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Jul. 24th, 2010 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Birds Chose Different Path to Manage Their Sexes
Some 300 million years ago, the living ancestor of humans was a reptile. Like turtles and alligators today, it let the temperature at which its eggs were incubated decide their sex.
Birds and mammals, two groups that descended from the reptiles, put sex under the more reliable control of genes, not of temperature. But sex-determining genes pose a severe problem for the organization of a genome. In a series of experiments over the past 15 years, David Page of the Whitehead Institute has reconstructed many of the steps in the evolution of the human sex chromosomes, which he calls “an infinitely rich experiment of nature.” He has now started to analyze a parallel experiment, the sex chromosomes of birds.
In humans, men have an X and a Y chromosome, and women two X’s. In reptilian times, the X and the Y were an ordinary pair of chromosomes until the male-determining gene landed on the Y. Thereupon the Y started shedding the genes it held in common with the X and shriveled to a fraction of its former size.
Birds have evolved a similar system with a twist — it’s the male that has two of the same chromosomes. Their sex chromosomes are called the Z and W, with males having two Z’s and females a Z and a W. The Z and W are derived from a different pair of ancestral chromosomes than the X and Y, a team led by Daniel W. Bellott and Dr. Page report in the current issue of Nature. The Z’s evolution has in several ways paralleled that of the X, even though each is associated with a different sex.
Both chromosomes have acquired genes related to the function of the testicles. With the help of the Washington University School of Medicine’s Genome Center, Dr. Page’s team has analyzed the DNA of the chicken’s Z and found that 15 percent of it consists of an array of sperm-related genes, many of them present in multiple copies.
Genes that benefit only males are likely to lead a safer life on the Y chromosome, which never enters a woman’s body, and indeed the Y chromosome is a sanctuary for sperm-making genes. More surprising is that the X chromosome, too, has added sperm-related genes, which of course are activated only in the cells of the testicles. “This flies in the face of common wisdom about the X, that it must be a female-biased chromosome,” Dr. Page said.
The Z and the X share another evolutionary feature: both, Dr. Page’s team has found, are padded with repetitive DNA sequences of no obvious function. The Z has picked up some 40 million units of this kind of DNA and X twice that amount. The padding seems to be a consequence of their withdrawal from the major ritual of chromosomal life, the swapping of chunks of DNA prior to making eggs and sperm.
These swaps generate new combinations of genes and hence individuals that differ from their parents. But the sex chromosomes, paradoxically, cannot engage in this central purpose of sex lest the sex-determining gene pass into the genome of the opposite sex.
Because the X and Y do not recombine for most of their length, the Y chromosome cannot repair damaged genes with backup copies from the X and has shed these damaged genes through evolutionary history. Its partner the X can refresh damaged genes through recombination with another X when next it finds itself in a woman’s body.
Most of the genes that the Y has retained maintain their genetic health by an unusual procedure. The genes are arranged in head-to-head copies so that when the DNA bends like a hairpin, a bad unit on one copy can be corrected from the good unit on the other.
These pairs of genes form giant palindromes of DNA, a distinctive feature of the Y chromosome’s structure discovered by Dr. Page and colleagues in 2003. The W chromosome in birds is in the same predicament as the Y and may have hit on the same solution, but so far has defied decoding. “It could be there are palindromes in there but they are not yet visible,” Dr. Page said.
Masculinity in people is attained with a single Y, so why do male birds need two Z’s? The solution was found last year by a group led by Craig A. Smith and Andrew H. Sinclair of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. In humans, the default condition is female and the reproductive organs develop as male in the presence of the male-determining gene’s protein.
In birds, sex is determined by the dose of the sex gene, which the Melbourne team identified as one called DMRT1. Bird embryos exposed to a single dose develop as female; two copies of the gene make a male.
“I see an endless chain of revelations in the future that will come from comparing the human X and Y to other sex chromosomes of species at different evolutionary distances,” Dr. Page said.
Taking Lessons From What Went Wrong
While that idea may sound paradoxical, it is widely accepted among engineers. They say grim lessons arise because the reasons for triumph in matters of technology are often arbitrary and invisible, whereas the cause of a particular failure can frequently be uncovered, documented and reworked to make improvements.
Disaster, in short, can become a spur to innovation.
There is no question that the trial-and-error process of building machines and industries has, over the centuries, resulted in the loss of much blood and many thousands of lives. It is not that failure is desirable, or that anyone hopes for or aims for a disaster. But failures, sometimes appalling, are inevitable, and given this fact, engineers say it pays to make good use of them to prevent future mistakes.
The result is that the technological feats that define the modern world are sometimes the result of events that some might wish to forget.
“It’s a great source of knowledge — and humbling, too — sometimes that’s necessary,” said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University and author of “Success Through Failure,” a 2006 book. “Nobody wants failures. But you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”
Now, experts say, that kind of analysis will probably improve the complex gear and procedures that companies use to drill for oil in increasingly deep waters. They say the catastrophic failure involving the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20 — which took 11 lives and started the worst offshore oil spill in United States history — will drive the technological progress.
“The industry knows it can’t have that happen again,” said David W. Fowler, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who teaches a course on forensic engineering. “It’s going to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.”
One possible lesson of the disaster is the importance of improving blowout preventers — the devices atop wells that cut off gushing oil in emergencies. The preventer on the runaway well failed. Even before the disaster, the operators of many gulf rigs had switched to more advanced preventers, strengthening this last line of defense.
Of course, an alternative to improving a particular form of technology might be to discard it altogether as too risky or too damaging.
Abandoning offshore drilling is certainly one result that some environmentalists would push for — and not only because of potential disasters like the one in the gulf. They would rather see technologies that pump carbon into the atmosphere, threatening to speed global climate change, go extinct than evolve.
In London on June 22 at the World National Oil Companies Congress, protesters from Greenpeace interrupted an official from BP, the company that dug the runaway well. Planetary responsibility, a protestor shouted before being taken away, “means stopping the push for dangerous drilling in deep waters.”
The history of technology suggests that such an end is unlikely. Devices fall out of favor, but seldom if ever get abolished by design. The explosion of the Hindenburg showed the dangers of hydrogen as a lifting gas and resulted in new emphasis on helium, which is not flammable, rather than ending the reign of rigid airships. And engineering, by definition, is a problem-solving profession. Technology analysts say that constructive impulse, and its probable result for deep ocean drilling, is that innovation through failure analysis will make the wells safer, whatever the merits of reducing human reliance on oil. They hold that the BP disaster, like countless others, will ultimately inspire technological advance.
The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.
“Any engineering failure has a lot of lessons,” said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called “Learning from Disaster.”
Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.
Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering “the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.”
Among other things, Dr. Brown taught failure analysis.
Dr. Petroski, at Duke, writing in “Success Through Failure,” noted the innovative corollary. Failures, he said, “always teach us more than the successes about the design of things. And thus the failures often lead to redesigns — to new, improved things.”
One of his favorite examples is the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The span, at the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge, crossed a strait of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. A few months after its opening, high winds caused the bridge to fail in a roar of twisted metal and shattered concrete. No one died. The only fatality was a black cocker spaniel named Tubby.
Dr. Petroski said the basic problem lay in false confidence. Over the decades, engineers had built increasingly long suspension bridges, with each new design more ambitious.
The longest span of the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened to traffic in 1883, was 1,595 feet. The George Washington Bridge (1931) more than doubled that distance to 3,500 feet. And the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) went even farther, stretching its middle span to 4,200 feet.
“This is where success leads to failure,” Dr. Petroski said in an interview. “You’ve got all these things working. We want to make them longer and more slender.”
The Tacoma bridge not only possessed a very long central span — 2,800 feet — but its concrete roadway consisted of just two lanes and its deck was quite shallow. The wind that day caused the insubstantial thoroughfare to undulate wildly up and down and then disintegrate. (A 16-millimeter movie camera capturedthe violent collapse.)
Teams of investigators studied the collapse carefully, and designers of suspension bridges took away several lessons. The main one was to make sure the road’s weight and girth were sufficient to avoid risky perturbations from high winds.
Dr. Petroski said the collapse had a direct impact on the design of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964 to link Brooklyn and Staten Island. Its longest span was 4,260 feet — making it, at the time, the world’s longest suspension bridge and potentially a disaster-in-waiting.
To defuse the threat of high winds, the designers from the start made the roadway quite stiff and added a second deck, even though the volume of traffic was insufficient at first to warrant the lower one. The lower deck remained closed to traffic for five years, opening in 1969.
“Tacoma Narrows changed the way that suspension bridges were built,” Dr. Petroski said. “Before it happened, bridge designers didn’t take the wind seriously.”
Another example in learning from disaster centers on an oil drilling rig called Ocean Ranger. In 1982, the rig, the world’s largest, capsized and sank off Newfoundland in a fierce winter storm, killing all 84 crew members. The calamity is detailed in a 2001 book, “Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology,” by James R. Chiles.
