News Briefs

Survey Looks At Graduates' Plans

More than 22 percent of the Class of 1989 plans to seek graduate degrees in the arts and sciences, according to Office of Career Services (OCS) survey taken last spring.

"It has to do with students recognizing that the market [for teachers and professors] will not only improve [in the coming years] but there will be shortages in some areas," said Martha P. Leape, director of OCS.

Eight percent of the class said they intended to pursue studies in the humanities, six percent in the social sciences and another eight percent in the life sciences, physical sciences and math. Of these students, 10.9 percent said they planned to pursue an academic career.

"A few years ago we had wonderful tutors in Winthrop who could not get jobs," Professor of Sociology James A. Davis said. Recently, said the Winthrop House master, there has been a "rebound in hiring" in the academic world.

Graduates, 95 percent of whom responded, also showed interest in spending time abroad, the survey found. Nearly 20 percent of the class said they planned to live in a foreign country this year.

While 41.3 percent of the graduates surveyed cited "high income potential" as an important criteria in their career decision, almost 90 percent selected "intellectual challenge" and 71 percent "the opportunity to be helpful to others" as significant considerations.

Twice as many men as women said they wanted to pursue a career in business, amounting to a total of 16.5 percent of the class, two percent less than last year. And 5.5 percent of female respondents said they would seek a career in the "helping professions," while 0.7 percent of the men said the same, the survey said.

AIDS Tests Start At Med School

The medical schools of four universities, including Harvard, this month began clinical testing for a four-year study of the transmission of AIDS from mother to fetus, doctors said yesterday.

The Women and Infants HIV Transmission Study (WITS) will examine the frequency of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus' transmission to fetus and its effect on the health of pregnant women and on the outcome of pregnancy, researchers said. The project will also chart the development of the disease in children.

About 500 pregnant women infected with the virus, 500 women who have tested positive for AIDS, 1500 pregnant uninfected women and 1500 women not known to be infected or pregnant will participate, according to the Harvard AIDS Institute newsletter.

The federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta predicts that AIDS will affect between 10,000 and 20,000 children under 13 by 1992, and 80 percent of these cases will involve prenatal transmission.

"The hope lies is in the fact that those babies [that CDC says will be infected in the next four years] have not been conceived yet," said Sheila B. Noone, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a coordinator of WITS.

But the study will not address the potential disaster of providing affordable health care for children, said Kenneth McIntosh, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital.

"The child with AIDS doesn't have the community support of a homosexual with the disease," professor McIntosh said. "Usually, the family reacts by cutting itself off from the rest of the world."

McIntosh said children will soon make up more than 5 percent of AIDS patients will have difficulty affording hospital care.

The project will be conducted at four medical centers, including the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago. It is partly funded by a $12 million NIH grant for AIDS projects, according to the institute's newsletter.

Students Protest Israeli General

A crowd of about 40 people opposing Israel's occupation of the West Bank staged the second protest this fall against an Israeli general's fellowship at the Center for International Affairs (CFIA) yesterday evening.

The protesters gathered outside Johnston gate for an hour, carrying banners and holding candles in memory of the Palestinians killed during the past two years. The event was sponsored by the General Union of Palestinian Students, a national organization which is not based at any individual campus.

The protesters charged that Major General Avram Mitzna, who oversaw military operations in the West Bank from May 1987 to June 1989, was responsible for several human rights abuses in the occupied territories.

"We consider him as a war criminal," said Samy K. Musa, a graduate student at Northeastern University and the president of the General Union. "He was the mastermind of the Israeli policies of killing, destroying, beating, and mass arrests.

At a similar demonstration on October 6, members of the Harvard Israel Public Affairs Committee (HIPAC) staged a counter-protest. HIPAC was unable to protest yesterday's demonstration, according to committee chair Ivan J. Dominguez '90.

"We view the actions against Mitzna as wholly insignificant to the cause of Palestinian rights given Mitzna's history," Dominguez said.