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College Station, Texas
Thursday, April 19, 1973
THE BATTALION
Supreme Court Ruling
States Can Check Oil Spillers
WASHINGTON <A>)_A unani
mous Supreme Court told the
states Wednesday they are free
to hold shippers financially re
sponsible for harm done by oil
spills.
The high court approved a
tough Florida law—tougher than
applicable federal law—that cov
ers facilities for storing, trans
ferring or drilling for oil, as well
as spills from tankers in the
state’s territorial waters.
Justice William ' O. Douglas,
writing for the court, called oil
slicks “an insidious form of pol
lution of vast concern to every
coastal city or port ...”
Douglas said the federal Water
Quality Improvement Act of 1970
—passed shortly before the Flori
da statute — does not limit the
authority of the states.
Shippers have threatened to
divert their vessels from Florida
waters because of the state’s law.
A spokesman for the Environ
mental Protection Agency in
Washington predicted other
states which have active environ
mental programs will now fall
in step with Florida, to take ad
vantage of the court decision.
Other court decisions:
—In a 6-3 decision, the Su
preme Court said federal habeas
corpus — the procedure used by
prison inmates to challenge the
validity of their imprisonment —
is available to those convicted
of crimes who are still free on
their own recognizance as well
as those who are already in cus
tody
The restraints on liberty in
volved in the conditions placed
on an individual’s release on
his recognizance are sufficient to
bring the federal habeas corpus
statute into play, the court said.
Chief Justice Warren E.
Burger, and Justices William H.
Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell
dissented.
—By a vote of 8 to 1, the court
said employes of state schools
and hospitals may not sue in
federal court to gain benefits of
federal wage and hour laws.
The federal law, the court
said, empowers the secretary of
labor—not individual employes—
to sue states not complying with
federal law.
Bulletin Board
Baylor Med Scientists Capture
Animals’ Memory In Test Tube
ATLANTIC CITY, N. J. <A>>_
Scientists at the Baylor College
of Medicine have captured ani
mals’ memory in a test tube.
Working with rat brains, they
have found that the memory of
the sound of an electric bell is
a chemical thing — an eight-seg
ment chain of six specific amino
acids, basic chemicals of life.
I
This discovery follows work
done at Baylor two years ago,
when the scientists indentified a
substance found in the brain of
rats trained to avoid the dark.
The chemicals can be isolated
from the brain and then injected
into other laboratory animals
which were not trained to the
sound of the bell or to avoid the
dark. The untrained animals then
behave as though they had been
trained.
This effort to crack the code
of memory in the mind was re
ported Tuesday by Dr. Georges
Ungar and Dr. S. R. Burzynsky
of Baylor at the 57th annual
meeting of the Federation of
American Societies for Experi
mental Biology.
To find the chemical footprints
of memory, the Baylor team ha
bituated rats to the sound of an
electric bell repeated at five-
second intervals for one or two
hours a day, for two to three
weeks.
Habituation is an elementary
form of learning which allows
one to ignore a neutral stimulus,
one that is neither pleasant nor
harmful. A loud noise would
startle one, for example, but
when repeated, one learns to ig
nore it if it is not associated
with danger. After being trained
to the bell, the rat brains were
removed. An extract was injected
into mice which were then sub
jected to the same electrical bell
sound.
Mice given the extract tended
to ignore the signal; other mice
reacted normally. This effect last
ed four to five days.
“We collected brains from close
to 6,000 habituated rats during
the last two years,” the Baylor
scientists reported. After purifi
cation, the memory material was
shown to be a substance called
a peptide.
Peptides consist of chains of
amino acids and the information
they carry depends on which of
20 amino acids may contain and
on the sequence of the amino
acids.
TONIGHT
Women’s Awareness Workshop
will hear Cathy Bonner, state di
rector of the Texas Women’s Po
litical Caucus, in Room 226 of the
Library at 7:30 p.m.
American Institute of Archi
tecture Student Chapter is spon
soring a student design contest
and art sale. Students’ work will
be on display today and Friday
in the lobby of the Architecture
Building. Judging will be today
and awards will be presented Fri
day. Student work will be sold
throughout the exhibit.
Free University workers for
next fall will meet in Room 2B
of the old Memorial Student Cen
ter at 6:30 p.m.
Penny Pincher
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