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Boston Globe: Medicine's fading call

According to figures released last month by the Association of Medical Colleges, the number of applicants to medical schools for the current academic year has dropped for the fifth year in a row, falling by 6 percent to just under 35,000. The drop was sharpest among men, reports the December 2 Boston Globe, down 8.4 percent from the previous year. Female applicants dropped by 3.2 percent. Applications from underrepresented minority populations fell by 4.5 percent. At UMass Medical School in Worcester, the ratio of applicants to spaces in the incoming class is 6 to 1. At Tufts, the ratio is 30 to 1. And at BU, it's 80 to 1. John O'Connor, a MED professor and associate dean of admissions, speculates that the strong economy over the past few years has made med school less attractive to potential students. "When students face a choice after college of either starting a job right away and earning $90,000, or borrowing $100,000 for eight years of training, it's hard to compete." O'Connor and others expect the number of applications to rise over the next few years if the economic recession continues.

NPR's Talk of the Nation: Presidential powers during wartime

As President Bush signed an order to establish military tribunals to try foreign terrorists and the Justice Department announced the possibility of eavesdropping on conversations between suspected terrorists and their lawyers, comparisons were drawn to President Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, to Franklin Roosevelt, who interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, and to Woodrow Wilson, who jailed a presidential candidate of the Socialist Party for agitating against the draft. A discussion on the history of presidential power in wartime, moderated by Neal Conan, on NPR's November 28 Talk of the Nation features guest commentator Robert Dallek, a CAS professor of history. "In time of war, there's a sense of deep concern about the safety of the nation," says Dallek. "Will it survive? Will it go forward? And the enemies we've had -- Germany in World War I, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism in World War II -- were genuine reasons to fear that our institutions, our democracy, our Constitution, our way of life could be jeopardized. And so it's understandable that in times of conflict like that, the president takes things into his own hands. There were concerns on the parts of presidents. For example, Woodrow Wilson, after he won the declaration of war from the Congress in April 1917, told Frank Cobb, a journalist from the New York World, that he was deeply concerned that taking the people into war might produce the destruction of the American Constitution.

He was deeply concerned that it would spark such emotional outpouring and repression that he wouldn't even be able to rein it in. . . . Now the presidency is back in vogue. The concentration of authority is what you expect when you get into a crisis."

Health Data Management: MED installs gigabit Ethernet network

Today's health-care providers are looking to their communications networks to handle more information than ever, including images, voice, and data, according to an article in December's Health Data Management. So when researchers at BU's School of Medicine, who need to exchange massive electronic files containing molecular structure graphics, ranging up to 100 megabytes, complain that their network bogs down, taking up to eight seconds to perform tasks that usually take only a couple, Graham Ward, a MED research assistant professor and director of information technology at MED's Office of Information Technology, is pleased. Those same massive files used to take minutes rather than seconds and slowed network response time for other Medical Campus computer users. So MED decided last May to install a gigabit Ethernet network, from Santa Clara, Calif.-based 3Com Corp, to enable researchers to transmit the files in seconds rather than minutes. "Before, we could get files at 10 megabits per second to the user's desktop," Ward says. "Now, everyone has essentially a private line capable of 100-megabit-per-second transfers."

7 December 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations