www.chicagotribune.com

A hard-charging banker left Goldman Sachs to join the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designation unit, tracking the financial trail and battling a bureaucracy

By Marja Mills Tribune staff reporter Published February 10, 2003

WASHINGTON -- The day was just beginning, but already Celina Realuyo was hurrying down the long corridors of the State Department. Perpetually in a rush, the counterterrorism adviser was doing her trademark speed walk in the 2-inch heels that lift her to a full 5 feet tall. She was on a mission, the ritual that marks the one predictable slice of her day. Realuyo ducks into a little store in the basement and plunks down the usual $1.87 for a bottle of mango juice and a copy of The Washington Post. The morning sip of sweet mango juice she can count on. After that, all bets are off. "The nature of this job is that you're at the mercy of events but at the same time, there is so much planning to do for later," said Realuyo, 36. "There just isn't enough time." A former banker with a Harvard MBA, Realuyo was at her desk in Goldman Sachs' London office when the terrorism of Sept. 11 struck back home. Now she is part of the complicated -- some might say insurmountable -- effort to track how terrorists get and move their money and to try to stem the flow. Realuyo is a policy adviser with the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designation Unit, one of six people assigned there full time. She offers training to foreign government officials and bankers -- those who want it -- on preventing and prosecuting money laundering, and on screening out potential clients on terrorist watch lists. "It takes money for [terrorists] to train, to travel, to carry out their plots," Realuyo said, citing the Al Qaeda operatives who pulled off the Sept. 11 plot. "It's just a piece of the puzzle," she said, "but it's a big piece." Despite a resume in overdrive and a high-security clearance, Realuyo is the first to say she is merely a cog in the wheel in the country's mounting effort to thwart terrorism. Her hectic, often frustrating routine offers a glimpse at life in the trenches for one woman drafted into this amorphous thing called the War on Terrorism. Declared by President Bush after Sept. 11, the War on Terrorism has its more visible components, of course: the troops amassed in Kuwait for the threatened invasion of Iraq; the stepped-up security at American airports; the congressional vote to create the massive new Department of Homeland Security. And then there is the kind of largely low-profile, long-range counterterrorism work Realuyo does. It is heavy on meetings and endless coordination among other federal agencies. Between trips to assess banking practices in different countries, and offer training in tightening them, Realuyo often is at her State Department cubicle well into the evening, writing reports. Computers and spreadsheets As she wryly puts it: "It's not like we're doing covert ops with night-vision goggles." Instead, Realuyo's tools are computer software and spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and the blue Mead spiral notebook she fills with notes and contact information at terrorist finance meetings around Washington and the world. She is one of many private sector executives who, since the terrorist attacks, have enlisted in one way or another in the government's response. The new Transportation Security Administration, for example, has been the beneficiary of a group of executives from companies such as Disney, Intel and Marriott, who went to Washington to direct the "go-teams" that helped launch one of the largest new agencies in the history of the federal government. Realuyo, born and raised in Manhattan, was leading a far different life only a year and a half ago. A gregarious, hard-charging former U.S. Foreign Service officer, Realuyo had left the government in 1998 to earn an MBA. She was an international banker with Goldman Sachs in London, talking by phone with a client, when she glanced up at the office television sets on Sept. 11. Live footage of the smoking south tower at the World Trade Center flashed across the screens. She watched the second jet hit the north tower, saw the Pentagon in flames. It didn't take long, Realuyo said, for her sense of fear to give way to fury. The next week, she spoke by phone with Maura Harty, her mentor and former boss at the State Department. Harty made her pitch. "We need people like you," she said, " . . . who can follow the money." And not just that. Realuyo already "knew the building," in the lingo of the State Department. She is fluent Spanish and French, and speaks some German, Italian and Tagalog, the language