Laboratories

LONG BEACH, Calif. - At Polytechnic High School, everyone wants a piece of Principal Shawn Ashley. They all also want a piece of Principal Gwen Mack. One minute, a teacher is complaining about kids loitering in the halls. The next, an aide is hauling in a boy caught in the girls' bathroom. Then a custodian is griping about co-workers. Ashley and Mack take it all in stride. Inside their office, with two gray cubicles and two names on the door, they divvy up a monster job usually heaped on the shoulders of a single principal.

Berkshire Laboratories Inc., the small Columbus, Ohio-based company that wants to locate a technology center employing 3,000 workers on a hill overlooking Port Deposit, could turn into something "very, very big" and should be aggressively pursued by the state, said a scientist familiar with the company. "We have seen their patents, and they are extraordinary," said Rustum Roy, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University, founder of the school's materials research laboratory and member of science and engineering academies in other nations.

Zenaida Evangelista, a medical laboratory manager, died of complications from cancer Saturday at her Cockeysville home. She was 60. Born in Manila, the Philippines, she earned a medical technology degree at the University of St. Tomas there before moving to the United States in 1964. She earned a master's degree from Michigan State University. She was a technical laboratory supervisor for the old North Charles Hospital, which was then affiliated with Wyman Park Medical Center. After running an independent medical laboratory in Lutherville, she became a lab manager at Georgetown University in Washington in 1992.

Baltimore police have begun patrolling the Inner Harbor and other local waterways in a new 27-foot powerboat and will soon be using high-tech surveillance cameras to keep watch on critical areas -- thanks to $1.3 million in federal grants, officials said yesterday. The new tools will help head off potential terrorists and prevent other crimes, police officials said. "This will help guard our critical infrastructure," said Kristen Mahoney, director of grants and government relations for city police.

J. Mehsen Joseph, who served as Laboratories Administration director for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene since 1977, died Wednesday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson of complications from diabetes. He was 74 and had worked at the department for 46 years. Born in Whitesville, W.Va., Dr. Joseph was the first in his family to attend college. His parents were Lebanese immigrants. At age 20, after graduating from West Virginia University in three years, he went on to Columbia University for his master's degree.

Bill Koppes has an idea that may produce more entertaining Fourth of July celebrations - a molecule that could eliminate the heavy smoke that sometimes obscures brilliant fireworks displays. A summer evening filled with Ohhhs and Ahhhhs is a long way from the laboratory cluttered with beakers and bottles of chemicals where Koppes works at the Indian Head division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Charles County. Defense researchers in Maryland and state officials are hoping to bridge that gap. They are trying to use Koppes' idea and others developed in the 57 federal research laboratories located across Maryland to spark increased commercial payoffs in the state from all of that research.

MOSUL, Iraq - U.S. troops secured yesterday what appears to be a mobile weapons laboratory, the second such find in a month, in their search for weapons of mass destruction produced by the regime of Saddam Hussein. The lab, found on the grounds of the Al Kindi rocket factory, was built within the confines of a large truck, complete with compressors, incubator tanks, distillery equipment and a large drier. The truck went unnoticed for weeks as troops guarded the facility and was examined only after the Pentagon released photographs this week of another suspected lab, when investigators noted similarities.

Nearly five months after receiving a $10 million grant, Morgan State University has forged ahead with plans for an interdisciplinary center focusing on biomedical research that officials say will establish the university's place in that field. The center will "bring attention to Morgan ... [and] it will really be able to attract a better quality of graduate students," said Annie Williams, program manager for the Morgan State University Biomedical Research Center. The grant, from the National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources, will fund three laboratories and nine research projects and provide scholarships for three students during the next five years.

Amalie Kriss, a retired laboratory technician and former Northwest Baltimore resident, died of sepsis Monday at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville. She was 92. Born Amalie Schlamowicz in Cernovitz, Austria-Hungary, she was raised and educated in Vienna. She was married in 1937 to Dr. Richard Kriss, and two years later the couple fled the Nazi occupation of Austria and settled in Shanghai for 10 years. Her husband died in Paris in 1949. In 1950, Mrs. Kriss and her young daughter immigrated to Baltimore, where she went to work in the fur department of the downtown Hutzler's department store.

Tim Mullady peers into a microscope in a darkened room at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater. He is counting cells from a sample of ballast water taken from a ship, looking for Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause human cholera -- and sometimes is discharged from that ballast into local waters along with scores of other "foreign" organisms. Mullady is part of the Marine Invasion Research Laboratory, which provides information from the forefront of the research community to the Coast Guard and Congress.