Charles Wood is principle investigator for the NIH grant.

$10.4 Million National Institutes of Health Grant Establishes Viral Research Center

By Monica Norby, Office of Research

UNL has won a $10.4 million award from the National Institutes of Health - the largest NIH competitive award ever received by a Nebraska research institution - to establish the Nebraska Center for Viral Pathogenesis. The center will be a collaborative research enterprise of UNL, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Creighton University, linking researchers studying viruses at the three institutions.

"This award is one of the initial successes of the research initiatives begun at UNL in the past year and demonstrates the benefits of increased research collaboration with the Medical Center," said Harvey Perlman, UNL interim chancellor. "It recognizes our world class researchers in virology and we are very excited about the potential of the center for improving human health and the treatment of viral diseases."

The center's researchers will conduct basic research on the ways viruses cause disease, studying some of the most devastating human viral diseases, including AIDS, HIV-associated cancers, and chronic infections caused by herpes viruses and a new class of infectious agents called prions. The center's studies of the mechanisms by which viruses replicate and cause infection and cell death also will lead to a better understanding of human neuroimmune disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, and have broad implications for other research areas.

"This grant establishes Nebraska as a major player in one of the emerging areas of science," said Dr. Harold M. Maurer, UNMC chancellor. "It will not only benefit Nebraska in terms of quality of life, it will also have a positive impact on the state's economic future. It's a perfect example of how collaboration among universities can lead to outstanding accomplishment."

Charles Wood, a molecular virologist and Lewis Lehr/3M Professor of Biological Sciences at UNL, was awarded the grant through a national, peer-reviewed NIH grant competition to establish centers of biomedical research excellence. Wood will serve as director of the center.

"We are pleased that our peers and NIH have recognized the quality of basic research on viral diseases in Nebraska, and our commitment to build a much stronger biomedical research component," Wood said. "Our success in this competition is the result of a team effort. The center will establish formal interactions between UNL virologists and UNMC and Creighton medical researchers, and bring everyone together under a single umbrella. Together we can make great progress in research areas related to human health."

Wood heads a UNL-based international research program that works with a clinical population in Zambia and focuses on how HIV and HIV-associated viruses are transmitted from mothers to their infants. His research into the relationships between HIV, human herpes virus 8 and Kaposi's sarcoma is shedding new light on ways to block HIV transmission from mother to child, and is a step toward development of an HIV vaccine.

Wood will be assisted in developing and administrating the center by Dr. Howard Gendelman, David Purtilo distinguished professor and director of UNMC's Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders, and James Van Etten, William Allington distinguished professor of virology at UNL, who will serve as co-directors.

"Unlike other federal grants that support a single researcher, this grant supports the entire state of Nebraska in research, in education, and ultimately in patient care, because our research focuses on the causes and treatment of human disease," Gendelman said. "It also will help us in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest scientists."

The NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence grants are aimed at increasing research capacity at the recipient institutions. The Nebraska Center for Viral Pathogenesis will use the $10.4 million, awarded over five years, to support research projects and key technical facilities needed by the center's researchers, recruit new scientists and students, and establish an administrative structure. Of the total grant, UNL will receive more than $6 million; UNMC, more than $3 million; and Creighton, more than $900,000.

"It's gratifying that our new faculty recruitments and investment in an expansion of basic science research at Creighton have helped in securing this collaborative award from the NIH," said Dr. Roderick Nairn, senior associate dean at Creighton's School of Medicine. "This grant brings resources to Nebraska that will enhance our state's expertise in combating newly emerging and re-emerging global threats from viral disease. The team approach to this work should also spin-off other new projects and bring more NIH funds to Nebraska and our three leading biomedical research schools."

Four major research projects, two at UNL led by Clinton Jones in veterinary and biomedical sciences and Robert Weldon in biological sciences, one at UNMC headed by Jialin Zheng in the Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders, and one at Creighton University's School of Medicine led by Richard Bessen, will receive direct support from the grant. UNL's protein structural and microscopy facilities and UNMC's bioinformatics facility also will receive grant funds. The center's administrative offices will be housed at UNL but affiliated researchers will work on all three campuses.