of her parents' native Philippines. An international relations junkie since high school, Realuyo was raised in New York but had traveled the world with her mother, a cardiologist, and her father, a prominent New York attorney who once served as a Filipino diplomat. Realuyo earned international affairs degrees at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins. In the Foreign Service, she was assigned to the American embassies in Spain and Panama and the U.S. mission to NATO. She also helped monitor international crises in the Situation Room, the nerve center of the White House. When she spoke with Harty, Realuyo said, she was intrigued by the anti-terrorism prospect, but unsure about going back to Washington. She would have to take a steep salary cut, uproot herself, and once again contend with the bureaucracy of the federal government. She debated the possibility with a close friend, Pam Schneider, who also had left the State Department to earn an MBA. Schneider understood why her friend was torn. "It's just a matter of does your heart or your head win out at any given time," said Schneider, a Chicago marketing consultant. "Your heart wanting to go back and do what you are passionate about and [wanting to] make . . . a difference in the world versus your head, which says you're dealing with so much bureaucracy and b.s. and being a cog in the wheel and they pay me nothing and I could be making lots of money in the private sector. That's kind of the dilemma constantly." Finally, Realuyo decided to go with her heart. "I was just so angry [about the terrorism]," Realuyo said, "and I was in a position to do something about it." A series of job interviews followed, then an extensive security check. She was in. By June of last year, she was working at the State Department. Tired of bureaucracy Six months later, Realuyo still has that passionate sense of purpose, she said, but is weary of her grinding schedule and the frustrations of trying to coordinate among the many agencies involved in anti-terrorism efforts. "The admin stuff,'" she said, "is a killer." In Washington, anti-terrorism programs sprawl across countless federal agencies, from the CIA to the FBI, from the National Security Agency to the Pentagon, from Customs to the Coast Guard. The new Department of Homeland Security is being assembled in the largest reorganization of the federal government in half a century. By March, the department, led by Secretary Tom Ridge, is expected to draw an estimated 175,000 employees from 22 federal departments and agencies. Realuyo and her State Department colleagues will remain separate from the Homeland Security Department. But many of those with whom they must coordinate -- from law enforcement officials to Treasury Department employees -- will be folded into the Homeland Security behemoth. "The problem we have," Realuyo said, "is a lot of the people we work with at Treasury don't know if they have a job at Treasury or at Homeland -- what they will do, and that will be a big blow to how we do things. . . . " That sense of limbo was palpable in Realuyo's office in makeshift quarters on the State Department's 8th floor. Other than the blue fighting fish darting around a small fishbowl -- an apropos gift from her young goddaughter -- Realuyo has not bothered to put out many personal effects. Larger quarters This spring, she is scheduled to move to the second floor and the expanded quarters of the State Department's counterterrorism office. The Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, as it officially is called, has tripled in size since Sept. 11 to about 100 people. The new counterterrorism coordinator is Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's anti-terrorism center. U.S. efforts aimed at hampering terrorist financing abroad include pressing for tighter money laundering laws and banking practices in different countries, encouraging institutions overseas to freeze or seize assets of groups designated as terrorists, and seeking more regulation of charities, another source of terrorist funding in some cases. Privacy and sovereignty issues shadow many of the efforts to crack down on international terrorist financing. So does the question of how effective such initiatives can be. They take place against the daunting backdrop of global money markets that send $1.5 trillion spinning around the globe every day, in everything from legitimate investments to currency speculation to tax dodging to mafia money-laundering to terrorist financing. With computer and satellite technologies and uneven banking practices internationally, it is relatively easy to deposit and move money many places with few questions asked, or paper trails