Sandy Smith

On the walls of the main staircase in Leidy Laboratories hang pictures of the turn-of-the-century scientists that made Penn a hotbed of research on the natural world. All but one of these pictures are old drawings or photographs of historical paintings. The exception is a color acrylic painting of Edward Drinker Cope, the famous 19th-century Penn paleobiologist.

A new research development holds promise that some day, people with Parkinson’s disease may be able to live free of its debilitating effects with help from a chaperone.

This is your brain. This is your brain on anti-drug ads. Any questions? Yes. You in the back there. But do these anti-drug ads really work?

Across America, urban university administrators are waking up to the realization that as among the biggest players in their cities’ economies, they have a responsibility to the city around them. Penn administrators woke up early and other schools have since followed suit.

So you’re in the market for, say, office furniture or some lab chemicals. Up until now, buying these things meant flipping through several catalogs, hunting down prices, filling out forms and waiting while they made their way through the purchasing food chain. Come Jan. 2, all that will be a thing of the past, thanks to BEN Buys and the Penn Marketplace.

At Penn, old grads marvel and current students revel in the campus’ park-like atmosphere, a dramatic change from the urban hustle and bustle of the 1950s and 1960s. They can thank Laurie Olin and his fellow landscape architecture faculty in the mid-1970s for that transformation.

We’ve tallied up the responses to our readers’ survey and you say you like The Penn Current. But you also say that you want more from the paper—longer stories and more coverage of workplace matters. So we’re making some big changes in content and appearance, starting with our Jan. 24 issue.

In a few short years, Penn has dramatically improved its reputation and sparked a renaissance in its home neighborhood. But its students, by and large, still head elsewhere to pursue their careers or further study.

Solar flair: A new documentary film, “Raycing the Sun,” chronicles the latest efforts of the Penn Solar Racing Team to beat the best at the 2001 American Solar Challenge this past July. (How’d they do? You’ll have to watch the film.) The film, produced by local production company GreenWorks, received its premiere at the Engineering School Nov. 7.

That the legend of Genghis Khan survived both Chinese and Communist domination of Mongolia didn’t surprise Paula Sabloff at all. The legend itself, however, did surprise her.