December 2001 cetera - archive.embl.org · EMBL &cetera Issue 9 - December 2001 EMBL opens ITTC and...

The first phase of EMBL’s new International Technology TransferComplex (ITTC) and the new Proteomics Core Facility wereopened on September 6, during a visit of German ScienceMinister Edelgard Bulmahn. The ITTC will be run by EMBLEM,the Laboratory’s technology transfer company, and will housestart-up companies. CellZome and Anadys have already movedin. The set-up that has been installed in the facility is “unique inthe world,” says Christian Boulin, “and includes all the facilitiesresearchers need for protein analysis.”

In the second meeting organized by EMBL’s PhD students, leading experts met inHeidelberg from Nov. 9-10 to discuss evolution. The students hope to make the PhDsymposium an annual tradition. page 6

Evolution: PhD students host second symposium

EEMMBBLL 9December 2001

&cetera

ContentsCouncil meeting 3Science & Society 7Staff Association 8News & events 9in memorium, Carmen Berthet 10The EMBO Corner 11Doooon’t panic over the Euro 12Research at the Kinderhaus 14Names to faces 16People @ EMBL 18

Council acting to resolve salary dispute

Selection on a sliding scalean interview with Stephen Jay Gould

Peter Gruss to head Max-Planck Gesellschaft

Stephen Jay Gould visited EMBL in mid-November to take part inthe EMBL PhD student symposium on evolution; he and RhondaRoland Shearer also gave a talk as part of the new EMBL-DAIScience and Culture initiative. In an exclusive interview, hediscusses the mechanisms of evolution, Galileo, and the art of theessay.

page 4

EMBL opens ITTC andProteomics facility

One of the major tasks at the latestmeeting of EMBL’s Council, held fromNov. 27-28, was to take action on recentjudgments from the International LabourOrganization’s Administrative Tribunal(ILOAT) regarding EMBL salaries. TheCouncil has accepted its legal obligationto implement Judgment 2057; in doingso, it will bring a close to the salarydispute that has affected the Laboratorysince 1995.Some guidelines were established at themeeting. Their implementation will

begin once the Finance Committee and theCouncil have had a chance to review thejudgment on a pending Staff Associationcase. This decision is expected at the endof January, 2002.

EMBL Council Chairman Peter Gruss hasbeen elected president of Germany’s MaxPlanck Society for the 2002-2008 term.Gruss has been Director of the Max Planck

Institute for Biophysical Chemistry inGöttingen since 1986. He succeeds HubertMarkl, whose presidency ends in June2002.

page 3 Peter Gruss

Newsletter of the European Molecular Biology Laboratorypublished by the Office of Information and Public Affairs

Over 200 high schoolstudents recently askedthis question at CERN;the experts answered,and EMBL was there...from the sister sciences

page 14

Has life evolvedelsewhere in theuniverse?

page 2

EEMMBBLL &cetera Issue 9 - December 2001

EMBL opens ITTC and Proteomics facility

Ministers get first-handlook at EMBLSeptember saw the visits of two more delegations from memberstates. Swiss Science State Secretary Charles Kleiber was accom-panied by Gérard Escher, Scientific Advisor to the Swiss ScienceAgency, as well as by Denis Duboule, Jean-François Conscience,and Isabella Beretta, the Swiss representatives to the EMBLCouncil. They met with the Director-General and senior repre-sentatives to discuss technology transfer initiatives at the Lab, sci-ence and society activities, and the new Core Facilities. The visitalso included a meeting with EMBL’s Swiss community.

On September 24, it was the Danes’ turn. Birte Weiss, Minister ofInformation Technology and Research was accompanied by otherministry staff, Danish parliamentarians and delegates to theEMBL Council for a day-long, intensive look at EMBL Heidelbergand EMBO.

In early September, the ribbon was cut to open EMBL’s newInternational Technology Transfer Complex (ITTC) and the newProteomics Core Facility. Both ceremonies were held during avisit of German Science Minister Edelgard Bulmahn. TheMinister also took the opportunity to discuss the present stateand future development of EMBL with Director General Fotis C.Kafatos.

EMBLEM to run expanding ITTC facilityThe ITTC will be operated by EMBLEM (EMBL EnterpriseManagement Technology Transfer GmbH), a company whollyowned by the Laboratory. The facility is intended to serve as alarge incubator/accelerator for life science start-up companies,many of which will probably spring from work originally done atEMBL or in conjunction with collaborating institutions. Space inthe ITTC will also be made available on a competitive basis tostart-ups that bundle together technology from EMBL and thesixteen member states.In its initial phase, the facility has approximately 1,700 squaremeters of space for lease to life science start-up companies. Spacehas already been made available to CellZome and Anadys, twostart-ups that originated at EMBL. Current plans foresee subse-quent buildings which should eventually provide about 9,000 m2of laboratory and office space. "Until now, there has been no such thing as technology transfer ina pan-European sense," says Gabór Lamm, Managing Director ofEMBLEM. "EMBL’s activities are a step in this direction. The ITTCwill serve as a training forum for both scientists and technologytransfer professionals in Europe so that they can learn from ourexperiences and accelerate technology transfer in Europe.""The formation of biopharmaceutical companies in partnershipwith the EMBL on the Heidelberg campus provides both partieswith the opportunity to benefit from the experience and expertise

of each other," says Giulio Superti-Furga, a founder and ScientificDirector of CellZome GmbH.

New Proteomics Facility fully functionalIn cooperation with two important industrial sponsors,Micromass and BioRad, EMBL has now opened a state-of-the-artproteomics facility which will serve in-house scientists and visi-tors."The set-up that Micromass and BioRad have installed is uniquein the world," says Christian Boulin, Head of EMBL’s ScientificCore Facilities. "It includes two mass spectrometry machines, allthe robotics and all the computing facilities needed to handle thework of protein analysis. We hope this will be a prototype forpartnerships with other companies.""This kind of arrangement will benefit both partners," says JohnRontree, Sales and Marketing Director of Micromass. "Gainingdirect access to leading scientists working with a proteomics lineis strategically important to us. By listening to their needs, we cangain the knowledge necessary to maintain a position at the fore-front in providing total proteomics solutions."The facility thus joins other key components at EMBL – includingthe Genomics and Microarray facility and the Advanced LightMicroscopy Facility – as service units for EMBL scientists and vis-itors, developed in partnership with industries, providingadvanced equipment for use in cutting-edge research.

Fotis C. Kafatos and German Science Minister Edelgard Bulmahn

EMBL’s International Technology Transfer Complex (ITTC) photo by

Maj Britt H

anse

n

photo by

Marietta

Sch

upp

3

f r o m t he Dire ct or- Ge ner al

I L O j u d g m e nt 2 0 5 7: D e ci si o n s at t h e N o v e m b er C o u n cil m e eti n g

1. W h et h er t o i m pl e m e nt J u d g m e nt 2 0 5 7

" C o u n cil h a s m a d e p e rf e ctl y cl e a r o n p r e vi o u s o c c a si o n s t h at itwill i m pl e m e nt l e g al d e ci si o n s. T h e I L O d e ci si o n s a r e n ot s u bj e ctt o a p p e al." ( D G, 1 7 J ul y 2 0 0 1)

D e ci si o n : Ye s, C o u n cil a c c e pt s it s l e g al o bli g ati o n.

2. W h at a dj u st m e nt s t o m a k e ( s af e g u ar di n g p ur c h a s e p o w erp arit y)

" A r el at e d c o n si d e r ati o n i s t h e l o n g- st a n di n g c o m mit m e nt ofM a n a g e m e nt a n d C o u n cil t o p u r c h a s e p o w e r p a rit y ( a c c o r di n gt o offi ci al st ati sti c s) f o r t h e st aff a p p oi nt e d i n t h e f o u r h o stc o u nt ri e s." ( D G, 1 7 J ul y 2 0 0 1)

" T h e b a si c s al a r y s c al e s a n d t h e all o w a n c e s f o r st aff b a s e do ut si d e G e r m a n y will b e d et e r mi n e d s o a s t o p r e s e r v ep u r c h a si n g p o w e r p a riti e s c al c ul at e d a c c o r di n g t o t h e p r o c e d u r eof t h e C o o r di n at e d O r g a ni s ati o n s."

( C o u n cil’s p a y p oli c y, De ce m ber 1 9 9 5)

I n pri n ci pl e d e ci si o n: I n c r e a s e s al a ri e s b a s eli n e f o r 1 9 9 6 b y 2. 1 % f o r G e r m a n y, a n db a s e d o n t hi s pl u s t h e p r e vi o u sl y a g r e e d a dj u st m e nt s f o r 1 9 9 7-2 0 0 1, r e c al c ul at e t h e s al a ri e s f o r t h e s e y e a r s.

I n c r e a s e t h e 1 9 9 6 b a s eli n e b y t h e s a m e a m o u nt a n d si mil a rl yr e c al c ul at e t h e s al a ri e s f o r st aff i n F r a n c e, It al y, U K, t h u spreser vi n g p urc h asi n g p o wer p arit y ( e q u al a dj u st m e nt p r o c e d u r e).

W h y "i n pri n ci pl e " ? FI N C O M a n d C o u n cil w a nt t o e x a mi n e t h e fi n al J u d g m e nt o nt h e p e n di n g St aff A s s o ci ati o n c a s e, e x p e ct e d o n 3 0 J a n u a r y 2 0 0 2,t o e n s u r e it s fi n al d e ci si o n i s f ull y c o m p ati bl e wit h all I L OJ u d g m e nt s.

T h e i n pri n ci pl e d e ci si o n s w er e pr e s e nt e d i n a r e p ort t oC o u n cil fr o m t h e C h air of Fi n a n c e C o m mitt e e, f oll o wi n g aCl o s e d S e s si o n of FI N C O M

" Fi n a n c e C o m mitt e e will m a k e a fi n al d e ci si o n i n M a r c h 2 0 0 2 o nh o w t o f u n d t h e i m pl e m e nt ati o n of I L O A T J u d g e m e nt 2 0 5 7 a n dt h e J u d g m e nt t o b e d eli v e r e d i n J a n u a r y 2 0 0 2, i n p ri n ci pl e o n t h eb a si s of t h e e q u al a dj u st m e nt s c e n a ri o. S p e cifi c all y t h eC o m mitt e e will e n d e a v o u r t o a c hi e v e t hi s b y v oti n g a n a d diti o n alC VI ( C o st V a ri ati o n I n d e x) i n M a r c h 2 0 0 2 t h at will p r o vi d e f o r t h ec o st s of 5 5 0 K € b a s eli n e i n c r e a s e pl u s i nt e r e st p a y m e nt s ofa p p r o xi m at el y 1 4 0 K € f o r a l o a n t h at C o u n cil h o p e s t o a ut h o ri s et h e A d mi ni st r ati o n t o t a k e o ut i n t h e a m o u nt of u p t o 3 3 0 0 K €, t ofi n a n c e t h e b a c k p a y t h at E M B L will h a v e t o m e et."