The floating rig, longer than a football field and 15 stories high, had eight hollow legs. At the bottom were giant pontoons that crewmen could fill with seawater or pump dry, raising the rig above the largest storm waves — in theory, at least.
The night the rig capsized, the sea smashed in a glass porthole in the pontoon control room, soaking its electrical panel. Investigators found that the resulting short circuits began a cascade of failures and miscalculations that resulted in the rig’s sinking.
The lessons of the tragedy included remembering to shut watertight storm hatches over glass windows, buying all crew members insulated survival suits (about $450 each at the time) and rethinking aspects of rig architecture.
“It was a terrible design,” said Dr. Halada of the State University of New York. “But they learned from it.”
Increasingly, such tragedies get studied, and not just at Stony Brook. The Stanford University Center for Professional Development offers a graduate certificate in advanced structures and failure analysis. Drexel University offers a master’s degree in forensic science with a focus on engineering.
So too, professional engineering has produced a subspecialty that investigates disasters. One of the biggest names in the business is Exponent, a consulting company based in Menlo Park, Calif. It has a staff of 900 specialists around the globe with training in 90 engineering and scientific fields.
Exponent says its analysts deal with everything from cars and roller coasters to oil rigs and hip replacements. “We analyze failures and accidents,” the company says, “to determine their causes and to understand how to prevent them.”
Forensic engineers say it is too soon to know what happened with Deepwater Horizon, whose demise flooded the gulf with crude oil. They note that numerous federal agencies are involved in a series of detailed investigations, and that President Obama has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations on how to strengthen federal oversight of oil rigs.
But the engineers hold, seemingly with one voice, that the investigatory findings will eventually improve the art of drilling for oil in deep waters — at least until the next unexpected tragedy, and the next lesson in making the technology safer.
One lesson might be to build blowout preventers with more than one blind shear ram. In an emergency, the massive blades of these devices slice through the drill pipe to cut off the flow of gushing oil. The Deepwater Horizon had just one, while a third of the rigs in the gulf now have two.
Perhaps regulators will decided that rig operators, whatever the cost, should install more blind shear rams on all blowout preventers.
“It’s like our personal lives,” said Dr. Fowler of the University of Texas. “Failure can force us to make hard decisions.”
African Studies Give Women Hope in H.I.V. Fight
With an AIDS vaccine still out of reach, two rigorous new studies have found different ways to sharply cut H.I.V. infections among women and schoolgirls, who make up a majority of the newly infected in sub-Saharan Africa.
After two decades in which researchers searched fruitlessly for an effective vaginal microbicide to block H.I.V., South African scientists working in two AIDS-devastated communities of South Africa, one rural and one urban, say they have finally found something that shows real promise.
Women who used a vaginal microbicidal gel containing an antiretroviral medication widely used to treat AIDS, tenofovir, were 39 percent less likely over all to contract H.I.V. than those who used a placebo. Those who used the gel most regularly reduced their chances of infection 54 percent, according to a two-and-a-half year study of 889 women by Caprisa, a Durban-based AIDS research center.
Broader trials are needed to confirm the results, and it will most likely be years before the product is publicly available, but if produced on a large scale the gel would cost less than 25 cents per application, the lead investigators estimated.
Because the trial was relatively small and the gel was nowhere close to 100 percent effective, AIDS scientists and public health officials wanted to see another trial get similar results before they undertook the large fund-raising and public education efforts that would be needed to make billions of doses of the gel, as well as the applicators, which are more expensive, and then to persuade women to use them and governments of poor countries to adopt them.
Dr. Bruce Walker, a Harvard Medical School professor who was not involved in the study, said a cheer erupted when researchers unveiled their findings to a small group of scientists last month in Durban.
“This is the first time that there’s been a tool that women can use to protect themselves from becoming infected,” he said. “It’s a game changer.”
In Vienna, where the meeting of the International AIDS Society just opened, leaders of the global fight against AIDS said they found the results of the microbicide trial very impressive. The study was published online on Monday by Science magazine.
“This is very encouraging,” said Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations AIDS agency. “It can be controlled by women, and put in 12 hours earlier, and that is empowering. They do not have to ask the man for permission to use it. And the cost of the gel is not high.”
In another piece of progress against AIDS, a separate, large study in Malawi sponsored by the World Bank, and made public on Sunday, found that if poor schoolgirls and their families received small monthly cash payments, the girls had sex later, less often and with fewer partners.
A year and a half after the program started, the girls were less than half as likely to be infected with the AIDS or herpes viruses than were girls whose families got no payments. The likelihood that the girls would agree to sex in return for gifts and cash declined as the size of the payments from the program rose, suggesting the central role of extreme poverty in sexual choices.
“Maybe we can combine these behavioral and biomedical interventions,” said Dr. Tim Farley, a scientist with the World Health Organization involved in H.I.V. prevention research. “We need to pursue both avenues.”
At a time of intensifying competition for global health dollars, when the number of people who contract H.I.V. is outstripping those put on treatment each year, pressure is mounting on African countries and donors to focus more heavily on prevention. Male circumcision is one method proven to at least halve a man’s chances of H.I.V. infection.
Scientists say the success of the $18 million microbicide trial, largely paid for by the United States Agency for International Development, and the study on cash payments offer hope to girls and women in Africa, who have higher rates of H.I.V. infection than their male counterparts and often less power in relationships to protect themselves.
There have been other signs of progress. A new Unaids study found that H.I.V. prevalence among young people had declined by more than 25 percent in 15 of the 21 countries most affected by AIDS. In eight countries, the agency found evidence of positive changes in sexual behavior among young people, for example delaying having sex, having fewer partners and the increasing use of condoms.
In the $400,000 trial in Malawi, 3,800 teenage girls and young women, ages 13 to 22, were randomly assigned to two groups. Half the girls received no cash payments. The parents of the other half were paid $4 to $10 a month while the girls themselves received $1 to $5 a month if they attended school regularly.
After 18 months, the H.I.V. prevalence among the girls who got the cash was 1.2 percent, compared with 3 percent for the others. “The program empowered these girls to make better choices,” said Berk Ozler, a senior economist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.
While cash programs are already spreading in Africa, the antiretroviral gel will take longer, according to the husband-and-wife team of epidemiologists who led the study. They are Dr. Salim S. Abdool Karim, Caprisa’s director, and Dr. Quarraisha Abdool Karim, associate scientific director.
“I would be very sad if we had to sit around a table three years from now and we don’t have the confirmation and regulations in place,” Dr. Salim Karim said.
Dr. Quarraisha Karim noted that, “For women, it certainly is a turning point.”
In South Africa, where 5.7 million people are H.I.V.-positive, more than in any other nation, the government is eager to move forward. “As soon as we’re confident it’s a safe and effective product, we should do our best to get it out,” said Derek Hanekom, the country’s deputy minister of science and technology.
The women who participated in the study — in the city of Durban and in the rural community of Vulindlela, in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal — used the gel up to 12 hours before and after sex. Usually their partners were not aware of it. Tissue biopsies found levels of tenofovir that were 1,000 times what they would have been in the blood if the drug had been taken by pill, the team said.
The success follows years of disappointing results in trials of other microbicides that were found to be ineffective, or even to raise a woman’s risk of H.I.V. infection. There are currently other trials under way that use tenofovir in gel and pill forms.
Gilead Sciences, the California-based biopharmaceutical company that developed tenofovir, donated 65 pounds of the active ingredient for the study. It has also relinquished any claim to royalties on the gel if it is distributed in Africa and poor countries in other parts of the world.
Dr. Howard Jaffe, president of the Gilead Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, said that Dr. Salim Karim — nicknamed Slim — pitched the microbicide idea to company scientists in 2004, to initial reluctance.
“Slim is nothing if not charismatic, passionate and intelligent, and we thought it needs to be studied, it will be studied and this may be the best time to do it,” Dr. Jaffe said.
In Vulindlela, women have a desperate need for a way to protect themselves. H.I.V. testing of pregnant women in the area has found that one in 10 is already H.I.V.-positive by 16; half are infected by 24.
Before antiretroviral treatment became available here, the graveyards were crowded every weekend with funeralgoers. Fewer people are dying now, but many young women are still getting infected.
Xoliswa Mthethwa, 26, who was part of the study, said she told her boyfriend about the gel and he was very supportive. If it worked, she said, “I’d be the first person to go buy it.”
Factory Defies Sweatshop Label, but Can It Thrive?
SITTING in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.
The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.
Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.
“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”
The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.
For Knights, the factory is a risky proposition, even though it already has orders to make T-shirts and sweatshirts for bookstores at 400 American universities. The question is whether students, alumni and sports fans will be willing to pay $18 for the factory’s T-shirts — the same as premium brands like Nike and Adidas — to sustain the plant and its generous wages.
Joseph Bozich, the C.E.O. of Knights, is optimistic. “We’re hoping to prove that doing good can be good business, that they’re not mutually exclusive,” he says.