Faculty recruitment is a critical component of the center proposal. The grant funds initial salary and start-up costs for five new researchers, four at UNL and one at UNMC.

"These new researchers will create the critical mass of expertise that is needed to take the center, and Nebraska, to the forefront of virology research," Wood said.

Ethics Authority Nussbaum To Deliver Centennial Address

Philosophical Association Celebrates Centennial Meeting Oct. 6-7

By David Ochsner, Public Relations

Historians often refer to the year 1900 as the beginning of a "golden age" at the University of Nebraska. The university was becoming known for its academic achievements, including the first program west of the Mississippi River to offer a Ph.D. degree. That same year the Association of American Universities was founded, and in less than a decade the AAU would invite the University of Nebraska into its membership.

In this atmosphere of high aspirations another national professional association was taking shape on the University of Nebraska campus. During Christmas vacation of 1900, a small group of philosophy professors from five states gathered here for the first meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

This little-known fact of history may have remained unknown if Albert Casullo, a UNL philosophy professor, hadn't happened across a small article in a 1900 edition of The Philosophical Review that announced the formation of a new society "to stimulate an interest in philosophy in all its branches, and to encourage original investigation."

Had this remained unknown Casullo and others wouldn't be commemorating the occasion at the annual meeting of the Central States Philosophical Association in Lincoln on Oct. 6-7.

All activities occur at the Cornhusker Hotel and Convention Center.

Not only is it a happy coincidence that Lincoln is hosting the CSPA this year; Casullo also is president of the organization.

According to Casullo, the CSPA is one of several regional philosophical associations. "The regional associations provide smaller venues for participants to present research," he said. "It allows for more interaction, yet most of these meetings still cover the entire discipline."

Despite the regional nature of the meeting, Casullo said participants from around the country would attend the conference. Among them will be the acting director of the national APA, Richard Bett; keynote speakers Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University; and Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Professor of Law & Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School.

Casullo said McGinn and Nussbaum are leading authorities on two of the areas of greatest interest among philosophers today: values and ethics in society (Nussbaum) and the study of the mind, or consciousness (McGinn).

These topics go beyond the esoteric forums of scholars however; the relationship of the mind to human values is often at the core of discussions regarding contemporary social issues.

"People today perceive significant moral problems in our society that need to be addressed," said Casullo. "Yet it seems that it has only become recently known that there is a discipline (philosophy) that has been studying these issues for more than 2,000 years."

Casullo contrasts philosophy's role in ethical issues with its other prominent area of inquiry: the study of the mind and the neuro-sciences. These two areas represent a larger debate in society that revolves around the pursuit of truth: to some truth is based on reason or even faith. It is a question of ethics and values. To others truth is based on empirical evidence, or the result of rigorous scientific inquiry. Of course, there is a lot of middle ground.

With the keynote speakers representing each side of the debate, it seems fitting that Casullo, in his presidential address, will attempt to strike a balance. "My talk addresses an issue raised by Immanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'," said Casullo. "Kant said that there are two sources of human knowledge-reason and experience."

Casullo said the keynote topics would have been appropriate even at the first APA meeting a century ago. "The APA came into existence because psychology (at the time a new offshoot of philosophy) was becoming a more empirical discipline."

One hundred years hence the debate continues with this two-day conference.

On Oct. 6, Colin McGinn will deliver his keynote address, "The Truth about Truth," at 5:15 p.m., followed by a reception and banquet at 6:45 p.m. Following the banquet Casullo will deliver the Presidential Address, "A Critique of Pure Reason."

On Oct.7 conference participants will dedicate a plaque commemorating the first meeting of the APA in Lincoln. The dedication will be at 5 p.m. in the new Arts & Sciences Garden located on the east side of Oldfather Hall. A reception and the Centennial Banquet will follow at 6:30 p.m. At 8:30 p.m. Nussbaum will deliver her keynote address, "Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero's Problematic Legacy." Nussbaum's address will be open to the public.