left. International finance experts predict that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Spreading the banking gospel But Realuyo is passionate about the need to spread the gospel about banking practices, many of them what she calls "the basic stuff" that could make it harder to move money for terrorist purposes, or, in other cases, easier to prosecute after the fact. Her colleague Mike Gayle gave this example. An overseas terrorist group on a watch list is denied access to banks to wire funds to the U.S. for a planned attack. The snag doesn't stop the plan necessarily, but it makes it harder to execute. "It increases the chances they'll get caught . . .," Gayle said, "maybe smuggling money into the country. . . . We're trying to narrow their options and make everything harder." Asked for examples of what the anti-terrorism financing work has yielded so far, Realuyo declined to say. Those are classified, she said. "We have made a dent in disrupting the terrorist financing network but we can't say because these groups don't know how much we know." According to Realuyo, success in the broadest terms for counterterrorism finance specialists has included helping uncover terrorist plots before they unfolded, and gleaning valuable information from money trails left by terrorist groups. "People ask Why are we spending money on other countries?'" Realuyo said. "We want to detect, disrupt and dismantle terrorist networks before they reach U.S. shores." The U.S. maintains lists of groups and individuals designated as terrorists, as does the United Nations. Realuyo's job aims, in large part, to assess what the banking practices are in different countries and to recommend ways to tighten them. Endless paperwork When she is not overseas, about half of each month, she is writing reports on the last trip, coordinating the endless logistics of planning the next ones and dealing with day-to-day classified matters she will not discuss. The assessment trips are a hit-and-miss proposition: The small U.S. delegations she organizes go only to countries that want them, according to Realuyo, and those countries are under no legal obligation to follow the groups' recommendations. On a trip to Caracas last fall, for example -- one complicated by the political and economic instability there -- she and a small U.S. delegation gathered with bankers and government officials in informal meetings. The sessions are designed to be educational, not confrontational, she said. "What we do is preach to them the best practices in the U.S. and what has worked in terms of knowing who your clients are, knowing what their activities are," Realuyo said. "If you see a transfer to a country you've never seen them transfer to before, it should be a red flag." She ran through her other usual questions with bankers, including: Do you require two forms of identification before opening an account for a new client? Do you ask to see a pay slip? Do you report to a federal agency wire transfers above a certain amount? In the U.S., that amount is $10,000. Do you have name-checking software designed to catch individuals or groups on lists of designated terrorists? Do you have a compliance officer keeping up with the lists as names are added? Do you create electronic records of transactions, a money trail investigators can use to trace criminal activity? In Asuncion, Paraguay, Realuyo and a similar team conducted seminars on the topic for bankers from several South American countries. The plan is to do this in dozens of countries, region by region. Other State Department trainers have made similar trips to some Middle Eastern countries, Realuyo said, though she declined to name which ones. When she meets with bankers, Realuyo emphasizes her own banking credentials. "It's hard to talk to bankers with credibility unless you've been one of them," she said. "They tend to look at the regulators and pooh-pooh them as people who have not been practioners." Realuyo usually travels with a State Department colleague experienced in investigating money laundering issues, plus a few people from other agencies. "It's always like Noah's Ark: two from Treasury, two from Justice, two from State," she said. Hence the constant meetings and e-mails in Washington to coordinate among those entities, and others, such as the National Security Council, that have a piece of the counterterrorism finance initiatives. "I probably spend half the day running up and down the stairs to try to coordinate things," Realuyo said. "Coordinating trips, finding money for training programs . . . finding trainers." So she can only roll her eyes at the image her counterterrorist title conjures up among her old banking buddies. "I'm always