Penn State has lost an alumnus whose leadership and philanthropy have helped the University to become a pioneer in the life sciences. J. Lloyd Huck, the retired chairman of the board of pharmaceutical firm Merck & Company and a former chairman of Penn State's Board of Trustees, died in State College, Pa., this week at the age of 90. With his wife and fellow Class of 1943 member Dorothy Foehr Huck, he established endowments in fields ranging from molecular biology to nutrition, leading to the creation of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.

"Few institutions are fortunate enough to have such visionary advocates as Lloyd and Dottie Huck," said Penn State President Rodney Erickson. "Through Lloyd's decades of service to the University, he guided Penn State on an ambitious path, and through the Hucks' philanthropy, they have enabled our students and faculty to fulfill that ambition.

According to Penn State plant geneticist and molecular biologist Nina Fedoroff, "Genetically modified foods are as safe to eat as foods made from plants modified by more traditional methods of plant breeding. In fact, they are very probably safer, simply because they undergo testing that has never been required for food plants modified either by traditional breeding techniques or by mutagenesis, both of which can alter a plant's chemical composition.

Resistant Roaches

"These fly," says Annie Steed (entomology). She tilted the lid of a small plastic box containing hundreds of pale green Cuban cockroaches. Picking another box, she lifted the lid right off. "This is the German cockroach. It's one of the more common ones in the U.S." Steed is studying the cockroaches' resistance to chlorpyrifos, a nerve poison used as an insecticide. "We've found that German cockroaches can be highly resistant," says Steed.

This year, for the first time in its history, Penn State revoked a Ph.D. As Eva Pell, Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, reported to the Faculty Senate, "Last fall it came to our attention that a Penn State Ph.D. recipient had fabricated data associated with her dissertation." The case was investigated, following the University's policy on research ethics. The researcher admitted to fabricating ten base pairs of a DNA sequence.