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Historians label the 1844 presidential election as pivotal, heightening political and sectional tensions. Abolitionist third-party candidate James Birney was a viable alternative for antislavery voters in a campaign that featured two slaveholders. This study of antislavery newspapers during that campaign concludes that although the antislavery press claimed to be singularly focused on abolition, its editors were distracted by the election and mirrored the partisan press of that era in their treatment of the various candidates. Furthermore, Liberty Party editors and their Garrisonian counterparts addressed each other with the same level of disdain that they directed at the Whigs and Democrats.

The area of plant and animal genomics covers the entire suite of issues in biology because it aims to determine the structure and function of genetic material. Although specific issues define research advances at an organism level, it is evident that many of the fundamental features of genome structure and the translation of encoded information to function share common ground. The Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) conference held in San Diego (California), in January each year provides an overview across all organisms at the genome level, and often it is evident that investments in the human area provide leadership, applications, and discoveries for researchers studying other organisms. This mini-review utilizes the plenary lectures as a basis for summarizing the trends in the genome-level studies of organisms, and the lectures include presentations by Ewan Birney (EBI, UK), Eric Green (NIH, USA), John Butler (NIST, USA), Elaine Mardis (Washington, USA), Caroline Dean (John Innes Centre, UK), Trudy Mackay (NC State University, USA), Sue Wessler (UC Riverside, USA), and Patrick Wincker (Genoscope, France). The work reviewed is based on published papers. Where unpublished information is cited, permission to include the information in this manuscript was obtained from the presenters.

The Municipal Limits of Slavery Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. By James Oakes. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Pp. xxviii, 595, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $27.95.)Freedom National offers a sweeping synthesis of what historians have come to call the abolitionist narrative of the American Civil War.1 James Oakes takes the title for his book from a speech delivered on the floor of the United States Senate in August 1852 by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner sought the repeal of the federal Fugitive Slave Act that had been passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850. His "Freedom National" speech expressed at length what had emerged over the previous decade as an antislavery historical analysis of the constitutional relationship between slavery in the Southern states and the authority of the federal government. It is the central thesis of Oakes' work that the Freedom National doctrine insured a wartime progression toward universal emancipation and citizenship rights for former slaves.Oakes'thesis is particularly important as it relates to Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to recruit black troops. "Like most historians," writes Oakes," I have always believed that the purpose of the war shifted 'from Union to emancipation,' but over the course of my research that familiar transition vanished like dust in the wind, and I have been unable to recover it"(p. xxiii). War Democrats experienced a profound shift as their willingness to support a war to preserve the Union advanced a Republican war to free the slaves. But for Republicans, Oakes insists, the pursuit of emancipation and citizenship rights directly fulfilled the promise of the Freedom National doctrine.Oakes draws on an extensive secondary literature and on published primary sources to locate the origins and trace the antebellum development of the Freedom National doctrine. By the time Sumner delivered his 1852 speech, the doctrine had been elaborated upon by antislavery politicians for more than a decade. Its principal architect was Salmon P. Chase, a leading figure in antislaveiy politics who served as Lincoln's Treasury Secretary during the Civil War and replaced Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1864. Chase presented his first extended exposition of the Freedom National doctrine in his 1837 defense of a fugitive slave named Matilda. At the time, Chase was a young lawyer who had moved west from his native New Hampshire, to settle in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the Matilda Case, Chase defended the fugitive and her abolitionist benefactor, James G. Bimey. Bimey had been a slave owner in Alabama before embracing the abolitionist cause and moving to Cincinnati during the first wave of antislavery agitation following the formation of the American Antislavery Society in 1833. When Birney gave Matilda employment in his home he did so as the prominent editor of the Cincinnati Philanthropist. Chase defended Matilda and Birney: the former from being returned to slavery and the latter from charges that he harbored a fugitive in violation of Ohio's fugitive slave law.At the core of Chase's defense of Matilda and Bimey was the insistence that the federal Constitution neither sanctioned slavery nor recognized the right to hold properly in persons. Chase conceded that the fugitive clause of the Constitution dealt with the relationship between master and servants, but it had nothing to do with property in persons. The fugitive clause referred to a "Person held to Service or Labour," not to property in slaves. Chase conceded as well that the Constitution did not prohibit slavery in the original states. But, by offering slavery no specific recognition, the national compact left the institution as the drafters found it, confined to the existing slave states where municipal laws enforced the right to hold property in persons. …

