After 160 years, a wild gray wolf turns up in Mass.

After 160 years, a wild gray wolf turns up in Mass.

By Beth Daley Globe Staff March 5, 2008

A wild Eastern gray wolf roamed Western Massachusetts last fall before being shot to death on a farm, federal and state officials said yesterday. It was the first wolf confirmed in the state since hunters drove the species out more than 160 years ago.

US Fish and Wildlife Service officials said they used genetic tests to identify the animal, which was killed after it mauled more than a dozen lambs in Shelburne.

"To find a real one is pretty exciting," said Thomas J. Healy, special agent in charge of the agency's Northeast region. He said that the animal probably came from Canada or the Great Lakes region and that there is no indication the species is breeding in the state or in New England. "But what we don't know about this animal far outweighs what we do know," he said.

The male wolf was 2 to 3 years old and weighed 85 pounds, scientists said. It was be lieved to have been attacking livestock for about a month.

While wildlife officials and naturalists are disappointed that the wolf is dead, they said the identification gives them hope that one day the species may reestablish itself in the thick, dark forests of the Northeast.

Most other species wiped out in New England - such as moose, beaver, and deer - have rebounded, and some wildlife specialists say the return of wolves would restore balance to the ecosystem, possibly helping to hold in check soaring deer populations. The discovery may lead to renewed calls for the government to help wolves regain a footing in the region by better protecting habitat, or even reintroducing the animals.

Yesterday's announcement coincided with controversy over the Bush administration's decision to take populations of wolves off the federal endangered species list in the Northern Rockies and Western Great Lakes. An earlier government attempt to de-list Northeast wolves by considering them part of the robust Great Lakes population was turned back in court five years ago, and the species here remains fully protected.

Revered by many in the Northeast as a reminder of the region's wild legacy, wolves were not always appreciated. The powerful, stealthy predators ravaged livestock on early American farms and were hunted so aggressively that populations disappeared by the mid-1800s. The nearest established packs today are in Canada, and wild wolves are spotted only occasionally in New England. Federal officials said the last confirmed in the region was shot by a hunter in 1993 in Jackman, Maine, close to the Canadian border.

Most officials thought the animal terrorizing Franklin County sheep and lambs last fall was probably a large coyote, dog, or some sort of wolf-dog or wolf-coyote hybrid. State wildlife officials get dozens of calls a year from citizens convinced they saw or heard the howls of a wild wolf, but the animal either disappears before its identity is known or is found to be a hybrid or a dog. Sometimes, the animals are found to be escaped captive wolves.

After 13 sheep and lambs were killed and partially eaten on a Shelburne farm one day last October, biologists from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife visited the farm. They concluded that a domestic dog had probably attacked the flock, on grounds that a wolf would have eaten the entire carcasses and that the tracks did not appear to be those of a wolf. The biologists told the farmer he had the legal right to kill any animal attacking his flock, and it was killed the next day. more stories like this

MassWildlife officials examined the animal, which had lamb wool, bone fragments, and teeth in its stomach and looked like a wolf. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the Endangered Species Act, sent the animal to its national forensics lab in Ashland, Ore., for DNA testing, the only sure way to establish whether an animal is pure wolf. Those results came back this week.














Federal officials said the lab can also usually determine whether an animal, even one found in the wild, has been held in captivity by examining how rough its paws are and how shorn its nails, as well as the contents of its stomach. This animal showed no signs of having been captive, although officials said there is no way to know for sure.

The wolf most probably migrated from Canada. While single male wolves are known to range hundreds of miles, this animal's journey, crossing highways and making it so far south, was nothing short of amazing, biologists said.

"When these things occur I look down at area maps and see the major highways and the major obstacles an animal would have had to cross and say wow," said Peggy Struhsacker, a Vermont wolf consultant with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Federal officials declined to identify the person who shot the wolf. State officials said they will try to work with farmers to better protect their livestock if more wolves are found in the region.

