Letters

      Soft Clay
      I've just completed reading the results of the 2006 California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year (CLAY) Awards in the March issue. Congratulations to all 47 attorneys on their tireless efforts and enhancing the public's perception of the legal community. Missing however, were any lawyers from Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Monterey counties. I'm not sure if that is a reflection of a committee that finds no one noteworthy, or simply a lack of nominations.
      Steve Henderson
      Executive Director
      Ventura County Bar Association
     
      While Jeff Kichaven is an able practitioner and otherwise deserving of his alternative dispute resolution lawyer of the year award, it is unfortunate that California Lawyer supported His Honor by citing the misguided amicus brief in Rojas v. Superior Court, which attacked mediation confidentiality and argued that mediation was nothing more than a dance step in litigation.
      James R. Madison
      Arbitrator and mediator
      Menlo Park
     
      STEM THE LAWSUITS
      Apparently your editorial board agrees with the nuts opposing stem cell research with lawsuits to block the search for cures of grave neurological diseases ["Stem Cell Standstill," ESQ., March]. I refer to the offensive cartoon figure giving names to cells in a petri dish, as if discarded fertilized eggs outside a womb have any significance beyond medical research. I wish we could examine the bona fides of those who create jobs for themselves to file lawsuits protecting imaginary rights, while millions of people around the world suffer daily from diseases with no treatments or cures on the horizon. I would impose qualifiers before you can file a lawsuit for inhabitants of a frozen dish. First, you are disqualified if you have ever eaten the flesh of an animal; the 27 million cows we "harvest" each year in the United States should have a right to argue that the plaintiffs lack standing. Second, you are knocked out of court if you have never lifted a finger to halt genocide around the world. Simply saying "it's not my job" isn't enough. Third, no lawsuits are permitted unless the attorney meets with a patient who has a neurological disease, looks the patient in the eye, and says, "I do not care if you have multiple sclerosis and may not live to see a cure, these petri dishes are more important than you are."
      Kevin H. Park
      Tarzana
     
      BALONEY
      Allow me to be the first to say that the piece ["Communicating with Clients," MCLE, March] is one of the sorriest of the trite MCLEs certified by the bar to be found. Full of emotional sob-sister baloney, it is a prime example of why MCLE should be eliminated.
      Francis Thomas Fahy
      San Francisco
     
      MAKING US PROUD
      It was a pleasure to read the opinion piece by Cupcake Brown ["Reclaiming a Dream," In Pro Per, March]. The Foundation of the State Bar was pleased to present a scholarship to her while she was in law school. Her tenacity, ability to overcome hardships, and dedication impressed us then and makes us proud today.
      Pauline Weaver
      President, State Bar Foundation
     
      LETTERS ON LETTERS
      Barbara Booth Grunwald stated ["Letters," March] that it took three trips to the dictionary to understand "The ontogeny of the gadget formerly known as the Windows-based Pocket PC (PPC) is recapitulating the phylogeny of desktop computers." ["Pocket PCs Grow Up," Technicalities, December]
     
      I had to laugh, as I took the quote as a clever aside. Maybe it's my interest in science, but I thought everyone who had been in a biology class knew of the 1866 quote by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. In biology, ontogeny is the embryonic development process of a certain species, and phylogeny is a species' evolutionary history. This theory claims that the development of the embryo of every species repeats the evolutionary development of that species fully. Or otherwise put: Each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history. Haeckel formulated his theory as such: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This notion later became simply known as recapitulation.
     
      With all the nonsense in recent months about intelligent design, this quote had been enjoying a rebirth in the discussion about what should be taught in public schools, since some of Haeckel's drawings of human embryos were drawn in a way to support the theory more than the facts allowed. The theory was eventually discredited, a fact that creationists often bring up in discussions regarding evolution.
     
      I enjoyed a laugh hearing the familiar phrase applied to the Pocket PC, but I guess some people just don't "get" the joke. Keep up the good work.
      Robert Miller
      Irvine
     
      In your March letters column, Barbara Grunwald complains about Rosie rambling on about "ontogeny" and "phylogeny." She simply didn't get the clever joke.
     
      Ernst Haeckel coined the phrase "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which is probably one of the most famous catch phrases in biology. It was kind of cute of Rosie to apply that idea to the evolution of electronic devices.
      If someone doesn't understand a word someone else uses, they should try going to the dictionary to look it up, rather than to their word processor to complain about their inadequate education. That will improve their weltanschauung and help them avoid weltschmerz.
      Dr. Harvey S. Frey
      Santa Monica
     
      Corrections
      Due to an editing error, our April cover story ["Fallout"] misstated the populations compared in a 1997 study of cancer death rates among employees at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. As accurately reported elsewhere in the article, the lab workers with the highest radiation exposure had triple the cancer death rate of lab workers with the lowest exposure, according to the study. Also, Atomics International's work was confined to nuclear power research; it had no hand in the extensive rocket testing done at the lab. California Lawyer regrets the errors. And finally, a clarification: The estimate that the amount of deadly radiation (specifically, iodine 131) from the Santa Susana site was up to 260 times the amount released during the Three Mile Island disaster came from two experts hired by the plaintiff's side in a case against Boeing.
     

---