By the 1844 presidential election, the United States was fully entrenched in a national two-party system that pitted Whigs against Democrats. Meanwhile, American newspapers were predominantly partisan organs that promoted their respective parties while attacking their opponents. Some special interest publications advocated for causes such as abolition. James G. Birney, a slaveholder turned abolitionist, entered the 1844 race as a third-party candidate. This article studied coverage of his race in Democratic, Whig, and Liberty papers from New York, Kentucky, Alabama, and Ohio to determine whether abolitionist newspapers acted as a party press as well as how the two major parties' newspapers treated the outsider. The two abolitionist journals became partisan organs for the Liberty candidate, advocating Birney and his platform while attacking the enemy. In the Democratic and Whig papers, coverage of the Liberty campaign consisted of linking Birney to the opposing party through rampant accusations of coalitions and forgeries.Revolving primarily around the issue of whether Texas-a slaveholding territory-should be annexed to the Union, the presidential election of 1844 is said to have brought sectional interests to the forefront of American politics, erasing partisan boundaries in the South, rendering southern Whigs nearly extinct, and pitting northern Democrats against their southern counterparts. Worthington Ford proclaims that the election's result was "a division between North and South which could only be healed in blood."1 James G. Birney entered this pivotal race on behalf of the Liberty Party, a third party with the solitary goal of abolishing slavery.Not only was the nation firmly ensconced in two-party politics by the 1844 election but so were the nation's newspapers.2 Historians demonstrate that even in the penny press, which originated in the 1830s, financial independence from political parties did not always translate into political impartiality.' Hazel Dicken-Garcia argues, "Early American conditions entrenched a political role for the press and established a pattern" that continued through the end of the nineteenth century.4 This pattern involved widespread propaganda through the respective parties' media networks, promoting the candidates and pet issues of one party while disparaging the opposing party. Jeff Rutenbeck declares, however, "While political partisanship in the two-party system dominated the ideological realm in which newspapers operated during this period, abolitionism must be considered as a special case of partisanship in action."''By 1844, the abolitionists had their own newspapers throughout the North. David Nord asserts that some abolitionist papers carried out Alexis de Tocqueville's vision of newspapers that served a democratic purpose, allowing interest groups to champion their opinions in public debate over political and social issues/' As a group, though, they hardly were as unified as the press networks of the Whigs and Democrats. Ford Risley notes that the abolitionist editors, who disagreed on the movement's goals and tactics, "sometimes seemed to spend as much time battling one another as they did battling slavery."7 Nonetheless, he points out that some did support the Liberty Party during the presidential election in 1840.8This article explores newspaper coverage of Birney's 1844 presidential campaign with the aim of discovering how the established partisan newspapers treated the third-party candidate as well as whether the abolitionist press transformed itself into a party organ at election time.Born in 1792 to affluent Protestant Irish immigrants in Kentucky, Birney grew up in a family that paradoxically believed slavery to be immoral but owned several slaves. James Birney Sr. argued that slavery was an unavoidable fact of life; owners merely had a duty to protect their slave property and treat their slaves humanely until they could be emancipated. Birney's mentor at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) reinforced these views. …

This chapter explores the responses of British free traders to American protectionism in the antebellum period. Then, it examines the use of American protectionism as a propaganda tool to demonstrate the ruinous consequences of maintaining protective duties on American raw materials, particularly corn. American protectionism posed a dilemma for those whose promotion of free trade was accompanied by a belief in the benefits of democracy. According to the theories of Adam Smith, protection benefited a small number of producers but was inimical to the needs of the mass of consumers: for a supposedly democratic government to sacrifice the well-being of the greater part of its citizens in this way therefore required explanation. In 1840 American abolitionist James Gillespie Birney, with the support of Joshua Leavitt, editor of the influential New York Emancipator, founded the Liberty Party to campaign against slavery from within the political system.

