November 2001

Compression

Board of Trustees

John Thrasher, who was speaker of the Florida House of Representatives when the Legislature gave Florida State a new medical school, promised to "fight like hell for FSU" as chairman of the FSU Board of Trustees.

Thrasher, an FSU alumnus, was elected unanimously to lead the board at its first meeting, conducted by telephone Sept. 24. The new trustees also elected Lee Hinkle of Tallahassee, an FSU alumna, as vice chairwoman.

Thrasher is now president of Southern Strategy Group and is an attorney for the Jacksonville law firm Smith, Hulsey and Busey. He lobbies the executive branch of the state government, representing two state universities, not including FSU.

As speaker, Thrasher was instrumental in the recent reorganization of the state's education system, which abolished the Board of Regents and replaced it with a state board of education and a board of trustees for each of the 11 state universities.

The Board of Trustees is designed to eventually take over major decisions on the university - such as setting the budgets, hiring and firing the president and creating and abolishing the academic programs.
Lee Hinkle is a lobbyist with the Tallahassee firm Bryant, Miller and Olive P.A.

Why is cocaine addictive?

Scientists are learning details about exactly how it happens that cocaine is addictive.

Charles Ouimet, a psychology professor in the College of Medicine at Florida State, is working with researchers at Yale and Rockefeller Universities. They are studying the enzymes and the chemicals that cause the cocaine rush and addiction.
The chemical messenger that brings the rush is dopamine. It is regulated by an enzyme, Cdk5. And Cdk5 is affected by delta-FosB, a transcription factor that regulates expression of other genes.

Understanding the behavior of the three players - dopamine, Cdk5 and delta-FosB - may make it possible to understand the changes cocaine causes in the brain and therefore the addiction.
And that could lead to more effective treatments for cocaine addiction, researchers say.

Long-term neuroadaptive changes come with drug addiction, and the researchers have found that one of the changes is an increase in the level of delta-FosB in the part of the brain that causes the rush of pleasure.

They saw that delta-FosB increases the level of Cdk5, which reduces the level of response to cocaine, and that may represent an attempt by the brain to deal with the assault of excess dopamine.

An understanding of the mechanisms by which Cdk5 helps the brain adapt to cocaine abuse may ultimately lead to pharmacotherapeutic interventions in addiction, Ouimet said.

Department name grows

The department of chemistry has added "and biochemistry" to its name, because, department Chairman Naresh Dalal said, biochemistry is a significant part of research and teaching at FSU.

"The change makes a big difference to our image outside the university, because this will allow some of the best biochemistry undergraduates from other institutions to apply to FSU for graduate programs," he said.

Better weather report

Richard Pfeffer, after 46 years of fundamental research, says he's ready to "make a contribution to practical weather forecasting."

To help him do that, NASA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has awarded him a three-year, $375,000 grant.

The grant will help Pfeffer and two co-researchers at Florida State - Xu-Feng Niu, a professor of statistics, and Greg Gahrs, a former graduate student of Pfeffer's - make statistical corrections to numerical weather forecasts.

The forecasts they will help to correct are made by the National Centers for Atmospheric Prediction.

Pfeffer is internationally known for research on hurricane formation and laboratory modeling of processes responsible for the global circulation of the atmosphere.

With that foundation, and Niu's expertise on statistics, the FSU researchers are expected to help improve precipitation predictions over the United States. 

Pfeffer, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, was named an FSU Disting-uished Research Professor in 1997.

Orange Bowl

After 67 years, 15 national championships and 11 Heisman Trophy winners, the Orange Bowl Classic has made a different kind of history in 2001. It has elected its first woman president, FSU graduate Susan Potter Norton.

"I thought the timing was right," Executive Director Keith Tribble said. "It's very big and very historic."

Norton was elected by a vote of the Orange Bowl Committee, on which she has served since 1992. In bowl circles, Norton's instinct for handling issues and challenges is not unlike her work as a partner and principal in Florida's largest labor and employment law firm, Allen, Norton & Blue.

