|  Investigations
The noise knows
Scrutinizing differences in single-cell behavior,
Philippe Cluzel characterizes biology in terms of variation.
Just as a driver listening to the car radio gets
annoyed when static overpowers the music, biologists studying a
group of organisms may view “noise”—any variation
from the norm—as distracting. They often eliminate it by calculating
average behaviors. Not Philippe Cluzel, assistant professor of physics.
Noise matters to Cluzel because it provides insight into a system’s
design. Noise isn’t always a nuisance,” he says. Deviations
in E. coli bacteria, for example, carry information useful for understanding
the network that controls cell division and whose breakdown in higher
organisms can cause cancers. “Decisions on the single-cell
level are crucial for life or death,” he notes. “At
the beginning of the story, it’s a single-cell decision.”
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Practical public health
A self-described short, nerdy guy,
Harold Pollack wears oversize glasses, sports floppy, graying brown
hair, and looks at home in the groves of academe. He’s mild
mannered, and at a Friday afternoon appointment he speaks so softly
that it’s difficult to hear him over the Law School cafeteria’s
end-of-week hilarity. But the School of Social Service Administration
(SSA) associate professor doesn’t confine his research to
academic debates. His interests rest instead with the practical
interface between public health and poverty—his curriculum
vitae cites HIV and hepatitis prevention for intravenous drug users,
drug abuse among welfare recipients and pregnant women, and infant
mortality prevention as recent research topics.
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Woman as evangelical
In the 1760s, says Divinity School
associate professor Catherine Brekus, “literally hundreds
of people” flocked to the house of a poor Newport, Rhode Island,
schoolteacher named Sarah Osborn. What began as a small women’s
prayer group, Brekus notes, grew into a religious revival with events
more on the scale of modern-day rock concerts. Historians don’t
know exactly how the meetings reached such levels; at the time ministers
claimed that God had ordained them. But thanks to their popularity,
Osborn, an early evangelical, took on pop-star status in Newport
both as a powerful spiritual leader and as a committed Christian—in
the face of extreme adversity and although she was a woman.
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