Biology

An Edgewood High School biology teacher whose science lessons include a biochemical ballet and a mock CSI episode, has been named Harford County Teacher of the Year. Christine Roland received the keys to a scarlet 2007 Nissan Altima to use for a year, a Dell laptop, a watch and gift certificates worth about $1,000 to local restaurants. Roland was given the honor at a banquet Thursday at the Bayou Restaurant. Students and colleagues praised Roland for making science relevant and enjoyable.

Karen Paris knew she was eating too much when she caught herself eating off her daughter's plate. "I had gotten into some really bad habits, and my portions were huge," she recalled. So she began a campaign to lose 25 pounds. There was no secret shortcut: She joined Weight Watchers, cut back on portions at every meal and took up aerobics and circuit training at the YMCA near her Catonsville home. Her weight has since fluctuated, but Paris, now 44 and paid to run weekly sessions for Weight Watchers members, has managed to keep it within 5 pounds of the goal she achieved back in 1995.

Not long ago, Harvard University professor Marc Hauser dropped in on his daughter Sofia's kindergarten class and presented the children with a moral dilemma. You must all keep your eyes closed for 30 seconds, he told them. If none of you raises your hand during that time, you will each get a sheet of stickers when it's over. But if one of you raises your hand, only that child will get all the stickers. The task brought immediate cries of protest, Hauser recalled. "But that's not fair!"

Sigmund Richard Suskind, a retired microbiologist who had been dean of arts and sciences at the Johns Hopkins University and the first ombudsman for its Homewood campus, died of cancer complications Dec. 5 at Chester River Hospital in Chestertown. The former Mount Washington resident was 80. Born and raised in New York City, he was the son of Seymour Suskind, an NBC Symphony Orchestra violinist who played for maestro Arturo Toscanini. Family members said the younger Mr. Suskind did not share his father's ability - although he appreciated music throughout his life.

Sealed in a small steel chamber at the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Tim Blades drilled a hole in a 1980s-era nerve gas artillery shell recovered in Iraq. Insurgents there used chemical shells at least once in an improvised explosive, and the Army wanted to determine how big a threat similar aging weapons posed. As the drill pierced the metal skin, something unexpected happened. A mix of sarin and cyclosarin, two super-toxic nerve agents, shot out, spraying yellow poisons inside a protective box, which began to leak.

Breckinridge L. Willcox, a retired Washington lawyer who served as Maryland's top federal prosecutor from 1986 to 1991, died yesterday morning at his wife's ranch in southern California after a battle with cancer. The Bethesda resident was 62. Former colleagues praised Mr. Willcox for his transformative impact on the U.S. attorney's office headquartered in Baltimore. They noted his creation of a cadre of career prosecutors inside the office while roughly doubling the size of his staff and extending its reach into the prosecution of savings-and-loan institutions as well as large-scale illegal drug organizations.

The year was 1997. Andrew Z. Fire, a 38-year-old Baltimore biologist, had just performed a neat trick that caused lowly roundworms to flick their genes on and off. It was the kind of fundamental discovery that delighted Fire and his colleagues at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Embryology in Homewood. He never dreamed it would one day earn him a Nobel Prize. But the trick - known as RNA interference - has since launched a new branch of biological research, spawning hundreds of scientific papers and potentially opening the door to new therapies for diseases ranging from cancer to macular degeneration.

If they miss this morning's introductory biology lecture, Johns Hopkins University students can still catch it this afternoon -- at the lacrosse field, on the light rail, even in bed. Or wherever they like, whenever they want, provided they have an iPod or some other digital music player. It's called course "podcasting" -- an amalgam of "iPod" and "broadcasting" -- and Hopkins is one of dozens of universities making classroom lectures almost instantly available on personal computers and hand-held media players, of which Apple Computer's iPod is the dominant brand.

Dr. Carl S. Weber, who had been a founding faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and taught biological sciences there for nearly four decades, died of lymphoma Sept. 20 at his Odenton home. He was 70. Dr. Weber was born in Hartford, Conn., the son of German immigrants, and raised in Milford, Conn., and Dallas. A musical prodigy, he was sent at age 13 to study at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. He earned a bachelor's degree in music from Southern Methodist University in 1957.

A flurry of new genetic and epidemiological studies is chipping away at a prized male myth: Sperm, it turns out, don't age as well as some men imagine. At least 20 exceedingly rare but potentially devastating genetic disorders, including dwarfism and other skeletal deformities, have now been linked to older fathers. Men who have families later in life also have a higher risk of fathering children with schizophrenia, studies show. And in the latest reality check, researchers reported last week that men over 40 are nearly six times as likely to have an autistic child as those under 30. "The conventional wisdom is clearly inaccurate: Men have as important a biological clock as women for having healthy babies," says Dr. Dolores Malaspina of Columbia University, one of several researchers of this "paternal age" effect.