Not everyone is so confident. “It’s a noble effort, but it is an experiment,” says Andrew Jassin, an industry consultant who says “fair labor” garments face a limited market unless deft promotion can snare consumers’ attention — and conscience. “There are consumers who really care and will buy this apparel at a premium price,” he says, “and then there are those who say they care, but then just want value.”
Mr. Bozich says the plant’s T-shirts and sweats should command a premium because the company uses high-quality fabric, design and printing.
In the factory’s previous incarnation, a Korean-owned company, BJ&B, made baseball caps for Nike and Reebok before shutting it in 2007 and moving the operation to lower-wage countries. Today, the reborn factory is producing under a new label, Alta Gracia, named after this poverty-ridden town as well as the Virgin of Altagracia, revered as protector of the Dominicans. (Alta gracia translates to “exalted grace.”)
“This sometimes seems too good to be true,” says Jim Wilkerson, Duke University’s director of licensing and a leader of American universities’ fair-labor movement.
He said a few other apparel companies have tried to improve working conditions, like School House, which was founded by a 25-year-old Duke graduate and uses a factory in Sri Lanka. Worker advocates applaud these efforts, but many say Alta Gracia has gone further than others by embracing higher wages and unionization. A living wage is generally defined as the amount of money needed to adequately feed and shelter a family.
“What really counts is not what happens with this factory over the next six months,” Mr. Wilkerson says. “It’s what happens six years or 10 years from now. We want badly for this to live on.”
Santa Castillo agrees. She and many co-workers toiled at other factories for the minimum wage, currently $147 a month in this country’s free-trade zones, where most apparel factories are located. That amount, worker after worker lamented in interviews for this article, falls woefully short of supporting a family.
The Alta Gracia factory has pledged to pay employees nearly three and a half times the prevailing minimum wage, based on a study done by a workers’ rights group that calculated the living costs for a family of four in the Dominican Republic.
While some critics view the living wage as do-gooder mumbo-jumbo, Ms. Castillo views it as a godsend. In her years earning the minimum wage, she said she felt stuck on a treadmill — never able to advance, often borrowing to buy necessities.
“A lot of times there was only enough for my kids, and I’d go to bed hungry,” she says. “But now I have money to buy meat, oatmeal and milk.”
With higher wages, she says, her family can move up in the world. She is now able to borrow $1,000 to begin building her future home and feels able to fulfill her dreams of becoming a minister at her local evangelical church.
“I hope God will continue to bless the people who brought this factory to our community,” she says.
IN many ways, the factory owes its existence to an incident a decade ago, when Joe Bozich was attending his son’s high school basketball game. His vision suddenly became blurred, and he could hardly make out his son on the court. A day later, he couldn’t read.
A doctor told him the only thing that would cause his vision to deteriorate so rapidly was a brain tumor.
So he went in for an M.R.I. “My doctor said, ‘The good news is you don’t have a brain tumor, but the bad news is you have multiple sclerosis,’ ” he says.
For three days, he couldn’t see. He worried that he would be relegated to a wheelchair and ventilator and wouldn’t be able to support his family. At the same time, a close friend and his brother died, and then one of his children began suffering from anxiety.
“I thought of people who were going through the same thing as my child and me,” Mr. Bozich recalls. “Fortunately, we had the resources for medical help, and I thought of all the families that didn’t.”
“I started thinking that I wanted to do something more important with my business than worry just about winning market share,” he adds. “That seemed kind of empty after what I’ve been through. I wanted to find a way to use my business to impact people that it touched on a daily basis.”
He regained his full vision after three weeks and says he hasn’t suffered any further attacks. Shortly after Mr. Bozich recovered, Knights Apparel set up a charity, weKAre, that supports a home for orphans and abused children. But he says he wanted to do more.
A national collegiate bodybuilding champion at Vanderbilt, Mr. Bozich was hired by Gold’s Gym after graduation and later founded a unit in the company that sold Gold’s apparel to outside retailers. Building on that experience, Mr. Bozich started Knights Apparel in 2000.
Still solidly built at 47, he has made apparel deals with scores of universities, enabling Knights to surpass Nike as the No. 1 college supplier. Under Mr. Bozich, Knights cooperates closely with the Worker Rights Consortium, a group of 186 universities that press factories making college-logo apparel to treat workers fairly.
Scott Nova, the consortium’s executive director, says Mr. Bozich seems far more committed than most other apparel executives to stamping out abuses — like failure to pay for overtime work. Knights contracts with 30 factories worldwide. At a meeting that the two men had in 2005 to address problems at a Philippines factory, Mr. Bozich floated the idea of opening a model factory.
Mr. Nova loved the idea. He was frustrated that most apparel factories worldwide still paid the minimum wage or only a fraction above — rarely enough to lift families out of poverty. (Minimum wages are 15 cents an hour in Bangladesh and around 85 cents in the Dominican Republic and many cities in China — the Alta Gracia factory pays $2.83 an hour.)
Mr. Bozich first considered opening a factory in Haiti, but was dissuaded by the country’s poor infrastructure. Mr. Nova urged him to consider this depressed community, hoping that he would employ some of the 1,200 people thrown out of work when the Korean-owned cap factory closed.
Mr. Bozich turned to a longtime industry executive, Donnie Hodge, a former executive with J. P. Stevens, Milliken and Gerber Childrenswear. Overseeing a $500,000 renovation of the factory, Mr. Hodge, now president of Knights, called for bright lighting, five sewing lines and pricey ergonomic chairs, which many seamstresses thought were for the managers.
“We could have given the community a check for $25,000 or $50,000 a year and felt good about that,” Mr. Hodge said. “But we wanted to make this a sustainable thing.”
The factory’s biggest hurdle is self-imposed: how to compete with other apparel makers when its wages are so much higher.
Mr. Bozich says the factory’s cost will be $4.80 a T-shirt, 80 cents or 20 percent more than if it paid minimum wage. Knights will absorb a lower-than-usual profit margin, he said, without asking retailers to pay more at wholesale.
“Obviously we’ll have a higher cost,” Mr. Bozich said. “But we’re pricing the product such that we’re not asking the retailer or the consumer to sacrifice in order to support it.”
Knights plans to sell the T’s for $8 wholesale, with most retailers marking them up to $18.
“We think it’s priced right and has a tremendous message, and it’s going to be marketed like crazy,” says Joel Friedman, vice president of general merchandise at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. He says Barnes & Noble will at first have smaller-than-usual profit margins on the garments because it will spend heavily to promote them, through a Web campaign, large signs in its stores and other methods.
It helps to have many universities backing the project. Duke alone placed a $250,000 order and will run full-page ads in the campus newspaper, put postcards in student mailboxes and hang promotional signs on light poles. Barnes & Noble plans to have Alta Gracia’s T’s and sweats at bookstores on 180 campuses by September and at 350 this winter, while Follett, the other giant college bookstore operator, plans to sell the T’s on 85 campuses this fall.
Still, this new, unknown brand could face problems being sold alongside Nike and Adidas gear. “They have to brand this well — simply, clearly and elegantly — so college students can understand it very fast,” says Kellie A. McElhaney, a professor of corporate social responsibility at the University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of college students would much rather pay for a brand that shows workers are treated well.”
Nike and Adidas officials said their companies have sought to improve workers’ welfare through increased wages and by belonging to the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group that seeks to end sweatshop conditions. A Nike spokesman said his company would “watch with interest” the Knights initiative.
To promote its gear, Knights is preparing a video to be shown at bookstores and a Web documentary, both highlighting the improvements in workers’ lives. The T-shirts will have hanging tags with pictures of Alta Gracia employees and the message “Your purchase will change our lives.” The tags will also contain an endorsement from the Worker Rights Consortium, which has never before backed a brand.
In a highly unusual move, United Students Against Sweatshops, a nationwide college group that often lambastes apparel factories, plans to distribute fliers at college bookstores urging freshmen to buy the Alta Gracia shirts.
“We’re going to do everything we can to promote this,” says Casey Sweeney, a leader of the group at Cornell. “It’s incredible that I can wear a Cornell hoodie knowing the workers who made it are being paid well and being respected.”
ONE such worker is Maritza Vargas. When BJ&B ran the factory, she was a stand-up-for-your-rights firebrand fighting for 20 union supporters who had been fired.
Student groups and the Worker Rights Consortium pressed Nike and other companies that used the factory to push BJ&B to recognize the union and rehire the fired workers. BJ&B relented. Today, Ms. Vargas is president of the union at the new plant and sings a very different tune. In interviews, she and other union leaders praised the Alta Gracia factory and said they would do their utmost to make it succeed and grow. Mireya Perez said the living wage would enable her to send her 16-year-old daughter to college, while Yolando Simon said she was able to pay off a $300 debt to a grocer.
At other factories, workers said, managers sometimes yelled or slapped them. Several said they were not allowed to go home when sick, and sometimes had to work past midnight after beginning at 7:30 a.m.
