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When the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns decided to collaborate on a movie about a deadly virus that ignites a global pandemic, they were determined that the film be firmly grounded in scientific fact, not science fiction. So Burns, the writer behind The Bourne Ultimatum, began consulting scientists for guidance. “When I asked who was the best virologist … who could help me create a believable virus and help spin out the ramifications," Burns remembers being told one name "without hesitation": Dr. Ian Lipkin.

Scott Snyder has always loved red wine, and recently his interest has extended well beyond the dinner table. Several years ago, the associate professor of chemistry became fascinated by the “French paradox,” the relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease among the French despite a diet high in saturated fats.

The phenomenon has been linked to red wine consumption, and almost all the evidence points to a chemical called resveratrol. Although scientists have been studying the headline-making substance for decades, no one has yet been able to harness its positive effects despite studies in mice linking it to weight loss and improved neural and cardiac function.

Snyder believes the benefits come not from resveratrol itself but from a family of organic structures called oligomers, which are formed when resveratrol molecules bind with one another.

\"These unique structures appear to have useful health properties,” Snyder says. “But nature produces them in limited amounts, and they are hard to obtain from organic sources. By figuring out a way to create them in the lab, we can study them, understand them and perhaps adjust the structures and make something even better.”

Resveratrol is found in grapes and other plants, where it acts as a defense mechanism against foreign substances. When a plant is attacked by fungus, for example, resveratrol molecules bond like Lego blocks to make oligomers, which serve as a barrier to the infection. Think of it as a plant version of the human body’s immune response.

“The plant can make between 60 to 100 new structures just from resveratrol,” says Snyder, whose team is based in Havemeyer Hall. “We think we found a general strategy to make the more complex members of oligomers.”

In 2007 he and his team were the first to create synthetic oligomers from two resveratrol molecules. In a paper published in the June 23 issue of Nature, Snyder demonstrated a new technique to build oligomers with three and four resveratrol molecules.

Snyder recently won the DuPont Young Professor Grant, which recognizes original research in chemistry and other sciences. Last year, he received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, which supports the work of promising early career scientists.

Snyder’s work has broad medical implications. One of the compounds Snyder has replicated in the lab can aid in preventing ultraviolet sun damage in humans. Another appears to be able to modulate Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that causes nerve cells in the brain to waste away. Others could be used to reverse aging, fight infections and help the body accept organ transplants.

Widespread clinical applications are a good five to 10 years away, but Snyder is accustomed to painstaking work. Indeed, he seems to live his life by the scientific method. An avid cook, he’ll work on a specific dish for weeks, tinkering with ingredients and cooking procedures until it’s just right; he recently perfected a recipe for lamb ragu. In the summer he gardens, experimenting with different soils.

Snyder’s scientific training started early. His mother taught high school calculus and his father was a biochemistry professor at SUNY Buffalo. Snyder started tagging along with his father to his lab as an elementary school student. “He would give me food colors, stir bars and a lab notebook and say, ‘Mix these and tell me what you get.’” Snyder attended Williams College, received his Ph.D. from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the lab of Elias J. Corey, a chemist who won the Nobel Prize for innovations in synthesizing organic compounds.

As for the supposed health benefits of resveratrol, does Snyder think that Americans should do as the French do and simply drink a glass or two of red wine each day? As a wine lover, he has no problem with that. But as a scientist, it won’t do.

“We are too complex of a system,” he says. “Unless we have the capability to really study it, with a dose and response, we can never really say for a society what it means. There’s no science behind it.”

—by Beth Kwon

In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare.

The magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook central Virginia on Tuesday afternoon is one of the biggest earthquakes to hit the East Coast since 1897, and was comparable in strength to a quake on the New York-Canadian border in 1944, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 centered in northern Virginia that has been felt here in New York City, including on Columbia’s campuses.

Special from The Record 

For years, Iranian studies scholar Ehsan Yarshater was frustrated that there was only one comprehensive and reliable reference for his field. It was E.J. Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam, which did not cover pre-Islamic Iran.

Another encyclopedia was needed, so he decided to create it himself. In 1974, Yarshater began a decades-long work-in-progress that is widely considered the most important scholarly contribution to Iranian studies. And it’s only half complete.

