Fall 2007

end­­eavors Fall 2007

Research and Creative Activity • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

After the tsunami page 10

Neil Caudle

Sailboats visit tower karsts in southern Thailand.

The limestone promontories of

southern Thailand are known as tower karsts. Long ago, sea creatures left their secretions in strata that buckled and jutted far into the sky. For ages, the tropical rainfall has eaten away at the limestone, slowly dissolving its calcium, seeping through crevices, opening gorges and caves.

One day last February, I sat under the canopy of a long-tail boat, admiring a powerful series of stark, toothy karsts in a placid blue sea. In movies, the towers are backdrops for violent action, exotic enough for James Bond. But in person, you sense their great lithic repose, and their slow dissolution in tropical rain. Even when your boat blows an engine, and sets you adrift a far distance from shore, the karsts will be soothing, imparting humility, patience, and calm.

Eight days before, I had stood on an observation deck in Singapore, looking out at the sparkling new campus of Biopolis, a research park in hyperdrive.

Singapore is where you go to observe the warp-speed tectonics of global economics. It’s where you measure

the tempo in minutes, not millennia. In twenty short months, the developers of Biopolis built seven huge towers of glass.

The pulse of Singapore is electric; everything is wired. School buses carry global positioning systems so that parents can pinpoint the coordinates of their children anywhere along the route. In the elevator lobby in Biopolis, a digital monitor displays an animation of earnest, high-tech workers living and working in the futuristic wonderland of Fusionopolis (coming soon!).

So the towers of Singapore impart a different state of mind: ambition, impatience, and buzz.

Wherever we go to learn something new, we take up the form of a place as we take up its knowledge. If I were advising a student, I would say this: Go to Singapore and visit the towers of glass. Tune yourself to their electric hum. Learn how to think in the now and the next of this digital age. But then go to Thailand, where the towers are timeless, and the agent of change is the trickle of water on stone. Understand both kinds of landscape, and both kinds of mind.

—The Editor

end­­eavors Fall 2007 • Volume XXIV, Number 1 Endeavors engages its readers in the intellectual life of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by conveying the excitement of creativity, discovery, and the rigors and risks of the quest for new knowledge.

Endeavors (ISSN 1933-4338) is published three times a year by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Send comments, requests for permission to reprint material, and requests for extra copies to: Endeavors Office of Information and Communications CB 4106, 307 Bynum Hall University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-4106 phone: (919) 962-6136 e-mail: endeavors@unc.edu

James Moeser, Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development

contents

fall 2007

2 overview

Not buying the Big Bang, digital drug-hunting, the trouble with Timeless and Tipin, lethal lights at sea, lizard spit goes pharma, and detecting depression in new mothers.

cover story 10 Back from the Stone Age

Quieting the ghosts of Thailand’s tsunami.

by Neil Caudle

features 7 Just Say NO

Nitric oxide was the molecule of the year, but can medical science tame its wild ways?

by Danielle Jacobs

18 Encoding Reality

28 Land for those who work it For Brazil’s farmers, the world isn’t flat.

by Mark Derewicz

33 Darwin’s Dissenters

Why does the evolution debate rage on?

by Colie Hoffman

36 Under the Volcano

Rock-solid results rewrite geology texts.

by Margarite Nathe

A compound in Magic Mint could help new antipsychotic drugs hit their targets.

by Kelly Chi

38 Running on Fumes

20 The Paper Docs

41 Fixing the News

The past is in their hands.

by Margarite Nathe

Is hydrogen good for the long haul?

by Mark Derewicz

Philip Meyer wrote the book on reporting by the numbers.

by Mark Derewicz

24 From Page to Stage

A novice playwright wrestles a modern classic.

by Mark Derewicz

44 Image/imagined

25 The Flow Below

46 in print

Going deep with underwater waves.

by Margarite Nathe

Three Carolina artists show their work.

Uncle Sam’s long shadow, a wartime witch hunt, and a poet plays favorites.

49 endview Art for adoption.

Editor: Neil Caudle, Associate Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development Associate Editor: Jason Smith Writers: Neil Caudle, Kelly Chi, Mark Derewicz, Colie Hoffman, Danielle Jacobs, Margarite Nathe, Jason Smith, and Sarah Whitmarsh Design: Neil Caudle and Jason Smith Print production, online design: Jason Smith

On the cover: A Thai fisherman near Krabi, Thailand works to salvage his boat after the tsunami of December 26, 2004. The photo is by Pailin Wedel, daughter of Paul Wedel, executive director of the Kenan Institute Asia. Pailin, a graduate of Carolina with a major in biology, is now a photojournalist and multimedia specialist with the Raleigh News & Observer.

http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/

©2007 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the consent of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Use of trade names implies no endorsement

by UNC-Chapel Hill.

overview

Rip the Big Bang

T

here was no bang in the Big Bang.

At least that’s what Paul Frampton says.

The physicist has created a buzz all around the world as his hypothesis has grown from a private discussion to a hot topic on Wikipedia. Frampton has ironed out the inconsistencies in the Big Bang theory by refuting it altogether.

Here’s what we know about the Big Bang.

It was kind of like a giant game of Concentration, where lots of unrelated, nonsensical puzzle pieces came together at precisely the same time and perfect orientation, 13.7 billion years ago, to create a universe. This “anthropic principle”—the theory that a lot of parameters had to fit tightly together so that our present universe could exist—leads to a swarm of philosophical and religious issues, and frankly, Frampton and many of his contemporaries regard it as somewhat implausible.

So everyone knows the beginning, but few know that the Big Bang theory can envision an even more explosive ending. The second law of thermodynamics—which states that 2 endeavors

the entropy, or disorder, of the universe is always increasing—means that the universe is constantly inconstant. It’s always expanding, faster and faster, to the point where the universe can come to a “Big Rip,” Frampton says, “a finite time in the future where the universe—space, the solar system, galaxies, atoms, even protons and neutrons—tears itself apart into patches, and time ends.”

Many physicists and cosmologists have been avid skeptics of the Big Bang theory since its inception in the 1930s, and in the 1950s they furnished its title, which they meant to be derogatory. While various alternate theories have been proposed over the decades, Frampton’s is different. Together with graduate student Lauris Baum, he came up with a theory that remedies the contrived origin of the Big Bang (and does not predict as gloomy an end to the universe).

Frampton and Baum claim that instead of getting larger and larger until it explodes into nothingness, the universe follows a cyclic model consisting of four stages. First, the universe expands exponentially. Next, while it’s breaking up into vacant patches, the universe comes to a screeching halt and

turns around right before the would-be Big Rip; it does this in a unit of time so small that there isn’t even a name for it. Then each patch contracts and eventually bounces back, starting a new universe from one infinitely small causal patch of the last one.

This implies that not only will the universe not end, but that there was no initial Big Bang, and in fact no beginning at all.

Cyclic models have been around for about seventy years, but they could never address the fact that a contraction period inherently means that the universe is contracting and creating order instead of expanding. The Baum-Frampton model solves this problem by explaining that each patch, devoid of any kind of physical matter, has no entropy, and follows the law of thermodynamics. So while the universe may be contracting, there’s nothing actually inside it to contract.

Well, nothing tangible, that is. There is something inside these patches; it just can’t be seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelt. Dark energy is an ethereal nothingness that comprises 72 percent of our universe. It was discovered by cosmologists only ten years ago, and is thought to be the culprit

Finding New Drugs Faster

D

iscovering new drugs may be faster and easier when a Carolina grad’s

NASA

in the universe’s accelerated expansion and, ultimately, its impending blowout. It’s also what makes Frampton’s new cosmological model work.

We are now in an expansion period, which Frampton predicts to be 1012 years long.

So what would the universe be like during a period of contraction? Pretty boring, it seems. “Nobody would be there to observe it,” he says. “It’s empty, devoid of life. Nothing can survive the turnaround.”

He points out why such an explanation was never envisioned by Albert Einstein, whose research formed the basis of the Big Bang theory (among others). “We don’t think we’re any smarter than Einstein,” Frampton says, “but we just know things that he never knew about.”

—Danielle Jacobs Danielle Jacobs is a doctoral student studying organic chemistry at Carolina.

Paul Frampton is the Louis J. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics in the College of Arts & Sciences. Lauris Baum is a doctoral student of physics at Carolina. Their research is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy.

research finds its way into the marketplace.

In the hunt for new drugs, scientists screen thousands of molecules, looking for the perfect fit—a drug, or ligand, that attaches snugly to its receptor, a target in the body—rather like a hand inside a glove.

Computer programs can determine which molecules fit, or bind, using information such as the shape of the molecule and charges of atoms inside it.

But molecules change shape and can bind to other molecules in numerous ways. So while computer programs can determine which molecules bind, they may not be able to tell which, out of hundreds of possibilities, would work best in experiments.

Pharmacy researcher Raed Khashan has found a new method of “scoring” all the possible ways a ligand and receptor bind.

Drug developers use other scoring methods to rank molecules based on the three-dimensional orientation of atoms. But Khashan says those methods are based on orientations of two atoms or two groups of atoms, while his method takes into account more atoms and atom groups.

Khashan uses a computer to store, or memorize, the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the space where the ligand and receptor attach to each other. The memorized structures are drug molecules that are known to attach to specific receptors.

When scientists look at a completely new ligand and receptor, they can judge how closely the atoms in the attachment space match the memorized structure. “The closer to your memorized structure, the higher the score,” Khashan says.

Using this scoring method, drug developers could more accurately determine whether it’s worthwhile to invest time and money into producing and testing a particular ligand, Khashan says. They can even modify the ligand to make it bind more strongly to its receptor, he says.

Before it can be put to use by drug companies, Khashan’s scoring method needs to attract the interest of software designers, who would then produce and market his method to drug developers as part of a computer program.

Khashan presented his findings in August at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting.

—Sarah Whitmarsh Sarah Whitmarsh is a master’s student in medical journalism at UNC. Raed Khashan received his doctoral degree in May 2007 from the pharmacy school’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products. He won a Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Computers in Chemistry for his work.

endeavors 3

The trouble with Timeless and Tipin These proteins help DNA repair, but let cancer survive.

T

he human body’s natural effort to prevent skin cancer may also hinder cancer treatments, a twist of fate that pathologist William Kaufmann and his collaborators uncovered.

Kaufmann’s team demonstrated that two cellular proteins—Tipin and Timeless— help slow the rate of DNA replication.

This slowdown gives cells additional time to repair DNA that ultraviolet radiation has damaged. It is this damage, or cellular mutation, that if left untreated could lead to skin cancer, a disease that affects one million Americans each year.

The slowdown of DNA replication, of course, is a good thing; it’s nature’s way of protecting the body from cancerous growths.

“But the protective response may make some cells more resistant to certain types of cancer therapy, such as radiation treatment and chemotherapeutic agents, which work by inducing the cancer cell to die,” Kaufmann says. “If a cancer cell is given this additional time to recover from treatment, it may be able to survive the treatment, much to the detriment of the patient.”

UNC’s team includes several scientists.

Pathologist Paul Chastain developed a way to label DNA molecules with fluorescent colors so scientists can study what happens to different DNA molecules under various conditions. Former UNC biochemist Keziban Unsal-Kacmaz created chemical reagents that reduce the effects of Timeless and Tipin within cell nuclei. As a team, the

researchers learned what happened to DNA when Timeless and Tipin were suppressed in cells that had been exposed to very low doses of ultraviolet radiation. If Tipin’s effect is suppressed, then the effects of Timeless are completely stopped; if Timeless is taken out, then Tipin’s power to slow replication is reduced, but not completely eradicated.

But if the two proteins are left to their own devices, they can help slow down or stop DNA replication, allowing cells to repair damage and resist cancer treatment.

“These are the kinds of things we would want to inhibit when applying chemotherapy or radiation to cancer cells,” Kaufmann says, “because taking out this system will make killing cancer cells more effective.”

—Mark Derewicz William Kaufmann, professor of pathology and lab medicine in the School of Medicine, received funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute.

Dan Sears

A deadly glow at sea

S

ea turtles see the light, and thousands of them are dying because of it.

Carolina biologist Ken Lohmann and former UNC grad student John Wang determined that endangered sea turtles are attracted to the same light-sticks that fishermen use to attract tuna and swordfish. Then turtles get hooked or ensnared on fishermen’s longlines.

Researchers placed turtles into soft cloth harnesses and tethered them to electronic tracking devices in the center of a large, water-filled tank that simulated the ocean. When the researchers introduced glowing light-sticks of several colors and types into the tank, turtles swam steadily toward them. But when the lights were inactivated, turtles ignored them.

Only one in five thousand turtles survives to adulthood, but those lousy odds seem to be getting worse.

Lohmann says, “A lot of turtles that beat the odds and would otherwise have lived long lives are now being caught on longlines.”

—Mark Derewicz Ken Lohmann is a professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. His study appears on the May issue of Animal Conservation.

His team received funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Ken Lohmann attaches a soft harness with an electronic device to a sea turtle to monitor its movements in a tank.

4 endeavors

Jon Davis

In its saliva, the Gila monster secretes a hormone that improves blood-sugar control in people with diabetes.

The natural enemies of diabetes: Gila monsters

I

t won’t take you long to realize that poking that Gila monster with a stick wasn’t a good idea. But when you go to the doctor to get the bite treated—and possibly the teeth extracted from your leg—refrain, for a moment, from cursing the whole species.

According to studies at the School of Medicine, a hormone in that Gila monster’s saliva (or something very much like it) is benefiting a lot of people.

In its saliva, the Gila monster secretes a hormone called exendin-4, which scientists have spun into a new drug that improves blood-sugar control and induces weight loss in people with diabetes. Exendin-4 is remarkably similar to a human hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) which stimulates insulin production when a person has high blood sugar. GLP-1 slows the emptying of the stomach to reduce appetite and make you feel full, says John Buse, UNC Chief of Endocrinology.

The new drug, called exenatide, is a synthetic version of exendin-4 (the lizard hormone). But why not just make more GLP-1? “GLP-1 is known to rapidly degrade in the body,” says Buse, who completed a three-year study of the drug with patients who have type 2 diabetes. “That made it hard to produce a convenient drug. But exendin-4 has properties that make it long-lasting.” And it’s easier to make in bulk in the lab.

Weight gain and being overweight are pervasive problems among people with type 2 diabetes, Buse says. And insulin injections—currently the most commonly prescribed medication

for diabetes—can cause more weight gain, which can, in turn, worsen some aspects of the disease. But after taking exenatide for three years, most patients in Buse’s study had achieved healthy, sustained glucose levels and had lost an average of eleven pounds—quite an accomplishment, especially for patients who had trouble losing weight despite proper diet, exercise, and help from other medications.

Venom and blood sugar But what about the Gila monsters? Where did that connection come from? Well, it turns out that toxic venom from these lizards—and lots of other venomous animals—can give victims pancreatitis. John Eng, an endocrinologist at the Bronx Veteran Affairs Medical Center in New York City, was looking at studies of those victims and trying to find out why and how the venom affected the pancreas, which controls blood sugar by releasing insulin. So Eng ordered a bunch of different animal venoms, including the Gila monster’s, and voilà: exendin-4.

The only drawback: patients who take Byetta (exenatide’s commercial name) are on it for the long haul. Patients have to self-inject the drug twice a day, and stay on it even after they have lowered their blood sugar and reached a healthy weight, Buse says. “If they stop the drug,” he says, “the assumption is that they’ll slide back to where they were before.”

— Colie Hoffman endeavors 5

Detecting depression in new mothers

W

hen a nurse practitioner asked my wife questions about her emotional state two weeks after the birth of our son, I knew she was just checking for signs of postpartum depression. I figured such questions were common for new mothers. I was wrong.

Betsy Sleath, a researcher in the School of Pharmacy, sent 1,200 surveys to obstetricians, gynecologists, and family practitioners across North Carolina, and from the 491 respondents, 228 had seen women for postpartum visits in the last three months, and 79 percent of these doctors were unlikely to screen patients for postpartum depression.

“I was really surprised that more doctors are not using the formal screening instruments that are out there,” Sleath says. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 can be found with a quick internet search, and patients could fill out the forms in the waiting room before seeing the doctor. As for one-on-one consultation, Sleath says that doctors are under a lot of pressure to focus on physical health instead of mental well-being.

“And North Carolina is not unique, because for years, postpartum depression care has focused solely on the mother’s

physical health,” she says. “But one out of nine new mothers has postpartum depression. I think that’s a pretty striking number.”

UNC psychiatrist Bradley Gaynes, co-author of Sleath’s study, says that at the very least, doctors should ask all new mothers two basic questions: “Do you feel sad or depressed?” and “Are you disinterested in usual activities?”

But only 43 percent of doctors were almost certain to ask mothers if they feel depressed or sad, and just 27 percent said they ask if new mothers are interested in their normal daily activities.

Some scientists say that changes in hormone levels after pregnancy are the likely cause of postpartum depression, and new mothers or women who lose their babies due to stillbirth or miscarriage are at greater risk if they have a history of depression, have poor support from their partners, friends, and family, or are under significant additional stress. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, loss of pleasure in daily life, sleeplessness, sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, feelings of worthlessness and guilt, irritability, appetite change, and poor concentration.

“Depression during the perinatal period can have devastating consequences, not

only for the women experiencing it but also for the women’s children and families,” Gaynes says. “It’s a disease that affects more than just the new mother.”

One way to make sure postpartum depression doesn’t spiral out of control is for new mothers to talk about how they feel, if not first with their doctors then with their partners, friends, and family.

That’s not easy, Sleath says, because there’s a stigma attached to postpartum depression. Women who suffer from it typically feel ashamed that they’re depressed during such a special time. But if women don’t talk and doctors don’t ask, then new mothers who need treatment might never get it.