Comparing this factory with other ones, Ms. Vargas said, “the difference is heaven and earth.”
Role of Women in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.
There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.
The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.
“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.
While most did not bloody their own hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse because they operated outside the concentration camp system, on their own initiative.
Ms. Lower’s findings shed new light on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to experts, and have further underlined the importance of the role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus.
“In the dominant literature on perpetrators, you won’t find women mentioned,” said Dan Michman, the chief historian at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
Ms. Lower, 45, presented her work for the first time at this summer’s workshop at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research. She has been trying to decipher what motivated these women to commit such crimes.
“They challenge so deeply our notion” of what constitutes normal female behavior, she said. But the Nazi system, she added, “turned everything on its head.”
Ms. Lower said she worked for many years at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and is now teaching and researching at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich.
She began traveling to Ukraine in the early 1990s, as the Soviet archives opened up. She started in Zhytomyr, about 75 miles west of Kiev, where the SS leader Heinrich Himmler had his Ukrainian headquarters, and where she found original German files, some burned at the edges, in the local archive. She noticed the frequency with which women were mentioned at the scenes of genocide. Women also kept cropping up as witnesses in West and East German investigations after the war.
In an anomalous twist on Christopher R. Browning’s groundbreaking 1992 book, “Ordinary Men,” it appears that thousands of German women went to the eastern territories to help Germanize them, and to provide services to the local ethnic German populations there.
They included nurses, teachers and welfare workers. Women ran the storehouses of belongings taken from Jews. Local Germans were recruited to work as interpreters. Then there were the wives of regional officials, and their secretaries, some from their staffs back home.
For women from working-class families or farms in Germany, the occupied zones offered an attractive opportunity to advance themselves, Ms. Lower said.
There were up to 5,000 female guards in the concentration camps, making up about 10 percent of the personnel. Ms. Grese was hanged at the age of 21 for war crimes committed in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; Ms. Koch was convicted of participating in murders at Buchenwald.
Mr. Browning’s book chronicled the role of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, which helped provide the manpower for the elimination of most Polish Jewry within a year. The book mentions one woman, the young, pregnant bride of one of the captains of the police battalion. She had gone to Poland for a kind of honeymoon and went along with her husband to observe the clearing of a ghetto.
Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators were women, according to Ms. Lower. But in many cases where genocide was taking place, German women were very close by. Several witnesses have described festive banquets near mass shooting sites in the Ukrainian forests, with German women providing refreshments for the shooting squads whose work often went on for days.
Ms. Petri was married to an SS officer who ran an agricultural estate, complete with a colonial-style manor house and slave laborers, in Galicia, in occupied Poland. She later confessed to having murdered six Jewish children, aged 6 to 12. She came across them while out riding in her carriage. She was the mother of two young children, and was 25 at the time. Near naked, the Jewish children had apparently escaped from a railroad car bound for the Sobibor camp. She took them home, fed them, then led them into the woods and shot them one by one.
She told her interrogators that she had done so, in part, because she wanted to prove herself to the men.
She was tried in East Germany and served a life sentence.
Ms. Altvater Zelle went to Ukraine as a 22-year-old single woman and became the secretary of a district commissar, Wilhelm Westerheide. Survivors remembered her as the notorious Fräulein Hanna, and accused her, among other things, of smashing a toddler’s head against a ghetto wall and of throwing children to their deaths from the window of a makeshift hospital.
Back in Germany, Ms. Altvater Zelle married, became a welfare case worker for youth in her hometown, Minden, and adopted a son.
In Commissar Westerheide’s region, about 20,000 Jews were wiped out. He and his loyal secretary were tried twice in West Germany, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were acquitted both times because of contradictions that arose in the testimonies of witnesses gathered over 20 years, the former chief prosecutor in the case told Ms. Lower.
One survivor, Moses Messer, said he saw the woman he knew as Fräulein Hanna smashing the toddler to death against the wall. He told lawyers in Haifa, Israel, in the early 1960s: “Such sadism from a woman I have never seen. I will never forget this scene.”
Pleas by Conscientious Objectors Evolve
Answering the G.I. Rights Hotline for the last 11 years, J. E. McNeil has counseled thousands of soldiers who want to become conscientious objectors and get out of the service.
But when the House of Representatives voted May 27 to allow the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, paving the way for gay men and lesbians in the military to be open about their sexual orientation, Ms. McNeil got a hot-line call that raised a new issue: the caller said he considered homosexuality an abomination and wanted to be a conscientious objector because he could not serve in the military alongside gay soldiers.
“I told him I wasn’t trying to criticize, but he was already serving with gays, since there’s lots of gays in the military now,” said Ms. McNeil, the executive director of the Center on Conscience & War, a nonprofit group that supports conscientious objectors. “He said, ‘Yes, but now if they come out, they can be forced out. But if homosexuality is actually allowed, I will be housed with somebody who’s sexually attracted to me.’ ”
For Ms. McNeil, a Quaker lawyer committed to helping anyone with valid legal grounds get out of the military, the call presented a legal and personal conundrum — and a possible unintended consequence of a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“I told him it was outside the norm, and I’d have to think about whether it met the legal criteria,” she said. “I won’t tell you my internal dialogue. But I will tell you I have a brother who died of AIDS and a sister who’s a lesbian.”
The next day, while Ms. McNeil was thinking through the legal ramifications, the center got an e-mail message raising the same issue.
“This is just the beginning,” Ms. McNeil said. “When the other shoe drops and the policy actually ends, I think we’re going to get a lot of these.”
The 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a compromise under which the military would not investigate individuals’ sexual orientation, and gay men and lesbians would not discuss their sexual orientation.
Although President Obama supports the policy’s repeal, it is not likely to happen this year. The Pentagon is studying the effects of allowing openly gay service members, and no action will be taken until the Pentagon report is complete and the defense secretary, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president all certify that repeal would not harm military effectiveness.
In her years at the center, Ms. McNeil has grappled with other cases that conflicted with her personal views.
“I had one woman who said she was a born-again Christian and had come to believe that a woman’s place was in the home, raising a family, so she had to get out of the military because of her religious beliefs,” she said. “As a feminist, I wasn’t wild about that. But she fit the legal criteria, and we helped her get out.”
In the “don’t ask, don’t tell” cases, Ms. McNeil concluded that there was no legal basis for a conscientious objector claim.
The legal standard, she said, is that the person must be conscientiously opposed to participating in war in any form, based on a sincerely held religious, moral or ethical belief. And the person must have had a change of heart since joining the military, when the person signed a form saying he or she was not a conscientious objector and did not intend to become one.
“In the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation, they’re not opposed to participating in war, they’re opposed to who they’re participating with,” Ms. McNeil said.
Ms. McNeil’s center, in a ramshackle fourth-floor walk-up over a church, is one of 20 that field hot-line calls from military personnel — and is not the only one getting questions about conscientious objector status from those anticipating the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
At the Bay Area G.I. Rights Network, Bob Jolly has had three inquiries, one from a staff sergeant on behalf of one of his men.
“The soldier is a very devoted Christian who believes that practicing homosexuality is a sin,” the staff sergeant wrote. “With changes in the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy, he is concerned that he will have to bunk and shower with homosexuals. He is concerned to the point that he is asking about ways to get out of the Army.”
Like Ms. McNeil, Mr. Jolly said opposition to homosexuality would not be a valid ground for a conscientious objector discharge, whatever happens with “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“It’s like when blacks and whites were integrated in the armed services,” he said. “They have to learn to live together.”
Ms. McNeil’s center gets about 150 calls a month, about 100 from people who are either absent without leave or about to be, and about 20 asking about becoming a conscientious objector.
“After talking to literally thousands of callers,” Ms. McNeil said, “I honestly believe that many of the people who go AWOL or commit suicide are people who are struggling with their conscience.”
As Ms. McNeil was being interviewed, the hot line got a call from Afghanistan, answered by Daniel Lakemacher, the center’s director of development, who won his own conscientious objector discharge from the Navy less than a year ago.
Mr. Lakemacher would not disclose the details of the caller’s situation, beyond that he was on his second tour in the Army, had recently been through “some traumatic stuff with his unit” and had decided he could no longer fire his weapon at another person.
“People wake up to their beliefs about war at different times,” Ms. McNeil said. “Sometimes it’s when they’re in training chanting, ‘Blood, blood, blood makes the grass grow green.’ Sometimes they don’t really think about it until they’re about to deploy or until they have to shoot a weapon.”
Some 300 million years ago, the living ancestor of humans was a reptile. Like turtles and alligators today, it let the temperature at which its eggs were incubated decide their sex.
Birds and mammals, two groups that descended from the reptiles, put sex under the more reliable control of genes, not of temperature. But sex-determining genes pose a severe problem for the organization of a genome. In a series of experiments over the past 15 years, David Page of the Whitehead Institute has reconstructed many of the steps in the evolution of the human sex chromosomes, which he calls “an infinitely rich experiment of nature.” He has now started to analyze a parallel experiment, the sex chromosomes of birds.