For more information contact Casullo at 472-2429 or email acasullo@unlserve.unl.edu.

NAACP President Mfume At UNL Oct. 5

Kweisi Mfume, president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, will discuss leadership in the 21st century in a free public lecture next month. His lecture will begin at 7 p.m. Oct. 5 in the Nebraska Union Auditorium, 1400 R St.

Mfume became president and CEO of the NAACP in February 1996 after a unanimous vote by the association's board of directors. To take the post, he gave up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he had represented Maryland's 7th Congressional District for 10 years.

The former congressman has raised the standards and expectations of NAACP branches nationwide and has worked with volunteers across the country. His five-point action agenda encompasses civil rights, political empowerment, educational excellence, economic development and youth outreach and has given the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization a clear and compelling blueprint for the 21st century.

Mfume, whose West African name means "conquering son of kings," was born, raised and educated in Baltimore, where he became politically active as a freshman at Morgan State University. He won election to the Baltimore City Council by three votes in 1979, but seven successful years later, he was elected to Congress by a wide margin.

As a member of Congress, he consistently advocated landmark minority business and civil rights legislation and successfully co-sponsored and helped to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Mfume's appearance is co-sponsored at UNL by the Nebraska Union, Student Involvement/Culture Center, the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Equity, Access and Diversity Programs; and by the NAACP Lincoln Chapter, Southeast Community College and the Nebraska Department of Education.

Geologists Warming to Ice Age El Niño Effects

By Tom Simons, UNL Public Relations

A funny thing happened on the way to Tammy Rittenour's master's thesis.

Rittenour, a first-year doctoral candidate in geosciences at UNL, was working on her master's degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the fall of 1997 when she and her colleagues, UMass geosciences professor Julie Brigham-Grette and postdoctoral researcher Michael E. Mann (now an assistant professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia) made an unanticipated discovery.

In a project funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and the University of Massachusetts, Rittenour and her colleagues were looking for evidence of the way New England's glacial Lake Hitchcock drained at the end of the last Ice Age. They found that evidence, but they also found something that surprised them - evidence of El Niño effects in New England's climate 17,500 to 13,500 years ago during the late Pleistocene era.

"We did not expect that," she said. "There's the idea, based on recent archaeological evidence from South America, that El Niños are warm-weather conditions and there was no evidence prior to this research that they occurred during glacial time periods. For them to be seen in North America, let alone right at the toe of the last ice sheet, is unexpected."

The discovery was announced in the May 12 issue of Science, the global weekly journal of research, in an article titled "El Niño-like Climate Teleconnections in New England During the Late Pleistocene."

Scientists define El Niño as a disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific, having important consequences for weather around the globe. A weakening of the trade winds allows unusually warm currents in the western Pacific to flow eastward across the equatorial Pacific to the western coast of South America. This exceptionally large area of warm ocean surface waters occurs cyclically causing serious changes in global weather patterns.

Lake Hitchcock covered what is now the Connecticut River valley from southern Connecticut to northern Vermont. Geologists knew it had been formed when the farthest advance of the Laurentide Ice Sheet built a terminal moraine that acted as a natural dam to the runoff when the ice sheet melted. But no one was sure how the lake had drained - gradually, in stages or catastrophically.

The UMass campus in Amherst sits on the shoreline of the ancient lake and Rittenour's team used well-drilling equipment at a site on a campus athletic field to pull two cores from the ancient lake bed, one of 105 feet and one of 25 feet. The longer core was missing the uppermost portion of the geologic record, so the second core was taken and the two cores were matched up to form one 110-foot core.

Each year of sediment consisted of two distinct layers, one light and one dark. Like modern glacial lakes and streams, Lake Hitchcock and its tributaries were filled with silt and clay and their waters probably had a turquoise-blue color. During the summer, when the lake's waters were stirred by wind and glacial runoff, only the heavier, light-colored silt settled to the bottom. When the lake was ice-covered in winter and its waters were calm, the lighter-weight, dark-colored clay settled. The next year, the process repeated itself, and so on for thousands of years.