telling my friends, No, I'm not Sydney on Alias,'" Realuyo said. In the popular ABC television show, a glamorous young spy travels the world to go hand-to-hand with shady operatives, foiling dastardly plots before disaster strikes. As Gary Novis, a colleague who often travels with Realuyo, puts it: "The popular image is James Bond, but the reality is it's a lot of hard groundwork. It's analyzing data, doing assessments, collating it with other reports, dealing with bureaucracies." Dealing with bureaucracies has gotten harder with so many federal agencies involved in anti-terrorism initiatives. "You have all these agencies competing for the mandate and the money," Realuyo said. "The policy is run out of the White House: It's like a bunch of people vying for Dad's attention type-of-thing." Struggling with the beast Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, oversaw a recent report on U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. "There is still very much a struggle with what this beast is and how we approach it," Flynn said. "We don't have the equivalent of the containment strategy we had during the Cold War that starts to provide an organizing construct for everyone. It makes it very, very difficult to bring people with disparate interests together and say, That's where we're going; that's what we're doing.'" At the State Department, Realuyo said, senior staff members gather every morning at nine in the blue-carpeted office of Black, the new counterterrorism chief. "It's a lot about the crisis du jour," Realuyo said of the meeting, often whatever terrorism-related news is in the headlines. Realuyo does not attend that meeting. By 9:30 a.m., she is getting assignments from those who did on any immediate tasks. A recent CNN report about a suspected terrorist group having targeted an American school in Singapore, for example, sent Realuyo scrambling for background for her higher-ups. The planned attack was foiled in 2001 after Singapore authorities arrested a group of suspected Islamic militants, she said, and was only recently announced by the Singapore government. It was not the immediate crisis she first thought from the news report. "It's almost like CNN runs your day," she said. If Black or Secretary of State Colin Powell need background reports for overseas trips as they arise, Realuyo and her colleagues sometimes are called upon to prepare briefings. That means reviewing intelligence, doing research, writing reports. The press of events competes with the planning of the assessment trips overseas. Her first morning back from two weeks in Panama and Venezuela, for example, Realuyo drank her usual bottle of mango juice at her desk while clicking through some of the 400 e-mails awaiting her. She scanned recent intelligence reports about the so-called Triple-Frontier area where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge. The region had just been in the news as a possible Al Qaeda breeding ground. Realuyo knew she might have to give a briefing on the matter any day to the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At a meeting with representatives of the Treasury Department and several others involved in the overseas training, Realuyo updated them on the South American trip. "Panama, thumbs up," Realuyo said. The Panamanians were amenable to a training seminar; the U.S. group had found wired classrooms in which to conduct the classes later. "We played up the You can serve as the model for your region,'" Realuyo said. "And they ate that up." Then it was on to discussions of Venezuela; a conference in response to the October Bali nightclub bombings that killed 192; questions of which agency would pay for what. It was 9:30 p.m. that first day back before Realuyo had finished her rounds of meetings and calls and reports. Afterward, a colleague joined her for shop talk over a dinner of sushi and smoothies at Wholesome Foods in Georgetown. Realuyo keeps up with old friends, but most of her time these days is spent with people from work. "There aren't that many people who can really relate to this job," she said. "And because of security, there are only so many people you can talk about your day with." By 11 that night, Realuyo was home, a one-bedroom apartment in an upscale complex not far from her office. Realuyo, who is close to her parents and brother, said she had set herself a "drop dead date" of age 35 to be married and having children. Her schedule isn't helping in that regard. "I guess," she said, "I'll have to move it to 40." That night, Realuyo e-mailed some friends, caught an 11:30 rebroadcast of Lou Dobb's "Moneyline" on CNN and drifted off to sleep. In six hours, it would be time to get up and start again.

