Mike Martin's Weekly Scientist

Semantic Web May Be Cancer Information’s Next Step Forward

2011-12-26T10:57:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

The next big thing on the Web—which World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee nicknamed “Web 3.0,” or the Semantic Web—may also be the next milestone in cancer information.

Already deployed in the U.S. census, the catalog of electronics retailer Best Buy, and Facebook pages, Semantic Web technology could give rise to “a killer app that allows the clinical oncologist to access, integrate, and analyze drug and genomics data, medical records, and other cancer-related information to enhance care and efficiency,” said Kei-Hoi Cheung, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Yale University School of Medicine Center for Medical Informatics.

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Rewriting the Mathematics of Tumor Growth

2011-12-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

A new theory about tumor growth makes oncology look a little like cosmology. Just as the universe accelerates as it expands, tumors become malignant at an accelerating speed, according to a team of scientists who have been probing the mathematics of tumor growth.

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New Medical Education Program Selects Students for “Emotional Intelligence”

2011-12-26T10:45:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for the AAMC Reporter, the flagship publication of the Association of American Medical Colleges

This July in Florida, a group of newly minted medical students embarked on their training. But instead of heading to gross anatomy lab or a biochemistry lecture, these students spent five days learning about empathy, cultural competence, and self-awareness.

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New Algorithm may help Data Centers Better Control Power Costs

2011-12-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

by Mike Martin for HPC Source

Data centers can get more green with less power consumption thanks to a novel yet powerful algorithm that keeps power costs down and paying customers happy.

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Modifying Google's MapReduce to Increase GPU Cluster Computing

2011-12-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

by Mike Martin for HPC Source

A modified version of MapReduce—Google’s patented program for distributed and cluster computing—harnesses the power of graphics processing units (GPU) for large-scale, high-performance applications, claim University of California, Davis computer science researchers.

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For Storing Web 3.0, HBase has the Edge

2011-12-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

by Mike Martin for HPC Source

A storage system modeled after Google's Big Table has the edge in data management for cloud computing and next-gen Internet users, researchers claim.

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Study details general aviation accident injuries

2011-12-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

by Mike Martin for General Aviation News

A first ever study details general aviation accidents.

READ ALL ABOUT IT ON PAGE 6

Massive Information Stockpile Guides Humanity's Course

2011-06-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

Tech News World

Sixty one CD-ROMS for every man, woman, and child on Earth.

That's the amount of global data humankind stored on devices of every kind in 2007 -- 295 exabytes, or 80 times more information per person than exists in the historic Library of Alexandria, Egypt, according to a study published in the journal Science.

"We tracked 60 analog and digital technologies from 1986 to 2007," said study co-author Martin Hilbert, Ph.D., an information researcher at USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

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Cold Fusion: It May Not Be Madness

2011-06-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

TechNewsWorld

A handful of intrepid scientists are reigniting interest in work that was dismissed as junk science more than 20 years ago, claiming to have found a way to create more energy from less.

The most recent excitement was generated by Italians Sergio Focardi and Andrea Rossi, who demonstrated a device that turned 400 watts of heat power into 12,400 watts. If their results are reproducible, the implications could be monumental.

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Verizon Goes for FCC's Jugular in Net Neutrality War

2011-06-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

E-Commerce Times

Verizon may have been involved in the crafting of the FCC's Net neutrality rules, but that doesn't mean the company wouldn't rather do without them, and it's taking the matter back to the courts.

For its part, the FCC is "prepared to defend its Open Internet Order in any forum." The battle may end up being waged in Congress, where Verizon may find fresh support.

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People Are People: Human Factors Engineering Works at the Intersection of Humanity and Technology

2011-06-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

AAMC Reporter

Some teaching hospitals and health systems are taking a fresh look at human factors engineering (HFE), a discipline not often associated with medicine, but one that proponents say can improve the quality and safety of health care.

In a nutshell, human factors engineers attempt to learn about human strengths and limitations, and then apply that knowledge to products and processes to reduce errors and improve quality and productivity.

Enterprises that rely heavily on people interacting with technology, such as aviation and consumer electronics, are prominent HFE users. Health care, however, has lagged behind other industries in adopting HFE programs.

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New Study Narrows Epilepsy Drug Suicide Risk

2011-06-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

Epilepsy USA

A recent study says the FDA may have overreached when it warned that all anti-epileptic drugs can increase the risk
of suicidal thoughts and behavior.

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Materials Scientists Join Oncologists To Explore Nano- and Microtherapeutics Materials

2011-06-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Journal of the National Cancer Institute

In the past year, researchers have reported killing cancer cells with magnetically driven, spinning iron–nickel discs; iron–cobalt particles; and radio waves aimed at gold, cadmium, indium, and gallium particles.

It's all happened in preclinical studies so far. But the studies have drawn attention, partly because of their science-fiction–sounding methods and partly because they highlight a burgeoning partnership between two unlikely bedfellows: materials science researchers and clinical oncologists.

“I’ve seen a dramatic increase over the last 3–4 years in the involvement of chemists, physicists, bioengineers, and materials scientists in clinical oncology,” said Steven Curley, M.D. , a surgical oncologist at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who is working on the radio waves.

Some of the partnerships are focused on nanoimaging devices ( see accompanying news story); others, on nano- or microtherapeutics. The treatments they are exploring are diverse but share a core concept: the pairing of biologically active molecules such as drugs and antibodies with biologically inert particles such as metals and polymers.

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Repairs Delay Discovery Launch as Shuttle Program Winds Down

2011-01-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin

TechNewsWorld

The space shuttle Discovery is scheduled for at least one -- possibly two -- more missions to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, but it's having a hard time getting off the ground.

The latest delay was necessitated by repairs to damaged struts supporting its exterior fuel tanks. NASA wants to make sure the mission is not endangered by cracks in the shuttle's foam insulation.

IPv6 for a Day: Sampling the New Web World

2011-01-16T08:40:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

It's been a long time coming, but IPv6 will soon go live -- for a day. Several Internet technology leaders are joining with the Internet Society to get some real Web-world experience using the new protocol this June.

"By providing an opportunity for the Internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness, we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption," said the Internet Society's Leslie Daigle.

Google Adds a Little Magic to Earth

2011-01-16T08:16:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

Google Earth is "a beautiful, user-friendly site to help us gain better awareness of our neighborhoods and our planet," said Jonathan Askin, a Brooklyn Law School professor.

Among the new features of the latest release are "3D trees" that let users examine dozens of native species in detail when strolling through parks and forests at ground level.

Wikileaks Spill: Catalyst for New, More Open Style of Governing?

2011-01-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

Hero, fool -- even terrorist -- are some of the characterizations of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, which revealed sensitive exchanges between the U.S. and other governments on its website.

"Mr. Assange doesn't understand how the U.S. constitutional democracy was meant to work, and has ensured that we will not be trusted in our foreign relations efforts for a long time to come," said BU professor Michael Corgan.

Is That a Computer You're Wearing on Your Head?

2011-01-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

Motorola (NYSE: MOT) announced Wednesday that it will develop a hands-free wireless computing headset with micro-display specialists at Kopin -- a move reminiscent of previous attempts to create wearable computers and communications devices.

The device will offer voice, audio and PC capabilities on a virtual reality-style 15-inch monitor that will also support simulation software and streaming video.

"We believe this computer headset will be a game-changing solution for mobile workforces," said Motorola emerging business director Tom Bianculli in a prepared statement. TechNewsWorld's attempts to contact Motorola were not successful.

FCC Aims to Bring 911 Into the Modern Era

2011-01-15T14:16:00.001-08:00

By Mike Martin

TechNewsWorld

Letting people use texting, photo and video messaging to make 911 calls from any type of wired, wireless or IP-based device makes common sense, but implementation could be tricky. For one thing, equipping all 911 call centers to receive such messages will be expensive. For another, extra training will be required to teach operators how to interpret grainy photos, jittery videos or obscurely abbreviated texts.

Berners-Lee Sounds Alarm Over Appified, Siloed, Regulated Web

2011-01-15T14:14:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

Tim Berners-Lee has set off a debate over the future of the Web, arguing in an essay published in Scientific American that the walled gardens being created by social networks, businesses and governments could create isolated islands of information in a vast ocean of lost data. At stake is the "continuous worldwide conversation" that the Internet enables, he maintains.

New Exoplanet Discovery Hints at Earth's End

2011-01-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld

Until now, planets known to humans have never wandered into the Milky Way galaxy. However, Friday's announcement that planet HIP 13044b entered our galaxy hitched to a giant star called HIP 13044 has astronomers rethinking how -- and where -- planets form.

"This is an exciting discovery," said Max Planck Institute for Astronomy researcher Rainer Klement, who selected HIP 13044 for the study. "For the first time, astronomers have detected a planetary system of extragalactic origin."

CERN Physicists Create Antimatter (and Could Build a Bomb in a Billion Years)

2010-11-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
TechNewsWorld
11/18/10

A product of the Big Bang theoretically produced in abundance, antimatter didn't survive whatever powerful evolutionary pressures permitted the matter we see all around us to reign supreme. As a result, it must be coaxed, very carefully, into existence. The "Alpha Experiment" had a simple goal, said CERN investigator Jeffrey Hangst. "We wanted to see if matter and antimatter behaved identically, as predicted by Dirac."

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Bells Ringing in Cupertino: The Beatles Have Been Landed

2010-11-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin
MacNewsWorld
Part of the ECT News Network
11/16/10

Steve Jobs has made no secret of his wish to draw The Beatles into his Apple universe, and once again, he has managed to turn his vision into reality. The legendary band has been deeply reluctant to join the digital download music revolution, but the day has come, spurring weighty reflections and hallelujahs in the form of one-liners pulled from the group's vast library of songs.

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Seizure Detecting Wristwatch May Promise Autonomy, Respite and Accuracy

2010-09-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for Epilepsy USA

A wristwatch-style device may soon help allay a major fear among people with epilepsy: That a seizure could occur without the knowledge of someone who could help.

“We are working on a device called the SmartWatch that will detect myoclonic and grand mal seizures within 4-5 seconds after onset and alert caregivers within 7-10 seconds after onset,” said Stanford University pediatric neurology professor Donald Olson, M.D.

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The Measure of Success

2010-09-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for Oregon Quarterly

Frustrated by poor student performance in introductory courses they were teaching, University of Oregon physics professors James Schombert and Stephen Hsu wondered if they were missing something in the acronym-driven numbers game—GPA, SAT, GMAT, GRE, ACT—that dominates the college admissions process.

Freshman students with high entrance-exam scores weren’t performing as well as expected, and “we were unable to determine if there was a deficiency in our teaching or in student cognitive abilities,” Schombert explains. “Being good scientists, we began looking for answers.”

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Like Google Earth, Below Ground

2010-07-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for E Magazine

The power grid isn’t just above the ground. Much of the power transmission grid lies in a hard-to-navigate subterranean world. Mark Smith, CEO of Geospatial Corporation, believes the answer lies in a Google Earth-like application that maps the world below the ground’s surface.

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Medical Students Feel Unprepared for Health Care System

2010-07-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for the AAMC Reporter

The U.S. health care system—like the 2,000-page reform bill proposed to change it—is a mountain of complexity. And less than half of graduating U.S. medical students comfortably understand it.

Citing inadequate education, a University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) study of 58,294 AAMC medical student graduation questionnaires revealed that, while 92 percent of respondents were confident with their clinical training, nearly 60 percent felt unprepared for the managerial demands of medical practice.

"Everyone benefits when medical students are introduced to key concepts regarding health care systems," said AAMC Chief Academic Officer John Prescott, M.D.

"That is why, when students say they believe their knowledge in this area is not where it should be, we take it very seriously. Our goal is for systems-based practice to be a core competency at every medical school and across the continuum of medical education. As students become aware of real-world issues and concerns, they can become active participants in finding solutions."

Published in the September 2009 issue of Academic Medicine, the study, which covered graduates from 2003 to 2007, found lagging student confidence in practice management, record keeping, insurance, medical economics, and managed care.

This may be especially important as health care reform legislation makes its way through Congress.

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Resident Workload Debate Unveils Bigger Picture

2010-07-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for the AAMC Reporter

A 25-year debate over resident workloads continues to stir the medical community, as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) considers new standards stimulated by 2008 Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations.

The IOM recommendations, which include shift limitations, guaranteed sleep periods, and stricter moonlighting guidelines, have some medical professionals welcoming new ways to reduce medical errors and fatigue. At the same time, others, such as Kevin Simpson, M.D., who directs the internal medicine residency program at the Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago, see further reductions in resident training time as unnecessary and possibly costly for hospitals covering the same patient loads with fewer available resident hours. Resident fatigue issues were at the heart of a set of 2003 ACGME standards limiting residents to 80 duty hours per week.

"The IOM report is excellent, but I disagree with the emphasis on further reducing hours," Simpson said. "Going from unlimited hours to 80 hours a week was great, but there's no need to go any further."

In a 2009 letter to the ACGME, the AAMC noted that improving how fatigue (and the residents themselves) are managed—as opposed to duty-hour limits or scheduling—is now the central issue. "We believe resident supervision and attention to patient handovers are critical but under-emphasized components of this debate," said AAMC health care affairs director Sunny Yoder. "A third important issue is resident fatigue—whatever its sources. We support the development of measures of 'fitness for duty' that could be used generally in the 24/7 health care environment."