While the federal government and states have the right to try to reintroduce the animals, New England states have so far opted not to do so.

"The more you start seeing individual animals, the more the potential for real recovery begins," said Patrick A. Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor who represented environmental groups in their successful 2003 bid to not have the Northeast wolf population lumped in with the Great Lakes population.

Still, the mystery of the Shelburne wolf is frustrating biologists. Had it just arrived in Massachusetts? Was it returning home? Why did it come to Massachusetts when there was ample food farther north?

"If it was looking for a friend, it had a long way to go," said Todd Fuller, a wildlife biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who helped identify the wolf.

Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com

Ensuring your end-of-life wishes

Ensuring your end-of-life wishes

Electronic registry - Oregon's groundbreaking POLST forms will go online by 2009

DON COLBURN
The Oregonian Staff

It's a recurring nightmare for frail people in distress and the workers trained to rescue them:

A patient near the end of life -- whether from old age or a life-threatening illness -- and with strong wishes about life-prolonging medical treatment, goes into cardiac arrest. Somebody calls 9-1-1. Paramedics arrive and start unwanted treatments because the unconscious patient can't speak up and they have no other medical orders.

A pink form called POLST originated in Oregon to help solve that problem and prevent undesired medical intervention.


























POLST -- Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment -- grew out of talks started in 1991 by emergency medical crews, long-term caregivers and the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health & Science University.

Since Oregon adopted POLST more than a decade ago, 14 states, including Washington and Idaho, have followed suit, along with parts of California. More than 1 million POLST forms have been distributed in Oregon. POLST is now offered by every Medicare-certified hospice and nearly every nursing home in the state.

Now OHSU is trying to take POLST to the next level by building a computer registry of POLST patients in the Portland area. Like the POLST form itself, Oregon's registry stands to become a national model.

With an electronic registry, paramedics and other emergency medical workers would be able to call a central hot line at OHSU to find out immediately if a patient had a POLST form and, if so, get access to its medical orders.

In one out of four cases, an OHSU survey found, the ambulance crew cannot find the POLST form in time to act on it.

"The problem with paper is that it's not always readily available," says Dr. Terri Schmidt, an emergency medicine specialist, medical supervisor for American Medical Response in Clackamas County and assistant director of the OHSU ethics center.

POLST holders are commonly advised to stick the pink form on the refrigerator, but some balk.

"Think about that," Schmidt says. "Do you really want a big pink piece of paper with instructions for what you want at the end of life right there on your refrigerator?"

Without a registry, proponents say, having a POLST form is no guarantee of having medical wishes carried out.

As a case in point, they cite Elizabeth Hirsch, who died at age 88 in the intensive care unit at OHSU Hospital.

Hirsch is known to many Portlanders for her long involvement in the community. Among other things, she came up with the idea of adding a red bulb at Christmastime to the nose of the leaping neon deer in the White Stag Manufacturing Co. sign at the west end of the Burnside Bridge.

A sad system failure

Hirsch, who lived alone in her Southwest Portland home, had a POLST form. Hers specified that she wanted comfort care, but not more aggressive measures such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, or a ventilator.

One night in 1999, Hirsch collapsed at home with abdominal bleeding. Her visiting sister-in-law found her on the floor and called 9-1-1. Paramedics went straight to her bedroom and never saw the POLST form on the fridge.

"I don't blame them one bit for not scurrying around the house looking to see if there was a POLST form," says Bob Conklin, Hirsch's son, who was in Italy at the time.

The ambulance crew revived Hirsch's heartbeat. But instead of taking her to Providence St. Vincent Hospital, where her doctor worked, the ambulance was diverted to OHSU Hospital, and she wound up in the intensive-care unit, unconscious and on life support.

"Her wishes were not respected," Dr. Susan Tolle, director of the OHSU ethics center, says. "She died in an ICU with machines all around her -- after things were done to her that she felt would be undignified."

Hirsch never regained consciousness.