After Sleath talked about this stigmatization during a radio interview, friends approached her for the first time about their own battles with depression. “They told me they felt more open to talk to me after they heard me talk about the stigma and how women shouldn’t be ashamed.”

—Mark Derewicz Betsy Sleath is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy and a research associate at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Heath Services Research. Bradley Gaynes is an associate professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine.

Tyler Olson

6 endeavors

Jason Smith

Just say

NO Mark Schoenfisch thinks the 1992 Molecule of the Year still has vast potential.

Nitric oxide

could be medicine’s Swiss Army knife, but only if science can learn how to make it behave.

by Danielle Jacobs

W

e’ve all heard the phrase “Just Say No” to drugs. But Mark Schoenfisch is telling people to “Just Say NO” to drugs. What’s the difference?

To Schoenfisch and other chemists, NO means nitric oxide—a gas not to be confused with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Schoenfisch thought carefully before diving into NO research. How could something that comes out of car exhaust and cigarette smoke have healing properties?

But NO does have a big hand in maintaining the body’s critical functions, and it was even named “Molecule of the Year” by Science in 1992. That places it alongside such scientific milestones as synthetic diamonds (1990) and Dolly the Sheep (1997).

NO ain’t new. Chemists have been probing the role of nitric oxide in human physiology for half a century, and have discovered that it is released endogenously—by the body itself—in small quantities. It’s a veritable Swiss Army knife of vital tools, yet it’s still smaller than a molecule of oxygen.

It’s a neurotransmitter. It releases neurotransmitters. It’s necessary for memory and learning. It helps modulate digestion, respiration, and almost everything in between.

These myriad roles arise from nitric oxide’s capability as a vasorelaxant—sort of a massage therapist for cells. The walls of healthy arteries release nitric oxide, which relaxes the surrounding muscle. This can help open blood vessels to vital blood flow, regulating blood pressure and flow all over the body. Too little nitric oxide can result in platelet adhesion and blood clotting, while too much could potentially cause incessant bleeding. endeavors 7

Jae Ho Shin

envelope to develop new materials that can hold more and more of the molecule. And it’s paid off—they’ve synthesized materials that store more nitric oxide than any others in the world.

In theory, NO-containing nanoparticles could be used to treat ovarian cancer and other diseases. In this model, the red ball represents a molecule carrying NO, and the green ball represents folic acid. Scientists would place these on a nanoparticle scaffold (shown as a gray lump of silica-based material). The cancer cells’ overabundant folate receptors would attract the nanoparticle, whose payload of NO would kill the cancer.

This relaxation property is likewise responsible for elevated NO levels in the uterine walls of full-term pregnant women; the NO helps thwart premature contractions. In men, NO promotes the blood flow that enables intercourse.

Scores of people have benefited from the relaxing quality of externally delivered NO, too. Nitroglycerine, essentially a deluge of nitric oxide, opens blocked arteries and, by allowing blood flow, has saved the lives of millions of heart-attack patients.

NO also promotes wound healing and kills bacteria and fungi. Genetically mutated mice lacking NO synthase, the enzyme that triggers NO production, have wounds that just don’t heal. No enzyme, no NO, no healing. This is because NO mediates multiple processes in the wound-healing cascade— “re-epithelialization, wound closure, tissue granulation, tissue remodeling, and scartissue prevention,” says Nathan Stasko, a fifth-year graduate student at UNC who has studied nitric oxide-based analgesics.

Wound healing can be further impeded by bacterial and fungal growth, so not only is NO necessary for repair itself, but also preventing the bacterial colonization that can encumber any one of the components of the cascade. “So if you treat the bacteria,” Stasko says, “you heal the wound.”

8 endeavors

What part of NO doesn’t he understand?

But it appears that having NO-releasing properties isn’t enough, and even though nitric oxide has all these valuable properties, NO drugs have yet to flood the market.

Nitroglycerine is the only NO-releasing product doctors use, due to one problem (that ironically saves heart-attack patients)— the unrestrained barrage of the gas into the body. Unfortunately, it goes anywhere and, like any molecule, can be toxic in uncontrolled amounts. No current devices use NO’s properties because no one has been able to safely store and deliver it.

“It all comes down to the innate difficulty of storing NO and controlling its release,” Schoenfisch says. “People are after that.

There are hundreds of patents on hundreds of NO donors—but none has led to the development of a useful product because of the issue of storage and controlled release.”

Complicating storage even more is the fact that different processes are mediated by different amounts of nitric oxide. At low concentrations, says postdoctoral student Jae Ho Shin, “NO is involved in improving wound healing. However, if we are interested in killing bacteria, we need a much higher concentration of NO.” This is why Schoenfisch’s team is constantly pushing the

Getting to know NO Schoenfisch’s involvement in NO research began with a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan. With his advisor, Mark Meyerhoff, he worked on exploiting nitric oxide’s power to reduce platelet adhesion. Current methods for measuring blood oxygen levels, for example, involve injecting blood into large gas analyzers. The consequent time lag between the output reading and a patient’s actual blood oxygen level can be damaging: in a critical-care situation, blood-gas sensors implanted directly into arteries could be lifesaving. Unfortunately, a foreign material embedded in the body is a welcoming surface for platelet and bacterial adhesion, leading to rejection and infection.

Schoenfisch was part of the first group to publish animal studies on an intravascular gas and electrolyte sensor made of a material that gradually releases low levels of nitric oxide to prevent such biofouling.

Since then, Schoenfisch has ventured into other NO-releasing biomaterials, beginning with the design of NO-releasing glucose sensors that could be implanted subcutaneously, giving constant, accurate readings of blood glucose levels without the need for inconvenient hourly assays.

In 2001, when Schoenfisch initially focused his efforts on implant-related infections, he expected to take advantage of NO’s promiscuous role in fighting infection. “That’s the beauty of NO,” says Shin, who has been synthesizing NO-containing biomaterials in the Schoenfisch lab for the past six years. With all of NO’s versatility, it’s possible to design a therapeutic that uses all its efficacious properties in concert.

“Typically, different drug molecules are employed to prevent platelet adhesion, kill bacteria, and promote wound healing at the implantation site,” Shin says. But with NO, they can simply reach into its mixed bag of tricks and achieve all three.

But that leaves the problem of NO storage and delivery, and one way Schoenfisch manages this is by synthesizing NO-releasing nanoparticles with controlled storage and release of nitric oxide. A nanoparticle is the bridge between a molecule and bulk material:

the middle kid who’s sort of different, more capricious than the others. Changing the size of the particle—typically by simple changes in reaction conditions—actually alters its physical and physiological properties.

First Schoenfisch’s group made gold clusters, and then dendrimers, which resemble the pattern on a cracked windshield. But their most recent silicon-based nanoparticles are what have shattered records for NO-storing capacity over any other material. These materials are made by exposing a simple organic molecule—the donor—to a high pressure of NO gas, which locks nitric oxide within each molecule. Next, these small NO-trapped molecules called nonoates are attached to a silica scaffold— essentially the stuff ceramics are made of.

The size of the resultant nanoparticle, and thus the amount of NO trapped within, can be easily increased or decreased by changing the reaction medium, sequence, concentration, and size of the silicon precursor. Shin has been able to make particles ranging from twenty to six hundred nanometers in size, which he believes could make the difference when targeting cancer cells that have large holes in their cell membranes from tumor growth and stretching. He’s investigating the selectivity of the large silica-based scaffolds against ovarian cancer cells, and has already found that not only are the NO nanoparticles too large to cross into healthy cells, but once they have penetrated malignant cells, they remain inside for much longer. This is their first attempt at size-selective targeting, Shin says, “and there is a lot more potential and possibility in that area.”

And Schoenfisch can control the delivery of NO just as easily as he can its storage capacity, by varying the type of donor molecule that resides on each nanoparticle. The way NO is released in the body depends on the structure of the donor, and Schoenfisch believes he can exploit the contrasting mechanisms in targeting. For example, a donor designed to release NO as a swift eruption should be more effective in killing bacteria, while a donor that only releases NO in response to distinct triggers in the body may be better at mediating biological processes over a long time.

So not only is Schoenfisch able to increase the trunk space of the materials, but Stasko says that their recent investigations have resulted in nanoparticles that “finely tune the rate of NO release.”

The future of NO Stasko and Schoenfisch have founded a corporation based on their patented NOreleasing materials. NOVAN (Nitric Oxide Vehicles and Nanotechnology) may take off into a wide variety of therapeutic areas, Stasko says, but they are initially concentrating on healing topical wounds such as burns. “Burns have an extremely high rate of infection, and you also have a good deal of scarring that occurs. Commonly employed burn antibacterials don’t include a second wound-healing component,” he says. But with all the evidence pointing towards the synergic properties of NO, they are confident that their products will do both.

Right now, the most exciting strategy available for infection is polymeric silver release, which, like nitric oxide, exhibits analgesic effects. The problem is that bacteria are developing resistance to the silver influx.

“But NO is going to be very difficult to develop resistance toward,” Schoenfisch says, “because it is known to diffuse rapidly through polymers and cell membranes.” And whereas antibiotics are typically administered systemically, promoting resistance all over the body, the localized delivery of NO will further discourage resistance.

“Ultimately we would like to develop lots of different NO-releasing technologies and license them for different applications: wound healing, anti-infection, and biofilms,” Schoenfisch says. The team hopes they can then venture into bigger territories such as ischemia and cancer.

Schoenfisch also wants to further explore selective delivery in the cancer arena. His team has already begun modifying their NO-releasing nanoparticles with folic acid.

As ovarian cancer cells express more folate receptors on their surfaces than non-tumor cells, an ideal drug would inundate the surface of a cancer cell before a healthy cell and deliver NO selectively.

But still, with no NO on the market today, Stasko says, “investors are very leery because they can’t compare our technology to other NO -releasing products—the safety, the efficacy, the cost. We’re pushing the field, and that’s a challenge.” The upside is that they’re armed with the results of exhaustive toxicity studies, which reveal that these nonoates should be more appropriately called yes-yes-ates. e Mark Schoenfisch is an associate professor of bioanalytical chemistry in the College of Arts and

Sciences. His research on nitric oxide-releasing nanoparticles is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Carolina Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, a National Cancer Institute-funded collaboration between UNC and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Jae Ho Shin (all)

Atomic force microscope images of nanoparticles in four sizes (20–500 nanometers). Larger particles can selectively enter cancer cells, whose membranes tend to have largerthan-normal openings.

endeavors 9

Neil Caudle

Back from the Stone Age Above: On Yao Noi Island, Thailand, the tsunami ripped up a steel-reinforced concrete pier used by fishermen.

Kenan Institute Asia has helped local people organize a microfinance group to stimulate new business.

Right: Boys walk past boat wreckage at Ban Nam Khem.

Facing page, left: Kiat Sriprasom, a hotel manager and vice president of the Phang-nga Tourist Association, lost all of his upscale hotel to the tsunami. He also lost 24 staff members and 100 guests.

Center: Chuleeporn Sermsirimanont, managing director of the Khaolak Paradise Resort. Her hotel, one-third destroyed by the tsunami, is now rebuilt.

Right: The beach at Khao Lak.

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Courtesy KI Asia

ON DECEMBER 26, 2004, Chuleeporn Sermsirimanont was away from her office at the Khao Lak Paradise Resort, where she is the owner and manager. But her husband was on duty there, in a building perched high on a wooded bluff above a postcard-pretty scene: aqua sea, white sand, and the lush, emerald green of the hotel grounds.

Suddenly, the sea disappeared, leaving a gray, eerie wasteland of sand. And then, just as suddenly, the sea came raging back. A huge mound of water raced inland, snapping the palm trees, tossing the buildings apart in the surge. Chuleeporn’s husband watched as the body of one of their guests bobbed toward him through wreckage and trees.

On this stretch of beach in Thailand’s Phang-nga province, the tsunami killed three thousand people. “We lost four guests and six staff members,” Chuleeporn says. “Seventy percent of the hotel was destroyed.”

Asked if she and her family have recovered from their losses, Chuleeporn smiles politely, as though the question has an answer too personal to share. “We have rebuilt,” she says. “We are ready for guests.”

The casualties were more numerous a short drive down the beach, where a twelvemeter wall of water hit the beachfront buildings and ripped Kiat Sriprasom’s upscale

hotel, the Seaview Resort and Spa, right off its footings, leaving only piles of rubble and twisted rebar. Kiat lost a hundred guests and twenty-four staff members. Some of the staff were longtime employees who had followed Kiat to Khao Lak from his previous job in Phuket.

“Losing those people was terrible,” Kiat says. “The day after the tsunami, there was nothing but ruin. There was no power.

Bodies were still in the wreckage. It was like the Stone Age.” Throughout coastal Thailand, reminders persist. In Khao Lak, a one-hundred-foot police patrol boat, stranded two-thirds of a mile inland by the tsunami, rests off-kilter in a field. Piers are still in ruins, the fishing boats broken and sunk. Repairs to watersupply pipes are lagging, and shortages still plague the area during peak demand.

But it’s not the Stone Age now. In most locations, the power is back on, roads are open again, and cell phones are jingling.

Crews are rebuilding the hotels, higher and stronger. And slowly, the tourists return.

But demand for hotel rooms remains much lower than before the tsunami, and Kiat is worried. By February of this year, his hotel was 70 percent rebuilt and open for business. But many hotel workers died in the tsunami, so Kiat has trouble finding

qualified staff. And his rooms don’t command the premium prices they once did.

Before the tsunami, Kiat charged 4,500 baht (about $139 U.S. dollars) per night for one of his luxury hotel rooms. This February, during the height of the tourist season in southern Thailand, he could only charge 2,500 to 3,000 baht (about $77 to $92 U.S. dollars). In January, his occupancy rate was only 60 percent. Before the tsunami, it was typically 90 to 95 percent, he says.

The problem is a matter of simple supply and demand, Kiat says. While tourists from Scandinavia and Europe have found their way back to Khao Lak, visitors from Asia and elsewhere have been slow to return. Kiat offers one explanation: “They are afraid of ghosts,” he says. “Thousands of ghosts.”

The “second tsunami” If you ask Kiat what to do about the ghosts, he will say, “Care for the living.”

Easier said than done. After the tsunami, relief organizations, missionaries, reporters, and well-intended volunteers flooded southern Thailand, often using up precious resources and getting in the way.

“We called it ‘the second tsunami,’” says Jack Kasarda, a professor of business and director of UNC’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. “Everyone from around the

After the tsunami, Carolina and Kenan Institute Asia Help Thailand recover.

By Neil Caudle

Neil Caudle (all)

endeavors 11

Paul Wedel

Above: Jack Kasarda in Khao Lak soon after the tsunami.

Pailin Wedel

world was coming to help. It was a mess.

We decided to focus on recovery, rather than relief.”

Kasarda, an expert in international business and air transport, is a member of the board of trustees of Kenan Institute (K.I.) Asia, a not-for-profit organization based in Bangkok with close ties to UNC-Chapel Hill. For years, Kasarda has steered UNC students and faculty toward service and study in Asia. Kasarda can be a tad evangelical about Thailand and the advantages of working there. Thailand, he says, is beautiful and its culture is splendid; it has been among the fastest-growing economies in the world; Americans are welcome; and Bangkok is only a brief plane ride from the political and economic power centers of Asia. And for anyone interested in international business, Asia is where the action is these days.

Kasarda’s affection for Thailand pushed him into overdrive after the tsunami. He and K.I. Asia leaders met with Thai government officials and business leaders to build support for the program they had in mind—one that would help put people back to work.

The effort required funding, and Kasarda found it. With Erskine Bowles, president of the UNC system, Kasarda landed $200,000 from the Bush-Clinton tsunami-relief fund.

The Kenan Charitable Trust committed another $1 million, 25 percent of which funds UNC students and faculty members working in the tsunami-recovery effort; the rest goes to K.I. Asia for an array of new projects.

12 endeavors

One example of such projects is an effort to help rebuild the fishing industry. The tsunami killed fishermen and destroyed boats, nets, fish traps, docks, and coldstorage facilities. K.I. Asia has helped local authorities acquire land to build a new pier for small-boat fishermen in the community of Tab La Mu Port, and several Kenan-Flagler Business School students worked to launch the project. Construction began this summer.

The ripple of money Along the southern coast, much of K.I. Asia’s recovery effort has focused on rebuilding the tourist industry in a way that attracts bigger spenders. “Upper-end tourism is the way the money is really going to pour in here,” Kasarda says. “And that starts with the hotels and ripples through the economy creating jobs.”

In the past, much of the tourism in places such as Khao Lak consisted of day trips that generated little revenue. Khao Lak, Kasarda says, has the potential to attract the kind of tourists who seek pristine beaches and picture-perfect scenery. But for high-end tourists, the entire experience has to be firstrate, from the natural beauty of the environment to the service in the restaurant and the furnishings in the hotel room. Creating that experience takes real expertise and close cooperation among the local businesses and governments—ingredients sorely lacking in the aftermath of a disaster.

Left: A child searches for toys in the ruins near Phuket.

In coastal areas of Thailand, much of K.I. Asia’s effort has been directed toward providing those missing ingredients. K.I. Asia staff arranged training for hotel operators, front-office workers, and food-and-beverage managers. UNC students arrived to help develop new business strategies (see “Back in Business,” page 14). The team also helped organize the Phang-nga Tourist Association, of which Kiat Sriprasom is vice president.

The association has fifty-four members and promotes practices that help businesses attract and please guests who have money to spend.

Richard Bernhard, associate executive director of K.I. Asia, says that one of the advantages of working in Khao Lak is that most of the hotel owners are locals, so profits are likely to remain in Thailand and benefit the Thai people.