“I thought that Persian history and culture needed to be known by the scholars and the students and the whole world properly, impartially and accurately,” says Yarshater, the 91-year-old director of Columbia’s Center for Iranian Studies, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies and the general editor of both theEncyclopaedia Iranica and the History of Persian Literature.

The Encyclopaedia Iranica aims to document all aspects of the Iranian world from prehistory to the present. Entries range from archaeology and agriculture to political science and botany. Geographic coverage includes all Iranian civilization in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

But the very scale of the project is one of its greatest challenges. After 37 years of work and contributions from 1,400 of the world’s foremost Iranian scholars, the encyclopedia this year is only halfway through the letter K. With about 800 scattered entries later in the alphabet completed, the encyclopedia has at least another decade to go. All entries are available for free online.

Yarshater works 11-hour days at the Center for Iranian Studies, which he founded in 1968. Sitting in his Riverside Drive office crowded with towering bookcases and Persian art, he explains why the work is so time-consuming. Contributors write in various languages, and between research, translation, editing and fact-checking, an entry can take up to two years for completion.

ored or edited such seminal works as Persian Poetry in the Second Half of the 15th Century (1953) and the third volume of the Cambridge History of Iran, in two parts (1983, 1986). But he says the encyclopedia stands out from all the rest.

“In terms of its service to Iranian studies and in terms of its use and its benefits, it’s the best thing that I have done,” says Yarshater, a widower who considers the encyclopedia and other projects his children.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has supported the project for more than 30 years. NEH reviewers, experts in the field who anonymously evaluate a project for funding, have called Encyclopaedia Iranica the “best impartial, non-governmental, and academically rigorous source” in the study of Iran.

The NEH grants were especially useful after the Iranian government, once a financial supporter of the project, cut off funding after the 1979 revolution. “I approached the chairman of the national endowment … to ask for support, even though it was during the hostage crisis, as I believed that scholarly projects should not be taken hostage for political considerations,” Yarshater says.

The reference tool is useful to scholars at all levels, says Professor Touraj Daryaee of the University of California, Irvine, who teaches the history of pre-Islamic Iran. He uses it himself, and it’s the first place he sends his students.

“There are about 100 or more encyclopedias being written or in progress on Iran right now, but I don’t think anything is really of the importance and scope of Encyclopaedia Iranica,” he says.

Like many of the leaders in the field, Daryaee has contributed a few entries himself.

Even the most esoteric subjects get the full treatment. One example is animal branding, or dagh. Without any scholarship to rely on, Encyclopaedia Iranica had to do its own fieldwork. “I asked a friend in Iran, and he sent someone to southeastern Persia where there are lots of camels to find out about how they are branded,” says Yarshater.

Once the first edition is complete, the work will continue. Entries written in the 1970s will need updating, and new ones will be needed to keep pace with historical developments and recent research.

“That is why I have set up a foundation to support the project after me,” says Yarshater.

—by Anna Spinner

Researchers returning from a cruise some 250 miles off the coast of Oregon have reported seeing a volcanic eruption on the seafloor that they accurately forecast five years ago—the first successful prediction of an undersea eruption. T

A new study co-authored by Columbia Engineering professor Kartik Chandran and recently published in the journal, Environmental Science & Technology, shows that reducing nitrogen pollution generated by wastewater treatment plants can come with "sizable" economic benefits, as well as the expected benefits for the environment.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School have demonstrated that light can travel on an artificial material without leaving a trace under certain conditions, technology that would have many applications from the military to telecommunications.

John F. Szwed, professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, has been appointed director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia.

The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science.

After the recent great quakes that have swept away entire coastlines and cities in Japan, Haiti and Sumatra, scientists are now looking hard at the nation that may suffer the gravest threat of all: Bangladesh

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger announced the appointment of Miller Theatre director Melissa Smey as executive director of Columbia’s Arts Initiative, effective immediately.

On June 23, Low Library was transformed into a lively dance studio for Columbia’s fifth annual “Shall We Dance?”, sponsored by the Office of Government and Community Affairs, the School of Continuing Education-Summer High School Program and the University’s Arts Initiative.