"It wasn't what she wanted," Conklin says. "Her wishes weren't carried out -- through the fault of no one."

Touchy issue of costs

Conklin says he thinks the POLST registry will not only keep patients from going through aggressive treatment they don't want, but also will save money.

"You don't want these things to be cost-driven, but you don't want to ignore the issue of unnecessary cost either," he says. "Think of the costs incurred for things done to people who don't want them done."

Dartmouth Medical School researchers estimated last year that Medicare could save $8 billion a year in hospital costs if the entire nation followed Portland's pattern, including POLST-like wishes regarding intensive care of the chronically ill.

The question of cost savings is a touchy one that Tolle sees as a mixed blessing. She opposes a mandatory POLST system, fearing a possible public backlash if states adopt a POLST registry to save money rather than to honor individual choice.

"This is not Big Brother," Tolle says. "It's about respecting you as an individual and what your wishes are."

Oregon's POLST registry will be voluntary and paid for by private donations. Emergency medicine specialists and ethicists will monitor the results and report back to the Oregon Legislature and the Health Fund Board that oversees statewide health-care reform.

Electronic backstop

POLST forms carry more medical clout than other advance directives because the patient's doctors sign them. "These are medical orders, and that makes them remarkably useful to EMTs in the field who need orders," Tolle says.

Most people fill out a POLST form to request something in between the all-or-nothing extremes of emergency medical care. They want what Tolle calls "the easy things" done: comfort care, pain relief, medications that can be taken by mouth. They don't want more aggressive and invasive treatments such as feeding tubes, CPR, ventilators and an ICU stay.

The target date for full implementation of the registry is Jan. 1, 2009, allowing time to build and test the system's database and a fail-safe backup. Start-up costs, about $200,000, are covered by donations, including a gift from the Greenwall Foundation.

"We're building a model no one else has ever built, and we can't make a mistake," Tolle says. "We can't have a single case of undertreatment, so we have to test this thing to death."

Don Colburn: 503-294-5124

doncolburn@news.oregonian.com

Word Riddle

What common nine letter word in the English language is still a word when each of the nine letters is removed one by one -- from nine letters all the way down to a single letter?

To find the answer Click Here and then click on the arrow. (You need Windows Media Player to play the video).

President-elect of RAPSU Betty Burke in the news

For senior auditor Burke, learning is a life-long pursuit

Senior Adult Learning Center lets people over 65 join in on classes at PSU

By: Devin Gallagher
Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: News

Elizabeth Burke spends hours every week writing essays and studying, but she doesn't get graded and she doesn't receive credits.

Media Credit: Eva Schifter

Elizabeth Burke

[Click on photo to enlarge]

As a PSU senior auditor who graduated many years ago, Burke, 71, is back in school. Not for a degree, but because of a love of learning.

"I believe in life-long learning," she said.

Since 1973, PSU's Senior Adult Learning Center (SALC) has made it possible for Oregon residents over the age of 65 to sit in on any class free of charge. The program had a slow start, with only a few dozen participants in the 1970s, according to Jost Lottes, program director of the SALC. The program has since expanded, he said, and a rapid growth spurt in the last few years has seen the enrollment jump to over 600 auditors this term.

"The growth has been phenomenal," Lottes said.

Senior auditors take classes but receive no credit and cannot earn a degree. Auditors can, if they prefer, arrange with their professors to have their work graded.

Participants in the program also gain access to the library and gym facilities on campus, and they qualify for an ODIN account so that they can use the Internet and create a PSU e-mail address.

"I usually just take one [class] at a time," said Burke, who studies English and writing and is currently enrolled in a personal essay class. She has been enrolled in the auditing program since she turned 65.

"I just thought it was wonderful," said Burke, who heard about the program from a friend.

Burke began her college education right after high school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pa., but dropped out after a few years to join the workforce. After building a family, she discovered a class correspondence program through Marylhurst University, which reinvigorated her desire to go back to school. Eventually, she found herself working and taking classes for her undergraduate degree at Lewis and Clark College. In 1982, Burke received her bachelor's degree and then in 1993, a master's degree.

