| I do not know of Dr. Virginia Holsinger beyond the info in this obituary but it is clear she was on the front lines of great changes in the ways people relate to food - LactAid allows people who otherwise can't tolerate dairy products to tolerate them - and voila! a new industry is born. While this may seem good on numerous fronts - personal choice, employment - it also increases reliance on engineered foods. Scientist Developed New Food Products By Patricia Sullivan
The next time you pick up a carton of low-lactose milk or reduced-fat mozzarella cheese at the grocery store, you are holding the result of Virginia H. Holsinger's research. She also developed a shortening used in baked goods and created a low-lactose powdered milk used in military field rations. Most important, Dr. Holsinger, who died Sept. 4 of breast cancer at Inova Fairfax Hospital at age 72, created a whey-soy drink mix that was shelf-stable and nutritious enough to be used as a replacement for milk in international food donation programs. She also developed a grain blend that, when mixed with water, can create a porridge in emergency situations such as famines, droughts or other natural disasters. "Holsinger's efforts have helped feed needy children and families around the world," said Floyd Horn, who was administrator of the Agricultural Research Service in 2000, when Dr. Holsinger was inducted into its Science Hall of Fame. "I still get letters from missionaries in Africa" asking about the lactate products that Dr. Holsinger and her team developed, said Peggy M. Tomasula, her successor at the research service. Dr. Holsinger, the former head of the dairy products research unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service in Wyndmoor, Pa., developed the enzyme treatment that makes milk digestible by people with lactose intolerance, research that resulted in the commercial product Lactaid. Her work also led to the development of a mozzarella cheese with 50 percent less fat, which is used in school lunches. "When you think of mozzarella, you want a cheese that melts, stretches and strings out," she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1994. "If people don't get it, they are disappointed." She also provided other tips. The half-teaspoon or so of salt that most cake recipes call for is not necessary, she told Science News in 1987: It was a vestige of a time when baking soda and other ingredients did not provide enough salt or flavor. While dairy provides nutrition, she knew it wasn't always needed in American diets. "Yogurt, for some reason, has an image of a diet food," she told The Washington Post in 1992. "Yet when you look at the calories, it's really quite high." Virginia H. Holsinger was born in Washington and graduated from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington County. She received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the College of William and Mary in 1958 and a doctorate in food science and nutrition from Ohio State University in 1980. She started her research career as an analytical chemist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service's dairy products laboratory in Washington and transferred in 1974 to the Eastern Regional Research Center in Pennsylvania, where she stayed until her retirement in 1999. While working there, she kept a home in Arlington, said her brother, Gordon Holsinger of Arlington, her only survivor. She sang in the Grace Episcopal Church choir as a young woman and was past president of the ladies' auxiliary of the American Legion and a member of the auxiliary to the local chapter of the VFW. Dr. Holsinger wrote or co-wrote more than 100 scientific papers and received multiple awards from agricultural and food chemistry organizations, as well as the Women in Science and Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/19/AR2009091902352.html |
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Food Engineer Dr. Virginia Holsinger
More Drug War Insanity
| Not that more examples of the drug war gone a muck are needed - we have enough already!! ....... but elected leaders on any level speaking out about the insanity is worth noting. The mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, has paid a high price for an experience that he did nothing to bring upon himself. The Day the SWAT Team Came Crashing Through My Door By Cheye M. Calvo
I remember thinking, as I kneeled at gunpoint with my hands bound on my living room floor, that there had been a terrible, terrible mistake. An errant Prince George's County SWAT team had just forced its way into our home, shot dead our two black Labradors, Payton and Chase, and started ransacking our belongings as part of what would become a four-hour ordeal. The police found nothing, of course, to connect my family and me to a box of drugs that they had been tracking and had delivered to our front door. The community -- of which I am mayor -- rallied to our side. A FedEx driver and accomplice were arrested in a drug trafficking scheme. Ultimately, we were cleared of any wrongdoing, but not before the incident drew international outrage. This was 14 months ago. We have since filed suit, and I am confident that we will find justice more quickly than most. Yet, I remain captured by the broader implications of the incident. Namely, that my initial take was wrong: It was no accident but rather business as usual that brought the police to -- and through -- our front door. In the words of Prince George's County Sheriff Michael Jackson, whose deputies carried out the assault, "the guys did what they were supposed to do" -- acknowledging, almost as an afterthought, that terrorizing innocent citizens in Prince George's is standard fare. The only difference this time seems to be that the victim was a clean-cut white mayor with community support, resources and a story to tell the media. What confounds me is the unmitigated refusal of county leaders to challenge law enforcement and to demand better -- as if civil rights are somehow rendered secondary by the war on drugs. Let me give you three specific concerns underscored by our case. First, the Prince George's Police Department's internal affairs function is broken. When the Justice Department released the county police from federal supervision in February, internal affairs was the one area that was not cleared. Internal affairs division (IAD) investigations were required to take no longer than 90 days. More than a year after our ordeal, my family awaits the IAD report on what happened at our home. The statute of limitations for officer misconduct is 12 months, which means that any wrongdoers are off the hook. Next, there is significant evidence that the county is broadly violating the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. After initially claiming that they had a "no-knock" warrant to forcibly enter our home, county police acknowledged that they did not have one. But they went on to contend that there is no such thing as a "no-knock" warrant in Maryland. But this isn't true. A statewide "no-knock" warrant statute was passed in 2005. Effectively, the county is denying the existence of state law. We can't get the county to say whether it has ever followed the law or, at a minimum, even acknowledges it. Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, county police may be lying to cover up their civil rights violations. A county officer on the scene told Berwyn Heights police a fabricated tale to justify the warrantless entry into our home. The lie disappeared after police learned that I was the mayor. Charges of a police coverup are hardly unusual, but there is significant evidence that county law enforcement engaged in a conspiracy on our lawn to justify an illegal entry. Nothing strikes at the heart of police credibility like creative report writing and false testimony to cover up a lie or even put innocent people behind bars. Swift and serious consequences are the best deterrent. In fairness, some good has come from the incident. State leaders have passed legislation that will provide statewide oversight of SWAT teams -- a first-in-the-nation law that will shine a light on the troubling trend of paramilitary policing. Yet, the wagons have circled in Upper Marlboro. The response is textbook: Law enforcement stands its ground and concedes no wrongdoing -- and elected officials bury their heads in the sand. As an imperfect elected official myself, I can understand a mistake -- even a terrible one. But a pattern and practice of police abuse treated with utter indifference rips at the fabric of our social compact and virtually guarantees more of the same. The writer is the mayor of Berwyn Heights. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/17/AR2009091701680.html |
Leon Kirchner - Composer, Musician, Conductor
| I love the last line of this obituary of Leon Kirchner - when asked by a musician performing one of his works how to deal with a piece of the music, Kirchner replied, "'Young man, make it sound like a succulent green forest'. Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer of Atonal Music By Anne Midgette
Leon Kirchner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of expressive, rigorous, atonal yet romantic music, died Sept. 17 of congestive heart failure at his home in New York. He was 90. A pianist and conductor as well as a composer, Mr. Kirchner stood somewhat outside the main musical currents of the late 20th century, forging his own way without being confrontational. A superb craftsman, he wrote music that was emotionally supercharged but also structurally rigorous, very much in the tradition of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, in particular). Yet Mr. Kirchner did not turn to the organizational principles so prevalent in his day: Serialism and the dodecaphonic (or 12-tone) system remained outside his field of inquiry. Of the prevalent trends of his time, he once wrote that "idea, the precious ore of art, is lost in the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks and cold stylistic minutiae." Nonetheless, he was not above occasional experimentation. In his Third String Quartet, he "set out to produce a meaningful confrontation between the 'new' electronic sounds and those of the traditional string quartet," writing a separate line for electronic tape. The work won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 -- marking the first time the Pulitzer went to a piece using electronics. Leon Kirchner was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 24, 1919, and began studying piano at 4. When he was 9, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he was able to benefit from contact with European musicians who had fled Hitler's Germany. Studying at Los Angeles Community College, he won the attention of Ernst Toch, who recommended him to Schoenberg, another local resident. Schoenberg remained one of his strongest influences, although Mr. Kirchner never embraced Schoenberg's 12- note system. Mr. Kirchner did graduate work with Ernest Bloch at the University of California at Berkeley, taking a hiatus to study with Roger Sessions in New York and to serve in the Army. He married Gertrude Schoenberg (no relation to Arnold Schoenberg) in 1949. In 1954, he took a position at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., and in 1961 went on to teach at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. His most popular course combined musical analysis and performance by students such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma and composer John Adams. He also founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. In his music, Mr. Kirchner gradually moved from the large-scale hyper-expressivity of earlier pieces, such as his first piano sonata (1948) and his two piano concertos (1953 and 1963), to more compact utterances. (His fourth and final string quartet, from 2006, is only 13 minutes long.) Mr. Kirchner devoted more than a decade to the composition of "Lily," his sole opera, based on Saul Bellow's novel "Henderson the Rain King." The opera's premiere at New York City Opera in 1977 was accounted a disaster by critics, which was a bitter blow to its creator. He later recast some of the music into other pieces, including a 20-minute work for soprano and chamber orchestra. In 1997, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered "Of Things Exactly as They Are," a large-scale work for soloists, chorus and orchestra that Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer called a "career-crowning achievement." Mr. Kirchner continued composing to the end of his life. His final orchestral work, "The Forbidden," was given its premiere by James Levine and the Boston Symphony in October 2008. The piece was conceived as part of a loose triptych, along with Mr. Kirchner's last string quartet and third piano sonata, exploring techniques that were "forbidden" to composers in certain epochs, such as the diminished seventh interval. Mr. Kirchner's wife died in 1999, and for the final years of his life he lived in New York with his companion, Sally Wardwell. Other survivors include two children and a stepdaughter from his first marriage; a brother; and a granddaughter. Violist Scott Nickrenz recalled his first meeting with the composer as a teenager at Tanglewood, the prestigious Massachusetts training center and summer home of the Boston Symphony, where Mr. Kirchner taught. Nickrenz was playing the composer's second string quartet from the manuscript. "I looked up at him," he recalled, "and said, 'There's either a 16th-note rest or a 16th note missing from this bar, Mr. Kirchner. What should we do about that?' " Mr. Kirchner's response was an object lesson for all young musicians focused more on the notes than the meaning of the music: He ignored the problem altogether. "He said, 'Young man, make it sound like a succulent green forest,' " Nickrenz said.
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