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The Great Green Grid

2010-07-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

A Smart Grid That Lets Us Better Control Our Energy Use May Finally Be Ready to Launch

By Mike Martin for E Magazine

Our current electric power grid hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. It’s designed to move electricity in one direction—from mostly fossil-fueled generation plants to user—and makes only limited use of automation and information technology. And it can’t collect power consumption information in real time. The smart grid would change that dynamic with a two-way flow of both electricity and information. It would also open the door for renewable energy sources like wind and solar to get connected and start to reduce the national dependence on dirty fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Many homes already feature solar panels and even wind turbines that could actually add electricity to the grid. But the current system of transmission lines isn’t able to determine how much renewable energy will be available at a given time—after all, solar power and wind power are both subject to fluctuation—so utilities produce the same amount of electricity regardless. And, in general, they have to overcompensate. In order to match electricity supply with demand, utilities decide on a level of demand that would be excessive and then match it.

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Green Schools: The Eco-Schoolhouse That Could

2010-07-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for E Magazine

The “eco-schoolhouse” was built after an arson fire destroyed a portable classroom at Grant Elementary in Columbia, Missouri. It’s a 21st century one-room schoolhouse nestled behind a century-old main building named for President Ulysses S. Grant.

The 1,024 square-foot classroom was designed for platinum certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Rain barrels irrigate a student garden; reflective/conductive roofing reduces heating and cooling costs; solar panels generate electricity; and students use desks, chairs and tables made from recycled materials.

Ultra-economical R-24 insulation buffers fireproof drywall, a subtle reminder of the tragedy—and the community it brought together. After the fire, parents donated books and educational aids; students made art and decorations; contractors, building suppliers and architect Nick Peckham—whose granddaughter Nora attended Grant—designed and built the schoolhouse, donating what fire insurance wouldn’t cover—about $250,000 in time and materials.

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Virtual Tumors

2010-03-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for Harvard Magazine

If a single word could describe the diverse disorders collectively known as cancer, it might be unpredictable. Trying to judge the course and prognosis of this meandering, unforgiving, and frequently fatal disease is almost impossible.

But Thomas Deisboeck, as director of a pioneering project to “engineer” different kinds of tumors, is trying to make cancer more predictable—and hence, more treatable. His Center for the Development of a Virtual Tumor (CViT) doesn’t grow cells in a lab or study cancer in mice. Instead, it serves as a “virtual laboratory,” using computers rather than test tubes, and three-dimensional images instead of lab animals, to foster collaboration among researchers from around the world.

“At CViT, we extract data from experiments and the scientific literature, and build models with it,” explains Deisboeck, an assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. “Basing our computational models on a cell’s interaction with its environment, we can simulate everything from a single cell to an organ, and make predictions from what we observe.”

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From Distant Stars to Dental Chairs

2010-03-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

By Mike Martin for AGD Impact, the magazine of the Academy of General Dentistry

When most people think about matter, they think of liquids, solids, and gases. But, there’s a fourth category of matter called plasma that’s actually the most unusual and the most abundant. It’s the stuff of stars, galaxies, and even the northern lights, and it could become a new and painless way to prepare cavities for filling with improved longevity.

“Application of plasma treatment in dental restoration procedures will effectively disinfect cavity-causing bacteria, reduce the use of the painful and destructive drilling currently practiced in dental clinics, and consequently save healthy dental tissues,” says one of the technology’s
inventors, Qingsong Yu, PhD, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC). “It also improves the bonding strength of restoration composites and prolongs the restoration life.

Furthermore, it requires no complicated or expensive equipment.” Calling the technology “novel,” University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry assistant professor Timothy Kosinski, DDS, MAGD, says it could “play a prominent role in all of our dental practices."

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Aberrant Chromosomes in Cancer

2010-03-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

Teams Use Math Models To Sort Drivers From Passengers

By Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

Using what they call a new, easier, and more "intuitive" methodof identifying chromosomal aberrations associated with variouscancers, Swiss, Israeli, and U.S. researchers say they’vediscovered a new subtype of the brain tumor, medulloblastoma,that is similar to type 1 neuroblastoma.

The study is one of the latest examples of an increasing focuson altered chromosomes as causes—not just by-products—ofcarcinogenesis.

A burgeoning literature "indicates many chromosomalaberrations are of fundamental importance to tumor development,"said geneticist Joseph Testa, Ph.D., who codirects the cancerbiology program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

More important, chromosomal aberrations—deletions, additions,and translocations common in tumor cells—can lead to thediscovery of previously unknown oncogenes and new therapeutictargets, said Testa, who was not involved in the study but reviewedit for this news story.

Full article available here

Generation Solar: Third-Generation Solar Cells Will Work Better, Cost Less

2010-03-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for E-Magazine

Turning sunlight into electricity is big business, with the market for photovoltaic technologies expected to grow a whopping 39.9% over the next five years, according to Georgina Benedetti, an energy analyst for Frost & Sullivan.

“Solar is predictable,” says Robert Wendt, a chief technology officer for solar company XsunX. “It’s adaptable. It’s compatible with other renewable sources such as wind. It allows installers to provide performance guarantees; it requires little maintenance; and it has no negative impact on the environment.”

And soon, solar may be cheap enough to compete with traditional power. Third-generation solar will “provide electricity on a massive scale, using low-cost raw materials,” predicts Stephen Squires, CEO of solar cell manufacturer Solterra Renewable Technologies, Inc. “A third-generation solar power plant will produce more megawatts per day than first- or second-generation solar plants can produce in a month,” he says.

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Molten Planet: Breakthrough technology studies the Earth's hot core

2010-02-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for Illumination

For centuries, explorers and scientists have gradually demolished misconceptions about the size, shape and character of the Earth.

The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Chinese thought the Earth was flat. Later observers, most notably the 17th-century British astronomer and comet chaser Edmund Halley, suggested our planet was spherical but hollow — a conjecture that led French science fiction writer Jules Verne to famously ponder a journey to its center.

Thanks to a pantheon of more contemporary truth seekers, we now know our planetary home is a round, reasonably solid mass that won’t accommodate center-bound travelers.

Still, misconceptions abound, even among some of the world’s most sophisticated Earth investigators. One of the more persistent involves the idea that the planet’s lithosphere, its rocky outer crust, conducts heat equally well at all temperatures.

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Bonds of Glass: Artist Susan Taylor Glasgow

2010-02-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for American Craft Magazine

Susan Taylor Glasgow is known for her depictions of domestic bliss as little more than well-crafted illusion, so her transition from the comforts of needle and thread to the brittle brilliance of fire and glass is a statement in itself. Raised to cook and sew, the sculptor does both, but in a medium that is neither edible nor wearable.

Stitching together glass panels with ribbon and thread, she has fashioned toasters, bras and other feminine icons, such as Chandelier Dress.

But in this show, Glasgow unhinges the concept to focus on insights she gained from working with homeless and abused women as an artist-in-residence at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. With their participation, she created The Communal Nest, a room-size take on avian domesticity.

The willow branches nestled amid glass twigs suggest the last remnants of a telling substitution—the breakable for the pliable, the rigid for the flexible—conveying that home sweet durable home is a fragile place indeed. The glass-for-wood transposition offers clarity over opacity: you could see through this nest, past the facade of picket fences and manicured lives.

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Quakes of the Brain: Earthquakes and epilepsy are alike, says neuroscientist

2010-02-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

Clinician scientist Ivan Osorio considers seizure prediction the “holy grail of neuroscience.”

By Mike Martin for Epilepsy USA

Although the best medicines can’t control seizures in nearly 25 percent of cases, epilepsy is as inspiring to Osorio—who received an Epilepsy Research Foundation New Therapy Grant in 2006—as it is intractable to his patients.

“Among the neurological disorders, it is the one where you can make the most difference,” said Osorio, who is a professor of neurology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo.

In between seizures, the epileptic brain is, for the most part, normal. Seizures come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. But how to tame the lion?

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Does Homeostatic Pressure Explain Tumor Growth?

2010-01-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute

To the much-studied genetic and biochemical forces that govern cell growth, dysplasia, and metastasis, a burgeoning science—call it mechanical biology—is adding forces that might seem more applicable to airliners and skyscrapers. Shear, friction, stress, tension, and viscosity also play a role in oncogenesis, according to researchers exploring this interface between biology and physics.

"To grow, a tumor must, most of the time, push normal tissue out of its natural position," said Jacques Prost, Ph.D., of the Curie Institute in Paris, a leader in the physical sciences research department where Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium and Paul Langevin discovered sonar. "Mechanical forces are at work, hence the necessity of investigating their importance."

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Where the Bad Things Are: New bio lab studies pathogens

2010-01-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for Illumination

In a world plagued by the threat of pandemic influenza, flesh-eating bacteria, multi-drug resistant infections, and potential terror attacks using exotic contagions, the construction of a “biocontainment laboratory” at the University of Missouri, Columbia (MU) is bound to conjure notions of moon-suited scientists wearing eerie facemasks with military escorts hovering nearby.

It’s the sort of image author Michael Crichton made famous forty years ago this year, with his hit novel-turned-movie, The Andromeda Strain, about a deadly virus from outer space that stumps a group of scientists after wiping out a desert town.

Rest assured, say researchers at MU’s facility, there is nothing to fear — except perhaps the costs of not investigating the potentially deadly pathogens safely contained with the $18-million Regional Biocontainment Laboratory.

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New Diagnostic tool for "automatic" epilepsy diagnosis?

2010-01-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

By Mike Martin for Epilepsy USA

A new system that may help to “automate” epilepsy diagnosis has sparked an updated version of an old debate: Is medicine—in this case, clinical neurology— more art than science or more science than art?

Supplementing clinical expertise with artificial intelligence, researchers from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and China’s Jiangsu Provincial Hospital in Nanjing have used a computer algorithm to interpret so-called “interictal” or between-seizure electroencephalogram (EEG) data.

In a paper for the 2009 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference, the research team—which includes computer scientists, electrical engineers, a neurologist, and two neurosurgeons—claims the algorithm correctly identified epileptiform EEG data with about 94 percent accuracy.

Though automated epilepsy diagnosis is not a new concept, the study also claims an important advance: the use of so-called “artificial probabilistic neural networks” to interpret scalp—rather than intracranial (inside the skull)—EEG data.

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With Malice Aforethought

2009-10-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

For three decades, a highly regarded Berkeley professor has stood accused of America’s most notorious serial murders. Why won’t he fight back?

By Michael J. Martin

Between 1966 and 1981, U.C. Berkeley public policy professor Michael Henry O’Hare (left), a Harvard-educated architect who regularly holds court at an Edge-style intellectual blog called The Reality Based Community, committed first degree murder with malice aforethought on seven separate occasions.

On or around Nov. 28, 1981, he bludgeoned to death 25-year-old Harvard architecture student Joan Lucinda Webster, dumping her body in a Massachusetts field, where it was found in 1990.

Twelve years earlier, on October 11, 1969, O’Hare fired a point-blank shot into the head of 29-year-old cab driver Paul Lee Stine. Stine was found in his cab on a dark San Francisco street, slumped, bleeding, and dead.

On September 27, 1969, Michael Henry O’Hare, then 26 years old, did stab Cecelia Ann Shepard (below), age 22, five times each in the front and back. Turning the knife on her companion, O’Hare did stab 20-year-old Bryan Calvin Hartnell six times in the back. She died in a Napa hospital. He survived.

On Independence Day, July 4, 1969 at approximately 11:55 p.m., Michael O’Hare used a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to shoot Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, age 22, five times. Turning the gun on Michael Renault Mageau, age 19, O’Hare fired four more rounds. Mageau, like Hartnell, lived. Ferrin died in a Vallejo, Calif. hospital.

Five days before Christmas, on Friday, Dec. 20, 1968, Michael O’Hare, supposedly on assignment in San Francisco for consulting giant Arthur D. Little and Company, did shoot David Arthur Faraday, age 17, once in the head at point blank range with a .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol. O’Hare turned the gun on 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen and shot her five times in the back. Both Faraday and Jensen died instantly, on a Vallejo lovers’ lane.

Finally, on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1966, Michael Henry O’Hare did beat and stab to death 18-year-old Cheri Josephine Bates in a dark alleyway on the campus of Riverside City College in Riverside, Calif.

These are the accusations that Dr. O’Hare has let stand without legal challenge for nearly 30 years: That he murdered Joan Webster and before that, was a homicidal maniac with a penchant for devilish taunts known only as the Zodiac killer.

They are the same allegations that his long-time accuser, a retired government librarian and true crime author named Gareth Sewell Penn (right), repeated in a March 2008 interview with a daily news magazine called Boston Now.

Prompted by the pending publication of this story, O'Hare broke a mysterious near-30-year silence to respond, in the May/June 2009 of the well-known political magazine, The Washington Monthly.

The Professor and the Polymath

An intellectual version of The Most Dangerous Game—Richard Connell’s famous tale of man as predator and prey—the odyssey of Gareth Penn, the Mensa polymath, and Michael O’Hare, the ascendant academic, is one of the most confounding, disturbing, and bizarre in the annals of contemporary crime.

Inspector Javert to O'Hare's Jean Valjean, Penn has chased the professor from Cambridge to Berkeley, combining a non-stop media blitz with a Zodiac-style personal harassment campaign that started as the very first public allegation in the Zodiac case and goes on to this day.

“To my mind, their relationship—or whatever it was—is the most fascinating subplot in the whole of the Zodiac story,” says Suffolk County (Mass.) District Attorney press secretary Jake Wark, who authored several articles on the crimes and spoke as a private citizen for this story. “It deserves big treatment.”

Penn—a Berkeley-educated linguistics scholar and retired research editor for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—may be the Zodiac killer’s biggest fan.

Through a compelling combination of absurdity and brilliance, his many pronouncements on the 20th century’s most famous unsolved homicides have held legions of investigators in thrall for decades.

