Preoccupations: When Relocation Is a Way of Life

ON New Year’s Day, the company I work for, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, will move me from Washington to Paris, where I will become a regional vice president of the company and general manager of the Hotel George V, which it manages.

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Gathering the frequent-mover miles: From left are Christian and Meg Clerc, and their daughters, Eleanor and Georgia, at home in Washington.

My wife, Meg, teaches at a Montessori school. She and our teenage daughters, Eleanor and Georgia, will reunite with me at the end of the school year. It’s the seventh move for Meg and me: about every three years for the last two decades, we’ve packed and unpacked, and left newfound schools, friends, cars, dry cleaners, banks and homes, and found newer ones.

If you want to advance in the hotel industry, you’d better be able to check “yes” next to the box that asks, “Willing to relocate?” Mobility must be in your DNA if you want to move up. Originally from Switzerland, I myself have moved eight times over 25 years of working in hotels, rising from hotel restaurant food runner to hotel general manager: from Gstaad to Lausanne, Switzerland; then to Washington, Rome, Paris and back to Washington, then to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and to Chicago and Washington once more. Eleanor, now 17, was born in Rome. Georgia, 14, joined the journey on our first assignment in Washington.

Meg knew the score — and welcomed the global lifestyle — when she married me. In fact, she chose a mobile career herself, knowing that there would be Montessori schools worldwide.

The company provides good logistical support when it moves its employees. And on the home front, we have grown increasingly adaptive, and the moves have become easier over the years. The process begins when I first realize that a move may be in the works. Meg and I go out for lunch or coffee and review our trusty to-do list to become move-ready. Then we take our daughters out to lunch or dinner and broach the subject, beginning with “How would you feel if we moved to X?”

The worst reaction was when we planned to move back to Washington from Chicago less than a year after arriving there from Mexico. We thought the girls would be thrilled to reunite with friends in a familiar place. We thought wrong. In unison, they broke out in tears; they had just made new friends and were starting to fit in again.

Meg, so skilled at working with children as a teacher, had them talk about the roots of their fears and sadness, which usually revolve around establishing new social networks. I, racked by guilt about upsetting their cart again, blurted that they could get the puppy they had been begging for. (I had been adamantly opposed until then.) The tears stopped. Needless to say, our pup, Snickers, will be moving to Paris, too.

To stay sane at relocation time, we keep the house we’re in as homey as possible until we move, then turn the new house into a home as fast as we can. That way, we don’t have to stare at cardboard boxes on both ends of the trip. We can pack in two weeks.

Moving makes you prioritize what’s important. You have to decide what’s crucial enough to bring, and what’s marginal enough to leave behind. With friends, you have to choose those to see before you go, and the ones you want to stay in touch with after the move.

Each of us has certain things we take along — our “transitional objects.” For example, I need the big wooden credenza that’s been in my family for generations, a great coffee machine, my A.S. Roma soccer-club shirt and my watch box — after all, I am Swiss. For Meg, it’s not about things, but about creating a cozy, well-lit new space. The girls still bring their favorite stuffed animals along with photos, but their most important transitional object is each other.

BUILDING a new network of friends can be as daunting for Meg and me as it is for the girls. We’ve found friends among new work colleagues and through tight-knit expat communities. But there’s a danger of getting stuck in a cultural bubble and never befriending local people.

Our moves have brought us a great appreciation of cultural differences. The ability to adapt quickly to change helps in all kinds of situations. The moves have also prepared our daughters to make new friends quickly. Still, we wonder and worry how it will affect their future relationships. Will they have trouble forming long-lasting bonds?

We find inspiration, meanwhile, in
the lyrics of “You’re My Home,” the Billy Joel song: “I never had a place that I could call my very own, but that’s
all right, my love, ’cause you’re my home.”

As told to Perry Garfinkel.