C o n s e q u e n c e:D e ci si o n s will b e c o nfi r m e d i n M a r c h, p a y m e nt s p r o b a bl y i nA p ril.

3. W h o will p a y f or f ut ur e ( s al ar y b a s eli n e) ?

A m o u nt: 5 5 0 K € p e r y e a r

T h e o r eti c al p o s si biliti e s:- C o u n cil- E M B L f r o m it s p r e s e nt b u d g et

D e ci si o n i n pri n ci pl e: C o u n cil i nt e n d s t o p r o vi d e u p t o 5 5 0 K €p e r y e a r f o r t hi s p u r p o s e.

4. W h o will p a y f or p a st ( s al ar y b a c k p a y) ?

A o n e- off a m o u nt of a p p r o xi m at el y 3 0 0 0 K € will b e n e e d e d f o rt h e b a c k p a y m e nt s of s al a r y pl u s i nt e r e st b a s e d o n t h e e q u ala dj u st m e nt p r o c e d u r e s.

T h e o r eti c al p o s si biliti e s:- C o u n cil- E M B L

D e ci si o n i n pri n ci pl e: P a y m e nt will b e p r o vi d e d b y E M B L f r o mit s p r e s e nt b u d g et.

- B ut C o u n cil a g r e e d t o s p r e a d t h e c o st o v e r t h r e e y e a r s b yo bt ai ni n g a l o a n.

- E M B L will p a y t h e c a pit al a n d C o u n cil t h e i nt e r e st.

C o n s e q u e n c e s:

- Eff e cti v el y, e a c h p a rt of E M B L will l o s e s o m e of t h e i n c r e a s e db u d g et o bt ai n e d i n 2 0 0 0.

- B ut t h e i m p a ct of t h e l o s s will b e mi ni mi z e d b y d el a yi n gr e p a y m e nt u ntil 2 0 0 3 – 2 0 0 5, wit h n o l o s s of b u d g et i n 2 0 0 2,a n d m o d e st l o s s e s i n 2 0 0 3 a n d 2 0 0 4.

- T h e l o s s will b e g r e at e r i n 2 0 0 5, b ut t h e Di r e ct o r- G e n e r al willb e a p pl yi n g f o r a s u p pl e m e nt a r y b u d g et f o r t h at y e a r,p e r mitti n g hi s s u c c e s s o r t o b e gi n wit h a cl e a n sl at e.

F o u r i s s u e s f or C o u n cil d e ci si o n

1 W h et h er t o i m pl e m e nt J u d g m e nt 2 0 5 7

2 W h at a dj u st m e nt s t o m a k e ( s af e g u ar di n g p ur c h a s ep o w er p arit y)

3 W h o will p a y f or f ut ur e ( c h a n g e i n s al ar y b a s eli n e)

4 W h o will p a y f or p a st ( s al ar y b a c k p a y)

J u d g m e nt 2 0 5 7 ( 1 2 J ul y 2 0 0 1)

O n T h u r s d a y, N o v e m b e r 2 9, E M B L Di r e ct o r- G e n e r al F oti s C.K af at o s h el d a g e n e r al a s s e m bl y at t h e H ei d el b e r g M ai nL a b o r at o r y t o b ri ef m e m b e r s of p e r s o n n el o n t h e o ut c o m e of t h eN o v e m b e r E M B L C o u n cil M e eti n g. T h e m aj o r t a s k f o r C o u n cilw a s t o m a k e d e ci si o n s r e g a r di n g t h e i m pl e m e nt ati o n of I L O A Tj u d g m e nt 2 0 5 7. T h e s e d e ci si o n s a r e i nt e n d e d t o b ri n g t o as ati sf a ct o r y cl o s e t h e s al a r y di s p ut e t h at h a s b e e n aff e cti n g t h eL a b o r at o r y si n c e 1 9 9 5. T h e f oll o wi n g i s a n o utli n e of t h e d e ci si o n sm a d e at t h e C o u n cil m e eti n g.

R e p a y m e nt s c h e d ul e of t h e l o a n c o v eri n g t h e b a c k p a y (i n K )

Y e ar 2 0 0 3 2 0 0 4 2 0 0 5

I n di c ati v e S c h e m e i n cr e a s e s ( a b o v e b a s eli n e f or 2 0 0 0) 1 0, 0 0 0 1 0, 5 0 0 1 1, 0 0 0

L o a n r e p a y m e nt 5 0 0 8 0 0 1, 7 0 0

% L o s s 5 % 7. 6 % 1 5. 5 %

an in

terview w

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Culture in

itiatve

DO YOU THINK THAT THE NUMBER OF MECHANISMSREQUIRED TO ACCOUNT FOR PRESENT LIFE ON EARTH

AND THE FOSSIL RECORD NEEDS TO BE ENLARGED BEYONDTRADITIONAL IDEAS OF EVOLUTION THROUGH VARIATIONAND NATURAL SELECTION? I don’t think it’s really so much a question of newmechanisms. It's how the mechanisms that we’remore or less familiar with operate over the broadscales of time that create the macroevolutionaryrecord. For example, we know how the mechanism ofnatural selection works, but in strict Darwiniantheory, it operates on organisms within populations.Changes within populations, by extrapolation, thenproduce the full panoply of changes in the history oflife. This yields a fully reductionistic, single-levelaccount of evolution: micro-evolutionary Darwinismworking within populations, at the level of theorganism, produces everything. The way manypaleontologists and I look at the world – I think thiscan be called a general movement withinevolutionary theory today – is to recognise thatnatural selection operates on other kinds of biological"individuals" which have the requisite properties.Under certain circumstances, groups within species,or species themselves, are discrete entities that havebirth points and death points. They are quite stable,and they have differential numbers of offspring whichlook like them. These are all the characteristics youneed for Darwinian individuality, so selection canalso operate on the properties of species, particularlyon emergent properties of species that can’t bereduced to the characteristics of organisms. Now in a sense we understand the mechanism ofselection, but when you treat a species as anirreducible entity, you are explaining trends as thedifferential success of species rather than anextrapolated Darwinian triumph of the individualorganism. This leads to a different set of explanationsfor things – not a new mechanism, but the applicationof the selectionist argument to different levels oforganisation. That is one kind of addition you need tomake to evolutionary theory. It’s not anti-Darwinianbut it certainly expands and changes the scope of theoriginal theory.

WOULDN’T A GLOBAL CATASTROPHE, SUCH AS A MASSIVEMETEORITE STRIKING THE EARTH, HAVE A QUALITATIVELYNEW TYPE OF EFFECT ON EVOLUTION? NORMALLY CATAS-

TROPHES ARE REGIONALLY RESTRICTED, MEANING THATPOPULATIONS OF A SPECIES WHICH HAD MOVED OUTSIDE APARTICULAR REGION MIGHT WELL SURVIVE.A global event would cause populations which haveundergone local adaptations to adapt to globalchange, and that’s what’s unexpected. As you know,under Darwinian theory if the environment changestoo fast for most organisms to adapt, then they die.Things are different when unpredictable, majorenviron mental changes result in catastrophic massextinctions and have a fortuitous effect on a large partof the patterning of evolutionary change. You couldnever, by studying ordinary natural selection innormal times, predict that mammals would win overdinosaurs. In normal times before the mass extinction,they never did – they were always out-competed bydinosaurs. It took an external trigger of catastrophicchange to do dinosaurs in while letting mammals getthrough. Not because mammals were better, butbecause mammals fortuitously had certain propertiesthat enabled them to survive. There was evidence for catastrophic mass extinctionwhen Darwin wrote the Origin of Species; he tried veryhard to reinterpret that evidence as due toimperfections in the geological record, and to see it asthe result of ordinary, slow environmental change. Inhis view there might have been accelerations ofenvironmental change, but these wouldn’t have beenfast enough or of wide enough scope to reallydiscombobulate everything. The crucial factor is lessthe globality of the event than its major impact, one towhich local creatures could not have adapted. Aspecies’ prior adaptive successes won’t predictwhether it will fortuitously survive such acatastrophe. Extrapolating from Darwinism, localadaptations tend to accumulate to some general stateof biomechanical improvement for a species throughtime, which will help it get through less catastrophicevents.

COULD BEHAVIOR AS WELL AS GEOGRAPHY LEAD TOISOLATION AND SPECIATION? FOR EXAMPLE, LET'S SAY THATA LOCAL TOWN HERE WANT TO GET RID OF A MASSIVEPOPULATION OF WILD CATS. THEY GO AROUND CHASINGAND ELIMINATING ANIMALS, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE A LOTOF MONEY TO SPEND ON IT, SO THEY MISS THE REALLY WILDONES, WHICH SURVIVE. ANOTHER TYPE TO SURVIVE IS VERYFRIENDLY AND CUDDLY AND GETS TAKEN BY PEOPLE. THEREMAY BE NO DEFINABLE GENETIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEGROUPS, BUT EACH WOULD BE A SURVIVAL STRATEGY.You are suggesting the "Pied Piper" theory applied tocats in Heidelberg, instead of rats or children inHamlin. Well, isolation only creates the potential forspeciation. The precondition of speciation is that agroup becomes so isolated and separate that it willbreed only within itself. Conventionally, it was hardto think of a way to achieve that isolation except bytrue geographic separation – how would it happen ifthe populations shared one area? But what you’resuggesting is not so far-fetched. I think there are a setof ways whereby isolation can be achieved bybehaviour al differences. Normally, of course, it wouldbe some thing besides human selection – perhaps onegroup may just begin breeding at a different time thanthe other, or one group may live on a different type offood.

photo by

Maj Britt H

anse

n

YOU’VE WRITTEN ABOUT HOW PARTICULAR FEATURES OF A SPECIESCAN BE MAINTAINED OVER VERY LONG STRETCHES OFEVOLUTIONARY TIME: OFTEN A BEAK CONTINUES TO RESEMBLE THESAME TYPE OF BEAK OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS. IS THAT BECAUSESELECTION NEVER TRULY WORKS ON SINGLE INDIVIDUALS, BUTALWAYS ON POPULATIONS WITH A WIDE AND UNDEFINABLE GENETICBASE?Selection does work on individuals, but the effect can only bemanifested in the group. It’s always a statisticalphenomenon. In the conventional theory you argue thatthose organisms that fortuitously vary in a locally adapteddirection will leave more surviving offspring, so thepopulation moves in that direction. The reason why mostspecies show stability is that these changes are just littlejiggles in the fullness of geological time. Most of these littlefluctuations are very rapid and local and likely to move backand forth, rotating around small changes. Or you may findten or fifteen little local populations within a species, withone of them changing one way, another changing anotherway. Those are all transient little blips and flips. The localpopulation, unless it can achieve isolation and become aseparate species, is just sitting out there. But the claim thatmost species are stable is an empirical one. It is notpredictable a priori. In fact, most people construe Darwiniantheories as expecting the opposite, whereas either result isconsistent with basic Darwinian logic. Empirically, it looks asthough the vast majority of species are stable for millions ofyears, by which I mean they fluctuate back and forth – butwhen they die millions of years after their origin they don'tlook all that different from when they began.

