The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

RAY SUAREZ: Good evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Jim Lehrer is off this New Year's Day. On the NewsHour tonight, Paul Solman examines how the Internet has changed our lives. Elizabeth Brackett has the story of a teenage girl who volunteered for an experimental cancer treatment. Margaret Warner and our essayists look back at the year 2000. And NewsHour regular Robert Pinsky reads an end-of-the- century poem. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.

NEWS SUMMARY

RAY SUAREZ: A car bomb exploded in a shopping district of an Israeli coastal town today. At least 54 people were injured. It happened in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. No one has claimed responsibility for the blast. The explosion came hours after four Palestinians were killed in several incidents in the West Bank and Gaza. Those attacks followed the killing of a prominent Jewish settler and his wife Sunday in the West Bank. Also today, a White House spokesman said Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will travel to Washington to meet with President Clinton. That could happen as early as tomorrow. They will discuss the U.S. peace plan for the Middle East. The leaders spoke by phone this afternoon. In Rome today, Pope John Paul prayed for peace in the Holy Land. In a Mass in St. Peter's Square, he urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to the path of dialogue. January 1 is the day the Roman Catholic Church traditionally dedicates to world peace. In this country, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms said he would oppose ratification of the treaty signed by the U.S. Sunday that would create a permanent world court to try alleged war criminals. Senator Helms called President Clinton's decision to sign "outrageous." The President endorsed the treaty, in part, he said, to enable the United States to continue to influence its shape. But Helms said it would not protect American military personnel stationed abroad. The court, to be based in the Netherlands, must be ratified by 60 nations. 27 have already done so. The U.S. Supreme Court's Chief Justice Rehnquist said today he hopes the court will never again be involved in a Presidential election. In his year-end report to Congress, he said the election tested the system in ways it had never been tested before. He also noted that despite the seesaw aftermath, there was an orderly transition of power. The high court blocked further vote recounts in Florida on December 12. Vice President Gore conceded the election the following day. Former California Senator Alan Cranston died yesterday at his home in Los Altos. The cause of death was not immediately known. The liberal Democrat served 24 years in the Senate, where he became a champion of nuclear arms control. Cranston briefly campaigned for the presidency in 1984. His career was clouded by a Senate reprimand in 1991 for his efforts to intervene with federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a savings and loan president accused of securities fraud. Alan Cranston was 86 years old. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the wired world; an experimental cancer treatment; looking back at the year 2000; and an end-of-the- century poem.

FOCUS - WIRED WORLD

RAY SUAREZ: Business correspondent Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston has the Internet story. He examined how the web has changed our lives in this discussion recorded lastFriday, as the old year was winding down.

PAUL SOLMAN: Let's begin with a look at some estimates of Internet use and how it's been exploding in the past year. Our numbers come from a variety of sources. About 80% of Americans now have personal computers. About 100 million people are online and at last count the Net was adding 38 new users every second. Some 55 million Americans log on to the Internet, in a typical day. About 40% of them check their e-mail every day. About 30% check several times a day. In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 101 billion pieces of paper or snail mail. The number of e-mail messages transmitted in 1998 is estimated to have been around 4 trillion. 60% of regular Internet users report watching less television; 34% spend less time shopping in stores; 13% attend fewer social events; more than 25% say they now have friends they've never met in person; and-- our favorite-- 48% of regular Internet users, according to a UCLA study, say they now deny their children on-line access as a punishment tool. In short, the Internet is becoming a given of the American and global landscape, whether we like it or not.

For a discussion of what that may mean we turn to four experts, Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer and author who joins us from San Francisco as does Katie Hafner, consumer technology reporter for the "New York Times;" Paul Kedrosky is a Professor of Commerce, who teaches information technology and strategy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and with me here in Boston is Mary Fran Johnson, editor of Computer World Magazine. Welcome to you all.

Katie Hafner, are people using the Internet and particularly in the last year in ways you were predicting or would have predicted?

KATIE HAFNER, New York Times: Well, i think it's interesting sort of to go back to the roots of the Internet, which we actually seldom stop to do. If you look back, oh, you know, 30 years when it-- or even farther than that, 40 years when J.C. R. Lichreiter - who was a scientist at M.I.T. he was sort of the intellectual, he planted the intellectual seeds for the net. He foresaw this sort of Mckluenesque global village that ate -- what he called an inter-galactic network was going to bring.

PAUL SOLMAN: McKluen, Marshall McKluen, the media -

KATIE HAFNER: Exactly.

PAUL SOLMAN: The futurologist of the '50s and '60S.

KATIE HAFNER: Right. What's interesting is that i think we're actually beginning to see that. It's taken all these years but there are so many ways in which the world is, in fact, shrinking, and what we're seeing this year with sort of the dot-com shakeout is that the e-commerce part of is almost receding, if you will, and i would posit that the social uses of the net are beginning to come into more prominence than ever.

PAUL SOLMAN: Paul Kedrosky, is the world shrinking? You are after all there in Vancouver, those people are in San Francisco. But this is TV technology. This has been around for a while.