Most auditors are interested in studying history, English and politics, Lottes said. Physical education is also a favorite, he said, with over a dozen senior auditors enrolled in Gentle Yoga. Auditors must register through SALC on a space-available basis.

"There are two types of auditors. There are those that want it for entertainment, like TV," Lottes said. "Then we have auditors that are really involved."

Some auditors choose not to buy books or do the assignments--a privilege of auditing--while others go above and beyond what is expected, Lottes said. "It's really for fun. They don't have to do it."

Burke said she can take only one class at a time because of her full life and grandchildren. Learning, she said, has been a constant thread in her life.

"We learn every day if we let ourselves," she said.

In a survey of faculty conducted in 2005, over 90 percent of professors responded that they value the presence of senior auditors.

"It's great to have them because they have life experience," said Lottes, who also teaches classes with auditors enrolled. "Auditors love it, of course. It's life enrichment for them."

Burke said she feels very at home in the learning environment at PSU.

"The students are very accepting. They're just amazing.... We all seem to be interested in the same thing," she said. "It's very life giving for me."

The Mozart Effect

The Myth of the Mozart Effect

by Will Dowd

Dowd is a science writer based in New York City. He received an M.S. in Science Writing from MIT. He has written about neuropharmacology and the intersection of neuroscience and culture.

Whenever stalled on an intractable problem, Einstein reportedly reached for his violin. He played to disentangle his brain and clarify the question at hand. Mozart especially did the trick. Einstein loved Mozart’s highly organized, intensely patterned sonatas. He felt, as many before him, that music and the reasoning intellect were linked. Music and his scientific work, he said, were “born of the same source.”

(If you get stalled somewhere in the middle of this article, skip to the end for something that might wake you up.)

It was with this same belief that Dr. Gordon Shaw, a University of California Irvine psychologist, corralled 36 undergraduates for a research experiment in February 1993. The students were given three spatial-reasoning tasks from the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests. Before each task, they listened to ten minutes of either silence, a relaxation tape, or Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. According to a paper published later that year in Nature, listening to Mozart boosted the students’ IQ by an average of eight to nine points. The improvement, researchers said, lasted between ten and fifteen minutes. The results were widely reported as evidence of what the press dubbed “the Mozart Effect.” The International Herald Tribune, for example, proclaimed “Mozart’s Notes Make Good Brain Food.”

Don Campbell, a classical musician and former music critic, was the first to recognize the research’s commercial potential. Campbell expanded the definition of the Mozart Effect to include all music’s influence on intelligence, health, emotions, and creativity. In 1996, he trademarked it. Today, the Mozart Effect™ boasts the lateral spread typical of any successful brand. Campbell has authored 18 books, a series of spoken tapes, and 16 albums incorporating Mozart’s music. The small commercial empire includes the recently published Mozart Effect for Children, which explains, in a chapter entitled “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Neuron,” that Mozart’s music enhances the network of connections forming in the infant brain. His recordings, one of which features Don Giovanni for the developing fetus, have sold over two million copies.

Since the U.C. Irvine study, the Mozart Effect has become fixed in the public consciousness. Zell Miller, while governor of Georgia, earmarked $105,000 of the state’s annual budget to supply every newborn with a cassette or CD of classical music. “No one doubts that listening to music, especially at a very early age, affects the spatial-temporal reasoning that underlies math, engineering and chess,” he explained to the Georgia legislature. In Florida, a bill was passed requiring all state-funded education and child-care programs to give a daily dose of classical music to children under five years old. Recently, the coach of the New York Jets, Eric Mangini, began playing classical music to help his football players concentrate at training camp study sessions. No word yet whether Mozart’s melodies will affect this season’s spread. What the Science Really Says

While the Mozart Effect flourishes commercially, the U.C. Irvine study that launched the phenomenon has been widely criticized. The startling results announced by the initial paper were misleading. First, the researchers claimed that the undergraduates improved on all three spatial-reasoning tests. But, as Shaw later clarified, the only enhancement came from one task — paper folding and cutting. Further, the researchers presented the data in the form of Stanford-Binet IQ scores; yet the study only measured spatial-reasoning, one-third of a complete IQ test. To arrive at the full scores, the students’ partial results were inflated by a factor of three.

