microwave levels, said she "did the first and only studies that have ever been done so far in which humans were studied under controlled conditions."

Eleanor Campbell Reed was born on Nov. 28, 1926, in Arlington, Mass. Her father owned a Dodge dealership near Boston and her mother worked as a fashion illustrator before she married. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1955. In 1952 she married Robert K. Adair, who would later become a prominent physicist at Yale. Mr. Adair became involved in his wife's work in her later years and sometimes appeared with her at conferences.

Besides her daughter, survivors include her husband; her son, Douglas; two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

"She would always be the first human subject in all of her experiments," including those involving exposure to microwaves, her daughter said. "She said it was absolutely the most comfortable heat that she ever experienced. She described it once as like having the sun come out — you just suddenly feel all warm and cozy. You're warm on the inside, not overly hot on the outside."

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New York City to Double Number of Storm Evacuation Zones

The Bloomberg administration announced on Friday that it would double to six the number of evacuation zones along New York City's coast and expand them to include an additional 640,000 residents, saying that the new map would provide more flexibility when major storms hit.

The changes to the city's coastal storm plan were the most visible initiative to emerge from a report on the response to Hurricane Sandy prepared at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's request.

The report repeatedly praises city agencies and their state and federal counterparts, and acknowledges few if any significant missteps as government officials scrambled to respond to and recover from the severity of Hurricane Sandy, which killed 43 city residents and damaged thousands of homes.

"Over all, the response was very strong," said Caswell F. Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, who oversaw the preparation of the report with Linda I. Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services. He said the point was to identify ways the city could do better, not to find fault.

"We were certainly not in a self-flagellation mode," Mr. Holloway said.

The new evacuation zones will bring to nearly three million the number of New Yorkers living in these areas. The city has roughly eight million residents.

Mr. Holloway declined to provide details on the new map until it is finished in June, but a preliminary version was included in the report released on Friday.

He and Ms. Gibbs said the city had to work on making evacuation orders more persuasive to residents who resist calls to leave their homes.

The extra evacuation zones should help with that, Mr. Holloway said, by making it possible to "only dislocate the people who truly need to be dislocated, and ultimately give everybody even more confidence that the data they're getting, they should be acting upon."

Many lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy will be set down in new "playbooks" for city agencies that had to learn on the fly how to deal with a major storm's aftermath: how to request waivers and extensions from federal school-lunch and food-stamp programs to serve a deluge of needy families; how to muster economic development programs to help battered businesses get back up to speed faster.

Others issues will be left to future task forces to interpret.

A number of smaller recommendations are already being acted on, like the purchase of more emergency lights, generators and small boats for firefighters.

The report also calls for new regulations for hospitals, nursing homes and adult homes during evacuations. It recommends the creation of a patient tracking system, better communication equipment and guidelines for the return of patients.

The report defends the city's decision not to evacuate health centers before Hurricane Sandy, emphasizing that the risks of evacuation were high and had to be weighed against the risks of the storm, which no one expected to be so severe.

The city and the state helped evacuate approximately 6,300 patients from 37 health care centers without a fatality, according to the report.

But it does not address the harrowing details of many of those evacuations, which were widely reported after the storm.

Two hospitals voluntarily evacuated before the storm. But NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue and Coney Island hospitals were forced to evacuate as the floodwaters rose and power faltered or failed.

At NYU Langone and Bellevue, gravely ill patients, including babies, had to be carried down darkened flights of stairs. Two patients remained at Bellevue for days in the flickering gloom of backup power because they were too ill to be evacuated with the rest.

Many nursing and adult homes were flooded and lost power, stranding residents without enough food or clothing, or waiting in buses while there was a scramble to find places that would accept them. Some families could not immediately find relatives. Some homes did not reopen for months.

While the report acknowledges that many hospitals, nursing and adult homes are in coastal areas where the flooding was worst, it does not directly address that geographic problem as a planning issue for the future.

City officials said they planned to issue a future report on infrastructure planning.

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Plans to Harness China’s Nu River Threaten a Region

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

Ke Shouyi, 47, a farmer in the Lisu ethnic group, prodded his cow to plow the remote rural area near the Nu River in China's Yunnan Province. More Photos »

BINGZHONGLUO, China — From its crystalline beginnings as a rivulet seeping from a glacier on the Tibetan Himalayas to its broad, muddy amble through the jungles of Myanmar, the Nu River is one of Asia's wildest waterways, its 1,700-mile course unimpeded as it rolls toward the Andaman Sea.