Esquire Magazine film critic Mike D’Angelo acknowledged Penn’s allure in his rev iew of the 2007 David Fincher film Zodiac, based on the Robert Graysmith book of the same name. “I think the movie erred in selecting Graysmith as its source and nominal protagonist,” D’Angelo wrote. “Zodiac buffs know well that the true obsessive is a fellow named Gareth Penn.”

Born and raised in New York City, Michael O’Hare represents the mainstream academy to Penn’s fringe infamy. With faculty appointments at MIT and Harvard’s Jo hn F . Kennedy School of Government, O’Hare’s career was rising fast when Penn took his first shot at derailing it.

Now an expert in art and environmental policy at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, O’Hare is a respected teacher whose friends defend his honor.

“Gareth Penn is full of crap,” wrote an ally on the Zodiackiller.com blog, in answer to a question about a Harvard University police investigation that supposedly drove O’Hare from that campus shortly after Joan Webster’s murder. “Penn spent the better part of three decades researching and writing books about a suspect he can’t place in the state of California during the Zodiac crimes, and at no time has that even given him pause.”

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J'accuse

Penn’s first published account of the Zodiac crimes was a November 1981 article for New York Magazine publisher Clay Felker's California magazine—formerly New West—memorably titled Portrait of the Artist as a Mass Murderer.

Writing under the pseudonym “George Oakes” the same month Joan Webster vanished, Penn introduced readers to the serial murderer as “diabolical artistic genius,” in this case one who had created “the boldest, most audacious, and largest conceptual art work in history using the most radical of materials: time and human life.”

Pitting his intellect against the killer’s, Penn promised to “solve” the case. Fusing substance with nonsense, his solutions were nearly as titillating as Zodiac’s riddles. Taking the killer up on multiple promises that his identity lie in his cryptographic ciphers, Penn developed what D’Angelo called an “untenable yet mesmerizing theory: That various odd misspellings in Zodiac letters—‘phomphit’ in lieu of ‘puff it’; ‘cid’ instead of ‘kid’—were part of an elaborate mathematical code.”

The broken code, Penn claimed, revealed the name of a real person—Michael O’Hare—who happened to be a brainy Ivy Leaguer with firearms training and a suggestive reluctance to sue.

A second mesmerizing theory added intriguing details. Penn claimed that O’Hare the architect had targeted his victims according to a Da Vinci-esque geometric design centered on Contra Costa County’s Mt. Diablo—the Devil’s peak.

Known among professional and amateur investigators as the “Radian Theory,” the idea appeared to answer a riddle the Zodiac left in one of his infamous San Francisco Chronicle letters: PS. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians & # inches along the radians.

It also seemed to confirm in Penn some level of criminological prowess.

“The Mt. Diablo radian theory was a major contribution,” Wark says. “No account of the Zodiac murders or their context can be complete without recognizing it. Gareth Penn’s unconventional approach was the first real breakthrough in an unconventional case.”

Following up his theories in a 1983-84 series of articles for The Ecphorizer, a San Francisco-based periodical of the genius society Mensa, Penn posited that “Mike O” was working in San Francisco when he committed the Zodiac crimes and teaching at Harvard when he murdered Ms. Webster.

A phone call from then-ABC News producer Dan Goldfarb (below, right) had made the connection.

Prompted by Penn’s increasingly public allegations, “Goldfarb was in Massachusetts, following O’Hare around for a 20/20 story,” Penn told me. “He called all excited: ‘There’s a murder out here that’s exactly like the Zodiac.’ He was almost screaming over the phone.”

Penn elaborated further in two self-published books.

Times 17: The Amazing Story of the Zodiac Murders in California and Massachusetts, 1966-1981 is the alternative yin to Graysmith’s mainstream yang, a hard-to-find underground favorite that sells for hundreds of dollars on eBay or Amazon.

Reading it is like watching an impatient, hypercritical director manipulate a stage full of actors: cynical FBI agents; weary private investigators; a tired, distracted sheriff; lawyers, neighbors, wives, children, witnesses, school teachers, editors, and journalists.

Exit all, but only after Penn paints each with prosaic, impatient chagrin. “The fools,” he seems to be saying. “How can they not see that Michael O’Hare is guilty as Hell and that I am a genius for having discovered his identity?”

An even scarcer follow-up to 1987’s Times 17, 1990’s The Second Power: A Mathematical Analysis of the Letters Attributed to the Zodiac Murderer has Penn’s “microscopic examination of O’Hare and the Zodiac progressing to an almost quantum level,” Jake Wark says. “Where Times 17 provided a theory as to who committed the murders, The Second Power provides one as to why.”

The “why” involves what Wark considers an even more libelous allegation than serial homicide—serial sexual abuse, perpetrated, Penn claims, against O’Hare by his mother Berta.

Absent verifiable evidence, Penn accuses father Eugene O'Hare of beating his wife, and Berta Margoulies-O’Hare of a strange form of revenge—“cuckolding” her husband with her son Michael, starting at the tender age of seven.

With the ciphers, the letters, the phone calls, and the murders that form the Zodiac-Webster corpus delicti, O’Hare had invented his own “private language,” Penn claims, to write a “Book of Secrets” that describes the recurrent sexual abuse in cryptic but graphic detail.

“Decoded” by Penn, words like penis, balls, erect, jizz, creaming, semen, prick, cock, pecker, vagina, womb, hole, hard on, pussy, snatch, and incest emerge.

“Childhood sexual abuse is all about terrible secrets no one will listen to,” Penn told me, in a flat, somber tone that rarely fluctuated during our first and only telephone interview. “Mike had been bursting at the seams to tell the world his own terrible secrets. But how do you communicate the pain of a father who molested you, beat your mother, and then drank himself into oblivion night after night? How do you put all that out there in a way that will force people to listen?”

Psy Ops

As if the barrage of accusations weren’t enough, Penn explained in Times 17—a reference to the number of times Zodiac stabbed two of his victims—how he had carried out a “psychological war” against O’Hare with late-night phone calls; threatening letters; and postcards similar to those Zodiac mailed to the media. “To prevent further bloodshed,” Penn wrote, “I would let him [O’Hare] know that somebody was aware of his secret identity.”

The January-May 1981 campaign occurred six months before the Webster murder and six years before Times 17 and its sequel.

“Michael O’Hare received a number of what you might call weird postcards (below) from me, all sent anonymously from a number of locations,” Penn wrote. “I expressed in these postcards what I felt were allusions to Zodiac formulations that the Zodiac and nobody else would recognize. If O’Hare were not the Zodiac, he would be baffled. He might even sue me. But I felt that was a small price to pay for being able to sleep nights.”

Increasingly sure of his target’s guilt and vulnerability, Penn copyrighted Papers relating to the impending suicide of Michael Henry O’Hare on 17 Ma y 1989, U.S. Copyright Office registration number TXu000354164.

“It was like warfare,” Penn wrote. “I didn’t know that it would work, and it may have been the wrong course to follow. But this was an unprecedented situation. There was no rulebook to consult. In war, the rule books are always written after the smoke has cleared.”

An FBI investigation ensued after O’Hare filed his one and only legal complaint against Penn in May 1981. According to FBI files, Federal agents considered charging Penn with extortion.

But he wasn’t extorting anyone. Instead, he was insisting that “binary Morse code”—a mathematical medium he invented to decipher the Zodiac—had revealed the killer’s identity. What’s more, he had letters of support from experts at the University of Texas, University of San Francisco, the University of New Mexico, and Leonti Thompson, M.D., formerly chief psychiatrist for the California Department of Corrections, whom Penn consulted when Thompson was practicing privately in Napa.

“Mr. Penn sent me some of his ideas,” Thompson told me. “He said he had discovered that a female passenger on the same plane as Michael O’Hare was seen talking to him during the flight and disappeared right after. I shared general concepts with him about the possible mental states of someone who performed killings in a ritual pattern to fit symbolic landmarks. I thought he might have been onto something.”

Ultimately, FBI agents dropped their inquiry, concluding that while Penn was “very absorbed with the case,” he was “not in any way deranged.”

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Criminal intent

Joan Webster’s (right) family discovered O’Hare after Penn inserted himself headlong into the investigation of the Harvard co-ed's murder. He fired off communiques to law enforcement officials about where her body might be found.

Corresponding with the victim’s grieving mother Eleanor, Penn shared details about O’Hare’s personal life he said he had learned from a private detective named Whit Caldwell.

Eleanor Webster reciprocated. Wealthy and well connected, she investigated O’Hare on her own. Ellen Clayton, who married Joan Webster’s brother Steve, told me Penn’s relationship with her mother-in-law “really bothered” her.

“Eleanor somehow obtained an American Express authorization slip from something Michael O’Hare had charged, and sent it to Penn. She also sent an aerial photograph of Dr. O’Hare’s property in Vermont,” Clayton explains. “She was doing her own investigation at her own expense, and sharing her results with a distant stranger whose intentions I never understood.”

During a self-arranged book tour, Penn explained to reporters how O’Hare had re-offended one time three thousand miles from California, fifteen years after the first Zodiac killing. From the Boston Herald blazed the 1987 headline Author Targets Harvard Lecturer in Zodiac Case. The Beverly (Massachusetts) Times followed up in 1990 with Author links Harvard professor to Webster case.

A May 1987 radio interview prompted O’Hare to condemn Penn’s tactics. Anthony Hilder (left)—a shock jock variously described as a “radio terrorist” and “a combination of Michael Savage and Art Bell on steroids”—lured the professor onto his Los Angeles-based talk show for what Hilder said would be a “public policy discussion.”

About a third into the interview, the script took a sharp turn.

HILDER: One particular book that came across my desk in the past couple of days is called Times 17, by a gentleman out of San Francisco named Gareth Penn. Have you heard of him?

O’HARE: Have I heard of Gareth Penn? Well, Gareth Penn has been a minor bane of my existence for, gee, I guess, seven or eight years now.

HILDER: Well, I’m curious about this particular book, of course. Gareth Penn is making claims that you are, according to Gareth Penn, the Zodiac killer.

After the interview, O’Hare told author Michael Butterfield that he “had nothing to do with the Zodiac murders or any other homicides or any felony, in California or any other place. This is intended to be the most complete, inclusive, unqualified denial I can phrase. I’ve never initiated any contact with Gareth Penn and as far as I know I’ve never met him or had anything to do with him. I think his hobby is not only abusive of me but more importantly, a cruel deception of the victims’ families and survivors.”

After reviewing Penn’s “evidence,” Ellen Clayton sided with O’Hare. “Some of Mr. Penn’s discoveries about Joan’s murder were right on,” she admits. “But Michael O’Hare didn’t strike me as a logical or reasonable suspect. It was also never clear why Penn spent so much time trying to tie the Zodiac case to Joan’s murder.”

Former Suffolk County, Mass. district attorney Timothy Burke, who prosecuted a local mobster connected with the Webster homicide, Lenny Paradiso, discounts everything about Penn.

Though Paradiso was never prosecuted for Webster’s murder,” all the rational evidence points to Lenny as the culprit,” says Burke, who in 2008 released a best-selling book on the case, The Paradiso Files. “I am baffled by Mr. Penn’s claims, but even more baffled as to why Michael O’Hare lets them stand unchallenged.”

Unchallenged, Penn has remained unyielding. In an interview with San Francisco Chronicle reporter Sandra Konte after the Hilder melee, he reportedly said, “My suspect knows I’m right.”

Death in Benicia

In dozens of academic journal articles over his decades-long career, Michael O’Hare has examined alternative energy, NIMBY, artistic license, and recently for Science, how bio-fuels contribute to greenhouse gases. He argued in the Boston Globe for sophisticated safeguards to protect museum treasures post-9/11 and in the San Francisco Chronicle for a technological solution to musician compensation post-Napster.

His passion for activism runs in the family.

A well-known socialist agitator, O’Hare’s grandmother—Kate Richards O’Hare (left, center)—was a Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones contemporary whose anti-WWI protests landed her in a Missouri penitentiary for violating the “Espionage Act” of 1917.

In From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare, history professor Sally Miller wrote of Richards-O’Hare’s “fundamental commitment to the working masses,” an ideology she shared with husband Frank.

The subject of his own biography—Linfield College historian Peter Buckingham’s Rebel Against Injustice: The Life of Frank P. O’Hare—Michael O’Hare’s grandfather Francis was an early 20th century labor advocate and “one of the truly great men of St. Louis—possibly the ONLY one,” according to a Teamster newspaper.

But Frank O’Hare was also a terrible businessman whose many failures cost him his marriage.

Son Eugene—Mike O’Hare’s father—was a DIY pioneer who authored several books on woodworking and home repair. He married Berta Margoulies, a Polish-Jew who had immigrated to Belgium shortly before World War I. After the Germans invaded and imprisoned her father, Margoulies fled to Holland, to England, and then to New York City, where she became a rare commodity among artists of that time—a professional female sculptor.

Accepting commissions from the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, Margoulies was known for her bronze interpretations of hope amidst oppression.

About her sculpture Displaced (left), curators at the Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts Gallery tell visitors to their website, “While not as angular and stylized as the figures in Margoulies’ Mine Disaster of 1942 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Displaced is more naturalistic and simple. It captures the feelings countless displaced children would have experienced during World War II, just as the sculptor herself had three decades earlier.”

In 1946, when her son was three years old, Margoulies visited Berkeley as a Guggenheim Fellow. When she died in 1996 at her Walnut Creek home after living mostly on the East Coast, a San Francisco Chronicle obituary called her a “Bay Area sculptor” whose work had appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum during a 1994 retrospective.

