![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On evacuated students
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
By SAM DILLON
Correction Appended
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.
On the evolution of the human brain
Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving
By NICHOLAS WADE
Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, suggesting that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution.
The discovery adds further weight to the view that human evolution is still a work in progress, since previous instances of recent genetic change have come to light in genes that defend against disease and confer the ability to digest milk in adulthood.
The new finding, reported by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago and colleagues in the journal Science, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size. New versions of the genes, or alleles, as geneticists call them, appear to have spread because they enhanced the brain's function in some way, the report suggests, and they are more common in some populations than others.
But several experts strongly criticized this aspect of the finding, saying it was far from clear that the new alleles conferred any cognitive advantage or had spread for that reason. Many genes have more than one role in the body, and the new alleles could have been favored for some other reason, these experts said, such as if they increased resistance to disease.
Even if the new alleles should be shown to improve brain function, that would not necessarily mean that the populations where they are common have any brain-related advantage over those where they are rare. Different populations often take advantage of different alleles, which occur at random, to respond to the same evolutionary pressure , as has happened in the emergence of genetic defenses against malaria, which are somewhat different in Mediterranean and African populations. If the same is true of brain evolution, each population might have a different set of alleles for enhancing function, many of which remain to be discovered.
The Chicago researchers began their study with two genes, known as microcephalin and ASPM, that came to light because they are disabled in a disease called microcephaly. People with the condition are born with a brain that is much smaller than usual, often with a substantial shrinkage of the cerebral cortex that seems a throwback to when the human brain was a fraction of present size.
Last year Dr. Lahn, one of a select group of researchers supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, showed that a group of 20 brain-associated genes, including microcephalin and ASPM, had evolved faster in the great ape lineage than in mice and rats. He concluded that these genes may have played important roles in the evolution of the human brain.
As part of this study, he noticed that microcephalin and ASPM had an unusual pattern of alleles. With each gene, one allele was much more common than all the others. He and his colleagues have now studied the worldwide distribution of the alleles by decoding the DNA of the two genes in many different populations.
They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.
With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
The Chicago team suggests that the new microcephalin allele may have arisen in Eurasia or as the first modern humans emigrated from Africa some 50,000 years ago. They note that the ASPM allele emerged at about the same time as the spread of agriculture in the Middle East 10,000 years ago and the emergence of the civilizations of the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, but say any connection is not yet clear.
Dr. Lahn said there may be a dozen or so genes that affect the size of the brain, each making a small difference yet one that can be acted on by natural selection. "It's likely that different populations would have a different make-up of these genes, so it may all come out in the wash," he said. In other words, East Asians and Africans probably have other brain enhancing alleles, not yet discovered, that have spread to high frequency in their populations.
He said he expected more such allele differences between populations would come to light, as have differences in patterns of genetic disease. "I do think this kind of study is a harbinger for what might become a rather controversial issue in human population research," he said. But his data and other such findings "do not necessarily lead to prejudice for or against any particular population."
A greater degree of concern was expressed by Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He said that even if the alleles were indeed under selection, it was still far from clear why they had risen to high frequency, and that "one should resist strongly the conclusion that it has to do with brain size, because the selection could be operating on any other not-yet-defined feature." He added that he was "worried about the way in which these papers will be interpreted."
Dr. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland and a coauthor of both studies, said the statistical signature of selection on the two genes was "one of the strongest that I've seen." But she said, like Dr. Collins, that "we don't know what these alleles are doing" and that specific tests were required to show they in fact influenced brain development or were selected for that reason.
Dr. Lahn acknowledges this point, writing in his article that "it remains formally possible that an unrecognized function of microcephalin outside of the brain is actually the substrate of selection."
Another geneticist, David Goldstein of Duke University, said the new results were interesting but that "it is a real stretch to argue for example that microcephalin is under selection and that that selection must be related to brain size or cognitive function."
The gene could have risen to prominence through a random process known as genetic drift, Dr. Goldstein said.
Richard Klein, an archaeologist, who has proposed that modern human behavior first appeared in Africa because of some genetic change that promoted innovativeness, said the time of emergence of the microcephalin allele "sounds like it could support my idea."
But if the allele really did support enhanced cognitive function, "it's hard to understand why it didn't get fixed at 100 percent nearly everywhere," he said. Dr. Klein suggested that perhaps the allele had spread for a different reason, that as people colonizing East Asia and Europe pushed northward they had to adapt to much colder climates.
Commenting on these critics' suggestions that the alleles could have spread for some reason other than their effects on the brain, Dr. Lahn said he thought such objections were in part scientifically based and in part due to reluctance to acknowledge that selection could occur in a trait as controversial as brain function.
The microcephalin and ASPM genes are known to be involved in determining brain size and so far have no other known function, he said. They are known to have been under selective pressure during primate evolution as brain size increased, and the chances seem "pretty good" that the new alleles are a continuation of that process, Dr. Lahn said.
Dr. Lahn said he had tested the possibility that the alleles had spread through drift, as suggested by Dr. Goldstein, and found it was very unlikely.
On China, and classes on gay studies
A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, Sept. 7 - As the class got under way, the diminutive teacher standing before an overcrowded lecture hall in this city's most exclusive university handed out a survey. The first of several multiple-choice questions asked students what their feelings would be if they encountered two male lovers: total acceptance, reluctant acceptance, rejection or disgust?
As a way of breaking the ice, the teacher, Sun Zhongxin, 35, with a Ph.D. in sociology and a fondness for PowerPoint presentations, read aloud some of the answers anonymously. In her survey, most of the 120 or so students said they would reluctantly accept gay lovers in their midst.
The Fudan University class, Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, is the first of its kind ever offered to Chinese undergraduates, and Ms. Sun briefly wondered why it was so well attended, before providing her own answer. "The attitude toward homosexuality in China is changing," she said. "It is a good process, but it also makes us feel heavy-hearted. What's unfortunate about such heavy attendance is that it indicates that many people have never discussed the topic before."
"Not only are people hiding in the closet," she concluded, "but the topic itself has been hiding in the closet."
A class like this would be unremarkable on most American university campuses, where many students are quite open about their homosexuality and the curriculum has long included offerings reflecting their interests. But among China's gay and lesbian population, which may be as large as 48 million by some estimates though it remains largely invisible, the new course is being portrayed as a major advance.
Less than a decade ago, homosexuality was still included under the heading of hooliganism in China's criminal code, and it was only in 2001 that the Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
"This is definitely a big breakthrough in the contemporary society, because for so many years, homosexuals, as a community, have lived at the edge of society and have been treated like dissidents," said Zhou Shengjian, director of a gay advocacy group in Chongqing, an inland city far from Shanghai's cosmopolitanism. "For such a university to have a specific course like this, with so many participants and experts involved, will have a very positive impact on the social situation of gay people, and on the fight against AIDS."
However much they welcomed the academic breakthrough, which is likely to spur similar courses on other campuses and perhaps eventually give rise to a gay and lesbian studies movement, many of today's gay and lesbian activists say they are no longer willing simply to wait patiently for the society to accept them.
In particular, gay activists have been able to leverage the rising alarm over the spread of AIDS to win more maneuvering space, including more acceptance from the government. Today, for example, by some estimates there are as many as 300 Web sites in China that cater to the concerns of gay men and lesbians.
Some of the sites focus strictly on health issues. Others tread into the delicate area of discrimination and human rights, and these are occasionally blocked temporarily or shut down by the government. Others feature downloadable fiction by gay writers, who deal candidly with matters of sexuality in ways that few publishers in China's tightly controlled book industry would allow. One of the most popular sites (www.gztz.org) includes detailed maps of gay entertainment areas, from saunas to nightclubs, in China and overseas.
"In each provincial capital there is at least one gay working group that is active on H.I.V.-AIDS prevention," said Zhen Li, 40, a volunteer for a gay hot line based in Beijing. "AIDS is not the main focus of our lives, though. We use the discussion of AIDS as a way of coming together on other issues, from getting coverage of gay life in the media to starting a discussion with the society."
For the most part, activists say, the government's attitude has been pragmatic. Groups that say they want to work on AIDS get official support. Those that focus on equal rights for gay people generally do not.
