Stanford Report, Mar. 10, 2004

FIVE YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, the accumulated papers of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights opinion, were made public last week. National Public Radio reported on the inner workings of the court as revealed in the mountain of files and 38 hours of oral history recorded by Blackmun. PAMELA KARLAN, who clerked for Blackmun when he was a justice, told National Public Radio and "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" March 5 that Blackmun was a champion of demystifying the Supreme Court and made it possible for people to understand how it operated during a critical period of U.S. history. "Garrison Keillor used to refer to Harry Blackmun as 'the shy person's justice,'" said Karlan, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Law. But "his oral history tapes and his decision to leave his papers to the public showed another side."

THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS and the San Francisco Chronicle reported March 3 on the first unmistakable evidence discovered by the NASA robot Opportunity that some rocks on Mars were once sopping wet, creating an environment that could have supported life. "I would call it a landmark discovery," said planetary scientist CHRISTOPHER CHYBA, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. "It's one thing to have models and photographic evidence; it's another to have direct evidence from the surface for liquid water." Chyba suggested that the tiny crater where Opportunity found the evidence for ancient water in its rocks could be an ideal place for a mission specifically designed to hunt for evidence of fossil life. Few scientists, if any, believe the claims of the NASA science team that in 1996 announced the discovery of a fossil microbe in a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth in Antarctica, Chyba noted. Fossils, even on Earth, are rare indeed.

IN A MARCH 5 ARTICLE ON THE growing use of humor in medical treatment, WILLIAM FRY, clinical associate professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, told the San Francisco Chronicle that laughter can help physically as well as emotionally. Not only does it exercise the lungs and heart, he said, it raises endorphins, the body's feel-good hormones. Fry, who has been lecturing on the topic in the United States and abroad for more than 30 years, said he's seeing humor therapy being embraced by more hospitals and businesses than ever before. "It has been shown to help patients in terms of speed of recovery as well as psychologically," Fry said. "The field is continually expanding in an environment of acceptance."