There are five Great Lakes, not six, senators agreed yesterday in a compromise measure deleting mention of Vermont's Lake Champlain as one of the greats. Instead, the senators agreed Lake Champlain is a "cousin."
President Clinton signed a bill into law on March 6 that designated Champlain as a Great Lake for the purpose of competing for research funds under the National Sea Grant Program.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had quietly put the sentence into the reauthorization bill for the program. But he underestimated the wave of controversy it would generate among Great Lakes lawmakers and residents who had pride in the name and feared other landlocked states might also try to snag some Sea Grant funding.
"It snowballed into concerns that we would have to rewrite our encyclopedias or throw out our atlases," Leahy said jokingly on the Senate floor.
Michigan's senators had made it clear they would not accept the designation of Champlain as a sixth Great Lake - even for the intended purpose of getting more funding for Vermont.
The Senate yesterday passed the amendment striking the designation by voice vote. In a compromise, the amendment does allow universities in Vermont to compete for the research funding on problems they have in common with the Great Lakes.
Any of several defects in two genes - BRCA1 or BRCA2 - are known to raise the risk of breast and ovarian cancer dramatically. Women who test positive for the defective genes often choose drastic options - even having healthy breasts and ovaries removed - to avoid cancer.
In previous research, up to 75 percent of breast-cancer patients with family histories of breast and ovarian cancer were found to have defects in BRCA1.
However, in a new study from North Carolina, only three women among 211 breast-cancer cases had a BRCA1 defect. The women were 20 to 74 years old and were selected without regard to whether they had a family history of
the disease.
And in a new Washington state study, only 12 women had a defective BRCA1 gene among 193 who developed breast cancer before age 35. Only 15 women had the trait among 208 who developed breast cancer before age 45 and also had a close relative with the disease.
A stylish new edition of "The Communist Manifesto" aims to make Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the latest in radical chic.
The slender volume is being republished as a glossy, $13 hardcover for release in New York and London on May Day. The fashionable department store Barneys is thinking about it for a window display.
The publisher says the 1848 work speaks to a sense on Wall Street that the party can't go on forever.
03-25-98
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