The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: The news of this Thursday; then analysis of what newly released documents reveal about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito; a look at what the coming of winter means to earthquake survivors in Pakistan; an encore science unit report on the gene that makes us age; a World AIDS Day update of the international effort to deliver AIDS drugs; and a Richard Rodriguez essay on the look outside, as well as inside, a new San Francisco museum.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Al-Qaida in Iraq staged a brief show of force today in a key western city. It came a day after President Bush laid out his strategy for victory. The assault focused on Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, a Sunni stronghold.

Masked gunmen took to the streets, allowing a cameraman for Associated Press Television News to tape them. They fired weapons and set up roadblocks for a time. No one was hurt, and a U.S. General insisted it was mostly about getting publicity.

MAJ. GEN. RICK LYNCH, U.S. Army: As of 1400 today in Ramadi there has only been one insurgent attack, and that attack was an RPG, rocket-propelled grenade, that was launched with no effect against a combined Iraqi security force, and a coalition force checkpoint. So the idea that there's a massive uprising in insurgents in Ramadi who have retaken control of the town is incorrect.

JIM LEHRER: The general said, in fact, U.S. and Iraqi forces have hurt al-Qaida with offensives along the Syrian border. He said as a result there were 23 suicide attacks last month, the fewest in seven months. The number of U.S. deaths in Iraq was also down slightly in November, to 85. More than 2,100 Americans have been killed since the war began.

The Iraqi interior minister fired his top human rights inspector today over a torture scandal. The Associated Press reported the firing.

Just yesterday the Iraqi government missed a deadline for reporting on the alleged abuse at a Baghdad prison. U.S. troops found more than 170 inmates at the site last month.

In Washington today there were questions about reports of the U.S. military planting stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories offer upbeat accounts of the war and rebuilding efforts. At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said this:

SCOTT McCLELLAN: We've seen the reports. We first learned about it when we saw the reports yesterday; I think in the Los Angeles Times was the first place that that was reported. We are very concerned about the reports. We have asked the Department of Defense for more information. Gen. Pace has asked people to look into the matter and get the facts, so we want to see what those facts are.

JIM LEHRER: A Pentagon spokesman said he still has very few facts. He also said, "It's certainly an issue that's easy to get emotional about."

Around the world today, people rallied against AIDS. Several governments joined in with new efforts to fight the disease. The occasion was the 18th annual World AIDS Day.

NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman narrates our report.

KWAME HOLMAN: This year's observance came as patients crowded clinics in Africa and elsewhere and the United Nations warned the epidemic continues to grow. There now are more than 40 million infections worldwide, more than of.

In Washington, President Bush took note of the global threat.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Our concern about HIV-AIDS does not stop at our borders. Other nations face greater challenges. Yet, they're moving forward with courage and determination that inspires our respect and deserves our support.

KWAME HOLMAN: Africa faces the greatest challenges with nearly 26 million cases and an estimated 12 million AIDS orphans. Today, the tiny Kingdom of LaSutu initiated a program to offer free HIV testing to all households.

DR. JIM YONG KIM: In launching their campaign today, LaSutu was the first country in the world to commit to offering a voluntary HIV test to every person.

KWAME HOLMAN: In China, officials unveiled a campaign targeting millions of migrant workers who move around the country, many of them men.

WU YI, Chinese State Council (Translated): We still have a long way to go in preventing AIDS. We cannot slack off in doing this work.

KWAME HOLMAN: And in India, AIDS marches took place across the country. India ranks second only to South Africa in the number of HIV infections at 5.1 million cases.

JIM LEHRER: AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981. We'll have more on the AIDS story later in the program tonight.

U.S. lawmakers visited earthquake survivors in Pakistan today, and promised help to get them through the winter. Congressman Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana led a delegation to a tent camp. They also visited a hospital and met with doctors. Thousands of quake survivors are still living in the camps as winter sets in. We'll have more on this story later in the program.

The city of New Orleans reopened the badly damaged Lower Ninth Ward today, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. It's one of the city's poorest sections, and the last to have people return. They were let in for the day to look at ruined homes and to collect belongings. Before now, residents of the Lower Ninth were limited to viewing the damage from a bus.

In economic news, the Commerce Department reported today consumer spending edged up 0.2 percent in October. It accounts for two-thirds of economic activity. On Wall Street today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 106 points to close at 10,912; the NASDAQ rose 34 points to close at 2267.

And that's it for the news summary tonight. Now it's on to: The Alito written record; the Pakistan cold; the aging gene; the AIDS medicine effort; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

UPDATE - ON THE RECORD

JIM LEHRER: Ray Suarez has our Alito story.

RAY SUAREZ: While serving as assistant solicitor general in the Reagan administration, Samuel Alito outlined a strategy for overturning the landmark abortion rights decision, Roe versus Wade.