One of the most consistent strains in Civil War historiography has been the argument that sectional crises over slavery's westward expansion had more to do with bringing on the conflict than protective tariffs, Northern resistance to returning fugitive slaves, and other issues dividing Northerners and South- erners in the antebellum decades. If Southerners wanted out of the Union in 1860-61 after Lincoln's election as president, it was primarily because of the determination of Lincoln and his Republican Party to prevent slavery from expanding. Neither Lincoln in his speeches, nor his party in its platforms, advocated, prior to the war, that the U.S. government abolish slavery in states where it already existed. Countless scholars, in making their case for the pri- macy of slavery expansion, make the obligatory allusion to Thomas Jefferson's foreboding, in the midst of the Missouri struggle of 1820, that the question of slavery's expansion would ultimately spell the "knell of the Union." The matter disturbed Jefferson "like a fire bell in the night" because he sensed that acquisitions of territory in the future would render that year's settle- ment, which divided remaining territory in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery and freedom at the 36o30' parallel, was impermanent. Sooner or later the disposition of other territory would kill the Union. 1 Straddling the boundary between popular history and original scholarship, Steven E. Woodworth's Manifest Destinies argues convincingly that prior to the Texas annexation crisis of the mid-1840s, the problem of slavery within a democratic republic, though disruptive, was contained by America's political party system, which superseded the nation's geographical divisions. That is, the country's most important political disagreements were partisan rather than regional and focused on economic issues like banking rather than the moral- ity of slavery. In 1840, the abolitionist Liberty Party's presidential candidate, James G. Birney, mustered a pitiful 7,069 votes—about one quarter of a percent of the electorate. However, once the nationalist president John Tyler's South- ern sectionalist secretaries of state—the Virginian Abel P. Upshur and South

The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor withNew York City Public Schools (BOP-CCERS)(NSF DRL 1440869/PI Lauren Birney) program is a National ScienceFoundation (NSF) supported initiative through collaboration by multiple institutions and organizations led by PaceUniversity. Partners on this initiatitve include Columbia Lamont Doherty, the New York Aquairum, the New YorkHarbor Foundation, the New York Academy of Sciences, the River Project, Good Shepher Services, SmartstartEvaluation and Research, the University Maryland Center for Environmental Science and Fearless Solutions. Inthis study, teachers from one cohort were paired with teachers from a succeeding cohort in order to facilitate amentoring process between the two cohorts. This allows for teacher ambassardors to have a support structurethroughout the program, seek integral feedback, modify teaching techniques, integrate project research and establishlong term partnerships within the project team.

Focusing on the narrative theme of the ideal-body-now-flawed, the essay reads two early-twentieth-century poems through contemporary disability theory. It examines the context, formal devices, and histories of the poems by Wilfred Owen and Earle Birney, considering how they 'suture' so easily to narratives whose focus is a presentation of the 'incurable' body.

The deaths of Earle Birney and Robertson Davies late in 1995 reminded readers of Canadian literature that the old order—those writers born before the First World War—was quickly passing. Of the major figures born in the early years of this century (Birney, Davies, Callaghan, MacLennan, Ross), only Ross was still living at the beginning of 1996, albeit in very poor health in a nursing home in Vancouver. http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2003n45p31The deaths of Earle Birney and Robertson Davies late in 1995 reminded readers of Canadian literature that the old order—those writers born before the First World War—was quickly passing. Of the major figures born in the early years of this century (Birney, Davies, Callaghan, MacLennan, Ross), only Ross was still living at the beginning of 1996, albeit in very poor health in a nursing home in Vancouver.

A self-taught programmer turned bioinformatician at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Ewan Birney has used his gift of gab to pull together 442 researchers to characterize not just the genes but also all the functional elements in the human genome. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project this week published 30 scientific papers that begin to fill in the details of DNA9s role in making life possible (see p. 1159). Birney was in charge of data analysis, and, along with his right-hand man, EBI9s Ian Dunham, he coordinated the setting of quality standards, the development of consistent protocols, and the planning of the publications as well as developing new ways to look at data.