“The goal is to make Khao Lak an international destination for sustainable tourism,” Bernhard says. UNC students from programs in business or information and library science are helping local businesses craft new marketing campaigns.

“The whole tourism trade here was based on word of mouth,” Bernhard says. “The students will help produce the kind of web sites and brochures that can appeal to travelers all over the world.”

Beyond the posh resort But not everyone in Thailand can run a resort or make a living from the tourist trade,

Neil Caudle

Neil Caudle

Fishing nets are returning to Yao Noi, southern Thailand, where boats and gear were destroyed by the tsunami.

Courtesy KI Asia

and K.I. Asia invests many of its resources in projects designed to foster local ownership of business. Paul Wedel, executive director of K.I. Asia, says that in Southeast Asia, outside investors often build fancy hotels or other developments that drive up land and food prices, damage the environment, and offer only low-paid jobs to local workers.

“In the early 1990s, Thailand’s growth was rapid and not sustainable over the long term,” Wedel says. “Ever since then, social and environmental goals have been part of our mission.”

Sustainable development is a notion that has survived for decades despite the lack of a clear definition, but the general idea is that development must be economically, socially, and environmentally sound in order to sustain a community or society for many generations. A weak economy tends to impoverish people and degrade the environment, just as the absence of social justice or environmental quality can undermine the economy. K.I. Asia seeks a balance among the three dimensions of sustainability, Wedel says.

Above: A woman learns a sewing technique in a workshop led by Kenan Institute Asia.

Below: Wooden long-tail boats serve fishing and transportation in island communities.

Neil Caudle

endeavors 13

Kuhn Noi

Back in Business Students help Thailand recover.

UNC graduate students Christopher Norman, Marisa Glassman, and Betsy Ronan Herzog aboard a long-tail boat in southern Thailand. This summer, they helped Thai business owners market Khao Lak as a tourist destination.

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or the past decade, students from UNC-Chapel Hill have flown to the other side of the world to work with the Thailand-based Kenan Institute Asia ( K.I. Asia)—a notfor-profit organization affiliated with the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise. The students’ goal: help foster sustainable business practices that energize the economy, protect the environment, and respect local customs.

This summer, one of the students, Betsy Ronan Herzog from Cullowhee, N.C., a second-year student in the master’s in library science program, has been collaborating with K.I. Asia to redevelop the Phang-nga Tourist Association’s web site.

“Small businesses in Khao Lak have always relied on tourists just finding them through travel agents or by word of mouth,” Herzog says. “This changed after the tsunami, when people assumed that it was no longer a destination worth visiting. We can use the power of the web to help travelers learn about Khao Lak. It really is an amazing destination: beaches, jungles, elephant-riding, scuba diving, and phenomenal food. Businesses are open and the community is ready for visitors to return. The challenge is to convey that message to the world.”

Another student, Marisa Glassman, a second-year MBA student from Montclair, New Jersey, is conducting marketing research and putting together a workshop for the tourist association. She says that the internship in Khao Lak has given her a new appreciation for the social dimensions of business.

“I think the hands-on nature of our work and the community interaction it requires have made this a great cultural and interpersonal experience,” Glassman says. “The ‘softer’ skills of communicating and trying to cater to the needs of various stakeholders have been as important as the ‘harder’ research and analysis skills we’re refining.”

Christopher Norman, who graduated in May with one master’s in business administration and another in regional planning, is working with businesses in Phang-nga to develop a regional marketing plan.

“It’s one thing to hear about the enormous efforts to rebuild infrastructure and the economy after a disaster that large, but it is another thing entirely to see it first hand,” Norman says. “Given the scope of physical and human loss, I am amazed at how strong and resilient the community has remained.”

Paul Wedel, K.I. Asia’s executive director, says that UNC students 14 endeavors

have made vital contributions to the tsunami-recovery effort, working with regional businesses, schools, governments, and communities to help people find better jobs and form independent businesses.

Wedel lists several examples: • Students from the Kenan-Flagler Business School are working with K.I. Asia’s small-business experts to help hotels and tourism companies fine-tune management and marketing strategies.

• Students from the School of Information and Library Science are helping businesses in Thailand’s Phang-nga province upgrade their web sites.

• Students from the business school and from the College of Arts and Sciences live for months in rural communities, where they help people develop tours and attract visitors. Some of these students also teach English to local high-school students.

• During the summer, Wedel advised a group of business students who conducted marketing research for Phang-nga’s tourism industry during the rainy season, when business normally trickles away. The students helped identify market segments right for the kind of tourism that harmonizes with local values, Wedel says. About 40 percent of the people in Phang-nga’s coastal villages are Muslim, so there are strong feelings against typical tourist developments such as bars and night clubs.

• Students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication are preparing to build a multi-media web site highlighting the stories and ways of life along the coast of Thailand.

• Education students are in high demand for K.I. Asia projects, as well—both for improving science education and for teaching English as a foreign language.

Wedel says that over the past decade several dozen UNC students have worked with K.I. Asia, including students from the business school, the College of Arts and Sciences, the law school, the Carolina Environmental Program, and the School of Information and Library Science. Over the past several years, more than a dozen students from the School of Public Health have completed internships or conducted research on global-health topics in Thailand, including HIV/AIDS, cancer, nutrition, water and sanitation, malaria, and women’s health and empowerment.

UNC student volunteers will be welcome for next year’s projects, too, Wedel says. Students interested in participating can learn more at www.KIAsia.org.

—Neil Caudle and Margarite Nathe

“For example, when we provide management consultation to a company, the goal is to benefit society and the environment at the same time we’re strengthening the business,” he says.

Many of K.I. Asia’s projects have involved organizing and training entrepreneurs, especially women (see “Small Loans, Big Results,” page 16). In the first fifteen months following the tsunami, K.I. Asia’s programs involved fifteen hundred people.

But Wedel quickly points out that this number is modest, given the need. The tsunami ripped out much of the social fabric of coastal Thailand along with its towns and businesses. Shortages of Thai workers and demand for new construction increased the number of low-paid workers from Burma and elsewhere. Agriculture also took a hit, and chicken farms and rubber plantations attracted foreign workers, compounding Thailand’s public-health problems.

Malevolent microbes The influx of foreign laborers and their families has spread malaria into some border areas of Thailand, especially in the rubber plantations, where mosquitoes thrive.

Malaria threatens not only public health but the Thai economy, because the disease affects the very workers Thailand needs to rebuild its infrastructure and resume its economic momentum, and because the tourist trade will suffer if malaria reaches the southern islands and beaches.

While malaria can be treated, there are two distinct types in Thailand, and drugresistant strains have begun to appear elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Successful treatment requires an accurate diagnosis—a difficult and expensive step in rural areas. Jim Hopkins, manager of K.I. Asia’s Borderless Action Against Microbes project, says that widespread screening for malaria in rural areas has been impractical because reliable

Neil Caudle

tests have required a microscope and skilled technicians.

“We know that early detection and containment in villages stops the transmission cycle,” Hopkins says. “But the weakest link in the chain is diagnosis.”

With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), K.I. Asia has supported work by Thai researchers to develop a field test for malaria. The test, which involves a small strip that changes colors when malaria is present in a drop of blood, has shown promise in the first round of field trials. Unlike commercial test strips tried previously, the new version appears to be relatively stable in the heat and humidity of Thailand. If the next round of field trials confirms the early results, the test kits could help Thai public-health workers bring the disease under control.

But as serious as malaria can be, its threat pales by comparison to that posed by another

Neil Caudle

Public health after the tsunami Above: Inexpensive malaria test kits developed with support from K.I. Asia may help prevent the spread of disease.

Left: In rural Thailand, people live with birds and fowl, increasing the risk of bird flu. K.I. Asia teaches children how to avoid the dangers.

Below: Clay filters developed by Mark Sobsey’s lab cut the risk of disease from contaminated water. The filters may be used in areas where the tsunami destroyed public water systems.

Van Sokheng

endeavors 15

disease that remains in the shadows, biding its time: avian flu. Almost everywhere in rural Thailand, people and birds share living space. Birdcages hang in the food stalls of public markets. Chickens wander in and out of houses and open-air kitchens. Children feed the family’s fowl and handle them daily.

If the disease does make its dreaded leap from birds to people, the first outbreak could very well happen here.

With support from USAID and UNICEF, Hopkins is leading a K.I. Asia effort to lower the odds that avian flu will make that leap. In addition to working with agencies and communities on emergency preparedness, his project has developed educational posters, teachers’ guides, and computer programs to

educate school children about the risks of avian flu. The materials, which use cartoons and illustrations to help children learn better hygiene and safety skills, are used in 40,000 Thai schools and have also been adapted for Burmese refugees, 150,000 of whom are living in camps in rural Thailand.

A place for UNC Given the public-health challenges in Southeast Asia, UNC can and should expand its work there, says Peggy Bentley, associate dean for global health in the School of Public Health. In February, Bentley traveled to Thailand and investigated public-health problems wrought by the tsunami.

“Part of what happens when you have a

tsunami or any natural disaster like that is a contaminated environment,” Bentley says.

“The water and soil become contaminated with fecal material, and that contamination drives the spread of infectious disease.”

Bentley is working with K.I. Asia and Tom Outlaw, a student in the Kenan-Flagler business school, to develop business models for producing and distributing inexpensive devices for filtering water. The filters, developed by Mark Sobsey and his doctoral student in environmental sciences and engineering, Joe Brown, greatly reduced the spread of diarrheal diseases when the devices were tested in Cambodia. (See Endeavors, Fall 2006, “Water, Water Everywhere.”)

Carolina has also collaborated with

Neil Caudle

Small Loans, Big Results Women go into business to rebuild.

Laoa Saguantai, leader of a community-savings group on Phi Phi Island, used a loan to open a souvenir shop, which she operates with other women in the group.

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hen the tsunami struck Phi Phi Island in southern Thailand, Laoa Saguantai’s family lost their home and their livelihood. Her husband’s boats, which he’d used to transport tourists, were heavily damaged.

With no income, no collateral for a conventional loan, and few prospects, Laoa and her husband took advantage of the first promising opportunity that came their way: a community-savings group organized and funded by Kenan Institute Asia (K.I. Asia).

In classes taught by K.I. Asia staff, Laoa learned how to manage money and coordinate the work of the group’s members, most of them women. The organization works something like a small savings and loan 16 endeavors

association: each member puts a minimum of 100 baht—about $5 U.S.—into savings each month, and the group’s executive committee authorizes small loans to help people start businesses or rebuild old ones. Contributions from K.I. Asia and other organizations have provided a base of working capital ranging from $2,000 to $17,500 U.S. to get the groups started.

Laoa and several other women in the group used their loans to open a souvenir stand where they take turns working. With a loan from the group, Laoa’s husband repaired his boats and went back to work.

Today, Laoa has a new house where she lives with fourteen members of her family left homeless by the tsunami.

Julee Waldrop, clinical associate professor in the School of Nursing and the School of Medicine, has been studying communitysavings groups in Thailand to learn how they work and what they contribute to tsunami recovery. In February, she interviewed nine women from six groups in southern Thailand. Two of the women had lost their husbands to the tsunami, and all were struggling to help their communities recover from the destruction. Waldrop found that the groups offered something in short supply after the tsunami: hope.

“The women I interviewed have real gratitude for the opportunity that these community-savings groups give them— not just to them personally but to their

Thailand’s Population and Community Development Association, which recently won the 2007 Gates Award for Global Health. As a senior studying environmental health science, Andrew Shapiro worked with the association in the Krabi community to create a biodiesel reactor for converting vegetable oils into fuel. (See Endeavors, Fall 2006, “Biofuel for Thailand.”)

For Jack Kasarda, it’s good news any time UNC students or faculty members venture into Asia. But he’s pushing for more. Back in 1990, when he became director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, it was already clear to him that the twenty-first century would be “the Asian Century,” he says, a time when rise of industrial might in China, India,

and Southeast Asia would shift the economic center of the globe from the West to the East. And if you want to understand this new landscape, Kasarda argues, Thailand is a good place to begin.

“Carolina has a future in Asia,” Kasarda says. “Whatever you’re interested in—business, scientific research, social science, public health, environment, history, culture—you can work there and be part of something truly exciting. Tsunami recovery is one good example. We’ve seen that our students can work with an organization like K.I. Asia and make a real difference in the way a country rebuilds.” e The malaria diagnostic test, supported by K.I. Asia with funding from USAID, is developed by

Ponwit Bualombai of the Bureau of Vector Borne Diseases in the Department of Disease Control and by Panadda Thepaksorn of the Biotechnology Center in the Department of Medical Science, both within Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health. Nakorn Amornwatpong is K.I. Asia’s manager for the recovery program in Phangnga. An agreement between UNC’s School of Public Health and Mahidol University’s School of Public Health has enabled numerous exchanges for faculty and students. Jack Kasarda is also Kenan Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at UNC. Tony Waldrop, UNC’s vice chancellor for research and economic development, is also a member of the K.I. Asia board of trustees.

For more information on K.I. Asia, visit www. kiasia.org.

communities,” Waldrop says. In each interview, Waldrop heard stories about small loans making a big difference. A woman from the Krabi area, a single parent who was working in the rubber plantations, used her loan to buy a motorcycle so that she could carry more rubber to the seller instead of walking for miles with the rubber in her arms.

The majority of the women Waldrop interviewed were Muslim, and she was surprised to learn that they claimed considerable control over household finances.

“Even the ones who said they were housewives before the tsunami told me that they were in control of the money and made decisions jointly with their husbands,” Waldrop says. After the tsunami, women ventured into new enterprises, apparently with support from their husbands. “There was such desperation that men and women all worked as hard as they could to make whatever money they could and to start whatever businesses they could to rebuild.”

For the women she interviewed, the infusion of capital from the community-savings groups has sped the rebuilding, Waldrop says, but money is only one side of the story.

Education is the other. “Everyone who had been a leader in a community-savings group had been to at least one training session that K.I. Asia sponsored,” Waldrop says. “These are women with very little formal education who were learning new skills that could really change their lives.”

In the women’s view, the training and con-

sultations they’ve received from K.I. Asia’s staff are giving their fledgling enterprises a chance to succeed in the long term. The women hope that this assistance will continue past the term of the K.I. Asia support, which is scheduled to end next year.

Waldrop plans to return to Thailand soon to learn more about how the groups are affecting local recovery efforts. She has been surprised at how much emphasis the

women place on rebuilding their villages and local economies, even when they’ve lost so much personally—their loved ones and their homes.

“I think they are proud to be helping themselves and their communities,” Waldrop says. “That generates community responsibility and community hope.”

—Neil Caudle The Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise provided funding for this research.

Neil Caudle

Julee Waldrop (second from left) interviews a Muslim woman in the community of Ban Nainnang, where a Kenan Institute Asia project is helping groups of women organize businesses. Staff members Supanit Kaewpinthong (left) and Parichart Jarupakti (third from left), who worked as interpreters during the interviews, provide business consultation to the community-savings groups.

endeavors 17

Salvia divinorum, commonly called Magic Mint or Diviner’s Sage, contains what may be the most potent naturally occurring psychoactive drug. Photo by Will Cook.

encoding reality Can a hallucinogen help people with depression, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s?

by Kelly Chi

18 endeavors

I

n 2000, a philosophy student at Case Western Reserve University smoked the legal hallucinogen Salvinorin A, the active ingredient in the Mexican plant Salvia divinorum. Concerned about the intense, nauseating experience, he approached Case Western biochemistry and psychiatry professor Bryan Roth (now at UNC) and asked how the drug worked and whether it might have lasting effects.

Intrigued by what the student told him, Roth looked at the chemical structure of Salvinorin A. It was lipid-like, and it didn’t look at all like the typical structure of a hallucinogen, he says, pointing to the chemical structure on his finger-smudged computer screen. “But the student said it was hallucinogenic, definitely. He could tell me from his own firsthand experiences,” Roth says. So Roth went online and ordered Salvinorin A. His lab had it chemically analyzed for purity, and then screened fifty possible targets.

They got lucky, Roth says, when they identified a single molecular target of Salvinorin A. His group published the finding in 2002 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Newly arrived at Carolina from Ohio and not quite finished filling his bookshelves, Roth is leading an effort to determine how the drug binds its target—not an easy feat when the hallucinogen does not act like a hallucinogen.

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alvia divinorum, a relative of the mint plant, is often called Magic Mint. It grows naturally in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Mazatecs used it in traditional spiritual practices. Though Salvinorin A has been reported as the most potent naturally occurring hallucinogen, the drug is sold legally in the United States.

It’s available on the internet and in smoking paraphernalia shops, including ones on Franklin Street, Roth says.

While Roth has never taken the drug, he sums up the effects in two words: spatiotemporal dislocation.

He quotes a user of the drug as having been in a “confused, fast-moving state of consciousness,” with a feeling of separation from his physical body. When the user tried “returning” to his body, he ended up “back in the wrong spot in the timeline of physical existence,” Roth says. “People who take Salvinorin A are transported to an alternative reality, one not shared by you or me.”

The profound alteration in consciousness, remarkably, is mediated through one type of target: the kappa opioid receptor, which is distributed throughout the human brain and spinal cord and known to be involved in pain perception. Roth’s lab stashed fifty types of receptors in groups of human cells and stored each group of cells in a well the size of a pen tip.

Many wells and cells later, the researchers discovered that Salvinorin A stuck only to the kappa opioid receptor; it ignored the kappa receptor’s close relatives, the mu and the delta opioid receptors. This selectivity is an oddity when considering that other hallucinogens, such as LSD, target multiple types of receptors in the brain to produce their trippy effects.