SUPPOSE THAT I PROPOSE TWO COMPETING HYPOTHESES. ONE ISTHAT THE "CLASSICAL", OVERSIMPLIFIED CONCEPT OF NATURALSELECTION – IN WHICH THE FATE OF A SPECIES DEPENDED ON ONESINGLE TRAIT – HAS ONLY HAPPENED 1,500 TIMES OVER HISTORY.THE ALTERNATIVE IS THAT IT HAS HAPPENED ONE TIME FOR EVERYEXISTING GENE IN ANY EXISTING GENOME ON EARTH AT SOME POINTIN ITS EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY. "IF WE HAVE LONG EYELASHES,THEN EYELASH LENGTH MUST HAVE MADE A SURVIVAL DIFFERENCEAT SOME POINT IN SOME ENVIRONMENT." HOW CAN WE ARBITRATEBETWEEN THESE TWO STANDPOINTS?I'm not sure you can always resolve specific questions aboutthe historical value of a particular trait, unless you couldrecover direct evidence; in this case, I don't think you can –because you don't find eyelashes in the fossil record.However, certain inferences can be made. You can study thegenetics of eyelash length in humans today. You might find,for example, that there is no genetic variation – in which casethe question wouldn't make a lot of sense. You might findthat this trait is affected by 50 different genes, at which pointthe inquiry makes no sense, either. On the other hand, youmight find that eyelash length is linked to certain other traitswhose significance we understand, or that the trait isdetermined by one gene that affects nothing else, at whichpoint the inquiry becomes more plausible. But again, thatwould only give you an indication. I'm not sure that in theabsence of detailed historical information, you are going tobe able to answer the question.This is particularly true for certain human traits likelanguage or moral beliefs. We really want to know wherethese uniquenesses of our own species came from, but theseare still questions about historical particulars rather thanchallenges to the general theory. We certainly didn't evolve abig brain so that we could read. But think of how centralreading this ability to human life today. A lot of what iscrucial to our current existence is simply fortuitously coopted

from the capacity of brains that got big for other reasons. At least in theory, I think we can pursue the issue of wheresome aspects of universal cognitive behaviour come from. Idespair at truly answering some key questions, including theorigin of language. How are you going to get at this issue?Language isn't fossilized, and to talk about its developmentduring prehistory one is forced to make distant inferencesabout, for example, the kind of language required for a groupof humans to hunt mammals or fashion tools. But you can atleast study the mechanics of brain action.

IN THE STONES OF MARRAKECH, YOU GIVE AN EXTENSIVE ACCOUNTOF THE POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF GALILEO’SIMPRISONMENT. WHAT GOT YOU HOOKED ON THAT STORY? Galileo’s story is so interesting because the canonical version– as a pure conflict between science and religion – is sowrong. I don’t have a tremendous revisionary account of thisincident; Galileo was the hero, of course, and the Pope’sreaction was unjustified. But you have to realize thatGalileo’s ordeal unfolded in Rome in the middle of theThirty-years’ war. Catholicism was under attack all overEurope. This was a tough time, and Galileo was a notorioushot-head. He and Urban VIII had been good friends, and thePope felt betrayed, and not entirely wrongly. Galileo hadofficial permission to write about Copernicanism as long ashe treated the theory hypothetically. All he needed to do waswrite an honest dialogue between a Copernican and aPtolomean. Instead, Galileo put Ptolomy's arguments intothe mouth of a character named Simplicio, whose argumentswere as bad as his name. He didn't need to be so provocativeto prove his point. The Copernican system would havetriumphed even if he had constructed a fair dialogue,because the Copernican arguments were so much better.

ANOTHER THEME OF THE BOOK IS "MARGINALIA" – THE CONTENTSOF THE MARGINS OF GUETTARD AND LAVOISIER’S WORK ONGEOLOGY, WHICH FOR THE FIRST TIME REALLY INTRODUCE THE IDEAOF GEOLOGICAL STRATA. DO YOU HAVE A GENERAL INTEREST IN"MARGINS"?It is the essayist's fundamental belief that importantconclusions flow from tiny, seemingly-insignificant items. Toreveal something so apparently insignificant that, at first, itpasses beneath everyone's notice.

THE GALILEO STORY HAS THE SENSE OF PLACE AND TIME THAT ONEFINDS IN REALLY GOOD HISTORICAL FICTION. DO YOU HAVE OTHERLITERARY ASPIRATIONS BEYOND THE GENRE YOU CURRENTLY WORKIN?The only way to convey a story like this is to try to immersemyself into the context. As for other ambitions, I'll do a bookabout baseball at some point… But I have no plans toexperiment with fiction because I suspect that I could notwrite dialogue, an essential ingredient of most fiction. It is soimportant to recognize what you can't do. I love opera andbaseball, but I know I could never be an opera star, or theNew York Yankees' center fielder. I don't mean thatnegatively: the key to success lies in understanding thethings you can't do.

– interview by Russ Hodge

Issue 9 - December 2001

From November 9 to 10, the "EMBLPhD Student Symposium on Evo lu -

tion" brought together young researchersand top-level scientists for the secondinternational symposium organised byEMBL PhD students. Following the suc-cess of last year's "From Genes toThoughts", they hope to make the eventan annual tradition. Evolution was select-ed as this year’s topic because although itprovides the underlying framework forall research in the life sciences, it some-times fades into the background. Thesymposium aimed to bring home thatmessage and help researchers from allwalks of biology to attain an evolutionaryperspective on their work.

The first talk appropriately addressed thesubject of the origins of life. EörsSzathmáry engaged in "constrained spec-ulation" with a refreshing look at howideas, experiments and mathematicalsimulations can be used to gain insightinto this field of study. His "speculations"included the currently held belief thatsurfaces, rather than any "primordialsoup," probably provided the conditionsrequired for the origins of life.

Christine Orengo discussed the evolutionof protein structures. A number of struc-tural motifs (for example, IgG folds andTIM barrels) occur very frequently. Theprevalence of certain structures amongstprotein superfamilies that are unlikely tobe related through evolution may be evi-dence of convergent evolution. Equally,there are structurally diverse proteinsthat share very similar functions. Thisbrings a new perspective to the proteinstructure-function paradigm.

Adrian Friday’s talk dealt with "homolo-gy". While this concept is fundamental toevolutionary biology, the word is loadedwith assumptions and is frequently mis-used. Friday suggested that it might bebetter to avoid using the word at all.

Molecular biologists and zoologistsfound some common ground in the talkson the evolution of development, with itselegant methods to study morphology atthe molecular level.

David Stern studies very small phenotyp-ic differences by comparing closely relat-ed Drosophila species. Examining thehair patterns on the larvae and the legs hehas found that the differences betweenspecies are due to the cis-regulatoryregion of a transcription factor. Pheno -

typic variation between closely-relatedspecies may frequently be due to differ-ences in expression patterns of transcrip-tion factors.

Turning to in vitro systems, AndrewGriffiths introduced the powerful tech-nique of directed evolution, focusing on amethod based on artificial cell-like com-partments. The principle aim of suchwork is to develop more effectiveenzymes for use in biotechnologicalapplications. Griffiths discussed howsuch systems could be used to learn moreabout enzymatic diversity throughoutthe biosphere, as well as to understandthe intermediate steps by which oneenzyme evolves into another.

Dario Floreano introduced the fascinat-ing world of evolutionary robotics. Heexploits the mechanisms of evolution to

generate robots– independently ofhuman intervention – which adapt to agiven task. The experiment starts with arandom population of artificial chromo-somes, each encoding a different neuralnetwork and conferring a different robot-ic "phenotype". Individual robots aregiven a set task and only the most suc-cessful ones are selected for "reproduc-tion". After successive rounds of selectionand modification of the artificial chromo-somes, a well-adapted robot evolves. Byintroducing degrees of plasticity to theneural network, a mechanism of learningevolves and robots are able to perform inspite of changes in the environment. Thiswork attempts to reveal new forms ofautonomous intelligence as well as to

help us understand adaptive behavioursand neural circuits found in nature.

Oliver Curry sought to counterbalancethe traditional, brutish view of "survivalof the fittest" by describing how truly co-operative strategies can have evolvedthrough natural selection. Using gametheory to describe social organisation andacts of altruism, he demonstrated thatsurvival can be more strongly promotedwhen all interacting individuals gainsome advantage than through competi-tive strategies.

Some experimental data on the mecha-nisms of social evolution came inGregory Velicer’s talk. Myxococcus xan-thus is a "social" bacterium . Given itsshort generation time, and the possibilityto easily control its environment in thelab, Velicer has produced strains that

exhibit anti-social phenotypes. Socialactivities necessary for reproduction anddevelopment are readily lost when cellsare grown under asocial conditions. Thismay have fatal consequences, but whencertain antisocial strains are mixed andcultured together with their wild typeancestors, they cheat the system andmanage to survive. There are clues thismay also be the case in the wild.

In an exploration of human origins,Svante Pääbo proposed thatNeanderthals and humans are moreclosely related to each other than to thegreat apes. Different parts of the humangenome vary significantly in the rate andmode by which they evolve, whichmeans that care should be taken when

Evolution: from molecules to mankindEMBL PhD students sponsor their second symposium

Fotis Kafatos and the organizers of the PhD Symposium on Evolution photo by

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EEMMBBLL &cetera

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using sequence analysis of a singlegenomic region to draw conclusionsabout relationships between species.Furthermore, his work has exemplifiedevolutionary studies in the post-genomicera, generating impressive data onhuman and chimpanzee gene expression.Whereas expression patterns of the liverand blood transcriptome have varied lit-tle between humans and chimps, geneexpression patterns are very different inhuman and chimp brains.

Stephen Jay Gould raised more generalpoints about evolutionary theory, argu-ing that some premises of Darwinian the-ory should be altered in light of new find-ings. These alterations should not bedestructive, but rather expansive. Forexample, he suggested that natural selec-tion does not only operate at the level ofthe organism, but on many levels simul-taneously: genes, cell lineages, organ-isms, species are all agents of selection.

In the final talk, Simon Conway Morrispresented new fossil findings that pro-vide insights into the assembly of bodyplans and the emergence of metazoancomplexity. Addressing the issue of evo-lutionary convergence, he stated thatevolutionary processes are strongly con-strained. For example, basic neurologicalprinciples are the same everywhere. Heclaimed that the emergence of intelli-gence was inevitable and if dinosaurswere not extinct, intelligent bipeds wouldprobably still have evolved and dominat-ed them.