By turns felon and freeman, Kate Richards O’Hare also came to California after living mostly elsewhere. Weary of poverty and Frank’s failing businesses, she left her husband for wealthy San Francisco businessman Charles Cunningham. She went to work for the California “Department of Penology,” becoming, as Kate Richards-Cunningham, one of the country’s first penal reform advocates.

The Cunninghams lived in “one of the nicest homes in Benicia,” Sally Miller told me, where Kate Richards died in 1948.

Ironically, Benicia was also ground zero for the Zodiac murders, a point Penn has woven into his narrative.

“Several things the Zodiac killer did echoed the life of his grandmother,” Penn told me. “Death in Benicia, claiming to be an escaped convict, referencing the color red—the color of her hair—in several of his letters. It was an oblique way for Mike O’Hare to identify himself, cryptic references to the most prominent member of his family.”

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2009-10-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

Kafka’s garden

A private man in all things but the Zodiac case, Gareth Penn, now 68, has rarely written or spoken about his personal life, a tumultuous affair that has turned quiet with age. “The last 28 years have seen setbacks and hardships,” he says, “but there have been triumphs and delights as well.”

Penn has no grandchildren, unless you count his son’s dog. “In my presence, he talks to his Boston terrier about me in the third person, describing me as ‘grandpa,’ knowing it will make me wince.”

Penn says he met his first wife, a pretty Berkeley co-ed named Sandy Scott, “in a class on modern German literature taught by Berkeley’s latest proud acquisition, Heinz Politzer.”

A Franz Kafka scholar and close friend of Kafka’s longtime editor Max Brod, the Jewish Politzer —like Berta Margoulies before him—fled German oppression in wartime Europe. Described in a Berkeley memoriam as a “desolate man” who, even in illness, never lost his “impeccable refinement,” Politzer dropped his guard around his handsome, articulate student.

For a final exam, Penn says he turned in a translation of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan so perfect Politzer “ran up and down the corridor, sticking his head into other professors’ offices, showing off my blue exam book.”

After he left Berkeley for Germany on a Fulbright scholarship in 1962, Penn’s marriage to Scott (left)—then pregnant with his daughter Christiane—soured. She divorced him in Berlin little more than a year after their marriage and returned to the states. He says he did not see Christiane, now a San Francisco city attorney, for 23 years.

A 1965 draft notice forced Penn—who had returned to Berlin, he thought permanently—into the U.S. Army. Describing military life, he borrowed a page from The Castle, Kafka’s story about a land surveyor named K. permitted to work only as a school custodian. A faceless authoritarian power adds a sneering caveat to torment K.: He will at least be allowed to use his surveying skills to plot the school's flower garden.

“I trained at Fort Sill (Okla.) to become an artillery surveyor, but I never did any surveying,” Penn says. “Just to perfect the parallel with K., someone at battalion headquarters suggested planting a flower garden. Since a military flower garden would have to be laid out with utter precision, my first sergeant nominated me to do it. But nobody ever followed up, so even this much surveying was denied me.”

A few years after their divorce, Sandra Scott married UC Berkeley associate president Patrick Hayashi, a well-known diversity advocate and coincidentally, an alum of O’Hare’s current employer, the Goldman School. After calling the now-retired Hayashi to the phone, Scott wouldn’t speak to me other than to say she “had heard rumors” of her former husband’s involvement in the Zodiac case.

War and relevance

On leave from active duty in October 1966, Penn met a grade school English teacher named Mary Ann Winterrowd at a going away party in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for mutual friend and fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate David R. McCann, who now directs the Korea Institute at Harvard University. Penn and Winterrowd were married two days before Christmas that year.

In a series of poignant posts from May to July 2005, one or more of Mary Ann Winterrowd’s students remembered her at RateMyTeachers.com:

She let me write about The Catcher in the Rye when that book was outlawed.

She led values discussions long before most teachers could get beyond plot.

I have never forgotten how well she taught symbolism in literature through the story The Scarlet Ibis and the three kinds of irony through the play Arsenic and Old Lace.

They called us boneheads and troublemakers, but she cared about us and believed we deserved to know good stories.

I loved Miss W. She read some great books to us: The Pearl, The Odyssey, Sailor on Horseback, The Good Earth, and she let me do a book report on The Catcher in the Rye—censored.

Best teacher ever at Castro Valley High School.

Penn and Mary Ann wandered around Europe after he was discharged from active duty in Oct. 1967. When they returned in the summer of 1968, she took a job teaching in Vallejo and for a second time, he went back to grad school at Berkeley, where he wrote a paper with renowned Germanic linguist Frederic Tubach, again about the 12th-century Celtic hero Tristan.

“Fritz said it was so good I should publish it, but that since I was too lazy or cowardly or whatever, he would do it for me,” Penn says. Publish it Tubach did. The Constellation of Characters in the Tristan' of Gottfried von Strassburg appeared in a 1972 issue of the University of Wisconsin’s Monatshefte: A Journal of German Language and Literature.

On his way up in academe, Penn abruptly quit his doctorate. Military service, he said, had changed him. Listening to students chanting about Cambodia outside a classroom window during his oral Ph.D. exams, he retorted sarcastically to a question about 13th century German history and failed. He walked out with a master’s degree in Medieval German, giving up the academy, he says, for reality.

“Those were the days when everybody was talking about what was relevant,” Penn said. “What I was doing didn’t seem relevant at all.”

To Penn, relevant meant finishing a library science degree, also at Berkeley, and settling into an uneventful librarian’s job in Vallejo. “Helping people look up information and find good books seemed more necessary,” he told me. It also helped pay the bills for a new baby, his son Felix born in 1971.

Reflecting on Penn’s choice these many years later, Fritz Tubach seemed hesitant, almost regretful. “I remember Gareth very well,” Tubach told me. “He was brilliant, but unfortunately he was never able to harness his brilliance to suit the narrow confines of academe.”

Outside those confines, Penn “created his own space for thinking and speculating,” Tubach said, a state of mind he well understands.

In 2001, Tubach published a best-selling book about an unusual friendship between a Nazi soldier’s son who grew up hating authority—himself—and a Hungarian Jew, Bernat Rosner, who survived the ultimate expression of the authoritarian state, Auschwitz. Recognizing his old professor in An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust, Penn contacted Tubach a few years ago and congratulated him.

“During my academic career at Berkeley, I had about half a dozen students who were truly geniuses,” Tubach remembered. “Gareth Penn was one of them.”

Of domes and Dukes

Penn’s life started to unravel after he quit the library and moved his young family—which now included a daughter, age 2—into a “geodesic dome home” he built but never finished on an isolated, wind-swept Napa ridge.

All the seventies rage for environmentally conscious DIY’ers, dome houses were hard to build and harder to inhabit. Penn recounted his own 3-year ordeal—again as “George Oakes”—in Domebuilder’s Blues, a widely reprinted story from Bolinas, Calif.-based Shelter Publications that often pops up in online discussions about the pitfalls of green living.

Wife Mary Ann (left, with Penn and children) recounted her own blues during the 1982 divorce proceeding that ended their 16-year marriage. Commuting early each morning to Solano Junior High School in Vallejo—where she taught for nearly 20 years—Winterrowd left daughter Amanda under Penn’s care while he worked on their home.

It was to be a refreshing respite from life on the move—Berkeley to several addresses around Vallejo and Napa. But Penn was no pioneering do-it-yourselfer like Eugene O’Hare.

In trying to show how her client’s divorce differed from a 1980 precedent-setting case, In Re: Marriage of Duke, Penn’s own lawyer, Susan Wilkinson, described a family living amidst “fire, safety, and health hazards” including exposed wires; a fungus-covered solar water heater; a rusting and rickety porch canopy; an unsecured staircase; and sheep defecating near a well, “endangering the purity of the family’s water supply.”

“The sheep, it was originally hoped, would eat the weeds surrounding the house, thus providing a fire break,” Wilkinson wrote in a trial brief for the Superior Court of California in Napa County. “They have thus far been unsuccessful; there is only one sheep left.”

Stress drove Winterrowd to a psychiatrist. Poverty drove the family to sympathetic relatives. “Our finances is (sic) a trauma,” Winterrowd testified, adding that she had out-earned her husband “each and every year of our marriage.” During their separation, Penn used food stamps and credit cards to survive. He was “in dire need,” Wilkinson told the court, with “no savings of any kind.”

In dire need, but still dogging Michael O’Hare. After hiring Whit Caldwell, a Massachusetts-based private investigator, to track the professor’s comings and goings, Penn formed “Zodiac Associates, Inc.” a California corporation dedicated to “exploiting the commercial possibilities” of a movie project that produced a screenplay entitled 12:22—the presumptive time of Cheri Jo Bates’ murder—but that Wilkinson wrote “produced no income.”

But producing income wasn't the goal of the quest, say people close to the situation. Working 24/7 on almost nothing else, with reams and reams of scratch paper supposedly deciphering the coded life of Mike O'Hare, Penn was given to “bullying” and “nasty tantrums,” ultimately turning off anyone who showed interest or tried to help.

Penn sued his former sister-in-law Lorna Winterrowd, whom he says raided his childrens' inheritance as the trustee of Mary Ann's estate. “She spent $32,500 of my kids' money to buy herself a Mercedes,” and left her sister's inurned ashes in a tool shed, Penn says. Winterrowd did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

All the litigation doesn't surprise a close family friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Dysfunctional family drama went back many years. "Gareth's stepfather Miles physically abused and humiliated him," the friend said. "Gareth developed a nasty temper and can be ruthless and vindictive in creative ways for all manner of slights. He's a bully."

After Penn and Mary Ann divorced, he worked again as a librarian, this time for NOAA in Tiburon, Calif. He later married Marin artist Diane Merrill, whom he met as a member of the Society for Creative Anachroni sm, a medieval re-enactment group. But that marriage also collapsed, another casualty of Penn’s obsession. According to court documents, Penn used his daughter to serve divorce papers on Merrill and argued over who had custody of season tickets to the San Francisco Opera.

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2009-10-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Bronx cheer

Victor Fershko, Mary Ann Winterrowd’s divorce lawyer, says he doesn’t remember his client from 25 years ago or her former husband and “probably couldn’t talk about them even if I did.”

But of all things, he does remember Michael O’Hare.

In a case filled with baffling coincidences, Fershko added another: He knew O’Hare at the renowned Bronx High School of Science, where he graduated in 1959, one year ahead of the beleaguered Berkeley professor.

“As I recall, Mike had an amazing mind,” said Fershko, who practiced law for many years in Napa and is now retired in British Columbia, Canada. “Brightest guy in his class, maybe in the entire school.”

Fershko also knew the psychiatrist who reviewed Penn's allegations: Leonti Thompson, a 1947 Bronx High School of Science graduate. “Leonti and I actually spoke about O’Hare, back when his name was in the news,” said Fershko, who practiced law in Napa while Thompson was practicing psychiatry. “Leonti chuckled that O'Hare made a pretty reasonable Zodiac. But neither one of us could understand why he tolerated all the accusations.”

The coincidences don’t stop there. At Berkeley during the 1968-69 academic year—the year of the Zodiac murders—Penn lived downstairs from Girard Pessis, Ph.D. (right), who graduated from the Bronx High School of Science with O'Hare in 1960.

In one of his many stories for the Mensa Ecphorizer, Penn wrote about standing with Pessis outside the duplex they shared, watching a National Guard helicopter circling the Berkeley campus. It was shortly after the People's Park disturbances (below), where on May 15, 1969—“Bloody Thursday”—the so-called “Blue Meanies”—sheriff's deputies from Alameda County—put down a riotous crowd with buckshot-loaded shotguns.

Pessis, Penn writes, refused to believe guardsman were preparing to strafe the campus with tear gas. But Penn, who had completed his Army service two years earlier, knew better. “The next day, when Girard came back from campus, his eyes were bloodshot and watery,” Penn wrote. “For the next month, CS gas was dripping from the leaves of the trees in Sproul Plaza.”

Recalling Pessis and his “goddess of a wife” Maeve forty years later, Penn told me they “gave raucous dinner parties. I have idly wondered if Michael O’Hare was a guest of theirs during one of his many business trips to the Bay Area.”

But Pessis, formerly chief technology officer for the California Medical Association and vice president of emerging technology at Bank of America, told me he and his wife never partied upstairs. “We mostly socialized downtown or with friends.” And though he remembered Penn—“he was a very serious guy who worried if I left the light on in the hallway too long”—and the “duplex we shared on Webster St.,” he never knew Michael O’Hare. “There were 800 people in my high school graduation class,” Pessis said.

Two months after Bloody Thursday, on July 4, 1969, the Zodiac struck for a second time. He would later label his police pursuers “Blue Meanies” with wicked, righteous glee.

Theatric intellect

Part of Gareth Penn’s allure is his proficient grasp of a political, social, and historical repertoire so vast it seems mind-boggling that one man could recall it all with such determined precision.

In the April 25, 1970 issue of The New Republic, he opined about Revolution as Theatre, an earlier article by Yale University drama professor Robert Brustein. Penn agreed with Brustein, that widely televised Vietnam War protests helped transform insurrection into political theatre, with “violent plans” openly displayed “to a wide audience.”

Revolution as theatre was a much-needed tonic to public apathy, Penn insisted. “The revolutionary show has to go into the streets where everyone can see it, must see it, nolens volens, and force itself to the attention of the great unwashed public.”

Two years later, Penn authored another academic treatise, Gottfried von Strassburg and the Invisible Art, a complex reflection on the German author’s use of a medieval mnemonic called “memory theatre” that uses architectural landmarks as memory aides. The prestigious journal Colloquia Germanica published the paper, no mean feat given Penn’s lack of official university credentials.