Roth’s lab is starting to figure out what makes Salvinorin A so selective. They know that a few chemical bonds make Salvinorin A ignore mu and delta, but until this year the nature of those bonds was a mystery. So for a study published in 2007 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Roth and his colleagues made blended versions of all the opioid receptors, and mutated certain sites on the receptors. They found that a couple specific portions of the receptor rotated in a way that made Salvinorin A choose kappa over mu and delta.

Finding out how Salvinorin A binds to the receptor may help researchers understand how the receptor can be blocked for drug development, Roth says. New drugs that were more selective for a particular receptor could better treat people who have schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, or other conditions that are marked by distorted perceptions. So multiple labs and drug companies are actively hunting for receptor blockers.

Selectively blocking the kappa opioid receptor is a new idea in the field of drug development for psychiatric conditions. Since the 1950s, few new drugs have arisen to treat major mental illness, Roth says. Most prescribed antipsychotic drugs come with a barrage of side effects because they aren’t selective for receptors. It’s a challenge to determine which drug-receptor interactions are important for therapy and which are producing the side effects, he says.

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oth’s lab takes up half of the eighth floor of the BurnettWomack building. Equipment hums in the large main lab, as four people in white lab coats work side-by-side, squirting liquids into small plates with hundreds of wells. Off the main lab, two rooms—for growing cells—are warm and smell vaguely of chicken soup. Another, colder room is filled with freezers containing cell membranes.

Finding Salvinorin A’s target and determining the nature of its selectivity was more than just luck. Roth brought his lab from Case Western to Carolina last year and is picking up speed with new people and equipment. He has thirty-five employees—both at Carolina and at other universities—and equipment for imaging cells not typically found in academic labs. Roth’s lab contracts with the National Institute of Mental Health, and much of the space is dedicated to screening compounds for other labs.

He says that the operation would not be possible without Jon Evans, Sandra Hufesein, and Estela Lopez, all of whom moved here from Case Western to continue their work. Lopez updates machine software, maintains databases, and makes sure the humans and machines are in sync. Evans coordinates compound screening, and Hufesein is in charge of cell culture.

These resources are anything but robotic; man and machine work together in harmony as Roth walks through the lab. “Basically, you have to have a dedicated staff of highly trained receptorbinding technologists. Right, Stan?”

Roth says loudly as he motions to the research technicians, who nod in agreement. Stan is one of five people who run the receptor binding assays.

The assay begins when technicians drop chemical compounds into plates filled with human cells that express the receptor of choice. The techs then load the plates into fridge-like machines that can screen a hundred thousand drugs a day, and then the machines track the affinity of each drug for its receptor. The assay is an old technique, but Roth’s lab does it on a massive scale. The lab has available more than two hundred different human receptors, which makes up about 50 percent of the whole set of receptors in the human genome. The receptors used in the lab are targets for over half of prescribed medications. One day, Roth says, he hopes to screen all receptors—the whole “receptorome,” he calls it.

Now the real work on Salvinorin A has started. Using genetically engineered mice, Roth says they hope to identify the neurons that Salvinorin A targets. This is important, Roth says, “because it will give us some notion of how Salvinorin A alters human perception and reality.” Through biochemical studies, his team plans to identify the molecular pathways that help “encode” reality. Working with Salvinorin A-like molecules, they hope to evaluate potential uses as therapies for drug addiction, depression, chronic pain, and other conditions. e Kelly Chi is a master’s student in medical journalism at Carolina.

Bryan Roth is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products.

“People who take Salvinorin A are transported to an alternative reality, one not shared by you or me.”

—Bryan Roth

endeavors 19

20 endeavors

Many of us might feel a tad squeamish at the thought of prodding, laundering, or gluing a four-hundred-year-old map.

Not these women.

by Margarite Nathe

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hen she opened the protective enclosure and saw the pink, lifesized breast molded entirely of foam rubber, Jan Paris gasped.

It was affixed to the cardboard wrapper around a copy of Le Surréalisme en 1947, the catalog for the 1947 surrealist exhibition in Paris. The wrapper (or chemise) is a rare accessory to the catalog, constructed by none other than Marcel Duchamp. We don’t know exactly how many copies of the deluxe edition with Duchamp’s chemise have survived in libraries around the world, Paris says, but only a few also have a second chemise and Duchamp’s black slipcase (which Paris had just removed from the copy in her hand).

This piece of Duchamp’s own handiwork is the stuff of art historians’ dreams, and yet it had been tucked away in the art library for decades, getting shoved and shouldered by the books around it. It wasn’t until 2004 that a library employee pulled it during a routine sweep for damaged items, and finally, its outer layers battered and scuffed, Le Surréalisme en 1947 made its way to conservator Jan Paris, UNC’s rare-book-surgeon.

Wilson Library harbors the university’s special collections, over twenty-two million items in all. Among them are huge, vellum-bound tomes; tiny Civil War diaries; an uncorrected proof copy of The Bell Jar; hundreds of fifteenth-century incunabula,

Since 1988, Lyn Koehnline, left, and Jan Paris have kept UNC’s paper treasures hale and hearty. Photo by Coke Whitworth.

printed just after the debut of moveable type; letters, pamphlets, manuscripts, and photos.

When tricky special cases such as Le Surréalisme en 1947 turn up, Paris sometimes calls on her across-campus colleague, Lyn Koehnline, for a second opinion. As the conservator for UNC’s Ackland Art Museum, Koehnline is responsible for the museum’s fifteen thousand works of art, including ten thousand drawings, prints, photographs, and other artworks on paper.

For the past nineteen years, Paris and Koehnline have been watching their collections grow and giving each other help along the way. In their labs, they treat never-ending queues of papery patients afflicted with rips and tears, rashes of mold, water stains, acidic decay, and—the bane of paper conservators—Scotch tape.

Some need simple, protective boxes, others complete dismemberment and then a nice, warm bath.

The chemistry of cling The buxom catalog’s future hung in the balance for almost a year while Paris researched its treatment options. Its outer cardboard chemise had been lashed with Scotch tape and masking tape, both of which contain adhesives that discolor and corrode paper as they age.

“One of the very worst problems in paper conservation is any kind of tape that sticks by itself,” Paris says. It’s such a problem, in fact, that she just attended a five-day workshop in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, all about removing tape from paper.

Tape is especially tough to remove from brittle papers, Paris says. As they get older, some papers get more acidic—especially those in mass-produced books made after 1840. That was when the book industry began using cheaper materials and more chemicals to keep up with the demands of a swelling literate population. And that’s why you may pick up a book from 1790 with pages that are in great shape, when its 1890s shelf-mate is so brittle it crumbles between your fingers.

In any case, removing tape involves first looking at it to figure out if it’s water-soluble (usually relatively easy to remove with water, as long as the tape doesn’t also cover watersoluble ink or paint), or, the worst kind, pressure sensitive.

Paris and Koehnline first determine whether the adhesives are rubber- or acrylicbased, and what the top layer is made of— materials such as cellophane, paper, cellulose acetate, or other plastics. They also estimate how long it’s clung to the paper, and how the adhesive changed over time.

Then there’s the chemical makeup of whatever the tape is actually stuck to. “If I’m thinking about using an organic solvent,” Paris says, “I have to do tiny little tests on the ink to be sure it’s not soluble in that solvent.

And even paper can react to solvents.”

It was the dreaded pressure-sensitive tape that was used with such abandon on the chemise of Le Surréalisme en 1947. Even after Paris concocted a recipe of organic solvents to remove the adhesives, tracks of unsightly stains the color of apple cider remained.

That’s when Paris called up Koehnline, who’s something of a stain-removal maven.

In working with museum showpieces, Koehnline generally tries to eradicate damage that’s ugly, or even just visually disruptive. When she finishes with a work, anyone looking at it will ideally clap eyes on the art itself, not its damage or repairs. Paris, on the other hand, usually isn’t as worried about making things pretty. “It’s not about having a visual experience with most books,” she says. It’s about research value.

As an artistic artifact, though, Le Surréalisme en 1947 was different. So after putting their heads together over the stains inside the chemise, Paris and Koehnline confirmed endeavors 21

that while the marks stuck out like a sore thumb, they weren’t actually hurting the paper. The catalog’s damaged outer chemise needed some reconstructive work, so—quite unusually—Paris just extended the repair tissue to cover up the stains, subtly sweeping them under the rug, so to speak.

Sshhh…

Treating the papery infirm. Top, Lyn Koehnline slips a sixteenth-century print into a cleansing bath of deionized water with calcium hydroxide solution. Middle, Jan Paris pieces together a 1795 letter from a mother to her traveling daughter. Bottom, Wilson Library’s copy of Le Surréalisme en 1947, complete with Duchamp’s foam breast.

Photos by Margarite Nathe.

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Deciphering the fine print Paris’s lab is full of long tables, tiny gluepots, tweezers, miniature pillow-weights filled with beans, delicate Japanese tissues, and a gigantic book press that echoes medieval dungeon décor.

Koehnline’s lab is similar, except without the book press; instead, she has a massive suction table, the surface of which gently inhales to flatten whatever sheets of paper or parchment are spread out on it. The suction not only helps to delicately dry fragile materials, it also makes it easier to remove stains by drawing the cleansing fluid through the precise spot where the blemish appears, rather than allowing the solvent to spread throughout the paper.

Like a friendly neighbor, Paris drops in occasionally to borrow the suction table’s services for library materials, just as Koehnline does with particularly large prints to be washed in the four-by-six-foot sink in Paris’s lab.

While Paris treats plenty of the library’s celebrities, it’s really the ephemeral underdogs of the collections that get her excited: pamphlets, advertisements, even 1950s copies of Seventeen magazine. She keeps these (most of which were never meant to reach old age) on life support because researchers can sometimes use them to read between the lines.

Take the 1770s cipher book, for instance, made and used by a young girl named Martha Ryan to study math. Martha, like many of her literate contemporaries, made her own ink out of mixtures of iron pyrites, oak galls, water, and gum arabic. Then she used sacking cloth as a cover.

Now, the cipher book is water-damaged, stained, and full of holes where ink laid too heavily has eaten through the pages. But it’s also full of beautifully curving penmanship and elaborate drawings of ships (The Schooner Freedom, The Ship American). “As beautiful as it is, though,” Paris says, “it’s not primarily about aesthetics; it’s a historical document that can be read in many different ways.”

For example, researchers might glean from the contents details about eighteenthcentury education of young women in North Carolina, or women’s and girls’ patriotism.

The cover and paper quality, along with her drawings, can give us clues as to Martha’s socioeconomic class.

For some artifacts, even mouse-nibbled corners, tears, and water stains can convey how and where an item was stored, how often its owner thumbed through it, and how carefully it was looked after over the decades.

Basically, Paris says, how and where certain items passed their long, sometimes traumatic lives can have as much to say to different researchers as the writing inside.

“The cipher book doesn’t have to look other than what it is,” she says. “Its messed-up features are part of it now.”

The art of conservation In her own lab, you can find Koehnline anchoring microscopic flakes of errant paint, or using the suction table to rid prints of foxing (nasty little brown spots that sometimes crop up in high humidity—you’ve probably seen them on your own old books), or analyzing paper to date works of art.

But she also advises the Ackland curators on museum purchases. That includes keeping a sharp eye out for items that are too damaged, would require excessive repairs, or have been altered by over-zealous restorers (or outright frauds).

Art restorers of the past were sometimes tempted to fill in the blanks a little too well, Koehnline says, by replacing damaged and missing parts of works with their own careful mimicry.

Koehnline chooses two out of the hundreds of flat, identical boxes lining the walls in a storage room off her lab. She sifts through its contents, and eases out two matted sheets of paper. One is a fifteenthcentury drawing of Saints Andrew, Peter, and Paul; it suffered a grisly tear at some point in its life that cut Saint Paul off at the ankles.

Someone along the way had “restored” it by carefully replacing the lost paper, and drawing in a presumed continuation of the image—Saint Paul’s feet.

“We would never do this now,” Koehnline says. “Because a drawing is a unique work of art, and there’s no way to be sure what the artist originally drew there.” Instead, professional conservators make inconspicuous

repairs where possible, or leave damage as it is when they have no other choice.

The other sheet is a print of a sleeping cat in a garden. Koehnline points to a clump of grass in the corner; there was a hole there originally, she says, but based on a photograph of another museum’s copy, she was able to fill the hole with a layer of paper and draw in the missing foliage.

Casual museum-goers would never notice the repair while the print perches in a frame on the wall. “But somewhere along the line, if another conservator simply looks at the back of the print, she will be able to see here what repairs I made,” Koehnline says. “It’s unethical to try to hide your repairs.”

Koehnline’s been researching a group of rare photographs in the Ackland, scenes of 1930s New York City taken by Berenice Abbott. These particular photos have the bonus of Abbott’s handwritten notes penciled into their backing. Trouble is, the backing is made of acidic cardboard, which could slowly eat away at the photographs.

evolves, and conservators across the world investigate and publish their research results for all their colleagues to see.

Evolving standards Unlike the conservators of fifty years ago, Paris and Koehnline document every repair and treatment they make, by writing out sometimes lengthy notes and including before-and-after photos. It’s standard procedure in the field these days, they say, as is making repairs that are potentially reversible. And as paper conservators learn more about the chemical interactions of the materials used to make ink, paper, books, and art, Paris and Koehnline change the way they care for the things that come through their labs.

“It’s all becoming much more complicated with twentieth-century materials,” Paris says. “You know, paper is simple compared to plastic. We get book jackets that have plastic in them; museums get collages and other modern materials incorporating plastics.”

A surgeon once asked Koehnline,

“Doesn’t it make you nervous to work on things that are so valuable?”

So Koehnline faced a thorny problem: remove the backing to save the original photos, and lose the handwritten notes, or leave the backing intact and store the photos in a stable environment, hoping a better solution will present itself before it’s too late.

After testing all the materials in the photos and months of research, Koehnline found out that Abbott’s inscriptions are even rarer than the photographs themselves. She’s given them special protective mats that, along with the museum’s stable environment, will slow any deterioration caused by the backing.

Some things are damaged in ways that conservators just don’t yet know how to fix.

In these cases, Koehnline and Paris say, no treatment is the best treatment. But there’s always hope. Their profession constantly

Modern digital photography, Koehnline says, has opened up a whole new world of issues for museums. “Up until not so long ago, photographs were made from a limited range of materials,” Koehnline says. And peering through a microscope often showed conservators all they needed to know about the anatomy and physiology of a photograph, which in turn determined its proper care. But that’s no longer true.

As recently as ten years ago, most digital prints were produced with dyes rather than ink pigment. “They were very vulnerable to fading and moisture, which makes the ink move and blur,” Koehnline says. “And that’s still true of some photographs.” Today’s art photographers can make digital prints that are stable and long-lasting, she says, as long as they make careful choices about the papers and inks they use.

“So when a contemporary digital print comes into the collection,” Koehnline says, “we can only hope to document how it was made before the artist has lost track of that information.”

A little breathing room After attending to Le Surréalisme en 1947’s tape situation, Paris was relieved to see that the volume’s most conspicuous feature didn’t need any reconstructive surgery. The catalog’s several layers of outer cardboard had evidently protected it from too much oxygen exposure, which speeds up deterioration of latex (a main component of the foam breast).

The decades of benign neglect had actually left Duchamp’s contribution to the catalog in better condition than many of the other surviving copies.

Paris chewed over the idea of storing the catalog in an oxygen-free plastic cocoon, accompanied by oxygen scavengers. “But there is still some debate in the field about the pros and cons of long-term anoxic storage,” she says. It would also make access to the high-profile piece rather cumbersome, and so she decided against it.

Today, Le Surréalisme en 1947 is in the pink, and quite cozy. It lies cradled in a box inside another box inside another box—the third box being the special collections vault, a refuge that’s constantly between 68 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit, with relative humidity between 45 and 55 percent.

Every single sheet that’s wheeled into their labs calls for a whole series of decisions, Koehnline and Paris say. Treatments are on a case-by-case basis, and the choices conservators make—maybe most importantly, that of what to treat—determine what the next century’s scholars will be poring over.

So needless to say, Paris and Koehnline pay attention to the details.

“It might seem like conservators only see problems,” Koehnline says. “But I think it’s actually a very optimistic profession.

We believe there will be people around in two hundred years who care if this art survives.” e Lyn Koehnline and Jan Paris are both Fellows of the American Institute for Conservation.

Koehnline is adjunct faculty in the Department of Art. Paris is an associate editor for books and papers at the Journal of the American Institute of Conservation.

You can sponsor treatment for an artwork at the Ackland (see Endview, page 49). endeavors 23

From page to stage

by Mark Derewicz

T

he bus wasn’t due for half an hour, so Rob Hamilton walked into Waldenbooks, found a novel that looked interesting, and bought it for seven bucks. That book was Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a story about two Chinese boys sent to the countryside for “reeducation” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s. And reeducated they were, both falling for the same girl—the little seamstress—and falling in love with Western literature after stumbling upon a suitcase full of books, including one by French playwright Honoré de Balzac. These books changed the boys and the girl forever.

Hamilton, a technical director and stage designer at Carolina, loved the story and its fantastical imagery and poetic dialogue describing a bygone era. He loved the colorful scenes of dirty livestock running up and down a hospital corridor full of women about to give birth. He thought all this could easily be adapted to the stage.

“Yeah, right,” he says now, after toiling for years with the script. Friends and colleagues told him that his first draft was way too long, and—yikes—a little boring.

“My own wife couldn’t even finish it,” Hamilton says. “So I set it aside for a year until I decided it was too good a story to abandon.”

He got started again, and in 2005, he took Joseph Megel’s UNC graduate course in stage adaptation. Megel and fellow students helped Hamilton winnow the four-hour play down to size and replace dialogue with unspoken textures, such as set design, character movement, music, and sounds.