"I counted 1,389 varves, or years' worth, of sedimentation," said Rittenour, who was the lead author in the Science article. "Also, by obtaining a radio-carbon date from the sediments I could determine the time that the ice retreated from Amherst and how long glacial Lake Hitchcock existed in Massachusetts."

As she counted the varves, Rittenour noticed immediately that there was a variance in the thickness of the annual layers. She began to suspect that there might be a pattern to them and she knew if there was, it had to be climate-related.

She was also familiar with the work of Ernst Antevs. A Swedish geologist who came to North America in the early 20th century, Antevs developed what is known as the New England varve chronology by examining and measuring outcrops left by Lake Hitchcock and other now-dry glacial lakes in New York and New England. He measured layers throughout Lake Hitchcock and the other lakes and correlated them, year-for-year and lake-for-lake, developing a chronology that covered 4,000 years of sedimentation.

"The reason he could correlate between lakes was because the amount of glacial melting that was coming into all of these lakes was controlled by climate," Rittenour said. "I correlated my year-for-year thickness with his and there was a series of five varves that had a really distinctive 'M' shape, and I used those to link the whole chronology together. It was almost as if I took his data and plotted it again.

"This is pretty remarkable for a lake. Lakes usually have different sedimentation in different regions, so there was something special about these glacial lakes - something that allowed sediment to be deposited throughout glacial Lake Hitchcock and the other glacial lakes in the region with the same variability each year."

Rittenour and her colleagues eliminated the earliest, thickest varves from their study because they were formed when the ice sheet was almost on top of the core site and their thickness only reflected the local effect of the melting ice sheet, not climate. They then performed a statistical analysis to look for climate signals and a spectral analysis to look for periodicities.

What they found was a grouping of three peaks of varve thickness - one between 2.5 and 2.8 years, one between 3.3 and 3.5 years and another from four to five years.

"This is right in the modern El Niño climate frequency," Rittenour said. "The fact that there are three peaks is related to the way El Niño operates and this gives us a better idea that this is El Niño. We expected some climate signals were recorded in the sediments because of how the thickness of the lake sediments change from year to year. But we expected the climate to be influenced by something called the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is closer to New England, and not a climate signal from the tropical Pacific."

Rittenour said evidence of an Ice Age El Niño provides an important new clue in learning how El Niños operate and what to expect from them in the future.

"We know so little about the El Niño system and how it operates under different climate conditions," she said. "We need to study it over a long period of geologic history, through a lot of different climate changes. If we know how it responded in the past, we can forecast how it will respond in the future.

"Prior to this, people really didn't think El Niños existed during glacial periods. By publishing this paper, we're showing that they do occur during glacial time periods and that may suggest that El Niños are a perpetual, continual aspect of the climate system. They've been around for at least 17,000 years, and there's new evidence published this year that they existed 120,000 years ago during the last interglacial period. We shouldn't just expect them to go away."

Lake Hitchcock, by the way, drained in stages and that finding was the main subject of Rittenour's thesis, "The Drainage of Glacial Lake Hitchcock, Northeastern United States." El Niño provided only a chapter in that document, but earned publication in the most prestigious American scientific journal.

For her new research in the Mississippi River valley, Rittenour recently won the 2000 J. Hoover Mackin Award given by the Geological Society of America's Quaternary Division. This is the nation's highest award given to a geology Ph.D. candidate. Brigham-Grette won the same award 19 years ago.

A native of Appleton, Minn., Rittenour earned her bachelor's degree in geology and biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris (1996) and completed her master's in geosciences last year at Massachusetts.

	Doctoral candidate Tammy Rittenour's evidence of Pleistocene­era El Niño's appears in the May 12 issue of Science magazine.
	A map shows Lake Hitchcock and the surrounding area. A chart depicts the variation in sedimentation of the glacial lake.
	A chart depicts the variation in sedimentation of the glacial lake.
	A foot­long hammer shows the actual size of the sediment layers.
	A portion of the core sample taken from Lake Hitchcock.