In dozens of letters to such intellectual chronicles as The Economist, Scientific American, and National Public Radio, Penn has approached a favorite topic—corrections and clarifications— with an edgy, righteous gusto. About a 1994 production of The Mikado—an opera Zodiac frequently quoted—Penn sniped at a Time Magazine reviewer who had mistakenly attributed the lyrics to Arthur Sullivan and the music to William Gilbert:

Let’s see, now. Sullivan wrote the words, and Gilbert wrote the music. Holmes is the doctor, and Watson the detective. Harpo had the cigar, and Groucho tooted the auto horn. Thanks for setting the record straight!

Rabbit holes

To set the record straight about Michael O’Hare, New York Press writer Alan Cabal scheduled a face-to-face interview with Penn in January 1983. He wanted to see and hear the foxy factotum.

Instead, a planned rendezvous at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco became “a bizarre head game,” Cabal wrote, “an authentic run down the rabbit hole of Northern California weirdness, all ambiguity and coded references as we roamed from the Embarcadero to North Beach to Los Gatos.”

Recalling the charade twenty-five years later, Cabal—one of the last Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo journalists—said that despite the run around, Penn is both “sane and serious.”

“Critics who accuse Gareth Penn of incoherence are probably members of the same crowd that wound up using Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow as a doorstop,” Cabal told me. “He’s obscure and ambiguous, but he’s not incoherent and he’s certainly not crazy.”

At first, Cabal thought Penn and O’Hare were intellectual thrill killers tag teaming the Zodiac murders like a modern-day Leopold and Loeb. Now, he’s not sure what the truth is, only that Penn has fashioned an elaborate lie.

“How he arrived at the identity of Michael O'Hare remains the big question,” Cabal said. “His own account of that particular epiphany is patently false.”

Innocent man?

False allegations nearly ruined Michael O’Hare’s grandmother. But “Red Kate”(right, center)—as she was known for her flaming locks and Marxist rants—fought back, starting on the witness stand.

“She vehemently stated her innocence and the absurd nature of the charges against her,” biographer Sally Miller wrote in Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. “Despite her best attempts, she was still sentenced to prison.”

Kate’s behind-bars battle ultimately vindicated her. President Woodrow Wilson commuted her sentence and later, President Calvin Coolidge granted her a full pardon.

These lessons of history seem lost on her grandson, who has withstood Penn’s assault absent even a simple “cease and desist” letter, not only to his accuser, but also to those who publish his tainted biography.

For nearly a decade, O’Hare’s photo has graced a seven-member rogue’s gallery (5th photo, below) of Zodiac suspects at Tom Voigt’s Zodiackiller.com, the world’s largest clearinghouse for information about the case.

The Learning Channel’s Case Reopened highlighted O’Hare for television audiences in 1999. From his home in Larkspur, Calif., a bearded and aging Gareth Penn told the program’s producer that the killer was alive and well—and living in Berkeley.

“The show’s cameraman turned white as a sheet,” Penn told me. “How far from the Claremont Hotel, he wanted to know? 2962 Russell Street, I said. He looked as if somebody had severed his aorta. He lived right across the street from Michael O'Hare!”

When Penn asked what it was like to have a renowned killer as a neighbor, the answer was straight out of Kafka.

“The cameraman said O’Hare (left) had uprooted the flower garden in his front yard and put in a new one,” Penn explained. “But whereas most people would just put a rosebush here and some pansies there, O'Hare sited every plant with a surveyor's transit.”

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With Malice Aforethought-6

2009-10-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Rushed to judgment

In a chapter entitled Aftermath toward the end of The Second Power (left), Penn uses O’Hare’s reluctance to sue as de facto proof of his guilt. Discussing the Anthony Hilder interview, Penn disses the two attorneys O’Hare claims advised him not to sue: corporate attorneys Jeffrey Rudman, then at Hale and Dorr in Boston; and Jeffrey Nussbaum, with Stein and Lubin in San Francisco.

Virtually beating the page with his insistence that O’Hare needn’t prove damage to win libel damages if he’s been wrongly accused of a felony, Penn writes that Rudman raised nary a finger as Boston’s WNEV and WBZ television stations rushed out unflattering stories about O’Hare.

Writing that his quarry never demanded so much as a retraction, Penn claimed that O'Hare used at least four different excuses not to sue, telling Boston Herald reporter Eric Fehrnstrom two of them: he couldn’t afford it; and he didn’t think he could prove damages.

“My children still love me; my wife still sleeps with me; and Harvard [O’Hare’s employer at the time] hasn’t fired me yet,” the professor reportedly told Fehrnstrom, who is now former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s press secretary.

“I left journalism 15 years ago, but this story stands out as one of the quirkiest,” Fehrnstrom (left, with Romney) told me. “Gareth Penn and I corresponded and spoke on the phone many times about his theories. Of course, he had no physical evidence tying Michael O'Hare to any crime, only his mathematical calculations. I spoke once to Michael O'Hare, by phone, and he denied involvement in any crimes. He said he was aware of Penn and his book, Times 17. I asked him why he didn't sue Penn for libel or slander, and he said he felt it best to ignore him.”

Twenty years later, on March 2, 2008, Penn renewed his allegations with characteristic fervor. James O’Brien’s Boston Now story—Killing of Harvard grad a mystery: Notorious author maintains prosecutor got it wrong—and its companion piece, a 20-minute online audio interview with Penn—opened O’Hare’s old wounds on the death of Leonard Paradiso.

From his Seattle home, Penn blasted Timothy Burke for of all things, “railroading” Paradiso with a “ludicrous theory.” He then fingered O’Hare, a counter-charge Burke called “absolutely ludicrous…the guy is whacked.”

But to O’Brien, a crime reporter who now works for the Boston Globe, Penn didn’t seem whacked at all. “He wandered off topic a few times, but mostly he was calm and deliberate,” O’Brien told me. Their recorded interview confirms that impression. “Mr. Penn didn’t raise his voice. He never got excited. He laughed a few times, but that was it.”

Vallejo valentine

Sufficiently challenged, Penn will raise, if not his voice, then his pen. Pressed for hard evidence against O’Hare, he provides flimsy suppositions. When that doesn’t work, he attacks.

“Your sophistry and tortured reasoning are wearing me out,” he emailed me after a grueling round of questions. “You are a bottomless pit of substance-less cavils.”

Though O’Hare has confirmed that he worked for Arthur Little in San Francisco “sometime in 1969,” I wanted to know how he knew the Vallejo area well enough to stalk targets on lonely lovers’ lanes and provide precise directions from local payphones to the police: If you will go 1 mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park you will find the kids in a brown car.

My questions aren’t new. For the producers of the 2007 Zodiac movie, Texas State University professor Kim Rossmo used a computer program of his own invention called Rigel to create a so-called geographic profile of the killer based on the crime locations and other clues. Despite cab driver Paul Stine’s San Francisco murder and all the letters mailed from that city, Rossmo concludes that the killer either lived or worked in the Vallejo area.

“People—criminals included—have regular routine activities, such as commuting to work, shopping, and visiting friends and family,” Rossmo (left) explains. “These locations, and the travel routes between them, make up a person’s activity space or comfort zone. Criminals typically commit crimes in those areas where their activity space overlaps suitable targets.”

But Mike O’Hare appears to have had no activities that overlapped Vallejo or nearby cities like Napa or Benicia, all of which are far from San Francisco.

And if he did, Gareth Penn would have been well positioned to discover them.

Unlike O’Hare, Penn did have numerous ties to Vallejo, including his wife’s 23-year teaching career with the Vallejo School District, which started in the Fall of 1968; their subsequent residence in Vallejo; his daughter’s birth in Vallejo; and his job as a librarian, from 1972-79, at the JFK-Solano County Library in Vallejo, where he ran the Donovan J. McCune archival collection—and met a lover with a definite connection to the Zodiac case.

“When Mary Ann and I had marital problems, I had a torrid and lengthy affair with a Vallejoan who is the niece of the woman who discovered the dead teenagers at Lake Herman Road in December 1968,” Penn told me.

That Vallejoan—Madeleine Borges—went to high school with one of those victims, David Faraday. Her aunt, Stella Borges Medeiros, discovered Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen about three miles from her ranch the night they were shot to death.

Penn insists, however, that his relationship with Borges “had nothing to do with the Zodiac murders. She mentioned her aunt Stella a few times but in other contexts, and I knew that she lived on Lake Herman Road. I didn't know that Stella had figured in the Zodiac story until I read Graysmith's book in 1986.”

Penn also insists that during the murders, he and Mary Ann lived in Berkeley. But Susan Wilkinson’s brief for his 1984 divorce—which she says Penn read and approved—has him living at two addresses in Vallejo from 1969-73. “We lived for only five months in Vallejo, starting in January 1973,” Penn says. “Susan Wilkinson made a mistake.”

After deluging me with old records to prove his point, Penn says National Public Radio correspondent Corey Flintoff (below)—a former student—can vouch for him.

“Corey and I shared a few beers at 1708 Lincoln Avenue,” his Berkeley address, Penn says. “Corey and his wife Claire came to a few of the lavish dinners Mary Ann and I threw at 1708 Lincoln Avenue, and they helped us move.”

But when pressed for evidence of O’Hare’s whereabouts during this time, Penn’s document and memory dump suddenly stopped—for a third time in a year—but not without another round of attachments rebutting his Vallejo connection.

“I have tons more of this stuff and would love to rub your nose in it,” Penn wrote me, recalling the Zodiac’s famous words to the police, that he was “rubbing their noses in their booboos.”

Signifying nothing

O’Hare told Mike Butterfield he never sued because “it would just give Penn more attention” and he did not respond to James O’Brien’s interview requests, preferring to let stand his earlier denials.

No surprise. Until our interviews, the accused professor hadn’t said anything to reporters for 20 years.

When I first contacted him, O'Hare rehashed his denial, then clammed up when I asked for clarifications. About a year later, I asked again, and sent him this manuscript.

The story must have jarred O'Hare, who emailed that I was “wallowing in Penn's most ludicrous nonsense,” and “gibbering after a lawsuit that would obviously be catnip for poor Penn and something you could retail, but that cannot benefit me in any way.”

He also responded with uncharacteristic dismay to my request for anything he might have to refute any of Penn’s claims or back up his denials, a question that once had Jake Wark surmise that O’Hare was “teasing Penn—and the rest of us—by refusing to give a decent alibi for even one Zodiac event.”

“Just to clarify, are you seriously suggesting that I owe it to you or anyone else to ‘back up’ a refutation of (for example) the falsehood that my mother sexually abused me?” O’Hare emailed. “To prove that my wife and I stick plants in our front yard in the usual way: ‘Hey, wouldn't a rosebush look good about here?’ To treat the fact that I used a transit to set the grades of the beds (is there some other way) as something inculpatory and suspicious that needs to be excused?”

Concluding that I reminded him of a “kid I knew in high school who was always trying to provoke fights,” O’Hare attached an MP3 file—Signifyin’ Monkey, a song by Oscar Brown, Jr. about a monkey that tries to incite a conflict between an elephant and a lion by using the elephant's words against the lion.

I did not open the attachment.

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With Malice Aforethought-7

2009-10-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Sons and mothers

In 19 pages of unvarnished prose excerpted from a longer memoir he wrote while at sea on the NOAA research vessel David Starr Jordan, Penn describes a troubled relationship with his own mother, “a tall slender blue-eyed blonde with a classically beautiful face who was witty like Dorothy Parker but unlike her, not mean.”

On the agricultural West Coast, Jean Sewell Penn (left) was a financially beleaguered housewife who worked in a bomber factory trying to support herself and her son after Penn’s father, Hugh Scott, (below, with Jean, Gareth) was drafted into overseas duty as a U.S. Army Air Corps cryptographer during the Second World War.

But on the cultural East Coast, Jean Sewell Standish—her name after divorce and remarriage—was a noted poet, writing from a prune-planted backwater called Campbell, California for the day’s finest periodicals: The N ew Yorker, Harpers, and The Atlantic Monthly, including a May 1958 edition devoted to the philosopher Albert Camus (pictured below).

Unpredictable, delicate, flippant, traditional, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, and almost blithely fatalistic—if there is such a thing—Standish’s verse routinely appeared in best-poem anthologies alongside poetry’s giants: Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden, and W.S. Merwin.

When she met him, Jean Sewell’s soon-to-be second husband—a dull-witted but stably-employed railroad worker named Miles Archibald Standish—lived with his widower father Archie Miles Standish in a house “where they sealed off the living room so they wouldn’t have to clean it,” Penn writes. Moving into this dark place, “the first thing my mother did was to open up the living room. It was full of dead bats” that “had come down the chimney…starved to death…and then dried up like little mummies….The dead bats kind of set the tone for the next eleven years.”

Eleven years with a man Penn describes as a classic boor, a Steinbeckian-Dickensian hybrid, perfectly lethal to Jean Sewell’s artistic disposition—and her son’s emotional well-being.

“One day, I was playing with the cocker spaniel, and I guess Miles thought I was being too rough,” Penn writes. “Suddenly, I was on my back, and he was pounding me in the face with his fists, yelling ‘See how you like it!’ I got a bloody nose, a split lip, and the inside of my mouth was bleeding where it had been pounded into a tooth. For the next eleven years, he and I were at swords’ point every waking minute.”

At 18, Penn left for college, but life back home got worse. His mother ran away to Monterrey and into the arms of an inner demon—“a disembodied spirit named Ace,” Penn explains, “who talked to her though a Ouija board.”