“This was a breakthrough period because I realized I could let go of the novel and trust myself to rewrite the script, as long as I was true to the author’s intent,” Hamilton says. He changed lines, added dialogue, altered integral scenes, and used puppets and masked actors to represent the novel’s symbolic but significant non-human characters, such as fire, the moon, and a red raven.

Rob Hamilton

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Rob Hamilton

I

n the book, one of the boys always lights a fire and roasts a sweet potato when he feels stressed. Hamilton thought, “Why not have an actor dress up and play fire—a warm embracing presence that no human characters would acknowledge.” Then he decided that each main character should have a similar non-human companion.

“The enthusiasm I was getting about such changes from people in and out of class was amazing,” Hamilton says. Classmates began saying, “We really need to do this play.”

The communication studies department agreed, and so Hamilton continued to plug away, including researching Chinese culture and hiring Chinese consultants to make sure the play was historically and culturally accurate. But despite four years of rewrites and research, and the larger-than-life puppets and striking masked characters (which The Independent Weekly said left some audience members gasping), the novel’s main theme still rang true during the play’s three-weekend run this summer at UNC’s Kenan Theatre: books change lives.

“This story appealed to me because it’s about books and how books fill your life and send you off in directions you never knew existed,” Hamilton says. “That’s very much me.” e Rob Hamilton is the technical director and stage designer for the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Karsten Petersen

Rogue waves can reach heights of 90 feet. The photographer who snapped this shot stood on a ship’s bridge 72 feet above sea level—and looked up to see the crest. Alberto Scotti’s models of subsurface waves can be applied to rogue waves too.

THE FLOW

Below Our planet depends on the waves we can’t see.

By Margarite Nathe

T

hink about this next time you strap on your scuba gear: even if you dive deep enough to get away from the swells crashing on the surface, you won’t escape the waves completely. In fact, says marine scientist Alberto Scotti, you might get caught up in internal (or underwater) waves that sweep you back and forth, toward and then away from shore.

The ocean has two layers, Scotti says. The bottom layer is normally colder, heavier, and denser than the top is, and the two meet at what Scotti calls the interface. This means that there are actually two types of waves sloshing around out there—surface waves and internal waves.

And while the waves we see on the surface are wind-fed, internal waves get their energy from the tide pushing past obstacles such as undersea mountain ranges. Imagine river water rushing around rocks to create rapids, only underwater and on a grander scale.

Internal waves are a crucial link in the conveyor belt of global ocean circulation, Scotti says. So a change in the ocean’s internal waves could disturb all the earth’s climate. In short, they’re a pretty big deal.

Scotti develops computer models to figure out just how these underwater waves work. “We model how they’re generated and eventually ‘crash’ as the bottom shoals near the coast,” he says. The crashing creates powerful currents near the seafloor, and plays a big part in how the ocean mixes itself. endeavors 25

For example, the entire oceanic food chain is dependent on how different underwater currents bring nutrients up through the water. “In the ocean, everything valuable— meaning food, including nitrogen, phosphate, iron—has the despicable tendency to sink to the bottom,” Scotti says. “You need a physical mechanism, such as internal waves, to re-suspend it.” And since the ocean mixes itself more in some places than others, some parts of the ocean are jumping with life while others are basically underwater deserts.

“Location, location, location,” Scotti says.

A sweet ride The word “plankton” comes from a Greek word that means wanderer, or drifter. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, if these microscopic critters actually use internal waves the way a landlubberly rambler might use a railroad car—they catch a ride.

While plankton can swim well vertically, they can only travel horizontally at the pace of a few inches per second, Scotti says. But he thinks that by surfing on internal waves, they could skim along at up to three or four miles an hour (which is a heck of a lot faster).

And so far, Scotti says, all the evidence from his work with internal waves seems to point toward his surfer-plankton hypothesis.

And because plankton is a major food source for all the bigger beasts in the ocean, their movements are vital for every life form that has a stake in the ocean (including those of us who occasionally enjoy a nice seafood dinner).

Scotti’s computer models show, though, that as the oceans warm, internal waves may shrink and break farther off the coast, making it difficult for the plankton to travel and spread out. This means that fish and other organisms that live close to shore won’t be getting their own dinner, and may start to disappear.

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Radar images and satellite photos taken from space reveal the surface expression of large-amplitude internal waves, which appear as relatively benign alternating bands of churning and smooth water running along the surface—what Scotti calls a slick.

But slicks are actually pretty strong. While working with his colleagues in the Massachusetts Bay, he says, their boat’s speed dropped by about one knot when they hit a slick—precisely the speed of the surface current generated by the internal waves. “It was like walking along an airport hallway,” he says, “and suddenly stepping on a moving walkway going in the opposite direction.”

Seafaring folk have known about largeamplitude internal waves for centuries, Scotti says. World War II submarines had a hard time getting into the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar while they were submerged because the internal waves ran so strong against them; any chance of navigating the strait in that direction meant breaching, and risking exposure to enemies on the surface.

And even in Homer’s time, mariners knew that the Strait of Messina was treacherous; they told stories about the nightmarish monsters Scylla and Charybdis dwelling on either side. But now we know, Scotti says, that the danger to mariners in the Strait of Messina was most likely due to ruinously strong currents stirred up by the outsized internal waves.

So massive internal waves have been around forever, but only in the last thirty years have scientists begun to study them.

It started when Al Osborn, then a scientist working for Exxon, was working on a drilling ship off the coast of the Andaman Sea, and happened to notice something fishy about the scenery: twice a day, his ship tended to drift some half a mile along a belt of churning water, all in the course of thirty minutes or so.

Energy flux In 2002, Scotti and his colleagues weighed anchor for their third trip to the Massachusetts Bay to try to figure out exactly how much potential energy large internal waves take from the tides and carry with them—a measurement called energy flux. Knowing the energy flux would take us one step closer to understanding how the ocean—Earth’s final frontier—really works, Scotti says.

Because the fact is there’s still a lot we don’t know, particularly about how and where ocean-mixing actually happens.

Oceanographers rely on a well-known mathematical formula to measure energy flux in small-amplitude waves, Scotti says; you just need to know the velocity, depth, and pressure variables of the conditions that make up the wave’s immediate environment.

This way you can measure how much work an internal wave is doing to push against the weight of the water on top of it.

But there’s one important thing this formula doesn’t tell us: how much potential energy an internal wave is carrying on its own. This leaves a pretty big gap in the information marine scientists use to make their computer models, Scotti says.

So while they were sailing around the Massachusetts Bay, Scotti and his colleagues dodged a few Nor’easters, did a little whalewatching, and finally figured out a new formula to calculate what they call the available potential energy (APE) in internal waves.

They used a gadget called an acoustic Doppler current profiler—a two-and-a-halffoot long cylinder that, from the ocean floor, draws on acoustic signals to take measurements of the currents above it. From the data, Scotti’s team estimated the direction and speed of the internal waves. But that wasn’t enough. One of the essential variables in their calculations—background potential energy (BPE)—was still missing.

BPE, Scotti says, is like the minimum balance in your bank account; it’s the amount

of potential energy that’s always there in the ocean, but can’t be used up. And scientists have always assumed that to calculate it, they needed simultaneous measurements of several different variables across an entire section of ocean; this is impossible, Scotti says, so historically, efforts to determine APE have ended here.

But using what measurements they did have, Scotti and his team came up with a range of estimates for the variables involved in BPE, and then calculated what the energy flux—or the amount of energy expended in a given unit of time—would be for each variable. This gave them a range of possible fluxes, Scotti says. And using the range taken from field measurements at isolated moorings in the Massachusetts Bay, they showed that you actually can estimate APE using a series of other estimates.

Scotti’s new formula won’t benefit only marine scientists. The beauty of fluid dynamics, he says, is that new formulas and models can solve problems in entirely different fields. For example: mathematically speaking, the way waves act near solid boundaries is pretty similar to what happens in our large blood vessels, he says. That is, rather than a continuous flow, blood pumps in waves, and knowing how this works can help doctors better treat their patients. And engineers can apply some of the same ideas to, say, the unsteady pulse of a turbine or helicopter blades to ultimately improve how the machinery functions.

Movin’ on up Thanks to a hefty grant from the National Science Foundation, Scotti will soon have all the benefits of studying from a boat in the Massachusetts Bay—just a few floors below his own office.

Right now, he and his colleagues are dreaming about the basement-level lab that should be complete before the year’s out, and the water-filled channel that will span

the entire length of Chapman Hall—about a hundred and thirty feet.

Massachusetts Bay is one of the best places to study internal waves because of its relatively stable conditions, Scotti says, but there are still plenty of conditions and variables that they can’t control. “But in the lab, we can control them,” he says.

Researchers in the marine sciences department will share the lab with those in the applied mathematics department, and they’re all keen to get their feet wet. “This way, we can do lab, field, and computer models,” Scotti says. “And we need all three of them to connect the dots.”

They’re out there In their new lab, Scotti and his colleagues will study not only the waves under the ocean’s surface, but also the ninety-foot ocean monsters known as rogue waves.

Lots of people think of rogue waves as big fish stories—never as big as eyewitnesses claim, if they ever existed at all. But the thing is that there are hardly ever any witnesses who live to tell the story. Rogue waves can take down a ship built to sustain forty-five-foot waves in a matter of minutes, Scotti says; that’s not even enough time to send out a distress signal, in many cases.

So how do we know they’re really out there?

Satellite images show us storms out in the open ocean; they also show us all the resulting rogue waves tossing and turning over the seas. And remnants from shattered ships tell us more of the story. For example, the Queen Elizabeth II, the flagship of the British Cunard Line, was walloped in 1995 by a ninety-five-foot rogue wave that had no trouble smashing the windows of her bridge and carrying away her forward whistle mast.

“Of course, you can make a ship that can sustain a ninety-foot wave,” Scotti says, “but it’ll cost a lot more.” And shipping companies don’t want their insurance rates to skyrocket

even higher than they already are.

Because all you have to do is take a close look at insurance claim records for shipping companies to know that “ships go down at a frightening rate,” Scotti says. “The public’s not much concerned, though, mostly because we don’t go to sea much anymore.

If airplanes were to come down at the same rate that ships go down, people would be up in arms.

“But I don’t want to discourage you from going on your next cruise,” he says. e Alberto Scotti is an associate professor in the Department of Marine Sciences. The Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation funded his work in the Massachusetts Bay. Margarite Nathe

Alberto Scotti fills a miniature version of the 130-foot channel that will soon run the length of their basement-level lab. He mixes food coloring into a compartment of saltwater and then releases it to observe the green underwater wave that rolls beneath a layer of clear water down the channel (below).

endeavors 27

A Brazilian family lives in a modest brick house on land that the Landless Workers Movement (MST) seized illegally. MST then worked with a government agency to legally expropriate it for farming.

Land for those who work it The struggle for a new Brazil in the age of globalization

T

Story by Mark Derewicz

homas Friedman, author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, says that globalization and innovation are leveling the competitive playing field between nations while bringing millions of people into the middle class. But with all due respect to Mr. Friedman, Wendy Wolford says, the world is not flat. It’s full of crevasses that are getting deeper.

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Photos by Wendy Wolford

Wolford, a Carolina geographer, says Friedman can only talk about a “flat world” because he ignores land and agriculture, two of the glaring omissions in his book.

In Brazil, an agricultural giant where 3 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the land, economic inequality and poverty are rooted in land politics, a specialty of Wolford’s. She says that the Brazilian government instituted policies after World War II that forced farmers and other rural workers into the Amazon and cities. But the Amazon is no place for farming and there wasn’t enough work in the cities. After a brief period of economic growth, unemployment and extreme poverty skyrocketed, creating a new class of people: the landless workers, many of whom wound up in Brazil’s notoriously violent slums.

Wolford has seen those slums, and for the past fourteen years she’s documented how more than one million Brazilians have responded to life there. They’ve returned to the countryside, busting through fences in the middle of the night to claim unused farmland. They’ve organized and protested in city streets, forcing the government to cede their central demand: land for those who work it.

This is Brazil’s Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra or MST), which has pressured the government to create more than forty-five hundred settlements with farmland for nearly one million families throughout Brazil’s vast rural expanse. This might sound radical—seizing land and protesting the government—but Wolford found out that the MST is a logical offshoot of Brazil’s weedy history and the thorny reality of international trade.

It’s true that Brazil is a top agricultural producer—soy, corn, coffee, cacao, bananas, poultry, beef, orange juice, sugar, and cotton.

But most of these crops are exported from huge industrialized farms. “So you have a country that’s successful in agriculture with forty-four million people suffering from chronic hunger,” Wolford says. “The MST is trying to alter this a little bit; you could say it’s trying to flatten things out.”

The people’s history As Wolford says, land is possession, power, and profit. In Brazil, due to colonization, old money, and politics, a tiny group of men owns most of the land. A similar thing happened in the United States, but in the

nineteenth century the U.S. government eventually allowed some six hundred thousand families to create ranches and small farms on eighty million acres throughout the American West. Brazil, facing a similar dilemma, decided that all unclaimed land had to be purchased. The rich got richer.

But so much land lay fallow that in the 1940s the Brazilian government amended its constitution to allow expropriation of rural property that wasn’t “performing its social function”—in a word, agriculture.

This constitutional article, Wolford says, is one of the MST’s main weapons. But the constitution also speaks of the sanctity of private property. And the government never put

into place meaningful legislation to address this contradiction between social function and private property. And so some landless laborers infiltrated private land where they could to do subsistence farming, often getting chased off or killed.

But something changed on December 6, 1979, when a man nicknamed Natalino set up camp at a road intersection in southern Brazil, where land ownership had been hotly contested. In her book, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the struggle for a new Brazil, which Wolford coauthored with environmental historian Angus Wright, she says that Natalino didn’t demand land; he just wanted to bring more attention to unfair

A Brazilian farmer and MST member stands in an eroded gully.

endeavors 29

Large areas of Brazil are suited to farming and ranching. This is an MST settlement surrounded by farmland.

land distribution. But with support from a progressive branch of the Catholic Church, hundreds of families joined him, and a local storeowner donated supplies. Natalino’s Crossroad, the symbol of the MST’s organic beginnings, was born.

According to local accounts, police and hired gunmen attacked the squatters but didn’t use their full force because of media scrutiny. The squatters stood their ground, bearing the burden of violence, disease, and limited food and potable water. Other encampments popped up in the next couple years.

Meanwhile, during the early 1980s, the Brazilian federal government was phasing out Brazil’s military dictatorship and setting up democratic elections. A politician sympathetic to small farmers won a governorship in the south and granted 164 families at Natalino’s Crossroad about 4,620 acres of land. The government granted land for other settlements, too. And Wolford says that by January 1984, the movement was so widespread that it could form a national organization and hold regular conventions.

Crickets and crooks As an undergraduate in 1993 studying economic development, Wolford became so fascinated with this movement that she decided to take a break from school to work construction on a settlement. By then, the MST had gained enough attention to be 30 endeavors

vilified in the press. Seizing private property seemed so antidemocratic, well beyond eminent-domain laws that allow governments to seize private property for highways or whatever local politicians prefer.

Despite the negative press, the MST kept growing, and on April 17, 1997, one thousand landless workers marched into the capital city of Brasilia where tens of thousands of supporters cheered them on. The leaders presented their case to the government: land, they demanded, for those who work it.

The MST’s tactics were certainly questionable, Wolford says. But it turns out that rich landholders had been seizing land illegitimately for centuries. Wolford points out a common scam: a landowner forges a land title, puts it in a box full of crickets that defecate on the paper, chew it up, and turn it into a kind of yellowy, stained, and holey document that looks old and authentic.

“This still goes on,” she says. “There was a huge scandal in 1998, so President Fernando Cardoso decided that all titles had to be checked with the cartography office.”

All told, the government found that rich landowners had fraudulently claimed 227 million acres—twice the size of Central America. “One guy claimed a huge piece of land that actually included large parts of Brasilia,” Wolford says. “The things that go on with land politics in a country that is otherwise ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ are astonishing.”

In the first four years of surveying, the government found enough arable land to settle every landless worker in the country, some twelve to sixteen million people. “But the federal agency in charge—INCRA—is supremely underfunded,” Wolford says. “It fights to stay alive, let alone do agrarian reform. At every turn INCRA is thwarted by landlords and the federal budget; each year the agency gets about one-tenth the amount it needs to settle landless workers.”

So, Wolford says, INCRA winds up following the movement. When landless workers chop down a fence, set up camp, and start the legal process of expropriating land, INCRA sometimes negotiates an official settlement.

A lot of times, though, INCRA isn’t involved.

In 2001, one landowner said that the main law in his region was “Law 44”—the law of the .44-caliber revolver. Several MST leaders have been assassinated, but that hasn’t deterred 1.5 million citizens from joining the MST, whose settlements are now located in 23 of Brazil’s 27 states.

Not for the faint of heart Not all settlements are the same, Wolford says. They vary in size from twenty houses to one thousand. Some homes are made with cement and bricks; some with mud and thatched roofs. Larger settlements have schools with state-paid teachers. All settlers grow subsistence crops, such as corn, beans, cacao, rice, and manioc, which farmers try

to sell in various markets. The MST helps create distribution networks, and it also lobbies the government for credit each year.

Wolford says that the MST has clearly been successful. A typical response to questions about life on a settlement came from a middle-aged man in the southern Bahia region: “You would have to know what life is like in the slums of the little towns around here,” he said. “In this settlement, I can go to bed when I want—early in the evening— and sleep soundly without worrying about what will happen while I’m sleeping. Here, I eat good food, breathe clean air, and drink clean water.”

This same man also said that his kids go to school—uncommon in the slums—and the settlement has a health clinic staffed by a nurse.

