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FORMER STUDENT APPOINTED HEAD OF US SECRET SERVICE Randolph “Tex” Alles, Class of 1976, has been selected to by President Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Secret Service, the White House announced Tuesday. Alles, a retired Marine Corps major general and acting deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, was an active member of the Corps of Cadets during his time at A&M. Alles will be the first director in over a century to hold no prior experience within the Secret Service. — Staff Report

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David Tarvin and his teaching assistant, communication junior Zoya Husain have worked together all semester.

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This year’s selected charity for the donation of the pennies and other forms of currency left on the Sul Ross is the 12th Man Foundation.

Copper for a cause Pennies on Sul Ross Statue to be donated to 12th Can Foundation By Brad Morse @bradsmorse53

inals are starting up and with that comes an influx of cash for one recognizable individual on campus. The statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross — better known as “Sully” — will be littered with pennies and other forms of currency. But since a statue can’t spend that money, it is instead donat-

ed to charity each year. As students pass by the statue, they place pennies at his feet before a test. The tradition of putting a penny on Sully stemmed from when Ross was the university president of Texas A&M, then known as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. Students would often come to his office seeking advice or academic help, and when asked how they could repay him, Ross would simply respond, “A penny for your thoughts.” While it is one of A&M’s oldest traditions, the pennies aren’t just left there. Each week the coins are collected and donated to

STUDENT AND TEACHER TAs weigh in on experiences of working with professors, leaders By EmmaLee Newman @emmy_lee014

the selected charity. This year that charity is the 12th Can Foundation, a student-run food pantry which serves the students, staff and faculty of Texas A&M. The selection process of which charity the money will go to is up to Student Senate. “The Student Senate decides which organization receives the pennies, and they then get to use it or gift it to a charity of their choosing” said Olivia Brown, senior director of the 12th Can Foundation and psychology senior. “The pennies go to The

Teaching assistants, or TAs, can be an integral part of a classroom with roles ranging from grading to teaching. Zoya Husain, communication junior, is a TA for two classes on campus — COMM 301 and ENGL 222 — and said she has had different TA experiences with both. “I think it’s interesting to work closely with the professor, and being a TA for two different professors I’ve had two separate experiences,” Husain said. “I consider the one with Professor [Adam] Rosenthal [ENGL 222] as more of a job in the sense that I don’t have to meet up with him as often because I’m just grading, and in that aspect

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Fifteen years ago, Duane Kraemer and a team of researchers at A&M successfully cloned a cat who they named CC, after cloned cat.

Cassie Stricker — THE BATTALION

Students participating in DNA Day activities make beaded DNA strands.

DNA Day raises awareness of Human Genome Project By Kenya Robinson @_KenyaJ In celebration of one of the biggest research programs in history, students hosted DNA Day April 25 at the MSC to provide a better understanding of genetics and genomics in healthcare. Students from a genetics and family health communication course teamed up with genetics graduate students to present A&M’s first DNA Day, which aimed to bring awareness of the importance of genetics and the Human Genome Project, 13-year effort started in 1990 to map and understand human genes. The event featured booths with interactive DNA perspectives and guest speaker Laura Koehly from the National Human Genome

Research Institute. According to the NHGRI, the Human Genome Project allowed researchers to better understand the blueprint of a human being, resulting in more medical advances and better treatment of hereditary diseases. Congress declared April 25 National DNA Day in 2003 to celebrate the Human Genome Project as well as the 1953 discovery of DNA’s double helix structure. In her research at NHGRI, Koehly focuses on how genetic information is translated into family systems. She said she hopes DNA Day will cultivate curiosity in genetics and spark important conversations on family health. “I look at genetics in the context of hereditary cancers,” Koehly said. “If there is a DNA DAY ON PG. 3

A&M cloning seeks to improve human life Researchers delve into environmental factors, elements on human embryos By Rachel Knight @ReKnight18 Fifteen years ago a group of Texas A&M researchers and their students welcomed CC into the world — the first cloned cat. CC’s birth marked an important milestone in cloning, and now A&M researchers are exploring new areas of cloning, looking to improve animal and human life. A&M is working to make animals that are more productive on less land by genetically engineering animals with enhanced characteristics. Mark Westhusin, professor of veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences, said his team’s research uses living bioreactors, an apparatus that supports chemical processes within a living organism. “We have genetically modified goats that produce malaria vaccine in their milk,” Westhusin said. “One goat is estimated to be able to produce 8 million doses of the vaccine in a lactation period, or year.”

Veterinary physiology and pharmacology professor Charles Long played a key role in CC’s cloning and currently researches early embryonic development and strategies to feed a growing world population. “The genetic engineering part comes about because clones are genetically identical to the donor animal,” Long said. “They don’t have any kind of improvement over the original. So, when we start thinking about genetic engineering in terms of what we do in our lab we are trying to take what characteristics nature gives us in this breed of cattle and apply them to this breed of cattle, for example.” A more direct result of cloning research takes place in the department’s embryonic development research. “[Clones] had all kinds of little things that weren’t unusual, but they were more common in clones than what we would see in normal births,” Long said. “The cloning really led to us investigating those interactions of the sperm and egg and how the embryo is altered by its environment. CLONING ON PG. 2