But the Nu's days as one of the region's last free-flowing rivers are dwindling. The Chinese government stunned environmentalists this year by reviving plans to build a series of hydropower dams on the upper reaches of the Nu, the heart of a Unesco World Heritage site in China's southwest Yunnan Province that ranks among the world's most ecologically diverse and fragile places.

Critics say the project will force the relocation of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in the highlands of Yunnan and destroy the spawning grounds for a score of endangered fish species. Geologists warn that constructing the dams in a seismically active region could threaten those living downstream. Next month, Unesco is scheduled to discuss whether to include the area on its list of endangered places.

Among the biggest losers could be the millions of farmers and fishermen across the border in Myanmar and Thailand who depend on the Salween, as the river is called in Southeast Asia, for their sustenance. "We're talking about a cascade of dams that will fundamentally alter the ecosystems and resources for downstream communities that depend on the river," said Katy Yan, China program coordinator at International Rivers, an advocacy group.

Suspended in 2004 by Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister, and officially resuscitated shortly before his retirement in March, the project is increasing long-simmering regional tensions over Beijing's plans to dam or divert a number of rivers that flow from China to other thirsty nations in its quest to bolster economic growth and reduce the country's dependency on coal.

According to its latest energy plan, the government aims to begin construction on about three dozen hydroelectric projects across the country, which together will have more than twice the hydropower capacity of the United States.

So far China has been largely unresponsive to the concerns of its neighbors, among them India, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Russia and Vietnam. Since 1997, China has declined to sign a United Nations water-sharing treaty that would govern the 13 major transnational rivers on its territory. "To fight for every drop of water or die" is how China's former water resources minister, Wang Shucheng, once described the nation's water policy.

Here in Bingzhongluo, a peaceful backpacker magnet, those who treasure the fast-moving, jade-green beauty of the Nu say the four proposed dams in Yunnan and the one already under construction in Tibet would irrevocably alter what guidebooks refer to as the Grand Canyon of the East. A soaring, 370-mile-long gorge carpeted with thick forests, the area is home to roughly half of China's animal species, many of them endangered, including the snow leopard, the black snub-nosed monkey and the red panda.

Clinging improbably to the alpine peaks are mist-shrouded villages whose residents are among the area's dozen or so indigenous tribes, most with their own languages. "The project will be good for the local government, but it will be a disaster for the local residents," said Wan Li, 42, who in 2003 left behind his big-city life as an accountant in the provincial capital, Kunming, to open a youth hostel here. "They will lose their culture, their traditions and their livelihood, and we will be left with a placid, lifeless reservoir."

As one of two major rivers in China still unimpeded by dams, the Nu has a fiercely devoted following among environmentalists who have grown despondent over the destruction of many of China's waterways. The Ministry of Water Resources released a survey in March saying that 23,000 rivers had disappeared entirely and many of the nation's most storied rivers had become degraded by pollution. The mouth of the Yellow River is little more than an effluent-fouled trickle, and the once-mighty Yangtze has been tamed by the Three Gorges Dam, a $25 billion project that displaced 1.4 million people.

For many advocates, the Nu has become something of a last stand. "Why can't China have just one river that isn't destroyed by humans?" asked Wang Yongchen, a well-known environmentalist in Beijing who has visited the area a dozen times in recent years.

Opponents say it is no coincidence that the project was revived shortly before the retirement of Mr. Wen, a populist whose decision to halt construction was hailed as a landmark victory for the nation's fledgling environmental movement. Although he did not kill the project, Mr. Wen, a trained geologist, vowed it would not proceed without an exhaustive environmental impact assessment.

No such assessment has been released. Given the government's goal of generating 15 percent of the nation's electricity from non-fossil fuel by 2020, few expect environmental concerns to slow the project, even if the original plan of 13 dams on the Nu has for now been scaled back to 5. "Building a dam is about managing conflicts between man and nature, but without a scientific understanding of this project, it can only lead to calamity," said Yang Yong, a geologist and an environmentalist.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

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Emil Frei III, Who Put Cancer Cures in Reach, Dies at 89

Dr. Emil Frei III, an oncologist whose trailblazing use of combination chemotherapy — in which anticancer drugs are administered simultaneously rather than singly — helped make certain cancers curable for the first time, died on Tuesday at his home in Oak Park, Ill. He was 89.