In humans, men have an X and a Y chromosome, and women two X’s. In reptilian times, the X and the Y were an ordinary pair of chromosomes until the male-determining gene landed on the Y. Thereupon the Y started shedding the genes it held in common with the X and shriveled to a fraction of its former size.
Birds have evolved a similar system with a twist — it’s the male that has two of the same chromosomes. Their sex chromosomes are called the Z and W, with males having two Z’s and females a Z and a W. The Z and W are derived from a different pair of ancestral chromosomes than the X and Y, a team led by Daniel W. Bellott and Dr. Page report in the current issue of Nature. The Z’s evolution has in several ways paralleled that of the X, even though each is associated with a different sex.
Both chromosomes have acquired genes related to the function of the testicles. With the help of the Washington University School of Medicine’s Genome Center, Dr. Page’s team has analyzed the DNA of the chicken’s Z and found that 15 percent of it consists of an array of sperm-related genes, many of them present in multiple copies.
Genes that benefit only males are likely to lead a safer life on the Y chromosome, which never enters a woman’s body, and indeed the Y chromosome is a sanctuary for sperm-making genes. More surprising is that the X chromosome, too, has added sperm-related genes, which of course are activated only in the cells of the testicles. “This flies in the face of common wisdom about the X, that it must be a female-biased chromosome,” Dr. Page said.
The Z and the X share another evolutionary feature: both, Dr. Page’s team has found, are padded with repetitive DNA sequences of no obvious function. The Z has picked up some 40 million units of this kind of DNA and X twice that amount. The padding seems to be a consequence of their withdrawal from the major ritual of chromosomal life, the swapping of chunks of DNA prior to making eggs and sperm.
These swaps generate new combinations of genes and hence individuals that differ from their parents. But the sex chromosomes, paradoxically, cannot engage in this central purpose of sex lest the sex-determining gene pass into the genome of the opposite sex.
Because the X and Y do not recombine for most of their length, the Y chromosome cannot repair damaged genes with backup copies from the X and has shed these damaged genes through evolutionary history. Its partner the X can refresh damaged genes through recombination with another X when next it finds itself in a woman’s body.
Most of the genes that the Y has retained maintain their genetic health by an unusual procedure. The genes are arranged in head-to-head copies so that when the DNA bends like a hairpin, a bad unit on one copy can be corrected from the good unit on the other.
These pairs of genes form giant palindromes of DNA, a distinctive feature of the Y chromosome’s structure discovered by Dr. Page and colleagues in 2003. The W chromosome in birds is in the same predicament as the Y and may have hit on the same solution, but so far has defied decoding. “It could be there are palindromes in there but they are not yet visible,” Dr. Page said.
Masculinity in people is attained with a single Y, so why do male birds need two Z’s? The solution was found last year by a group led by Craig A. Smith and Andrew H. Sinclair of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. In humans, the default condition is female and the reproductive organs develop as male in the presence of the male-determining gene’s protein.
In birds, sex is determined by the dose of the sex gene, which the Melbourne team identified as one called DMRT1. Bird embryos exposed to a single dose develop as female; two copies of the gene make a male.
“I see an endless chain of revelations in the future that will come from comparing the human X and Y to other sex chromosomes of species at different evolutionary distances,” Dr. Page said.
Taking Lessons From What Went Wrong
While that idea may sound paradoxical, it is widely accepted among engineers. They say grim lessons arise because the reasons for triumph in matters of technology are often arbitrary and invisible, whereas the cause of a particular failure can frequently be uncovered, documented and reworked to make improvements.
Disaster, in short, can become a spur to innovation.
There is no question that the trial-and-error process of building machines and industries has, over the centuries, resulted in the loss of much blood and many thousands of lives. It is not that failure is desirable, or that anyone hopes for or aims for a disaster. But failures, sometimes appalling, are inevitable, and given this fact, engineers say it pays to make good use of them to prevent future mistakes.
The result is that the technological feats that define the modern world are sometimes the result of events that some might wish to forget.
“It’s a great source of knowledge — and humbling, too — sometimes that’s necessary,” said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University and author of “Success Through Failure,” a 2006 book. “Nobody wants failures. But you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”
Now, experts say, that kind of analysis will probably improve the complex gear and procedures that companies use to drill for oil in increasingly deep waters. They say the catastrophic failure involving the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20 — which took 11 lives and started the worst offshore oil spill in United States history — will drive the technological progress.
“The industry knows it can’t have that happen again,” said David W. Fowler, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who teaches a course on forensic engineering. “It’s going to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.”
One possible lesson of the disaster is the importance of improving blowout preventers — the devices atop wells that cut off gushing oil in emergencies. The preventer on the runaway well failed. Even before the disaster, the operators of many gulf rigs had switched to more advanced preventers, strengthening this last line of defense.
Of course, an alternative to improving a particular form of technology might be to discard it altogether as too risky or too damaging.
Abandoning offshore drilling is certainly one result that some environmentalists would push for — and not only because of potential disasters like the one in the gulf. They would rather see technologies that pump carbon into the atmosphere, threatening to speed global climate change, go extinct than evolve.
In London on June 22 at the World National Oil Companies Congress, protesters from Greenpeace interrupted an official from BP, the company that dug the runaway well. Planetary responsibility, a protestor shouted before being taken away, “means stopping the push for dangerous drilling in deep waters.”
The history of technology suggests that such an end is unlikely. Devices fall out of favor, but seldom if ever get abolished by design. The explosion of the Hindenburg showed the dangers of hydrogen as a lifting gas and resulted in new emphasis on helium, which is not flammable, rather than ending the reign of rigid airships. And engineering, by definition, is a problem-solving profession. Technology analysts say that constructive impulse, and its probable result for deep ocean drilling, is that innovation through failure analysis will make the wells safer, whatever the merits of reducing human reliance on oil. They hold that the BP disaster, like countless others, will ultimately inspire technological advance.
The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.
“Any engineering failure has a lot of lessons,” said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called “Learning from Disaster.”
Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.
Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering “the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.”
Among other things, Dr. Brown taught failure analysis.
Dr. Petroski, at Duke, writing in “Success Through Failure,” noted the innovative corollary. Failures, he said, “always teach us more than the successes about the design of things. And thus the failures often lead to redesigns — to new, improved things.”
One of his favorite examples is the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The span, at the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge, crossed a strait of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. A few months after its opening, high winds caused the bridge to fail in a roar of twisted metal and shattered concrete. No one died. The only fatality was a black cocker spaniel named Tubby.
Dr. Petroski said the basic problem lay in false confidence. Over the decades, engineers had built increasingly long suspension bridges, with each new design more ambitious.
The longest span of the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened to traffic in 1883, was 1,595 feet. The George Washington Bridge (1931) more than doubled that distance to 3,500 feet. And the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) went even farther, stretching its middle span to 4,200 feet.
“This is where success leads to failure,” Dr. Petroski said in an interview. “You’ve got all these things working. We want to make them longer and more slender.”
The Tacoma bridge not only possessed a very long central span — 2,800 feet — but its concrete roadway consisted of just two lanes and its deck was quite shallow. The wind that day caused the insubstantial thoroughfare to undulate wildly up and down and then disintegrate. (A 16-millimeter movie camera capturedthe violent collapse.)
Teams of investigators studied the collapse carefully, and designers of suspension bridges took away several lessons. The main one was to make sure the road’s weight and girth were sufficient to avoid risky perturbations from high winds.
Dr. Petroski said the collapse had a direct impact on the design of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964 to link Brooklyn and Staten Island. Its longest span was 4,260 feet — making it, at the time, the world’s longest suspension bridge and potentially a disaster-in-waiting.
To defuse the threat of high winds, the designers from the start made the roadway quite stiff and added a second deck, even though the volume of traffic was insufficient at first to warrant the lower one. The lower deck remained closed to traffic for five years, opening in 1969.
“Tacoma Narrows changed the way that suspension bridges were built,” Dr. Petroski said. “Before it happened, bridge designers didn’t take the wind seriously.”
Another example in learning from disaster centers on an oil drilling rig called Ocean Ranger. In 1982, the rig, the world’s largest, capsized and sank off Newfoundland in a fierce winter storm, killing all 84 crew members. The calamity is detailed in a 2001 book, “Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology,” by James R. Chiles.
The floating rig, longer than a football field and 15 stories high, had eight hollow legs. At the bottom were giant pontoons that crewmen could fill with seawater or pump dry, raising the rig above the largest storm waves — in theory, at least.
The night the rig capsized, the sea smashed in a glass porthole in the pontoon control room, soaking its electrical panel. Investigators found that the resulting short circuits began a cascade of failures and miscalculations that resulted in the rig’s sinking.
