Fall 2009

end­­eavors Fall 2009

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

something new under the sun page 6

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NEIL CAUDLE

his morning, my house began

making electricity. A pleasant young man named J.R. came to fiddle with the wiring and flip a few switches to put the system on-line, and now twelve photovoltaic panels plus two water-heating units are in business on my sunny, south-facing roof.

As we stood in the basement, eyeing a nifty panel of switches and digital readouts, I asked J.R. what I would need to do to operate the system.

“Not a thing,” he said firmly, meaning, Keep your mitts off the gear. But then he hurried to console me: “You can go online and monitor your system and your production rate any time you like!”

Well, okay then.

As soon as my batteries are charged, surplus electricity will flow past an electric meter and onto the grid. In January, Progress Energy will send me a small but satisfying check. I like that idea. Next spring, I will claim a tax credit for a part of the cost of the system. I like that too.

But I will freely admit that my brandnew solar system may soon be obsolete.

MegaWatt Solar is the cutting edge, and they’re not on my roof yet.

And I make no claim to bragging rights.

Tom Meyer, a chemist who has spent much of his career working on ways to harvest sunlight using cheap chemistry instead of

costly silicon, told a group of us last week that conventional photovoltaic arrays like mine are a dead end. The United States would need a photovoltaic array one hundred miles square, costing trillions of dollars, to satisfy its appetite for energy. His answer: new materials that capture sunlight and store it far more efficiently than batteries can.

So my rooftop array is a drop in the bucket. I get that. I also get that technology changes so fast that wise people wait for the

next wave, or maybe the next, before they take the plunge. But I’m impatient, and I’m not trying to satisfy the nation’s appetite for energy. I’m just trying to have a little more control over my own. I will be delighted if Tom Meyer or MegaWatt Solar or anybody else can produce the breakthrough that weans us away from fossil fuels for good. So go ahead, guys; render me obsolete. But for now, I’ll just try to make a little hay while the sun shines.

—The Editor

Send comments, requests for permission to reprint material, and requests for extra copies to:

Holden Thorp, Chancellor

end­­eavors

Fall 2009 • Volume XXVI, 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.

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

Bruce Carney, Interim Provost Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development

contents

Fall 2009

2 overview

Hard times south of the border, working out for younger brains, the common cold delivers, a cancer test you may not need, the overweight enzyme, life and death by the numbers, and seeing into the future.

28 The Stubborn Persistence of Cuba

How the Bay of Pigs invasion backfired, the politics of misplaced metaphors, and rethinking the embargo.

by Mark Derewicz

cover story 6 Something New Under the Sun

33 The Pharaoh’s Curse

Can solar finally give coal a run for its money?

by Mark Derewicz

What do King Tut, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan have in common?

by Jessica McCann

features 14 Seeing Light in the Dark

36 Learning to Bust Drug-Resistant Bugs

16 The Air over There

38 Born to Run

A paradoxical approach to treat a rare disease.

by Meagen Voss

An Arab nation tries to clear the air.

by Margarite Nathe

21 The Flap over Flight

Winging it with the birds and the bees.

by Susan Hardy

24 More than Biltmore

A historian sets the story straight about blacks in a mountain town.

by Mark Derewicz

How to stop a quick-change artist.

by Beth Mole

What makes these mice marathoners instead of couch potatoes?

by Scott Kelly

41 in print

Sitting in with the men and women of the gutbucket blues, and standing up to back pain.

49 endview

Progress, as it once looked.

Editor: Neil Caudle, Associate Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development Associate Editor: Jason Smith Writers: Neil Caudle, Mark Derewicz, Susan Hardy, Tom Hughes, Scott Kelly, Les Lang, Jessica McCann, Beth Mole, Margarite Nathe, Deborah Neffa, and Meagen Voss

On the cover: Three UNC professors designed and built a new kind of solar collector that could make solar energy cheaper than power from coal. Photo

by Coke Whitworth.

Design: Neil Caudle and Jason Smith Print production and website: Jason Smith

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

Š2009 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 Is the Mérida Initiative rubbing salt in Mexico’s wounds?

In the desert slum of Anapra, on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—just over the border from El Paso, Texas—there are no water or sewer lines, and thousands of families live in shacks like this one. Photo ©Antonio Olmos.

2 endeavors CAROLINA FINDINGS

Latino teens living in the U.S. are happier and healthier if their families embrace biculturalism. • People who walk or bike to

Bordering on atrocious

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n the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, houses are made of anything people can drag away from local factories and dumps: pallets, cardboard boxes, rusted car hoods. People use kerosene, candles, and jerry-rigged electricity to keep warm. Fires are a constant threat. Unregulated dumping in the Rio Grande has contributed to birth defects that are rarely seen elsewhere.

“You can see what people have to do to survive in these conditions; you’re bound to have an unraveling of the social fabric,” Deborah Weissman says. Specializing in immigration and gender violence law, Weissman was drawn to Ciudad Juárez after a burst of violent crime in the 1990s.

Weissman sees a link between the situations in cities such as Ciudad Juárez and NAFTA. The trade treaty, in combination with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, resulted in a shrunken public sector: the police academy in Ciudad Juárez was shut down, for example. Mexico’s consumer-protection laws were weakened under pressure from foreign investors.

Changes to labor laws undermined Mexico’s once-progressive workers’-rights protections. “Transnational corporate management made efforts to teach Mexican counterparts how to break unions, how to deny workers’ rights,” Weissman says. Land-use laws changed and farmers were suddenly thrown off land their families had worked for generations, while subsidized corn flooded the market. “A lot of farmers started to grow what they knew they could sell, which were drug crops,” Weissman says. As the saying goes, drugs kept going north, guns kept coming south.

