THIS WEEK IN

RANDOM SAMPLES
PEOPLE
Edited by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): MAYA LINNELL, THE SOUTH EASTERN TIMES, SOUTH AUSTRALIA;THE BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY; MSU
JOBS
Hot seat. A 19-year veteran
of Brookhaven National Laboratory
in Upton, New York,
has become the first woman
to chair its physics department.
A particle theorist with
134 publications to her credit,
Sally Dawson, 50, will lead a
staff of 260 and oversee a
budget of nearly $60 million.
Dawson,
now acting
chair,
assumes the
helm of a
struggling
department.
Last month,
the National
Science
Foundation
canceled a
pair of high
energy physics experiments
to be built at the lab (Science,
19 August, p. 1163), and
there’s a cloud over the lab’s
flagship Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider, a particle smasher
that studies nuclear physics
(Science, 24 June, p. 1852).
Dawson’s skills as a consensus
builder should help her guide
the department through its
troubles, says Yannis
Semertzidis, an experimental
POLITICS
physicist at Brookhaven.“She
listens to you sincerely, and
she has great enthusiasm for
physics,” he says.“She understands
that the way out of the
mess is physics, not politics.”
Ideas man. Peter McPherson
says that his first task as the
new president of the National
Association of State Universities
and Land-Grant Colleges
(NASULGC) is to halt “the
gradual defunding” of public
universities by state legislators.
Holding course. Mohammad-Mehdi Zahedi, an expert on fuzzy
mathematics at the Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, has
been named Iran’s new science minister. But Zahedi is not
expected to deviate far from the course laid by his predecessor,
Ja’far Tofiqi, who championed big-science projects in highenergy
physics, astronomy, and biotechnology in the country’s
$900 million science portfolio. “It’s too early to say anything,”
says deputy research minister Reza Mansouri, an astrophysicist,
who nonetheless predicts only minor fluctuations in science
policy. Zahedi, whose appointment was confirmed by Iran’s
Parliament last week, could not be reached for comment.
Iranian researchers are more worried about the policies of
the country’s new president, the ultraconservative Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. They say that a potential rollback of social
reforms and a chill in relations with the West provoked by Iran’s
nuclear ambitions are greater threats to Iranian science than
any potential changes brought about by Zahedi.
MISFORTUNES
Shark attack. A marine field trip turned
tragic last week near Adelaide, Australia.
Jarrod Stehbens, 23, was diving with
another research assistant off a reef about
2 kilometers offshore to collect cuttlefish
eggs as part of a research project on the
population structure of the species Sepia
apama, which has been threatened by
fishing. When the pair was about to
emerge from the water, they were attacked
by what was likely a great white shark. The
other diver managed to surface and was
pulled from the water by two researchers
on the boat, but Stehbens was dragged
down and vanished. Stehbens graduated
last month from the University of Adelaide
and was about to begin a Ph.D. program in
marine ecology at the Alfred-Wegener
Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Helgoland, Germany.
McPherson, 64, has watched
that trend for the past 11 years
as president of Michigan State
University.There he learned
the value of finding other
sources of revenue, a skill that
he plans to
share with
NASULGC’s
215 members.
“Ideas
move
things, and
money can
follow,” says
McPherson.
He will take
over from
Peter McGrath, who’s leaving at
the end of 2005 after 14 years
atop the association.
RISING
STARS
Not old enough. 14-year-old
Yinan Wang is the latest child
prodigy to be offered a university
place in the U.K. Could he
also be the last?
Unable to speak English
when he arrived in the U.K.
from China two years ago,
math and physics whiz Wang
is now on his way to Oxford to
study materials science. But a
new U.K. law, passed in March,
states that all those working
with children have a legal duty
to protect them. In recent
years, Oxford was the only
British university to accept
children as young as 12.
But it will probably no longer
do so.The new law would
mean expensive training and
screening of any personnel
coming into contact with
these youth, who would not
be allowed to live with other
students.Admissions officials
are considering establishing a
minimum age of 17, according
to a spokesperson.
That would be unfortunate,
says mathematician Ruth
Lawrence, who was 12 when
she went to Oxford in 1982.
Lawrence, now at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem,
believes parents or guardians
should keep track of their
children as her father did when
she was at Oxford.“Universities
should not be turned from
wellsprings of knowledge into
caretakers for students.”
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www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 309 2 SEPTEMBER 2005 1487