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In the News
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Week of 3 April 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 26 |
In the News
Herbert Voigt, College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering, is featured in a March 24 Boston Globe article for arranging an exhibit at the Captain Forbes House Museum in Milton on the rescue from the Nazis of neurophysiologist Ernst Theodor von Brucke by fellow scientist Alexander Forbes. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, Forbes asked the physiology department at Harvard to offer von Brucke, an esteemed Jewish scientist from Vienna, a fellowship and offered to pay the stipend himself. When the fellowship did not prove enough to secure a visa, Forbes persuaded the university to offer a lectureship, and he urged friends to join him in contributing the needed funds. Von Brucke, who had lost his job at Innsbruck University, been forced to sell his home, and paid $45,000 in taxes to the Nazis, arrived in New York in August 1939, just two weeks before Germany invaded Poland and began World War II. The exhibit will run at the museum until May 31.
A March 23 Financial Times article praises a new textbook coauthored by Robert Merton, who shared last year's Nobel Prize for economics, and Zvi Bodie, School of Management professor of finance and economics. In the article, economist Paul Samuelson calls Finance an "innovative work that sets a new pattern of excellence." The textbook is published by Prentice Hall and is set for wide distribution next year, although test copies are available now. Eight business schools, including Harvard, Georgetown, and Boston University, have already incorporated the text into their curriculum. "Most finance books would just look at companies and leave out households and government," Bodie says in the article. "To understand why banks are on the decline and mutual and pension funds are on the rise, you need to look at personal finance. What happens within millions of individual homes heavily influences financial markets."
"When the government gets involved with organized crime, it just causes a lot of complications," says Jack Beermann, a professor at the School of Law, in a March 24 Boston Globe article discussing the numerous delays in the Boston mob hearings. The latest delay stems from a debate over whether U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf should step aside because prior contact with some of the witnesses and issues in the case could call into question his impartiality. Beermann says in the article that Wolf's recusal will cause even more delays. "When you have such a huge, complicated case, transferring it to another judge can be an administrative nightmare," he says. "No judge wants to take this case."
Because of low cost, high levels of purity, and wide availability, heroin use is increasing among young people, according to a March 17 Allston-Brighton TAB article. Dr. Jeffrey Samet, an associate professor at the School of Medicine, says that contrary to popular belief, snorting heroin does not make it less addictive than injecting the drug. In fact, the higher purity levels could lead to a quicker rate of dependency. "The higher potency the drug, the more likely it is that a person gets hooked," he says in the article.
"In the News" is compiled by Laura Raichle, Office of Public Relations.