In a lengthy 1985 memo released by the National Archives yesterday, Alito urged the Justice Department to advocate convincing the Supreme Court to allow states to regulate board, arguing this would advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe V. Wade, and in the Manhattan, of mitigating its effects.

Alito did not recommend a frontal assault on the decision because, he wrote, "No one seriously believes the court is about to overrule Roe v. Wade."

This memo release follows the recent disclosure of Alito's application for a political post in the Reagan White House in 1985. On it Alito wrote, "The Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Abortion rights advocates have been swift to jump on these t writings. Judiciary Committee Democrat Chuck Schumer.

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: I don't think we've come by a nominee, for the Supreme Court, certainly, who has stated things so directly and boldly and even talked about a strategy as a way of overturning Roe v. Wade.

RAY SUAREZ: But some of Alito's supporters say the 20-year-old documents reveal little about how Alito would rule on issues today.

Chuck Cooper worked with Alito in the Reagan Justice Department.

CHUCK COOPER: We can't even draw certain inferences about what he believed in 1985 from what he wrote as an advocate, as a lawyer in a team of lawyers advancing the position of his client, the Reagan administration.

RAY SUAREZ: Alito's supporters also point to the judge's response to a Judiciary Committee questionnaire in which Alito reaffirmed a view of judicial restraint, writing: "The judges must respect the judgments reached by their predecessors and they must be sensibly cautious about the scope of their decisions."

Still, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said yesterday Alito's statements from the memo and job application would be the lead question when he opens confirmation hearings on the judge's nomination next month.

RAY SUAREZ: Joining us to discuss what we know about Judge Alito are two constitutional law scholars: Lillian BeVier at the University of Virginia School of Law; and Akhil Amar from Yale Law School.

Professor BeVier, what emerges from the hundreds of documents in this most recent release, a competent lawyer, strong thinker?

LILLIAN BeVIER: A competent lawyer, a strong thinker, certainly. I think there's very little that we can infer about how he's going to approach Roe versus Wade or any other major precedent when he gets on the bench on the Supreme Court.

The job of a Supreme Court justice is just so very different from the job of a lawyer for the Justice Department or someone who is applying for a job with a particular administration.

Judge Alito, from all that we know about him, from his 15 year on the bench, is a very cautious very careful, a very respectful judge, and he, on the bench so far, has exhibited great respect for precedent.

RAY SUAREZ: Let me just jump in right there because these documents predate his time as a judge. Are you suggesting that they don't really have that much value as a sight into who he is in 2005?

LILLIAN BeVIER: Well, you know what I'm inclined to think is what Judge Alito adheres to as a political matter is -- he is a conservative person. He's a conservative thinker. He's also a conservative thinker about the role of the court and the role of judges.

And so I think to infer from his political positions what his views would be, what his decisions would be on the Supreme Court is just a great mistake. It's a leap that is wrong to take, I think.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Amar, what did you see in that recent release of documents?

AKHIL AMAR: Well, I didn't hear all of what was just said so I hope I don't repeat all of Professor BeVier's points, which I'm sure were excellent.

But I saw a judge - excuse me -- a lawyer who was quite a careful craftsman. He had an argument that the administration should respectfully put forth their views but not wave a red flag in front of the Supreme Court, to go slow, to proceed cautiously, to make clear they thought Roe went too far but to do so in a very careful, measured way.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Professor BeVier also suggested that these weren't very helpful in guiding anyone to an understanding of what kind of justice Samuel Alito would be, and she pointed to hismore than a decade's work on the bench, which is quite different from these memos as an advocate working inside the Reagan Justice Department.

AKHIL AMAR: And in a sense, neither is an absolute perfect predictor of what he will do as a Supreme Court justice because lower court judges are bound by precedent in ways that Supreme Court judges are much more free to change precedent.

So, we have lots of tea leaves, and we don't have any definitive resolution. It is interesting, though, that on several issues, his opinions sound a little bit like Justice O'Connor's actually. She thought that the early Roe versus Wade opinions went too far; so did he.

There's another opinion -- another memo that came out today about his involvement in a criminal procedure case involving police shooting at fleeing suspects, and his view in that case turned out to be very similar to Justice O'Connor's also.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, a lot of the attention that this latest document release has gotten, Professor Amar, has gone to just the issue of abortion. Did it provide you any better understanding of just Judge Alito's thinking on this question, but to see how he was providing intellectual ammunition, talking points to the Reagan Justice Department?

AKHIL AMAR: I came away from reading the Roe memo and the other materials that were released today with a lot of respect for Alito as a very careful lawyer and craftsman.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor BeVier, the same question, did Judge Alito show his hand in these days with the solicitor general's office in his writings on Roe?

