Category Archives: Letter to the Editor

Letter to the editor: Beware PHEEIA, fracking

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To the Editor:

I was pleased to read of the legislative victory against the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA) won by UUP and others, but was dismayed supporters might re-submit it. PHEEIA would allow SUNY and CUNY administrators “to lease university land to private corporations” without legislative accountability.

I fear university administrators might broadly interpret “private” to allow, for instance, leasing our public colleges for fracking (natural gas drilling). Since the 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, fracking has spread virally across the country, including numerous universities, like the University of Texas at Arlington, and land owned by Penn State. Already New York legislators feel pressured to frack in upstate communities. Millions of dollars are hard to turn down.

Unfortunately, this Halliburton technology has a questionable environmental record. Into millions of gallons of fresh water, tons of toxic carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and neurological inhibitors are added.

Also, radioactive materials, heavy metals and methane are brought up from deep underground. These contaminants tend to leak into the aquifer and air, causing explosions, fish kills and major health problems.

It might be a disaster if PHEEIA opened the possibility of fracking, or any other unintended industry, on SUNY/CUNY campuses. UUP is right to fight its adoption.

— Alice Zinnes, NYC College of Technology, Adjunct Assistant Professor

Letter to the Editor; State budget cutbacks the result of costly wars

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To the Editor:

As UUP members struggle on behalf of quality public higher education in New York, they should continue to stress the connection between devastating state cutbacks and the huge expenditures for ongoing wars and national security institutions—the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes estimate that the U.S.-Iraq war may eventually cost $3 trillion; the enlarging and endless Afghan war may exceed $1 trillion.

With a total of $4 trillion for these wars—about $13,200 per person—New Yorkers’ share will be nearly $260 billion. In the budget crisis, those working on behalf of the University and the truly vulnerable must break out of the intra-state financial box and target the massive funds that support U.S. militarism and unjust wars.

— John Marciano, Emeritus, SUNY Cortland

Letter to the editor: Member thanks NYSUT for efforts in Leadership Institute

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To the Editor:

As a graduate of the recently completed NYSUT Leadership Institute (class of ’07), I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the wonderful effort NYSUT and Cornell put forth on our behalf. The opportunity gave me and my two fellow UUP leaders the ability to work on and further develop our leadership skills with union activists from all areas and walks of New York state. The lessons learned and network of contacts formed will serve the union well as we take our place with the other 10 years of graduates numbering over 600.

It truly shows NYSUT is a union of professionals who look to give us the tools and knowledge to be better leaders in the union movement. The efforts and continued support of this program by our officers and NYSUT staff is a tribute to this organization putting its money where its mouth is, that being education. Thanks again to my fellow classmates and our instructors for a wonderful, eye-opening experience.

— Charlie McAteer, Stony Brook

Letter to the Editor: Who discovered MRI?

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To the Editor:

Every so often the claim resurfaces that Dr. Raymond Damadian should have received, or shared, the 2003 Nobel Prize awarded to Dr. Paul Lauterbur (who did his work at Stony Brook) and Dr. Peter Mansfield for their "seminal discoveries … led to the development of modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

In the March 2008 Voice, Dr. Richard Macchia supports Damadian’s claim.

As a working NMR/MRI scientist, familiar with the evolution of the theory and practice, I disagree.

Damadian certainly wanted badly to build a useful scanner, but his effort failed. If you put a sack of grapefruit into a magnet, the water will give you an NMR signal. If the field is inhomogeneous and you move the sack around, the signal will change; you can plot the change, get a smudge and call it an image. In the 1950s, we used to move our tiny samples around in the magnetic field to find one of several "sweet spots, where the field was locally homogeneous enough (1 part in 10 million), to get sharpish NMR spectra (OK, if all the sample inside the receiver coil is also inside the spot). Damadian tried to make one spot inside the sample "super sweet and all the rest supersour (signal washed out); not surprisingly, he couldn’t do it. The idea was a dead end and he abandoned it.

In 1969, Lauterbur solved the problem of mapping the receiver amplitude/frequency response one-to-one with the physical object, by using controlled, reproducible linear field gradients, and obtained unambiguous, quantitative cross-sectional images; this was the fundamental breakthrough, the basis for all MRI today. Mansfield was a fundamental innovator: taking Ernst’s new pulsed-RF Fast Fourier Transform NMR spectroscopy (itself a quantum leap) and adding pulsed-current linear gradients, he created the MRI system used today.

– Arnold Wishnia

Associate Professor of Chemistry

SUNY Stony Brook


Letters policy

The Voice welcomes timely letters about union and university issues, politics and other events relevant

to UUP’s concerns. All letters are subject to editing. Please type or e-mail your letters, limit them to 300 words, and include your name and daytime phone number for verification. E-mail letters to Denyce Duncan Lacy, UUP director of communications, at ddlacy@uupmail.org, or send them to her attention at: The Voice, United University Professions, P.O. Box 15143, Albany, NY 12212-5143.