Norton has an undergraduate degree, MBA and juris doctorate cum laude. In addition to her law practice, she is involved in a wide variety of business, civic and charitable activities in South Florida.

Patriotism in art

The Ringling Museum in Sarasota is displaying art works that chronicle the changing attitude toward patriotism in the United States over the 20th century, by two artists who span most of the century.

The exhibit - "One Nation: Patriots and Pirates Portrayed by N.C. Wyeth and James Wyeth" - will run through Jan. 6.
From 1912 to 1945, N.C. Wyeth was most productive as an artist, while the country was embroiled in two world wars.

James Wyeth, his grandson, was born in 1946, and he also came of age in a time of turmoil, but the views were different.

Being "patriotic" meant marching in protest as well as marching off to war.

The exhibit includes 80 paintings and drawings.
The work of N.C. Wyeth has been seen as quintessentially American. He created propaganda posters for the U.S. government, depicting Uncle Sam and the brave fighting troops during the world wars. He also illustrated books depicting historical figures, such as Paul Revere, George Washington and Stonewall Jack-son, in a glorified, idealized light.

James Wyeth came of age when patriotism had to deal with the Vietnam War and Watergate. The subject of one of his best-known portraits, "Draft Age," is a boy of 18 in a black leather jacket and dark sunglasses, a defiant youth during the Vietnam era. The artist went on to paint a posthumous yet defining portrait of President John F. Kennedy, apparently in a moment of indecision. Robert Kennedy said it made him think of the way his brother had looked during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Helping children read

Two FSU professors traded compliments with President Bush on Sept. 10 when the President and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, met with teachers, parents and students at Justina Road Elementary School in Jacksonville, campaigning for the White House education initiative.

The Bushes-president and governor-recognized Chris Lonigan and Joe Torgesen, FSU psychology professors and experts in early childhood education, for identifying obstacles to early reading and developing methods to overcome them.

Lonigan and Torgeson praised the president's education initiative for including reading preparation in the Head Start program.

Lonigan said reading preparation is a serious problem in the earliest years of learning.

"Without good instruction, children who start behind will stay behind," he said. "What we need to do is find the children who are behind in some of the skills they need and work on improving those skills."

Lonigan and Torgesen said many students don't have the oral language, recognition of sounds and "print awareness" they need.

"There are huge individual differences in how ready they are," Torgesen said. "That's probably the most critical problem faced by schools."

TV winner

Florida State Professor David Kirby stepped out his front door on Sept. 25 and found a package on his steps containing a $500,000 check. But the check wasn't for the English professor; it was made out to his son Will Kirby.

Will Kirby, a native of Tallahassee, and a graduate of Florida High, was the winner of Big Brother 2.

Getting Will on the show, his father said, was the idea of his other son, Ian Kirby.

Since Will Kirby is 28, an osteopathic physician, and handsome, Ian thought he was just what the producers of Big Brother 2 would be looking for.

He was.

From July 1 to Sept. 20, Will lived in Los Angeles with 12 strangers for approximately 100 days, with cameras taping 24 hours a day in every room of the house. He managed to be the last one on the show after a contestant was voted out each week.
On Big Brother 2, Will portrayed himself as arrogant, evil and a liar, but he said he was only playing a character masterminded by his brother.

Since his son became a celebrity, Kirby said, sales of his own poetry books have increased substantially.

Correction-libraries

The Florida State Times reported inaccurately in Septem-ber that Althea Jenkins, FSU's new director of university libraries, had "assumed control" of all 11 Florida State libraries.

Jenkins said that her role is one of coordination and oversight for all the university libraries.

She has direct responsibility for the operations of the university's main libraries, Strozier and Dirac.

She said three university libraries-law, music, and information studies-are under their respective college deans and report directly to them.

Correction-class gifts

The classes of 1946, 1947 and 1948 gave the Heritage Tower to FSU.

The Florida State Times omitted-by mistake-one of the classes in an October story about the gifts.

Send a letter to the Editor: fstimes@unicomm.fsu.edu

Copyright ©2001 Florida State Times