goerie.com

This should be another big week for Erie International Airport. Continental Airlines is expected to give the official announcement that service between Erie and Cleveland is coming back, and Northwest Airlink is scheduled to put a regional jet on one more of its six Erie-to-Detroit flights. Northwest now uses three 50-passenger regional jets and three 32-passenger turboprop commuters. As of Thursday, the schedule calls for four regional jets and two turboprop commuters. According to the schedule on Continental's Web site, it will launch Erie service with two flights on April 6, and after that go to a regular schedule of four roundtrips a day, using 19-passenger Beechcraft. Erie officials have hinted that the service could be upgraded in the future, depending how the market responds. Northwest Airlink is getting praise from Erie International officials, first for bringing in regional jets in the post-9/11 days when things looked dark, and then for continuing to upgrade with more jet service to Erie. Of course, the bottom line is that all of the airlines in Erie are here because they believe they can make money in this market. Erie officials are waging a "Fly Erie" campaign and are working with the airlines to maintain competitive fares in hopes of generating the business needed to support four carriers. Airlines once had service representatives who checked prices in places like Erie to watch for imbalances in fare structures, but they haven't been able to afford to do that for years. Airport officials say they are now trying to fill that role. Local officials are paying close attention to fares and letting airlines know if they believe some fares are out of line with those the airline has posted in surrounding airports. That would help keep Erie competitive with the major carriers. Of course, discount carriers Southwest and Jet Blue still have fares that will lure some Erie travelers out of town, but local officials believe they can offer a combination of convenience and price that will lessen that impact and increase Erie's share of the market. Federal energy analysts described the oil markets last week as being "tight as a fully-stretched rubber band." Fuel experts with the National Association of Convenience Stores said domestic crude stocks are at their lowest point in 25 years — that current reserves are about 1 percent above the minimum acceptable level of 270 million barrels. The prospect of war with Iraq looms and unrest in Venezuela continues to reduce imports. If all that sounds like a recipe for higher prices, well, it is. The survey that OPIS Energy Group does for the AAA auto club showed the average price being charged by Erie gas stations climbed another 5 cents a gallon during the week that ended Friday. The average among Erie stations was reported to be $1.625. That is only 6.1 cents away from the survey's all-time Erie record of $1.68, which came in May 2001. The survey's averages in other nearby metro areas show $1.563 in Pittsburgh, $1.61 in Cleveland, $1.575 in Youngstown and $1.652 in Buffalo/Niagara Falls. State averages were reported as $1.561 in Pennsylvania, $1.607 in Ohio, and $1.677 in New York. This week is Child Passenger Safety Week and that is a good reminder of a new law will go into effect Feb. 21 to require parents to place children 4 to 8 years old in child safety seats or booster seats. Children aged 8 to 17 will be required to buckle up when riding anywhere in the vehicle, not just in the front seat. Research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that children ages 4 through 7 are three times more likely to sustain serious injuries in a traffic crash if they are using adult seat belts instead of booster seats, said Pennsylvania Department of Transportation officials. PennDOT reports police agencies will be out in force to check for child seat belt use when the new law takes effect. Delta Air Lines was making news over the past week. For one thing, the airline is falling in line with other carriers and charging passengers more if their suitcases are too heavy. As of this month, there will be a $25 charge for any bag weighing more than 50 pounds, and a $80 charge for a bag that weighs more than 70 pounds. The airline will not take a bag that weighs more than 100 pounds. Elite frequent fliers will not be charged extra for bags that weigh between 50 and 70 pounds. Also, the new policy does not apply to military duffels and sea bags up to 70 pounds, nor sporting equipment, wheelchairs and some other items. Delta also said it hopes to use lobby redesign, an increase in self-service kiosk technology and new customer service roles for employees to significantly reduce airport check-in wait times and lines at 81 airports. It didn't say which ones. But look for the airline to have lobby assist agents and service coordinators posted in airport terminals and more than 400 more self-serve kiosks and direct phone service to reservation agents. JIM CARROLL,who writes about transportation each Monday, can be reached at (814) 724-1716, 870-1727 or by e-mail at jim.carroll@timesnews.com.

Last changed: February 08. 2003 3:08PM

www.arizonarepublic.com Dave Cruz/The Arizona Republic A shop owner at the Old Souk, Kuwait City's oldest marketplace, climbs a ladder to hand a Kuwaiti flag outside his shop. By Judd Slivka The Arizona Republic Feb. 10, 2003

KUWAIT CITY A cab driver here calls it "the maybe war." As in maybe it will happen, and maybe it won't.

In the city's expensive Salmiya district, women covered in full robes carrying Prada handbags continue to walk the streets, talking on cellphones and engaging in the national pastime of shopping. At the Old Souk, the oldest marketplace in the city, the old men are still cutting meat and arguing about everything.

But for Jim Leahy, who grew up in Scottsdale and is now the assistant principal of the American International School's high school here, the past few days have been a rush to get things done before he leaves with his family.

"Everyone is kind of strung up tight like a piano wire," Leahy said Sunday, the last day of school for the two American schools in Kuwait. "Everybody has to go somewhere."