In almost the same breath, though, many also acknowledge that their strategy of using AIDS to create greater freedom carries a risk that they will be blamed for the spread of the disease.
"This is a very sensitive issue among homosexuals, thinking that outsiders are equating them with AIDS," said Gao Yanning, a professor in the school of public health at Fudan University, whose course on homosexual life for the medical school was a precursor of the new undergraduate class. "But we, the professors, have been very careful about this. When I was first thinking of a course called the theory and practice of homosexuality, I was approached by another professor who told me I should call the class 'Homosexuality and AIDS.' "
Mr. Gao said he would have refused to teach the class if he had been forced to use such a name.
Many gay and lesbian Chinese say that it is social conservatism more than the government, whose policies during the Communist era have veered from repressive to prudish, that has discouraged gay people from publicly acknowledging their sexual orientation.
Chinese are hard pressed to name a single celebrity or notable person from their country who has lived an openly gay life, meaning that except for foreigners, young gay men and lesbians have no prominent role models. Explicitly gay literature or cinema and television roles are equally scarce.
A 52-year-old lesbian in the northeastern city of Dalian, who gave her name as Yang, said she had discovered her sexual identity only at age 36, after marriage, when she had her first relationship with another woman, a factory co-worker.
"When we were together, people would talk about our relationship behind our backs or sometimes ask outright whether we were gay people," Ms. Yang said. "I was just ashamed and didn't know what to say, so I avoided my girlfriend in public occasions. The young gay people in Dalian today, though, seem to live in a very comfortable time."
"They're not forced to get married," she said, "and they take new partners one after another."
Many others, however, said the issue of marriage continued to weigh heavily.
"If you tell your parents you have a boyfriend, that may be O.K., but you've still got to get married," said Wang Xieyu, a junior at Fudan University. "The parents have their own concerns, their friends and their reputations. China today is like the U.S. in the 1960's, but we are changing faster. What took 40 years in the States may only take 10 years in China."
On preserving historical documents
Out of the Spy's Stocking and Into the Wash
By MICHAEL COOPER
ALBANY, Sept. 2 - The spy had made a daring foray behind enemy lines for a rendezvous with a highly placed agent and was rewarded with a trove of military secrets. But his escape plan fizzled, forcing him to try to return on foot through enemy territory. Just short of the border to safety, he was caught, unmasked and eventually executed.
It was not Cold War Berlin, but Revolutionary War New York. The spy was John André, a British intelligence officer, and his agent was none other than Benedict Arnold. In those pre-microfilm days, the secrets André carried away were written out in longhand on large papers that he folded up and placed in his boot.
Today those papers - including a detailed chart titled "Return of ordnance in the different forts, batteries, etc. at West Point and its dependencies" - can be found in a small laboratory on the 11th floor of the State Archives here, where they are among many Revolutionary War-era papers that conservators are painstakingly working to preserve.
They will reinforce areas where small tears have cropped up in pages over the years, especially along the creases of the document, which was folded into twelfths to fit more easily into André's boot. They will make sure that past efforts to preserve the document will not end up harming it in the long run, and study it for signs of anything that may lead to deterioration in the future. (Some wonder if its strange splotches of discoloration could have been caused by sweat in the frightened spy's stocking some 225 years ago.)
In addition to plans showing how the forts at West Point were built, how many men were needed at each fort and what their artillery plans were, the archive holds some of the safe-conduct passes that Arnold, a major general who was then commandant of West Point, made out to help André escape after the ship that was supposed to bear him to safety - the Vulture - sailed off on the Hudson without him.
One of the passes, dated Sept. 21, 1780, signed "B. Arnold, M Gen," is made out in André's cover name, John Anderson. It reads: "Permit Mr. John Anderson to pass the guards to the White Plains, or below, if he chuses. He being on public business by my direction."
But when André was stopped just short of the border to safety by a group of militiamen, they found the incriminating papers stuffed in his boot. The jig was up. Arnold escaped. André was hanged.
Benedict Arnold - whose name has come to stand for treason and betrayal - is not the only eponym represented in the collection. On a recent visit to the laboratory here, a document from the State Library's collection on the next table over was a letter signed by John Hancock, the man whose name is now used to mean a signature.
Some of the state's documents and artifacts have been badly damaged over time, not only by the ravages of the Revolutionary War but also by a fire that tore through the State Capitol in 1911.
Now the remaining Revolutionary War-era documents, culled from the collections of the State Archives and the State Library, are being preserved, thanks to a $164,000 grant in public and private money through the federal Save America's Treasures program, a national effort to preserve historic structures, documents and works of art.
"It's time, we feel, to work to bring them back to a condition where they can be exhibited, shared with the public and digitized so copies can go up on the Internet," said Christine W. Ward, the state archivist. "We want to make sure that what is left is preserved for future generations."
So, in a white lab coat, Maria Holden, the preservation administrator at the State Archives, pores over the documents. An intern, Marianna Neubauer, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, carefully tests the inks on the documents to see if they will run or dissolve in water.
If they will not, Susan Bove, a conservator, places them on polyester sheets and carefully bathes them in trays of distilled water, and then dries them. Torn documents are reinforced with kozo paper, a long-fibered paper from Japan.
It is finicky, hard work, and with thousands of historic documents to preserve for posterity, the conservators do not have the luxury of, say, art restorers, who can spend years on a single object. Some documents must be removed from old leather bindings they were placed in by past archivists, and placed in plastic sleeves to protect them.
The state's archivists and librarians hope that the renewed interest in the Revolutionary War - with popular histories beginning to appear - will send scholars and authors here, where they hope they will soon be able to find data and insight by looking over the state's newly cleaned, newly legible documents.
It is not only papers that must be saved, but also artifacts. The State Library has an impressive collection of George Washington's papers and effects, including one of his dress swords and pistols, a box of surveying instruments and a book of hand-colored engravings showing British regimental uniforms. There is a draft of his "Farewell Address" in his own hand, complete with crossed-out lines and other editing.
And there is a book in which Washington evaluated other generals in the war, sometimes with brutal candor. One, he wrote, was "rather addicted to ease & pleasure - & no enemy it is said to the bottle." Another "by report, is addicted to drinking."
Another was "lively, sensible, pompous and ambitious, but whether sober or not, is unknown to me."
But apparently they were not all intemperate; Washington wrote of one brigadier general who was "sober, tolerably sensible and prudent."
On the San Francisco earthquake
Before the Flood
By SIMON WINCHESTER
THE last time a great American city was destroyed by a violent caprice of nature, the response was shockingly different from what we have seen in New Orleans. In tone and tempo, residents, government institutions and the nation as a whole responded to the earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees a century ago in a manner that was well-nigh impeccable, something from which the country was long able to derive a considerable measure of pride.
This was all the more remarkable for taking place at a time when civilized existence was a far more grueling business, an age bereft of cellphones and Black Hawks and conditioned air, with no Federal Emergency Management Agency to give us a false sense of security and no Weather Channel to tell us what to expect.
Nobody in the "cool gray city of love," as the poet George Sterling called it, had the faintest inkling that anything might go wrong on the early morning of April 18, 1906. Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore - who both happened to be in town - and 400,000 others slumbered on, with only a slight lightening of eggshell-blue in the skies over Oakland and the clank of the first cable cars suggesting the beginning of another ordinary day.
Then at 5:12 a.m. a giant granite hand rose from the California earth and tore through the city. Palaces of brick held up no better than gold-rush shanties of pine and redwood siding; hot chimneys, electric wires and gas pipes toppled, setting a series of fires that, with the water mains broken and the hydrants dry, proceeded over the next three dreadful days and nights to destroy what remained of the imperial city. In the end, at least 3,000 were dead and 225,000 homeless.
Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock and took charge.
A stentorian Army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own - his superior officer was at a daughter's wedding in Chicago - and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours scores of soldiers were marching in to the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and 20 rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45 a.m. - just 153 minutes after the shaking began.
The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: "San Francisco is in ruins," the cables read. "Our city needs help."
America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshalling yards by 11 o'clock that night. The Navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the Army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.
Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse Code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00 a.m. on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, assembled in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.
Millions of rations were sped in to the city from Oregon and the Dakotas; within a week virtually every military tent in the Army quartermaster general's stock was pitched in San Francisco; and within three weeks some 10 percent of America's standing army was on hand to help the police and firefighters (whose chief had been killed early in the disaster) bring the city back to its feet.
To the great institutions go the kudos of history, and rightly so. But I delight in the lesser gestures, like that of the largely forgotten San Francisco postal official, Arthur Fisk, who issued an order on his personal recognizance: no letter posted without a stamp, and that clearly comes from the hand of a victim, will go undelivered for want of fee. And thus did hundreds of the homeless of San Francisco let their loved ones know of their condition - a courtesy of a time in which efficiency, resourcefulness and simple human kindness were prized in a manner we'd do well to emulate today.
On Egyptian medicine
Secrets of the Mummy's Medicine Chest
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
The ancient Egyptians left proof of their scientific prowess for people to marvel at for millennia. Their engineering skills can still be seen at Giza, their star charts in Luxor, their care for head wounds on Fifth Avenue.
Head wounds? Yes, and the ancients treated broken arms, cuts, even facial wrinkles - vanity is not a modern invention - and they used methods as advanced as rudimentary surgery and a sort of proto-antibiotics.
As for Fifth Avenue, it, like the Valley of the Kings, is a place of hidden treasures. What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.
It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater - Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.
It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.
"What they knew about the body is quite striking, though they did not always understand it," said James Allen, curator of Egyptian art at the Met, whose new translation of the papyrus appears in the exhibition catalog.
The papyrus shows that ancient medics had a pretty good idea that blood, pumped by the heart, flows around the body - a notion that was not firmly established until the 17th century - and knew how to stitch cuts closed. It includes the oldest known descriptions of the effects of brain injuries, and the meninges, the membrane that covers the brain.
It also advises using honey - a natural bacteria killer - on open wounds, and giving patients a concoction of willow bark, which contains a natural painkiller that is chemically similar to aspirin. Mr. Allen said another ancient Egyptian text recommends putting moldy bread on wounds, suggesting that doctors had stumbled onto the principle behind penicillin. "They didn't know what bacteria was, but they were already fighting infections," Mr. Allen said. Though Egypt had metal tools, its doctors used stone knives, because "They could make flint knives much sharper, and a freshly sharpened flint knife is sterile."
Preparing bodies for mummification gave the Egyptians detailed knowledge of anatomy and bandaging. They understood that a wound to one side of the head could cause paralysis on the opposite side of the body. The papyrus advises doctors to insert fingers into head wounds to feel what kinds of skull fractures and brain penetration are involved, and it differentiates between bones that are fractures, splintered or snapped in two.
Ever since an American, Edwin Smith, bought and translated the papyrus in the 19th century, it has struck readers as surprisingly modern. It includes magical incantations, but most of the text takes a methodical, empirical approach to diagnosis and treatment. Perhaps most striking is its restraint - the author's approach is cautious, and in some cases, the text counsels doing nothing but waiting to see if the body will heal itself.
"When you think about some of the aggressive treatments recommended by later authorities, the things done in the Middle Ages that would make your skin crawl and were sometimes harmful, the papyrus is often much more in line with our current thinking," said Miriam Mandelbaum, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the academy of medicine.
The papyrus dates to the 17th century B.C. - about nine centuries after the great pyramids were built, but about a century before the time Moses is believed to have lived. While there are fragments of medical writing that are somewhat older, experts say, none are nearly as extensive.
The papyrus uses words that were already archaic then, and the writer explains them, evidence that it is a copy of a document that was a few hundred years older. Writing with black and red ink, the ancient scribe used hieratic, a sort of cursive writing that is more abstract than the familiar picture-writing of hieroglyphics.
The author documented 48 medical cases, starting at the top of the head and working steadily down as far as the upper arm and chest. There, the papyrus stops mid-case, so experts assume that originally it continued to the feet.
It deals mostly with traumatic injuries like punctures and broken bones, so it may have been a manual for battle wounds, but one case addresses surgical removal of a growth - a cyst or tumor - on the chest. There is one lighter bit among all that gravity - someone added to the original text a recipe for an ointment to make the user look younger.
Smith, a native of Connecticut, was an amateur Egyptologist when the field was new, learned to read hieratic and hieroglyphics, and lived in Egypt for many years. In 1862, he bought a pair of papyrus medical scrolls from a dealer in Luxor; whether they had been looted from a tomb or library is unknown.
He kept the scroll that the Met will show, known as the Edwin Smith papyrus. He sold the other one, which is slightly newer, and today it belongs to a museum in Leipzig, Germany.
When Smith died, in 1906, his daughter gave his papyrus to the New-York Historical Society, which lent it for several years to the Brooklyn Museum, and then gave it in 1948 to the Academy of Medicine, at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.
Everyone recognized the importance of the scroll but no one knew quite what to do with it; the occasional scholar has taken a look, there is no record that the historical society or the Brooklyn Museum ever displayed it to the public, and the Academy of Medicine says it never has. The academy has long been a repository for rarities at the nexus of history and medicine, like George Washington's ivory false teeth and a sample of Alexander Fleming's original penicillin culture.
Displaying the papyrus safely turns out to be a challenge. The Met has put each of the scroll's 11 panels - long since separated - into a matte, in a sliver of air between thick slabs of plexiglass that filters ultraviolet light. Nothing actually touches the papyrus, except around its edges.
Now that it has been safely and expertly mounted, what will the academy do with its treasure, after the Met's exhibition is over?
"That's an excellent question," said Maria Dering, an academy spokeswoman. "And we don't have an answer yet."
On food in a Harlem school
Harlem School Introduces Children to Swiss Chard
By KIM SEVERSON
Ebony Richards, a confirmed hamburger and Tater Tots girl, knows the rules of the lunch line at her school, the Promise Academy in Harlem.
When confronted with whole-wheat penne covered with sautéed peppers and local squash, she does not blurt out "That's nasty." If she does, she goes to the end of the line.
Although seconds on main courses are not allowed - someone has to show children what a reasonable portion is - Ebony can fill her tray with a dozen helpings of vegetables or bowls of Romaine lettuce from the salad bar. Any time in the school day, she can wander into the cafeteria for a New York apple.
Ebony, 12, had never seen Swiss chard until a month ago. She ate three helpings. "I was like, 'I don't want to eat that,' " she said of her first few months of meals at the Promise Academy. "But I had to, because there was nothing else. Then it was like, 'This is good.' "
Now she demands that her father, Darryl Richards, pick up chard at the makeshift farmers' market held once a month in the school cafeteria. They may even take one of the school's cooking classes together.
As this school year begins, it is a rare administrator who is not reconsidering at least some aspect of lunch, as a way to confront increasing obesity and poor eating habits. Some steps are as simple as shutting off soda machines. Others involve writing new, comprehensive nutrition policies.
But perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took control of the students' diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home.
Experts see the program as a Petri dish in which the effects of good food and exercise on students' health and school performance can be measured and, perhaps, eventually replicated.
"The Promise Academy model is probably the most intensive anybody is working with," said Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who is working on a book about school food for the University of California Press.
Almost 90 percent of the students at the school come from families poor enough to qualify for free government lunches, and 44 percent are overweight. Most had never tasted a fresh raspberry or eaten a peach that wasn't canned in sugar syrup before they picked up a cafeteria tray at the school.
"Our challenge is to create an environment where young people actually eat healthy and learn to do it for the rest of their lives," said Geoffrey Canada, the teacher and author from the South Bronx who developed the Promise Academy. Mr. Canada created his school kitchen as part of the larger Harlem Children's Zone, an assault on poverty being watched by social service experts and policy makers across the country.
Promise was one of nine charter schools opened in the city last year. The Bloomberg administration has pledged to open 50 such schools, including 15 that are opening for this school year.
Mr. Canada, who has a master's in education from Harvard, drew a circle around a 60-block area in central Harlem to create the children's zone, a tight web of social, health and educational programs that start with a "baby college" for new parents and will end, he hopes, with the well-fed collegebound graduates of the Promise Academy.
