Daily Herald the Brown
vol. cxliv, no. 82 | Friday, October 9, 2009 | Serving the community daily since 1891
For a select squad, an anti-gang vigil By George Miller Metro Editor
After school Wednesday, three students are hanging out outside Gilbert Stuart Middle School in Providence. It’s been an hour or so since classes let out for the day, but they’re standing around talking to a grown man — a streetworker with the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, which aims to combat youth violence in the city. Two other streetworkers, Tony Kim and Ali Amoure, pull up to the curb in Kim’s car. “Why aren’t you home yet?” Amoure asks one of them, whom he recognizes as a student at Bridgham, another middle school nearby that he watches over daily. He gets no definitive answer. Tuesday, a student was arrested at Bridgham after trying to attack another student with a broken bottle, Amoure says. Four streetworkers were called to the
scene. The streetworkers and the students talk about who’s in what gang. The Bridgham student denies being in one — he says they just think he is because he hangs out with them sometimes — but the streetworkers remain convinced he’s a member. The gangs recruit at a young age, Amoure says. The students tell him about another fight and another arrest today at Bridgham. Amoure is understandably upset. He asks when it happened. It was lunchtime — he was in a meeting then. Even though they work at it every day, the Institute’s streetworkers can’t stop every fight.
SPOTLIGHT
Claire Huang / Herald
Students demonstrated Wednesday to support Dining Services workers in contract negotiations with the University. Representatives from the University and the workers’ union will meet over the weekend. The contract expires Monday.
Rallies continue, BDS deadline looms By Alexandra Ulmer Senior Staf f Writer
With Dining Services workers’ contract with the University set to expire Monday and negotiations on a new deal ongoing, public demonstrations in support of the workers intensified this week.
On Wednesday, students opposing changes to workers’ required contributions to their health-care plans presented a petition to President Ruth Simmons. On Thursday, protesters marched from outside the Sharpe Refectory to put on a show outside J. Walter Wilson, with the University depicted as a giant
man-puppet clutching dollar bills in its fists and roaring about the importance of its chief investment officer. A short time later, administrators presented information about the University’s recent endowment continued on page 5
inside
The government’s role in the pharmaceutical industry — either highly regulative or uninvolved, leaving the industry to police itself through competition — was the subject of a Janus Forumsponsored debate Thursday night before a half-full Salomon 001. The event, “Doing Good or Doing Well: Responsibility in the Pharmaceutical Industr y,” featured two medical professionals with opposing views on regulation. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in the department of social medicine at Harvard and the first female editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, argued that drug companies primarily ser ve their own interests of profit-making with little regard to fulfilling “social responsibility.” The other panelist, Mar y Ruwart, who ser ved as a research scientist for 19 years with Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, suggested government regulations force companies to raise drug prices in order to sustain the costs of research and development.
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Angell spoke first, basing the majority of her argument on the claim that the industry’s “aim is almost always to make sales,” so it is not responsive to community health needs. In response to the industry’s argument that high prices result from the heavy cost of research and development, Angell cited statistics showing that the major pharmaceutical companies spend much more on marketing than on they do on research. She also refuted the argument that high prices are necessar y for innovation. She referred to a study between 2000 and 2007 showing that drugs that were both innovative and reflected improvement over a placebo in trials constituted only 11 percent of total Food and Drug Administration approvals. Because the FDA approves drugs by comparing their effect to a placebo, she said, a new drug simply “has to be better than nothing” to be released. As a result, “me-too drugs,” which are “trivial variations” on existcontinued on page 2
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Lakes key to climate change study, scientist says
Industry leaders debate pros, cons of Rx drug regulation By Nicole Boucher Contributing Writer
Struggling for peace The Institute traces its roots back to 2000, when the South Side murder of Jennifer Rivera moved members of St. Michael’s Church
By Kristina Klara Contributing Writer
also a staf f writer for the New Yorker and author of the 2007 bestseller “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Cour t.” He told the audience that he wrote his latest book because he thought the high court should be an “institution for all of us” despite its largely private workings.
Climate change is difficult to predict. But trying to deduce historical precipitation patterns may help us build a model for the weather patterns of the future, geologist Wallace Broecker told a full MacMillan 115 audience Thursday afternoon. Broecker, a renowned scientist often credited with coining the phrase “global warming,” discussed his recent examinations of lakes and cave stalagmites to measure ancient climate cycles in a colloquium sponsored by the Department of Geology. A professor of geology at Columbia, Broecker is working with a team of scientists to gather data about the past climate patterns of various isolated “closed-basin” lakes‚ from which water can exit only by evaporation and enter only
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Nick Sinnott-Armstrong / Herald
Author Jeffrey Toobin headlined a 25th anniversary celebration for the Taubman Center for Public Policy Thursday in Salomon 101.
Toobin: Conservative justices hold sway By Seth Motel News Editor
Americans can expect conser vative Supreme Court justices to practice their brand of “judicial activism” in the coming years, CNN senior analyst and author Jeffrey Toobin told a Salomon 101 audience Thursday night. Toobin, a CNN commentator on American legal issues, is
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CHe Sera, SERA Will Wray ’10 questions Brown students’ love for a famous revolutionary
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