Not counting the military, there are a couple thousand Americans here by most estimates. Some of them can leave. Some of them can't. Others don't want to. And still others, like Leahy, feel as if they have to.

Leahy has been working in international education for 20 years. He has been in Venezuela during rebel terror campaigns and in Ecuador during a coup.

But this would be his first war, and as the drumbeat of war gets louder for Americans, he is one of hundreds preparing to leave.

Packing up in a hurry

The American Embassy issued a voluntary evacuation notice for civilians two weeks ago, but it was only last week that the American schools decided to close until March. That decision sent Leahy's life into a frenzy.

"There are things that go on here - budgeting, scheduling, accreditation - that don't stop even if we're closed," he said. "I'm running around like crazy trying to burn things on CD so I can essentially move my office."

He'll move that office - and his wife, who teaches at the school, and two children who attend there - to his parents' home in Scottsdale.

'Kids are all nervous'

"It's hard to know what work to focus on," he said. "The kids are all nervous, and so are the adults. It's kind of a feeling of relief that the company that owns our school made the decision they did."

Leahy will be gone by the end of the week, but others aren't so lucky.

Ricky Mutina works in Kuwait managing defense contractor Lockheed-Martin's tank simulators for the Kuwaiti army. The march toward war has left Mutina with nothing to do: The Kuwaiti army's armor has all moved north to the Iraqi border for live-fire training and pre-positioning.

So Mutina, of Orlando, has been buying groceries and trying to get as many tasks done as he can, as many in the American expatriate community are doing.

"I think that when it happens, and it will happen. things are going to be very dangerous," he said Sunday after shopping at a 24-hour supermarket popular with the foreign community. "Not bombs falling on us, but doing what I just did will be a lot more difficult. This will be a dangerous place to be an American."

Danger lurks

It already has been. Marines have been shot at on exercises outside Kuwait City, and civilians have been fired on as well. The government responded by posting machine-gun equipped police trucks at various intersections around the city and setting up checkpoints where drivers have to show their papers.

Starbucks is crowded

Still, life goes on as normal. At the Sultan Center Supermarket, people of 15 nationalities still load up grocery baskets under the strains of the Arab Muzak version of Copacabana. Across the street, Starbucks is jammed, MotherCare World is filled with mothers and their children buying clothing, and the manager at the Mercedes dealership says his business is pretty good, "though not as good as it was two years ago."

For Americans like Leahy and Mutina, hostilities draw closer with each sunrise. But for so many Kuwaitis, no one seems to have told them that a war is about to happen.

www.centredaily.com Posted on Mon, Feb. 10, 2003 BY FAYE FLAM Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA - KRT NEWSFEATURES

(KRT) - In the near future, individuals may be able to pinpoint which diseases they should worry most about - heart disease, Alzheimer's, stroke, prostate cancer or multiple sclerosis.

The medical crystal ball will be high-tech, inexpensive, personal genetic testing, which could be available in just five to 10 years, according to some medical researchers.

"This will create a profound revolution in medicine," predicts Leroy Hood, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington. "Medicine will become predictive, preventive and personalized."

Hood and other scientists gathered last month in Los Angeles at a seminar focused on the increasing power of genetic testing.

Such testing will offer more than just a window on your future demise, Hood said. The same technology that exposes your personal health demons could also provide strategies to battle them - new drugs to "overcome the limitations of your genes."

The seminar was organized by Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Stock said he believed humanity stood at the dawn of a revolution people would remember for millenniums.

"Genes are the biggest window into who we are, and we are drawing back the curtain," he said. "This will call into question what it means to be a human being."

The seminar was prompted in part by the completion three years ago of the $3 billion public and private undertaking known as the human genome project. The result was a sequence of letters that represented the entire genetic code - the full complement of DNA - for a small sample of people from different ethnic groups.

Hood said he believes that in a few years many people will have their own complement of DNA sequenced and stored on a floppy disc for less than $1,000.