Ace encouraged his mistress to send out “lengthy handwritten letters exposing Miles as the ringleader of a homosexual conspiracy whose purpose was world domination,” Penn explains. “My [half]-sister and I drove to Monterey and managed to trick her into getting into the car; we drove her to a mental health center in San Jose, where we all had a conversation with a doctor, who after listening to Mother rant for a while, concluded, ‘Jean, you have what we call a thought problem.’ She spent thirty days there, making ashtrays in occupational therapy, before being released with a trank prescription.”

But pills didn’t help. His mother's letters became “more and more vile,” Penn writes. Eventually, Jean turned on almost everyone. “My father had murdered his third wife by beating her to death with a length of pipe; my brother-in-law, his friends, and the minister who had officiated at my sister’s wedding were implicated in the homosexual conspiracy.”

Public records show Jean Standish divorcing Miles twice, in 1971 and 1973. She lived alone for 9 years in a Tenderloin district flophouse, where her estranged husband would arrive every month with a check, insert it under her door, and wait, Penn says, until she pulled it in from the other side.

Circumstances went from tragic to comic when Miles himself went dotty, building a fort in his driveway and sitting guard with a loaded Mauser rifle he brought back after his own wartime European tour.

“He was protecting his home from the Germans,” Penn writes “The most colorful thing that ever happened to him in his whole life was being in northern France with a war on. So when his mind went, he snapped back to 1944.”

Jean Standish finally returned home, but lived with her husband “like two ghosts haunting the same Scottish castle…When one spoke, the other one seemed not to hear,” Penn writes. “Eventually, after the police had come four or five times to confiscate Miles’ firearms, my sister put him away in a home for the bewildered, and Mother continued to hold forth on her own.”

“With no help from Gareth,” a family friend told me. “When I last saw Jean, she was living in squalor, managing on Wonder bread, wine, chocolate and cigarettes. Gareth hated her for abandoning him.”

As if to explain everything, Jean Standish wrote a poem to her son, reflecting on a life of incomplete promise.

I would be a beacon
on the shore to light your path
safely through every peril of the sea.

But “hidden reefs” and “sudden storms” intervened.

I have been tossed by tempests,
nearly wrecked and often lost and cast upon the barren sands of grief.

The dignity of men

As an only child himself, Michael O’Hare would be the only living witness to his family’s troubles, if not for the small community of O’Hare scholars that studies the reams of letters and notes his father, grandparents, and other family members left behind.

With chapters in his book like Family Martyrdom, A Tragic Four Years, and Hard Times, Peter Buckingham recalls that Frank O’Hare’s father abandoned him at age four to life in the Kerry Patch, an Irish slum in St. Louis.

Business and family failures would later leave him “completely busted and flattened out, as ever Job was,” Frank (right, with Eugene V. Debs, center) wrote. After a long, chilly separation, Kate told him she could not return. “You have a warped, sick soul and mind,” she wrote, later initiating divorce proceedings on the trumped up charge that he had tried to murder her in St. Louis.

The failing relationship between Frank and Kate took its toll on their children. Daughter Kathleen moved away and didn’t speak to her father for nearly a decade. Trying to encourage him, son Eugene belittled Frank instead. “You are bouncy, trenchant, brilliant!” Eugene wrote. “But everything you do reeks of infernal sloppiness.”

Frank’s crumbled marriage, his children’s hostility, and the previous suicides of three business associates had left him contemplating “pistol, cyanide, or high window.” It wouldn't be until he was an old man near death that he would tell his son Richard, “It was no little thing, that your mother spoke to millions of people, stirring them to realize the dignity of being men.”

If sexual abuse was ever part of the family dysfunction, as Penn alleges, O’Hare scholars have yet to see evidence. Sally Miller recalls non-specific rumors at best. “There was supposedly a son, or a brother, who was traumatized and institutionalized,” she said. “But that wasn’t much interest to us. Any evidence of it, if it exists, is probably buried away with Neil Basen.”

A taxi driver from Madison, Wisconsin and author of Kate Richards O'Hare: The First Lady of American Socialism, “Neil probably knows more about the O’Hare family than they know about themselves,” Buckingham told me.

A committed O’Hare-ophile, Basen (right) supposedly came into a correspondence mother lode rescued from a fire that destroyed Frank O’Hare’s St. Louis home. For his almost microscopic knowledge and willingness to share authentic documents, Basen is acknowledged in dozens of papers, presentations, and books on the O’Hare legacy.

“He was a huge help to me,” Buckingham said. “But he can be hard to reach.”

True enough. This writer hasn’t had any luck and uncharacteristically, Gareth Penn has never heard of Basen.

Sleuths and subcultures

With Zodiac, a compendium of reports and evidence so well-known it simply goes by “The Yellow Book,” Robert Graysmith birthed a subculture of amateur gumshoes, each with his or her own pet suspect. For Graysmith, the Zodiac Killer was Arthur Leigh Allen, (right) a lonely drifter once convicted of child molesting that police investigated and—with DNA—ultimately cleared.

Tom Voigt has championed and dismissed half a dozen or so Zodiacs over the past decade.

Last year, the FBI announced an investigation of Jack Tarranc e (below), another drifter whose primary guilt-advocate is his Sacramento-based stepson, Dennis Kaufman. Like Voigt, Kaufman has built a thriving online community around his stepfather’s presumed guilt.

This year, three more names joined the suspect roster: Guy Ward Hendrickson, a nomadic carpenter (pix here) so incapable of Zodiac-style writings that his daughter/accuser Deborah Perez (below left) says she had to help him; and an un-named merchant seaman that retired Las Vegas attorney Bob Tarbox said confessed to him thirty years ago (below right).

Finally, Steve Hodel, who earlier accused his father of being the Black Dahlia killer now accuses him of
the Zodiac crimes. In both cases, Hodel has hawked books supporting his theories.

Like Graysmith, Kaufman, Perez, Tarbox and Hodel claim enough circumstantial evidence to make their suspects intriguing possibilities.

Intriguing, but hardly convincing. The cunning, culturally-literate impresario who staged a murder spree with unbreakable ciphers and darkly taunting lines from The Mikado is absent from Tarrance, Hendrickson and virtually ever other suspect.

“The Zodiac case may have been the most cerebral murder case of all time,” said Northeastern University criminology professor Jack Levin. “What appears to have been unprovoked catharsis may actually indicate a premeditated, cold-blooded act of instrumental aggression. Or does it? What passes for craziness may really have been a well-planned scheme to accomplish what the killer wanted. Or was it?”

The legend calls for canny ambiguity and Gareth Penn has responded accordingly. He’s even joined the suspect roster himself a few times, most recently at the hands of criminologist Christopher Farmer.

A graduate of the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, Farmer runs a private Connecticut-based consulting company, OPORD Analytical. Basing his claim on what he considers a mountain of circumstantial evidence, mostly from the public record and Penn’s own writings, Farmer says Penn “fits the Zodiac profile perfectly.”

Where Zodiac failed to find the intellectual audience he so desperately sought, instead foiling cops and journalists he considered his gross inferiors, Gareth Penn went straight for the brainy crowd, Farmer explained. With the radian theory, binary math, and articles for Mensa, he approached the case with a first-ever, hyper-intellectual narrative that showed he had finally learned how to sell his story.

Less a viable suspect than a conduit to an “intelligent audience,” the professorial Michael O'Hare is merely an actor on the killer's new stage. “By pointing the finger at a worthy surrogate, Mr. Penn has simply been calling attention to his own crimes,” Farmer told me.

Calling his latest accuser “morally, ethically, and financially bankrupt,” Penn dismisses the claim as a “vile libel.” But even though his accusation was widely reported almost two years ago and remains heavily debated on the Internet, Farmer says that Penn has never contacted him with complaints, corrections, or legal challenges. He also sees in Penn’s condemnation a supreme irony.

“He’s calling my charges a vile libel?”

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With Malice Aforethought-8

2009-10-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Official suspect?

Farmer isn’t the only investigator to finger Penn, who says Napa County sheriff’s detective Ken Narlow considered him an “official suspect,” a claim Narlow (right) denies. “We were too busy to give Penn or O’Hare much thought,” says Narlow, who led Napa’s efforts to apprehend the killer.

But Penn has written and recited the same story for nearly 30 years. “On 29 December 1980 at precisely 8:00 a.m., I waltzed into Ken Narlow’s office to talk about a word I wasn't supposed to know.”

The word was radian.

“I had learned about it from my father Hugh, who saw it in one of Zodiac’s letters.” Hugh Penn tried to solve the Zodiac ciphers when he came across the case files, his son said. The former cryptographer had become a statistician with the California Department of Justice, where he studied traffic accidents for the California Highway Patrol and profiled a serial rapist.

“He thought it passing strange, since all of the psychological evaluations typed the Zodiac as a near-moron,” Penn explained. “Radian is something you find in the vocabulary of someone trained as an engineer—or an architect.”

Penn said Narlow “thanked me profusely” for calling his attention to the word, adding that for the last ten years he’d been wondering what radian meant.

“My figurative jaw hit the figurative floor,” Penn exclaimed. “Here was a man charged with the arrest of a criminal whose letter contained a word he was unfamiliar with, and he spent over a decade not looking it up.”

Penn said Narlow ultimately ruled him out as a suspect after “inquiries to the Department of Defense had shown I was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma” when Cheri Jo Bates (left) was murdered in Riverside, Calif.

But that was premature, and to illustrate, Penn ginned up a scenario in Times 17 to nullify his alibi. Shortly before the murder, “I was in charge of preparing my unit’s Morning Report, which accounts for the whereabouts and duty status of everyone in the unit,” Penn wrote. “It would not have been hard for me to falsify an entry or…to get a military hop to March AFB [near Riverside] from Oklahoma for a three-day pass.”

Penn told me he was indeed in California the month Bates was murdered—October 1966—but in San Francisco, meeting his second wife-to-be at a going away party for David McCann, the Korean languages scholar. McCann did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Penn also wrote, in Times 17, that authorities had cleared him of the Zodiac crimes "on the basis of my fingerprints." That surprised Narlow, who said he never took Penn's prints or checked them against any national databases or Zodiac evidence. "We had no reason to," he said.

What's more, police officials in San Francisco, Vallejo, Benicia, Napa have no records of ever fingerprinting anyone in connection with the Zodiac case named Gareth Penn, Gareth S. Penn, or Gareth Sewell Penn.

He said, He said

Two weeks after chewing me out for rehashing Penn’s claims, Michael O’Hare emailed: “Do you have a publication date/journal for this story yet?”

A month later, he broke his thirty-year silence in an unusual venue—the May/June 2009 issue of the left-leaning Washington Monthly.

Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer didn’t confess much, but it did use witty repartee to dismiss Penn’s allegations and bolster O’Hare’s position that he’d never been harmed enough to consider litigation.

“My contact with Penn has died down to three or four letters a year that he sends me at my office, where I drop them unopened in the folder with the others,” O’Hare writes. “I wish I could say I’ve learned a lot from this disagreeable experience, but about all I’ve gleaned is how hard the subconscious mind tries to make sense of irrational circumstances.”

Penn, of course, wasted no time responding: O'Hare won't sue because he knows the allegations are true, not because he can't prove damages.

“Any first-year law student will be happy to tell you that anyone falsely accused of the commission of a felony is exempted from the requirement to prove that he has been damaged,” Penn wrote in a 7-page letter to the Washington Monthly. He also added his own witty rejoinder, openly wondering why O’Hare should address his claims now, after so many years of silence.

“While I hesitate to compare myself with my betters, I note that his bulletin comes around the same time as the latest from Osama bin Laden criticizing Barack Obama for his speech in Cairo,” Penn concludes. “I think there’s something in the air.”

The Third Knife

Partly about the murders, David Fincher’s Zodiac is mostly about the unraveling of Robert Graysmith’s once tidy life. Call it the curse of Ahab—the obsessive pursuit that ultimately destroys the obsessed pursuer.

As Penn would readily admit, his own life has never been tidy. But the strange and isolating circumstances within which he now finds himself raise the question: Has chasing Michael O’Hare all these years really been worth it?

With his Dorian Gray good looks and hyperbolic intellect, Penn never had problems attracting women before Zodiac. But now, “it’s very difficult to find someone to date, let alone maintain a relationship,” he says.

And forget real employment. “A few years ago, I was a shoe-in for a great job. Then they Googled me.” Google has also encouraged phone calls from “nutcases who want to talk to a real live serial killer while they jack off,” says Penn (pictured below circa 1980).

Nevertheless, he remains undeterred. He’s tackling the Zodiac/O’Hare connection from a new angle these days, largely disavowing his previous attempts as “sophomoric and juvenile.”

“I don’t think there’s much worth reading,” he says of Times 17 and The Second Power. “That’s why I don’t reprint them.”

He has a new book, he tells me over the phone, while coaxing a manuscript from the sound effect of an opening desk drawer. “It’s the real deal,” it being The Third Knife, his magnum opus, the culmination of his life’s work.

Where Penn earlier sought to identify a killer, The Third Knife dispenses with the “whodunit” and instead seeks appreciation—of both “the brightest person who ever stalked the Earth” and the “incredibly ingenious way Mike O’Hare communicated the pain and anguish he suffered at the hands of his father. ”

Penn’s sotto voce tone lost its flatness just long enough to beam. “I’m torn by disapproval of the means he chose to express himself and utter admiration. What a mind!”

Dangerous game

Recalling the cool December morning nearly 30 years ago “when Gareth Penn showed up in my office,” Ken Narlow said “he was a strange, fascinating guy without a shred of real evidence who wanted to spend half the day going over why he thought O'Hare did it.”