The lessons of the tragedy included remembering to shut watertight storm hatches over glass windows, buying all crew members insulated survival suits (about $450 each at the time) and rethinking aspects of rig architecture.
“It was a terrible design,” said Dr. Halada of the State University of New York. “But they learned from it.”
Increasingly, such tragedies get studied, and not just at Stony Brook. The Stanford University Center for Professional Development offers a graduate certificate in advanced structures and failure analysis. Drexel University offers a master’s degree in forensic science with a focus on engineering.
So too, professional engineering has produced a subspecialty that investigates disasters. One of the biggest names in the business is Exponent, a consulting company based in Menlo Park, Calif. It has a staff of 900 specialists around the globe with training in 90 engineering and scientific fields.
Exponent says its analysts deal with everything from cars and roller coasters to oil rigs and hip replacements. “We analyze failures and accidents,” the company says, “to determine their causes and to understand how to prevent them.”
Forensic engineers say it is too soon to know what happened with Deepwater Horizon, whose demise flooded the gulf with crude oil. They note that numerous federal agencies are involved in a series of detailed investigations, and that President Obama has appointed a blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations on how to strengthen federal oversight of oil rigs.
But the engineers hold, seemingly with one voice, that the investigatory findings will eventually improve the art of drilling for oil in deep waters — at least until the next unexpected tragedy, and the next lesson in making the technology safer.
One lesson might be to build blowout preventers with more than one blind shear ram. In an emergency, the massive blades of these devices slice through the drill pipe to cut off the flow of gushing oil. The Deepwater Horizon had just one, while a third of the rigs in the gulf now have two.
Perhaps regulators will decided that rig operators, whatever the cost, should install more blind shear rams on all blowout preventers.
“It’s like our personal lives,” said Dr. Fowler of the University of Texas. “Failure can force us to make hard decisions.”
African Studies Give Women Hope in H.I.V. Fight
With an AIDS vaccine still out of reach, two rigorous new studies have found different ways to sharply cut H.I.V. infections among women and schoolgirls, who make up a majority of the newly infected in sub-Saharan Africa.
After two decades in which researchers searched fruitlessly for an effective vaginal microbicide to block H.I.V., South African scientists working in two AIDS-devastated communities of South Africa, one rural and one urban, say they have finally found something that shows real promise.
Women who used a vaginal microbicidal gel containing an antiretroviral medication widely used to treat AIDS, tenofovir, were 39 percent less likely over all to contract H.I.V. than those who used a placebo. Those who used the gel most regularly reduced their chances of infection 54 percent, according to a two-and-a-half year study of 889 women by Caprisa, a Durban-based AIDS research center.
Broader trials are needed to confirm the results, and it will most likely be years before the product is publicly available, but if produced on a large scale the gel would cost less than 25 cents per application, the lead investigators estimated.
Because the trial was relatively small and the gel was nowhere close to 100 percent effective, AIDS scientists and public health officials wanted to see another trial get similar results before they undertook the large fund-raising and public education efforts that would be needed to make billions of doses of the gel, as well as the applicators, which are more expensive, and then to persuade women to use them and governments of poor countries to adopt them.
Dr. Bruce Walker, a Harvard Medical School professor who was not involved in the study, said a cheer erupted when researchers unveiled their findings to a small group of scientists last month in Durban.
“This is the first time that there’s been a tool that women can use to protect themselves from becoming infected,” he said. “It’s a game changer.”
In Vienna, where the meeting of the International AIDS Society just opened, leaders of the global fight against AIDS said they found the results of the microbicide trial very impressive. The study was published online on Monday by Science magazine.
“This is very encouraging,” said Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations AIDS agency. “It can be controlled by women, and put in 12 hours earlier, and that is empowering. They do not have to ask the man for permission to use it. And the cost of the gel is not high.”
In another piece of progress against AIDS, a separate, large study in Malawi sponsored by the World Bank, and made public on Sunday, found that if poor schoolgirls and their families received small monthly cash payments, the girls had sex later, less often and with fewer partners.
A year and a half after the program started, the girls were less than half as likely to be infected with the AIDS or herpes viruses than were girls whose families got no payments. The likelihood that the girls would agree to sex in return for gifts and cash declined as the size of the payments from the program rose, suggesting the central role of extreme poverty in sexual choices.
“Maybe we can combine these behavioral and biomedical interventions,” said Dr. Tim Farley, a scientist with the World Health Organization involved in H.I.V. prevention research. “We need to pursue both avenues.”
At a time of intensifying competition for global health dollars, when the number of people who contract H.I.V. is outstripping those put on treatment each year, pressure is mounting on African countries and donors to focus more heavily on prevention. Male circumcision is one method proven to at least halve a man’s chances of H.I.V. infection.
Scientists say the success of the $18 million microbicide trial, largely paid for by the United States Agency for International Development, and the study on cash payments offer hope to girls and women in Africa, who have higher rates of H.I.V. infection than their male counterparts and often less power in relationships to protect themselves.
There have been other signs of progress. A new Unaids study found that H.I.V. prevalence among young people had declined by more than 25 percent in 15 of the 21 countries most affected by AIDS. In eight countries, the agency found evidence of positive changes in sexual behavior among young people, for example delaying having sex, having fewer partners and the increasing use of condoms.
In the $400,000 trial in Malawi, 3,800 teenage girls and young women, ages 13 to 22, were randomly assigned to two groups. Half the girls received no cash payments. The parents of the other half were paid $4 to $10 a month while the girls themselves received $1 to $5 a month if they attended school regularly.
After 18 months, the H.I.V. prevalence among the girls who got the cash was 1.2 percent, compared with 3 percent for the others. “The program empowered these girls to make better choices,” said Berk Ozler, a senior economist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.
While cash programs are already spreading in Africa, the antiretroviral gel will take longer, according to the husband-and-wife team of epidemiologists who led the study. They are Dr. Salim S. Abdool Karim, Caprisa’s director, and Dr. Quarraisha Abdool Karim, associate scientific director.
“I would be very sad if we had to sit around a table three years from now and we don’t have the confirmation and regulations in place,” Dr. Salim Karim said.
Dr. Quarraisha Karim noted that, “For women, it certainly is a turning point.”
In South Africa, where 5.7 million people are H.I.V.-positive, more than in any other nation, the government is eager to move forward. “As soon as we’re confident it’s a safe and effective product, we should do our best to get it out,” said Derek Hanekom, the country’s deputy minister of science and technology.
The women who participated in the study — in the city of Durban and in the rural community of Vulindlela, in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal — used the gel up to 12 hours before and after sex. Usually their partners were not aware of it. Tissue biopsies found levels of tenofovir that were 1,000 times what they would have been in the blood if the drug had been taken by pill, the team said.
The success follows years of disappointing results in trials of other microbicides that were found to be ineffective, or even to raise a woman’s risk of H.I.V. infection. There are currently other trials under way that use tenofovir in gel and pill forms.
Gilead Sciences, the California-based biopharmaceutical company that developed tenofovir, donated 65 pounds of the active ingredient for the study. It has also relinquished any claim to royalties on the gel if it is distributed in Africa and poor countries in other parts of the world.
Dr. Howard Jaffe, president of the Gilead Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, said that Dr. Salim Karim — nicknamed Slim — pitched the microbicide idea to company scientists in 2004, to initial reluctance.
“Slim is nothing if not charismatic, passionate and intelligent, and we thought it needs to be studied, it will be studied and this may be the best time to do it,” Dr. Jaffe said.
In Vulindlela, women have a desperate need for a way to protect themselves. H.I.V. testing of pregnant women in the area has found that one in 10 is already H.I.V.-positive by 16; half are infected by 24.
Before antiretroviral treatment became available here, the graveyards were crowded every weekend with funeralgoers. Fewer people are dying now, but many young women are still getting infected.
Xoliswa Mthethwa, 26, who was part of the study, said she told her boyfriend about the gel and he was very supportive. If it worked, she said, “I’d be the first person to go buy it.”
Factory Defies Sweatshop Label, but Can It Thrive?
SITTING in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.
The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.
Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.
“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”
The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.
For Knights, the factory is a risky proposition, even though it already has orders to make T-shirts and sweatshirts for bookstores at 400 American universities. The question is whether students, alumni and sports fans will be willing to pay $18 for the factory’s T-shirts — the same as premium brands like Nike and Adidas — to sustain the plant and its generous wages.
Joseph Bozich, the C.E.O. of Knights, is optimistic. “We’re hoping to prove that doing good can be good business, that they’re not mutually exclusive,” he says.
Not everyone is so confident. “It’s a noble effort, but it is an experiment,” says Andrew Jassin, an industry consultant who says “fair labor” garments face a limited market unless deft promotion can snare consumers’ attention — and conscience. “There are consumers who really care and will buy this apparel at a premium price,” he says, “and then there are those who say they care, but then just want value.”
Mr. Bozich says the plant’s T-shirts and sweats should command a premium because the company uses high-quality fabric, design and printing.
