USM Develops Nation's Largest Repository of Marine Cell Lines
Researchers at USM have established the nation's most extensive Marine Cell Line Library, a vital tool for understanding and protecting endangered whales and other marine mammals. The living cell repository will allow scientists worldwide to do research on endangered marine mammals without harming or interfering with living animals.
This information is critical if scientists are to discover the cause of major die-offs and strandings among some whale species, and also may lead to comparative studies between marine mammals and humans.
Leading the initiative is USM toxicologist John Wise, director of the Wise Laboratory of Environmental and Genetic Toxicology located at USM's Biosciences Research Institute. “Lots of people around the world do human cell culture and rodent cell culture,” he says, “but very few people do marine animal culture. These animals are too big to bring into the lab, they are federally protected, and many are endangered. Consequently, we have very limited knowledge of how viruses, toxicants, and pollution are affecting them.”
USM scientists receive tissue samples from a network of collaborators, among them, Mystic Aquarium and the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif. Additionally, tissue samples are supplied by Natives in Barrow, Alaska, who are federally authorized to hunt a limited number of bowhead whales annually. The harvested tissues are maintained and reproduced through genetic manipulation at USM labs.
Cell lines from the bowhead whale population may hold clues of importance to human toxicological research as well, says Wise. “These whales can live for 200 years and there's not much evidence that this species gets cancer. Is there some protective mechanism in their DNA? If so, can we take advantage of this for humans?”
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USM Using Space Age Technologies to Map Geologic History of Maine's Coast
Over the summer, Mark Swanson, USM professor of geology, Matthew Bampton, USM associate professor of geography, and a team of nine undergraduates spent six weeks paddling sea kayaks filled with digital surveying gear, radio transmitters, and GPS satellite receivers along the Maine coast. The effort was part of a project run out of the USM Geographical Information Systems (GIS) lab on the Gorham campus to study a collision between North America and Africa that happened 300 to 400 million years ago. Initial findings from their research have revealed a previously undiscovered fault zone at Harbor Island, eastern Muscongus Bay.
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GIS technology combines a powerful database system with the three-dimensional graphic capacity of a CAD (computer-aided design) system. The GIS lab project began in 2002 and was funded by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Swanson and Bampton received word that the project will be funded for an additional three years through 2007, with a second NSF grant.
The NSF grants Swanson and Bampton have received allow them to train undergraduates in an emerging scientific field and help provide networking opportunities for young researchers. Last summer the team consisted of students from all across the country.
Bampton, Swanson, and students will present their research findings at a March 2005 conference of the Geological Society of America, Northeast Section, in Saratoga, New York.
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Pulp Fiction, Russian Style
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Professor Rosenthal |
On the eve of the Communist Revolution in 1917, Anastasiia Verbitskaia may have been the most widely read author in Russia. Her steamy, six-part saga, The Keys to Happiness, far outsold most serious fiction, capturing the public's imagination with its mix of seduction and political and philosophical discussions.
When the Communist regime took power, however, Verbitskaia's works were condemned as counter-revolutionary. Her books were banned and stripped off library shelves; a warehouse of her books was burned. The queen of literary pop died in 1928, dishonored, living in obscurity in Moscow.
“More Russians probably knew of her work than that of Chekhov or Tolstoy; her influence was enormous,” says USM Associate Professor of Russian Charlotte Rosenthal. “Yet she's been relatively little studied.”
Last summer, Rosenthal returned from Russia where, under the support of a Fulbright Research Grant, she spent countless hours in state archives in Moscow, poring through Verbitskaia's letters, manuscripts, fan mail, photographs, and bits about her daily life. She now has a fuller understanding of this largely forgotten icon of popular literature.
Rosenthal plans to write a book that will offer a more complete picture of Verbitskaia's life and work, and in conjunction with a colleague in Moscow, wants to publish an anthology that will reintroduce Verbitskaia's work to Russian audiences. “Hers is a complicated, and partly serious, literary legacy,” says Rosenthal.
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