Looking back, Narlow -- who passed away in December 2010 -- wondered if he was too quick to dismiss Penn -- as both accuser and accused. “I probably should have checked out Penn a lot better than I did,” he said. “I didn't know what I do now. I had no idea about any of it.”

As for O'Hare, “maybe Dr. O’Hare has something to hide and he’s trying to ignore all this because he doesn’t want anyone digging too deep," Narlow said. "Maybe I should talk to him sometime, ask him a few questions.”

Ask him a few questions, but what exactly? Why has Gareth Penn haunted you all these years? What did you ever do to him? Slight him somehow? Have an affair with his wife? Was he the guy you cut off on the Bay Bridge that day?

Or are you really the Zodiac killer?

“I think the statement in James O’Brien’s Boston Now story covers it pretty well,” O’Hare told me when I first inquired. “I had nothing to do with the Zodiac or Webster murders.”

But if not O’Hare, then whom? Perhaps one of Mary Ann Winterrowd’s students knows something.

Buried in all that praise at RateMyTeachers.com was a line about a story the Zodiac referenced many times, most notably in his only decoded cipher, the one about how hunting men was such a thrill because man “is the most dangeroue anamal of all.”

Gareth Penn’s wife—and the student who rated her—apparently knew that story well.

Ms. Winterrowd taught us plot structure and sentence construction by using my all time favorite short story, The Most Dangerous Game.

*The author wishes to acknowledge the expert assistance of Amanda Clifton, a Danville, Calif.-based legal researcher, and thank her for locating, analyzing, and copying legal records, military records, and other public but hard-to-find information.

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Old police reports may shed new light on Zodiac murders

2009-09-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

by Michael Martin with Kortnie Ford, Columbia College Dept of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science

Between 1966 and 1969, a serial murderer known as the Zodiac killer terrorized California. Despite intense law enforcement and media scrutiny, few clues to the killer’s identity or motives have ever emerged.

Now, old police reports may shed new light on characteristics common to the victims.

Collected for nearly a decade at a unique online repository for information about the case, Zodiackiller.com, the reports -- from Napa, Vallejo, and Solano County police and sheriff departments -- reveal that before they were murdered, sometimes within days or weeks, each of the Zodiac's four known or suspected female victims had broken off a relationship or rebuffed the advances of a male admirer in favor of another male partner, and each breakup involved public arguments or witnessed threats.

What's more, in the three murders involving male-female couples, the female victim was the “older woman” in either her former or current relationship.

Experts say the similarities suggest the killer may have known more about his victims than has previously been assumed, and may not have chosen them entirely at random.

"The similarities are very intriguing and worth taking a second look at," said Sheryl McCollum, founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute at Bauder College in Atlanta. "Similarities between victims are often telling about the killer. I do not believe in coincidences—much less four of them. Therefore, the victims all having had a breakup or male stalker becomes something that may need to be re-investigated."

Discovered during research for a story about the first public allegations in the Zodiac murders -- when, beginning in 1981, retired government librarian and true crime author Gareth S. Penn accused U.C. Berkeley public policy professor Michael H. O'Hare of the crimes in a series of articles and two books -- the findings were presented at the Midwest Criminal Justice Association annual conference in Chicago and the Southern Criminal Justice Association annual conference in Charleston, South Carolina this September.

Motivated to murder

The author of a warning/confession letter to both the Riverside (Calif.) police department and the editor of the Riverside Press-Enterprise newspaper suggested that a lover's jilting drove him to kill.

Written one month after the Oct. 1966 Riverside, Calif. murder of suspected Zodiac victim Cheri Josephine Bates (left), the author repeatedly claimed that he was motivated to murder by young women who had rejected him in high school and the "brush offs" Bates had given him "in the years prior."

Betty, David -- and Ricky

Striking on Dec. 20, 1968, the Zodiac killer murdered two young high school students in the Vallejo-Benicia area, Betty Lou Jensen, 16, and David Arthur Faraday, 17.

Within two weeks of her death, Jensen had broken off a relationship with Richard (Ricky) Allen Burton, 14, who witnesses say threatened both her and Faraday. Jensen "went steady" with Burton, 13, from Dec. 1 to Dec 14, 1968 according to a Solano County Sheriff report.

Jensen's parents said Burton “bugged Betty Lou at school, " and police officials found a handwritten note in Jensen's school locker, referring to Faraday:

Do you know a kid named Richard Burton? I was going with him until two days before the installation. He still phones me and is threatening me to keep away from Dave. He said if he is ever close enough to Dave he would punch him one in the teeth. I told him to leave me alone, if he knows what’s good for him.

Authorities briefly investigated Burton for the murders of Jensen and Faraday, but never considered him a suspect.

Darlene, Mike, Dean, Jim -- and George

The Zodiac killer struck again on Independence Day, 1969, killing Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22, and injuring Michael Renault Mageau, 19, at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo.

Married at the time, Ferrin was romantically involved with other men, including Vallejo police officer Howard "Buzz" Gordon. Authorities considered Ferrin's current husband Dean, and former husband, Jim Phillips suspects in her murder, but later cleared both men.

According to the Vallejo Police Report on her death, another man, George William Waters, 29, (right) appeared to be stalking Ferrin for "turning him down" in the months before her murder.

Waters tried to date her many times and after several refusals, walked into her apartment and threatened to rape her or "get her into bed one way or the other."

"She was deathly afraid of George Waters,” the report states.

Cecelia, Bryan -- and Gary

When the Zodiac killer stabbed Cecelia Shepard, 22, and Bryan Hartnell, 20, in late September, 1969 at Lake Berryessa near Napa, Hartnell was a student at Pacific Union College in nearby Angwin.

Shepard's parents told the Napa County Sheriff that “a former male friend of victim, Gary (last name redacted), age 21 (22 in 1969) a senior at Pacific Union College, threatened Cecelia when she started going with Hartnell. This occurred sometime in 1968."

Cheri Jo, her fiance -- and "Bob Barnett"

About a month after the Oct. 1966 stabbing of Riverside (Ca.) City College (RCC) student Cheri Jo Bates, 18, someone sent an unsigned "confession letter" to both the Riverside Police Department and the Riverside Press-Enterprise newspaper.

"I lay awake nights thinking about my next victim," the person wrote. "Maybe she will be the shapely, blue-eyed brownett who said no when I asked her for a date in high school."

Graphically describing Bates' murder, the writer said only one thing was on his mind. "Making her pay for the brush offs that she had given me during the years prior."

In a 1999 interview with an anonymous source, Zodiackiller.com publisher Tom Voigt continued the theme. The source told Voigt that Bates had returned from a trip to visit her "steady boyfriend" in San Francisco, where she had accepted his wedding proposal. Bates told another man she'd been dating -- Bob Barnett, a pseudonym -- that they could no longer date less than a week prior to her murder.

"Barnett and Cheri engaged in a very public argument on the RCC campus just days before her murder," Voigt writes. "During the argument, Barnett allegedly slapped Cheri. A passerby heard Barnett say, 'Have you changed your mind yet?'"

Playing basketball with friends the night Bates died, Barnett left the game after Bates called him "for unknown reasons." "That bitch is going to the library," Barnett allegedly told his friends.

Police subsequently cleared Barnett of her murder, but remain unwilling to release official police reports about the 43-year-old case.

"Per the Office of the Chief of Police, this case is still an OPEN criminal case," Riverside Police Department sergeant Jaybee Brennan wrote in an email. "Therefore, there will be no release of information."

Other information may be lacking as well, including evidence that law enforcement officials either missed the victim similarities or failed to share them, Sheryl McCollum says. "We don’t know that they did miss these similarities. They may have discussed these events and facts and never shared it with the public."

For now, though, she reminds, "There is no harm in taking a second look at all aspects of a cold case."

Science journalist Michael Martin, and Kortnie Ford, a graduate student in the Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri presented the findings at the Midwest Criminal Justice Association annual conference in Chicago and the Southern Criminal Justice Association annual conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Margie Profet's Unfinished Symphony

2009-06-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

A Promising Scientist Vanishes Without a Trace
A Weekly Scientist Exclusive Report
By Mike Martin

The most striking thing about biologist Margie Profet (right) used to be her unconventional theories about evolution and pregnancy, conceived as she surfed the perilous waters of academe with neither tenure track nor Ph.D.

Now, more than 15 years after she made headlines as a young scientific “It Girl,” the most striking things about Profet are how her life suddenly stopped and how the establishment she purportedly shunned has come forth, with praise, bewilderment, and sorrow.

Google Profet's name and you'll see thousands of entries, debates, conversations, and news, all but ending a few years ago. Unmarried, fit and healthy, no reports of ill health or death have ever surfaced. No out-of-sorts boyfriends or obsessive stalkers. No dangerous pursuits, at least not involving life and limb.

So what happened to this anti-establishment thinker whose Sheryl Crow looks and beautiful mind made her a media darling?

No one seems to know—not her family, not her friends, not her former colleagues. All they know is that one day Margie Profet was at Harvard University and the next day she wasn't. The prodigal prodigy vanished into thin air, disappeared without a trace.

“Very sad," says U.C. Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames, who worked closely with Profet on some of her groundbreaking research. “We tried desperately to find Margie a few years ago, but came up empty handed,” Ames’ executive assistant Teresa Klask told me from the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, where Ames maintains a lab. “As far as we know, she personally decided not to be found and we unfortunately do not have any further information on her whereabouts.”

Harvard Medical School psychologist Deirdre Barrett planned to meet Profet in Cambridge, Mass. for an interview about her work. Though they spoke by phone several times, the meeting never happened. “I later realized that Margie had become quite isolated, almost reclusive,” Barrett told me. “She was battling some real psychological issues, and I sensed there were shadows at her back.”

Almost single-handedly recasting a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings, Margie Profet argued that menstruation, morning sickness, and allergies are highly-adaptive protection mechanisms.

In a series of notable papers, she did what the best scientists do—overturn the conventional wisdom with insightful thinking and rigorous defense. (Click the paper GIF images to enlarge).

After Profet won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1993, Scientific American, The New York Times, and even Time Magazine swooned.

People Magazine featured her in the Shannen Doherty “secret wedding” issue. Elle covered her in a “Good Hair Day” edition. Harper’s Bazaar asked if she needed the magazine's hair and make-up artists for a photo shoot.

Profet’s back story was irresistible—a small, soft-spoken, wisp of a woman born of the southern California sun who wandered—almost dreamily, it seemed—between physics and philosophy, mastering each like a post-modern Renaissance woman at places like Harvard and Berkeley, then publishing brilliant biology papers with neither biology nor graduate degrees.

Her free spirit enchanted leading journalists and her ideas intrigued the best theoreticians, who found elegance in their sentence-long simplicity and intuitive sensibilities.

Sperm, reproductive soldiers though they are, also carry hitchhiking germs. Menstruation costs so much life-giving blood for a protective and life-saving reason. Thanks to evolution, sneezing, menstrual bleeding, and pregnancy-related nausea ward off toxins and disease. With these “radical new views,” Profet had given ordinary annoyances, the New York Times said, “an active and salutary spin.”

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Margie Profet's Unfinished Symphony -- 2

2009-05-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Profet’s friends peg her vanishing to sometime in 2005. Reporters and journalists didn’t notice because by then she had become a dying star, so reclusive and withdrawn even those who knew her best say they no longer knew her at all.

“Shocked and saddened to hear that Margie had disappeared and might even be dead,” Donald Brown, (right) who taught anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, got to know Profet when she stayed with Brown’s friend and colleague, UC Santa Barbara evolutionary anthropologist Donald Symons.

Famous for his theory of “human universals,” which posits that certain behavioral traits are common to all human beings regardless their culture or ethnicity, Brown remembers Profet as “attractive, bright, and a little eccentric, but unfailingly pleasant and upbeat.”

He was also a fan of her work. “It seemed an insightful, well-thought-out, and very useful application of evolution,” he told me.

Profet learned to think at Harvard, where she graduated with a political philosophy degree in 1980. Returning to study more than two decades later, she looked up Harvey Mansfield, (left) another old friend and mentor.

Supervising what he calls her “her fine senior thesis on Nietzsche,” Mansfield—Harvard’s William R . Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government and one of the world’s leading political theorists—worked closely with Profet during her undergraduate years.

But when she came back to study math, something troubling came with her. The bright, clear-eyed, inquisitive young woman Mansfield knew had become lonely, agitated, and adrift.

“I tried to help, for several months, but she became exasperated,” Mansfield says. The last time he saw her was on a Cambridge street, where “she finally told me to get lost.”

Deirdre Barrett has similar memories. A leading dream researcher, Barrett interviewed Profet by phone after reading stories about how her theories came to her in dreams.

Like the German chemist August Kekule, who said he discovered the ring-shaped chemical structure of benzene in a dream about a red-and-yellow snake swallowing its tail, Profet had recounted how her cat interrupted a similarly colorful dream about black triangles embedded in red. The triangles were pathogens, she interpreted, in menstrual blood washing them away.

Starting in 1994, “Margie and I spoke off and on,” Barrett told me. “At one point—I think it was 1998—I was writing a book. I called to check some quotes and facts, and that was the first time I noticed something odd. She didn’t sound well and she kept quibbling about little things. Her speech was very fast and hyper—much more hyper than usual. She seemed aggravated and distressed.”

“It was wonderful,” Don Symons told the New York Times about Profet’s theory of menstruation as adaptation. “Margie fit together many disparate elements into one coherent explanatory system, exactly what a scientific theory should be.”

In The Quarterly Review of Biology, she not only proclaimed that menstrual bleeding was Mother Nature’s way of cleansing the reproductive canals; she also warned women away from oral contraceptives that suppress it, and when patients complained of unusually heavy periods, advised doctors to test, not only for cancer but infections most of all. With each new pronouncement, Profet was chipping away at the status quo, and irking establishment peers.