The school has longer hours than most public schools and runs through most of the summer because the founders believe that its students need help catching up with those born into better circumstances.
School officials regularly measure the children's weight and fitness along with their academic progress. Mr. Canada and his staff hope that the Promise Academy will prove the importance of a serious school food program, much as data from the national Head Start program was used to prove the effectiveness of early education and support for children.
That will take time. When the Promise Academy opened last year, kindergartners and sixth graders were the only students. This year they are moving up a grade, and another batch of kindergartners and sixth graders is starting. In five years, when every grade level is filled, 1,300 students will be eating two meals and two snacks a day from the Promise Academy kitchen.
"We want the children to get to a point where they're looking forward to that apple, and the parents provide it for them," Mr. Canada said. "Now we say, 'Eat fruits and vegetables,' and we have kids who come back and say, 'My moms ain't buying that.' "
The team at the school uses strict guidelines, education and a little psychology to change young palates. One key is to teach resistance to marketing come-ons from fast-food and candy manufacturers.
"They've got to hear they're being conned," Mr. Canada said, "or they're not going to be open to this."
Eating at the Promise Academy is about more than just the food. Children learn to respect where it comes from and who serves it, as well as whom they eat with. They must use tongs to pick up their morning bagels. They may not bang their trays down on the cloth-covered cafeteria tables. No one is allowed to toss out whole peaches or to cut in line.
To make it all work, Mr. Canada relies on Andrew Benson, a young chef with a culinary degree from Johnson and Wales University. Mr. Benson, a veteran of three public school cafeterias in Harlem, said he was defeated by the city's school food bureaucracy. (Actual cooking from scratch is done in less than half of the city's 1,356 schools.)
The new kitchen at the academy rivals many in good New York restaurants. Mr. Benson does not use foods like processed cheese and peanut butter from the commodities program, choosing to spend part of his budget on fresher food.
He feeds the children breakfast, lunch and an array of after-school and Saturday snacks at a daily cost of about $5.87 per student. The amount, almost twice what some public schools spend, comes from a mix of government reimbursements and a school budget pumped up by grants and other private donations.
To get things rolling, Mr. Canada first turned to Ann Cooper, the chef who gained a national platform reworking the lunch program at the private Ross School in East Hampton. She helped stock the kitchen, find food purveyors and plan menus. But the Promise Academy program is much less fancy than Ross's, in both food and financing.
The Promise menu and the per-pupil budget are the envy of Jorge Leon Collazo, who was hired last year as the first executive chef of the New York City public schools, in one of several efforts to improve the 860,000 meals that are pumped out each day in the school system.
"I can't put turkey lasagna with fresh zucchini on the menu for all the schools in the city," Mr. Collazo said. "I'd get killed. No one would eat it. If I did something esoteric like that - esoteric for a public school - you'd also have to have something like pizza."
Even at the Promise Academy, getting students to embrace healthy eating has been a struggle. At first, they went home complaining that they had not had enough to eat or that the food was terrible, so Mr. Benson brought parents in for a meal.
The food impressed Jacqueline Warner, whose son, Chuck Cherry, 11, used to come home from school complaining that he was hungry. "It's just that he wasn't used to eating healthy portions," she said.
Ms. Warner, 40, has diabetes. She grew up in Harlem, eating what her mother could afford and knew how to cook. Often that meant fried foods, macaroni and cheese and lots of rice and potatoes. She loved it, but attributes her disease, in part, to that diet.
"I'm just glad he has a chance now to know the difference between the food we grew up on," she said, "and the healthy kind of food they serve in this school."
On families divided by the recent disaster
'But I Just Want to Know, Where's My Baby?'
By SUSAN SAULNY
HOUSTON, Sept. 9 - If she didn't have younger siblings to watch and three of her own small children depending on her, Lakerisha Boyd could do what she feels like doing here in an old motel near the Astrodome.
She could cry for her youngest child, Torry Lee, who is still missing almost two weeks after the storm.
But even tears are a luxury that Ms. Boyd cannot afford during her grueling vigil of praying and hoping and waiting. She has worked the Internet, the telephones and her feet to the point of exhaustion looking for the 16-month-old who was with his grandmother just before Hurricane Katrina swept into New Orleans.
On Friday, 11 days after the storm, grandmother and grandchild were still missing.
"I keep telling myself it's going to be all right," said Ms. Boyd, breathing deeply to control frayed nerves and turning her face away from her room, where 11 people are sharing two beds. "I can't start crying because of the other children. I can't break down. I'm all they've got right now. But I just want to know, where's my baby?"
Ms. Boyd, 23, is certainly not alone in her sorrowful quest. Officials said there was no way at this point to estimate how many children have been severed from families, but early figures suggest the tally could be in the thousands.
Scores of children have been found wandering alone in search of lost adults. On Thursday and Friday alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 500 new cases of parents looking for children or vice versa, bringing the number of reports in its Hurricane Katrina database to 1,500.
Of the center's cases, 258 have been successfully resolved.
Some of the parents have told the group that when they were evacuating the city, they placed their children on earlier buses in the mistaken belief that when they got seats on a later bus, the whole family would end up in the same place.
"This is a massive problem and the numbers are growing," said Ernie Allen, the president of the national center. "We know there will not be a positive ending in some of these cases. We hope the number is as small as possible. Meanwhile, we're working under the assumption that these children are out there."
Other charities and news organizations are compiling their own statistics and creating Web sites to help reunite families.
Louisiana officials urged the dozens of impromptu shelters that have popped up across the country to register with the state so that officials could begin to compile a database of all the people in them.
There are some 54,000 people in 240 shelters that are already registered, said Terri Ricks, undersecretary of the Louisiana Department of Social Services, but the state still does not have a list of who is in those shelters.
The difficulties of the mission are almost impossible to overstate. In some cases, the children who have been found are too young to give their names or are too traumatized to speak, even if they are of age to talk. In other cases, investigators have no photographs of the children to circulate because they were left behind in the floods.
The story of how Edwina Foster, 11, and her brother Foster Edward, 9, lost their mother is typical. Family members were wading through waist-high water in New Orleans when they noticed trucks passing on an elevated part of Interstate 10. They raced to an on ramp, and a pickup truck already crammed with 16 people stopped.
The children's mother, Judy Foster, begged the passengers to make room for Edwina and Foster. According to a cousin, Carisa Carsice, who was with the group, Ms. Foster told the people on the truck: "Please watch them until we get to the Superdome. Please! Take the kids first, and I'll get on the next one."
Edwina said Thursday that when the truck took off, "We were going so fast and I felt like I wanted to jump off that truck to get back to her. But when we stopped, I looked down and there was too much water."
Edwina and Foster ended up in Houston, and, in a larger sense, were among the lucky ones. After a week of searching, the authorities located their mother at a shelter in Dallas, and plans were made on Friday to reunite the family.
In an area for lost children at the Reliant Center, next to the Astrodome, Edwina and Foster played with Queneisha White, 14. Queneisha fled rising waters in downtown New Orleans with a few teenage friends after her grandmother, with whom she lived, refused to leave her apartment in the Iberville Housing Project.
" I was so scared," Queneisha said. "I said, 'Grandma, lets go!' But she said she wanted to stay with her house. Well, I was scared and I didn't want to drown."
The group of friends walked to Algiers Point, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, and boarded buses to the Astrodome. Meanwhile, Queneisha's mother was being evacuated to Corpus Christi, Tex. Her grandmother's whereabouts remain unknown.
Late Thursday, Lee Reed, one of the men who had been working on Queneisha's case for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used his own money to buy her a bus ticket to Corpus Christi.
"I couldn't find a way to get her down there, so I bought her a ticket myself," Mr. Reed said. "That's one of our concerns of the moment once we match people, not having the transportation to connect them. It's tragic."
Since arriving in Houston, Ms. Boyd, the woman searching for 16-month-old Torry Lee, said she that had received numerous offers for housing in other states, but that she did not want to leave the area without her whole family.
"We could be in a house right now, but I don't want to leave without my son," she said. "He was just a good baby. That's all I can say about him. A good baby."