LILLIAN BeVIER: Well, I don't think so, and I think -- certainly not in terms of the way he would handle the issue today.

I think it's important, you know, to look at part of that strategy that he was advocating as being a search for some kind of middle ground, rather than continuing to affirm or strengthen Roe versus Wade and abortion on demand.

I think Judge Alito was looking for ways to find a middle road between abortion on demand ask -- and no abortion rights whatsoever, and that that strategy, giving the states some leeway to make decisions at the margins, seems in many respects to make a lot of sense.

I think as a political matter, it's the -- it's a strategy that a lot of people in the American public would prefer to have both the political branches and the court pursue.

RAY SUAREZ: Despite your own stated misgivings, Professor BeVier, about the value of these 20-year-old memos, Judge Alito himself in meetings with senators has tried to minimize their impact and dismiss them just as the writings of someone who was seeking a job, the writings of someone who was trying to gain favor inside a system and catch the attention of his superiors. Is that a reasonable explanation for strongly worded opinions of an earlier career?

LILLIAN BeVIER: Well, of course I don't know just exactly what Judge Alito has said to the senators. Of course I think it's a reasonable position. I think there are very few of us who could go back and look at everything we wrote 20 years ago on a job application or any other place and be wholly satisfied that it's a clear picture of the person and the lawyer that we have become 20 years later.

So I think it's perfectly reasonable to look at the memos, but I think that a lot of credence has to be given to the passage of time to the accrual of wisdom, and to the fact that Judge Alito is -- and knows he is, applying, if you will, for a very different job from the job he was applying for at that time.

RAY SUAREZ: And indeed, Professor BeVier, he added in some of those conversations with senators, that he would prefer that they look at his opinions of the last 15 years instead of just those memos from his time at the Justice Department.

Let me turn to Professor Amar, same question. We saw the same thing when John Roberts was heading for his hearings, sort of neutralizing earlier writings, neutralizing earlier strongly worded opinions. What do you make of that?

AKHIL AMAR: Well, I don't think that these earlier memos are a perfect predictor, but as I said before, I don't think that lower court opinions are either, because you're supposed to follow Supreme Court precedent as a judge on the Third Circuit, and you don't always have to as a Supreme Court justice.

So it would be interesting if he at the confirmation process actually talked about his views today about certain things. He is not going to want to answer those questions, any more than then Judge, now Chief Justice Roberts wanted to answer those questions.

It might be a little harder for him to evade it because he's been more specific on Roe versus Wade than anything that we have in Judge Roberts' materials.

The other thing that's quite interesting about his background is that he's a former prosecutor, and he'll be the first former prosecutor on the modern court, and I think he brings a certain sensibility about that that you see in some of this material also, how, perhaps, the Warren Court, and even the Berger Court went too far in protecting rights of guilty defendants at the expense of law enforcement interests, and you very much see that sensibility in this material, and I think in some of his Third Circuit opinions as well.

RAY SUAREZ: So are the documents that are being released from the Reagan years consistent with the things that Judge Alito has ruled upon when sitting at various levels of federal benches, Professor Amar?

AKHIL AMAR: Yes, I think you do see the same person at work; in a memo that was released even earlier, his 1985 job application to the Reagan administration, he described himself always having been a conservative. I think that's who he is.

There's nothing wrong with being a conservative. This president is a conservative; President Reagan was a conservative, and I think that's what you're getting here.

But what I didn't know before I looked at this material is I think you're getting someone who also has a real respect for facts, for tradition, for other institutions of government and not just for the courts, a certain sense of deference, and a certain care and craftsmanship that I thought was in these materials.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor BeVier, do you agree with that summation, if you will?

LILLIAN BeVIER: I do agree very much so. I think what we have here is a conservative in the ways that are appropriate to someone who is going to be a Supreme Court justice. He's conservative in his approach to everything that he takes on.

He's careful, he works diligently. He tries to be fair in everything that he's done. I have never heard a single word of criticism about Judge Alito in terms of his fairness to individuals or the approach that he's taken to people he's worked with or cases he's decided.

And I think that that's an important ingredient in the evaluation of anything he's written and any work that he's done is the care and respect that he shows to the materials before him.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor BeVier, Professor Amar, thank you, both.

LILLIAN BeVIER: Thank you.

AKHIL AMAR: Thank you.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: The weather crisis in Pakistan; a science ofaging story; going after AIDS; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

UPDATE - GRIM FORECAST

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill has our Pakistan update.

GWEN IFILL: Two months after a deadly earthquake in Pakistan killed 87,000 people, dropping temperatures there have fueled fresh concern about the potential for a new wave of casualties.

Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, just returned from touring the earthquake region and is here to update us on the situation there.

I guess the best way to start with you is to ask you to describe for us what you saw on the ground.

