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NEW CANCER CLINIC It won't be completed until 1999, but ground-breaking began in July for the new UCSF Clinical Cancer Center at the UC-San Francisco/Mount Zion Medical Center. It will house the cancer care programs of UCSF Stanford Health Care, which formed when UCSF and Stanford medical centers merged in November. The five-story, 88,000-square-foot building at 1600 Divisadero in San Francisco will include a radiation therapy center, mammography and chemotherapy units, and a breast care center. One goal for the center is to become a designated National Cancer Institute center in order to receive additional grants from the institute. SLAC HACKERS Hackers infiltrated the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's computer system early in June, causing the facility to shut down for almost a week and preventing its more than 1,700 research associates worldwide from connecting with the center's computer. SLAC conducts basic, non-classified research on atomic and subatomic physics. As a result of the breach, which caused delays in many projects but no serious problems, officials are rethinking the center's standing as an open scientific research facility.
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DINO DROPPINGS Dinosaur dung is helping scientists get the poop on Tyrannosaurus rex and his eating habits from 65 million years ago. Researchers found a fossilized T. rex dropping in Canada's Saskatchewan province, according to a June report in the British scientific journal Nature. It is perhaps the largest sample ever found from a carnivorous dinosaur, and the pulverized bone fragments in it may prove that T. rex chomped the bones of its prey instead of gulping prey down in big chunks. "T. rex couldn't chew as people do because its upper and lower teeth didn't meet each other,'' said Gregory Erickson of Stanford, a member of the scientific team reporting on the find. "But those powerful teeth might have still pulverized bone as they sheared past each other.''
HEALTHFUL HABITS A study by Stanford researchers has found that middle-age people who watch their weight, exercise and don't smoke not only live longer, but have fewer years of sickness and dependence on others when they get old. Published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study is the first to confirm the theories of co-author Dr. James Fries, professor of medicine, who ignited a debate 18 years ago when he challenged the common belief that those who live longer end up sicker and frailer than
those who die young.