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

The Boss: Blair LaCorte of XOJet, on an Unintended Career Turn

I WAS born prematurely with hyaline membrane disease, also called infant respiratory distress syndrome. The doctors kept my mother from seeing me while they waited a day or two to see how I’d do. She wasn’t happy about it, and climbed out on a window ledge to force the issue. Police cars converged, as the officers didn’t know she was just trying to make a point. A female doctor worked with my mom to resolve the situation, and then my dad brought me to my mom. My parents named me for that doctor.

Seven Artist Management

Blair LaCorte is the C.E.O. of XOJet in Brisbane, Calif.

AGE 49

HIS HERO His father

TRAVEL PLAN To take a Virgin Galactic spaceflight

As a child, I suffered from exercise-induced asthma and couldn’t play sports. When I was around 10, however, I started running, and my dad helped me track my progress. He kept me focused on the process and monthly goals. In junior high, I joined the track team, and I broke a cross-country record for the course at my high school in Beverly, Mass.

My parents divorced when I was young, and I was able to see two sets of entrepreneurs. My dad had a recruiting firm that was a family business — he employed my aunt and my future stepmother. My mother and stepfather had another business, a small regional airline, also in Massachusetts.

In 1985, after graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in business, I entered the financial management program at General Electric. I left three years later to get an M.B.A. at Dartmouth, then took a position at Gemini Consulting.

In 1992, I wanted a new challenge and ended up in the high-tech industry by accident. My dad had advised me to work for people I wanted to learn from. I always remembered Eric Herr, who had been a managing partner at the Michael Allen Company, a consulting firm where I had worked one summer in business school. I contacted him and he mentioned a position at Sun, which I assumed meant Sun Oil. I told him I’d take it, that I trusted him and that I didn’t need to know any more. I told my friends I was taking a leave from consulting to work at Sun Oil for a year. When the offer letter arrived, however, it was from Sun Microsystems.

That misunderstanding changed my life. For the next 12 years, I worked at a variety of technology companies. I loved the innovation in this industry; merging my business skills with colleagues’ technical skills allowed us to move very quickly.

A year after joining Sun, I followed Eric to Autodesk and became director of strategy. I founded two divisions there. Next I was president of the Internet division at Cadis, a software company, then spent a year as executive in residence at the Internet Capital Group. After serving as a senior vice president at VerticalNet, I started consulting in 2000 for my friend Vic Verma, then C.E.O. of Savi Technology.

In 2004, I returned to the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth as an executive fellow, and in 2005 joined the private equity firm TPG, which had invested in XOJet. I joined the airline as president in 2009 and became C.E.O. in 2010.

XOJet was started in 2006 and has grown quickly. Our challenge is to educate potential customers about our business model. Unlike charter jet companies that offer corporations and individuals fractional ownership of an airplane, XOJet owns its aircraft. Our customers pay per trip, or pay an annual fee for a certain number of hours, just as customers do in a fractional arrangement. We have also introduced a plan in which customers are guaranteed that a plane will be available when they want it.

I might have worked at my family’s aviation company after college, but I would have lacked the knowledge I’ve gained in a number of industries. I’ve brought to XOJet everything from algorithms I developed at Savi to pricing strategies and marketing techniques from other industries. I’d like to think that my dad, who died before I joined XOJet, would be proud of me.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

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Chinese-American Faces Trial in China Over Business Dispute

BEIJING — As his family tells it, Vincent Wu is an industrious Chinese-American immigrant who sold his family’s suburban Los Angeles home to finance the construction of a shopping center in China he thought would allow him to retire early. To the police in Huizhou, a city in the southern province of Guangdong, Mr. Wu, 54, is a Mafia kingpin and illegal casino operator who dispatched his enemies through kidnapping, extortion and violence.

Whether an accurate depiction of Mr. Wu will emerge during a trial that begins Monday in Huizhou is anyone’s guess, although the 98 percent conviction rate enjoyed by Chinese prosecutors suggests that the defendant stands a slim chance of acquittal.