In the factory’s previous incarnation, a Korean-owned company, BJ&B, made baseball caps for Nike and Reebok before shutting it in 2007 and moving the operation to lower-wage countries. Today, the reborn factory is producing under a new label, Alta Gracia, named after this poverty-ridden town as well as the Virgin of Altagracia, revered as protector of the Dominicans. (Alta gracia translates to “exalted grace.”)
“This sometimes seems too good to be true,” says Jim Wilkerson, Duke University’s director of licensing and a leader of American universities’ fair-labor movement.
He said a few other apparel companies have tried to improve working conditions, like School House, which was founded by a 25-year-old Duke graduate and uses a factory in Sri Lanka. Worker advocates applaud these efforts, but many say Alta Gracia has gone further than others by embracing higher wages and unionization. A living wage is generally defined as the amount of money needed to adequately feed and shelter a family.
“What really counts is not what happens with this factory over the next six months,” Mr. Wilkerson says. “It’s what happens six years or 10 years from now. We want badly for this to live on.”
Santa Castillo agrees. She and many co-workers toiled at other factories for the minimum wage, currently $147 a month in this country’s free-trade zones, where most apparel factories are located. That amount, worker after worker lamented in interviews for this article, falls woefully short of supporting a family.
The Alta Gracia factory has pledged to pay employees nearly three and a half times the prevailing minimum wage, based on a study done by a workers’ rights group that calculated the living costs for a family of four in the Dominican Republic.
While some critics view the living wage as do-gooder mumbo-jumbo, Ms. Castillo views it as a godsend. In her years earning the minimum wage, she said she felt stuck on a treadmill — never able to advance, often borrowing to buy necessities.
“A lot of times there was only enough for my kids, and I’d go to bed hungry,” she says. “But now I have money to buy meat, oatmeal and milk.”
With higher wages, she says, her family can move up in the world. She is now able to borrow $1,000 to begin building her future home and feels able to fulfill her dreams of becoming a minister at her local evangelical church.
“I hope God will continue to bless the people who brought this factory to our community,” she says.
IN many ways, the factory owes its existence to an incident a decade ago, when Joe Bozich was attending his son’s high school basketball game. His vision suddenly became blurred, and he could hardly make out his son on the court. A day later, he couldn’t read.
A doctor told him the only thing that would cause his vision to deteriorate so rapidly was a brain tumor.
So he went in for an M.R.I. “My doctor said, ‘The good news is you don’t have a brain tumor, but the bad news is you have multiple sclerosis,’ ” he says.
For three days, he couldn’t see. He worried that he would be relegated to a wheelchair and ventilator and wouldn’t be able to support his family. At the same time, a close friend and his brother died, and then one of his children began suffering from anxiety.
“I thought of people who were going through the same thing as my child and me,” Mr. Bozich recalls. “Fortunately, we had the resources for medical help, and I thought of all the families that didn’t.”
“I started thinking that I wanted to do something more important with my business than worry just about winning market share,” he adds. “That seemed kind of empty after what I’ve been through. I wanted to find a way to use my business to impact people that it touched on a daily basis.”
He regained his full vision after three weeks and says he hasn’t suffered any further attacks. Shortly after Mr. Bozich recovered, Knights Apparel set up a charity, weKAre, that supports a home for orphans and abused children. But he says he wanted to do more.
A national collegiate bodybuilding champion at Vanderbilt, Mr. Bozich was hired by Gold’s Gym after graduation and later founded a unit in the company that sold Gold’s apparel to outside retailers. Building on that experience, Mr. Bozich started Knights Apparel in 2000.
Still solidly built at 47, he has made apparel deals with scores of universities, enabling Knights to surpass Nike as the No. 1 college supplier. Under Mr. Bozich, Knights cooperates closely with the Worker Rights Consortium, a group of 186 universities that press factories making college-logo apparel to treat workers fairly.
Scott Nova, the consortium’s executive director, says Mr. Bozich seems far more committed than most other apparel executives to stamping out abuses — like failure to pay for overtime work. Knights contracts with 30 factories worldwide. At a meeting that the two men had in 2005 to address problems at a Philippines factory, Mr. Bozich floated the idea of opening a model factory.
Mr. Nova loved the idea. He was frustrated that most apparel factories worldwide still paid the minimum wage or only a fraction above — rarely enough to lift families out of poverty. (Minimum wages are 15 cents an hour in Bangladesh and around 85 cents in the Dominican Republic and many cities in China — the Alta Gracia factory pays $2.83 an hour.)
Mr. Bozich first considered opening a factory in Haiti, but was dissuaded by the country’s poor infrastructure. Mr. Nova urged him to consider this depressed community, hoping that he would employ some of the 1,200 people thrown out of work when the Korean-owned cap factory closed.
Mr. Bozich turned to a longtime industry executive, Donnie Hodge, a former executive with J. P. Stevens, Milliken and Gerber Childrenswear. Overseeing a $500,000 renovation of the factory, Mr. Hodge, now president of Knights, called for bright lighting, five sewing lines and pricey ergonomic chairs, which many seamstresses thought were for the managers.
“We could have given the community a check for $25,000 or $50,000 a year and felt good about that,” Mr. Hodge said. “But we wanted to make this a sustainable thing.”
The factory’s biggest hurdle is self-imposed: how to compete with other apparel makers when its wages are so much higher.
Mr. Bozich says the factory’s cost will be $4.80 a T-shirt, 80 cents or 20 percent more than if it paid minimum wage. Knights will absorb a lower-than-usual profit margin, he said, without asking retailers to pay more at wholesale.
“Obviously we’ll have a higher cost,” Mr. Bozich said. “But we’re pricing the product such that we’re not asking the retailer or the consumer to sacrifice in order to support it.”
Knights plans to sell the T’s for $8 wholesale, with most retailers marking them up to $18.
“We think it’s priced right and has a tremendous message, and it’s going to be marketed like crazy,” says Joel Friedman, vice president of general merchandise at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. He says Barnes & Noble will at first have smaller-than-usual profit margins on the garments because it will spend heavily to promote them, through a Web campaign, large signs in its stores and other methods.
It helps to have many universities backing the project. Duke alone placed a $250,000 order and will run full-page ads in the campus newspaper, put postcards in student mailboxes and hang promotional signs on light poles. Barnes & Noble plans to have Alta Gracia’s T’s and sweats at bookstores on 180 campuses by September and at 350 this winter, while Follett, the other giant college bookstore operator, plans to sell the T’s on 85 campuses this fall.
Still, this new, unknown brand could face problems being sold alongside Nike and Adidas gear. “They have to brand this well — simply, clearly and elegantly — so college students can understand it very fast,” says Kellie A. McElhaney, a professor of corporate social responsibility at the University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of college students would much rather pay for a brand that shows workers are treated well.”
Nike and Adidas officials said their companies have sought to improve workers’ welfare through increased wages and by belonging to the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group that seeks to end sweatshop conditions. A Nike spokesman said his company would “watch with interest” the Knights initiative.
To promote its gear, Knights is preparing a video to be shown at bookstores and a Web documentary, both highlighting the improvements in workers’ lives. The T-shirts will have hanging tags with pictures of Alta Gracia employees and the message “Your purchase will change our lives.” The tags will also contain an endorsement from the Worker Rights Consortium, which has never before backed a brand.
In a highly unusual move, United Students Against Sweatshops, a nationwide college group that often lambastes apparel factories, plans to distribute fliers at college bookstores urging freshmen to buy the Alta Gracia shirts.
“We’re going to do everything we can to promote this,” says Casey Sweeney, a leader of the group at Cornell. “It’s incredible that I can wear a Cornell hoodie knowing the workers who made it are being paid well and being respected.”
ONE such worker is Maritza Vargas. When BJ&B ran the factory, she was a stand-up-for-your-rights firebrand fighting for 20 union supporters who had been fired.
Student groups and the Worker Rights Consortium pressed Nike and other companies that used the factory to push BJ&B to recognize the union and rehire the fired workers. BJ&B relented. Today, Ms. Vargas is president of the union at the new plant and sings a very different tune. In interviews, she and other union leaders praised the Alta Gracia factory and said they would do their utmost to make it succeed and grow. Mireya Perez said the living wage would enable her to send her 16-year-old daughter to college, while Yolando Simon said she was able to pay off a $300 debt to a grocer.
At other factories, workers said, managers sometimes yelled or slapped them. Several said they were not allowed to go home when sick, and sometimes had to work past midnight after beginning at 7:30 a.m.
Comparing this factory with other ones, Ms. Vargas said, “the difference is heaven and earth.”
Role of Women in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.
There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.
The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.
“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.
While most did not bloody their own hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse because they operated outside the concentration camp system, on their own initiative.
Ms. Lower’s findings shed new light on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to experts, and have further underlined the importance of the role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus.