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
By SAM DILLON
Correction Appended
School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.
On the evolution of the human brain
Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving
By NICHOLAS WADE
Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, suggesting that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution.
The discovery adds further weight to the view that human evolution is still a work in progress, since previous instances of recent genetic change have come to light in genes that defend against disease and confer the ability to digest milk in adulthood.
The new finding, reported by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago and colleagues in the journal Science, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size. New versions of the genes, or alleles, as geneticists call them, appear to have spread because they enhanced the brain's function in some way, the report suggests, and they are more common in some populations than others.
But several experts strongly criticized this aspect of the finding, saying it was far from clear that the new alleles conferred any cognitive advantage or had spread for that reason. Many genes have more than one role in the body, and the new alleles could have been favored for some other reason, these experts said, such as if they increased resistance to disease.
Even if the new alleles should be shown to improve brain function, that would not necessarily mean that the populations where they are common have any brain-related advantage over those where they are rare. Different populations often take advantage of different alleles, which occur at random, to respond to the same evolutionary pressure , as has happened in the emergence of genetic defenses against malaria, which are somewhat different in Mediterranean and African populations. If the same is true of brain evolution, each population might have a different set of alleles for enhancing function, many of which remain to be discovered.
The Chicago researchers began their study with two genes, known as microcephalin and ASPM, that came to light because they are disabled in a disease called microcephaly. People with the condition are born with a brain that is much smaller than usual, often with a substantial shrinkage of the cerebral cortex that seems a throwback to when the human brain was a fraction of present size.
Last year Dr. Lahn, one of a select group of researchers supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, showed that a group of 20 brain-associated genes, including microcephalin and ASPM, had evolved faster in the great ape lineage than in mice and rats. He concluded that these genes may have played important roles in the evolution of the human brain.
As part of this study, he noticed that microcephalin and ASPM had an unusual pattern of alleles. With each gene, one allele was much more common than all the others. He and his colleagues have now studied the worldwide distribution of the alleles by decoding the DNA of the two genes in many different populations.
They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.
With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
The Chicago team suggests that the new microcephalin allele may have arisen in Eurasia or as the first modern humans emigrated from Africa some 50,000 years ago. They note that the ASPM allele emerged at about the same time as the spread of agriculture in the Middle East 10,000 years ago and the emergence of the civilizations of the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, but say any connection is not yet clear.
Dr. Lahn said there may be a dozen or so genes that affect the size of the brain, each making a small difference yet one that can be acted on by natural selection. "It's likely that different populations would have a different make-up of these genes, so it may all come out in the wash," he said. In other words, East Asians and Africans probably have other brain enhancing alleles, not yet discovered, that have spread to high frequency in their populations.
He said he expected more such allele differences between populations would come to light, as have differences in patterns of genetic disease. "I do think this kind of study is a harbinger for what might become a rather controversial issue in human population research," he said. But his data and other such findings "do not necessarily lead to prejudice for or against any particular population."
A greater degree of concern was expressed by Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He said that even if the alleles were indeed under selection, it was still far from clear why they had risen to high frequency, and that "one should resist strongly the conclusion that it has to do with brain size, because the selection could be operating on any other not-yet-defined feature." He added that he was "worried about the way in which these papers will be interpreted."
Dr. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland and a coauthor of both studies, said the statistical signature of selection on the two genes was "one of the strongest that I've seen." But she said, like Dr. Collins, that "we don't know what these alleles are doing" and that specific tests were required to show they in fact influenced brain development or were selected for that reason.
Dr. Lahn acknowledges this point, writing in his article that "it remains formally possible that an unrecognized function of microcephalin outside of the brain is actually the substrate of selection."
Another geneticist, David Goldstein of Duke University, said the new results were interesting but that "it is a real stretch to argue for example that microcephalin is under selection and that that selection must be related to brain size or cognitive function."
The gene could have risen to prominence through a random process known as genetic drift, Dr. Goldstein said.
Richard Klein, an archaeologist, who has proposed that modern human behavior first appeared in Africa because of some genetic change that promoted innovativeness, said the time of emergence of the microcephalin allele "sounds like it could support my idea."
But if the allele really did support enhanced cognitive function, "it's hard to understand why it didn't get fixed at 100 percent nearly everywhere," he said. Dr. Klein suggested that perhaps the allele had spread for a different reason, that as people colonizing East Asia and Europe pushed northward they had to adapt to much colder climates.
Commenting on these critics' suggestions that the alleles could have spread for some reason other than their effects on the brain, Dr. Lahn said he thought such objections were in part scientifically based and in part due to reluctance to acknowledge that selection could occur in a trait as controversial as brain function.
The microcephalin and ASPM genes are known to be involved in determining brain size and so far have no other known function, he said. They are known to have been under selective pressure during primate evolution as brain size increased, and the chances seem "pretty good" that the new alleles are a continuation of that process, Dr. Lahn said.
Dr. Lahn said he had tested the possibility that the alleles had spread through drift, as suggested by Dr. Goldstein, and found it was very unlikely.
On China, and classes on gay studies
A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, Sept. 7 - As the class got under way, the diminutive teacher standing before an overcrowded lecture hall in this city's most exclusive university handed out a survey. The first of several multiple-choice questions asked students what their feelings would be if they encountered two male lovers: total acceptance, reluctant acceptance, rejection or disgust?
As a way of breaking the ice, the teacher, Sun Zhongxin, 35, with a Ph.D. in sociology and a fondness for PowerPoint presentations, read aloud some of the answers anonymously. In her survey, most of the 120 or so students said they would reluctantly accept gay lovers in their midst.
The Fudan University class, Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, is the first of its kind ever offered to Chinese undergraduates, and Ms. Sun briefly wondered why it was so well attended, before providing her own answer. "The attitude toward homosexuality in China is changing," she said. "It is a good process, but it also makes us feel heavy-hearted. What's unfortunate about such heavy attendance is that it indicates that many people have never discussed the topic before."
"Not only are people hiding in the closet," she concluded, "but the topic itself has been hiding in the closet."
A class like this would be unremarkable on most American university campuses, where many students are quite open about their homosexuality and the curriculum has long included offerings reflecting their interests. But among China's gay and lesbian population, which may be as large as 48 million by some estimates though it remains largely invisible, the new course is being portrayed as a major advance.
Less than a decade ago, homosexuality was still included under the heading of hooliganism in China's criminal code, and it was only in 2001 that the Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
"This is definitely a big breakthrough in the contemporary society, because for so many years, homosexuals, as a community, have lived at the edge of society and have been treated like dissidents," said Zhou Shengjian, director of a gay advocacy group in Chongqing, an inland city far from Shanghai's cosmopolitanism. "For such a university to have a specific course like this, with so many participants and experts involved, will have a very positive impact on the social situation of gay people, and on the fight against AIDS."
However much they welcomed the academic breakthrough, which is likely to spur similar courses on other campuses and perhaps eventually give rise to a gay and lesbian studies movement, many of today's gay and lesbian activists say they are no longer willing simply to wait patiently for the society to accept them.
In particular, gay activists have been able to leverage the rising alarm over the spread of AIDS to win more maneuvering space, including more acceptance from the government. Today, for example, by some estimates there are as many as 300 Web sites in China that cater to the concerns of gay men and lesbians.
Some of the sites focus strictly on health issues. Others tread into the delicate area of discrimination and human rights, and these are occasionally blocked temporarily or shut down by the government. Others feature downloadable fiction by gay writers, who deal candidly with matters of sexuality in ways that few publishers in China's tightly controlled book industry would allow. One of the most popular sites (www.gztz.org) includes detailed maps of gay entertainment areas, from saunas to nightclubs, in China and overseas.
"In each provincial capital there is at least one gay working group that is active on H.I.V.-AIDS prevention," said Zhen Li, 40, a volunteer for a gay hot line based in Beijing. "AIDS is not the main focus of our lives, though. We use the discussion of AIDS as a way of coming together on other issues, from getting coverage of gay life in the media to starting a discussion with the society."
For the most part, activists say, the government's attitude has been pragmatic. Groups that say they want to work on AIDS get official support. Those that focus on equal rights for gay people generally do not.