The methodology of the study has also come under fire. According to some critics, the test group of 36 psychology undergraduates may not have been large or varied enough to produce credible results. Even Don Campbell has attacked the experiment’s lack of controls. In the endnotes to his 1997 bestseller, The Mozart Effect, Campbell observes that the U.C. Irvine researchers “did not administer listening tests before testing, as many researchers in the field recommend. Nor did they examine how posture, food intake, or the time of day modified their listening.” Naturally, Campbell believes that had these controls been in place, the Mozart Effect would have been more dramatically evident.

Many scientists have proposed alternative explanations for the study’s results. Who’s to say that Mozart’s sonata caused the difference in scores? Maybe listening to an annoying relaxation tape or ten minutes of dead silence impaired the students’ performance. Or perhaps the students experienced a change in mood and arousal rather than a fluctuation in intelligence. One study found that listening to a Stephen King short story had a comparable effect on spatial-reasoning scores, but only for those who enjoyed what they heard. Is it possible that Mozart’s sonata had simply stimulated or uplifted the subjects in the U.C. Irvine study? After all, Shaw selected that particular sonata not just for its organized, cerebral quality, but because it is “riveting” and “never boring.”

But the most damaging blow to the Mozart Effect has been the failure of other researchers to reproduce the Irvine results. Psychologist Kenneth Steele and his colleagues replicated the experiment in 1999 and found no trace of the Mozart Effect. “A requiem may therefore be in order,” Steele wrote in Nature. Dr. Frances Rauscher, co-author of the Irvine study, countered that the Mozart Effect cannot be found under all laboratory conditions. “Because some people cannot get bread to rise,” she wrote, “does not negate the existence of a ‘yeast effect.’”

But that same year, a Harvard psychologist analyzed 16 studies on the Mozart Effect, including the original experiment, concluding that any cognitive enhancement was small and within the average variation of a single person’s IQ-test performance. In 2007, the German Ministry of Education and Research conducted a similar meta-analysis. Their findings were unambiguous: passively listening to any kind of music, whether by Mozart or Madonna, does not increase intelligence.

The German report did, however, propose a link between musical training and IQ development. According to recent studies, the motor and auditory skills developed for musical performance may have a long-term influence on intelligence. In fact, brain mapping has revealed that professional musicians have more grey matter in their right auditory cortex than nonmusicians, as if practicing an instrument flexed a muscle in the brain. It seems increasingly likely that the long-term practice of playing music, rather than merely listening, can have the kind of impact suggested by the Mozart Effect. Einstein, after all, organized his mind by playing the violin, not listening to a recording.

Ironically, the U.C. Irvine researchers had initially planned to test whether music training for young children would increase higher brain function. When Shaw, a particle physicist, developed an interest in neuroscience later in his career, U.C. Irvine gave him the freedom to research what he wanted. But, according to his book Keeping Mozart in Mind, he had to make do with “extremely limited resources.” So Shaw scaled down his ambition. He thought, “if music training might yield a long-term enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, then perhaps even listening to music might produce a short-term enhancement!” Fourteen years and dozens of studies later, it is clear this analogy was off the mark. Magic Mozart

What can explain the Mozart Effect’s persistent hold on the public consciousness despite the lack of solid scientific evidence? No art-lover expects to absorb a better memory by staring at a Renaissance painting. No reader hopes to pluck IQ points from a classic novel. So why are the Mozart Effect™ products snatched up by the millions?