Yet Wolford is careful not to paint the MST as some sort of agrarian utopia, where all settlers are in loving agreement. Most Brazilians don’t even support the movement, Wolford says. Some assume that rich landowners earned their way in life, and wonder where the MST gets off seizing property. Others don’t like the revolutionary spirit of some MST leaders. To combat such sentiments, movement members go door to door to gather people for meetings in various towns.

But the MST has other problems, such as people without farming experience joining the group and then returning to the cities because it wasn’t what they had expected. As Wolford says, farming is hard.

Kids who grow up in the MST sometimes leave for the cities when they’re older, causing the cycle of poverty to continue because the jobs still aren’t available there.

These criticisms, Wolford says, pale in comparison to the need for agrarian reform in a country that has the second-highest level of unequal land distribution in the western hemisphere.

“And people who criticize the movement for being radical or violent should visit a settlement,” she says. “They would see people who love the land, work hard, and meet regularly with their neighbors to solve problems and play soccer. Sure, not everyone in the MST is a good person or a good farmer, but not all of my students at UNC care about their education, and I don’t hold that against the university as a whole.”

The MST, Wolford says, “is not about creating some sort of harmonious agrarian

populist lifestyle. That’s part of it but not all of it. What reform really means is creating sustainable development so that some poor people get to produce food that other poor people in the country get to eat.”

MST and the powers that be

The Brazilian government has grudgingly undertaken agrarian reform in response to MST land seizures, but in 2001, INCRA’s vice-director said, “What you are seeing here is what you might call ‘agrarian reform light.’” Slow and steady land negotiations are like a pressure valve to prevent the movement from spreading too quickly. True agrarian reform, he said, would be possible only with a left-wing administration. Brazil elected a left-wing president in 2002: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Unfortunately for the MST, Wolford says, Lula’s never been a big supporter of agrarian reform.

“There’s a pretty strong distinction, particularly in Latin America, between the trade-union left and the agrarian-Catholic Church left,” Wolford says. Lula is tradeunion left; he’s focused on making immediate conditions better for poor urban workers.

For instance, he implemented the Zero Hunger Project to eradicate malnutrition in Brazil. “Had that program been linked to agrarian reform it would’ve been fabulous,” Wolford says, “because sometimes the MST settlements have no access to markets.”

The Zero Hunger Project gets food from large farms, the same ones that account for most of Brazil’s exports. Despite Lula’s Worker-Party roots, he still supports trade policy, taxes, and subsidies that favor chemically dependent, large-scale corporate agriculture. But factoring in the not-so-flat demands of globalization, Brazil often has little choice.

Settlers’ lives are full of hard work, but family life is better in settlements than in the cities’ violent slums.

endeavors 31

MST members raise their flag and set up makeshift tents while working with the government to expropriate land.

Meanwhile, they farm to survive.

In the summer of 2002, when Lula showed strong in polls, Wall Street firms cautioned international investors about the possibility of another Hugo Chavez in the region, causing a rush of dollars out of Brazil. U.S. financiers and government officials disparaged Lula and predicted a severe economic crisis.

Brazil’s currency lost value and economic indicators looked ominous. As a result, all Brazilian presidential candidates had to reassure the United States that they’d abide by the terms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan program to avert runaway inflation and economic catastrophe.

“Brazilian leaders who might consider economic or political alternatives feel that they have no choice but to cooperate with the U.S. and IMF,” Wolford says. Consequently, agrarian reform takes a back seat.

(Remember that settlement’s health clinic?

A doctor had been regularly visiting it before the Brazilian federal government ended his employment in order to meet the IMF mandate to cut social spending.)

But not that long ago, small farming was the way of the world. The United States once supported small farmers and agrarian reform in Italy, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—all successes of U.S.sponsored post-World War II restoration.

According to Wolford, U.S. officials thought that small agriculture was more conducive to democracy, while large landholdings 32 endeavors

encouraged authoritarian and militaristic government. And history has shown that small farms are much better for domestic economies. In 2001, a joint study by INCRA and the United Nations showed that smallscale farming in Brazil used credit and land far more efficiently than large-scale operations. Family farmers can’t afford to waste or mistreat land, so they are more inclined to use sustainable practices. As a result, some

Farming is hard work, but many MST families stick with it.

local economies around the world have flourished. In Brazil, more local merchants and politicians are supporting agrarian reform. And this is one reason why, against the odds, the Landless Movement in Brazil has survived for twenty-three years.

Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union now support large farms and agricultural corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto through tax breaks, subsidies, and import tariffs. Huge multinational operations dominate food production and consumption around the world. This, essentially, is the major stumbling block for the World Trade Organization, Wolford says.

This is the debate between free trade and fair trade, and the main point of contention for family farmers around the world.

They need better access to markets, even inside their own countries, if they’re going to survive. That’s basically what the MST wants, Wolford says—a level playing field, a flatter world. e Wendy Wolford is an associate professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Her forthcoming book on the MST will be published by Duke University Press. She was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant to research INCRA. In 2006, she was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead a Sawyer Seminar series at UNC on four land-related themes: property, mobilization, ecology, and food.

© Underwood & Underwood/CORBIS

Darwin’s dissenters Clarence Darrow received piles of mail when he defended the theory of evolution during the Scopes trial in 1925.

by Colie Hoffman In the Garden of Eden, an animatronic

Adam and Eve revel in each other’s company. Just a few yards away, children play while dinosaurs roam nearby. A little farther is the Cave of Sorrows—a display of the “horrific” effects of man’s fall from grace—where “sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo throughout the room.” According to the web site, anyway. This is the Creation Museum; newly unveiled in Petersburg, Kentucky, it’s the grandest showpiece of the antievolution movement since 1925.

Nearly a hundred and fifty years since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evolutionary theory still vexes some conservative Christians, who continue to battle against the accepted science curricula of most U.S. schools.

Why is the evolution debate so fervid, and why does it keep raging on? In his new book, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement, political scientist Michael Lienesch tries to find out.

Lipstick and jazz The hottest public evolution debates started in the 1920s, just after World War I, Lienesch says. Colleges across the country had higher enrollment than ever, and religious education—once the bread and butter of many colleges—was pushed aside in favor of more scientific, secular learning. Students started coming home from school with a new attitude that their conservative religious parents didn’t like one bit. These new grads were skeptical, serious, and definitely not into church. “They considered religion old-fashioned and out-of-date,” Lienesch says.

This modernist sensibility in colleges—and how fast it was catching on—troubled religious conservatives in the fledgling fundamentalist movement, he says. It was the Roaring Twenties, people were losing their faith, and fewer students wanted to go into mission work or become ministers anymore. Religion was out, and jazz music was in. Women wore lipstick and were voting. endeavors 33

And young people didn’t believe the Bible—at least not the way their parents did.

The worst part, conservatives thought, was that these twentysomethings weren’t alone. “Increasingly at the time,” Lienesch says, “lots of churches were controlled by modernists—people who thought that the Bible didn’t have to be understood literally anymore.”

Some of the country’s most powerful people agreed: John D. Rockefeller sent his money straight to the University of Chicago, which was filled with liberal theology professors. And William Poteat, the president of Wake Forest College and the most famous Baptist in the South, was famously liberal; he was also a scientist, professor, and—gulp—an evolutionist.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known politician and brilliant public speaker, was troubled by modernism, too. He wanted to take action against the universities, which he felt were systematically undermining students’ religious views, Lienesch says. Bryan didn’t really understand the nitty-gritty science of evolution, but he knew he hated social Darwinism; the ideas of “every man for himself” and “only the strongest survive” greatly offended Bryan’s populist philosophies. With the two ideas conflated in his mind, Lienesch says, “Bryan depicted Darwinism as the root of virtually all existing evils.”

And while faith was a big part of Bryan’s motivation, he campaigned hard against evolution because he saw himself as a true democrat—the voice of ordinary men and women, Lienesch says.

“Ironically, Bryan wasn’t a fundamentalist. Most of his allies in the antievolution movement didn’t even vote for him,” he says. “The fundamentalist preachers in particular hated his liberal ideas.”

Let’s talk about sects When Bryan started touring the country preaching against evolution, not many fundamentalists had ever even heard of it, Lienesch says. And a lot of those who had heard of it found it confusing and incomprehensible.

Bryan didn’t fully understand it either, but he didn’t let that stop him from getting people excited. He was studied enough on the topic to sound credible to one congregation after another, and once people started listening, they started talking, too. Conservative Christians of all stripes held rallies and debates about evolution, published treatises advocating their views, and mobilized politically in unbelievable numbers.

In the early part of the century, Christian fundamentalists weren’t yet a political force, Lienesch says. They were too scattered among various denominations—Baptists here, Presbyterians there, with nary a communiqué between them. But slowly, galvanized by their opposition to modern secularism, fundamentalists from different Protestant groups began to connect with each other.

They built social networks through their megachurches and small Bible colleges, and formed the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association—a sort of early Moral Majority—in 1919. They rented a hall in Philadelphia for their first conference, expecting only a few hundred attendees. Six thousand showed up. By the early 1920s, they’d grabbed hold of evolution and taken the show to revivals across the country.

34 endeavors

“Because fundamentalists seized evolution as an issue, they were able to get out of their churches and connect with the larger population,” Lienesch says. “They became interdenominational.”

And even though many fundamentalists didn’t understand evolutionary theory, they framed it in ways that automatically turned listeners against it, Lienesch says. “They’d say things like, ‘Evolutionists believe that monkeys turn into men.’”

A perfect target For Bryan and the fundamentalists, evolution provided an alluring bull’s-eye: the colleges. Conservatives wouldn’t have to waste time ranting about lack of spiritual values or something equally abstract; they could just get individual professors fired. For years, Bryan had portrayed academics as educated elitists who had no sympathy for democratic values. Suspicion of college professors was already widespread among fundamentalists, Lienesch says.

But the campaign didn’t stop at colleges. With the advent of compulsory education, there were more high schools in the United States than ever before—and more kids learning about evolution. Influential evangelist T.T. Martin, one of Bryan’s colleagues, published a book in 1923 called Hell and the High Schools. In it, he described the sinister chain of indoctrination: college professors taught students about evolution, and some of those students became high school teachers, passing on the ideas.

The strategy, Lienesch says, was to put pressure on the schools, demanding investigations of what teachers were teaching, and to consequently change what an entire generation of students was learning. And it worked—externally, anyway.

“In the 1920s, it was hard to find many science teachers in America who didn’t believe in evolution,” Lienesch says. “But it was a lot like McCarthyism in the 1950s. Small numbers were fired, but large numbers were terrified.” Antievolutionists didn’t limit their scope to biology professors, either; the crusaders were after secularism in general. So religious studies professors were pressured to remove modernist ideas from their classrooms, and social scientists were denounced for teaching progressive social theories. Anyone was fair game.

Eventually even the textbooks changed, especially in high schools. “Publishers just stopped including evolution,” Lienesch says. “In the early 1920s, almost all biology books taught Darwin’s theory, and a few even included his picture. But after 1925, they removed all that.”

In some cases, publishers would reprint textbooks with evolution included, but move it to the last chapter. “And everyone knows that teachers never get to the last chapter,” he says.

By the mid-1920s, twenty-one states had introduced antievolution bills into their legislatures, including Tennessee, where the bill became law. And it wasn’t long before that law was challenged at the trial of a humble young high-school science teacher named John Scopes. Scopes, Lienesch says, “wasn’t even sure he had taught evolution at all.”

Scopes had been hired to coach the football team and to teach general science courses at Dayton, Tennessee’s Rhea County Central High School. Another teacher was in charge of the more advanced biology courses, but for a few days in the spring of 1925,

that teacher was out sick. Scopes stepped in to substitute, mostly selection,” according to the Discovery Institute, the major ID think helping students review for upcoming exams. But when local busitank. This theory, Lienesch says, is cast to appeal to a more mainness leaders approached him that summer—the American Civil stream audience—people who may believe in God and don’t fully Liberties Union was looking for a test case against the antievolution understand the theory of evolution. To broaden the idea’s appeal, bill—they already had their minds made up, Lienesch says: Scopes ID advocates have created sophisticated web sites, literature, and would be the guinea pig. No one cared whether he had actually think tanks. taught evolution.

“Supporters include a small but growing number of advoSo each side had their poster boy. Bryan was on one side, lookcates who have some scientific credentials, and these people are ing for the ultimate gold star as a moral crusader, and on the other featured prominently in advertisements and petitions,” Lienesch side was Scopes’ lawyer, Clarence Darrow. Darrow wasn’t evasive says. “ID advocates realize that to succeed, they have to present about his purpose: he wanted both to nail Bryan and to drive a ID as scientific.” stake in the heart of the fundamentalist movement, Lienesch says.

But popular success can come at a cost. ID advocates don’t The ACLU had envisioned something a little more low-key than specifically name God as the “intelligent cause”—at least not Darrow’s high-profile, controversial tactics—he was famous for officially—and that gets under the skin of hard-core creationists, taking up the causes of extremely unpopular defendants—but the who believe failure to name God explicitly is a cop-out. And these media came in droves, the Associated Press picked up the story, and tensions within the ID movement can limit its ability to speak with it made the front pages of papers around the world. one voice, Lienesch says. He doesn’t think that will ultimately harm If the Scopes trial was a stage, the performance was outstandthe movement too much. “All antievolutionists agree on what they ing. T.T. Martin showed up selling copies of Hell and the High are against, which is Darwinian evolution. And even though most Schools; prophets announced the end of creationists would say they want to get God the world; and street performers brought into the school curriculum, more would say their acts to town, including one very short, what they really want is to get Darwinism ©Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis misshapen man who labeled himself “the and its materialistic teachings out.”

Missing Link.” And of course, Lienesch says, there were monkeys—monkeys in Not a simple story sports coats, monkeys in bow ties, monkeys For fundamentalists, who interpret with golf clubs. the Bible literally, evolution goes to the In the end, Scopes was found guilty heart of whether the Bible is true—the and fined a hundred dollars. A year later, whole foundation of their faith. Another his lawyers appealed the verdict, and it was reason antievolutionists keep fighting this overturned on a technicality. But by that battle, Lienesch says, “is that we’re talktime, that damage was done—Scopes had ing about our children, what they learn lost his teaching job, and he never taught in school. And parents get very excited high school again. Tennessee’s antievoluand upset about what their children are tion law, on the other hand, remained on being taught.” And because public schools the books for another forty years. are democratic institutions, everyone has some claim on the curriculum: parents, Re-creationism taxpayers, teachers, science experts, and Over the rest of the twentieth century, public officials. antievolutionism as an overt movement Deep down, Lienesch says, evolution has waxed and waned, Lienesch says. But just isn’t emotionally credible to a lot of it has stayed alive by reinventing itself in people. Evolution—and science as we PR-sensitive ways. For example, in the know it today—is not a simple story. “It’s 1960s—a time of unprecedented public not easy to understand; you can’t visualize embrace of science—the movement’s it. It explains the world, but at heart, for public face became “creation science,” the some people, it’s not totally satisfactory. idea that biblical explanations of creation Science doesn’t offer the certainty that it were confirmed by scientific evidence. The once did. Science today asks us to underconcept wasn’t new, Lienesch says, but callstand the world by asking questions, and ing it “science” was. The latest incarnation? to never stop asking questions. The truth This photograph was taken October 7, 1925, during the Scopes trial. The original caption “Intelligent design,” or ID. is, evolution is a theory—a powerful and read, “Getting data on his family tree. As Mr. ID is the notion that “certain features repeatedly proven theory—but for some Scopes will not be allowed an exhibition to of the universe and of living things are people, theories aren’t enough.” e promote his theory, Duke listens with interest best explained by an intelligent cause, Michael Lienesch is a professor of politito the trial over the radio to get any possible not an undirected process such as natural cal science in the College of Arts and Sciences. information about himself and family.”

endeavors 35

Under the

Volcano

by Margarite Nathe Two geologists are using rock-solid results to rewrite the textbooks.

36 endeavors

Jason Smith

T

hey started off looking for something totally different. For several sweaty weeks, Drew Coleman and Allen Glazner chipped rocks out of the ground in Yosemite National Park, hunting for the rare, dark remains that are bits of Earth’s melted mantle— chemically primitive stuff that hasn’t been tainted with a lot of other minerals and geological debris.

And when they lugged their heavy harvest back to the lab to determine just how old the rocks they’d gathered were, Coleman and Glazner thought they knew what they would find. But when the uranium-lead dating results on the rocks came through, they muttered, “Well, this can’t be right.”

Now, four years later, the strange results of their lab tests are still quaking controversy through the scientific world.

The rocks were pieces broken from a pluton—a city-sized blob of solid granite that gestates beneath volcanoes and eventually rises to the surface as the rocks above it erode. Yosemite’s Half Dome is one of them, and if Chapel Hill didn’t sit on top of its own resident pluton, Coleman and Glazner say, we’d be living in Chapel Valley.

Geologists have long thought that plutons were born of cooled magma deposits in only a few hundred thousand years—a geologic heartbeat. “Actually,” Coleman says, “turns out it’s more like several million years.”

Textbooks often show giant pools of magma seething below volcanoes. While such pools do exist, they’re probably fairly rare, say geologists Allen Glazner and Drew Coleman. Instead, they say, the amount of liquid magma found below a given volcano at any given time is generally much smaller than scientists previously thought. Here, bright yellow dikes supply new magma to a relatively small magma body (A), which is made up of about 90 percent liquid and ten percent crystals of various minerals. Immediately outside the magma is a slightly cooler zone (B) that is only about 30 to 40 percent liquid and 60 to 70 percent crystals.

A third, cooler region (C) has no liquid magma at all. This gradual cooling causes plutons—city-sized blobs of solid rock—to form slowly, over millions of years.

