Railroad merger okayed despite opposition
Merger creates largest U.S. railroad Portland·
The Surface Transportation Board (STB) has unanimously approved the $5.4 bil lion merger of the Union Pacific (UP) and Southern Pacific (SP) railroads de spite opposition from three federal agen cies and some trade groups. The merger will create North Ameri ca's largest railroad, with 31,000 miles of track in 25 states and a dominant role in petrochemical and plastic ship ments on the Gulf Coast. STB—created this year to replace the Interstate Com merce Commission—will publish its complete decision Aug. 12, after which appeals can be filed. To mitigate concerns that the merger will reduce or eliminate competition, STB imposed several conditions. As the basis of its conditions, STB built upon an agreement that UP reached in April with the Chemical Manufacturers As sociation to gain CMA's support. The conditions include expansion of track age rights and access to transfer and storage facilities for Burlington North ern/Santa Fe (BNSF), UPs only re maining major competitor in the west ern U.S. STB also has given trackage rights to Texas Mexican Railway in portions of the Gulf Coast. But STB has not required UP to di vest thousands of miles of duplicate track, despite requests from merger op ponents and offers from competitors. UP has rejected Conrail's $1.9 billion bid to buy major portions of SP track, saying such a sale would undermine anticipated merger benefits. Many be lieve the merger would fall apart if UP had to divest track. As part of a fiveyear oversight plan, STB has reserved the right to require UP to divest lines or increase trackage rights if competi tion is not preserved. The merged system will have 20% of its tracks in Texas, but will control 80% of petrochemical and 88% of plastic shipments on the Gulf Coast, according to the Texas Railroad Commission. STB says major manufacturing facilities— such as Dow Chemical's Freeport, Texas, site and Union Carbide's Seadrift, Texas, plant—will be given the option of build ing rail spurs to competing lines. However, the merger is opposed by many shippers; by the U.S. Departments of Transportation, Agriculture, and Jus
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tice; and by officials in Texas, Louisiana, and Missouri. They cite in particular de creased competition and possible ship ping cost rises of 10 to 20%. Indeed, the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) fears creation of a rail monopoly in a critical region, noting that 92% of U.S. polyethylene and polypropylene ship ments originate in Texas and Louisiana. "SPI disagrees with STB's decision to substitute federal oversight for the freemarket system," says SPI President Lar-
ry L. Thomas. "The board devised an illconceived scheme of trackage and stor age rights for the BNSF railroad and five years of STB oversight. This isn't compe tition. ... This is a bad precedent and bad government." But UP and STB believe the merger will improve service, increase efficiency, and lead to annual savings of more than $600 million. And UP intends to invest $1.3 billion to upgrade SP operations. Ann Thayer
Science center to handle terrorism at Olympics
Breeze" to improve on the Atlanta ef fort, a military source says. This source stresses, however, that the scientific and technical strategies developed for the Olympics "will serve as a benchmark for how the nation re acts to a chemical or biological threat. It will serve as the model on which ev erything else is built." The center will be based at the Na tional Center for Environmental Health of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Federal Bureau of Investigation scientist Randall Murch will direct the multiagency forensic and analytical enterprise. Medical issues will be handled by the Public Health Service, with region al health administrator J. Jarrett Clinton at the helm. If an attack occurs, his group will treat any casualties. The Marines' special unit, the Chemical/Bi ological Incident Response Force
The federal government is putting the finishing touches on a science and tech nology center in Atlanta that will en able it to respond swiftly to a possible chemical or biological terrorist attack at the Olympic games, which begin this Friday. If such an attack occurs, the center's mission is to identify the chemical or biological agent, decide how to react to it, and collect evidence to convict those responsible. Until now, the U.S. has had no concerted contingency plans for responding to a domestic terrorist act. The effort is still evolving and will continue to be refined after the games. In September, the surgeon general and the Pentagon's director of military sup port plan a war game called "Terminal
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(C&EN, July 1, page 22), will contribute medical personnel. But before casualties can be treated, the chemical or biological agent used must be identified. That task will fall primarily to other federal agencies, including the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, the Army Materiel Command, CDC, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all of which will contribute analytical expertise. A dry run exercise to respond to a small threat in an area that can't be contained or controlled—such as the Olympic stadium or the subway system—is being held in Atlanta, July 15 to 17. Lois Ember
UN units call global warming a health risk In the midst of already heated negotiations on controlling greenhouse gases, three United Nations agencies are warning that global warming poses a serious threat to human health. A "wait-and-see approach" to the problem "would be imprudent at best and nonsensical at worst," says their report. "Climate Change and Human Health" —by the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, and the UN Environment Program— predicts increased suffering and death from both direct and indirect effects of global warming. The agencies issued the report last week in Geneva at the 2nd Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, where delegates from some 150 countries are debating policies on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The 300-page report examines possible impacts of climate change—based on scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change— that estimate global mean temperatures could rise 2 to 3 °C over the next century. The international team of authors concedes its forecasts of health effects are uncertain, but recommends "adoption of precautionary policies that balance current social needs against serious, perhaps unacceptable, future risks." Direct effects of climate warming on human health include increased summertime heat stress and greater air pol12
JULY 15,1996 C&EN
Crystal structure illuminates mechanism of rapamydn-induced dimerization Sequence of images shows immunosuppressant rapamycin (top center) linking up to FK506-binding protein (FKBP) (middle), and rapamycinFKBP then binding to FKBP-rapamycin-associated protein (FRAP) (bottom). The crystal structure of the ternary complex of human FKBP12, rapamycin, and the binding domain of human FRAP has been determined by chemistry professors Jon Clardy of Cornell University and Stuart L. Schreiber of Harvard University and coworkers [Science, 273, 239 (1996)]. Their work shows details of the FKBP-FRAP association, which occurs only as a result of rapamycin's ability to simultaneously occupy one hydrophobic binding pocket on each protein. The structure shows how a small cell-permeable molecule like rapamycin can act as a synthetic inducer of dimerization and thus as a potential drug. This is also the first structure determination for any domain of an ataxia-telangiectasia gene product, the protein family to which FRAP belongs.
lution. According to current models, the report says, "by around 2050 many major cities around the world could be experiencing up to several thousand extra heat-related deaths annually, not taking into account the effects of population growth." Indirect effects—such as contamination of freshwater supplies by rising sea levels or wider ranges for tropical infectious diseases—are harder to predict but equally serious, notes Paul R. Epstein, associate director of Harvard University Medical School's Center for Health & the Global Environment and a lead author of the report. For example, he tells C&EN, the mosquito-borne diseases malaria and dengue fever are both occurring at higher altitudes than they used to.
Researchers at Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Mass.—a firm with which Clardy and Schreiber are associated— recently found that rapamycin can control expression of human growth hormone in mice. Ariad anticipates clinical trials of a dimerization drug in the near future. Stu Borman "Overwhelmingly, the negative will outweigh the positive impacts," Epstein says. "These impacts may be nonlinear and appear to be happening already. We need to take steps to slow down the rate of climate change." Just what actions to take, if any, are the focus of contentious debate in Geneva. Environmental groups are pressuring industrialized countries to commit to reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2005. But industry representatives, including the Washington, D.C.-based Global Climate Coalition, argue the science is too uncertain to justify economically costly controls. The conference concludes this week with a meeting of environmental ministers. Pamela Zurer