PAUL KEDROSKY: We've been able to pull this trick off for a little while. It is shrinking. The point Katie makes is a good one. This is something that is useful to keep in mind with all technologies and the Internet in particular is that it's taken a long, long time to get the Internet to the point where it feels like it's been an overnight success. It's really been sort of a 30-year ride. Suddenly it's reached this point of kind of ubiquity where everyone you know is swapping e-mail addresses and telling you how to get ahold of them and disappointed when you don't get email them at Christmas or New Year's or whenever. That's taken them a long, long time to reach the mass penetration. And that's when things really get, I think, interesting. At the same time though in the same way that our sort of expectations 30 years ago of how quickly that would happen were really out of sync with reality, i think our expectations about how quickly we'd be able to profit from it and the expectations that drove this euphoric rise of Internet stock prices over the last 36 months were equally out of sync with how realistic it would happen in the near term.

PAUL SOLMAN: Are you surprised about that? Are you surprised that the Internet stock collapsed?

PAUL KEDROSKY: Not at all. I have to confess i was very skeptical from the get-go.

PAUL SOLMAN: You were shorting the NASDAQ, were you?

PAUL KEDROSKY: If only i were so smart. I mean, these kind of -- technology seems to breed this phenomenon, for want of a better word, call it a mania where suddenly we put all of our fondest hopes and wishes on the back of some poor, old belabored technology. In the 20's it was sort of refrigerators and televisions. And today it's personal computers and the Internet. We load them up with all of our hopes, dreams and let them fly. You know, the poor things can't manage under all the load.

PAUL SOLMAN: Mary Fran Johnson with me here in Boston -- you were nodding when Paul Kedrosky was talking. We do freight these new technologies with more than they can bear?

MARYFRAN JOHNSON, ComputerWorld: Well, and I was thinking that technology changes very quickly but human beings change rather slowly. And I think some of the uses that we see today of the Internet are not some of the things that we may have anticipated two or even three years ago. I think especially as we move forward there will be more services delivered over the Internet that we really hadn't thought were going to be coming.

PAUL SOLMAN: Like what?

MARYFRAN JOHNSON: Well, communication with all the different companies that you get services from, like with your car dealership, that expectation that i think Katie mentioned that everyone has an e-mail. It's like I think the question has become instead of just are you on the Internet, i think in the future and even now the question is what kind of access do you have? Is it a very fast Internet connection? Are you going to be ordering a book from Amazon.Com through your Internet-enabled cell phone? The questions I think become different as people adapt to the different ways that they can use the Internet in their daily lives.

PAUL SOLMAN: Jaron Lanier, is it as you predicted? What's different about how the Internet looks today than, say, a year ago that you-- I don't know-- are surprised by or that you had right on the nose?

JARON LANIER, Computer Scientist/Author: Well, i thought the market was going to crash a lot sooner than it did. I was amazed at how long the madness lasted. I think part of the reason the madness lasted so long is that for some reason we just all adore obsessively talking and thinking about this technology -- I think in a way that we haven't ever obsessed about other technologies, even the old televisions and refrigerators. And I think the reason we obsess about it so much is because it's really all about us. It doesn't do anything by itself. It's just a pipe that runs between us. In a way it's our own vanity that is driving this market. As far as what surprises me, I'll tell you the happiest surprise is the rise of Internet use among the elderly. We've always known that the Internet was a medium of the young. We've always thought of youth as being the primary entrance card. It's really nice to see this demographic effect where we see the Internet also serving as a sort of a response against the separations that our mobile society creates in families so that's the happiest surprise. The market collapse is absolutely no surprise at all.

PAUL SOLMAN: Katie Hafner, what's your happiest surprise?

KATIE HAFNER: Well, actually, i hate to keep jumping in here as sort of the resident historian, but if you go back and you look at e- mail and how e-mail has evolved -- what Mary said earlier about how humans are so slow to change, what's interesting is that's so true, because when the Net was first around and first growing among university researchers, the killer very, very early was e- mail. What's interesting is that that pretty much is still is. I find that fascinating, and also one thing when i was mentioning earlier about the social uses of the Net, one thing that i find very interesting is how these sort of self-organizing web sites that are sort of just beginning to crop up, where sort of the best stuff bubbles to the surface....

PAUL SOLMAN: What do you mean?

KATIE HAFNER: Things like e-opinions.

PAUL SOLMAN: E-opinions.

KATIE HAFNER: E-opinions where the users who are on the site actually rate what other people on the site... you see this in crude form by the way on Amazon where sort of you rate the reviews. Then it gets....

PAUL SOLMAN: You rate the books.

KATIE HAFNER: You rate the books, right, exactly, and the other things that are on Amazon. And then in e-opinions there are these sort of reviews where everyone is sort of rating everybody's review and there's this sort of complicated for algorithm as how the best stuff bubbles to the surface. And this is truly something that could not have happened anywhere else but on the Net.

PAUL SOLMAN: Mary Fran, you've got-- Johnson-- you've got this in your workplace, right? There was the "am i hot or am i not" site? Kind of what Katie Hafner was talking about.

MARYFRAN JOHNSON: Right. I was thinking about that. The way the Internet and various web sites allow us to connect with each other and react to each other in whole new ways is actually a social phenomenon that I don't think anyone really anticipated a year, even two years ago. I wandered by one of the cubicles at Computer World where some of the editors and designers were having a fun time and laughing it up. I went over to see what they were doing. They were on that site: Am i hot or not.Com. You can send in a picture and basically people will tell you if you're not hot or not.