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Mozart, a historical figure enveloped in myths, should be at the center of yet another. According to the most recent spate of biographies, the real Mozart was an incessant reviser addicted to his work. Yet the details of the Mozart legend — his astonishing prowess as a child prodigy, his immaculate first drafts — have bolstered the popular belief that the composer was a fine-tuned antenna picking up snatches of celestial song. Einstein didn’t help matters. He described Mozart’s music as “so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.”

The creators of the Mozart Effect have eagerly traded on the composer’s lingering mystique. Campbell traces the source of Mozart’s talent to his time in the womb: his father’s violin playing “almost certainly enhanced his neurological development and awakened the cosmic rhythms in utero.” Shaw also portrays Mozart as supernaturally gifted. Keeping Mozart in Mind is packaged with a CD of the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. “Before you read further,” Shaw writes in the Preface, “I suggest that you slip the CD out of the book, make yourself comfortable, and listen to the magic genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” To Shaw, Mozart is not a musical genius; he’s a magic genius whose music rains down brief moments of enhanced brainpower.

But Mozart is not the only magic genius. The transformation of a dubious psychology study into a multi-million dollar industry also has a touch of the miraculous. In The Mozart Effect, Don Campbell summarizes Shaw and Rauscher’s conclusions — the scientific backbone of his brand — when he writes: “Listening to music, they concluded, acts as ‘an exercise’ for facilitating symmetry operations associated with higher brain function. In plain English, it can improve your concentration, enhance your ability to make intuitive leaps, and, not incidentally, shave a few strokes off your golf game!”

Campbell’s translation of the U.C. Irvine study into “plain English” is inaccurate and insincere, an abracadabra that replaces questionable research with fantasy. The Mozart Effect™ has carried on long after the initial study has been debunked because it was never about science to begin with. If the Mozart Effect teaches us anything, it’s that an elegant metaphor is always at risk of becoming a common expression, a copyrighted product, a popular belief infused with a magic that is difficult to dispel.

Related Story by Operaman
Other Musical Effects:

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

BRUCKNER EFFECT: Child speaks very slowly and repeats himself frequently. Gains reputation for profundity.

WAGNER EFFECT: Child becomes a megalomaniac. May eventually marry his sister.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams - at great length and volume -that he's dying.

SCHOENBERG EFFECT: Child never repeats a word until he's used all the other words in his vocabulary. Sometimes talks backwards. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child blames them for their inability to understand him.

IVES EFFECT: The child develops a remarkable ability to carry on several separate conversations at once.

GLASS EFFECT: The child tends to repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

STRAVINSKY EFFECT: The child is prone to savage, guttural and profane outbursts that often lead to fighting and pandemonium in the preschool.

BRAHMS EFFECT: The child is able to speak beautifully as long as his sentences contain a multiple of three words (3, 6, 9, 12, etc). However, his sentences containing 4 or 8 words are strangely uninspired.

CAGE EFFECT: Child says nothing for 4 minutes, 33 seconds. (Preferred by 9 out of 10 classroom teachers.)

To see what effect all this prose has had on you, take the musical listening test.
Click here.

Ithaka

Ithaka

by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.






















Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.


Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.


And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

The Science of the Perfect Souffle

The Science of the Perfect Souffle

by Joe Palca

1-7-08 · Science in the kitchen is largely the chemistry kind — the properties of two liquids mixing, the transformation of bread into toast, the breakdown of starches into sugars. But do you ever think about velocity or gravity in your cooking? It turns out, beating eggs is all about science — and it's physics and chemistry that make a souffle rise or fall.

Though I've beaten plenty of eggs in my day, for an expert opinion on the subject I turned to Jeffrey Buben, owner and head chef at Vidalia, a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

To see hear audio and see video of this demonstration Click Here and then on Listen Now and Audio Slide Show.

The first step in making an egg dish like meringue or a souffle, Buben says, is to separate the yolks from the whites, the fat from the protein.

Fat and protein — remember that. The yolk has fat and some protein, but the white is all protein, no fat.

