TheRecord
4
New Findings
in Breast
Cancer Study
By Stephanie Berger
A two-year breast cancer
study, originally designed to
determine if a cell’s ability to
repair damaged DNA may have
an influence on cancer risk, may
have yielded some unexpected
outcomes: Data showed that
cells from sisters with a history
of breast cancer had a significantly diminished capacity for
repair compared to those from
sisters without a history of cancer. The study used blood samples donated by sisters participating in the Metropolitan New
York Registry of Breast Cancer
Families, a project headed by
Ruby Senie, professor of clinical
epidemiology at the Mailman
School of Public Health.The registry is funded by the National
Cancer Institute, part of the
National Institutes of Health,U.S.
Department of Health and
Human Services.
Prior research indicated that
DNA repair in blood cells from
lung cancer patients was less
efficient than DNA repair measured in people who had not been
diagnosed with lung cancer.
Regina Santella, professor of
environmental health sciences,
director of the Center for Environmental Health in Northern
Manhattan and principal investigator of the current breast cancer study, suggests that the ability of cells to repair damaged
DNA may influence a person’s
risk of developing lung cancer.
To explore the possibility of a
similar role for DNA repair in
breast cancer, cells from blood
samples donated by sisters with
and without a history of breast
cancer from 137 families were
grown in the laboratory and then
treated with a chemical known
to cause DNA damage.This type
of damage may be the result of
environmental exposures to cancer-causing chemicals, such as
cigarette smoke and certain
dietetic components. DNA damage also may also occur through
normal cell division.
The most recent research
findings on the role of DNA
repair and susceptibility to
breast cancer were presented at
the annual meeting of the
American Association for Cancer
Research (AACR) held in
Orlando, Florida. The data also
was published in the Jan. 19
issue of the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute.
Santella says, “Although this
study and others may lead to
avenues for reducing risks of
breast cancer,currently there are
no known methods for elevating
the body’s ability to repair DNA.
Therefore, the most sensible
course is to reduce exposure to
known cancer-causing agents,
such as cigarette smoking,and to
maintain a healthy lifestyle.”
The study builds upon the
Mailman School’s ongoing investigation into environmental
exposures and genetic susceptibility to breast cancer. This
includes the Long Island Breast
Cancer Study Project, a collaborative effort to determine
whether environmental contaminants increase breast cancer risk
among women residing in
Nassau and Suffolk counties on
Long Island.
For full story, see www
.mailman.hs.columbia.edu.
Faculty Perspective
Democracy Isn’t Built on One Election Alone
By Samuel Issacharoff
D
espite the deteriorating
security situation that
has left dozens dead in
Iraq during the past few
days alone, many Iraqis will feel justifiably proud to take the first step
toward democracy when they cast
their votes for a transitional national assembly a week from now. By
itself, the election is a milestone.
But it is not the key to their country’s democratic legitimacy.The lasting success of democracies lies not
in seeing that the will of the majority is expressed through the ballot
box, but by two more long-standing
factors: first, a commitment by a
nation’s elites that a victorious electoral coalition will not use its hold
on power to exact revenge on the
losers; and second, proof that the
people can vote their leaders out as
well as vote them in.
The history of the 20th century
is littered with the remains of elections that augured neither democracy nor the rule of law.The entire
Soviet empire was enamored of
show elections in which every citizen was given the privilege of voting for the winner—and only the
winner. Fascist and corporatist
regimes would routinely invoke
the plebiscite to crown the
claimed rule of the people, a tool
used by Hitler to consolidate
power in the 1930s. Post-colonial
regimes in countries such as the
Central African Republic or more
recently Zimbabwe would hold
elections only to see the victors
proclaim themselves rulers for
life—what the British ex-colonialists would sneeringly call “one
man, one vote, one time.” What’s
more, all these oppressive regimes
would hold their elections pursuant to constitutions that stood
as paeans to human dignity.
For most Iraqis, the act of voting
alone is understandably a major
event, as their country has not had
a meaningful election since 1953.
Assuming that the elections are
held across most of the country,
that they are not fraudulent and
that the majority prevails, most
would conclude that democracy, at
least in some rudimentary fashion,
has been established. While elections may be necessary to a democracy, though, they are by no means
sufficient.
The dirty secret about democratic processes is that they come
into being in a decidedly undemocratic fashion. Before any election
can be held, there must be ground
rules that determine what the elections are for, and formal institutional structures that will be filled by
the elections. But what justifies
those rules? The answer can only
be given retrospectively, based on
the success of the democratic
experiment itself.
All democracies enter this
world with this so-called democratic deficit—a system preordained
by no particular democratic
process. In Iraq, for example, over
100 parties appear on the ballot,
but no candidates do, even though
there are more than 7,000 candidates running for the 275 seats in
the National Assembly.
Each party has named a slate,
and its delegation to the constituent assembly will be determined by the overall party votes
that entitle a set number of slate
members to assume office. Each
party is obligated to name a
woman to every third slot on its list
in order to ensure that 25 percent
of the Assembly be women. There
are no districts, as in the United
States or Britain, there is no second
Yves Lefevre
Current Research
FEBRUARY 7, 2005
chamber of the Parliament, as in
many countries, and the Assembly
will select the president and the
two deputy presidents, as well as
serving as the drafting body for a
new Constitution.