A major strength of the symposium wasthe diversity of the programme: inherent-ly, evolution is studied through manylines of research. The closing panel dis-cussion sought to bring together differentperspectives by considering to whatextent large-scale evolutionary changescan be explained at the molecular level.From the discussion, it is unclear whetherthis macro/micro-evolution "paradox"really exists, but in any case it seems itdoes not offer a particular challenge toevolutionary theories.

The organisers gratefully acknowledge thesupport of EMBL, EMBO and the EC (High-Level Scientific Conferences).

– by Alison Shaw, Célia António, AidanBudd, Emanuel Busch, Sílvia Curado,

Natalie Denef, Peter Duchek, Marica Grskovic, Luís Teixeira, Hanne

Varmark, Jennifer Volz, Ulrich Weihe

An illusion of chanceArtists throughout history have confronted the problem of transforming

three dimensions into two. The Renaissance saw the development of awhole science of perspective, which gave painters elaborate tricks to create illu-sions of depth on canvases, walls, and the ceilings of churches. Centuries later,the Cubists added the dimension of time, trying to incorporate the shifting per-spectives of a viewer into flat surfaces.

Now sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer is peeling the process apart again inintensive analyses of the works of French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1967).She presented a scientific analysis of his work in a new Science and Societyvenue: the first collaboration between EMBL and the Deutsch-AmerikanischesInstitute (German-American Institute, or DAI) in downtown Heidelberg. Morecollaborative projects are planned next year.

Shearer is an eclectic figure who pursues interdisciplinarity in her daily activi-ties. Alongside her own artistic work, she is founder and co-director (with herhusband Stephen Jay Gould) of the Art Science Research Laboratory (ASRL) inNew York, as well as an associate of the Psychology Department at HarvardUniversity and a visiting scholar at the Physics Department of New YorkUniversity. The ASRL, based in a loft in Soho, is a unique environment whereartists, art historians, mathematicians, physicists and graphic designers workdaily side by side. There the boundary that commonly separates the humanitiesfrom the exact sciences is challenged; the cultural and the scientific intermingleharmoniously. ASRL has employed a wide variety of scientists, including foren-sics experts, in decoding the works of Duchamp.

Duchamp is most famous for his ‘toutfaits’ (readymades), works of art derivedfrom mass-produced objects, such as coat racks or bicycle wheels. To the sur-prise and astonishment of most art-historians, Shearer has shown that Duchamp(profoundly influenced by the mathematician Henri Poincaré) did not makethese mass-produced objects artworks simply by selecting them and displayingthem in an exhibition room under his name, but by forging in them hidden cluesto mathematical and optical laws, available for recognition only through exper-iment and measure of an attentive reader. Using computer animations, shedemonstrated how seemingly-innocuous photographs of objects in the artist’sstudio had actually been highly manipulated, often combining dozens of partialimages into a single picture. These tricks have gone almost entirely unnoticedfor decades because they fall “below the radar” of the viewer’s awareness ofproportion and perspective.

More information about the Art Science Research Laboratory can be found atwww.artscienceresearchlab.org. An on-line journal devoted to Duchamp stud-ies is available at www.toufait.com.

– Giovanni Frazzetto

Rhonda Roland Shearer

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Staff Associationfrom the

Meeting with new administrators The Staff Association invited EMBL'snew Administrative Director Bernd-Uwe Jahn and new Head of HumanResources Keith Williamson to attend its regular committee meeting onOctober 23. The intention was to get acquainted with the new administra-tors on the one hand and to present them with a list of issues that havepriority with the Staff Association on the other. The list was sent earlier tothe Director General, who responded positively to our initiative. Issuesbrought forward by the Staff Association included:

Revision of the Rules and Regulations with respect to their legality andconformity with the laws of the outstation countries and the EuropeanUnionStructured timetable for an expeditious revision of the Health schemeImprovements in the Personnel Section Eliminating problems with the financial software, which are endanger-ing the quality of research at EMBL and EMBL's imageIntroduction of a policy on e-mail and web privacy consistent withEuropean lawPublication on the web of as much information for the staff as possible Independent legal adviser for both EMBL staff and AdministrationRegular meetings between the Administration and the Staff Association

Bernd-Uwe and Keith both expressed their interest in constructive coop-eration with the Staff Association and agreed that meetings should beheld on a monthly basis. The next meeting between the Administrationand the Staff Association including the outstations is planned forDecember 17. The Staff Association looks forward to working with Uweand Keith.

ILO Salary case The Staff Association was pleased to learn that Councilhas voted "in principle" to implement ILOAT Judgment 2057 (filed by threeprivate individuals), hopefully ending the salary dispute that has beenongoing at EMBL since 1995. The Staff Association had urged Councildelegates in a letter to end the dispute on the basis of 2057, but the del-egates voted, for legal reasons, to wait for judgment in the pending StaffAssociation case and will make a final decision in March. This letter maybe accessed as a pdf file via the Staff Association homepage atwww:embl-heidelberg.de/~staff/ under "Staff Info" (see sidebar). A com-

prehensive history of the ILO salary dispute and the issues involved isalso available from the web site or directly from the Staff Association(Meyerhofstr. 1, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany; [email protected]).

The effect of Judgment 2057, if implemented, would be back pay for thosewho worked at EMBL between 1995-2001 and an increased salary basefor future adjustments. Council voted in principle to add the 2.1 percentsalary increase for Germany in 1995 to the base line for salaries from1996 through the present. There is some question as to whether anacross-the-board raise of 2.1 percent for all stations is the correct inter-pretation, however, as salary adjustments in 1995 were 3.4 percent for theU.K. and 1.7 percent for France. The Staff Association is attempting toclarify which interpretation best preserves parity for all duty stations andwill report in more detail in the upcoming issue of our newsletter, The StaffAssociation Bulletin.

Home leave We would like to remind staff members who plan to use theChristmas holidays for their home leave that there are specific rulesregarding the minimum number of days that must be taken to qualify ashome leave (5 working days). Although no prior approval from thePersonnel Section is required, we urge you to consult them in advance tomake sure that your travel plans are eligible for reimbursement as homeleave.

Intermedex and the Euro (€) Advice that the Staff Association repre-sentative in Grenoble has received from Intermedex:

If you have a medical invoice in Euro, clearly state on the Intermedexform that it is in Euro. When you receive the reimbursement, check thatit has not been paid in Francs If you have received a prescription for a patented drug from your doc-tor and the pharmacist has substituted a generic drug (médicamentgénérique), ask the pharmacist to write on the reimbursement form thatthis drug is a "médicament générique remplaçant tel médicament", oth-erwise Intermedex will refuse to pay.

– Ann Thüringer

Philippe Kourilsky, Director General ofthe Institut Pasteur, came to EMBL onNov. 20 to give a Science and Society talkentitled, “The precautionary principle: afashionable concept or a mutation in soci-ety?” He also met with scientists to dis-cuss ways to strengthen collaborationsbetween our two institutes.

From genomes to cures - 2nd EMBO-EMBL symposium

Science, society, Pasteur & EMBL

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The completion of the genomes of humans and other organisms holds great promise formedicine and other fields, and will inevitably have a significant impact on society. Thiswas the topic of the second joint EMBO-EMBL Conference on Science and Society, heldfrom Nov. 16-18 in Heidelberg. Among the speakers and panelists (pictured): Sam Broder,Frank Burnet, Barbara Jasny, and Jonathan Knowles. Extensive information about theconference can be found at the address www.embo.org/projects/scisoc/index.html .

9

Hamburg and GrenobleOutstations award joint PhDswith European universitiesTwo PhD students at the Outstations have been awarded EMBLdegrees jointly with other European universities. Attila Remeny(EMBL Hamburg) has successfully defended his dissertationwith the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. Attila has donehighly successful interdisciplinary structural and biochemicalwork with Hans Schöler and Matthias Wilmanns.

Cedric Clapier defended his degree on December 4, making histhe first degree to be awarded by the Grenoble Outstation andthe Université Joseph Fourier.

Attila and Cedric follow in the footsteps of Joep Muijrers, whoreceived his degree from EMBL and the University of Nijmegen(Netherlands) in January 2001.

Other institutions that have agreed to award joint degrees withEMBL include the Universities of Lisbon, Madrid, Heraklion,and most recently, Strasbourg.

newsevents&

Hubert Markl, President of the Max Planck Society,visited EMBL on October 31 as part of the HeidelbergForum on the Biosciences and Society. He gave twolectures: the first, “Man's Place in Nature -Evolutionary Past and Genomic Future", was intendedfor a scientific audience and took place at EMBL; thesecond talk, "Entgrenzte Wissenschaft: der Irrweg vonEvolutionsbiologie und Genetik zu Rassismus undMord," for the general public, was held at the PrintMedia Academy in downtown Heidelberg.

��

The European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC)has appointed Frank Gannon as its new SecretaryGeneral. Gannon will combine these new duties withhis previous post of Executive Director of EMBO. Thehistoric decision to combine the two posts was madeat the November EMBC meeting, in light of the con-tinuing expansion of EMBC activities, and of the closecooperation between the EMBC and EMBO.

��

Thomas Preiss gave his inaugural lecture at theUniversity of Heidelberg on Thursday, December 13,the final step towards obtaining his Habilitation für dasFach Biochemie, the license to teach Biochemistry as theprofessorial level at German universities.

��

Freddy Frischknecht has been selected as a RegionalWinner for Europe for the Amersham PharmaciaBiotech & Science Prize. He was awarded a US $5,000prize and a plaque at a ceremony in Sweden onDecember 5. Freddy appears among the list of winnersin the November 30 issue of Science. Read his winningessay at www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/pharma-cia/prize/winning.shl

��

Michael Boutros received the PhD prize from theHeidelberg Society for Molecular Biologie(Gesellschaft fuer Molekularbiologie) and the GermanSociety for Genetics prize for 2000 for his thesis,"Dishevelled mediates specificity in Wnt Frizzled sig-nalling pathways". See more at www.gfg.bttec.de/frames/d_preise001.htm.

��

Group leaders from the entire Laboratory escaped toDarmstadt in mid-October for a retreat. During twohalf-day meetings, they exchanged information andviews on the state of the Laboratory. Among the talkswere presentations by Janet Thornton (EBI) and NadiaRosenthal (Monterotondo) about the new directionsthat their units will take.

Henk and his coat of many indelible inksInstead of having a going-away party after nine years at EMBL,Henk Scholten roamed the Lab in a luminescent yellow labcoat, collecting signatures and donations for the “NewbornScreening” project at the University of Heidelberg’s Children’sClinic. When last seen, Henk was heading into the elevator,weighted down by hundreds of signatures and thousands ofDM.

Are you an EMBL alumnus? Is your address going to change?