"When I was growing up in the kitchen," Buben says, "the chefs would say 'no goldfish.' And what they meant was… sometimes when you separate eggs you get a little nip of the egg yolk in the whites and that would fall into the bowl. And if you brought the chef a bowl of egg whites that had goldfish in it… he would pretty much throw you out of the kitchen and tell you to start all over again."

So why is it so important to make sure there aren't any goldfish in the egg whites? Because remember, yolks have fat in them.

When you beat egg whites, you're basically mixing air into them. The protein in the egg whites forms a kind of skin around the bubbles of air. But if there's any fat present, the skin can't form and the air leaks away. Even a trace of fat is ruinous. So, no goldfish if you want a souffle.

Just the Right Amount of Air

There are some tricks to getting just the right amount of air into your egg whites.

Use a very clean bowl, Buben says, and keep a "nice, even flow of beating to incorporate the air. And you don't want to over-beat them and have too thick a mixture that it won't fold into your souffle or your batter or your sponge."

With that, Buben's ready to start cooking. He's wearing a spotless white chef's jacket, checked pants, and those clogs that all chefs seem to favor. He has a large, clean, stainless-steel bowl — some say copper bowls work better, but he's not convinced. He also has a large whisk and a carton of fresh eggs.

He picks one up, holds it over his work table, and tells me something surprising.

"You always want to crack an egg on a flat surface," Buben says. "What that does is it gives you less shell shatter, so that when you go to add it to a recipe, you won't get little shards of shell in your recipe. So it comes with a much cleaner crack, one crack on a flat surface."

So not on an edge?

"Not on an edge," Buben says.

Buben cracks open an egg and lets the white spill into one bowl. Then he plops the yolk into a different bowl. He repeats this with two more eggs.

You can tell he's practiced at this. For those not as expert as Buben in separating eggs, you might want to put each egg's white into a small bowl, inspect it for goldfish, and only then add it to your mixing bowl.

Buben picks up his whisk and starts to work on the egg whites.

"Now what I like to do," he says, "is start in circle eights, just to break up the egg whites. Then you want to go in a circular motion. Turn your bowl at about a 15 degree angle, and just keep whipping it, and try to get as much air in as quickly as possible.

"We were doing a party last month, and we were whipping egg whites by hand, and they said, 'I can't believe people still whip egg whites by hand.' And I said, 'I didn't know there was any other way,'" Buben laughs.

The Architecture of a Souffle

About four minutes later at a steady 180 beats per minute, our egg whites have transformed.

"What we're looking for now is nice beautiful peaks," Buben explains. "Some chefs that I learned from say the point where you have the meringue perfect is when you just lose the shine from the egg whites... And we're getting very, very close to that point."

He finishes beating, and the whites are as light as air. But their architecture is fragile, Buben says, "so you have to move very quickly with it, and be very gentle."

Move quickly because the air can still leak out of the tiny protein pockets, and move gently because the protein skins are thin and will collapse easily.

He uses his whisk to mix the egg yolks and then uses a rubber spatula to gently add the stiff egg-white mixture to the yolks. He folds the two just until the whites are incorporated, then places the whole thing into a baking dish.

When the egg mixture is baked in a 350-degree oven, those air bubbles trapped in the egg whites expand, making the souffle rise. The heat also causes the protein to stiffen a bit, and along with the fat from the yolk, it forms a kind of scaffold that keeps the souffle from collapsing.

After six minutes, Buben checks on his omelet souffle. "Oh, isn't that beautiful," he says, pulling it from the oven.

The egg mixture has nearly doubled in volume.

Now I'd probably eat it as is, but Buben has bigger ideas. While the souffle was in the oven, he made a reduction of wine and shallots and stirred in some butter. Now he spoons that mixture over the souffle, topping it off with a few shavings of black truffle.

A couple of glasses of red wine appear.

The glasses clink.

"Bon appetit," he smiles.

And you wonder why I love my job.