PAUL SOLMAN: Hot meaning good looking.

MARYFRAN JOHNSON: Good looking, yes. It was pretty funny.

PAUL SOLMAN: That's pretty terrifying. Paul, how come it still takes me so long to find what I'm looking for when i look for a piece of information? When Dave Barry was running his mock Presidential campaign, his one campaign promise was he would come up with a search engine where you could actually find what you wanted without having to wade for hours through what you don't want.

PAUL KEDROSKY: If only we had a good answer. I think -- there's a couple of different way to go at it - one answer is that like so much technology it was created by technologists and then only later on sort of retrofitted for the great unwashed who didn't happen to enjoy tinkering with technology for much of their today.

PAUL SOLMAN: And according to Jaron Lanier perhaps narcissistic technologists.

PAUL KEDROSKY: Sure - I mean, I think that's part of the answer, and the other answer for better or for worse is the Internet is truly-- and i mean this in sort of a small "d" sense of the word disorganized-- is a truly disorganized system where there isn't a lot of top-down structure or any real top-down structure imposed on it. And so it's kind of like an exploded library with card catalogues strewn all over the place. And so piecing all of that back together would be one thing that was a static creation that wasn't growing as quickly as it is. But with it growing so quickly you're trying to assemble a really loose fast changing picture of something that's changing as quickly as what you're trying to put together. And you put those two things together-- this fast changing thing and the technologist-- and it's a nightmare trying to find anything at you will.

PAUL SOLMAN: Jaron Lanier, is the Internet, do you think, a more positive or negative development - net/net -- at this point in time?

JARON LANIER: No pun intended.

PAUL SOLMAN: I mean at the bottom line.

JARON LANIER: I will be better behaved than our host here. I think the Internet is overall a positive technology for the simple reason that it's a human technology that connects people together. It doesn't move mountains in and of itself. It's not something that creates power. It doesn't... It's not a form of action. It's a form of communication. And so if you believe that there's a little bit more good and evil in human nature, then you've got to like the Internet. That's where i come down on it. It's definitely true that the Internet has exposed some of our evil nature. But the good thing about that is it's a little bit like living in a society where everybody's window shades are up and you can see all of the people who are dangerous, and the nice thing is that there are actually fewer of them than we used to think there were. I don't like seeing fascists, child molesters and so forth but i'm happier seeing them knowing how many there are and knowing that they're out there in limited numbers than being terrified in not having any concrete sense of them. I think we're better off than we used to be in that regard.

PAUL KEDROSKY: I think just to add to Jaron's point -

PAUL SOLMAN: Sure. Paul Kedrosky.

PAUL KEDROSKY: -- the direction this is going, i mean, the metaphor I like to use to describe it to people sort of the future of where I see a lot of this going is that the Internet is a kind of communications utility in a lot of ways analogous to an electrical utility where we sort of take alternating current for granted. We don't really get excited when we plug something in and it works unless maybe you live in northern California these days. But in general i think that's the direction that you're going to see this information utility called the Internet go, where it becomes so widespread, so ubiquitous, so tied into to so many parts of our lives that we actually forget it's there. It becomes this ubiquitous thing that's almost therefore transparent. It's just this grid that happens to run information not electricity but in the same way it recedes into the background and our children and grandchildren will look back at us - at what's happening today -- and think we all went nuts.

PAUL SOLMAN: Very quickly, just a few concerns. Katie Hafner, privacy concerns.

KATIE HAFNER: I was just going to say privacy is obviously huge especially with mobile devices and these location-based mobile devices where the marketers are saying isn't it great that everyone will know where you are? Well, is it so great that everyone will know you're cruisingthe aisle of the supermarket and then the Net will download to you exactly what's on sale right there in the aisle and another sort of bit of cold water on this is sort of that the d-d word, the digital divide word. Where you talk about a ubiquitous utility but how ubiquitous can it really be if there are so many people that really aren't on it or last year or this year still in 2000, President Clinton, you know, the Clinton administration made sort of a big deal, this digital divide although not a whole lot happened. It will be very interesting to see what the bush administration decides to do about it.

PAUL SOLMAN: Let's just very quickly what's going to happen looking out ahead? If we had this discussion four years ago it's similar to this discussion we had tonight.

MARYFRAN JOHNSON: I agree with some of what Jaron and others were saying, the idea of the ubiquitous Internet where access to it comes at you in various devices from various different points - maybe, as Katie said, where you're in the supermarket as was said. The other thing to keep in mind is the balance that everyone has to be watching between the security of their information and their privacy. In some ways you have to trade off something to get the other. Like if you want the access anywhere, say, to 911, so you can tap that in on your Internet enabled cell phone and they will... anyone would know where you are without any further information that actually trades off the fact that anyone can find you. So if you were for instance in a town and you were going to perform some sort of crime, those records could be checked. Your phone essentially becomes a location device.

PAUL SOLMAN: Jaron Lanier, last word to you. Briefly, what do you see five years from now when we have this same discussion right before New Year's?

JARON LANIER: Oh, I've been building the thing that we'll see in five years. It's called teleemersion. It's extending the Internet to create the illusion that you're actually in the same place. It will bring people together without having to get on planes. That's what we'll see in five years, and that's really a delicious experience. It just started to work this year.

