Three years ago, at a scientific meeting, associate chemistry professor Ira Krull got an eye-opening look at bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease.

He learned how the fatal disease, transmittable to humans, had caused panic and economic chaos in Europe and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. Around the world, nearly 140 people have contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a cousin of mad cow, after eating contaminated beef; more cases are diagnosed every year.

Now, Krull and assistant chemistry professor Norman Chiu are in hot pursuit of an antemortem clinical test to detect chronic wasting disease, a variant of mad cow that affects deer and elk. Current tests for tissue spongiform diseases—characterized by the spongelike formations they cause in the brain—are effective only on slaughtered animals, because of the large amount of tissue needed to confirm a diagnosis.

Clearly. mad cow testing has taken on a new urgency since the first U.S. case was confirmed in Washington state last month. Back in May, the discovery of a diseased cow in Canada resulted in beef export bans that cost that country’s cattle industry an estimated $27 million a day.

There are those who believe all slaughtered animals should be tested. But testing is a highly political issue, believes Krull. The more cattle that are tested, the more likely some will be found to have the disease. And officials “don’t want to find it,” Krull said in an interview late last year, not long before the discovery of the U.S. case was announced. “You can’t imagine what would happen if it were found in live cattle in this country tomorrow. You can kiss your economy goodbye.”

Krull’s funding comes from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and McDonald’s Corporation, which are concerned about the current epidemic of chronic wasting disease among deer and elk in the western United States. Though there’s no proof the disease can jump to cattle and become mad cow, scientists suspect a link.

With proper funding, Krull guesses an antemortem mad cow test could be available in five years. But, he predicted in the interview, politics may slow things down. “It’s a mess,” he said. “But it’s something that absolutely needs to be done.”

Keeping an eye on terror

In the months following the September 11 terrorist attacks, racial profiling of Arab Americans escalated dramatically. Many found themselves singled out for questioning or security checks on the basis of their skin color, clothing, name, or religious beliefs.

But law professor Deborah Ramirez says racial profiling not only threatens civil liberties, it does nothing to stop terrorism. A better approach, she believes, would be for law enforcement agencies to form partnerships with the nation’s Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs, since they are likely to be the first to recognize unusual activity within their own communities.

To further this goal, Ramirez and project manager Sasha Cohen O’Connell are studying three cities with sizable Arab American populations—Boston, Los Angeles, and Dearborn, Michigan—to find examples of promising practices in the fight against terrorism. Ramirez plans to produce both a printed guide and a website detailing their findings.

In Dearborn, for example, after post-9/11 hate e-mails were received by an Arab American social services organization, authorities tracked the writer down in California and brought him to trial; his sentence was three days of community service at the organization he’d threatened.

“That was real follow-through,” O’Connell says, “and a creative solution.”

Birds in the hand

Why should Earth and Environmental Sciences chair Peter Rosen worry about shore birds?

For the past five years, Rosen has been helping the town of Duxbury protect piping plovers, endangered birds that nest on flat, exposed beaches. Along with colleagues at Boston University and Bridgewater State College, Rosen is monitoring Duxbury Beach, a barrier beach heavily used by sunbathers, fishermen, off-road vehicles—and piping plovers.

“The town of Duxbury aggressively manages the beach, and they’re committed to multiple uses,” Rosen explains. “We’ve been monitoring habitat, nests, nesting patterns, human and vehicular use of the beach.”

The scientists are also studying whether the birds can be enticed to nest in the beach’s more protected areas. Rosen has brought his expertise in shoreline geology to the task.

“Many people feel a wildlife biologist should take the lead in this,” Rosen says. “But we are experts in barrier beaches. So we are trying to understand how the beach works, what the birds need, and what level of impact they can sustain.”

Because their feathers were prized as decoration for women’s hats, the piping plover population nose-dived in the early 1900s.

“They’re so trusting, it’s very easy to catch them,” Rosen says. Keeping them safe today isn’t easy either, since their habitat is so heavily used. But protection is no laughing matter to Duxbury.

“They have a staff of endangered species officers, police officers in charge of protecting the birds, who drive up and down the beach, patrolling,” Rosen says. Rosen feels a bit sorry for the piping plovers.

“If the young chicks are stressed,” he says, “sometimes they just sit down and die.” The birds’ idea of camouflage can be a few broken shells or pebbles. Overall, he says, “the bird appears very poorly adapted to surviving.”