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Well, first of all, it's something I cannot describe because it was really such devastation. There are no words to describe it. I remember one place Balakot, in which a large number of people died. The buildings just crumbled and everybody was down below, and everybody was dying. So it's just really terrible.

And now there is a huge effort of the Pakistani authority and the international community trying to help these people to survive the winter.

The crucial question is to make them survive the winter and then to lay the foundations for the reconstruction and rebuilding, not only the infrastructure, the schools, the houses, but their lives, that is the most important.

GWEN IFILL: You mentioned Balakot, where else did you go on your trip?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Well, I went, of course, to the capital, Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, and to several other places whose names I can't remember because there were small villages. But I've seen a lot of devastation.

GWEN IFILL: And is there any way - you say you can't find the words - is there anything you can compare it to that would help for people who have never seen it with their own eyes?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: No. I was prime minister in Portugal when there was an earthquake and a few hundred people died; there's nothing comparable to all the destruction. It's terrible. And then you see small valleys, mountains, and everything destroyed up in the mountains, and people living in extremely difficult conditions.

GWEN IFILL: As you try to categorize what the major concerns are that you have about what happens as winter approaches, as you talked, let's try to break them down one at a time. Reconstruction issues: Are we at the point yet where we can talk about extensive reconstruction?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: I think it's important that even relief bears in mind reconstruction. And one of the reasons many people do not want to leave home even the home is no longer there but they want to settle close to their properties is because they are reconstruction minded, and that is something very positive that should be encouraged.

Of course, in some circumstances it's not possible. But many of the things that are necessary for the relief operations will then be used for reconstruction; the two things go hand in hand.

But the crucial, crucial objective now is to make sure people will survive during this winter, and it is very important for the people still in the upper valleys where shelter has been provided, but where everybody is concerned because of the extremely hardship that they have to face in the winter in those upper valleys, many will come down, I believe, and then in the lower valley, we have some organized camps. We have 20 organized camps, in which we ourselves are present.

But we have more than 500 spontaneous camps, and the crucial thing now is to support those camps to make sure that they provide to the people the minimum conditions for them to survive the winter.

GWEN IFILL: When you say "camps," are you talking about camps of tents, camps of rude construction--

ANTONIO GUTERRES: -- tents. One of the concerns, of course, in the mountains is to have the so-called single dry room for a family, a single room to make sure that people can, in the worst hours of the day and especially when it is snowing, can really be protected.

GWEN IFILL: So right now, most of the people you're talking about are still outdoors; technically, they're not indoors yet?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Of course, everything has been destroyed. Almost everything has been destroyed. Now, the winterization of the tents is crucial -

GWEN IFILL: Right.

ANTONIO GUTERRES: -- because those tents were not meant for Pakistan.

We have emptied our warehouses all over the world, and we have with NATO a very important airlift operation, UNHCR and NATO; that airlift operation just brought in more than 2,000 tons of equipment, but those equipments were not sought for disaster in winter. They were just there.

GWEN IFILL: Right.

ANTONIO GUTERRES: So now we need to winterize the tents and to make sure that everybody, as I said, can go through the winter.

GWEN IFILL: You said 20 camps are now up and operating?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Twenty formal camps. But then you have more than 500 spontaneous camps.

GWEN IFILL: And how many people are we talking about who need to be sheltered?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: We are talking about in the camps more than 150,000 people.

GWEN IFILL: And where were they coming from?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: They were coming from, well, most of them from the villages or the towns around, and some of them are already coming from the mountains.

And we can expect in the next few weeks to have some tens of thousands maybe coming from the mountains into these camps that have been prepared or will then be enlarged.

GWEN IFILL: As winter begins, is there any evidence yet of disease or any other kind of casualties that are -- kind of a secondary wave of quake casualties?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: We have to be humble in one side because, as I mention, the tragedy is so immense, the problems are so overwhelming that really nobody can guarantee we'll be able to handle everything. So I'm afraid something might happen.

But what I could see, really, was a total commitment of the Pakistani army, of the local authorities, of the different UN agencies, of the NGO's, everybody hand in hand doing their best.

Sometimes coordination was not perfect. Sometimes things were not being done in the best possible way. It's a very difficult thing, but everybody was really working in the best spirit to make sure that we could really provide help to those in need.

GWEN IFILL: There have been some concerns, apparently, that some of these generous international pledges are for long-term reconstruction, not for what is happening right now. What can you tell us about that?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: I think that situation has improved, but the most important thing is the pledges materialize, and that is done as soon as possible.

GWEN IFILL: What kind of pledges are necessary at this point?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: At the present moment it's basically the support of the relief operations which are taking place, and to make sure they are sustained during the winter, and then of course the huge effort of reconstruction, but according to our estimations, the amount of money pledged for reconstruction corresponds more or less to the needs, and the Pakistani authorities were quite happy with that.