PAUL SOLMAN: You mean the virtual reality?

JIM LEHRER: No, virtual reality is putting you in an imaginary place. This is bringing people from real places together as if they were in the same room. I call it sometimes a cross between the holodeck and a transporter beam. It creates the illusion that you are three dimensionally with the other person as they are. It's really quite a lovely thing. So that's five years from now. I actually know the answer this time.

PAUL SOLMAN: Five years we'll check back in and see if it worked. Happy holidays to you all and thanks very much.

RAY SUAREZ: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a teenager's heroic battle against cancer; the NewsHour essayists look back at the year 2000; and an end-of- the-century poem.

FOCUS - BATTLE FOR LIFE

RAY SUAREZ: Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW-Chicago has the story of an experimental cancer treatment and the teenage girl who volunteered for it.

SPOKESPERSON: She loved life. She was very sociable, had lots of friends-- very popular in school until all of this happened.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Last year, Kelley Mitchell lost her battle against cancer. But before the 16-year-old died, she agreed to try a highly experimental cancer-fighting therapy, which produced amazing results for a short period of time. Now, less than a year after her death, Mitchell's case has inspired important clinical trials in similar therapies. For Mitchell's parents, Donald and Lee Ann, the difficult journey began five years ago when they became worried about the leg pains bothering their normally healthy 11-year-old daughter, Kelley.

DONALD MITCHELL: We took her to a regular family doctor.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: Three times, because it wasn't getting any better.

DONALD MITCHELL: And they looked each time and said, "hey, look, you know..."

LEE ANN MITCHELL: We've got to check for something. There's... She's in too much pain. She's up at night crying, her leg hurts, there's too much pain here. So Donny made the pediatrician send her for an x-ray.

SAMUEL BERGER: Mitchell was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer called Ewing's Sarcoma. Over the next five years, she endured chemotherapy, full body radiation, and a bone marrow transplant. She came down with a second round of Ewing's sarcoma, and fought that as well.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: So, then, in may of '98 she had relapsed with the Ewing's again. She was very ill. We were losing our daughter, and my prayer at that point was "God, give us more time. I'm not ready to say good-bye."

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Kelley Mitchell was being treated by pediatric oncologist Dr. Chris Rossbach in St. Petersburg, Florida. He says she understood the gravity of her condition.

DR. CHRIS ROSSBACH, All Children's Hospital: She was devastated. For a young girl, a very smart girl who had experienced so much and knew so much-- about cancer in general and her particular tumors and the therapies-- i don't think she saw a way out.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: With nothing to lose, Rossbach looked to the latest cancer research and found articles on angiogenesis. It's a process that was first described by Harvard University's Dr. Judah Folkman. 30 years ago, Dr. Folkman realized that a cancer cell cannot grow unless it develops blood vessels that bring in oxygen and nutrients. That process is called angiogenesis. Dr. Folkman then developed drugs to stop the process of angiogenesis-- angiogenesis inhibitors. The first two drugs were angiostatin and endostatin. He explained how they work in this 1990 interview.

DR. FOLKMAN: One of the drugs we're working on stops the blood vessels from growing in, so the tumor is sitting there, but since it can't connect up to the blood vessels, it's very hard for it to send cells out into the bloodstream. It's the same as if you build a house and now you want to hook up to the sewage system or to the water system. If you have no pipes, there's nothing you can do to get into the main system.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The treatment created a media splash when a respected scientist told the "New York Times" in 1998 that "Judah is going to cure cancer in two years." The story also created skeptics, as well as an intense interest in research on angiogenesis inhibitors. Researcher Dr. Gerald Soff from Northwestern University took Folkman's work a step further. Soff discovered that by combining two already existing drugs, the body could make enough of its own angiostatin to inhibit tumor growth.

DR. GERALD SOFF,, Northwestern University: In other words, we can give the two drugs to patients with cancer and the... Their own plasminogen and their own plasma is converted to angiostatin directly in their bodies.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: So their own bodies become little drug-making factories?

DR. GERALD SOFF: Exactly right. And we call it... I called it an angiostatic cocktail.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Dr. Rossbach wanted to try Dr. Soff's therapy on Kelley Mitchell, even though up to then results had only been seen in rats. But he needed approval from his hospital to use such an experimental treatment.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH:I wrote up a little proposal. I approached our hospital; the institutional review board, who I believe thought I was crazy.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH: Come on, we'll just go back to your room here. We'll get out of everybody's face.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: He did get approval from his hospital board. He was blunt when he talked with the Mitchells about their daughter's chances with the new therapy.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: There would be no guarantees. None whatsoever. So we would not know how Kelley would respond to it, but if we were interested in trying an experimental drug-- it had never been tried on any other human being-- was it something we would think about doing?

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Kelley Mitchell said yes.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: She looked me right in the eye and said, "mom, even if i die taking this treatment, if they get enough research from me taking it to ever save another child from dying of this disease, i'm willing to do it."