“It’s going to be a tough battle,” one of his lawyers, Wang Shihua, said Friday as he scrambled to sort through the 8,000 pages of evidence that the police had only recently delivered to Mr. Wu’s defense team. “At the very least, it’s going to be a very confrontational trial.”

That confrontation is likely to center on allegations that Mr. Wu was tortured into signing a confession, which is the crux of the case against him. In a deposition released by his lawyers, Mr. Wu says he was beaten while being hung upside down, deprived of food and water for several days and then given stimulants so he could not sleep. In the end, Mr. Wu says, he signed the declaration of guilt that was placed before him. “They pre-wrote everything,” he told his lawyers, according to the deposition. “If I didn’t sign it, they beat me.”

Mr. Wu’s case, human rights groups say, highlights the problems that even American citizens face in China’s flawed and deeply politicized criminal justice system. Although confessions extracted through torture are technically inadmissible in court, legal experts say the police frequently rely on heavy-handed tactics to win the confessions that often form the basis of convictions. “We’d be pleasantly surprised if the judge even allows the allegations of torture to be discussed in the courtroom,” said Roseann Rife, East Asia director for Amnesty International, which has been publicizing his case.

According to his family, powerful former business associates are behind Mr. Wu’s prosecution. They say one of them, Lin Qiang, a former provincial public security official, is seeking to claim his assets following a Chinese court ruling that favored Mr. Wu.

During an earlier entanglement with Mr. Lin in 2002, Mr. Wu says, he was detained by the police for 11 months, but later released after prosecutors decided that there was insufficient evidence to try him. His family said a ruling in February by the Supreme People’s Court vindicated Mr. Wu’s claims and cemented his ownership of the disputed property, a successful fruit market in the city of Foshan.

Mr. Lin could not be reached for comment, and police officials in Huizhou declined to comment. Kenny Wu, one of Mr. Wu’s sons, said in a phone interview that Mr. Lin warned his father that he would prevail in the end. “ ‘I control the laws in mainland China,’ ” Kenny Wu said Mr. Lin told his father. “ ‘Watch me put you back in prison like I did 10 years ago. Even President Obama and God cannot save you.’ ”

Mr. Wu was arrested in June; later that day, 300 police officers raided his still unfinished Lucky Star shopping center, detaining dozens of employees. After the police obtained incriminating statements against Mr. Wu, most of the detainees were released, although 33 other defendants face trial along with him.

American officials seeking to visit him in jail say they have been stymied because Mr. Wu did not use his American passport on his most recent visit to China from Hong Kong, the former British colony that enjoys some autonomy under Chinese law. Because he often drove between Guangdong and Hong Kong, where he lived before immigrating to the United States in 1993, Mr. Wu used his Hong Kong identification card to avoid the hassle of obtaining a Chinese visa for each border crossing, his family said. Under international law, the Chinese can restrict consular access to Mr. Wu based on the identification he used to enter China.

Shi Da contributed research.

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Vernice D. Ferguson, Leader and Advocate of Nurses, Dies at 84

Vernice D. Ferguson, who fought for greater opportunities, higher wages and more respect for nurses as a longtime chief nursing officer for the Veterans Administration, died on Dec. 8 at her home in Washington. She was 84.

NYU Photobureau

Vernice D. Ferguson served at the Veterans Administration.

Her niece Hope Ferguson confirmed her death.

America faced a nursing shortage when Ms. Ferguson began overseeing the agency’s more than 60,000 nurses nationwide in 1980. Historically, the nursing ranks were overwhelmingly female, but as job opportunities began to expand for young women in the late 1970s, nursing, with its prospect of strenuous work, irregular hours and relatively low pay, was losing its appeal.

Doctors, most of whom were men, were paid far more and rarely discussed medical treatments with nurses, despite nurses’ hands-on knowledge of patients.

“What is good enough for the doctor is good enough for me and the nursing staff,” Ms. Ferguson was quoted as saying in the book “Pivotal Moments in Nursing: Leaders Who Changed the Path of a Profession,” by Beth Houser and Kathy Player. “Whatever the boys have, I am going to get the same thing for the girls.”