Follow the Alumni link on the EMBLhomepage; keep us updated on your whereabouts, and

we’ll keep sending you EMBL&cetera

photo by Maj Britt Hansen


obituary

Carmen Berthet, staff scientist at the EMBL GrenobleOutstation, died on September 13, 2001, only a few

weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.During that historic week we had to grapple with our ownlocal tragedy as well as the global one, making it a verydifficult time for everyone.Carmen originated from Barcelona where she was trainedas a physicist. She moved to Grenoble in 1962 to pursueher PhD work in neutron diffraction from magneticmaterials and from 1969-1975 was a scientist at theInstitute Laue-Langevin, responsible for thediffractometer D2. Carmen was one of the founder recruitsto the EMBL Grenoble Outstation which was establishedin late 1975, along with Dino Tochetti, Jo Sedita and Jean-Marie Bois. Under the first Head of Outstation, Dr.Andrew Miller, she installed the first X-ray generator andremained responsible for the Outstation X-ray facilitiesfrom then on. She made important contributions to mostof the major scientific projects carried out at theOutstation, pursuing X-ray and neutron diffractionstudies of collagenous materials. That was the time of rat-tail tendons, turkey tendons, fish bones and bovine inter-vertebral disc… work which resulted in publications inScience and Nature nevertheless! With the coming in 1980 of the second Head of Outstation,Bernard Jacrot, the focus of the laboratory and Carmen’swork switched to virus structure, using both neutrons andX-rays. Crystals of the adenovirus fibre grown in thelaboratory by Christiane Devaux stimulated Carmen andmyself to learn protein crystallography in the mid-1980s,although it was not until ten years later that technicalimprovements yielded a solution to the fibre structure. Wehad more luck with aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, asubject introduced into the laboratory by ReubenLeberman and Michael Härtlein. That was still the heroicperiod of protein crystallography, of week long measuringsessions at LURE or EMBL Hamburg, breathing darkroom fumes to develop the stacks of films. Nicolas Nassar,a PhD student, Carmen, and I eventually solved thestructure of seryl-tRNA synthetase. By the 1990s, we hadour own synchrotron next door and improved detectors.Carmen worked closely with students on two otherdifficult crystallographic projects: the structure of theE.coli EfTu-EfTs complex, which was the PhD project ofTaki Kawashima and was published in Nature as the firststructure of a G-protein/exchange factor complex. Thesecond project, the structure of p24, the HIV capsidprotein, in complex with an Fab, was a collaboration witha pharmaceutical company, bioMerieux. Carmencrystallised the p24-Fab complex and worked with PhDstudent Stephanie Monaco to solve the structure. Itremains the only structure of the complete p24 molecule.Car men’s most recent projects were relat ed to aspar -aginyl- tRNA synthetase. She solved the first structure ofthis enzyme together with one of Reuben Leber man’s PhDstud ents, Lawrence Seignovert. In the last two years thisproject was ex tend ed to the crystal lization and solution ofasparginyl-tRNA synthetase from the human para siticnematode Brugia malayi, the causative agent of awidespread and debilitating tropical disease calledfilariasis. Carmen spent her last months trying to soak intocrystals or co-crystallise lead compounds which had been

identified as inhibitors of enzyme, intending to make alimited, high-throughput screen. Unfortunately she wasunable to succeed before her death.Over the 25 years of Carmen’s career at EMBL, theOutstation has changed enormously, growing both in sizeand scientific reputation, to which Carmen’s solidscientific output contributed significantly. One constantduring this time was Carmen’s enthusiasm, generosityand energy which never failed to help maintain thelaboratory as more than just a place of work but a warmand friendly community. A very large number of staffmembers, students, visitors and external scientificcolleagues have interacted with her over that period andmessages of condolence have poured in from them. Allremember her strength of character, good humour andunderstanding that often helped them in difficultmoments. She was a "mother" to us all, particularly foryoung scientists, notably women, and I think of Nicolas,Hassan, Taki, Stephanie and Lawrence, amongst manyothers who made their first steps in research accompaniedby Carmen. Before she died, Carmen often spoke of hertwo families, both of which were a central part of her life:the family at the laboratory and of course her own family,particularly her children and grandchildren.Carmen never really left her native Barcelona andreturned there to be laid to rest. She brought us thewarmth and sun of Spain. As a former PhD studentsummed up, "I worked with Carmen during my thesisyears at the EMBL. She was a happy, loving womanalways ready to help. Just listening to her talking with herCatalan accent was enough to cheer you up."

– Stephen Cusack

Carmen Berthet(1940-2001)

11

How do you pronounce EMBL? Doyou say "EMBUL" or "EMBEL" or

“E.M.B.L.”? or is it something thatsounds like “EMBUH”?The same sounds can emanate from thosewho speak about activities in EMBO (torhyme with toe or EMBUH?). Those whodrive up Meyerhofstrasse are aware ofthe co-existence of the two organizationseven if they are sometimes confused as towhere one begins and the other ends.Those outside the Heidelberg regionhowever are totally confused to the pointwhere it doesn't make any difference tothem. EMBO/EMBL/ the "EMBO labora-tory" are mixed in sentences as differentactions are carried out by the organiza-tions either individually or collectively. The confusion is not surprising given thatboth organizations come from the sameroot and have the same goal i.e. to pro-mote and improve molecular biology inEurope. In legal terms they are separateorganizations, with a further complica-tion that EMBO is not only the organiza-tion but is also supported in a more invis-ible way by the EMBC. The EMBC or theEuropean Molecular Biology Conferencewas established in 1969, to support theactivities of EMBO, which was a dream ofmany years earlier and is made up of thescientific community. The EMBC dele-gates today come from 25 member statesand a subset of these are the supportersof the EMBL. In 1974 the EMBL (which was discussedand planned as far back as 1962) was

established, or to use today's terminolo-gy, a "spin-off" from the EMBC in recog-nition of the importance of having astrong independent structure for the lab-oratory-based activities. The three organ-izations (EMBO-EMBC and EMBL) workwith great synergy on many differentprojects while guarding their independ-ence on the areas that are appropriate tothemselves. The most obvious point ofinteraction is with the EMBO Coursesand Workshops. The cornerstone of theseare the practical courses provided formany years by the EMBL group leadersand their colleagues. The funding comesfrom the EMBC through EMBO, the workis carried out by the EMBL scientists andthe benefits go to the scientific communi-ty.Another major form of interaction relatesto the housing of EMBO within the EMBLcampus. Many years ago the EMBLoffered to house the EMBO/EMBC activ-ities and this arrangement continues totoday. One obvious change is the fact thatEMBO now has its own building paid forby EMBO funds but benefiting from theinfrastructural and practical supportwhich comes from the neighbouringEMBL organization.This version of the EMBO corner is beingco-signed by the directors of EMBL andEMBO. This is to send a particular mes-sage to those in the scientific communitywho sometimes may need reassurancethat both organizations remain fully com-mitted to jointly working in a most pro-ductive way to deliver on their individ-ual and collective agendas. The opportu-

nities for cooperation are expandingrather than contracting. For example theScience and Society joint symposium is anew aspect of the combined strengths ofthe organizations being used to expandinto new areas which are required by thecommunity in which we live. The EMBOYoung Investigator Programme is anoth-er point where this cooperation is inher-ent in the delivery of this new develop-ment, with the EMBL group leaders act-ing as a reference point for the younginvestigators that are selected throughoutEurope. Given the energy and dynamicactions that both organizations have dis-played over the last number of years itwould be surprising if further opportuni-ties for cooperation do not arise. Whenthey do there is a commitment from bothof us to ensure that these will beaddressed in a positive and cooperativemanner.So when you are next asked how to sayEMBL consider the subtle differenceswhich are present in the last letter butmore than anything else realize that weare family!

– Frank Gannon and Fotis C. Kafatos

thecorner

We are family

One of the first things KeithWilliamson realized when

coming for his interview at theEMBL was that adding "limitedknowledge of German" to his CVwas a slight overstatement. Herecalls causing great confusion tothe waiter in an Italian restaurantwhere he was to meet Fotis C.Kafatos, resulting in the totalrearrangement of two tables forabsolutely no reason.

Keith worked for many years inthe UK Civil service as anaccountant, most recently as theDirector of Administration in theCentral Office of Information, a

semi-commercial British government organisation specialisingin publicity, advertising and filmmaking. Fotis felt that Keith'slong experience and personality would fit very well into theEMBL spirit. "I was immediately impressed by the friendliness

and enthusiasm of everyone I met during my first visit toHeidelberg,” Keith says. “I had always wanted to work on theContinent, and being offered the position of Head of HumanResources was a perfect opportunity to do so.”

Getting to grips with the terminology used within the institutetook a little bit of getting used to. "Every time I mentioned anEM as in EMBL or EMBO, I got the wrong one," he says, adding"a simple enquiry for the organisation's organogram turned outto be less straightforward than I was used to, and gave me agood idea of the content of my work for the months and yearsto come." Still, there are a lot of similarities between his previ-ous workplace and the EMBL. "Specialists, whether they are inthe field of media or science, tend to be enthusiasts who do notwant to be bothered too much with the administrative side ofthings," Keith explains. He finds that the laboratory functionsquite well without heavy-handed controls and rigid structuresin place, especially considering so many different languages,cultures and projects are melted together. ”Yet the EMBL has anoutstanding international reputation and delivers very high-standard output. Maybe one reason for this is that it is a placewhere 'people' come first and share a common enthusiasm. Thisis why I really like the cut of EMBL's jib.”

– Lena Reunis

“I like the cut of EMBL’s jib”

Keith Williamson

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board of your computer. Few computers have that key, becausethey were all made in America or Japan and their manufacturersfigured this would be a good trick to make all the Europeans buynew computers. A new computer costs 2,000 – no matter whatcurrency you use to pay for it. An alternative is to spend 200 on asoftware patch which will enable you to type € by holding downthe capital letter "C", the "=" sign, Control, Option, Apple, andEscape all simultaneously. This will swiftly lead to carpal-tunnelsyndrome. The best solution is to retrieve your paper from thelaser printer and simply write in € by hand.

The biggest problem with €, however, is that nobody under-stands what anything costs. Prices are completely random. Atfirst there will only be two prices. Everything that doesn’t cost€2000 will cost €3.99. It costs a lot of € to make new money, espe-cially since you can't pay for the new currency in Euros. As aresult, governments have decided to start with the largestdenominations and work their way down, which means that €one-cent pieces will not be made until about the year 2044. Thisraises the disturbing question of what will happen to all of thosesingle cents in change you're supposed to get when you pay€3.99. These will go into a slush fund and store managers will usethem to do day trading on the stock market via the internet.However, if you have a Lufthansa frequent flyer card, you canpresent it to the store and the cent will be added to your miles. In42 years, when they finally make cents, you will have accumulat-ed 93 billion miles, including interest.