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Based on Dr. Soff's research, Dr. Rossbach treated Kelley with the so-called angiostatic cocktail. He used two different drugs already approved by the F.D.A. One was Captopril, a commonly used blood pressure medication; the other, Urokinase, a clot- busting drug used for heart attack patients. He was hoping the cocktail would work as it had it Dr. Soff's lab. If it did, in theory, it would raise the level of angiostatin in Kelley's body, which would then go to work to stop the growth of her tumor. It had worked in mice, but it had never been tried in humans. And so in September of 1998, Kelley Mitchell began taking the angiostatic cocktail.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: And all of a sudden something started to happen. And she came to me one Sunday night about six weeks after the treatment had started. We had just done the third treatment, and she had a really bad boil starting in her groin area, on her left side, which is where the tumor was. It was huge. So they admit us to the hospital, they put a drainage tube in it, and they send it down-- once it starts draining into the bag-- they send it down to the lab. The next morning, Dr. Rossbach comes into our room, and he is like a kid in a candy store, is the only way i can describe the look on his face. He says, "it's dead tumor tissue." The tumor was gone. There was nothing there.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Dead tumor tissue meant Kelley Mitchell's cancer cells had been killed.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH: It was unbelievable. Because that was clearly not what we had expected. We had thought, well, maybe the tumor will not grow quite as fast, maybe it will shrink a little bit here or there, or maybe if we just find things that we envision as slightly better. This was a completely different picture.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Kelley got to live the life of a normal teenager, even get a drivers license.

DONALD MITCHELL: First car.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: Christmas morning.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: And a new car for her 16th birthday, a special gift from her parents.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH: There was one point in time where the mother actually asked whether she could go jogging, which was an incredible question for me as a doctor of a patient who was "supposed" to die soon.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: While Kelley Mitchell's recovery was amazing, it was unclear how big a player the angiostatic cocktail actually was.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH: To be honest, i can't tell you that i'm convinced that it worked the way we think it might have worked, because she clearly did not have just one therapy. It is entirely possible that all her initial response was because of the other therapies, as short and abbreviated and minimal as they were -- I have to argue that before you create hope in a lot of people that there's a new therapy out there that is effective, that you really have to use it on more than one individual.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: University of Chicago medical school researcher, Dr. Ralph Weichselbaum, is investigating the effects of combining angiostatin with radiation therapy. Kelley Mitchell's response could have been related to the 15 doses of radiation she got shortly before she was given the angiostatic cocktail. Weichselbaum was excited about Mitchell's results, but remains eager for the necessary clinical trials.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Wasn't it your research coming to life?

DR. RALPH WEICHSELBAUM, University of Chicago Hospital: Don't i wish? Realistically, this is somewhere between magic and witchcraft, and fundamentally should not be done. The only way you can access this kind of a treatment is in a controlled, clinical trial where the physicians have a scientific hypothesis about what they want to test, where the patients have appropriate informed consent, and where you can actually have some valuable idea.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Four months after Kelley was tumor-free, she stopped taking the angiostatic cocktail. In case of a relapse, doctors stored enough for two more treatments. But a key ingredient in Mitchell's angiostatic cocktail was taken off the market because of problems in manufacturing. Almost a year later, a young cancer patient that Kelley Mitchell had known from the hospital had a relapse. The young girl's mother reached out to Dr. Rossbach for Kelley Mitchell's remaining two cocktails.

KAREN'S MOTHER: When we found out the tumor had come back, we asked Dr. Rossbach about the medicine that he had used on Kelley Mitchell.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: What was your reaction?

KAREN'S MOTHER: I wanted it for Karen.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: And did you ask for it?

KAREN'S MOTHER: Yeah.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: Kelley and I sat down and we talked about it. And she said, "mom, I'm almost 16 and Karen's only 12. Let's give her a chance to live." I said, "Kelley, understand, please-- understand-- if your tumor ever comes back, this drug's not available now." And she said she understood but she wanted Karen to have the chance to live.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The treatment that appeared to work on Kelley Mitchell, had no effect on Karen Schoenberg.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: Karen passed away at the end of October of '99, and Kelley still was doing good. She turned 16 on January 10. She was doing so good, and then February rolled around, and she started limping again. And she walked off, and my heart sunk, because I knew. The limp was really bad and i knew.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The cancer had returned. Dr. Rossbach said he could try and find a synthetic version of the drug in the angiostatic cocktail that had been taken off the market. But Kelley Mitchell decided she'd had enough.

LEE ANN MITCHELL: She said, "mom, i'm not trying anything else. I'm going to go home to the lord now."

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Dr. Rossbach respected Kelley Mitchell's decision.

DR. CHRISTOPHER ROSSBACH: What this kid has gone through is just unbelievable. If you count the two relapses of the Ewing's, she's had five cancers in her life, in a life that was only 15 or 16 years long. It was intellectually interesting... would have been interesting to pursue that, to see: How much more can we get out of this kid? ButI did not think it was right for me. I think I would have felt selfish.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Do you think if she had continued with the therapy she might be alive?