All of this is the result of negotiations conducted under the auspices
of the United Nations and implemented under the authority of the
recently created Independent
Electoral Commission of Iraq.
Democracy is
ultimately not about the
ability to elect rulers;
it is about the ability to
send them packing.
This lack of democratic pedigree puts Iraq in excellent company. No one authorized the
Americans gathered in Philadelphia at our founding to jettison
the Articles of Confederation and
craft a new constitutional order.
No one selected the South African
negotiators who decided the terms
of a new democratic era, complete
with an embryonic constitutional
plan. No democratic election preceded the gathering of the Loya
Jirga in Afghanistan, which met to
decree a new election code and
plan the transition to democracy.
In fact, with the possible exception of the French Fourth
Republic, no constitutional democratic order has emerged from anything that would pass muster as a
genuine democratic process. And
the Fourth Republic, a duly authorized constitutional overhaul by the
French Parliament after World War
II, collapsed in only a few years—a
victim of the paralysis built into it
by parliamentary self-interest.
Which brings us back to the
two critical elements to a democracy’s success. Prevailing political
thought prior to the 20th century
doubted that it would ever be possible to gain a credible commitment from a nation’s elites to prevent a victorious electoral coalition
from misusing its hold on power to
settle old scores. British philosopher John Stuart Mill, for instance,
wrote that political liberalism was
impossible in a country with ethnic or national divisions:“Among a
people without fellow-feeling,
especially if they read and speak
different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government,
cannot exist.”
Over the past half century, the
need to secure democratic order
in countries fractured by racial,
ethnic or religious cleavages has
robbed us of the easy assumption
that democracy simply cannot
take hold in riven societies. From
the Asiatic steppes of the former
Soviet Union to South Africa to
the Iraqi cauldron, stabilizing
democratic tolerance is the most
vital issue to face the geopolitical
order.
Much as we may associate
democracy with the will of the
majority, the success of constitutional democracies, in fact, turns
on the ability to constrain the
majority by limiting the powers
of government, while allowing
minorities and oppositions to
exist and flourish. Constitutions
by their nature impose obstacles
on the ability of the majority to
claim its immediate objectives.
The U.S. Constitution creates a
formidable hurdle through the
amendment
process.
Most
Western European constitutions
build in delay to temper the
momentary zeal of an electoral
majority, as with the Finnish and
French requirements that two
successive parliaments must
approve
any
constitutional
change. Germany goes even fur-
ther and declares critical portions of its constitution unamendable.
In South Africa, the most successful transition from authoritarian to democratic rule of the late
20th century, negotiations between
Nelson Mandela’s African National
Congress and the apartheid
National Party focused extensively
on the interim principles that
would form the basis of the new
constitutional order. It was this
embryonic constitution that provided protection against the country’s white minority trying to hold
out in a fratricidal civil war. The
promise of limits on the political
power of the majority was the precondition for the new democratic
order.
The second requirement is even
more difficult to assess.The key to
democracy turns out not to be the
capacity to elect rulers, because
elections can also provide tyrantsin-waiting with the ability to marshal their partisans and use the
veneer of democracy to consolidate their treachery.Whether in the
form of pure evil, as with Adolf
Hitler, or simple venality, as with
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or just
demagoguery, as with Argentina’s
Juan Peron, the partisan zeal
unleashed in electoral combat may
prove the first step to a power grab
immune from any form of further
accountability.
Democracy, then, is ultimately
not about the ability to elect rulers;
it is about the ability to send them
packing. The political tragedy of
post-colonial Africa was not the
absence of elections. It was the
inability to ever vote rulers out of
office.
This is why the election of 1800
in the United States continues to
fascinate historians. Amid tremendous rancor and charges of foreign
intrigue, the fledgling republic
faced its ultimate challenge: Could
elections dislodge a chief executive (John Adams) and bring to
office his bitter rival (Thomas
Jefferson)?
Democracies aspire to ennoble
their citizens, to allow them to
reach beyond the most basic concerns for security and survival.The
first elections in a divided nation
such as Iraq will no doubt revolve
around group identities.The hope,
however, is that the process of governing will diminish those concerns and allow politics to focus on
governance and statecraft.The ability to vote out of office the initial
governors is critical to the democratic enterprise.
Whether an election is indeed a
harbinger of democracy is best
addressed in hindsight once the
security of the minorities can be
assessed and once the first elected
rulers face retrospective accountability before the electorate.
It may well be, as Harvard
Professor Samuel Huntington
once famously wrote, that “elections, open, free, and fair, are the
essence of democracy, the
inescapable sine qua non.” Iraq
will have made great strides if it is
able to hold elections across most
of the country and if a governing
coalition can be forged. But we
should also be aware that elections alone are not enough.
Samuel Issacharoff is the
Harold R. Medina Professor in
Procedural Jurisprudence at the
School of Law.
Reprinted from the Washington
Post with permission from the
author.