There are a number of myths surrounding the Euro, some ofwhich are simply unkind and malicious. For example, some peo-ple have gotten the impression that prices have gone up in the

The arrival of the Euro has understandably thrown us all intodisarray, particularly when it comes to doing your Christmas

shopping or when you place your order at Starbucks and discov-er you've just spent eight hundred marks for a double Mocha.Even worse is having to find the symbol for the Euro on the key-

Doooon’ t panic - it’ s only the Euro!

Now the facts about the Euro changeover...

By 31 December 2001, all bank accounts will be convertedto euro automatically and free of charge.As from 1 January 2002 it will be possible to use eurobank notes and coins for payments, i.e. they will have legaltender status, all over the euro area, which consists ofAustria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, andSpain.Most ATMs (automated teller machines) will dispenseeuro as from 1 January 2002.In principle, retailers will give change in euro as from 1January 2002. After that, the use of euro banknotes andcoins will be increasing rapidly, and national banknotesand coins will be withdrawn and not re-issued for circula-tion.Exchange of national banknotes for euro will take place atcredit institutions, national central banks or dedicatedexchange points starting on January 1, 2002. Do notaccept, or exchange, legacy currencies for euro banknotesprior to this date.In general, banks will exchange national currency againsteuro free of charge up to the end of February 2002. In somecountries this will be limited to "household" amountsand/or to the banks' own customers.

It will be possible to exchange national banknotes of theother euro area countries free of charge until the end ofMarch 2002 at points designated by the national centralbanks of the Eurosystem. It will not be possible, in princi-ple, to exchange coins of other euro area countries.National central banks will exchange their respectivenational banknotes against euro free of charge at leastuntil the end of 2012; coins may be exchanged free ofcharge at least until the end of 2002. In most countries theexchange periods are longer or even indefinite.

Tips and tricksReturn to the banks, or use up hoarded cash, in particularcoins, in the course of 2001.Buy coin starter kits when they become available and usethe coins as from 1 January 2002. Try to 'avoid the rush' by exchanging hoarded nationalcash, or depositing it at banks either before or after thebusy period in early January.Use national coins of other euro area countries in thecountries of issue before the end of the changeover periodor exchange them afterwards at the respective nationalcentral bank, or donate them to charity.

For more information on the introduction of the euro bank -notes and coins see the official euro website athttp://www.euro.ecb.int.

(provided by the European Central Bank)

photo by Maj Britt Hansen

13

process of rounding things off to €3.99. This is simply not true.Converting things into €s is very complex, which is why govern-ments recommend that you not try it yourself. It may be neces-sary in an emergency, however, so we have provided handy con-version formulae at the end of this article.

Other stories turn out, in fact, to be true. The British, for example,will probably start driving on the correct side of the road. This isbecause all toll booths which accept the Euro have their basketson the right side. This was done as a penalty because the Britishhave the only unit of currency worth more than the Euro.

It is not true that all Euros will be easy to counterfeit. The Eurofrom your country will be incredibly difficult to counterfeit, oncepeople know what it looks like. Euros from places like Namibiawill be somewhat easier, but the EC has promised to find a solu-tion before too many of them are circulated.

According to financial expert Lawrence B. Fishbein, of theInternational Institute for Psychoeconomics, the main thing issimply not to panic during the transition period. His institute hascompiled a list of a few simple things people can do to maintaincalm:

As in any crisis, lay in a stock of canned goods and ammuni-tion;Take all of your money from the bank, convert it all first intoFrench francs, then into Belgian francs or Austrian shillings,and finally into Japanese yen or Icelandic Krona. Put it intoMason jars and bury them in your back yard (do not put airholes in the jars). Be sure to draw a map so that you can findthem later. Put all your old spare change in a box and mail it in to pay nextyear’s income tax deficit.

Send out an e-mail saying that your father milked a third-world government of 787,992,312,413 _____ (fill in the blankwith your old currency) and you are just looking for a bankaccount to put it in.

"There will undoubtedly be some confusion due to the fact thatno one has ever understood exchange rates," Fishbein said. "Thepart of the brain which processes exchange rates is the same asthe part which has to figure out whether you get to sleep an hourmore or less at daylight savings time. Objective exchange ratesaren’t very valuable anyway; what’s important is that peoplehave a practical method to translate their ‘feeling’ for the value ofmoney – the monetary unit they are used to dealing with – intoEuros."

His institute has published a simple handbook called "Foreignexchange for dummies" which will soon be published on theinternet. Here are some excerpts:

Case study 1: A UK citizen who has lived in Italy for many yearshas now moved to Germany. Multiply one (British £) by 3000(Italian lire), divide by 1000 (DM) and then divide by two again.The formula is: € = (1 x 3000)/(1000 x 2).

Case study 2: An American who has lived in France, receiving asalary in Belgium, recently moved all his money to a Swiss bankaccount. Multiply one ($) by 7.5 (FF) and then by 6 (Belgiumfrancs). Divide this number by 31 (Swiss francs). Then divideagain by 1.45. The formula is: 1€ = (1 x 7.5 x 6)/(31 x 1.45).

The institute promises that these formulae will give you the psy-chological value of one Euro within about a factor of ten, whichis close enough.

– Russ Hodge

The EMBL Cup: a report on a glorious daycleaners! I locked my keys in the car! There was an earthquake! Aterrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN'T MY FAULT!), we thought thatthe Boxberg team had made it through by goals difference. Butthanks to the captain of Development II, Thomas "Delpierino"Vaccari, an accomplished mathematician, we stopped this semifi-nal (Structures II – Boxberg) and played the real one. ThoughCellZome comfortably qualified for the semis, they struggled toreach the final (3-2 against Development I). Structures II had atough time, both in the first round and in the semis, making thefinals only with a last-second goal. A penalty shoot-out was need-ed to beat Development II and to meet CellZome (thanks Arieand thanks Vitor). Because of lack of time (and the arrival of apolice officer – it seems that some people don’t like the sound ofa bouncing ball after 21:15 in Boxberg), the finals had to be playedon the 22nd. CellZome lost. Structures won. Development IIreached third place after beating their "brothers" (Development I)in a tense derby. The prizes? None, just the right to make fun ofthe losers until the next tournament, which will be held in Marchor April. Winners and losers celebrated together in the pub.

So, in conclusion, we would like to thank everybody that madethis tournament so cool, CellZome for the drinks during the firstday of the tournament, and the organizers for thinking about it.We hold weekly football sessions in Boxberg. If you are interest-ed, it's quite relaxed and it’s free.

– by Federico De Masi and Christian Edlich

When the international referee, Dr. Oliver Gruss, whistled theend of the final, Giulio Superti-Furga was crying like a

fountain. Gitte Neubauer was yelling at her players like aninjured eagle. CellZome athletes were stunned. On the other sideof the pitch, the Structures II team was jubilating in scenes of col-lective hysteria. What a game it had been! During the last 5 min-utes of the game, it was Armageddon in front of the valiant andfearless Arie "the Flying Dutch" Geerlof, Structure’s goalkeeper.Defenders had to resort to some rough methods to stop Miro"Spread the game" Brajenovic and David "Braveheart" Dicksonfrom scoring the equalizer…

What we are talking about, of course, is the football tournamentthat took place on October 8 and 22. We had teams from almostevery department in EMBL: Cell Biology was there, GeneExpression, the new Predocs and Core Facilities as well. We hadtwo teams from both Developmental Biology and Structures andBiocomputing. There were also two external teams, CellZomeand Boxberg. Participants included group leaders and even peo-ple who had never seen a football in their lives. We also had abunch of hooligans, the feared S.O.S (Structures OrganizedSupporters) that rocked the place with their music and cheer-leaders.

Teams to make it to the finals included Development, StructuresII and CellZome. At first, due to a miscalculation by one of theorganizers (I ran out of gas! I got a flat tire! I lost my tux at the


Governments are spending a tiny dol-lop of our tax money to turn huge

radio-telescope ears to the stars. Only ahard-hearted person would not be fasci-nated by the prospect of listening to analien civilization’s classical music, ortheir equivalent of Dr. Laura. But howlikely are we to catch the broadcast, andcould we understand it if it came? TheBritish astronomer Ian Morrison recentlytried to answer these questions, speakingto 200 enthusiastic Euro pean high schoolstudents from 23 countries who hadcome to CERN for a science fair called"Life in the Universe." Students enteredscientific or artistic projects on this themeinto national competitions, and the final-ists were invited to the international fairat CERN.The students hoped that Morrison wouldgive them some hard scientific answers.As head of important international SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)activities, he is a proponent of wideningthe search, following in the footsteps ofastronomer Frank Drake. Back in 1961,Drake proposed using radio telescopes tosearch for life, and created an equation topredict how many alien radio stations wecould expect to find. His famous formulalooks like this:

N = R* fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L

which means, in plain language, that thenumber of broadcasting civilizations canbe calculated by multiplying the rate at

which suitable stars form, by the numberof those with suitable planets, by the frac-tion of those where life develops, by theprobability of intelligent life evolving, thefraction of that life which develops tech-nology, and the longevity of communi-cating civilizations. Whew. There areprobably a few factors missing, like thealien psychology – whether they areparanoid about being gobbled up by usextraterrestrials, which may depend onwhether they caught "IndependenceDay" on DVD.Most people regard the equation as a use-ful thing, although so far it has beenimpossible to substitute real values forDrake’s variables. Science should eventu-ally fill in part of the equation. At CERN,Willy Benz, discoverer of the first planetoutside our own solar system, said thatimprovements in technology will proba-bly help us discover other planets withthe basic prerequisites for sustaining life.Just days ago the Hubble space telescopediscovered traces of a planetary atmos-phere 150 light-years away.But will life or intelligence evolve there?With enough time, all sorts of ecospherescould probably produce self-replicatingmolecules. From that point on, manyagree, pure Darwinism would reign. Butwould evolution function the same wayin an alien ecosphere? Does all life oper-ate according to variation within speciesand natural selection? Could an alien bio-chemistry achieve a very long-term, crys-

tal-like steady state, where moleculesreproduced themselves almost flawlessly,and variations from the template werepunished with instant extermination? Orcould conditions systematically wipe outlife that exceeded a certain size?What about the likelihood of intelligence,technology, and communication? A lot ofpeople believe that intelligence is analmost inevitable outcome of naturalselection – you even hear statements like,"If the asteroid hadn’t hit the earth,dinosaurs would have become intelli-gent," despite the fact that neither geckosnor chameleons have started to buildradios. This is an area in which we actually havesome statistics, and in fact, things don’tlook promising. Of all the billions (tril-lions?) of species that have ever lived onearth, it’s only happened once, and so faronly for a very short time. The earth didperfectly fine without our brains for near-ly all of its history, and there’s no reasonto think that it couldn’t have gotten alongfine without us forever. Every speciesalive today has an evolutionary historyjust as long and successful as our own,and it can be just as proud of itself as weare (at least until we exterminate it).Sharks’ teeth and bacterial flagella arejust as successful as an evolutionary strat-egy as human intelligence, in the uncom-promising Darwinian formula that states,"survival equals success."

basis to go back to whenever a difficult situation arises". Themanagerial course concentrated mostly on how to provide effi-cient leadership within a Kindergarten, covering issues such aspersonnel questions, pedagogical concepts, parents' policy,accommodation, communication, financial management andhealthy nutrition. "As part of my training, I also worked in akindergarten with men, which is more common in theNetherlands and a welcome change to a mostly female orientedworld," she adds.