His daughter Judy Frei confirmed the death.

Combination chemotherapy is now a standard treatment for a wide range of cancers, including breast, bone and testicular cancers, and has been credited with saving millions of lives worldwide.

A clinician, researcher and administrator, Dr. Frei (pronounced "fry") held senior leadership positions at three prominent cancer centers: the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health; the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

At his death, Dr. Frei was the emeritus director and emeritus physician-in-chief of Dana-Farber. He was also the Richard and Susan Smith distinguished professor of medicine emeritus at Harvard Medical School.

When Dr. Frei began his research at midcentury, chemotherapy with even a single drug, much less multiple ones, was considered a treatment of last resort.

"It was known that these drugs were cell-killers: some of them were derived from mustard gas," Dr. Harold E. Varmus, the current director of the National Cancer Institute and a winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said Friday. "They were developed initially as toxic agents, not different from drugs that were used in warfare."

In the mid-1950s, Dr. Frei, along with Dr. Emil J. Freireich, a colleague at the National Cancer Institute, and others, began investigating a multipronged assault on childhood leukemia that entailed using these drugs in combination, with each attacking a different aspect of cancer-cell physiology.

As the two men and their colleagues found, administering a cocktail of anticancer drugs let each drug be given in smaller quantities. This mitigated the drugs' toxic effects on the patient without diminishing their combined attack on the cancer.

"If you give 60 percent of each dose, it's the same as giving 100 percent of one or the other," said Dr. Freireich, who is now at M. D. Anderson. "But the effect on the tumor is additive."

When Dr. Frei and Dr. Freireich began their work, childhood leukemia was invariably fatal. By 1965, after a decade of clinical trials and refinements, the methods they devised, which involved combining as many as four drugs, had increased the survival rate to about 40 percent five years after treatment.

Today, childhood leukemia has a long-term survival rate of more than 80 percent.

"There are recurrences, but the incidence is low," Dr. Freireich said. "These are lifetime cures. Compared to the general population, their survival rate is the same as for people who hadn't had leukemia."

The two men then applied their approach to Hodgkin's disease, also rendering it curable in many cases.

Emil Frei III, familiarly known as Tom, was born in St. Louis on Feb. 21, 1924.

In 1898, his paternal grandfather founded Emil Frei & Associates, a stained-glass company in the city that is still well known, and Emil III was expected to pursue the family calling. But he became interested in medicine in his youth after reading "Rats, Lice and History," Hans Zinsser's 1935 "biography" of typhus.

Serving in the Navy in World War II, he was sent for premedical studies at Colgate University and medical studies at Yale, from which he earned an M.D. in 1948. He later served with the Navy Medical Corps in the Korean War.

Dr. Frei joined the staff of the National Cancer Institute in the mid-1950s. He was later chief of the leukemia section and chief of medicine there.

In 1965, he moved to M. D. Anderson, where he was the associate scientific director of clinical research and the chairman of the division of experimental therapeutics. He joined the institute now known as Dana-Farber as physician in chief in 1972 and became its director the next year.

At all three institutions, Dr. Frei also trained a generation of researchers and clinicians.

Dr. Frei's first wife, the former Elizabeth Smith, whom he married in 1948, died in 1986; his second wife, the former Adoria Smetana Brock, whom he married in 1987, died in 2009. Besides his daughter Judy, his survivors include three other daughters, Mary, Alice and Nancy Frei; a son, Emil IV; a brother, Bob; and 10 grandchildren.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," published in 2010, the doctor and author Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote of Dr. Frei making rounds on a pediatric oncology ward.

"He was charming, soft-spoken and careful," Dr. Mukherjee wrote. "To watch him manage critically ill children and their testy, nervous parents was to watch a champion swimmer glide through water — so adept in the art that he made artistry vanish."

One of those children was Edward M. Kennedy Jr., a son of the Massachusetts senator. In 1973, at 12, young Ted Kennedy lost a leg to osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer.

A patient of Dr. Frei's at Dana-Farber, he underwent intensive chemotherapy for nearly two years afterward. He has remained free of cancer ever since.

"I honestly believe that Dr. Frei saved my life," Mr. Kennedy, now 51 and a lawyer and disability rights advocate in New Haven, said in an interview on Thursday. "My father obviously had incredible resources in terms of being able to identify the most capable people. And of all the people in the world, he asked Dr. Frei to take care of me."