T

extbooks say that plutons are formed when magma accumulates in huge underground chambers, and any magma that leaks to the surface forms a volcano. Things can go two ways from there, the books say: either the magma nestles down to cool and eventually hardens into a granite pluton, or the roof of the chamber caves in and looses all hell into the atmosphere—a super eruption, in other words.

And this theory has led geologists to believe that every big, active volcano—such as Mounts Rainier, Fuji, and Pinatubo— broods over a huge chamber of red-hot magma. But geologists, for all their probing with seismic waves, have never been able to actually find one of these magma chambers; all they’ve found is what they assumed were the frozen remnants—the plutons.

Coleman and Glazner were expecting to find that their Yosemite rocks were all around the same age, having come from the same cooled magma chamber. And when they instead found that some were millions of years older than others, they went back for more samples. Sure enough, their results showed that the pluton underneath Yosemite was almost ten million years in the making.

Their results suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of plutons were never completely molten. Rather, the earth’s consistent hiccups and growls send injections of molten magma into a pluton, heating and shifting the granite and causing it to grow little by little over long periods of time.

Imagine old-fashioned candle-making, where tapers are dipped over and over again into melted wax, the outer layers melting a little into the new ones, but then cooling and solidifying together. Plutons are just like that, only upside-down.

With each injection, groundwater around a pluton burns off as steam, which pulls more water up. And as the new water flows up through crust, it picks up ore metals such as copper, silver, and gold (plutons are the ultimate source of all gold, Glazner says). Some volcanic gurgles even disgorge diamonds from two hundred kilometers below. Then, as the water boils away, the metals create ore deposits concentrated in the pluton and, like tree rings, show us how old the pluton is and how it’s changed over time.

Coleman and Glazner’s new model shows that not all active volcanoes are potential super eruptions. And that’s good news, given that the next super eruption could mean the end of all human civilization. Geological events of that magnitude would spew out carbon dioxide and poisonous gases, devastate the global climate, and bury continentsized areas beneath suffocating blankets of volcanic ash.

Earth’s most recent super eruption was 75,000 years ago. It came from the volcano Toba in Indonesia, and released about 2,800 times as much magma as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. It was a close call, Glazner says; there’s evidence that Toba’s super eruption created a bottleneck in human evolution, cutting the human population down to anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs.

“There’s been nothing even remotely super-eruption-sized in recorded history, the past ten thousand years,” Glazner says.

So it’s comforting (sort of) that Coleman and Glazner say that while super eruptions do happen, they’re the rare exception, not the rule.

C

oleman and Glazner’s results created a hullabaloo in the geological community in 2003, and even now in 2007, not everyone’s convinced. “Dogma dies hard,” Glazner says. “A lot of the old guard don’t like this.”

But other geologists are getting similar pluton age results. It’s been a slow change, but scientists are beginning to reexamine dozens of other things we thought we knew about the earth’s skin and bones, and the way the earth matures. For example, how magma shoulders solid rock aside, and how the continents slide across the earth. And Coleman and Glazner are now watching their students rewrite the textbooks.

As an orientation for their fledgling geology students, Coleman and Glazner try to help them think in terms of Earth’s lifetime by taking them on a geologic time walk across campus.

Each of their steps on this walk, Glazner says to his freshmen, is ten million years.

Then they begin their four-and-a-halfbillion-year stroll, all the way from the steps of Wilson Library to Franklin Street.

Along the way, Glazner has taped down pictures of one-celled organisms, dinosaurs, and mammals, all according to when they showed up in time. There are only six and a half steps after the dinosaurs before they get to Franklin Street, he says, and human history is about as thick as one of the blue lines on the students’ notebook paper.

The introduction is important, Coleman says, because most of their students are still trying to wrap their heads around their own twenty or so years. “Ten million years,” he says. “What’s ten million years? Ten million years is nothing. That’s one step.” e Drew Coleman is an associate professor of geology and Allen Glazner is a professor of geology, both in the College of Arts and Sciences. They received funding from the National Science Foundation.

John Gracely, a master’s student who graduated in 2007, dates and maps the distribution of pluton rocks in the field. Doctoral student Jesse Davis researches plutons’ histories of heating and cooling, and master’s student Breck Johnson uses Coleman and Glazner’s new model to determine the origins of huge potassium feldspar megacrysts in plutons. Glazner’s undergraduate class researched pluton chunks on the new Carolina North property, and presented their findings at the Undergraduate Research Symposium this year. endeavors 37

Steve Exum

Running on fumes W Is hydrogen too fickle to be green?

by Mark Derewicz

38 endeavors

ouldn’t it be great if we could fuel our cars with hydrogen? One gram of molecular hydrogen contains three times the energy of a gram of gasoline, and the only by-product of running a car on a hydrogen fuel cell is water.

Those are the best reasons for fueling cars with hydrogen. The bad news—part of it, anyway—is that molecular hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, and there aren’t a whole lot of hydrogen molecules per volume under normal pressure. That means your Honda Accord would need a fifteen-gallon hydrogen tank pressurized at one thousand times the atmosphere for you to be able to drive typical distances. Such a contraption would be an explosion waiting to happen. And lowering tank pressure simply means that you’d need a ridiculously large tank.

Y

Physicists Yue Wu (far left) and Alfred Kleinhammes use nuclear magnetic resonance to find out if carbon-based nanomaterial can effectively store hydrogen. If so, the trek toward a hydrogen-based economy will have one less roadblock.

ue Wu is part of a national team trying to find a way to store hydrogen in a smaller tank. His team has created a way to use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to determine how well and how much hydrogen molecules adsorb onto carbon-based nanomaterials.

The idea, in theory, is simple. Scientists have created carbon-based nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes (see Endeavors, Spring 2000, “The World’s Tiniest Tubes”), lightweight tubes made from graphene sheets with walls a single atom thick. “One gram of some carbon-based nanomaterials could contain the surface area of up to nine basketball courts,” Wu says.

If hydrogen atoms could bind with carbon atoms and cover the entire surface of such nanomaterials, then you could fill a tank with nanomaterial, pump in hydrogen, and presto—there’s your hydrogen tank that feeds the fuel cell.

“Unfortunately, nature is not too kind with this approach,” Wu says. “Carbon and molecular hydrogen don’t like each other enough at room temperature. For this to work, the nanomaterial has to be stored at low temperatures, such as minus one hundred ninety-six degrees Celsius, which is somewhat undesirable.”

At room temperature, hydrogen either binds too strongly—as it does in some metallic alloys, causing problems when it is released it from the material—or it binds too weakly, as it does in carbon-based materials, which means that storing hydrogen would only work at very low temperature.

“So we’re trying to create a surface that works in between, with three or four times

the hydrogen binding energy of the current carbon-based nanomaterials,” Wu says.

When Wu says “we,” he means the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Center of Excellence for Carbon-Based Hydrogen Storage, which, along with his team, includes the National Renewable Resources Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and eleven other research teams from U.S. companies and universities.

Other scientists create the nanomaterial, such as nanohorns (picture an ice cream cone sized down to one billionth of a meter), and Wu’s team tests the material with a unique NMR system that his team created for the sole purpose of measuring how gases interact with nanomaterials. Wu and research partner Alfred Kleinhammes designed the NMR system so they could study hydrogen storage at high pressure. The DOE took notice and granted them $780,000 to be part of the center.

N

uclear magnetic resonance occurs when the nuclei of a substance are placed in a static magnetic field and then exposed to radio waves with a specific frequency. NMR allows scientists to study nuclei that have intrinsic spin, such as those in hydrogen.

In medicine, NMR is used as an imaging tool known as MRI—magnetic resonance imaging. For instance, when a patient breathes in oxygen, the MRI shows where the gas goes to image the details of brain activity. Studying nanomaterial is similar; NMR shows where the hydrogen goes.

Wu’s NMR system includes a long tube—a probe, they call it—that contains a pencil-thin sapphire cylinder and a coil that Steve Exum

At the heart of Yue Wu’s NMR test is a probe that his team designed and maintains. The probe includes a sapphire tube that looks like glass but is much stronger. Researchers place carbon-based nanomaterial inside the tube, which is surrounded by a coil that transmits radio waves. Then researchers insert the entire probe into a temperature-controlled container which they slip into the top of a large superconducting magnet for experimentation.

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“I don’t think anybody knows for sure if this will work. That’s why we do the research.”

resembles a bent paper clip. The coil, which surrounds the sapphire cylinder, emits the radio waves and picks up the responding radio wave from the nanomaterial inside the sapphire cylinder. The entire probe is housed in a cryostat—a temperaturecontrolled container—which slips into the top of the superconducting magnet (a large, metal, can-like container).

Wu’s team attached stainless steel pipes to the sapphire cylinder to feed hydrogen into the nanomaterial at up to one hundred times the atmospheric pressure. The team added valves and pumps to control the amount of hydrogen, as well as the amount of liquid nitrogen, which cools the cryostat so that scientists can conduct experiments at various temperatures.

Then when everything is ready to go, Wu’s team bombards the substance with radio waves.

“It’s like a microwave oven in which water in food absorbs energy and makes food hot,” Wu says. “The idea is similar; we shine the sample with this radio wave—a pulse of energy—and then see how much energy is absorbed.”

The NMR allows Wu to watch how hydrogen reacts inside a substance. “We can tell how much hydrogen the nanomaterial absorbs and how much pressure you need to cover the surface of a material,” Wu says. “And we can also tell the binding energy—we can say, ‘this material has that many binding sites for hydrogen per gram.’

And we can tell how strongly the hydrogen is bound.

“We are looking for nanomaterials that could absorb a lot of hydrogen at room temperature, and we want to tell people why it works or why it doesn’t work.”

The NMR method has unique advantages 40 endeavors

over the traditional technique of measuring the weight-gain of a substance when exposed to hydrogen. For years, scientists who used that traditional technique went back and forth on whether carbon nanotubes worked for hydrogen storage. Part of the problem, Wu says, was the lack of specific information about weight measurements.

“Our test is very specific,” Wu says. “We really can tell how the molecule feels; we can tell the details of the situation. If the hydrogen goes inside the nanomaterial, we can see that. And we can change the pressure to see how this changes the amount of adsorption at different places inside the nanomaterial.

At the molecular level, substances have their own unique signatures, and NMR provides detailed information on those signatures.”

The team can also study why hydrogen binds well or does not. Full experiments on one substance take about a week, Wu says.

I

n the past two years, there’s been no eureka moment, but Wu’s team keeps learning more about carbon-based nanomaterials, especially those laced with boron, another lightweight element that, in theory, should allow hydrogen to bind better. Wu’s team found that boron does do this, but the number of binding sites is not quite high enough for transportation purposes. So DOE center scientists are trying to find different ways to add more boron to carbon-based nanomaterials without losing vital surface area in the process. This is where Wu’s NMR method is essential; it can reveal previously undetectable details when hydrogen interacts with altered nanomaterial.

Last year, Mike Chung, a DOE center scientist at Penn State, created boron-doped graphitic carbon, and Wu’s team showed that such material has significantly better

binding energy than bare carbon nanotubes.

“But we still need to improve the material by about fifty percent,” Wu’s research partner Kleinhammes says.

Wu says, “We’ve seen so far that adding boron has led to improved binding energy, which is favorable. But we don’t know exactly the local structure of the binding sites and the structure surrounding the boron atoms.

The number of such binding sites with favorable binding energy is still too small.

If we want to design this material, we need a better understanding of the structure, and we’re working on that now.”

Another material called nanoporous carbon expands when heated, leaving channels on its surface, which means more surface area for hydrogen binding. It, too, is laced with boron. And Wu’s team is also running experiments on carbon nanohorns decorated with metal particles.

“So that gives us three types of samples,” Wu says of his current projects. He hopes his team will find out if hydrogen-binding has more to do with adding boron to carbon, or if the porosity of a substance matters more.

If the materials show promise, Wu’s team will try to determine why, and consult with team members who will then work to improve the material within the narrow parameters for hydrogen storage at room temperature. Many materials have already been ruled out because they’re too heavy, too expensive, or react with hydrogen so slowly that filling a gas tank would take hours. Few consumers would stand for that.

The DOE has given Wu and other team scientists strict guidelines that would keep society humming along the way it is, only with hydrogen fuel cells instead of combustion engines.

Whether that’s a pipe dream or not, Wu can’t say. “I don’t think anybody knows for sure if this will work,” he says. “That’s why we do the research. But we’ll definitely know what won’t work.” e Yue Wu, a professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, receives funding from the United States Department of Energy. His team includes research professor Alfred Kleinhammes, also of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and graduate student B.J. Anderson.

fixing the news Philip Meyer says newspapers don’t need more art; they need a dose of

science.

by Mark Derewicz

Mark Derewicz

The year was 1967, and Detroit was on fire.

Police had raided an illegal bar, sparking a five-day riot that left fortythree people dead, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested. Over two thousand buildings were burned to the ground.

What caused the raid to spiral into a five-day riot was up for immediate speculation. Experts thought that it was the frustration of southern migrants struggling to assimilate. Editorial writers thought that it was the desperation of uneducated poor folks. But Philip Meyer, a reporter assigned to cover the riots for Knight Newspapers, wondered if these assumptions told the whole story.

He suggested to editor Derick Daniels, a Carolina alum like Meyer, that the Detroit Free Press could find deeper reasons for the riot if the paper conducted surveys in the African American community. Meyer thought reporters could use the same social-science techniques that UCLA researchers had used after the Watts Riots in 1965. Daniels liked the idea, and under Meyer’s leadership the paper debunked the speculation: people born or raised in the North were three times as likely to riot as the immigrants from the South. Education and income were not good predictors of whether a person would riot, although unemployment was. endeavors 41

The survey also helped Meyer ferret out specific grievances in the African American community, and these also contradicted assumptions. Police brutality was a main grievance, as were poor housing and overcrowded living conditions.

The Free Press staff won a Pulitzer Prize for “both the brilliance of its detailed spot news staff work and its swift and accurate investigation into the underlying causes of the tragedy,” according to the Pulitzer committee. Meyer’s social-science reportage gained instant credibility, and was even given a cool name—precision journalism—which Meyer liked and used as the title of his 1973 book, now in its fourth edition.

At the time, publishing in-depth surveys and analyses was completely novel and in direct contrast to the sort of storytelling articles—the New Journalism—that Tom Wolfe and others were making popular.

There’s a definite art to writing narratives and even traditional news articles that quote sources, but Meyer says newspapers don’t need more art; they need a dose of science.

on a two-week junket across the state to learn about Ohio and her voters. They filed stories, conducted polls, and reported in the Beacon-Journal that the race was too close to call. Turned out they were wrong; Republican challenger James Rhodes won in a landslide. Two years later, they conducted more polls and predicted that Robert Taft would unseat Senator Stephen Young.

Wrong again—really wrong.

Meyer figured he was doing something, well, wrong, so he documented his troubles in an application to Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship Program for mid-career journalists.

He was accepted, and the social-science methods he learned—including statistical analysis and how to properly poll a diverse population—gave him the confidence a year later to pursue the Detroit Riot stories from a different angle.

In 1968, he was back at it in Miami. After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Meyer was skeptical of experts who assumed that violence would replace MLK’s passive nonviolent resistance. Meyer had already

if truth is scarce,

“ there should be money to be made by finding it, branding it,

and selling it.

to do so would require journalists of greater skill than is the norm now.”

To be precise Meyer, a professor of journalism at Carolina since 1981, says that the most common applications of precision journalism are survey research, analysis of public records, and field experiments. Each method can uncover precise, accurate information that cannot be gleaned from confidential sources or experts, or by haphazardly surveying citizens.

Meyer’s career offers a few examples.

Before his days in Detroit, Knight Newspapers assigned Meyer to cover the governor’s race in Ohio for the Akron Beacon Journal. But he had never been to Ohio so his editor sent him and a political reporter 42 endeavors

conducted a survey on attitudes in the African American community, so he contacted his respondents again to ask questions about activism. “I had to raise the money for this project on my own,” Meyer says, “but I did get back in the field, and produced a series of stories showing that King’s death had strengthened his following, and that the violent minority was steady at 10 percent.”

On election night in 1976, when wire services were reporting a high voter turnout— some even predicted a record turnout— Meyer decided to analyze sample precinct data from ABC News, and wound up accurately describing the lowest presidential voter turnout in a generation.

The precious truth “One of the great benefits of precision journalism is that it can give you the confidence to break from the master narrative,” Meyer says. “Being different can lead to eventual success, but you need to be sure you’re right and have the patience for acceptance of the truth to emerge.”

Precision journalism has little to do with covering city council meetings or reporting on fires and accidents, but if a city councilman uses data to support a claim, a reporter can and should look at those data instead of merely reporting on what the councilman says. This, Meyer says, was the problem with most of the White House reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War. Precision journalism, though, takes money, Meyer says. In his 2004 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, Meyer rails against publishers who slash fixed costs, such as editorial staff, so that their newspapers can stay afloat in a world awash in new media.

This approach, he says, won’t lead to success or long-term survival.

Again, Meyer derives his opinion from science. In the 1970s, political scientist Herbert Simon found that the growing abundance of information available in the media was leading to a scarcity of attention—that is, the more attention people give to something, the less attention they can give to something else. In today’s world, if a reader can find instant news on the internet, he may never find time to read the paper.

“The response from the media of all kinds has been to do wilder and crazier things to get our attention, even if it means sacrificing accuracy,” Meyer says, pointing to entertainment media obsession with celebrity, violence, and sex.

“The outcome is that now truth is becoming a scarce good. The cure for this is better trained journalists who can apply scientific method to their work instead of being mere hunter-gatherers of information that’s processed by someone else.”

In The Vanishing Newspaper, Meyer writes that instead of cutting editorial staff, newspapers should cut variable costs, such as paper, ink, and transportation by migrating distribution to the web.