In almost the same breath, though, many also acknowledge that their strategy of using AIDS to create greater freedom carries a risk that they will be blamed for the spread of the disease.
"This is a very sensitive issue among homosexuals, thinking that outsiders are equating them with AIDS," said Gao Yanning, a professor in the school of public health at Fudan University, whose course on homosexual life for the medical school was a precursor of the new undergraduate class. "But we, the professors, have been very careful about this. When I was first thinking of a course called the theory and practice of homosexuality, I was approached by another professor who told me I should call the class 'Homosexuality and AIDS.' "
Mr. Gao said he would have refused to teach the class if he had been forced to use such a name.
Many gay and lesbian Chinese say that it is social conservatism more than the government, whose policies during the Communist era have veered from repressive to prudish, that has discouraged gay people from publicly acknowledging their sexual orientation.
Chinese are hard pressed to name a single celebrity or notable person from their country who has lived an openly gay life, meaning that except for foreigners, young gay men and lesbians have no prominent role models. Explicitly gay literature or cinema and television roles are equally scarce.
A 52-year-old lesbian in the northeastern city of Dalian, who gave her name as Yang, said she had discovered her sexual identity only at age 36, after marriage, when she had her first relationship with another woman, a factory co-worker.
"When we were together, people would talk about our relationship behind our backs or sometimes ask outright whether we were gay people," Ms. Yang said. "I was just ashamed and didn't know what to say, so I avoided my girlfriend in public occasions. The young gay people in Dalian today, though, seem to live in a very comfortable time."
"They're not forced to get married," she said, "and they take new partners one after another."
Many others, however, said the issue of marriage continued to weigh heavily.
"If you tell your parents you have a boyfriend, that may be O.K., but you've still got to get married," said Wang Xieyu, a junior at Fudan University. "The parents have their own concerns, their friends and their reputations. China today is like the U.S. in the 1960's, but we are changing faster. What took 40 years in the States may only take 10 years in China."
On preserving historical documents
Out of the Spy's Stocking and Into the Wash
By MICHAEL COOPER
ALBANY, Sept. 2 - The spy had made a daring foray behind enemy lines for a rendezvous with a highly placed agent and was rewarded with a trove of military secrets. But his escape plan fizzled, forcing him to try to return on foot through enemy territory. Just short of the border to safety, he was caught, unmasked and eventually executed.
It was not Cold War Berlin, but Revolutionary War New York. The spy was John André, a British intelligence officer, and his agent was none other than Benedict Arnold. In those pre-microfilm days, the secrets André carried away were written out in longhand on large papers that he folded up and placed in his boot.
Today those papers - including a detailed chart titled "Return of ordnance in the different forts, batteries, etc. at West Point and its dependencies" - can be found in a small laboratory on the 11th floor of the State Archives here, where they are among many Revolutionary War-era papers that conservators are painstakingly working to preserve.
They will reinforce areas where small tears have cropped up in pages over the years, especially along the creases of the document, which was folded into twelfths to fit more easily into André's boot. They will make sure that past efforts to preserve the document will not end up harming it in the long run, and study it for signs of anything that may lead to deterioration in the future. (Some wonder if its strange splotches of discoloration could have been caused by sweat in the frightened spy's stocking some 225 years ago.)
In addition to plans showing how the forts at West Point were built, how many men were needed at each fort and what their artillery plans were, the archive holds some of the safe-conduct passes that Arnold, a major general who was then commandant of West Point, made out to help André escape after the ship that was supposed to bear him to safety - the Vulture - sailed off on the Hudson without him.
One of the passes, dated Sept. 21, 1780, signed "B. Arnold, M Gen," is made out in André's cover name, John Anderson. It reads: "Permit Mr. John Anderson to pass the guards to the White Plains, or below, if he chuses. He being on public business by my direction."
But when André was stopped just short of the border to safety by a group of militiamen, they found the incriminating papers stuffed in his boot. The jig was up. Arnold escaped. André was hanged.
Benedict Arnold - whose name has come to stand for treason and betrayal - is not the only eponym represented in the collection. On a recent visit to the laboratory here, a document from the State Library's collection on the next table over was a letter signed by John Hancock, the man whose name is now used to mean a signature.
Some of the state's documents and artifacts have been badly damaged over time, not only by the ravages of the Revolutionary War but also by a fire that tore through the State Capitol in 1911.
Now the remaining Revolutionary War-era documents, culled from the collections of the State Archives and the State Library, are being preserved, thanks to a $164,000 grant in public and private money through the federal Save America's Treasures program, a national effort to preserve historic structures, documents and works of art.
"It's time, we feel, to work to bring them back to a condition where they can be exhibited, shared with the public and digitized so copies can go up on the Internet," said Christine W. Ward, the state archivist. "We want to make sure that what is left is preserved for future generations."
So, in a white lab coat, Maria Holden, the preservation administrator at the State Archives, pores over the documents. An intern, Marianna Neubauer, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, carefully tests the inks on the documents to see if they will run or dissolve in water.
If they will not, Susan Bove, a conservator, places them on polyester sheets and carefully bathes them in trays of distilled water, and then dries them. Torn documents are reinforced with kozo paper, a long-fibered paper from Japan.
It is finicky, hard work, and with thousands of historic documents to preserve for posterity, the conservators do not have the luxury of, say, art restorers, who can spend years on a single object. Some documents must be removed from old leather bindings they were placed in by past archivists, and placed in plastic sleeves to protect them.
The state's archivists and librarians hope that the renewed interest in the Revolutionary War - with popular histories beginning to appear - will send scholars and authors here, where they hope they will soon be able to find data and insight by looking over the state's newly cleaned, newly legible documents.
It is not only papers that must be saved, but also artifacts. The State Library has an impressive collection of George Washington's papers and effects, including one of his dress swords and pistols, a box of surveying instruments and a book of hand-colored engravings showing British regimental uniforms. There is a draft of his "Farewell Address" in his own hand, complete with crossed-out lines and other editing.
And there is a book in which Washington evaluated other generals in the war, sometimes with brutal candor. One, he wrote, was "rather addicted to ease & pleasure - & no enemy it is said to the bottle." Another "by report, is addicted to drinking."
Another was "lively, sensible, pompous and ambitious, but whether sober or not, is unknown to me."
But apparently they were not all intemperate; Washington wrote of one brigadier general who was "sober, tolerably sensible and prudent."
On the San Francisco earthquake
Before the Flood
By SIMON WINCHESTER
THE last time a great American city was destroyed by a violent caprice of nature, the response was shockingly different from what we have seen in New Orleans. In tone and tempo, residents, government institutions and the nation as a whole responded to the earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees a century ago in a manner that was well-nigh impeccable, something from which the country was long able to derive a considerable measure of pride.
This was all the more remarkable for taking place at a time when civilized existence was a far more grueling business, an age bereft of cellphones and Black Hawks and conditioned air, with no Federal Emergency Management Agency to give us a false sense of security and no Weather Channel to tell us what to expect.
Nobody in the "cool gray city of love," as the poet George Sterling called it, had the faintest inkling that anything might go wrong on the early morning of April 18, 1906. Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore - who both happened to be in town - and 400,000 others slumbered on, with only a slight lightening of eggshell-blue in the skies over Oakland and the clank of the first cable cars suggesting the beginning of another ordinary day.
Then at 5:12 a.m. a giant granite hand rose from the California earth and tore through the city. Palaces of brick held up no better than gold-rush shanties of pine and redwood siding; hot chimneys, electric wires and gas pipes toppled, setting a series of fires that, with the water mains broken and the hydrants dry, proceeded over the next three dreadful days and nights to destroy what remained of the imperial city. In the end, at least 3,000 were dead and 225,000 homeless.
Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock and took charge.
A stentorian Army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own - his superior officer was at a daughter's wedding in Chicago - and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours scores of soldiers were marching in to the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and 20 rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45 a.m. - just 153 minutes after the shaking began.
The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: "San Francisco is in ruins," the cables read. "Our city needs help."
America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshalling yards by 11 o'clock that night. The Navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the Army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.
Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse Code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00 a.m. on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, assembled in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.
Millions of rations were sped in to the city from Oregon and the Dakotas; within a week virtually every military tent in the Army quartermaster general's stock was pitched in San Francisco; and within three weeks some 10 percent of America's standing army was on hand to help the police and firefighters (whose chief had been killed early in the disaster) bring the city back to its feet.
To the great institutions go the kudos of history, and rightly so. But I delight in the lesser gestures, like that of the largely forgotten San Francisco postal official, Arthur Fisk, who issued an order on his personal recognizance: no letter posted without a stamp, and that clearly comes from the hand of a victim, will go undelivered for want of fee. And thus did hundreds of the homeless of San Francisco let their loved ones know of their condition - a courtesy of a time in which efficiency, resourcefulness and simple human kindness were prized in a manner we'd do well to emulate today.
On Egyptian medicine
Secrets of the Mummy's Medicine Chest
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
The ancient Egyptians left proof of their scientific prowess for people to marvel at for millennia. Their engineering skills can still be seen at Giza, their star charts in Luxor, their care for head wounds on Fifth Avenue.
Head wounds? Yes, and the ancients treated broken arms, cuts, even facial wrinkles - vanity is not a modern invention - and they used methods as advanced as rudimentary surgery and a sort of proto-antibiotics.
As for Fifth Avenue, it, like the Valley of the Kings, is a place of hidden treasures. What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.
It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater - Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.
It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.
"What they knew about the body is quite striking, though they did not always understand it," said James Allen, curator of Egyptian art at the Met, whose new translation of the papyrus appears in the exhibition catalog.
The papyrus shows that ancient medics had a pretty good idea that blood, pumped by the heart, flows around the body - a notion that was not firmly established until the 17th century - and knew how to stitch cuts closed. It includes the oldest known descriptions of the effects of brain injuries, and the meninges, the membrane that covers the brain.
It also advises using honey - a natural bacteria killer - on open wounds, and giving patients a concoction of willow bark, which contains a natural painkiller that is chemically similar to aspirin. Mr. Allen said another ancient Egyptian text recommends putting moldy bread on wounds, suggesting that doctors had stumbled onto the principle behind penicillin. "They didn't know what bacteria was, but they were already fighting infections," Mr. Allen said. Though Egypt had metal tools, its doctors used stone knives, because "They could make flint knives much sharper, and a freshly sharpened flint knife is sterile."
Preparing bodies for mummification gave the Egyptians detailed knowledge of anatomy and bandaging. They understood that a wound to one side of the head could cause paralysis on the opposite side of the body. The papyrus advises doctors to insert fingers into head wounds to feel what kinds of skull fractures and brain penetration are involved, and it differentiates between bones that are fractures, splintered or snapped in two.
Ever since an American, Edwin Smith, bought and translated the papyrus in the 19th century, it has struck readers as surprisingly modern. It includes magical incantations, but most of the text takes a methodical, empirical approach to diagnosis and treatment. Perhaps most striking is its restraint - the author's approach is cautious, and in some cases, the text counsels doing nothing but waiting to see if the body will heal itself.
"When you think about some of the aggressive treatments recommended by later authorities, the things done in the Middle Ages that would make your skin crawl and were sometimes harmful, the papyrus is often much more in line with our current thinking," said Miriam Mandelbaum, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the academy of medicine.
The papyrus dates to the 17th century B.C. - about nine centuries after the great pyramids were built, but about a century before the time Moses is believed to have lived. While there are fragments of medical writing that are somewhat older, experts say, none are nearly as extensive.
The papyrus uses words that were already archaic then, and the writer explains them, evidence that it is a copy of a document that was a few hundred years older. Writing with black and red ink, the ancient scribe used hieratic, a sort of cursive writing that is more abstract than the familiar picture-writing of hieroglyphics.
The author documented 48 medical cases, starting at the top of the head and working steadily down as far as the upper arm and chest. There, the papyrus stops mid-case, so experts assume that originally it continued to the feet.
It deals mostly with traumatic injuries like punctures and broken bones, so it may have been a manual for battle wounds, but one case addresses surgical removal of a growth - a cyst or tumor - on the chest. There is one lighter bit among all that gravity - someone added to the original text a recipe for an ointment to make the user look younger.
Smith, a native of Connecticut, was an amateur Egyptologist when the field was new, learned to read hieratic and hieroglyphics, and lived in Egypt for many years. In 1862, he bought a pair of papyrus medical scrolls from a dealer in Luxor; whether they had been looted from a tomb or library is unknown.
He kept the scroll that the Met will show, known as the Edwin Smith papyrus. He sold the other one, which is slightly newer, and today it belongs to a museum in Leipzig, Germany.
When Smith died, in 1906, his daughter gave his papyrus to the New-York Historical Society, which lent it for several years to the Brooklyn Museum, and then gave it in 1948 to the Academy of Medicine, at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street.
Everyone recognized the importance of the scroll but no one knew quite what to do with it; the occasional scholar has taken a look, there is no record that the historical society or the Brooklyn Museum ever displayed it to the public, and the Academy of Medicine says it never has. The academy has long been a repository for rarities at the nexus of history and medicine, like George Washington's ivory false teeth and a sample of Alexander Fleming's original penicillin culture.
Displaying the papyrus safely turns out to be a challenge. The Met has put each of the scroll's 11 panels - long since separated - into a matte, in a sliver of air between thick slabs of plexiglass that filters ultraviolet light. Nothing actually touches the papyrus, except around its edges.
Now that it has been safely and expertly mounted, what will the academy do with its treasure, after the Met's exhibition is over?
"That's an excellent question," said Maria Dering, an academy spokeswoman. "And we don't have an answer yet."
On food in a Harlem school
Harlem School Introduces Children to Swiss Chard
By KIM SEVERSON
Ebony Richards, a confirmed hamburger and Tater Tots girl, knows the rules of the lunch line at her school, the Promise Academy in Harlem.
When confronted with whole-wheat penne covered with sautéed peppers and local squash, she does not blurt out "That's nasty." If she does, she goes to the end of the line.
Although seconds on main courses are not allowed - someone has to show children what a reasonable portion is - Ebony can fill her tray with a dozen helpings of vegetables or bowls of Romaine lettuce from the salad bar. Any time in the school day, she can wander into the cafeteria for a New York apple.
Ebony, 12, had never seen Swiss chard until a month ago. She ate three helpings. "I was like, 'I don't want to eat that,' " she said of her first few months of meals at the Promise Academy. "But I had to, because there was nothing else. Then it was like, 'This is good.' "
Now she demands that her father, Darryl Richards, pick up chard at the makeshift farmers' market held once a month in the school cafeteria. They may even take one of the school's cooking classes together.
As this school year begins, it is a rare administrator who is not reconsidering at least some aspect of lunch, as a way to confront increasing obesity and poor eating habits. Some steps are as simple as shutting off soda machines. Others involve writing new, comprehensive nutrition policies.
But perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took control of the students' diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home.
Experts see the program as a Petri dish in which the effects of good food and exercise on students' health and school performance can be measured and, perhaps, eventually replicated.
"The Promise Academy model is probably the most intensive anybody is working with," said Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who is working on a book about school food for the University of California Press.
Almost 90 percent of the students at the school come from families poor enough to qualify for free government lunches, and 44 percent are overweight. Most had never tasted a fresh raspberry or eaten a peach that wasn't canned in sugar syrup before they picked up a cafeteria tray at the school.
"Our challenge is to create an environment where young people actually eat healthy and learn to do it for the rest of their lives," said Geoffrey Canada, the teacher and author from the South Bronx who developed the Promise Academy. Mr. Canada created his school kitchen as part of the larger Harlem Children's Zone, an assault on poverty being watched by social service experts and policy makers across the country.
Promise was one of nine charter schools opened in the city last year. The Bloomberg administration has pledged to open 50 such schools, including 15 that are opening for this school year.
Mr. Canada, who has a master's in education from Harvard, drew a circle around a 60-block area in central Harlem to create the children's zone, a tight web of social, health and educational programs that start with a "baby college" for new parents and will end, he hopes, with the well-fed collegebound graduates of the Promise Academy.