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Panel Convenes in Washington to Discuss Aliens

WASHINGTON — While President Obama was promoting an immigration overhaul in Mexico, six former members of Congress gathered two blocks from the White House to consider what they see as the enforced government secrecy surrounding another kind of visitor: the kind who come from a lot farther away.

Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

Mike Gravel, a former senator from Alaska, above in 2007, appeared this week on a panel to discuss extraterrestrial life.

Every day this week, the former legislators presided over panels made up of academics and — former, of course — government and military officials, who were there to discuss their research or their own eyewitness accounts of unidentified flying objects and the extraterrestrials who presumably would have occupied them.

"Something is monitoring the planet, and they are monitoring it very cautiously, because we are a very warlike planet," said Mike Gravel, a former Democratic senator from Alaska who ran in both the Democratic and Libertarian presidential primaries in 2008.

Mr. Gravel and his fellow panelists were assembled by the Paradigm Research Group, which says it is committed to ending the government's "truth embargo" on the existence of extraterrestrial life. The lawmakers were there in hopes that their presence and political credibility would be enough to persuade Congress to take the issue seriously.

"I've been exploring how we might get this issue out of the shadows of the lunatic fringe," said Roscoe G. Bartlett, a former Republican representative from Maryland. Before his defeat last year, Mr. Bartlett was known for sounding the alarm on the threat posed to the nation's energy infrastructure by electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, the shock wave from a nuclear weapon detonated beyond the earth's atmosphere.

Called the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, the event might have been mistaken as advocacy for government transparency, and some of the panelists had impressive résumés.

"I've come to understand and appreciate the importance of open, transparent government and the power of truth," said Paul T. Hellyer, who served as Canadian minister of defense during the 1960s.

"We are not alone in the cosmos," he added.

One reason the ex-members of Congress agreed to sit on the dais and ask questions may have been curiosity.

"Our country has trivialized it, has made it a joke, has made it green people with horns sticking out," said Carolyn Kilpatrick, a Democratic representative from Michigan who lost her seat in 2010. "Now I find that it's much more than that. And it's not a joke. And there is scientific data that there may be something there."

Another reason might have been the $20,000 the organizers said they paid each panelist. But they are still maintaining a healthy skepticism.

"Just because the government might have had a document about how to handle extraterrestrials doesn't mean there were any," said Merrill Cook, a Republican from Utah who was twice elected to the House.

The panels this week have been low-hanging fruit for the news media while President Obama is out of town and Congress is out of session, and not all of the people who study U.F.O.'s think the meetings will help them improve their stature in Washington.

"There really is something to this issue, and there is a serious side to it, but that's not what's being presented as this event," said Leslie Kean, a journalist and author of "U.F.O.'s: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record," a collection of firsthand accounts by people who believe they saw them.

The conclusion that U.F.O.'s are proof of extraterrestrial life is misguided, she said, and the people who broadcast that belief hindered support for real scientific research.

Despite the ridicule that usually accompanies the discussion of U.F.O.'s, they have been quietly talked about in corridors of power here. Some panelists at the event this week counted among true believers John D. Podesta, a chief of staff in President Bill Clinton's White House, because of his role in Executive Order 12958, which requires the declassification of most government documents over 25 years old.

But the possible existence of extraterrestrial life is not exactly why he believes in government transparency, Mr. Podesta said.

"At the end of the day, there are going to be people who say that even if you did that, there must be other files that exist that you're not disclosing," he said in an interview.

But objects in the sky have piqued his interest. In June 2011, the Center for American Progress hosted government officials, from the Pentagon, NASA and the Department of Transportation, as well as Congressional staff and former officials from intelligence organizations, for a briefing by Ms. Kean and experts from academia and foreign militaries.

The private briefing was organized to discuss a proposal that the government establish a small office of two staff members who would selectively investigate mysterious skyward sightings and seek to understand them by applying scientific method. The proposal did not refer to U.F.O.'s, but rather, U.A.P.'s, unidentified aerial phenomena, as if those who drew up the proposal were keenly aware of how their objective could be perceived.

"They were interesting, credible people who had observed aerial phenomena that were unexplained and worthy of additional follow-up," Mr. Podesta said. "Going back and looking at and declassifying whatever government documents exist is a smart thing to do."

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