DR. GERALD SOFF: To answer that question is sticking my neck out a bit. I dream that she would have. I pray that it will work if we start it again, but we don't really know that yet. We have to do a series of patients and a series of trials and answer the question scientifically. If the angiostatic cocktail really pans out, and it'll take some serious effort to determine that, I mean, she will be one of the most important cancer patients that have been treated.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Largely because of the results seen with Kelley Mitchell's treatment, Dr. Soff himself began clinical human trials of the angiostatic cocktail. He currently has 12 patients in the trial. And there are several other key drug trials under way. The father of angiogenesis research, Dr. Judah Folkman, has just presented his results from phase one trials on his angiostatic inhibiting drug called endostatin. Phase one trials are done to make sure a drug is safe. Folkman's drug not only showed virtually no side effects, but also showed tumor shrinkage in some of the patients. Human trials on Dr. Weichselbaum's therapies may begin within the year. So far he has shown tumors in mice shrink faster when angiogenesis inhibitors are used in combination with radiation than when used alone. It's not just a medical foot race, it's a financial foot race as well. Dr.'s Folkman, Soff, and Weischelbaum all have partnerships with drug companies involved in the testing of angiostatic inhibitors.

DR. GERALD SOFF: The stakes in the race are huge. The financial analysts are talking about something like $20 billion or $30 billion a year in sales for successful angiogenesis inhibitors.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: But experts in the field caution against raising unrealistic expectations, then point out that there are many approaches to treating cancer, stopping angiogenesis is just one of them.

SPOKESMAN: So I look at this as another rung on the ladder or another arrow in our quiver. And, obviously, I hope it turns out to be more than that-- i hope it does turn out to be the magic bullet.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Results from the first group of patients in Dr. Soff's human trials are expected this summer, one year after Kelley Mitchell's death.

FOCUS - LOOKING BACK

RAY SUAREZ: Now, five ways of looking at the same thing-- the year 2000-- and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Tonight, as in years past, we bring together our regular NewsHour essayists for some end of the year reflections. They are Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service; Jim Fisher of the "Kansas City Star"; New York author and writer Roger Rosenblatt; Los Angeles author and writer Anne Taylor Fleming; and Clarence Page of the "Chicago Tribune." Welcome to you all, and let's start with you.

Anne, let's start with you. What, if anything, will the year 2000 be remembered for?

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Well, i think probably the end of it certainly has to be the election, and all of the contretemps that went on about it. I think, though, probably also the economy; the beginning wobbles, the dot-com sort of fail-out, the first thoughts that the cyberspace, the whole revolution in the economy, isn't exactly what we thought. That may be more lingering, in fact, than any thought about the election. I think it will also be remembered for a, you know, an election of Al Gore that didn't happen, sort of a collapsing campaign. And it might also be filled withsome real nostalgia for Bill Clinton. I think that the country, while very ambivalent for him, is really gearing up to miss him and his brain big time.

MARGARET WARNER: Roger, your thoughts about the year 2000.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: My guess is that it will be remembered for the Genome Project and not just what the project did in terms of the predictive value of medicine and human health and the data of what we're made of but, in an odd way, the Genome Project encourages our recreation always of mystery which interests me. In other words, every scientific discovery, every major one, as this one clearly was, delimits mystery so that the soul is called into question and other mysteries about the body. The more data we have... even consciousness, now, can be accounted for, but when that happens, the culture usually compensates. All the movies that we've seen about talking to dead people or visits of aliens-- whether they're silly or whether they're moving-- are, I believe, in some way a reaction to the scientific delimiting of mysteries so we create mysteries in other ways. So one of the things that interests me about this year is that phenomenon and one of the things i think for which it will be remembered is the Genome Project.

MARGARET WARNER: Clarence, your thoughts. Anywhere from politics and the economy, to science and mystery.

CLARENCE PAGE: Yeah, there's so much, you know? Trying to remember this year without remembering politics is like trying to ignore that elephant in the room or that huge donkey. But you know, this year may be not remembered for something that we're already starting to forget, which is how this year started out, with a great deal of fear about how the year was going to start out. Remember Y2K?

MARGARET WARNER: Y2K. ( Laughs )

CLARENCE PAGE: The breakdown, the meltdown? There was all the nervousness, all the apocalyptic fear and loathing that just faded, just evaporated when the year started out in quite a lovely fashion. I think what's more significant is we will remember the year 2000 for being the year 2000, for being that marker between centuries. Compared to 1900, it has been a great century of progress to quote the title of a great Chicago World's Fair that occurred during this century. I saw a lot of hope. You know, the economy was bustling along for most of the year. The crime rate was down the lowest it's been in decades and continued to decline this year. The teen pregnancy rates drained. All these seemingly intractable problems, we started to get a handle on them. It seemed like there was a sense of ease which, in a way, contributed to all the viciousness of the fighting over the election and the post- election like, you know, like the old saying about academic disputes that the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small. In a way, there was a sense underlying it all that we will listen to the Supreme Court even if we don't agree with them.

MARGARET WARNER: Jim Fisher, your thoughts.