“If truth is scarce, there should be money to be made by finding it, branding it, and selling it,” Meyer says. “To do so would require journalists of greater skill than is the norm now.”

The art of polling These days, most common social-science reportage in newspapers involves polling and editorializing about poll results, neither of which guarantees precise analysis, depth of coverage, or even accuracy.

Meyer, who has studied public-opinion research for decades, says that polling has been evolving ever since political scientist George Gallup accurately predicted the winner of the 1936 presidential election by using a special method with a much smaller sample size than other pollsters used.

But in 1948, Gallup predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman by five to fifteen percentage points. His mistake was captured in that iconic photo of Truman holding up the next day’s edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”

Meyer says that Gallup didn’t have a bad sample of voters; Gallup messed up because he stopped polling three weeks before the election, and so did not take into account Truman’s effective whistle-stop tour or the use of mass media. Also, some Democrats didn’t like Truman, Meyer says, and told pollsters they would vote for Dewey instead. But as Election Day approached, they changed their minds, and voted Democratic. For newspapers, this problem was easily solved—conduct polls right up until Election Day. But other problems popped up.

Polls were a lot easier to conduct back when homeowners expected uninvited guests and daily deliveries of mail, dry cleaning, ice, and milk; pollsters were merely part of the parade of visitors. As those halcyon days faded away, Meyer says, pollsters began using the telephone, which worked well at the time because 95 percent of the population could be contacted by phone and one phone per household was the norm. And random-digit telephone dialing worked like a charm because the theory of polling depends on each member of the population having an equal chance of being polled.

“But now, so much technology has gotten between pollsters and recipients,” Meyer says. Answering machines, call waiting, multiple phone lines, fax machines, and especially people who use only cell phones all screw up the polling sample. “The only survey I trust nowadays is one done by mail, and—for certain populations of people—the internet,” Meyer says.

But news organizations could still use the mail and internet (and in-person interviews, if they are so bold) to conduct in-depth surveys and polls, and then tease out the surveys with analysis and interpretation to come up with fascinating story angles that would inform readers.

Meyer points to Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas as a good example.

“Frank’s research showed that many working class people in Kansas voted for President Bush in 2000 against their own economic interests, and they did this based on their social values,” Meyer says. But Frank’s book was published in 2004. Meyer says that newspapers could have done this sort of reporting before the election because the Kansas phenomenon had developed over time. Polls would have shown that Republicans wisely built a coalition between poor people with strong feelings on social values and relatively affluent, educated people with opposite opinions on social issues. Together, they sealed victory for Bush.

“If polls showed reasons why people vote the way they do, voters might become more aware of conflicts of interest,” Meyer says.

“Voters could ask themselves, ‘Which group do I feel more comfortable with? Where do my interests really lie?’ It could change people’s minds about how they vote.”

Such analysis would better serve readers, but reporting only on who’s winning a presidential race isn’t necessarily shallow or harmful, Meyer says. Polls attract attention.

“You wouldn’t expect people to stay interested in a basketball game if the scoreboard was covered up,” he says. “And polls can help voters interpret what candidates are saying. A candidate who’s way behind might say more desperate things. Voters should know that.”

And, Meyer says, polls are good for democracy. If a voter knows that his first choice for presidential nominee is way behind in the polls, but his second choice has a real chance of winning, then the person could vote for his second choice, making his vote more meaningful and building a coalition of supporters. “But you could probably find some people who disagree with me,” he says.

And the award goes to . . .

Newspapers don’t gain readership, earn trust, or get accolades for conducting

“horse-race” polls without analysis or interpretation. Newspapers get attention and gain credibility when reporters break accurate and amazing stories, and a lot of these stories are right under our noses—in public records or confusing reports or even scientific data that may never see the light of day. It’s tough work, Meyer admits, but the results are worth it.

In 2005, reporters at the St. Petersburg Times found that federal government records of wetland depletion were full of questionable science and accounting. As the reporters were trying to decipher those data, they decided to use before-and-after satellite imagery and geographical information systems software to measure the loss of 84,000 acres of wetlands partly due to residential development, even though federal law was supposed to have stopped such development in 1990.

Last year, Wall Street Journal reporters dug through public records and analyzed raw data to help expose illegal backdating of stock options in publicly held companies.

The stories won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award, which cites the best use of socialscience methods in news reporting. A few months later the Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the same story.

Meyer says these stories show how advanced precision journalism has become, but using such methodology is still the exception to the rule. The proportion of adults who read the newspaper every day has declined an average of nearly one percentage point a year for more than forty years, and many publishers, citing the bottom line, have circled the wagons.

“The industry might be reverting to the hunter-gatherer model,” Meyer says. “I think a reporter who has precision journalism skills can still get a good job, provided he’s also good at something else.” e Philip Meyer plans to retire in 2008 as Knight Chair in Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a post he has held since 1993. He was a correspondent in the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder, Inc., from 1962 to 1978. He is also past president of both the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the World Association for Public Opinion Research.

The Philip Meyer Award is administered by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. endeavors 43

Mario Marzan Mario Marzan focuses on climate and memory—in this installation, his childhood experience of hurricane season in Puerto Rico.

This piece and its series were also influenced by ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese woodblock prints that dates back to the seventeenth century.

The term literally means “paintings of the floating world.”

Susan Harbage Page To create these photographs, Susan Harbage Page started at the North Carolina Museum of History, where the staff let her handle original Ku Klux Klan uniforms and taught her how to make patterns.

We often try to historicize racism by saying we’re past it, she says. “But this is what it would look like today. Racism, stereotypes, hatred—they don’t always come in the package you’d expect.” One of Page’s favorite things about these photographs is the black background. “Because when you stand in front of it, you’re reflected in the background,” she says.

“You see yourself in that image, and you’re forced to say, ‘Is this me?’”

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image/imagined This summer the Ackland Art Museum presented Practicing Contemporaries, an exhibit featuring the drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture of UNC’s studio art faculty. Each of the three pieces shown here is part of a larger series of the artist’s work.

All three artists are members of the Department of Art. Mario Marzan is an assistant professor of studio art.

Dennis Zaborowski is a professor and directs the undergraduate program in studio art. Susan Harbage Page is a studio art instructor and director of the John and June Alcott Gallery.

Dennis Zaborowski In this series, Dennis Zaborowski’s scenes were inspired by his Polish-Catholic upbringing in Cleveland.

In “Dance Hall Reception,” as in many of his works, Zaborowski paints purely from memory and imagination, without photographic references. He also likes to leave vestiges of his creative process in the painting—here, a shadow of a second dog appears next to the fully drawn dog, and to the right of the child, we can see the legs of an undrawn man.

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Beyond Empire The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance.

By Michael H. Hunt. The University of North Carolina Press, 324 pages, $34.95.

W

Jason Smith

hen historian Michael Hunt reflected on our confusing times, he thought that historical perspective—not thinktank policy wonks—could best illuminate current events. So he wrote The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance, the story of a fragile country growing into the most influential and beloved nation in history. But this story isn’t over, Hunt says. In fact, the plot is thickening.

Hunt traced U.S. history and found three major themes to sum up the country’s rise: the advent of consumer society, national pride, and the development of a strong modern state with a knack for pursuing goals with deliberation and patience, not to mention a fair amount of luck and timing.

All these themes have their roots in the nineteenth century. Hunt says our consumer society is an American invention that other

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in print nations admired even more than our political system.

After World War II, the United States clearly had the world’s leading economy, thanks in part to the free trade agreements that kick-started globalization as we know it today. Meanwhile, the United States claimed the political high ground, leading the reconstruction of Europe and Japan while holding the Soviet Union at bay. The United States was the driving force behind the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Court, and various aid programs for U.S. citizens and countries in need.

“Essentially, the United States set up an international system,” Hunt says. “And none of that would’ve happened without a strong modern state.”

In this system, the United States grew beyond empire and into hegemony, a

word Hunt says best describes the sort of economic, cultural, political, and military powerhouse that it has become.

But as this evolution was taking place, Hunt says, the U.S. presidency gained the sort of strength that the Founding Fathers feared.

Hunt says that William McKinley was the first president to figure out how to manipulate public opinion. “He had a very sophisticated White House with people analyzing newspapers with purpose. It was McKinley who figured out that war helped extend presidential power.”

McKinley didn’t seek war with Spain in 1898; it was Congress who pushed for it at first. McKinley acquiesced and then realized that the United States could control the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, essentially making the United States an empire, which rekindled the debate between imperialism and anti-imperialism that dates back to Jefferson and Hamilton.

The United States never stopped involving itself abroad, and presidential power continued to expand. One of the best examples, Hunt says, is that Congress no longer uses its Constitutional power to declare war; it instead votes to transfer its authority to the president, who then decides whether or not to use such power.

“We haven’t used that Constitutional provision since Pearl Harbor,” Hunt says.

“But we’ve had many wars.”

Such a strong presidency is one reason why the United States has had an ad hoc foreign policy, leading us into regional conflicts while fomenting distrust even among our closest allies. And Hunt says the so-called War on Terror has only compounded the problems.

“During the past thirty years, we have not tried to sustain the international organization we helped create after World War II,” he says. “In fact, there’s a kind of contempt for

Loyalty in question American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II. By Eric Muller. UNC Press, 182 pages, $27.50. human rights, the international legal system, and environmental management that should be part of a hegemon’s obligations. And by being cavalier and negligent, we’ve undermined our credibility in every part of the world.”

When Hunt was finishing his book, he thought he’d end by detailing the United States’ unique place as a not-so-beloved hegemon. He gave this draft to Marilyn Young, a long-time colleague who, Hunt says, “gave my conclusion a withering critique.”

Historians don’t predict the future, he says, but Young’s critique made sense— America’s story isn’t over, and there’s enough evidence to suggest that this country could choose from various paths.

So he reflected, and wound up writing a provocative conclusion. The United States, he says, could retreat into isolation, although that would spell economic doom at home and abroad. And, with its imperial president, it could continue to manage the world’s affairs to its liking, and then deal with the consequences as we have been.

Hunt, though, says the best path might be the least likely—collaborative internationalism, which means that the United States would engage in a genuinely cooperative relationship with other nations instead of the cautious opportunism that has been all too common during the last half of the twentieth century.

But collaborative internationalism, Hunt admits, would require a more cosmopolitan understanding of other cultures, a more sophisticated grasp of U.S. limits, and a better informed and engaged citizenry, just to name a few.

There were times in the United States’ story when she met these standards. How our nation measures up to them in the near future, Hunt says, could determine the fate of the republic and empire and hegemony.

—Mark Derewicz Michael Hunt is the Everett H. Emerson professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences.

S

pouse not of Japanese descent—good. Registered voter—really good.

Traveled to Japan since 1935—not good. American bureaucrats were making these judgments in the name of national security in 1943, and it led to a civil-rights nightmare.

In his latest book, American Inquisition, Eric Muller shows how the United States set up a four-agency bureaucracy to determine the loyalty of seventy thousand Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during World War II. Bureaucrats forced internees to fill out a loyalty questionnaire, and then used the answers to determine who might be a threat to the United States even though, as Muller points out, the questions were poorly designed and the interpretations of answers were subjective.

One question asked if internees would renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan, a loyalty that the vast majority of internees had never sworn in the first place because they were citizens of the United States, not Japan.

“Most of the internees who were American citizens had never even been to Japan and could barely speak Japanese,” Muller says. “They found that question insulting.”

Another question asked whether internees would be willing to enlist in the U.S. Army—in essence, asking wrongly jailed citizens to fight for other people’s freedom while family members remained incarcerated. Muller says that almost all internees agreed to enlist and renounce their supposed allegiance to the Emperor because they wanted so badly to prove their loyalty. But other questions—about club affiliations, parents, occupations, and magazine subscriptions—demanded more than yes/no answers.

For each question, bureaucrats used a point system to convert answers into number values so that each internee would have a loyalty score.

“The point systems were absurdly oversimplified and depended on cultural assumptions,” Muller says. “Practicing judo earned a negative score, while playing little league baseball earned a positive. Buddhism was a negative; Shintoism was really negative. Christianity was a positive.”

Some people were deemed loyal to the United States and were allowed to leave the camps, but they weren’t allowed back to their homes along the West Coast; they had to relocate to the interior of the country. About 25 percent of interned Japanese Americans were deemed disloyal, and sent to harsher camps or denied access to certain jobs. Others were not allowed to return to their homes in the western United States even after the war.

Muller says that Japanese American internment is not just a sad story during a trying time; it’s about the government using loose accusations and cultural assumptions to determine who’s a threat to national security.

He says something similar could happen again, especially in our post-9/11 world.

“When there’s another domestic terrorist attack, if any of the people involved turn out to be U.S. citizens of Arab ancestry or Muslim faith, I expect that some people will call for measures against U.S. citizens,” Muller says. “If this book does one thing, it documents pretty clearly that such an effort will be a civil-rights disaster.”

—Mark Derewicz Eric Muller is the George R. Ward Professor of Law in the School of Law. endeavors 47

The Napkin Manuscripts. By Michael McFee. The University of Tennessee Press, 207 pages, $29.95. took Michael McFee’s Intro to Poetry Writing class way back in the fall of 1993, and watched as Carolina basketball colossus Eric Montross scrunched all seven feet of his height into an improbable crouch and fluttered on the tips of his size-nineteen shoes to recite Robert Francis’ 1948 poem “The Base Stealer” to the rest of the class by heart—“Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now!” So forgive me if I’m a little sentimental over McFee’s latest book, The Napkin Manuscripts, part of which finds him looking back at thirty-some years of teaching and writing poetry at Carolina.

Montross was riveting; the poems we wrote were anything but. A friend turned in one about how I drove past him one day and didn’t offer him a ride (his title: “I Guess I’m a Chump”).

Each and every one of us had to stand up and recite one poem from memory, McFee always ready with a quick prompt if we stumbled. “Honor the line!” he told us. Speak as it was written.

He wanted us inside those poems, and he wanted them inside us—to strengthen our memory muscle, as he puts it, and to understand “how each poem is a verbal journey.” McFee tells me I recited James Galvin’s “A Photograph of Miners,” and I’ll have to take his word for it.

But my atrophied memory muscle can still pull up parts of “The Man Who Became Old,” by Alberto Ríos: For every year, he grew a new tooth and this, at least among his friends, created around him a kind of fame; but the kind everyone gets used to so that it was only occasionally enjoyable.

I recited that one in McFee’s Intermediate Poetry class. I reenlisted because I liked that McFee was an Appalachian expatriate—he was from Arden, N.C., spitting distance from Mills River where I grew up.

ut back to the book. McFee divides The Napkin Manuscripts into four sections. The essays in part one are personal. There’s a letter he wrote but did not send to poet Robert Morgan; a reflection on what the Confederate flag means, or doesn’t; an account of why McFee stole the footstone from his grandfather’s grave.

The essays in part two concern the crafts of teaching and writing. Topics include cover letters, rejection slips, and how McFee murdered his favorite typewriter.

Part three’s essays are close examinations of seven fellow North Carolina poets and their poems, and part four is a transcript of McFee being interviewed by Michael Chitwood at the 2002 Emory & Henry College Literary Festival.

As an undergrad, McFee ditched architecture at State for poetry at Carolina. The fields are similar, he says. They both involve constructions, makings, the visual. He thought poetry would be an easy A. But after many failures, he kept at it, never gave up, never stopped writing. Nowadays he has a standing weekly appointment to meet any of his former students for a drink: Linda’s, every Thursday at 5:00 p.m.

Arden is a little over two hundred miles and one world west of Chapel Hill, and depending on which of those measurements you want to use, you can argue that most every essay in The Napkin Manuscripts looks back toward North Carolina’s mountains either implicitly or unequivocally. At sunset, the shadows off the Blue Ridge are long. Michael McFee might have traded mountain views for the Piedmont’s red clay, but he’s never forgotten home.

—Jason Smith Michael McFee is a professor and Assistant Department Chair in English and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.

He received funding from the University Research Council and from the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences.

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endview This nameless inmate

is imprisoned behind more than just walls, says art conservator Lyn Koehnline. Over the decades, the uneven layers of varnish covering the painting have darkened and, in places, are almost opaque. The linen canvas, stretched with uneven tension, has become slightly distorted. And gaps where the paint is thin have joined the tiny stress cracks that come with the territory as paint ages.

Through the Ackland Art Museum’s new “Adopt a Work of Art” program, you can help fund individual conservation treatments—which in Italy’s case will include feeding adhesive into the cracks to secure loose flakes of paint, flattening the canvas, and swabbing off the old, dirty varnish. Sponsors can follow the treatment’s progress through written reports and photos from the conservator, and, in some cases, lab visits.

For more information, or to reserve your work of art, visit www.ackland. org, or contact Ackland conservator Lyn Koehnline (919-843-3689, koehnlin@email.unc.edu).

Italy, painted by Elizabeth Jerichau-Baumann in 1859, is on display at the Ackland Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Ackland Art Museum.

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Office of Information & Communications Research & Economic Development CB 4106, 307 Bynum Hall Chapel Hill, NC 27599-4106

NONPROFIT ORG. US POSTAGE PAID RALEIGH, NC PERMIT NO. 2483

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Page 33: Defense attorney Clarence Darrow

Page 38: One day, the pundits say, we’ll all fill

Page 20: Two conservators fight Scotch tape,

got stacks of mail during the Scopes trial in 1925.

Over eight decades later, evolution still incites a war of words. Photo from CORBIS.

up our cars with hydrogen. But will this fickle gas make our hydrogen economy go up in smoke?

Photo by Steve Exum.

mold, water stains, and decay to keep Carolina’s priceless printed treasures alive. Image courtesy of Wilson Library.

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