Community Briefs

Monday, October 26, 1998

Community Briefs

Latino political power grows, study finds

A new UC Berkeley report on Latino demographics and voting
behavior in California shows a dramatic increase in the number of
Latino citizens in the 1990s and a consequent jump in the political
power the population wields.

The 218-page report is the second edition of the California
Latino Demographic Databook, originally published in 1993. The new
edition gives the first detailed picture of the California Latino
population in five years.

The report was published by the university’s California Policy
Seminar, with funding from the University of California’s Latino
Policy Research Program and its Institute for Mexico and the United
States.

Andres Jimenez, director of the California Policy Seminar, said
that, ironically, the rise of anti-immigrant policies in the
Å’90s has driven the Latino population toward political
empowerment.

"Faced with anti-immigrant sentiment and denial of social
services to legal immigrants, the community responded with the
ability to be more politically powerful," said Jimenez.

After becoming citizens and registering to vote, "Latinos vote
at essentially the same rates as whites, 83.1 percent and 84.7
percent respectively, and more than either blacks, 76.5 percent, or
Asians, 79.5 percent," the report said.

Human genome

project passes goal

The U.S. Department of Energy announced Friday that its Joint
Genome Institute (JGI), an integrated three-laboratory effort to
help decipher the human genetic code, surpassed its ambitious goal
of sequencing 20 million base pairs for fiscal year 1998.

"This achievement marks an unprecedented ten-fold increase in
production output over the previous year," said Martha Krebs, the
DOE’s Director of the Office of Energy Research. "With this
milestone, the JGI rises to the third position worldwide in terms
of its total contribution of human DNA sequence to public
databases, and signals great promise for completion of the entire
project in five years."

The JGI, established in 1996, is a consortium of scientists,
engineers and support staff from the Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence
Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The JGI has
assumed a key role in the international effort to determine all 3
billion base pairs ("letters") that comprise the human genome. This
worldwide project, the largest biological undertaking in history,
promises untold opportunities to understand the basic molecular
underpinnings of life and to improve human health.

"Two years ago today, the DOE Human Genome Program took a bold
step forward in forming the JGI, and in so doing took advantage of
significant economies of scale," Krebs said. "By combining forces
of our three genome centers, DOE has clearly established a solid
position among the leaders in this exciting pursuit of the first
volume in the human book of life."

"The JGI is well on its way to making an important contribution
to the quest to discover all human genes and elucidate their
functions," said Dr. Elbert Branscomb, Director of the Joint Genome
Institute. "I expect that once we are established in our new
facility, we will be generating high-quality DNA sequence
information at greatly accelerated rates."

Food bank holds

annual walk-a-thon

The Westside Food Bank held its annual walk-a-thon Sunday,
attracting over 500 participants from various companies, churches,
schools, nonprofit agencies and the community at large.

This year’s walk is the ninth annual such event in the food
bank’s history. Last year’s event raised enough money to provide
350,000 meals to homeless and needy individuals.

Compiled from Daily Bruin staff reports.

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