JIM FISHER: What struck me about 2000 was so few stories that actually touched America. The Firestone/Bridgestone story is one that I had to really wrack my mind to think of. What hit me was the absolute self-indulgence of the media that took over the news and the airwaves, in early January until mid-December we were absolutely bombarded -- not with the ordinary voices of-- except on occasion-- of ordinary Americans, but the so- called gas-bags or chattering class. It became, i think, almost self- defeating in the sense that 50% of Americans refuse to exercise their franchise to vote, and once we got to the end of the year in November, I think many people were so turned off that i wonder if this isn't going to rebound on the press, that this constant looking for scandal or some way to hit you between the eyes isn't going to drive people away. And I truly worry about not only newspapers but you see these tremendous losses in the people watching television. I got so towards the end Loony Tunes became my favorite show and my favorite politician was Leghorn Cleghorn.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard, to you; your thoughts about 2000 and what stands out.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I agree with Jim that there was... The glass may be half- empty, in the sense that half of America didn't vote. But I've been struck with the recreation of America that is going on around us. Here in California we discovered sometime this year that the majority population now is the minority population; that is, there is no majority population. The country seems to anticipate this change. They're probably a generation away. Participation in the census this year has been very high, particularly among immigrant populations. That seems to me an encouraging note. I've noted also that an African- American has been named secretary of state. We don't even have a way of describing the significance of the event because although i just called him an African- American, Colin Powell describes himself in his own autobiography as African, Caribbean, Indian, Anglo-Saxon, Scots-Irish, and we continue to call him black. But clearly something new is forming in America, appropriate to the new century. I noted, or rather, I've been hearing from east coast twits of the Washington sort that the new President can't speak English very well. But they haven't noted that this new President speaks Spanish. That seems to me significant because so few American Presidents have spoken a second language and that this new incoming President is speaking Spanish at precisely the time that the new Mexican President Vincente Fox is saying in English, or calling in English, for the end of a border between north and south.

MARGARET WARNER: Anne, pick up on that point that Richard just makes. Do you agree... Do you see that really our society is changing before our eyes and, in some ways, for the better, even though they don't recognize it?

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Yeah, i think it's a very good point. Maybe we're more conscious of it out here in California where he and I both are. I definitely feel it. And you can see it even in the culture of literature. This year there was a wonderful book written by a young...Junta LaHare -- of Indian distraction called the "Interpreter of Maladies" -- wonderful new voices in literature that are immigrant voices. I think it's sliding in in a way now that-- Richard is absolutely right-- that we're almost unconscious of, but that there is an acceptance of it. I feel it very definitely here in a very, very positive way. I think we also should take note of Joseph Lieberman on the ticket. I mean, that was a huge step forward. There was real thought... These much derided chattering classes that we keep talking about, ourselves obviously excluded, kept saying there was going to be an anti-Semitic backlash or they were gearing up for one. It didn't happen. One of the nice things, I think, back to the point that Jim made is i think the country is increasingly so far ahead -- in its evolution, psychic, spiritual, moral-- of the media and that they are working things out in ways that we're all speaking to, that the media misses. They blow things up. They have dramas and traumas,and everything is black and white. The country is making its way in very positive ways, I think. The one thing I do think, though, is that I do think that in terms of the glass half-empty right now that there's a great deal of economic fear in the under classes, or what passes for them, that we're going to have to face in the New Year. And along with the positive, which is this evolution and the acceptance of different people and different colors... And the fact that, you know, any day in my life I turn on a station and people are speaking Spanish. - and I now feel apologetic because i don't. I think that's a very positive sign.

MARGARET WARNER: Roger, evolution and also apprehension?

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, i like the point about the media blowing things out of proportion and Anne's point about people being ahead of it. Something like that must be true because all of us will remember that, by far, the greatest story of the year 2000 involved Uncle Lazaro, Marisleysis, Elian, and the Fisherman. I miss the Fisherman so much. None of us has mentioned the Elian Gonzalez story, yet it dominated the news seemingly forever, and that was because some discrimination was made when everything settled down between what was significant and what was insignificant. Some of the things we might consider of importance, either evolutionary or revolutionary, don't occur in this country. There's an ongoing story of which this year was an instance in Africa-- we were watching an entire continent die quite silently because it's a dog that doesn't bark. You're not paying attention to that story. Or the remarkable story in Yugoslavia where the people, yes again, the people inserted their "yes" again, overthrew a tyrant, and established a democracy -- or on the sad side, and the continuously difficult side, the Middle East which comes together, comes apart. And all of these things are evolutionary and fluctuate within a single year. You never know how they turn out. But they do vie for the important story of the year.

MARGARET WARNER: Clarence, go back to the point that Richard and Anne were making, since someone has to speak for the east and the Midwest at least.

CLARENCE PAGE: Thank you. Especially of the Washington chattering classes.

MARGARET WARNER: Or twits, i think someone called us.

CLARENCE PAGE: We'll let that go by.

MARGARET WARNER: It's very cold here now, Clarence. We're all the chattering class.

CLARENCE PAGE: That's right. Roger's part of the East Coast as well.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you think, in a very positive sense, that our country really is making this evolution to a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic society without as much, perhaps, angst as sometimes we assume there is.