“There are just so many logical arguments against what she says,” objected University of Michigan anthropologist Beverly Strassmann. “To the extent you can generate predictions from her theories, none were supported.”

The criticism intensified when Profet extended her morning sickness and food aversion theories, warning pregnant women to avoid certain vegetables. Cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts contain trace levels of the carcinogen allyl isothiocyanate, for instance.

Sounding the alarm in two popular books, 1995's Protecting Your Baby-To-Be: Preventing Birth Defects in the First Trimester and a 1997 sequel, Pregnancy Sickness: Using Your Body's Natural Defenses to Protect Your Baby-To-Be, Profet incited the establishment once again.

“We're very concerned about Profet's books, because eating vegetables is a very good way to get folic acid, which is essential to a baby's development,” March of Dimes spokesperson Andrea Zeitzer told reporters in a response typical of the time.

Taking aim at Profet in an aptly-titled American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology paper Profet, profits, and proof: Do nausea and vomiting of early pregnancy protect women from "harmful" vegetables? Penn State nutrition professor Terryl Hartman, Ph.D. and Judith Brown, Ph.D., professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of Minnesota, warned against further media infatuation. “It is suggested that claims made in the popular press about food and health relationships should be evaluated by the media as fiction, unless supported by scientific research.”

But the criticism didn’t seem to affect her much, and with nothing to prove one way or the other, Profet chucked the best-seller lists for what she told Scientific American was “a new adventure in life,” a return to student-hood, to restore “the math part of my brain that withered and died.”

The University of Washington—where I attended classes with her—welcomed Profet as a department of astronomy “scholar in residence,” though she came to study math. She stayed in Seattle a few years before returning to her Harvard alma mater.

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Margie Profet's Unfinished Symphony -- 3

2009-05-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

Margie Profet grew up with three siblings, the California surfer-girl daughter of aerospace engineers Karen and Bob Profet, Berkeley physics graduates who relocated for a more laid back life in Manhattan Beach.

Bob Profet (left)—who died in 2006 after a long struggle with heart disease—pioneered technical engineering conferences. He was “a wonderful man, who loved Margie in a deep, open-hearted way,” says Don Symons, who knew the family well. Margie’s mother Karen—who did not respond to interview requests—and sister Julie still help operate a confab her father created 15 years ago, the IEEE Aerospace Conference.

Growing up a math wiz who consistently tested three grades higher than her years, Margie considered herself a hopeless misfit, telling People Magazine she felt “like an alien who didn’t belong.” Stories of her eccentricity—considered a common side effect of genius IQ that can also hint of deeper struggles—surfaced repeatedly in media profiles, as in her father’s comment about “off the chart weirdness” and her never-changing attire.

“I am all but certain I never saw Margie in a skirt or slacks, or anything but shorts,” says Don Brown.

At Harvard, where Profet “discovered I had a brain,” she studied under Mansfield and English professor Paul Cantor, who now teaches at the University of Virginia.

Even though she took only one class from him 33 years ago, Cantor (right) still remembers the course—Myths of Creation—and his student.

“Very upset” by news of her disappearance, Cantor says Profet was fascinated with “big ideas,” and asked probing, adult questions with a childlike, “almost elfin” curiosity. “We talked about Nietzsche and Heidegger, and I told her that if she wanted to learn philosophy seriously, she should study with Professor Mansfield,” Cantor recalls. “The way her mind worked seemed to show up in her professional life—the ‘maverick’ thing.”

After Harvard, Profet programmed computers in Germany and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Back in California two years later, she enrolled at Berkeley and emulated her parents, graduating in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in physics while hating every regimented minute of the past three years.

School is the wrong place for people who want to use the energy of their twenties and thirties to ask naive questions, Profet told Scientific American. “You may be using up a time in life that will never come again."

Working odd jobs for low pay, Profet discovered the liberating allure of libraries, where she could think and study in blissful solitude at no charge. At Berkeley’s library, she started researching questions about unusual problems—like why do allergies make us scratch? And why would a woman who loves coffee run from the aroma of Starbucks after she gets pregnant?

Bruce Ames (left), who invented a way to test chemical compounds for cancer- or mutation-causing potential, met Profet at Berkeley during a seminar he gave on natural carcinogens. Her insightful questions prompted him to ask afterward what she did for work. She was a waitress, she told him, studying to be a biologist in her spare time.

Ames hired her shortly thereafter, and she went from clerical work in his lab to principal editor of his papers. “She's a fanatic on getting every sentence right,” he told Seattle Times reporter Terry McDermott, who wrote an exhaustive profile of Profet in 1994.

Applying that fanatical approach to her own research, Profet survived “significant criticism during peer review” to publish theories Quarterly Review editor George Williams told McDermott “married biology and medicine in a way that hadn't been done before.”

A second Quarterly Review paper—on the evolutionary advantages of menstruation—dominated the September 1993 issue and helped earn Profet a $225,000 five-year MacArthur Foundation grant.

“I was stunned,” she said, on hearing the news. “It was something I never expected.”

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Margie Profet's Unfinished Symphony -- 4

2009-05-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

To be a young, pretty, rising star with a genius grant, two bestsellers, and a reputation for shaking things up in the staid, distinguished world of science would give a lot of people an inflated sense of self worth.

But not Margie Profet, remembers Maureen Atwell, who got to know Profet at picnics and other events as a program administrator for the MacArthur Foundation. “Margie was unusual in a lot of good ways. None of her success went to her head. She was not a prima donna at all. She was a sweet, innocent person who was easy to like.”

The idea that anything might have happened to her stunned Atwell and her co-workers when they heard from a worried Karen Profet in 2005.

“Karen called to ask if we knew where Margie was living and if we had any recent dental records,” Atwell told me. But the Foundation hadn’t stayed in touch those many years later, and it only kept limited information about grant awardees. “It sounded like Margie’s family was looking everywhere for her, all over the country. They didn’t know if she was alive or dead.”

Atwell paused to gather herself, and asked me to send a message. “If you write about Margie, tell her from all of us that wherever she is, we hope she's safe and okay.”

The last person to speak with Profet may have been Deirdre Barrett, who says that while Profet was safe, she was not okay.

Living back in Cambridge on Memorial Drive, Profet reconnected with Barrett (right) in “2004, maybe early 2005-ish,” she says. “We spoke on the phone about a math problem she was trying to solve, how it was so difficult, and how she was having a lot of trouble concentrating.”

Then Profet started calling Barrett—a lot. Subsequent conversations—always at night—found her drifting between organized thought, “and rambling—about how badly her work was going or how she needed to be left alone. Some nights she sounded really suspicious,” Barrett says. “She’d tell stories about people she was working with that didn’t make sense at all.”

When Barrett suggested to Profet that she was deliberately isolating herself from those who cared and were trying to help, she relented. “Margie told me she was being treated for something—she didn't say what, but it sounded like bipolar disorder. She was sure she would get better soon.”

Characterizing their last contact as “unremarkable,” Barrett says Profet was worried about money. Twelve years later, she was still stretching MacArthur. “She said she had to find someplace cheaper,” Barrett told me, and subsequent public records show another Cambridge address on Agassiz Street. “It was ironic that we planned to meet and never did, when it turned out that she lived just around the corner from me.”

When Barrett asked if I had spoken with the Cambridge authorities, I told her they had no record of any missing persons reports with the name Profet, Margaret Profet, Margie Profet, or Margaret J. Profet.

She stopped short of calling it another irony, deciding instead that it made sense in a strange way. “Margie had deliberately stopped communicating for so long, everybody who knew her, including her family I think, knew she had pretty much checked out,” Barrett says. “If a person doesn’t want to be found, are they really missing?"

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Margie Profet's Unfinished Symphony -- 5

2009-05-11T11:23:00.004-07:00

Margie Profet’s vanishing was neither sudden nor particularly unexpected to Don Symons (left). Mentor, friend, and later, boyfriend, Symons was probably closer to Profet than anyone outside her family. She had, for years he told me, “suffered from serious psychological problems that she was adept at concealing, including when you knew her in Seattle.”

Considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, the study of the human mind as Darwinian adaptation, Symons lived with Profet for about 6 months of their six year relationship. It was 1990, and she was back at Harvard, this time as a graduate student in biological anthropology.

“I took a sabbatical and moved back with her to support her,” Symons told me. “Although the grad student part was a short-lived disaster, she did make a lot of headway on the allergy paper, she in one room writing, me in another editing.”

With a sobering tone, Symons draws a different picture of Profet than the one that emerged in the media, noting that she was mis-characterized as a “maverick,” and that her “innate scientific abilities” did more to rally the scientific establishment to her cause than turn it away.

“Margie was not an outcast, nor a lone voice in the wilderness,” he explains, pointing to her notable supporters. “Bruce Ames is surely one of the most respected biochemists of our time, and George Williams one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. And of course, winning a MacArthur grant testifies to the support she received from some well placed and established people.”

The scientific establishment may ultimately vindicate some of her theories too, Symons adds, ironic given what he calls “the criticisms of some establishment nutritionists.”

Williams and co-authors have since written that first-trimester food aversions function as Profet proposed. But in updating the idea for a modern woman's diet, they also allay the concerns of nutritionists who have argued that natural toxins in vegetables simply aren’t at high enough levels to threaten a fetus—or precipitate pregnancy sicknesses, as Profet surmised.

Modern-day food aversions are vestiges of evolution, they argue, remnants of a time when some foodstuffs did indeed possess a poisonous potential.

“Our forager ancestors ate wild plants that had higher levels of natural toxins than do the plants we eat,” Symons explains. “But growers today deliberately breed better-tasting, less bitter plants, selecting for low levels of natural toxins. In a modern environment, pregnancy may produce food aversions, but at toxin levels that aren’t high enough to threaten a developing embryo.”

On the shoulders of giants goes the adage, and the idea that Margie Profet’s work is still rising on broad shoulders lays to rest another myth about it. She stood on Symons’ shoulders too—he’s acknowledged in each of her major papers—but in press accounts he cedes the limelight and stays in the background.

Speaking of Margie with such honesty now seems a recognition that friendship demands truth, no matter how hard it may be to deliver. She is diminished by none of this, her friends and colleagues seem to be saying. We love and care for her just the same.

“I was honored to have helped Margie shape her ideas,” Symons told me. “No one has more respect and admiration for her amazingly creative intellect than I do.”

If you look carefully at it, a 1996 photograph in Scientific American captures some of the many contradictions in this remarkable woman. Perched like a cat in a soft, Earth-tone chair, legs folded tightly in her arms, Margie Profet is wearing her trademark running shorts and a heavy, fuzzy, brightly-colored sweater. It’s cold beyond the window behind her, where overcast skies crowd out the light and a chill Seattle drizzle sprinkles the glass.

I walked by Margie at the University of Washington every day for a year, even sat next to her in a physics class. Maybe we spoke a few times—I don’t recall. But I do remember the shorts—no matter how cold or wet or gray, always shorts, like—as Harvey Mansfield recalled to a reporter from 16 years earlier in the Massachusetts snow—like Margie Profet had just come in from her own sunny day at the beach.

Sun and clouds; coldness and warmth; knowledge and innocence; running shorts and heavy sweaters. Mansfield would later characterize the two sides of Margie as “an apparent case of schizophrenia.” Curled tightly into herself the last time he saw her on that lonely Cambridge street, she was exhausted and bowed, no match, finally, for the unrequited cloak that had hovered for so long over the person he knew.

“Margie was a wonderful, free spirit in the best, intellectual sense of the phrase—a charmer, and a beauty, too,” Mansfield says. “May God protect her, wherever she is.”

MORE ABOUT MARGIE PROFET

A Radical New View of the Role of Menstruation (New York Times)

Margie Profet: Evolutionary Theories for Everyday Life (Scientific American)

"School isn't my kind of thing" (Time)

A curse no more (People Magazine)

Are periods a protection against men? (New Scientist)

Margie Profet: Co-Evolution (Omni)

(Getty Image previews in accordance with non-commercial use terms and conditions.)

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Laser Accelerated Radiotherapy: Is It On Its Way to the Clinic?

2009-03-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

One of the newest candidates for delivering radiotherapy maybe largely unknown to the world of oncology.

Laser accelerated subatomic particles for the treatment of superficialtumors may afford the tissue-sparing precision of proton therapy—anotherfledgling technology—without the unwieldy size or cost."Though most clinicians have never heard of laser acceleratedradiotherapy, the technology is promising enough that we spentfour years investigating it," said Eric Horwitz, M.D., actingchairman and clinical director of the Fox Chase department ofradiation oncology.

Budget cuts have put the Fox Chase program on hold, but studiesin Europe, Japan, and elsewhere continue. In Germany, ChristophKeitel, Ph.D. led a group from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg that recently concluded severaltypes of laser beams could accelerate protons "to the energiesrequired for cancer therapy."

Read the story by Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Can Game Theory Explain Invasive Tumor Metabolism?

2009-02-25T08:17:00.000-08:00

Game theory, the discipline behind the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind and the science that predicts strategies andpayoffs in competitive scenarios, may explain how invasive cancercells gain the upper hand in certain metabolic scenarios.

For a report published in the December 2008 issue of Cell Proliferation,German researchers Andreas Deutsch, Ph.D., and Haralambos Hatzikirou, from the Dresden University of Technology, the Moffitt Cancer Center's David Basanta, Ph.D. and neurosurgeon Mathias Simon, M.D. studied how tumor cells compete in the survival game.

Read the story by Mike Martin for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

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