The school has longer hours than most public schools and runs through most of the summer because the founders believe that its students need help catching up with those born into better circumstances.
School officials regularly measure the children's weight and fitness along with their academic progress. Mr. Canada and his staff hope that the Promise Academy will prove the importance of a serious school food program, much as data from the national Head Start program was used to prove the effectiveness of early education and support for children.
That will take time. When the Promise Academy opened last year, kindergartners and sixth graders were the only students. This year they are moving up a grade, and another batch of kindergartners and sixth graders is starting. In five years, when every grade level is filled, 1,300 students will be eating two meals and two snacks a day from the Promise Academy kitchen.
"We want the children to get to a point where they're looking forward to that apple, and the parents provide it for them," Mr. Canada said. "Now we say, 'Eat fruits and vegetables,' and we have kids who come back and say, 'My moms ain't buying that.' "
The team at the school uses strict guidelines, education and a little psychology to change young palates. One key is to teach resistance to marketing come-ons from fast-food and candy manufacturers.
"They've got to hear they're being conned," Mr. Canada said, "or they're not going to be open to this."
Eating at the Promise Academy is about more than just the food. Children learn to respect where it comes from and who serves it, as well as whom they eat with. They must use tongs to pick up their morning bagels. They may not bang their trays down on the cloth-covered cafeteria tables. No one is allowed to toss out whole peaches or to cut in line.
To make it all work, Mr. Canada relies on Andrew Benson, a young chef with a culinary degree from Johnson and Wales University. Mr. Benson, a veteran of three public school cafeterias in Harlem, said he was defeated by the city's school food bureaucracy. (Actual cooking from scratch is done in less than half of the city's 1,356 schools.)
The new kitchen at the academy rivals many in good New York restaurants. Mr. Benson does not use foods like processed cheese and peanut butter from the commodities program, choosing to spend part of his budget on fresher food.
He feeds the children breakfast, lunch and an array of after-school and Saturday snacks at a daily cost of about $5.87 per student. The amount, almost twice what some public schools spend, comes from a mix of government reimbursements and a school budget pumped up by grants and other private donations.
To get things rolling, Mr. Canada first turned to Ann Cooper, the chef who gained a national platform reworking the lunch program at the private Ross School in East Hampton. She helped stock the kitchen, find food purveyors and plan menus. But the Promise Academy program is much less fancy than Ross's, in both food and financing.
The Promise menu and the per-pupil budget are the envy of Jorge Leon Collazo, who was hired last year as the first executive chef of the New York City public schools, in one of several efforts to improve the 860,000 meals that are pumped out each day in the school system.
"I can't put turkey lasagna with fresh zucchini on the menu for all the schools in the city," Mr. Collazo said. "I'd get killed. No one would eat it. If I did something esoteric like that - esoteric for a public school - you'd also have to have something like pizza."
Even at the Promise Academy, getting students to embrace healthy eating has been a struggle. At first, they went home complaining that they had not had enough to eat or that the food was terrible, so Mr. Benson brought parents in for a meal.
The food impressed Jacqueline Warner, whose son, Chuck Cherry, 11, used to come home from school complaining that he was hungry. "It's just that he wasn't used to eating healthy portions," she said.
Ms. Warner, 40, has diabetes. She grew up in Harlem, eating what her mother could afford and knew how to cook. Often that meant fried foods, macaroni and cheese and lots of rice and potatoes. She loved it, but attributes her disease, in part, to that diet.
"I'm just glad he has a chance now to know the difference between the food we grew up on," she said, "and the healthy kind of food they serve in this school."
On families divided by the recent disaster
'But I Just Want to Know, Where's My Baby?'
By SUSAN SAULNY
HOUSTON, Sept. 9 - If she didn't have younger siblings to watch and three of her own small children depending on her, Lakerisha Boyd could do what she feels like doing here in an old motel near the Astrodome.
She could cry for her youngest child, Torry Lee, who is still missing almost two weeks after the storm.
But even tears are a luxury that Ms. Boyd cannot afford during her grueling vigil of praying and hoping and waiting. She has worked the Internet, the telephones and her feet to the point of exhaustion looking for the 16-month-old who was with his grandmother just before Hurricane Katrina swept into New Orleans.
On Friday, 11 days after the storm, grandmother and grandchild were still missing.
"I keep telling myself it's going to be all right," said Ms. Boyd, breathing deeply to control frayed nerves and turning her face away from her room, where 11 people are sharing two beds. "I can't start crying because of the other children. I can't break down. I'm all they've got right now. But I just want to know, where's my baby?"
Ms. Boyd, 23, is certainly not alone in her sorrowful quest. Officials said there was no way at this point to estimate how many children have been severed from families, but early figures suggest the tally could be in the thousands.
Scores of children have been found wandering alone in search of lost adults. On Thursday and Friday alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 500 new cases of parents looking for children or vice versa, bringing the number of reports in its Hurricane Katrina database to 1,500.
Of the center's cases, 258 have been successfully resolved.
Some of the parents have told the group that when they were evacuating the city, they placed their children on earlier buses in the mistaken belief that when they got seats on a later bus, the whole family would end up in the same place.
"This is a massive problem and the numbers are growing," said Ernie Allen, the president of the national center. "We know there will not be a positive ending in some of these cases. We hope the number is as small as possible. Meanwhile, we're working under the assumption that these children are out there."
Other charities and news organizations are compiling their own statistics and creating Web sites to help reunite families.
Louisiana officials urged the dozens of impromptu shelters that have popped up across the country to register with the state so that officials could begin to compile a database of all the people in them.
There are some 54,000 people in 240 shelters that are already registered, said Terri Ricks, undersecretary of the Louisiana Department of Social Services, but the state still does not have a list of who is in those shelters.
The difficulties of the mission are almost impossible to overstate. In some cases, the children who have been found are too young to give their names or are too traumatized to speak, even if they are of age to talk. In other cases, investigators have no photographs of the children to circulate because they were left behind in the floods.
The story of how Edwina Foster, 11, and her brother Foster Edward, 9, lost their mother is typical. Family members were wading through waist-high water in New Orleans when they noticed trucks passing on an elevated part of Interstate 10. They raced to an on ramp, and a pickup truck already crammed with 16 people stopped.
The children's mother, Judy Foster, begged the passengers to make room for Edwina and Foster. According to a cousin, Carisa Carsice, who was with the group, Ms. Foster told the people on the truck: "Please watch them until we get to the Superdome. Please! Take the kids first, and I'll get on the next one."
Edwina said Thursday that when the truck took off, "We were going so fast and I felt like I wanted to jump off that truck to get back to her. But when we stopped, I looked down and there was too much water."
Edwina and Foster ended up in Houston, and, in a larger sense, were among the lucky ones. After a week of searching, the authorities located their mother at a shelter in Dallas, and plans were made on Friday to reunite the family.
In an area for lost children at the Reliant Center, next to the Astrodome, Edwina and Foster played with Queneisha White, 14. Queneisha fled rising waters in downtown New Orleans with a few teenage friends after her grandmother, with whom she lived, refused to leave her apartment in the Iberville Housing Project.
" I was so scared," Queneisha said. "I said, 'Grandma, lets go!' But she said she wanted to stay with her house. Well, I was scared and I didn't want to drown."
The group of friends walked to Algiers Point, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, and boarded buses to the Astrodome. Meanwhile, Queneisha's mother was being evacuated to Corpus Christi, Tex. Her grandmother's whereabouts remain unknown.
Late Thursday, Lee Reed, one of the men who had been working on Queneisha's case for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used his own money to buy her a bus ticket to Corpus Christi.
"I couldn't find a way to get her down there, so I bought her a ticket myself," Mr. Reed said. "That's one of our concerns of the moment once we match people, not having the transportation to connect them. It's tragic."
Since arriving in Houston, Ms. Boyd, the woman searching for 16-month-old Torry Lee, said she that had received numerous offers for housing in other states, but that she did not want to leave the area without her whole family.
"We could be in a house right now, but I don't want to leave without my son," she said. "He was just a good baby. That's all I can say about him. A good baby."