CLARENCE PAGE: That's the way it's supposed to be. By the way, I'll also add to the previous list. Ha Jin, Chinese American writer, won the Pulitzer and the pen- Faulkner award this year. I mean, we can go on and on. Yeah, you know, the funny thing about news, Margaret, is that, you know, news is what happens when things aren't working the way they're supposed to. ( Laughs ) When things are working the way they're supposed to, it's not news. The exception is, of course, tragedies like Roger mentioned. We don't have TV cameras in Africa covering that tragedy there, often enough, anyway. We don't have cameras in the third world often enough. However, we do find... The reason why stories like Elian get such exaggerated play is because we're not at war right now. We're not in a major depression. We're not in a state of national crisis. So with this proliferation of 24-hour news channels, now, and all the other media on the web, et cetera, we have to really inflate news now to get an audience. A new era is starting there, for better or for worse. In some cases, i would agree for worse, but we're getting better. You know, my colleague Jim Fisher mentioned earlier feeling great dismay over the lower voter turnout. But let's look closer to that. Black turnout this time hit a record and was actually higher than white turnout in Florida and a number of other places, Illinois, and that's something that is a cause for celebration. When people have a reason for participation in a democratic society, they participate. I'll be delighted, Jim, to bet you a Kansas city steak against a Chicago pizza when we get together in four year-- deep dish-- when we get together four years from now, I think we're going to see more participation because of the excitement that was generated by this election.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Jim, do you think... Do you feel optimistic going into 2001 or do you sense, also, the apprehension and the little anxiety economically that Anne was talking about?

JIM FISHER: Well, i think the... It was a "blah" year in a sense. If you take the politics and a couple of high-profile stories away. I mean, most people that I've talked to seem to be just watching and seeing what's going on. But as Anne said, the demise of some of the dot-coms, which in effect means that people are seeking a niche for themselves. You know, so they don't have to go to work for GM or the "Kansas City Star," they want to do something on their own. I ran into a story the other day that... I don't think most people realize that there are people out there that are not dot-commers that are seeking that kind of thing. This guy's name was Jim and he raises pastured chickens. Now, if you don't know what pastured chickens are, they're chickens raised on pastures and compared to what you buy in the supermarket, they're steak to baloney. He's a dry waller, which is not what you would call a high-tech profession.

MARGARET WARNER: What's a dry waller? You mean someone that puts up dry wall?

JIM FISHER: He puts up dry wall, and he's doing very, very well selling chicken. And he's driving... He's not going to drive Tyson or Purdue out of business, but if you've ever eaten... That was probably my big experience in the year 2000, was eating a pastured chicken, which tastes like the ones grandma used to wring their necks in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1945.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Richard, I'll end with you. What wonderful experience are you looking forward to in 2001? What do you think we ought to look forward to?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, i just remembered this year, at this time of the year last year, we were so optimistic about-- and apprehensive-- about Y2K, about the future-- the technological future-- everyone was buying into the market. We were being told by 20-year- olds that we were heading into an economic future that had no precedent. And that, don't worry, that this company or that company wasn't making a profit, that was the old economy. Now we seem to be completely at the other end of expectation. There is this pessimism on the part of those in business and technology that maybe these companies are not worth very much. It seems to me what's worrisome right now is that we don't know how to moderate our feelings very well. It's appropriate almost to a drug culture. One day we're on uppers, the other day we're on downers. We begin the year on uppers talking about the great, great, great new future. We ended the year on downers talking about the worthless stock. It seems to me that what America seems to need right now is some calmer way to proceed, a way that does not extend in such extremities all the time. It's rather like having a teenaged son who keeps you awake at night because before he goes to bed he talks to you about suicide. Then he comes down the next morning and he's whistling and optimistic about a football game he's going to. Somehow America has that adolescent quality right now. And the thing that worries me most is that we have not found some way to moderate our soul.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, Richard and all of you, thanks so much and happy New Year.

FINALLY - HAPPY NEW YEAR

RAY SUAREZ: Finally tonight, NewsHour regular Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, looks even farther back to the end of the last century.

ROBERT PINSKY: Thomas Hardy dated his poem "The Darkling Thrush," December 31, 1900, the last day of the 19th century, as Hardy figured it. The purest debate about where centuries begin and end should recognize its context in a fact Hardy cunningly evokes: All these divisions are arbitrary and artificial-- human nomenclature and refer to human reality, not nature. I think "The Darkling Thrush" must be the greatest work ever written about the end of the century, and i doubt that it will be equaled. It is also a great work about the difference between nature as it is and nature as we see it in our own terms. Hardy deals brilliantly with that distinction between our arbitrary numbers and visions on one side, and the real rhythms of time as we try to measure them on the other. He does that partly by distinguishing his own gloomy perceptions from the natural landscape around him. "The Darkling Thrush" begins: "I leant upon a coppice gate when frost was spectre-gray and winter's dregs made desolate the weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky like strings of broken lyres and all mankind that haunted nigh had sought their household fires -- the land's sharp features seemed to be the century's corpse, outleant. His crypt the cloudy canopy, the wind his death lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry, and every spirit on earth seemed fervourless as I." That's the first half of the poem, and it ends with the word "I." The subjective "I," that says the landscape seems like a corpse; the wind seems like a death lament. Here's the second half of the poem, where what seems and what he could think take another direction. "At once a voice arose among the bleak twigs overhead in a full- hearted evensong of joy illimited; an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled plume, had chosen thus to throw his soul upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound, was written on terrestrial things afar or nigh around, that i could think there trembled through his happy good- night air, some blessed hope, whereof he knew, and I was unaware." Then the date: "31 December, 1900." I wish you an amusing and productive New Year.

RECAP

RAY SUAREZ: Again, the major stories of this Monday. At least 54 people were injured when a car bomb exploded in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya. And President Clinton invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Washington to discuss terms for Middle East peace. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Thanks, and good night.