GWEN IFILL: Have rich -

ANTONIO GUTERRES: The crucial moment is now.

GWEN IFILL: Have rich countries like the United States and Great Britain stepped up to the plate?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Well, many countries, not only the developed world, also countries in the -- many countries have done so. Of course in the beginning we were all slow. Agencies have been slow in getting to the ground.

Countries have been slow in giving financial support, but I would say that's also natural because we were all, to a certain extent, overwhelmed with the tragedy.

HILLARY GOODRIDGE: Your portfolio is to deal with refugees. How does this fall into that?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: First of all, Pakistan is a country that has been extremely generous, receiving refugees from Afghanistan. They peaked with about six million; there are still about three million refugees in Pakistan, and we are very active in Pakistan and they are very happy supporting those refugees in Pakistan.

Now, how could we refuse to support the Pakistani people in this occasion, when they have been helping us to protect refugees for decades? It would be inconceivable.

It is our obligation; I think we have done it. As I said, we have emptied warehouses all over the world. We have engaged in a major airlift with NATO. We are now very active at the field, together with the UN family, and many other international organizations and the local authorities.

And I think it's our duty also to correspond to that generosity and that solidarity the Pakistanis have had with the Afghans during, as I said, the last decades.

GWEN IFILL: And finally, you know, here in the United States we have been watching what happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and even people there have been concerned about donor fatigue in a much smaller catastrophe that occurred here.

Is there any sense that there is international donor fatigue, or people are just forgetting what happened in Pakistan?

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Well, I think I'm going to be very frank. Money goes with television. Whenever there is a big event that has huge coverage in television, people get a strong feeling about it, and then the donor countries come, maybe a little bit late sometimes, maybe not enough.

The problem is not donor fatigue. The problem is donor diversion because much of the money that has been going into Pakistan now has been diverted from relief programs in different parts of the world.

For instance, we are extremely under funded in programs to return refugees in Africa, in Burundi, for instance, to protect refugees in shock, so that is also one of the problems is when there is something that is under the spotlight, there is support.

But many of the crises in this world, many of the people suffering in this world are suffering where the television is not there and where the public opinion is not aware of the fact, and where international community sometimes tend to forget, and this is a tragic scene.

GWEN IFILL: Commissioner Antonio Guterres, thank you very much.

ANTONIO GUTERRES: Thank you very much.

ENCORE - SCIENCE OF AGING

JIM LEHRER: Now, an encore look at the connection between genes and aging. Tom Bearden has our science unit report.

TOM BEARDEN (originally aired 2-28-05): When Eri Gentry buys groceries, she's shopping with a lot more than the next week's meals in mind. A couple of years ago, gentry, an undergraduate at Yale, abandoned conventional eating habits and began restricting her intake of calories to between 1,100 and 1,300 calories a day, about two-thirds of what she'd previously consumed. She did that after reading about scientific research showing that laboratory animals on calorie- restricted diets tended to live longer, in some cases, a lot longer. Her shopping cart was heavy on vegetables and fruits: Collard and broccoli, apples and oranges, but was balanced out with eggs, yogurt, and nuts. She says it's a healthy, nutritious diet. Gentry also joined the Calorie Restriction Society, a worldwide group whose members hope that following the same diet might extend their lives, too.

ERI GENTRY: It was the only type of diet consistently proven to increase your health biomarkers. And it seems that there's a strong case that humans can live longer through calorie restriction and that seems amazing.

TOM BEARDEN: Seventy years ago scientists first discovered that rodents kept on a carefully balanced but calorie-restricted diet, lived longer, healthier lives on average than control animals on a normal diet. Later research showed the same thing happened to every animal tested. The research has now gotten as far as monkeys. But no one understood exactly why restricting calories seemed to extend life. Some scientists now believe that new research indicates genes are the controlling factor in the process. They've identified a series of genes with a bewildering variety of names that have similar structures, even though they're found in many different plants and animals. All seem to control the aging process. Some of those discoveries were made by David Sinclair at the Harvard Medical School.

DAVID SINCLAIR: We used to think that aging was a lot like-- as if we were cars-- we're made fresh and youthful and then we eventually just break down and die. What we didn't realize until recently is that we're much more complex than a car. We fix ourselves if we're broken. And we found that there are particular genes that protect us against aging and if we can tap into these genes, we would have a way of protecting ourselves against the aging process.

TOM BEARDEN: Scientists suspect these anti-aging genes must have developed in primitive animals millions of years ago. They think that organisms under stress, like not having enough to eat, activate a kind of cellular survival mechanism, which apparently helps fend off disease, and hence, the animals live longer. Sinclair thinks it's a kind of a cellular emergency response.