Coming to Heidelberg was a big challenge for Eva, though onethat she was eager to take on. The international atmosphere,beautiful surroundings and fantastic infrastructure at the EMBLKinderhaus immediately appealed to her. "My first duty was togain the trust of all teachers and find my place in middle man-agement, balancing between my staff and the EMBL administra-tion," she says. This was followed by taking a close look at com-munication structures, the security measures and nutrition.

It has been almost a yearnow since Eva Puhm joined

the EMBL as the Head of theKinderhaus, and most par-ents would agree that theplace is buzzing with activity.

After finishing a degree inpedagogical studies in Vien -na, Eva moved to Am sterdamto complete a combined de -gree in women's studies witha one year course in Kin der -gar ten management. "Themost important thing I learntduring this course is toalways have a vision of how

one would like your organisation to function", Eva says. "Thisvision can develop and change as time goes by, but it is a vital

Research at the Kinderhaus

photo by

Marietta

Sch

upp

from the sister sciencesOn the evolution of extraterrestrial intelligence

15

Intelligence certainly doesn’t mean thatyou are capable of broadcasting intelligi-ble signals. We’ve only made two curiousattempts at that ourselves. In 1974 abunch of our best and brightest put theirbrains together to beam a message to thestars, and what they came up with can beseen to the right.This is an odd message because it is soloaded with anthropomorphic symbolsthat I think it would be completelyincomprehensible to anyone else. First ofall, it’s a two-dimensional image that’ssupposed to represent a three-dimension-al object. Only beings with eyes and anervous system almost identical to ourswould ever do the bizarre thing of repre-senting volumes by squashing them intoplanes. (You would also need plants thatcan be cooked and pressed into flatsheets, or animal skins that can bestripped and flattened, which were theoriginal types of flat writing surfacesuntil the flat-screen monitor was invent-ed.)There’s nothing keeping us from sendinga message that could be reconstructedinto a cube or sphere, but then we’d haveto take a close look at the contents. In thismessage, we teach our alien friends howto count from one to ten, then immedi-ately show them the structure of a carbonatom and the chemistry of our geneticcode. I don’t know how many years ofeducation you needed to make this jump,many of us needed a little while.

How should we depict an atom in threedimensions, anyway? In reality, neutronsand electrons are so tiny, and there issuch an immense amount of spacebetween them, that you could pack thewhole universe into a space the size of alarge molecule. (You shouldn’t try to doit; you’d probably cause a Big Bang.)What’s shown here is a peculiar short-hand that some human found conven-ient. A message that attempted to portrayan atom in its correct proportions wouldhave to be really (* really * really * real-ly)1,000,000,000,000 long, consisting almostentirely of zeroes. (Hopefully the trans-mitter software won’t crash during trans-mission.) ...and the Uncertainty Principlestates that we can’t really know preciselywhere the electrons are, so we’ll have toput some blur into the message.But help is on the way. A company calledEncounter 2001 (in Texas, where else?)has sent a second message into space. Forjust $14.95 (that’s €15.70, at today’sexchange rate) people were allowed toadd a 30-word message to the broadcast.Their next project is to send a spacecraftalong with Ariane 5. For just $49.95 youcan have a sample of your own DNA sentalong. I’m not sure exactly what the ideais. Perhaps they hope that by exportingintelligence (well, at least its DNA), the(so far) silent universe will someday befull of planets containing vast numbers ofclones of people who are willing to forkout the $ (DM, €).

– Russ Hodge

Now Eva has finally reached the point where she feels she canstart concentrating on her vision, and how to implement it in theKinderhaus. "During my training I was greatly inspired by the so-called De Reggio Emilia approach," Eva explains. Originatingfrom a Kindergarten in Italy, this approach is based on the ideathat one has to first observe a child's points of interest and findout what he or she would like to learn, rather than imposing ateaching programme on them. "Listening to children's questionscan lead to a week's activity," Eva explains. “For example, duringa project on life in medieval times, a child asked how soap wasmade. That gave us our cue to do our own research and then passthat on to them!” The approach also focuses on continuity ratherthan isolated activities. Four sheep were brought in for the“Burgfest” in October, serving as a starting point for the babygroup to make sheep-shaped lanterns two months later.

"What I would appreciate is an increase in parents' involvementin our activities," Eva replies when asked what she would like to

change in the future. "Children with such various cultural back-grounds as here at the Kinderhaus could bring along very inter-esting material from home," she explains. As an example Evapoints out how a simple photograph of grandparents living inNorway or a tape with Spanish music could lead to a whole set ofinteresting activities. "All children are natural researchers," Evapoints out, "give them a few familiar clues and they will go a longway." As part of this, Eva would like to urge scientists to thinkabout safe objects from the lab that could be donated to thekinderhaus. "Our younger researchers might just be able to use itfor further experimenting," she says.

Finally, Eva asked us to look out for the Kinderhaus' own websitedesigned by Sophie Chabanis-Davidson, to be launched soon…

– Lena Reunis

of the world demonstrating maintenanceequipment for golf courses, he has foundhimself back at EMBL on a temporarybasis. Leo Burger is currently running theMechanical Workshop, which has alwaysbeen a critical support team for theLaboratory’s scientific groups. Upon therecent retirement of Hans Flösser (EMBL&cetera 6), who had headed the work-shop since it was created along with theLaboratory, the team found itself short ofhands. (Now at three people since its hey-day when the staff totaled seven.) Leo

thought of Tony andinvited him to comeback.Leo had an ongoingproject for whichTony’s expertise inplexiglass could beuseful. Working withAndreas Girod, JensRietdorf, RainerPepperkok, and theelectronic workshop,Leo and SiegfriedWinkler weredesigning air-tightplexiglass boxes witha temperature andC02 controller tobuild around micro-scopes. "The scien-tists have a numberof experiments theywould like to per-

form where samples ought to be studiedat very precise temperatures, or in a C02environment," Leo says. "The best solu-tion was simply to build a box around themicroscope, but that didn’t exist on themarket with the required specifications."


If you drop in on Tony Landomini in theMechanical Workshop (fourth floor), it

probably won’t be long before he trotsout his map of the United States andstarts to talk about his four-and-a-halfmonth, 22,000-kilometer adventure withan antique Topolino (Italian for “littlemouse”). He’s got pictures of his 1953Fiat Belvedere Topolino Estate Wagon(the name is longer than the car) in frontof the White House, sitting on a pothole-ridden road in Monument Valley, andparked under the Golden Gate Bridge."I worked at EMBL from1986 to 1995, then hadone of those reallyincredible leaving par-ties," he says. "My gift tomyself when I left was atrip around the U.S. inmy Topolino." At theparty, somebody gavehim a paperback copyof John Steinbeck’s bookTravels with Charley, theauthor’s account of athree-month tripthrough the U.S. withhis dog. Tony wasamazed to discover thatthe route he hadplanned was nearlyidentical to Steinbeck’s.One major differencewas that Tony had notrouble skipping acrossthe Canadian border in his Topolino.Steinbeck wouldn’t have had any prob-lems, either, except that he couldn’t havebrought his dog. After a six-year hiatus, during whichTony traveled around Europe and the rest

Now it does, thanks to the efforts of theALMF team and the workshops. Theyhave already built boxes for two micro-scopes, are working on several more, andtheir most recent design for a Nikoninstrument will likely serve as a proto-type that can be adopted by externalmanufacturers and produced on a widerscale.Like many other projects, this is precisionwork that has to be carried out by theworkshops in close collaboration withscientists. The Nikon box is tidy and ele-gant, with smooth plastic curves, andscrews set tightly into transparent holesin the plexiglass. Leo demonstrates ahinged door that has to swing back andforth as the neck of the microscope ismoved. Panels on the sides can beopened for access to the instrument’scontrols. "This is really typical of the type of proj-ect we do," he says. "We’re usually in thebackground on projects, and some peoplehave the impression we’re a sort of ware-house. That’s not at all accurate; we’vealways been actively involved in thedesign and construction of original scien-tific equipment. If a researcher wantssomething special, or if he would like tocustom-design a piece of equipment thathe’s not satisfied with, we’re the place tocome."Throughout the history of the Laboratory,the workshops’ efforts have made impor-tant contributions to some high-profilescientific projects. Teams built cryo-lensesfor scanning transmission electron micro-scopes (STEM) practically from scratchfor Arthur Jones and Max Haider, haveconstructed large "cell-crackers," and one

names to faces Ever wondered what name goes with that face you keep seeing around EMBL? or who else works nooks and crannies of the Main Lab and the Outstations, helping you get to know some of the

Tony Landomini

A little mouse, and a microscope

lab notesfrom the Szilard LibraryThe Science Citation Index with data back to 1975 is now avail-able throughout EMBL - including the outstations andMonterotondo. The Szilard Library at EMBL has joined a consor-tium of other libraries (including those at the DKFZ and MDC-Berlin) to benefit from a reduced price for this service.New journals online Current Protocols in Molecular Biology andCurrent Protocols in Cell Biology are now also available online.For more information on either of these services either visit thelibrary's web-site at http://library.embl-heidelberg.de or mail thelibrary at [email protected].

from the PhotolabNew Colour Printers: The installation of the five new OCE colourprinters is now complete. They are located throughout EMBL (seebelow). All are identical and require a new printer driver whichshould be updated on the computer you are printing from.Instructions and the download for Macs can be found on our webpages www.embl-heidelberg.de/LocalInfo/Photolab/printer.pdf. PC and UNIX users, please contact the Computing depart-ment.Printer name LocationOCE-216_CS110-CS115_print rm. 216 (Library)OCE-306_CS110-CS115_print rm. 306 (Structures)oce-409 rm. 409 OCE-549a_CS110-CS115_print rm. 549a (Development)OCE-PHOTO_CS110-CS115_print rm1.80 (Photolab)

17

‘Cartesian ball,’ which worked on thesame principles as the mouse."Another challenge was the creation of a"floating table" for precision microscopy– where samples and instruments had tobe held absolutely still, protected fromtremors in the building due to passingtrucks or other causes. Leo describes howa crane was used to raise a 10,000 kilo-gram stone slab into the Laboratory. TheMechanical Workshop built an "air mat-tress" that would hold it up."Its like making a table swim on a bigrubber balloon," Leo explains.

