Woodstock CT Café

‘Its time to stop carving up education and the town’s infrastructure and services’

Few things are more dangerous than free-spending politicians… except perhaps, a disengaged, non-thinking citizenry. This applies especially to formulaic spending solutions such as our Proposition 46. No one really wants to pay taxes and surely, nobody wants to pay more taxes. Though spending caps may initially address the problem of run-away spending, the automatic nature of their application creates the illusion of responsible financial management. Read the rest of this entry »

“what has been forgotten is… … it IS the public’s business“

In October 12th’s Worcester Telegram and Gazette is an article entitled, “Officials cited for meeting violation”. The header of the article as it is continued on page B3 is “Woodstock meeting violated law”. To sum up the article… the CT freedom of Information Committee found town officials in violation of the Freedom of Information Act. Now, I supposed we should start off noting that it is election season, Read the rest of this entry »

Just Do It!

If you would like to make a comment about any article on this page, just click on the comment icon near the title and follow the prompts. Also, any ‘cafe’ suggestions would be appreciated. If you’d like to publish at this site please send your article or commentary to… Read the rest of this entry »

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This coffee is superbly aromatic, well-balanced with medium body, and has lively acidity with overtones of spice and chocolate Read the rest of this entry »

“the Town missed a payment to the Academy in July”

On September 21st Headmaster of the private Woodstock Academy, Richard Foye, delivered a letter to Dr. Frank Baran, Superintendent of Woodstock Public Schools. The purpose of this letter was to outline six steps that must be taken by the Town of Woodstock (Town) to satisfy the Academy in the absence of a mutually acceptable contract for the future between the Academy and the Town. The tone of this letter was “lawyered” and clear. It began by reminding the Town and the Board of Education of their unprecedented threat to remove 9th grade students from the Academy and replace the Academy with a new high school either in town or through a deal with another regional high school. I remember the tone of the announcement on the removal of 9th grade students from Woodstock Academy at a public Board of Education Meeting six months ago. It was no less stern or threatening than the Headmaster’s letter of Sept. 21st. Superimposed upon these threats by the Town is the fact that the Town has missed tuition payments to the Academy since July. Read the rest of this entry »

“Education, is consistently told to name the child that they will sacrifice“

As the first leaves start to turn their bronze and golden colors and the sky takes on the crystal clear, azure blue of autumn most of us turn our attention to putting the garden to bed, raking leaves and figuring out where we put our ice scrapers. But for some, this is time to start anticipating the annual Budget Dance. While the “dance” formally starts in February, the planning and strategizing commenced some weeks and even months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

“All the players were stars on this day…”

On Monday evening, September 26th, Woodstock Academy Centaurs launched its first football team in 80 years kicking off the season against football stronghold, Fitch Falcons of Robert E. Fitch Senior High School from Groton CT. This was a junior varsity game composed of Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior student players. The inauguration of our football program was made possible, in part, by the fundraising activities of the WA Booster Club. Through their tireless efforts, $30,000 was raised to purchase the necessary equipment for the football team. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1979 I was ensconced in Building 29A in the center of the NIH campus with a career appointment at the FDA’s Bureau of Biologics. My friends and colleagues, Carl Merril and David Goldman at the Institute of Mental Health across the street, and I were on a roll. I had made a discovery that was going to fuel my research for the next 15 years by exploiting protein profiling using high-resolution 2-dimensional electrophoresis. The three of us were heavily invested in this technique and applying it to many different areas of investigation. The technique had been developed by Patrick O’Farrell at the University of Colorado. A year later Greg Milman demonstrated elegantly that this technique could detect point mutations in genes. At the same time Dr. B. Deal (pseudonym) was starting to swing his weight around in this field. He had started publishing numerous papers on the many different applications of 2-D gels, in effect ‘wallpapering’ over the historical facts in development of this technique.

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During one of my numerous trips from Paul Ts’o’s lab at Johns Hopkins to Aaron Bendich’s lab at Sloan-Kettering in 1974 (mentioned in Part 1) another major case of fraud hit the national news. Since this happened at Sloan-Kettering, I learned the inside scoop a few floors away from where the incident happened. William Summerlin, an MD, was working in the lab of Robert Goode then Director of the prestigious Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute. Both had their eyes on the Prize but Goode was honest with himself and the world. Summerlin, on the other hand, saw the glory but could not wait for the results. Summerlin had talked openly about having success at transplanting skin from a black (haired) mouse onto an albino mouse without transplant rejection. His break-through was to culture the black pigmented skin in-vitro before transplantation. If this simple step solved the problem of transplant rejection, then the advance could aid in improving skin transplantation for burn victims and possibly aid in organ transplantation.  At some point Dr. Goode asked to see the white mice bearing black patches of transplanted skin. Summerlin wheeled a cart of mice in small cages into an elevator to take them upstairs to Dr. Goode’s office. Before the doors could close, an associate who was in the hall outside the elevator noticed Summerlin ‘touching up’ some of the mice with a black magic marker. I imagine that Goode gave the mice a causal glance and noticed the black patches of hair, then asked Summerlin to take the smelly critters back to the animal room. Shortly afterwards, the associate who saw Summerlin’s artwork, reported what she had seen to Goode. Goode came forward publicly, took blame for his in attentiveness and misuse of federal funding, and needless to say Summerlin was fired.

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Yesterday and today there was news of fraud by the Korean stem cell scientists who made worldwide news in May of 2005 for their published cloning of human stem cell lines corresponding to afflicted human individuals. Although it seems certain that the Koreans’ work will be disproved and retracted, I prefer to wait for the dust to settle before commenting further on this fiasco. However, in this context I thought that I could discuss my own brushes with overzealous ambition and fraud that occurred during my 30 year career as a bench scientist and researcher. Here is part 1 which relates to events of the 1970’s. I plan to follow-up with some more bizarre examples that occurred in the 1980’s in a second blog (part 2).

During my career as a research scientist I met and worked with many great scientists like Kivie Moldave, Garret Ihler, and Dai Nakada in my formative years at the University of Pittsburgh where I received my Ph.D. Later in my career during my postdoctoral years at Johns Hopkins, I collaborated with Aaron Bendich at Sloan Kettering who was an inspiring cell biologist and protégée of Erwin Chargaff at Columbia. As I established myself as a productive molecular biologist, I formed collaborations with high-powered notable scientists like Klaus Weber at that Max-Plank Institute, Rudi Aebersold at Cal Tech, and Larry Kedes at Stanford. I also interacted with Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling, Dan Nathans, Hamilton Smith, David Baltimore, and Howard Temin to name a few. I was uniformly impressed by the precision, intelligence, and focus of these scientists. Never did I see any hint of ambitiousness in these people and their discoveries were infinitely correct, substantiated, and proved by others who followed. No doubt these people were ambitious, but intelligence and precision dominated their personas. This kind of character helped these special people to make great discoveries that advanced human civilization in meaningful and measurable ways.

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