DAVID SINCLAIR: We think of these longevity genes a bit like a 911 command center, where these genes respond to stressors and maybe a lack of food and they send out the troops, like the ambulance, the fire brigade, to help the cells survive, to hunker down and get through the lean period.

TOM BEARDEN: Sinclair and others began looking for ways to turn on the anti-aging genes without restricting the animal's diet, hoping to extend life without reducing caloric intake. He began by working with common baker's yeast. Because a yeast cell grown in a broth of nutrients in a Petri dish lives only ten days, it doesn't take long to measure lengthened lifespan. A year ago, researchers isolated a gene called NPT-1 and learned that it controls the activity level of a second gene called SIR-2. They discovered that artificially stepping up NPT- 1 activity stimulated SIR-2, and caused yeast cells on normal nutrients to live an average of 40 percent longer, just as if they'd been on restricted calories. As research continued, the genes were found in many organisms. University of Connecticut researcher Stephen Helfand found similar genes in fruit flies, another widely studied lab animal with a short lifespan.

STEPHEN HELFAND: So this is a mutation that's been introduced into the fly and we'll have it live longer and we'll have it, we believe, behave as if it thinks it's calorically restricted.

TOM BEARDEN: By breeding different kinds of flies and counting the number of flies that die each day, Helfand and his colleague Blanka Rogina found that flies with higher levels of the SIR-2 gene also lived longer, even on normal calories. He also found the process worked in reverse.

STEPHEN HELFAND: We changed SIR-2, we can change lifespan. We prevent SIR-2 from increasing, we can block the lifespan extension. So it seems as though when we block the ability of SIR-2 to increase, we block the ability of calorie restriction to extend lifespan.

TOM BEARDEN: So it SIR-2 the key to aging?

STEPHEN HELFAND: (Laughs) Well I know people that would like to believe that. Certainly there's a number of pieces of data that suggest SIR-2 is one of the central regulators of this process.

TOM BEARDEN: The studies gained validity when experimenters found that the same class of genes could also extend lifespan in another widely used lab animal-- a microscopic worm known scientifically as C. Elegans. Now Sinclair's lab is starting to experiment with mice.

DAVID SINCLAIR: Most biologists will tell you a yeast cell and a fly are more distant from each other than a fly is to a human. So we've already jumped a huge distance in terms of biology and we're just filling in the last little gap between flies, mice, and people.

TOM BEARDEN: Working together, Helfand and Sinclair also found resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine and peanuts. It seems to target the aging genes specifically, putting them into overdrive and lengthening lifespan in many lab animals. Sinclair helped found a biotech company to try to turn these discoveries into drugs that could activate the survival mechanism in humans without calorie restriction. It might delay or perhaps even prevent the onset of the diseases of aging, like diabetes, Alzheimer's, and others.

TOM BEARDEN: In effect, are we talking about tricking the organism into thinking it's under stress?

DAVID SINCLAIR: Yeah, that's exactly right. What we're on about here is to trick the animal into thinking that it is calorie restricted.

TOM BEARDEN: Neither Sinclair nor Helfand is looking for a fountain of youth pill. But both are optimistic about longer term gains.

STEPHEN HELFAND: The idea that you could extend the healthy portion of a life span, and also the maximal life span, I think is entirely possible. In fact, that's what's extended in calorie-restricted mice and rats.

DAVID SINCLAIR: Let's admit that people have claimed that they've had the elixir of youth probably for the last 40,000 or more years. So I don't want to claim that we have the cure for aging by any means, but it's really clear that modern medicine, modern molecular biology has finally grasped a potential way to manipulate lifespan and have a dramatic impact on healthcare.

TOM BEARDEN: In the absence of new pharmaceutical miracles, Eri Gentry plans to continue her calorie-restricted lifestyle. Scientists doing aging research think her diet could have some benefits, but don't believe most people have the stamina to follow such a demanding regimen long term. They hope that what they're discovering with genes and simple organisms will one day help humans live longer, healthier lives without drastic calorie restriction.

FOCUS - MAKING PROGRESS

JIM LEHRER: Now an AIDS Day look at efforts to provide AIDS drugs around the world. Jeffrey Brown has our report.

JEFFREY BROWN: On this day two years ago, the World Health Organization proposed a bold initiative called "3 by 5." The goal: To treat three million HIV-infected people worldwide by the end of 2005. That number, it's now clear, will not be met. But the effort has provided lifesaving drugs to more than one million people to date.

We assess the initiative and look at the work ahead with: Stephen Lewis, United Nations special envoy for HIV-Aids in Africa-- he's author of a new book, "Race Against Time," that examines the AIDS epidemic; and Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, an organization which works for human rights in Africa. Welcome to both of you.