To be successful, consortia need clear management, codes of conduct and participants who are committed to working for the common good, says ENCODE lead analysis coordinator Ewan Birney.

At first glance, Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage and Earle Birney’s Down the Long Table certainly share many easily identifiable similarities: characteristic of social realist works, both are without disguise set in the Hungry 1930s, though the latter was published 16 years later than the former; each is highly referential in its unmistakable connections or associations with the city of Vancouver and its suburban area. Also, the two novels are closely concerned with the relationships between the embittered and embittered individuals and a society gone madly wrong in more ways than one. Furthermore, they squarely deal with protagonists who take an active part in the most turbulent and violent sociopolitical activities of the times—in fact, nothing short of revolutions. Finally, they both dramatize several equally tragic deaths directly resulting from the revolutions, revolutions which, as the introductory quotation indicates, Leon Trotsky has soberly and, alas, cold-bloodedly prophesied. Indeed, the list of resemblances can further multiply.

This paper is about “Mappemounde,” a beautiful but difficult poem composed in 1945 by the esteemed Canadian poet Earle Birney. While exploring the reasons for its composition, we examine the poem’s debts to Old and Middle English poetry as well as to medieval world maps known as mappaemundi, especially those made in England prior to 1400. But Birney took only so much from these maps. In search of more elusive inspirations, both cartographic and otherwise, we uncover other sources: Anglo-Saxon poems never before associated with “Mappemounde,” maps from the Age of Discovery and beyond, concealed details of Birney’s personal life. Then we trace Birney’s long-standing interest in geography and exploration to show how he used maps, especially mappaemundi, as visual metaphors for his intellectual, spiritual, and personal life.

This paper elicits a twentieth-century American story that is deeply rooted in the legacy of American philosophical pragmatism, its impact on a particular school, and its reconstruction of American theology. The paper focuses on three generations of American theologians, and it centers on how these theologians reconstruct theology in light of the science of their day and how they maintain a true plurality of insights about human life in the world. The pragmatic theologian regards the creative exchange between theology and natural science as an opportunity for renewing our understanding of religious life and appreciating the various commitments of scientists and theologians as they meet at the juncture of human interests. The first voice is that of the early Chicago School of Theology represented by Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and George Burman Foster. The second voice is that of Henry Nelson Wieman, a second-generation theologian at Chicago. The final theologian discussed is James M. Gustafson, former Professor of Theological Ethics at Chicago.

On 11 June 2000, Dr. Elmer C. Birney unexpectedly passed away from cardiac arrest suffered while outside caring for his cattle at his home in Blaine, Minnesota. One of his former students, Robert Timm, probably best expressed the immediate reaction of his family and many friends: “He was too young and in too good of health to be gone so soon.” At the time of his death, Elmer was Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, the Curator of Mammals at the Bell Museum of Natural History, and Director of Graduate Studies of the program in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. Dr. Birney was born 26 March 1940 in Satanta, Haskell County, Kansas, to Russell and Esther Birney. He had 2 sisters—Letty Gay and Lorna Ann. Elmer married Marcia F. McVey on 5 August 1961 in Culver City, California. They had 2 children, Amy and Clayton, and 2 grandchildren, Aaron and Danielle. Elmer's family described its feeling about him in the obituary that appeared in Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “He was a great husband, father, grandfather, friend, University of Minnesota Professor, and hobby farmer who loved his life.” Dr. Birney attended the public schools of Sublette and Satanta, Kansas, and he graduated from Satanta Rural High School in May 1958. Elmer enjoyed athletics and played both football and basketball throughout high school as well as participating in the junior class play. His high school graduation motto really did set the tone for the remainder of his life: “The men who roll up their sleeves never lose their shirts.” Although he was never truly passionate about professional sports, he still knowledgeably followed his favorite teams, and he and his wife played in an adult volleyball league. Elmer had a competitive streak that …

(2000). James Gillespie Birney, the Revival Spirit, and The Philanthropist. American Journalism: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 31-51.