" I n s t r u m e n t sdetect all thechanges in thesurface and com-pensate by chan -g ing the pressurein the balloon."He drops the capof a pen on thetable. "It has to besensitive enoughin order to com-pensate for thattype of change."What happenedto the slab? "Thedevelopment ofcomputers and

lasers made it out-of-date; you don’tneed to make tables that heavy anymore,"he says. "Eventually they cut it up. Butthere are still pieces of it around some-where."

– Russ Hodge

of their major accomplishments has beenthe design and construction of standard-setting electrophoresis equipment still inuse today and for which they have fillednumerous orders from universities andother institutions. They have built instru-ments with the Ansorge group inBiochemical Instrumentation, and havealso been heavily involved in buildingequipment for the Hamburg andGrenoble Outstations. Now they areworking on projects with the groups ofChristian Boulin (who is responsible forthe facility), Ernst Stelzer, PhilippeBastiaens, and many others.

Along the way, there have been somecurious stories. "You know the computermouse which operates by running a ballover the table?" Leo says. "Before thatexisted, there was a need for somethinglike that to drive a part of the electronmicroscope, and equipment at DESY. Sothe design team of the STEM used a bil-liard ball to build what was called the

Would you like to contribute to the next issue of EEMMBBLL&cetera?

Just send a message to [email protected] for submissions is

February 15, 2002

EEMMBBLL &cetera is published by theOffice of Information and Public AffairsEMBL, Meyerhofstrasse 1D-69117 Heidelberg

Tel. +49 6221 387 252; fax 387 525e-mail: [email protected]: Russ Hodge; Associate Editor:Sarah Sherwood; Design: SarahSherwood, Russ HodgeContributors: Stephen Cusack, FedericoDe Masi, Christian Edlich, GiovanniFrazzetto, Frank Gannon, Fotis C.Kafatos, Lena Reunis, Ann Thüringer,the PhD student symposium organizersPhotographic support: EMBL PhotolabPrinted on recycled paper byColorDruck, Leimen

here besides scientists? Starting in this issue, we’ll be regularly exploring some of the people who,behind the scenes, in their quiet way, do a lot to help EMBL function.

Leo Burger, Tony, and the Box Photos by Maj Britt Hansen

in a plastic box

Video Conferencing. During theScience and Society Conference inNovember we installed a multisitevideo conference link in order to testthe possibility of broadcasting confer-ences and talks from the Operon liveto the other EMBL sites. This allowedviewers from the Outstations andMontero tondo to participate directlyin the conference. Live webcasting onthe internal Heidelberg network alsoallowed web browser users to followthe conference from their work places.The results were encouraging and theservice was appreciated. We are evalu-ating a permanent installation.

Book your Beamer in advance! The shift to laptop presentationshas finally overtaken traditional slide use. As many of youalready know, we have several beamers available on loan. Wecannot always accommodate last-minute requests - so, book inadvance! Send us an email ([email protected]) orring us at 238 and we’ll confirm your booking.

from the Office of Information and Public AffairsJason Soffe has joined the staff of the Office of Information andPublic Affairs in Heidelberg. His main area of responsibility willbe to help overhaul the design of the EMBL website. He hasalready put up a new OIPA home page, worked with us on elec-tronic versions of press releases, and redesigned the Science andSociety and PhD programme pages.

Here are this month’s contributions inour continuing search for the “Best ofPubMed.” Have a look at these PMIDnumbers...

11098371110983712308280230828011046411110464119686446968644665027746502774

Send contributions to [email protected]@embl-heidelberg.de

False Positives

Claus Nerlov joined the Mouse Biology programme inMonterotondo as a Group Leader in October. Claus did his PhDwith Ed Ziff at New York University, followed by a postdocwith Thomas Graf in the EMBL Developmental BiologyProgramme. He has spent the last three years running theLaboratory of Gene Therapy Research at the CopenhagenUniversity Hospital. Claus will continue his work on C/EBP

transcription factors in development and disease, whenever the weather in Rome isnot sunny.

In October, Carsten Schultz moved into the chemistry facilitiesof the EMBL as an interdisciplinary group leader in the GeneExpression Programme. Carsten received his PhD at theUniversity of Bremen, German, and after three years as a post-doc work with Roger Tsien at the University of California SanDiego, he returned to Bremen for his habilitation in OrganicChemistry. He continued his work intracellular messengers at

the MPI for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, and has now expanded this to thedevelopment of novel methods to monitor signaling events in living cells.

Jürg Müller is another new Group Leader in the GeneExpression Programme. He did his PhD at the University ofZürich with Mariann Bienz and postdoctoral work in the lab ofPeter Lawrence at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology inCambridge, England. After that he became a group leader at theMPI für Entwick lungsbiologie in Tübingen where he usedDrosophila to study chromatin-related aspects of gene regula-tion. At EMBL, Jürg plans to continue these studies but complement genetics withbiochemical approaches to tackle old problems from a new angle.


EEMMBBLL@people Who’s new?

Asifa Akhtar joined EMBL in October as a Group Leader in theGene Expression Programme. Asifa did her PhD at ImperialCancer Research Fund, London, with Richard Treisman, andpost-doctoral work with Peter Becker at EMBL (Heidelberg)then at the Adolf Butenandt Institute (Munich). At EMBL, Asifaplans to continue her work on chromatin regulation usingDosage Compensation as a model system ...and drink tea.

Michael Knop is the most recent Group Leader addition to theCell Biology and Cell Biophysics Programme. He did his PhD inStuttgart with Dieter H. Wolf, and his postdoctoral work at theMPI in Munich with Elmar Schiebel and at the Beatson Institutein Glasgow. He joins EMBL after two years at the MPI inMartinsried as an independent researcher. At EMBL he willwork on cell differentiation, membrane organisation and cellcycle control in Baker’s yeast -the real yeast.

In the Cell Biology and Cell BiophysicsProgramme: Nicola Berns (González), MaiwenCaudron (Karsenti), Emmanuel Caussinus(Gonzalez), Ute Kahl (Knop), Michael Knop(Group Leader), Peter Maier (Knop), Kota Miura(Pepperkok), Alexandra Moreno-Borchart(Knop), Martin Offterdinger (Bastiaens), AnnaPeyker (Bastiaens), Emmanuel Reynaud(Pepperkok), Teresa Sardon (Vernos), JeanetteSeiler (Vernos), Vytaute Starkuviene(Pepperkok), Hideki Yokoyama (Karsenti), IvanYudushkin (Bastiaens); in the DevelopmentalBiology Programme: Lodovica Borghese (Rørth),Carl Neumann (Group Leader), Rebecca Quiring(Wittbrodt), Martina Rembold (Wittbrodt),Giorgia Salvagiotto (Nebreda), Eve Seuntjens(Treier), Alena Shkumatava (Neumann), MarijaSpasikova (Neumann); in the Gene ExpressionProgramme: Asifa Akhtar (Group Leader),Alessia Buscaino (Akhtar), Carlo Dinkel(Schultz), Ulrich Elling (Treier), Cerstin Franz(Mattaj), Cornelia Fritsch (J. Müller), NicoleHeath (Schultz), Maria Koffa (Mattaj), JürgMüller (Group Leader), Martina Niksic(Valcarcel), Andreas Schleifenbaum (Schultz),Carsten Schultz (Group Leader), AdityaSengupta (J. Müller), Dan Slocum (Akhtar),Mikko Taipale (Akhtar), Leonie Unterholzner(Izaurralde), Oliver Wichmann (Schultz), BrigitteWild (J. Müller), Louise Woodley (Valcarcel); inthe Structural and Computational BiologyProgramme: Richard Bayliss (Conti), Fulvia Bono(Conti), Sandra Esteras (Serrano), CarolineHadley (Russell), Caroline Lemerle (Serrano),Christian Marx (Böttcher), Vladimir Pena(Scheffzek), Ximena Ramirez (Macias), FredericRousseau (Serrano), Joost Schymkowitz(Serrano), Parantu Shah (Bork), Baozhen Song(Leonard), Christian von Mering (Bork); inAdditional Research Activities; Graziella Penot(Gannon), Dina Vlachou (Kafatos); at the EBI:Philippe Aldebert (Apweiler), David-WilliamBinns (Trembl), Paul Browne (Apweiler),Idelfonso Cases (Ouzounis), Yuan Chen(Ensembl), Nikos Darzentas (Ouzounis),Federico Garcia Diez (Trembl), MartinHammond (Birney), John Livingstone(Jokkinen), John Melford, Ahmet Oezcimen(Brazma), Christel Perrin (Apweiler), ManuelaPreuss (Apweiler), Anastasia Samsonova(Brazma), Esther Schmidt (Birney), SiamakSobhany (MSD), Mohamaed Tagari (MSD), AbelUreta-Vidal (Birney), Wim Vranken (MSD), DanWu (Apweiler); at the Grenoble Outstation:Susan Fridd (Cusack), Bernard Lavault,Anastasia Mylona (C. Müller), Antoine Royant;at the Hamburg Outstation: Vladimir Volkov,Alexander Kornelyuk, Manfred Weiss, FrankLehmann, Virginia Calabritto, Huseyin Uysal,Fernando Ridoutt, Young-Hwa Song, OlgaKirillova (Lamzin), Anni Linden (Wilmanns); atthe Monterotondo Programme on MouseBiology: Jose Gonzalez, Claus Nerlov (GroupLeader), Craig Panner; elsewhere at EMBL: TanjaBlotz (Szilárd Library), Siegfried Candussi (ISG),Heinz Harz (ISG), Marc Hemberger (Computer& Networking Group), David Ibberson (CoreFacilities), Bernd-Uwe Jahn (Administration),Heike Kirsch (Switchboard), Nathalie Leclercq(DG’s Office), Karl-Heinz Marx (ISG), GoeranNitzsche (ISG), Emmanuel Reynaud (CoreFacilities), Sara Savaresi (Core Facilities), SabineSchmidt (Core Facilities), Jason Soffe (OIPA),Janin Topaloglu (Kinderhaus), Nadine Winter(Personnel), Keith Williamson (Personnel); atEMBO: Baerbel Laur

Carl Neumann is a new Group Leader in the DevelopmentalBiology Programme. He did his PhD at EMBL Heidelberg in1997 with Steve Cohen, and then postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen,Germany. At EMBL he will focus on the role of cell-cell signal-ing in patterning the zebrafish retina and paired fins.

faculty appointmentsKlaus Scheffzek (Structural and Computational Biology), Kim Henrick (EBI),Manfred Weiss (Hamburg) have been appointed as team leaders. Hassan Belrhali(Grenoble), Martin Hetzer (Gene Expression), Elena Lehvashina (AdditionalResearch Activities), and Hans-Michael Müller (Additional Research Activities),Andrea Schmidt (Hamburg), and Young-Hwa Song (Hamburg) have been appoint-ed as staff scientists.

December 2001 cetera - archive.embl.org · EMBL &cetera Issue 9 - December 2001 EMBL opens ITTC and...

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