“In the dominant literature on perpetrators, you won’t find women mentioned,” said Dan Michman, the chief historian at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
Ms. Lower, 45, presented her work for the first time at this summer’s workshop at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research. She has been trying to decipher what motivated these women to commit such crimes.
“They challenge so deeply our notion” of what constitutes normal female behavior, she said. But the Nazi system, she added, “turned everything on its head.”
Ms. Lower said she worked for many years at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and is now teaching and researching at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich.
She began traveling to Ukraine in the early 1990s, as the Soviet archives opened up. She started in Zhytomyr, about 75 miles west of Kiev, where the SS leader Heinrich Himmler had his Ukrainian headquarters, and where she found original German files, some burned at the edges, in the local archive. She noticed the frequency with which women were mentioned at the scenes of genocide. Women also kept cropping up as witnesses in West and East German investigations after the war.
In an anomalous twist on Christopher R. Browning’s groundbreaking 1992 book, “Ordinary Men,” it appears that thousands of German women went to the eastern territories to help Germanize them, and to provide services to the local ethnic German populations there.
They included nurses, teachers and welfare workers. Women ran the storehouses of belongings taken from Jews. Local Germans were recruited to work as interpreters. Then there were the wives of regional officials, and their secretaries, some from their staffs back home.
For women from working-class families or farms in Germany, the occupied zones offered an attractive opportunity to advance themselves, Ms. Lower said.
There were up to 5,000 female guards in the concentration camps, making up about 10 percent of the personnel. Ms. Grese was hanged at the age of 21 for war crimes committed in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; Ms. Koch was convicted of participating in murders at Buchenwald.
Mr. Browning’s book chronicled the role of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, which helped provide the manpower for the elimination of most Polish Jewry within a year. The book mentions one woman, the young, pregnant bride of one of the captains of the police battalion. She had gone to Poland for a kind of honeymoon and went along with her husband to observe the clearing of a ghetto.
Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators were women, according to Ms. Lower. But in many cases where genocide was taking place, German women were very close by. Several witnesses have described festive banquets near mass shooting sites in the Ukrainian forests, with German women providing refreshments for the shooting squads whose work often went on for days.
Ms. Petri was married to an SS officer who ran an agricultural estate, complete with a colonial-style manor house and slave laborers, in Galicia, in occupied Poland. She later confessed to having murdered six Jewish children, aged 6 to 12. She came across them while out riding in her carriage. She was the mother of two young children, and was 25 at the time. Near naked, the Jewish children had apparently escaped from a railroad car bound for the Sobibor camp. She took them home, fed them, then led them into the woods and shot them one by one.
She told her interrogators that she had done so, in part, because she wanted to prove herself to the men.
She was tried in East Germany and served a life sentence.
Ms. Altvater Zelle went to Ukraine as a 22-year-old single woman and became the secretary of a district commissar, Wilhelm Westerheide. Survivors remembered her as the notorious Fräulein Hanna, and accused her, among other things, of smashing a toddler’s head against a ghetto wall and of throwing children to their deaths from the window of a makeshift hospital.
Back in Germany, Ms. Altvater Zelle married, became a welfare case worker for youth in her hometown, Minden, and adopted a son.
In Commissar Westerheide’s region, about 20,000 Jews were wiped out. He and his loyal secretary were tried twice in West Germany, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were acquitted both times because of contradictions that arose in the testimonies of witnesses gathered over 20 years, the former chief prosecutor in the case told Ms. Lower.
One survivor, Moses Messer, said he saw the woman he knew as Fräulein Hanna smashing the toddler to death against the wall. He told lawyers in Haifa, Israel, in the early 1960s: “Such sadism from a woman I have never seen. I will never forget this scene.”
Pleas by Conscientious Objectors Evolve
Answering the G.I. Rights Hotline for the last 11 years, J. E. McNeil has counseled thousands of soldiers who want to become conscientious objectors and get out of the service.
But when the House of Representatives voted May 27 to allow the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, paving the way for gay men and lesbians in the military to be open about their sexual orientation, Ms. McNeil got a hot-line call that raised a new issue: the caller said he considered homosexuality an abomination and wanted to be a conscientious objector because he could not serve in the military alongside gay soldiers.
“I told him I wasn’t trying to criticize, but he was already serving with gays, since there’s lots of gays in the military now,” said Ms. McNeil, the executive director of the Center on Conscience & War, a nonprofit group that supports conscientious objectors. “He said, ‘Yes, but now if they come out, they can be forced out. But if homosexuality is actually allowed, I will be housed with somebody who’s sexually attracted to me.’ ”
For Ms. McNeil, a Quaker lawyer committed to helping anyone with valid legal grounds get out of the military, the call presented a legal and personal conundrum — and a possible unintended consequence of a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“I told him it was outside the norm, and I’d have to think about whether it met the legal criteria,” she said. “I won’t tell you my internal dialogue. But I will tell you I have a brother who died of AIDS and a sister who’s a lesbian.”
The next day, while Ms. McNeil was thinking through the legal ramifications, the center got an e-mail message raising the same issue.
“This is just the beginning,” Ms. McNeil said. “When the other shoe drops and the policy actually ends, I think we’re going to get a lot of these.”
The 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was a compromise under which the military would not investigate individuals’ sexual orientation, and gay men and lesbians would not discuss their sexual orientation.
Although President Obama supports the policy’s repeal, it is not likely to happen this year. The Pentagon is studying the effects of allowing openly gay service members, and no action will be taken until the Pentagon report is complete and the defense secretary, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president all certify that repeal would not harm military effectiveness.
In her years at the center, Ms. McNeil has grappled with other cases that conflicted with her personal views.
“I had one woman who said she was a born-again Christian and had come to believe that a woman’s place was in the home, raising a family, so she had to get out of the military because of her religious beliefs,” she said. “As a feminist, I wasn’t wild about that. But she fit the legal criteria, and we helped her get out.”
In the “don’t ask, don’t tell” cases, Ms. McNeil concluded that there was no legal basis for a conscientious objector claim.
The legal standard, she said, is that the person must be conscientiously opposed to participating in war in any form, based on a sincerely held religious, moral or ethical belief. And the person must have had a change of heart since joining the military, when the person signed a form saying he or she was not a conscientious objector and did not intend to become one.
“In the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation, they’re not opposed to participating in war, they’re opposed to who they’re participating with,” Ms. McNeil said.
Ms. McNeil’s center, in a ramshackle fourth-floor walk-up over a church, is one of 20 that field hot-line calls from military personnel — and is not the only one getting questions about conscientious objector status from those anticipating the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
At the Bay Area G.I. Rights Network, Bob Jolly has had three inquiries, one from a staff sergeant on behalf of one of his men.
“The soldier is a very devoted Christian who believes that practicing homosexuality is a sin,” the staff sergeant wrote. “With changes in the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy, he is concerned that he will have to bunk and shower with homosexuals. He is concerned to the point that he is asking about ways to get out of the Army.”
Like Ms. McNeil, Mr. Jolly said opposition to homosexuality would not be a valid ground for a conscientious objector discharge, whatever happens with “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“It’s like when blacks and whites were integrated in the armed services,” he said. “They have to learn to live together.”
Ms. McNeil’s center gets about 150 calls a month, about 100 from people who are either absent without leave or about to be, and about 20 asking about becoming a conscientious objector.
“After talking to literally thousands of callers,” Ms. McNeil said, “I honestly believe that many of the people who go AWOL or commit suicide are people who are struggling with their conscience.”
As Ms. McNeil was being interviewed, the hot line got a call from Afghanistan, answered by Daniel Lakemacher, the center’s director of development, who won his own conscientious objector discharge from the Navy less than a year ago.
Mr. Lakemacher would not disclose the details of the caller’s situation, beyond that he was on his second tour in the Army, had recently been through “some traumatic stuff with his unit” and had decided he could no longer fire his weapon at another person.
“People wake up to their beliefs about war at different times,” Ms. McNeil said. “Sometimes it’s when they’re in training chanting, ‘Blood, blood, blood makes the grass grow green.’ Sometimes they don’t really think about it until they’re about to deploy or until they have to shoot a weapon.”
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Date: 2010-07-24 06:16 am (UTC)As to the conscientious objectors... two points: you already could be housed with someone who is sexually attracted to members of your sex under don't ask don't tell, you just didn't know for sure whether or not you were - was that really more comforting? And I just looked into this, the torah actually uses the term toevah. And another thing that is toevah is a man remarrying a woman he divorced who had sex with another man while they were divorced. It has the same status as male-male homosexual relations (female homosexual relations are not listed as toevah). People who do that are currently allowed into the military. Shrimp eating is also toevah, but one can argue that since Jesus specifically said that you could eat anything that that "abomination" is okay now.
Also "abomination" is not a very good translation for the concept, although it is the case that the torah is against these behaviors. And while I don't think cotton-poly blends are actually listed as toevah, they are also a death-sentence offense. But very few people care about these things when they don't conform to their personal prejudices.