Jo Noero to design Apartheid Museum

Architecture Professor Jo Noero's winning designs for the new Apartheid Museum in South Africa draw on notions of memory, showing both the horrors of institutionalized racism and the heroic efforts of the anti-apartheid movement in sharp relief. Noero's first-place designs were selected from 151 entries in a competition sponsored by the City of Port Elizabeth, New Brighton.

"The museum seeks to remember the past in ways that are both familiar and frightening," said Noero, whose designs will help transform the site of a shack settlement into a museum complex. "One of the horrors of apartheid was the sense of normalcy -- the ability of its perpetrators to shut out from memory the ghastly consequences of institutionalized racism. And yet, at the same time, the sense of impending terror in the country was undeniable."

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Henry Schwartz dies at 89

Schwartz was one of this century's most influential figures in his field. "He trained more leaders of academic neurosurgery than any other person in the United States during the past 40 years," said Ralph G. Dacey Jr., M.D., the Edith R. and Henry G. Schwartz Professor and head of neurological surgery. "He also was one of a small number of neurosurgeons who established the principle of applying the most recent discoveries in brain science to the care of patients with neurosurgical illnesses."

Schwartz chaired the Department of Neurological Surgery from 1946 to 1974, and the training program he established attracted some of the finest talent in the nation.

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Papal visit

Pope John Paul II will not be seen at the University during his papal visit, but Hilltop and Medical Campus officials are seeing to it that faculty, staff and students will have ample parking and access to our facilities.

Contrary to reports in the local media, the welcome parade Jan. 26 will not begin at the University.

"There is no time that the pope and his motorcade will be on Washington University grounds," said Steve Hoffner, assistant vice chancellor for students and director of operations. "The public parade route will begin several hundred feet east of Skinker on Lindell. People who want to see the pope need to go to Forest Park along Lindell. Everything up to that point will be a high-speed motorcade. If people come to the University to see the Pope, they're doing themselves a disservice because they won't see him."

While spectators need to head east of the campus for a view of the pontiff, faculty, staff and students entering campus will be directed to access points along Forsyth Boulevard and Forest Park Parkway, where permits will be checked.

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Early birds

Collaborators here and in England have obtained the first set of instructions for making an animal by determining the order of the 97 million genetic letters in a worm's DNA. The achievement was reported in the Dec. 11 issue of the journal Science. The announcement, at a press conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., sparked worldwide media interest and coverage.

"This is a watershed event in the history of biology," said Harold Varmus, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health. "Unveiling this blueprint is giving us the first picture of what it is like to understand a multicellular, complex organism."

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Sastry installed as Byrnes Professor of Engineering

Shankar M.L. Sastry, Ph.D., professor of metallurgy and materials science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was installed as the first Catherine M. and Christopher I. Byrnes Professor of Engineering Dec. 8 at a ceremony in Holmes Lounge.

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