In 1981, Ms. Ferguson told National Journal, “Hospitals are going to have to rethink and restructure their policies to let nurses perform nursing services and let others attend to ‘hotel’ services,” like making beds and handling phone calls.

Ms. Ferguson helped establish an agency scholarship program to recruit and retain nurses and made educational programs that had been restricted to doctors open to nurses as well.

By 1992, when she left the agency — then the Department of Veterans Affairs — the number of registered nurses there with bachelor’s degrees or higher had more than doubled. Nurses’ salaries also increased throughout the field. In 1980, their average annual pay was $26,826 in 2008 dollars; in 2008, it was $66,973, according to the most recent survey of registered nurses.

Vernice Doris Ferguson was born on June 13, 1928, in Fayetteville, N.C. Her father was a minister in Baltimore, where she grew up, and her mother was a teacher. At a time when few black women attended college, Ms. Ferguson graduated from New York University with a nursing degree in 1950 and was awarded the Lavinia L. Dock prize for high scholastic standing. At the awards ceremony, the director of nursing refused to shake her hand, Ms. Houser and Ms. Player wrote.

Ms. Ferguson’s first job out of college was in a research unit financed by the National Institutes of Health at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She went on to be a co-author of papers in The American Journal of Nursing, The Journal of Clinical Nutrition and The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

She worked in several hospitals around the country, and from 1972 to 1980 was the chief of the nursing department of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health. A brief marriage ended in divorce. Her survivors include a sister, Velma O. Ferguson, and several nieces and nephews.

After retiring in 1992, Ms. Ferguson was appointed senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

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Vernice D. Ferguson, Leader and Advocate of Nurses, Dies at 84

Vernice D. Ferguson, who fought for greater opportunities, higher wages and more respect for nurses as a longtime chief nursing officer for the Veterans Administration, died on Dec. 8 at her home in Washington. She was 84.

NYU Photobureau

Vernice D. Ferguson served at the Veterans Administration.

Her niece Hope Ferguson confirmed her death.

America faced a nursing shortage when Ms. Ferguson began overseeing the agency’s more than 60,000 nurses nationwide in 1980. Historically, the nursing ranks were overwhelmingly female, but as job opportunities began to expand for young women in the late 1970s, nursing, with its prospect of strenuous work, irregular hours and relatively low pay, was losing its appeal.

Doctors, most of whom were men, were paid far more and rarely discussed medical treatments with nurses, despite nurses’ hands-on knowledge of patients.

“What is good enough for the doctor is good enough for me and the nursing staff,” Ms. Ferguson was quoted as saying in the book “Pivotal Moments in Nursing: Leaders Who Changed the Path of a Profession,” by Beth Houser and Kathy Player. “Whatever the boys have, I am going to get the same thing for the girls.”

In 1981, Ms. Ferguson told National Journal, “Hospitals are going to have to rethink and restructure their policies to let nurses perform nursing services and let others attend to ‘hotel’ services,” like making beds and handling phone calls.

Ms. Ferguson helped establish an agency scholarship program to recruit and retain nurses and made educational programs that had been restricted to doctors open to nurses as well.

By 1992, when she left the agency — then the Department of Veterans Affairs — the number of registered nurses there with bachelor’s degrees or higher had more than doubled. Nurses’ salaries also increased throughout the field. In 1980, their average annual pay was $26,826 in 2008 dollars; in 2008, it was $66,973, according to the most recent survey of registered nurses.

Vernice Doris Ferguson was born on June 13, 1928, in Fayetteville, N.C. Her father was a minister in Baltimore, where she grew up, and her mother was a teacher. At a time when few black women attended college, Ms. Ferguson graduated from New York University with a nursing degree in 1950 and was awarded the Lavinia L. Dock prize for high scholastic standing. At the awards ceremony, the director of nursing refused to shake her hand, Ms. Houser and Ms. Player wrote.