DAVIES, M. B., J. AUSTIN, AND D. A. PARTRIDGE. 1991. Vitamin C: Its chemistry and biochemistry. Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, United Kingdom. DIAMOND, J. M. 1986. Why do disused proteins become genetically lost or repressed? Nature 351: 565-566. ELLIOT, O., N. J. YESS, AND D. M. HEGSTED. 1966. Biosynthesis of ascorbic acid in the tree shrew and the slow loris. Nature 212:739-740. ENGLARD, S., AND S. SEIFTER. 1986. The biochemical functions of ascorbic acid. Annual Review of Nutrition 6:365-406. FITCH, W. M. 1971. Towards defining the course of evolution: minimal change for a specific tree topology. Systematic Zoology 20:406-416. HANSSEN, K., H. J. GRAV, J. B. STEEN, AND H. LYSNES. 1979. Vitamin C deficiency in growing Willow Ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus lagopus). Journal of Nutrition 109:2260-2278. HORNIG, D. 1975. Distribution of ascorbic acid, metabolites and analogues in man and animals. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 258: 103-118. JACOB, R. A. 1994. Vitamin C. Pages 432-448 in Modern nutrition in health and disease, vol. 1 (M. E. Shils, J. A. Olson, and M. Shike, Eds.). Lea and Febinger, New York. JENNESS, R., E. C. BIRNEY, AND K. L. AYAZ. 1980. Variation of L-gulonolactone oxidase activity in placental mammals. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 67B:195-204. MADDISON, W. P., AND D. R. MADDISON. 1992. MacClade (version 3): Analysis of phylogeny and character evolution. Sinauer Associates, Boston. PAULING, L. 1970. Vitamin C and the common cold. W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco. PIANKA, E. R. 1994. Evolutionary ecology. Harper Collins, New York. POLLOCK, J. I., AND R. J. MULLIN. 1987. Vitamin C biosynthesis in prosimians: Evidence for the anthropoid affinity of Tarsius. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 73:65-70. ROBBINS, C. T. 1993. Wildlife feeding and nutrition. Academic Press, San Diego, California. SIBLEY, C. G., AND J. E. AHLQUIST. 1990. Phylogeny and classification of birds: A study in molecular evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. SIBLEY, C. G., AND B. L. MONROE, JR. 1990. Distribution and taxonomy of birds of the world. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Visiting museums is a common leisure time activity in America.(1) A recent American Association of Museums report (1992) estimated that 565.8 million people visited museums in 1988. Some people visit museum-like settings frequently (4 or more times per year); many people visit occasionally (once or twice per year); and many others not at all (Gudykunst, Morra, Kantor & Parker, 1981; Hood, 1983; Pollock, Finn, Garfield, Snyder & Pfenning, 1983; Balling & Cornell, 1985; Robinson, Keegan, Karth & Triplett, 1986; DiMaggio & Ostrower, 1990). A number of studies suggest that most African Americans fall into one of the two latter groups (Robinson, et al., 1986; DiMaggio & Ostrower, 1990; Birney, 1990; Doering & Black, 1989; ASTC-AAAS, 1987; American Museum of Natural History, 1977, 1986; Kaplan & Talbot, 1988; Bickford, Doering & Smith, 1992; Horn & Finney, 1994). This study represented an effort to better understand the factors that influence African American use or non-use of museums as leisure resources.Factors Influencing Museum Going BehaviorNumerous settings for leisure exist and these are perceived by the public as affording a range of non-equivalent benefits. Four major factors can be defined which contribute to museum going being selected as a leisure time experience by the public: socio-economic; institutional; cultural/ethnic and regional.Socio-Economic FactorsGudykunst, Morra, Kantor & Parker (1981) determined that museum going appealed to those individuals seeking a "cultural or intellectual" orientation in a leisure setting; an orientation strongly associated with higher levels of education and occupation. Several investigators have linked leisure activities to social and educational class (e.g., Mather, 1941; Clarke, 1956; Cicchetti, 1972; Cunningham, Montoye, Metzner & Kelly, 1970; Dixon, Courtney & Bailey, 1974; Burdge, 1969; DiMaggio & Ostrower, 1990). Studies at a variety of museums have determined that museum visitors were of higher than average education and income level (Cheek, et al, 1976; Balling & Cornell, 1985; Hood, 1988; Doering & Fronville, 1988; Doering & Black, 1989; Bickford, Doering & Smith, 1992). The 1985 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (Robinson, et al., 1986) found strong correlations between art museum attendance and education and income -- the higher the education and income, the greater the level of visitation.There are data, though, that tend to suggest education and income may not be the only factors at work. Marketing research carried out by American Visions magazine showed that well educated, affluent African Americans were less likely than comparably educated and affluent white Americans to support cultural activities (Puckrein, 1991). A number of leisure researchers have openly disputed the importance of socio-economic variables in influencing leisure behavior (Kelly, 1974; 1978; Edwards, 1981).Institutional FactorsMuseums are not passive institutions; their actions and the public's perceptions of those actions, influence who visits and who does not visit. At the most basic level, museums contain differing types of information and objects; zoos afford different learning opportunities than art museums and hence attract or repel different types of visitors (cf., Falk & Dierking, 1992; Falk, 1993). Less obvious though, is the fact that historical and present day institutional policies, including such seemingly benign policies as operating hours and pricing and such not-so-benign policies as (historical) segregation and exclusion, overtly or covertly influence who visits (West, 1989; Wicks & Crompton, 1990; Jones, 1983). In some cases, it is not necessarily the institution itself, but the neighborhood in which the museum is located which influences utilization (T. Washington, personal communication, April 1991).Another critical "institutional" variable determining museum visitation is how individuals learn about the institution. …