The genome project didn't sort out which genes had any bearing on health or illness, but such work is under way.

Scientists are looking for what they call polymorphisms - places where the genetic code differs from person to person. Some of these differences have no apparent effect while others influence people's vulnerability to disease.

Some of the latest findings have come from Iceland, where Keri Stefansson of the private company DeCode has undertaken to analyze the DNA of the 275,000 residents of his country. So far, about 70,000 people have been analyzed.

Because Icelanders keep detailed genealogy and medical records, Stefansson said, he has been able to trace patterns of disease in families and then search the DNA for genetic differences that might be responsible. In one family, he said, there were cases of a variety of cancers - melanoma, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer and breast cancer - all, he said, related to some genetic quirk present in that family.

He has also isolated a genetic variant that appears in about a third of Icelanders with schizophrenia. The gene, he said, helps in the remodeling and growth of neurons in the brain. The finding, he said, may help scientists understand what causes schizophrenia and perhaps lead to new treatments.

But some people may not want to know their own genetic heritage in too much gory detail.

"You're going to get a lot of information, why you get frequent colds, whether you'll get cancer or ALS or Alzheimer's disease, why you're a pain in the neck," said Nancy Wexler, a medical researcher from Columbia University. "All of these have genetic components."

The knowledge gained from genetic tests, she said, "is going to affect the rest of your life."

Wexler knows firsthand about contemplating such tests, she said, because she learned when she was in her 20s that her mother was ill with Huntington's disease, an incurable neurological disorder that strikes people around their 40s and leads to a slow, horrific death. Wexler's father told her and her sister that each of them had a 50-50 chance of inheriting their mother's fatal genetic disorder.

Wexler, 57, is probably safe, since she is past the age that most people with the disorder develop serious symptoms.

As a medical researcher, she went to Venezuela to study families in which the disease was particularly rampant, and eventually helped to isolate the genetic flaw, making it possible to test people for Huntington's disease.

But most people who live with those 50-50 odds opt not to take the test, she said, preferring to go on in uncertainty. She read some quotations from people who had the test and got bad news. "It was like a loss, a loss of dreams," one read.

As other tests come along to assess risk for other fatal and possibly incurable diseases, she said, people have to keep in mind that the knowledge is irreversible - you can't ever go back.

There may be other cases, however, where advance knowledge can save your life. Icelandic researcher Stefansson said his analyses uncovered a gene that influences whether people develop pulmonary obstructive disease (chronic bronchitis and emphysema). The disease is almost inevitable if people with the genetic variant are smokers. But if they don't smoke, they will almost certainly not get the disease.

Stefansson said he anticipated most of the genetic tests that would become popular would involve preventable diseases. That way doctors will no longer give everyone the same advice - don't smoke, drink in moderation, avoid saturated and hydrogenated fats, exercise.

Instead, he said, doctors will be able to pinpoint which parts of the standard medical mantra will be particularly important for each patient.

Hood said he foresaw the ability to isolate genes that influence behavior - including variants that make people prone to behave violently or otherwise inappropriately.

"I think inappropriate behavior will have to be treated the same way we treat cardiovascular disease or cancer," he said. "But this opens up fascinating questions about what is normal and what is abnormal."

www.boston.com

CARACAS - President Hugo Chavez threatened yesterday to jail the thousands of oil workers fired for leading a two-month strike against him. ''Fired is nothing! Many of them should go to prison for sabotaging the Venezuelan economy,'' Chavez said of the more than 9,000 workers dismissed from the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. Chavez's threat came one day after more than 100,000 Chavez opponents protested in Caracas in support of the fired oil workers. Thousands more held a similar protest yesterday in the state of Carabobo, 66 miles west of the capital. The nationwide strike was called Dec. 2 to demand Chavez's resignation or early elections. But its leaders - business groups, labor unions, and leftist and conservative politicians - agreed to end the protest last week in all areas but the crucial oil industry. (AP)