The Brown Daily Herald F riday, N ovember 16, 2007
Volume CXLII, No. 112
Students win gold for glowing mold By Chaz Firestone Senior Staff Writer
This summer, as some Brown students traveled the globe, relaxed out in the sun or otherwise enjoyed their time off College Hill, a small, passionate group of students elected to remain at Brown, indoors and playing with Legos — complex, microscopic, living Legos, that is. Members of Brown’s entry in the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, hosted annually by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent their summer designing and building tiny living gadgets with highly specialized functions. The Brown delegation earned gold medals for their project — bacteria that glow bright green in the presence of lead. “Certain bacteria have a sensor built into them specifically for lead, so what we did was to take the lead sensor out of that bacteria, put it into E. coli and have it send out a signal,” said Deepa Galaiya ’08, a member of Brown’s iGEM team. “Once the cells received the message, they all started to glow green.” The competition, which promotes undergraduate research, is built around BioBricks — highly specialized pieces of DNA catalogued by MIT researchers — that promise to influence the emerging interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology. “When you build a bridge, you have standard parts — nails, screws, screwdrivers — and you can buy them at a hardware store,” said iGEM team member Glen Scheinberg ’08, drawing an analogy to genetic engineering. “Imagine if every time you wanted to design a bridge you had to figure out how continued on page 4
Since 1866, Daily Since 1891
Students struggle to keep up with the rising cost of college By Irene Chen Senior Staff Writer
Last year, Julie Pridham ’10 took out an outside loan to cover the $41,700 cost of attending Brown. For economic reasons, Pridham had to ask her parents to sign as co-borrowers on the loan, but she felt uncomfortable with the decision. As a first-generation college student
on financial aid, Pridham wanted to pay for her own education. Pridham doesn’t take issue with rising tuition costs. She says it’s understandable and that as Brown’s fees increase, so do its financial aid awards. “They will help you to figure out something,” she said. “But the school can only do so much. I think just the general economic situation has really made it more
difficult to get by on my own.” Looking to pay off her debt, Pridham is mindful of accumulating loans as she considers a postgraduation path. She is interested in grad school, but a program like AmeriCorps would help her pay off her loans. “For the most part, I figure I’ll be young, so I can work two jobs if I need to and still go to school,”
By Michael Bechek Senior Staff Writer
Courtesy of Amy Chang ’08
Professors T.Y. Wang of Illinois State University (left to right), Alan Wachman of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and Sujian Guo of San Francisco State University sat on a panel Wednesday as part of the Strait Talk Symposium.
‘Strait talk’ on China-Taiwan relations By Lily Szajnberg Contributing Writer
Can you be both Chinese and Taiwanese? Does identity grant you a right to a nation? These are the major issues surrounding the third annual Strait Talk Symposium, now called the Dialogue Project, a weeklong conference that concludes today. The conference, named for the 100-mile Taiwan Strait that separates China and Taiwan, has
facilitated dialogue about U.S.China relations among academics, students and diplomacy experts since 2005. This year, organizers included another key global conflict, Indian-Pakistani relations, in the discussion. In addition to hosting accomplished academics and diplomacy experts, the student-run event steering committee selects five student delegates from each of the respective countries to attend Strait Talk. Under the guidance of
internationally-renowned conflict resolution specialist Tatsushi Arai, the 15 delegates meet for four to eight hours every day during the week-long event to discuss the conflict in a safe space, “letting both sides share very privately and intimately what they feel, and ultimately finding a compromise,” said Matthew Reichel ’09, head coordinator of the Dialogue Project. continued on page 4
FEATURE
Last month, the Corporation announced that the University will make room for the Mind Brain Behavior building by moving or demolishing the house located at 129 Angell St. — a house that its former owner, Helen Pierpont, never wanted Brown to have in the first place. Pierpont, a Providence native born in 1892, grew up in a house on George Street that was eventually destroyed in the University’s efforts to remodel the campus and build Wriston Quadrangle. Years later, Pierpont wrote in her will that she did not want the University to gain ownership of her property at 129 Angell St. The house at 129 Angell St. was built in the mid-19th century, according to a University report — and as Brown expanded, the property
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ARTS & CULTURE
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Students perfect the ‘elevator pitch’
Former 129 Angell St. owner mistrusted University By Chaz Kelsh Staff Writer
she said. Pridham’s situation is becoming increasingly common as tuition fees rise nationally and students struggle to keep up. A decade ago, only 6 percent of loans used to fund higher education were private, with most funds coming from federal loans and college grants. But last year, nearly
gradually became surrounded by campus buildings. When Pierpont died in 1980, she left the house to her close friend and neighbor Margaret Howe. Howe had lived next door at 127 Angell St. in a first-floor apartment she rented from Brown for several years, according to Gail Medbury, director of University auxiliary housing. Pierpont’s generosity was not without strings. “I request that Margaret Howe not sell my real estate to Brown University,” she wrote in her will. But Brown did get the house. Howe was elderly and needed money to move to a house that had only one story, according to her niece, Marcia Sewall ’57. Howe had taught at the continued on page 6
YEOMEN AT THE GATES Brown University Gilbert & Sullivan will present “Yeomen of the Guard” this weekend.
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CAMPUS NEWS
Chaz Kelsh / Herald
The former owner of 129 Angell St., owned by the University since 1980 and slated to be moved or demolished to make way for the Mind Brain Behavior Building, insisted in her will that the house never be sold to Brown.
STOP JAEGERBOMBS A new study shows that mixing liquor and energy drinks can be hazardous to your health
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OPINIONS
195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island
CHANGING DEBATE Nicholas Swisher ‘08 reflects on the changing discourse in Congress over torture.
It isn’t every day that a budding entrepreneur ends up standing in an elevator with the major CEO who could help turn his or her fledgling idea into a profitable business venture. Almost certainly, the fortuitous meeting will last less than a minute or two — every second must be used effectively to pitch an idea quickly and concisely. That’s the idea behind “elevator pitch” competitions, in which two Brown students took home top prizes at separate events this month, one state-wide and another hosted by the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. The elevator pitch competition invites anyone with a burgeoning business idea to make a brief pitch for it, getting immediate feedback from a panel of business leaders and experts and the chance to win cash prizes. Presenters have no more resources than they would in an elevator — 90 seconds (sometimes less) and no fancy visual aids or PowerPoint slides. Robert Neville ’08 was named the winner of the Nov. 7 state-wide elevator pitch competition held at Johnson and Wales University and sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. He pitched a cardiac rehabilitation monitoring system that he and five other students are developing for DigiTRx, an incorporated venture started by students taking an entrepreneurship class in Spring 2006. Amy Seibel ’09 won the Entrepreneurship Program’s pitch-off on Nov. 10 at Brown, taking home an $800 prize for her 45-second pitch for a television program that would teach English to adults. The product being developed by DigiTRx, which Neville said already owns patents on some of its technologies, would allow patients recovering from a heart attack to avoid the hassle of commuting to medical facilities for super vised exercise and instead allow them to work out at home. With DigiTRx’s system, the patient would wear a vest which measures his or her vital signs while exercising. After exercising, the patient would upload the data from the vest to a computer, at which continued on page 4
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READY FOR WINTEr The Herald’s sports staff gives its take on the winter varsity sports teams and their prospects.
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