It may be, that such a slavery, regulating the relations of capital and labor, though implying some deprivation of personal liberty, will prove a better defense of the poor against the oppression of the rich, than the too great freedom in which capital is placed in many of the free states of Europe at the present day. Something of this kind is what the masses of free laborers in France are clamoring for under the name “ the right to labor .” … It may be, Christian slavery is God's solution of the problem about which the wisest statesmen of Europe confess themselves ‘at fault.’ —The Reverend George D. Armstrong of Norfolk The Doctrine Emerges That the black slaves of the South fared better than the mass of the world's free workers and peasants became gospel among southern whites of all classes. In seventeenth-century Virginia planters asserted, with some justification, that their slaves worked a shorter and less rigorous day than English herdsmen. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Robert Beverley, in his History and Present State of Virginia , maintained that black slaves and white servants in Virginia did not work as long or hard as husbandmen and agricultural laborers of England. In the 1720s the Reverend Hugh Jones, a professor at the College of William and Mary, acknowledging that slaves did most of the hard work, reported their food and material conditions superior to those of English woodcutters.

There is no country, not even the countries in which this relation [slavery] is wholly unknown to the laws, in which the difference of rank and of wealth does not put the labor of the poor at the disposal of the rich. —Benjamin Henry Latrobe Familiarity Breeds Disquiet Europeans and Northerners traveled to the South; Southerners traveled to Europe and the North. Supposedly, if Northerners and Southerners visited each other more, sectional antagonisms would abate. Southerners urged Northerners to see for themselves the humanity of slavery in practice. During the congressional debate of 1819–1820 on Missouri, Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina wished that an antislavery northern colleague “would go home with me, or some other Southern member, and witness the meeting between slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands.” In Virginia in the mid-1830s, Lucian Minor and Edgar Allan Poe followed suit in Southern Literary Messenger . Minor concluded a series of five articles: “ The North and South need only know each other better, to love each other more ” – a theme advanced by Poe in a review of J. H. Ingraham's The South-West. By a Yankee . Southerners appealed to Harriet Martineau and others to stay long enough to observe slavery closely. If they stayed awhile – so went the refrain – they would embrace the southern point of view. The Reverend Adiel Sherwood, a New Englander, offered a pleasing illustration.

We bring you the highlights of the second Joint Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Wellcome Trust ‘Genome Informatics’ Conference, organized by Ewan Birney, Suzanna Lewis and Lincoln Stein. There were sessions on in silico data discovery, comparative genomics, annotation pipelines, functional genomics and integrative biology. The conference included a keynote address by Sydney Brenner, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (jointly with John Sulston and H. Robert Horvitz) a month later.