Ms. Ferguson’s first job out of college was in a research unit financed by the National Institutes of Health at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She went on to be a co-author of papers in The American Journal of Nursing, The Journal of Clinical Nutrition and The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

She worked in several hospitals around the country, and from 1972 to 1980 was the chief of the nursing department of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health. A brief marriage ended in divorce. Her survivors include a sister, Velma O. Ferguson, and several nieces and nephews.

After retiring in 1992, Ms. Ferguson was appointed senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

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As Shoppers Hop From Tablet to PC to Phone, Retailers Try to Adapt

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Shoppers often visit ModCloth, a Web site that sells women’s clothes, on their phones but return on a different kind of device to buy something, said Sarah Rose, a vice president at ModCloth.

Ryan O’Neil, a Connecticut government employee, was in the market to buy a digital weather station this month. His wife researched options on their iPad, but even though she found the lowest-price option there, Mr. O’Neil made the purchase on his laptop.

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

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Ben Ali’s Possessions to Be Auctioned in Tunisia

TUNIS — It could be the Middle East’s most opulent yard sale.

Just in time for Christmas, Tunisia’s Finance Ministry has organized a public auction of cars, jewels, carpets and trinkets that once belonged to the deposed president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the first autocrat to fall in the Arab Spring revolution incubated here two years ago.

The monthlong sale and exhibition of 12,000 items begins Saturday at the Cleopatra Hotel, a sumptuous property in a northern suburb of Tunis.

For the price of a 30-dinar ticket, about $20, curious Tunisians can gape freely at the former president’s collection of rare clocks, rococo-themed picture frames and gold-plated falcons. Those in a shopping spirit can even take home one of the first lady’s treadmills or handbags.

Advertisements for the event feature a village of mud-brick houses lighted by one of the former president’s sparkling chandeliers and a poster of a smiling schoolboy whose image is Photoshopped into the back seat of Mr. Ben Ali’s Bentley.

According to the event’s French-language Web site, www.confiscation.tn, “bargain hunters” can buy an array of high-end electronics, while those with more “retro” tastes can indulge in one of Mr. Ben Ali’s many knickknacks, some of them gifts from wealthy businessmen and fellow despots.

The government aims to raise an estimated 20 million dinars, about $13 million, from the event, largely through the sale of big-ticket items like Mr. Ben Ali’s fleet of luxury automobiles, more than 300 items of silver and gold jewelry, and an extensive collection of local and foreign artworks.

Thirty-nine of his cars will be up for auction, including two Lamborghini Gallardos and an Aston Martin Vanquish that contains a personalized plate reading “hand-built in England for Sakher el Materi,” Mr. Ben Ali’s son-in-law, now 31.

The items are mostly from Mr. Ben Ali’s Sidi Dhrif residence, one of numerous presidential palaces peppered across Tunisia’s northeast coast. After the Jan. 14, 2011, revolution that sent Mr. Ben Ali and his family into exile in Saudi Arabia, locals destroyed or looted some of the family’s homes, including a sumptuous palace in the Hammamet resort district.

 Attempts to retake public ownership of Mr. Ben Ali’s assets, particularly his foreign holdings, have proceeded fitfully over the past two years.

Many Tunisians have criticized the government as moving too slowly on the sale of confiscated assets and have expressed frustration at the prospect that Mr. Ben Ali could reclaim some of his old possessions through Saudi purchasers.

According to a statement from Slim Besbes, then acting minister of finance, it took eight months just to determine the value of items and legal procedures surrounding the sale of Mr. Ben Ali’s confiscated assets.

While some cars in his collection have been sold in earlier auctions, the event starting Saturday is the government’s most ambitious sell-off effort yet. And even those items represent a small sliver of what the government considers Mr. Ben Ali’s corruptly attained assets, which included 398 holding companies, Tunisian banks and telecommunications concerns.

 

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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