University Of Pennsylvania

Horse racing fans talk about their sport not having a Triple Crown winner in nearly 35 years much the way baseball fans lament the fact that their favorite game has gone more than twice as long without a .400 hitter. Undoubtedly, in the days leading up to the 138th Preakness at Pimlico Race Course on Saturday, there will plenty of discussion about Orb's chances to repeat what he did at the Kentucky Derby and, if victorious in Baltimore, what he might do next month in New York at the Belmont Stakes.

On paper, Lisa Scottoline is a little intimidating. She's got more than 30 million copies in print of her books, including 20 best-selling novels. She writes a weekly column, with her daughter, for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She's a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and taught a class at the latter called "Justice and Fiction. " But ask her about any connections she might have to Baltimore, where she'll be visiting May 20 as a featured author in the Baltimore Sun Book Club, and you'll quickly discover her self-deprecating sense of humor.

PHILADELPHIA -- The truth of the past can disappear as easily under a blanket of assumptions as under the dust and debris that accumulates in the physical world.What sort of pots did a group of people cook in? What did their homes look like? What were their stories, their beliefs? The realities of life as it was lived can become a stew of historical tidbits, misconstrued truths, and outright-imagined facts.Robert L. Schuyler, a teacher and archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was among the first in his field to become interested in the real experiences of early African-Americans.

PHILADELPHIA - University of Pennsylvania scientists are growing a garden full of weeds, tending them with the kind of loving care usually reserved for prize begonias.The weeds are part of a $12 million research project designed to identify every gene in the cells of the plant arabidopsis, much the way the $3 billion human genome project will map the genes in human cells.Researchers say this plant genome project, headed by Penn biologist Joseph Ecker, will hand humankind new power to alter the plant kingdom at will, creating strains of wheat and other grains that can grow in the desert or resist drought; tomatoes whose ripening can be orchestrated so they hold up during shipping but turn juicy and ripe on supermarket shelves; roses that don't wilt for weeks; bizarre new plants that produce plastic or other chemicals; and even plants that soak up toxic waste.

Dr. Duane Anthony Sewell, a highly regarded head and neck surgeon and researcher who was also a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, died Nov. 26 of gastric cancer at his Mount Washington home. Dr. Sewell was 44. "I can't think of anybody who better exemplified what it means to be a physician than Duane Sewell. He combined excellent surgical and research skills, and making his patients extraordinarily comfortable," said Dr. Kevin Cullen, director of the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center.

PHILADELPHIA - As night cloaked the chilly school grounds recently, Mike Faust strolled "The Quad" - the University of Pennsylvania's dorm area for freshmen - with the casual ease of a big man on campus. The 5-foot-10, 235-pound wrestler and football player was recognized by nearly every person he passed. Four young women playfully greeted him. Javier Starkand, the teacher's assistant from Faust's first-semester business management class, declared himself a "Mike Faust fan," calling his former student "the man who carried the study group" and "its key leader, without a doubt."

Times are good these days at the Linde Corp., where despite a sluggish economy nationally, the company is on a hiring binge. The construction company, based near Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania, has seen its workforce nearly triple over the past five years as it switched from helping to build big-box stores to laying miles of natural gas pipelines connecting hundreds of gas wells drilled in the rolling rural terrain here in Susquehanna County....

PHILADELPHIA -- It was 1951 when the father of Retin-A first came to Holmesburg Prison.The 1,200 inmates of Philadelphia's gloomiest jail were plagued by an outbreak of athlete's foot, and the prison pharamacist had asked Dr. Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist, to take a look.Imagine the researcher's thrill as he stepped into the aging prison, hundreds of men milling around."All I saw before me were acres of skin," Kligman told a newspaper reporter in 1966. "It was like a farmer seeing a field for the first time."

Robert Jeffrey Forbes, an artist who used the name Peter Keating to sign his works of farm buildings and landscapes, died of a heart attack Nov. 18 at his home in Campbellsville, Ky. The former Reisterstown resident was 57. Born in Baltimore and raised in Reisterstown, he was a 1967 McDonogh School graduate. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and the Maryland Institute College of Art. "He always loved nature. He loved Maryland, the cloudy weather and cool, damp days," said his mother, Helen McKee Forbes of Glyndon.