Newsmakers

Schultz's Latest Research Culminates in Two Flashes and Bear Hug

Before any important experiment, Peter Schultz performs a ritual. He crosses his legs, fingers, and arms. If the test is really critical, Schultz crosses his eyes, too. All these body parts were pretzeled the night of July 3.

Along with a team of NASA scientists, the professor of geological sciences was huddled in a conference room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch a space probe get plowed over by Tempel 1, a comet measuring about half the size of Manhattan. At 11:52 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, the probe hit its mark. There was a small flash, then a big one.

Schultz screamed. Then he bear-hugged Jessica Sunshine '88, a former student and NASA co-investigator. The $333-million experiment was, literally, a smashing success.

"It was like rooting for a race horse that finally made it over the finish line," Schultz recalled. "When we saw that flash, I thought 'Oh my God, look at that. Look at that.' And the room just erupted."

Schultz landed a spot on the comet mission, dubbed Deep Impact, because he is an expert in impact cratering -- the science of what happens when a massive, fast-moving cosmic train slams into something. For twenty-five years, at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Schultz has loaded a three-story gun with glass, copper or meteorite beads. These are fired at piles of sand or ice, dust or mud. Once they hit their targets, at speeds ten times faster than a speeding bullet, the projectiles create brilliant flashes, dramatic sprays of debris, and impressive craters.

The work helps explain when and how comets, asteroids, and other space travelers shaped the face of planets such as Earth and Mars, as well as the Moon and other satellites. Deep Impact, meanwhile, is challenging some of this science.

Scientists have long theorized that comets are hard-crusted balls of dust and ice that give off glorious gas trails as they streak through the solar system. Early results from Deep Impact, however, suggested that the surface of Tempel 1 is soft, as if it were made of fluffy, dirty snow.

Instruments on a flyby spacecraft also detected organic molecules that could not be easily identified. These compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are critical. Material inside comets is relatively unchanged since the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Mission scientists hope the project will answer basic questions about how the solar system formed and how water and other life-sustaining elements made their way to Earth.

This month, the Deep Impact team expects to publish early findings in the journal Science. The report is sure to spark more international attention -- and more work. "We've got years of research to do," Schultz says.

Booked Solid

The New York Times once called Peter Kramer (left), author of the groundbreaking Listening to Prozac, "possibly the best-known psychiatrist in America." The label stuck. Now the clinical faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior gets "best-known" billing in U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, and other outlets heralding his new book, Against Depression.

Kramer shrugs off the praise.

"Who is the best-known gastroenterologist or mortician in America?" Kramer says. "Think about it. Even if it is true, it's not very consequential."

Against Depression is Kramer's fifth book. In the prologue, he summarizes his intent: "I have written a polemic, an insistent argument for the proposition that depression is a disease, one we would do well to oppose wholeheartedly."

The author rebukes the romanticization of a major mental illness by reviewing the findings of the latest research: Depression damages heart muscle, destroys nerve cells, weakens bone, shrinks the brain. Yet, Kramer notes, melancholy is associated with sensitivity, as witnessed by Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

"Typically, people with depression get treated ten years after the first symptoms surface. You don't get that with diabetes," Kramer says. "Ultimately, I wanted people to see the destruction of depression and to get help quickly."

Against Depression hit a media high note when it was released in May. The book was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and praised by Joyce Carol Oates. Kramer was written up in People magazine and interviewed by NPR's Terry Gross. Kramer traveled to about a dozen cities ("if you include Warwick") to publicize the book. He was often greeted with earnest questions about treatment -- "get a good doctor," he'd say -- and was picketed in Boston by drug company critics.

Compiled by Wendy Y. Lawton