Stephen Lewis starting with you, how well has the 3 by 5 Program worked?

STEPHEN LEWIS: It's worked moderately well. It's made a tremendous impact in terms of finally getting significant antiretroviral therapy out, as you indicated, to over one million people.

I think what is important about it is that we've unleashed a momentum that is now irreversible, and as I travel through southern Africa, country after country is moving heaven and earth to get more and more of its people into treatment. So that at least is a glimmer of hope amidst the otherwise sense of despair, which engulfs much of the continent.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, give us some specifics. Remind us how the drugs work. Who exactly is getting them? Who are these million people? Mr. Lewis? You can hear me?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Yes, I can hear you now.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. I was asking you for some specifics of who was getting the drugs, and remind us how they work.

STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, the drugs are not a cure. The drugs simply prolong life, and the drugs are primarily from the generic drug manufacturers in India, which are called triple combination therapy.

They're three drugs in one tablet taken twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. The regimens are easy to adhere to. The resistance and side effects are relatively minimal. It makes people feel much better almost overnight. They eat more. They feel healthier. They go back to work.

It keeps the parents alive. You diminish the number of orphans, and the flow of drugs is fairly consistent now as the generics come into the countries through the support of the global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and the presidential initiative in the United States.

And it is making a tremendous difference. I mean, we are keeping people alive under the most difficult of circumstances.

JEFFREY BROWN: Salih Booker, how do you assess the situation with the 3 by 5 Initiative so far?

SALIH BOOKER: Well, certainly treatment was the right focus. 3 by 5 was a modest initiative. We have to bear in mind they were simply trying to put three million people on treatment in low- and middle-income people in countries who needed it, out of a total of six million people who without medicines will die.

So the fact that we were only able to achieve one million out of the three target is deeply concerning. And, of course in Africa, which is the front line of this pandemic, less than 10 percent of African HIV patients who need access to medicines have those antiretroviral environmental medicines available to them now.

JEFFREY BROWN: In Listening to both of you, starting with you, Salih Booker, is it a glass half full-half empty type of thing for telling the public, all of us, what is going on?

SALIH BOOKER: Well, it's certainly half full, maybe a tenth full. But Stephen is right; there is momentum, which is new, because for so long treatment was just being ignored, and there was only a focus on prevention. So now, that's right. There's new momentum; the right to treatment as part of the right to health is widely being recognized.

When you have obstacles of inadequate funding, you have still obstacles from the big pharmaceutical companies that are more interested in protecting their intellectual property than in patients' lives.

So we have momentum, but it's just not fast enough; the progress is just not fast enough.

JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Lewis, one of the issues that's always been out there is the question of to what extent countries, developing countries are able to effectively use the money that is there and effectively use the drugs that do come to them.

Do you see some improvements in your trips to Africa and the rest of the world?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Oh, yes, there are improvements. I share Salih's view, that it is a calamitously low number of people who are in treatment. One would wish it was four, five or six million, but I think of the context, and the context was that the world was immobilized. We were inert. We were not responding. There was terrible negligence in the international community and a good deal of silence and denial in the African community, and we at least have broken through that, and we're now getting more and more people into treatment.

What is prohibiting it or inhibiting it strongly now, as you have implied, is the absence of capacity in Africa. I mean, people have to understand extraordinary numbers have died -- doctors, nurses, clinicians, pharmacists, community health workers -- right at the moment when we have the drugs, we lack the human capacity to get them out.

And so everybody is attempting to train and refurbish capacity and to give the African countries the kind of support they need because God knows they have the sophistication and the knowledge at the grassroots of Africa to turn this pandemic around if the western world will provide an adequate flow of resources and other support.

JEFFREY BROWN: How do you see this capacity question? And related, I think, is the question of stigma that has always been there in Africa and in other countries that many have seen as getting in the way of getting things done, more done.

SALIH BOOKER: On the capacity side, often from a donor perspective, they might refer to this as absorptive capacity. They say the developing countries, particularly in Africa, can only absorb so much by way of funding because of bottlenecks in healthcare delivery systems.

I think the answer to that is you need to invest more precisely in developing that capacity. In other words, if you have a problem in the supply chain of getting medicines out to rural clinics, et cetera, if you have difficulties with access to clean water, the response is to not say, we'll have to withhold funding until there's greater capacity.

You use this funding, the billions that have been promised, to invest in creating more effective and integrated healthcare systems in Africa. This is what African governments and civil society are trying to do.

So, you know, I think the capacity problem can certainly be addressed. And it's not all within ministries. There are so many NGO's, people, organizations representing people living with AIDS that are part of the effort in the fight against AIDS in Africa. So capacity can be addressed. Resources are really the key constraint there.