In the 1830s American abolitionists argued that the federal government by virtue of its authority over interstate commerce possessed the power to prohibit movement of slaves across state lines. The founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) adopted a constitution which declared that the society intended to influence Congress "to put an end to the domestic slave trade." The convention also endorsed a "Declaration of Sentiments," written primarily by William Lloyd Garrison, which asserted that Congress had both the right and the duty "to suppress the domestic slave trade between the several States." Subsequently, Henry B. Stanton, William Jay, Alvan Stewart, and many other abolitionists produced a barrage of books, articles, tracts, and speeches that agitated for such a ban. Meanwhile, antislavery societies both inundated Congress with petitions on the subject and successfully lobbied the legislatures of Vermont and Massachusetts to call upon Congress to end the interstate slave traffic. At the close of the decade, when Stanton and Stewart, together with James G. Birney, William Goodell, Myron Holley, Joshua Leavitt, Gerrit Smith, and Elizur Wright, moved to establish an antislavery political party, all of those veteran abolitionists agreed that destruction of the interstate slave trade should be a major objective of their enterprise.1 By 1840 the stage was set for a vigorous political assault upon the slave trade, and for a time such an assault occurred. But then everything changed. Instead of increasing in importance, the slave trade issue received less and less attention from antislavery politicians, as the Liberty men of 1840 and 1844 gave way first to the Free Soilers and Free

S tudent lab research projects, even when unsuccessful in a conventional sense, can provide a valuable window into how real-world research science works. Here, I discuss five general observations, made while conducting my own independent research project, that might be helpful to prospective student researchers. I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct an independent research project with my microbiology professor at Montgomery College, Dr. Margaret Birney, from June 2011 through May 2012. This project sought to combine a few fundamental ideas: since bacteria use chemical messages to coordinate simple behaviors, since a number of organisms have evolved anti-predator chemical warning systems, and since bacteriophages (viral predators of bacteria) have been shaping bacterial evolution for billions of years, I wanted to see if bacteria might be able to utilize an anti-phage warning system to collectively defend against phage attack. For most of the project, it seemed that such a warning system did indeed exist. We found that bacterial populations pre-treated with an ‘‘infected filtrate’’ (molecules fromother bacteria exposed to phage) survived better against phage attack than did control populations pre-treated with an ‘‘uninfected filtrate,’’ or molecules from normal bacteria not exposed to phage. After exploring further aspects of this antiphage warning system, I prepared a manuscript for submission to a peer-reviewed journal, but on the advice of a mentor, I decided to run a few more controls before sending it in. It soon became clear that we had missed something from almost the very beginning: an overlooked control snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, rendering our conclusions unsupportable and my manuscript unpublishable. Even though the project didn’t ultimately succeed in a conventional sense, my time in the lab was far from unproductive. To the contrary, working on this project gave me a year-long window into how real-world science works and the planning, diligence, critical thinking, and people skills that are required for successful research. The goal of this piece, then, is to share with the readers of BIOS some of the most important things I learned during my year as a student researcher.

The evening bat, Nycticeius humeralis, is an austral species (Armstrong, Choate, and Jones 1986) that ranges from the southeastern United States north to the southern Great Lakes region and west to the central Great Plains (Watkins 1972). In Kansas, the species was known from just four counties (Clay, Douglas, Jewell, and Johnson) in the northeast when Jones, Fleharty, and Dunnigan (1967) reviewed the distributional status of bats in the state. Birney and Rising (1968) subsequently reported specimens of the evening bat from Franklin and Ford counties, the latter in southwestern Kansas, and Kunz, Choate, and George (1980) reported specimens from Barber and Comanche counties in south-central Kansas. Sparks and Choate (2000) added more than a dozen counties, most in north-central Kansas, to the known range of the species in the state and opined that this tree-dwelling species, which previously was rare at the western limit of its range, was becoming increasingly common in riparian corridors. They concluded that the lack of forested habitats in much of western Kansas in the past possibly restricted the range of the evening bat to the eastern twothirds of the state (Sparks and Choate 2000), but that growth of forested habitats along watercourses was enabling this species to expand westward.

A bioinformatician’s career benefits from good timing, hard work and trust in his colleagues.