On the issue of stigma, certainly it's still a major problem but progress has been made, particularly because of AIDS activists in Africa demanding that their governments wake up, open their eyes, and acknowledge that this is a priority for everyone in their countries.

The president of Nigeria, for example, began today by going for a run with HIV-positive patients in Nigeria. Across the continent, you have initiatives, like the All-Africa Conference of Churches, putting on its web site, "The church is positive." All are efforts to try to do away with stigma, which is a key obstacle to wider treatment and prevention efforts in Africa.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, Mr. Lewis, I'm wondering, on a day like this, World AIDS Day, when the world is looking in at the problem, what should we see as the next goal, or are specific targets a useful way to think about the problem?

STEPHEN LEWIS: Oh, I think specific targets are a very useful way to think about the problem, and I think that the world has generally embraced the proposition of universal access to treatment, prevention, and care by the year 2010.

That was given testament by the G-8 back at the Gleneagle Summit in July. It was just reaffirmed by UN AID in a report they released last week. It's generally agreed now that's the target.

And, by the way, with treatment comes prevention. A lot more people get tested, and with treatment there is also a diminution of stigma. I was just a couple of days ago in Rwanda visiting a very famous American doctor, Dr. Paul Farmer who has done wonderful things in Haiti and now is collaborating with the Clinton initiative in Rwanda to build a health apparatus that provides treatment, and it's astonishing how the whole community rallies around when treatment is broadly available and stigma diminishes.

I've seen that done by Doctors Without Borders in Uganda through to Mozambique. We can beat this thing. What is harassing everyone is the uncertain flow of resources to keep the pipeline filled with drugs, and the need to give support around the building of capacity.

And if the international community continues to betray every promise it makes -- and it's already started since the G-8 summit was held -- then this World AIDS Day will be looked back upon in a lamentable fashion.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, we have to leave it there. Stephen Lewis and Salih Booker, thank you very much.

ESSAY - IS IT ART

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, essayist Richard Rodriguez visits a new museum in San Francisco.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Across America, museums have recently opened that are challenging and I think are as beautiful as any work of art within their walls. Milwaukee's Art Museum, the Figgie Museum in Davenport, Iowa, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the new Walker in Minneapolis.

San Francisco has just opened a new de Young Museum, and like many other museums in America, it looks like nothing else in the city in which it sits. The old de Young Museum was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

There was no question but that the museum would have to be rebuilt. Designs for the new museum were argued over, hollered over. People thought the new tower ugly, an intrusion into a beloved park, a battleship, an Aztec Temple.

The controversial tower has a 360-degree observatory from which it is now possible to stare out at a San Francisco that the museum in no way resembles.

This small, big city of San Francisco has long boasted of its exception to the rest of America. Here the misfit is welcome.

Many of us prefer to live our unorthodox lives within the shells of other lives -- wooden slats, creaky floors. San Francisco's architectural preference might well be called sentimental or brave because it is at war with the hard, concrete and glass of urban architecture, of Wal-Mart boxes and smoked-window office parks.

The de Young's architects, the famous Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, were dismayed by the hostility to their modernist design by a city so famous for its sexual and bohemian freedom.

As it was being built, the de Young loomed repellent against the sky, armored, armadilloed, a fortress, a concentration camp.

Inside within the museum, lie scattered artifacts of the past, many pasts, an Ulmich head, a Shaker chair, a pastoral painting.

In an American city of many races, many gods, many memories, the de Young's galleries are not separated from one another in discreet rectangles.

The museum's strengths, Oceana, Africa, California, are fused by long walkways, but this fluid design also highlights the tension between civilization.

Outside the British nature sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has cut what resembled earthquake fault lines into the stone. Goldsworthy's design is a most unsettling entrance into a building that should otherwise assure us of permanence.

The museum's exterior is wrapped in a copper sheaf in which has been cut a pattern of apple shade, taken from the very trees on the site. What appears to be armor is, in fact, metamorphosis, for the copper will with time oxidize in the damp light to a bluish-green, like the leaves of the eucalyptus.

This exterior forces the visitor, whether approaching or leaving the building, ostensibly devoted to the preservation of the past, to consider the passage of time.

Perhaps this is what the new museum architecture in America is announcing by sitting so uncomfortably in the present. The museum belongs to the future as much as it belongs to the past.

In this city, especially, where the old Templeton memory had been destroyed by an earthquake, this new museum is unsettling because it reminds us so sharply of the impermanence of all that we treasure.

I'm Richard Rodriguez.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: Gunmen for al-Qaida in Iraq staged a brief show of force in Ramadi. It came a day after President Bush laid out his strategy for victory. And on World AIDS Day, the UN warned the epidemic is still spreading. More than 40 million people are now infected.

JIM LEHRER: And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are eight more.

JIM LEHRER: We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening with Mark Shields and David Brooks, among others. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.