In response to rampant drug cartel violence, the United States signed the Mérida Initiative in 2008. Weissman fears that this could be rubbing salt in the wounds. The initiative promises four hundred million dollars of aid to militarize the Mexican efforts against drug violence and terrorism. Most of the money will go to equipment, helicopters, and military training. “But a percentage of the funds is supposed to go to judicial reform and some legal experts think that this is about reforming a legal system so that it works for foreign investment just as much as anything else,” Weissman says.

She wants to follow the Mérida Initiative’s influence on legal reforms and how it affects everyday citizens. An example is legislation Mexicans refer to as the Gestapo laws, which expand police authority and violate civil rights by allowing warrantless house searches and extending holding time for detainees.

These laws, Weissman thinks, are an example of U.S. interests being woven into Mexican legal reform without addressing the roots of social problems. Violence and the drug supply continue untouched; the militarization of the war on drugs has made it easier to quash social activism. “A number of labor activists have disappeared or been murdered,” she says.

“You can’t just say, ‘We want accountability for crimes, we want an end to drug violence,’ without thinking about how these situations come to pass,” Weissman says.

—Beth Mole Beth Mole is a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine.

Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and director of clinical programs in the School of Law.

One more reason to sweat

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lderly people who are physically active may have healthier blood vessels in their brains than do elderly people who aren’t active. Elizabeth Bullitt used magnetic resonance angiography to look at the number and shape of blood vessels in the brains of fourteen physically active people—seven women and seven men—between the ages of sixty and eighty. Half of the participants had exercised aerobically for a minimum of 180 minutes a week for the past ten years. The other half had no history of regular exercise and spent less than ninety minutes a week in any physical activity.

The active group had more blood vessels in their brains.

Their vessels also showed less twisting (the brain’s blood vessels narrow and become more twisted as we get older) and were similar to those of younger adults. Future research may determine whether exercise improves anatomy, if older patients with “younger” brains are more likely to exercise, and whether elderly adults who begin an exercise program can reverse their cerebrovascular changes.

—Les Lang This study was published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology on July 9, 2009, and was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. Elizabeth Bullitt is the Van L. Witherspoon Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery.

Cold virus delivers CF gene

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arolina researchers have found what may be the most efficient way to deliver gene therapy to the lung cells of cystic fibrosis patients. The researchers used a parainfluenza virus—one of the viruses that cause common colds—to deliver a corrected version of the CFTR gene to lung cells grown in a tissue culture model that resembled the lining of the human airway. They were able to deliver the gene to 25 percent of the lung cells, enough to restore normal function in the tissue.

“When you consider that in past gene-therapy studies, the targeting efficiency has been somewhere around 0.1 percent of cells, you can see this is a giant leap forward,” says microbiologist Ray Pickles.

The experiment also improved the cells’ ability to hydrate and transport mucus secretions. “We haven’t generated a vector that we can go out and give to patients,” Pickles says. “But these studies continue to convince us that a gene replacement therapy for CF patients will someday be available.”

—Les Lang This study was published in the journal PLoS Biology on July 21, 2009. The National Institutes of Health and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation provided funding. Ray Pickles is an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. endeavors 3

work are more fit and less fat than drivers. • Men and women who are gay or lesbian are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to smoke.

A metabolism drug?

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GRAY’S ANATOMY OF THE HUMAN BODY

Should you be screened for ovarian cancer?

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aniel Clarke-Pearson thinks that unless you’re in a high-risk group, the answer is probably no. Clarke-Pearson says that the two tests doctors typically use aren’t reliable.

A transvaginal ultrasound can detect abnormalities in the ovaries, but the test returns a lot of false positives: some studies have shown that up to 80 percent of the ovary-removal surgeries it prompted were unnecessary. A blood test can detect high levels of a protein called CA-125, which may suggest ovarian cancer.

But the CA-125 test is not very sensitive, and it’s unable to detect early-stage cancers.

And no matter which test doctors use, they still have to resort to surgery to definitively diagnose ovarian cancers. In its early stages, ovarian cancer’s symptoms, which include bloating and pelvic or abdominal pain, can be mistakenly attributed to other maladies.

Sometimes symptoms may not fully develop until the disease has reached a later stage.

Clarke-Pearson says you should be screened if: • you have or have had breast cancer, or have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer; • you have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation (which can be detected by a blood test); • you are fifty years of age or older and have had any of the following specific symptoms more than twelve times in one month over the past year: pelvic or abdominal pain, urinary frequency or urgency, increased abdominal size or bloating, or difficulty eating or feeling full.

“There is no evidence to date that screening would result in fewer deaths from ovarian cancer,” Clarke-Pearson says. “We still have a lot of research to do.”

—Tom Hughes Daniel Clarke-Pearson is the chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine. An article on his research appeared in the July 9, 2009, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

eight-loss medications that curb appetite may leave you feeling fuller a few hours longer. But improving the body’s metabolism might be just as effective and even safer.

Yi Zhang, a biochemist in the School of Medicine, has discovered that the enzyme JHDM2A affects the expression of metabolic genes and the ability of muscle to burn energy. If defective, the enzyme can harm the body’s metabolism and lead to weight gain. Zhang says that the study is the first to link obesity in mice to a faulty metabolism that doesn’t affect appetite, a function of the nervous system.

“This particular mouse model affects only the metabolism and doesn’t affect brain function,” he says. “It could be valuable for testing antiobesity drugs for humans, since a drug that increases metabolism is better than a drug that suppresses appetite and affects the brain.”

In the study, which was published in the journal Nature in February, Zhang and colleagues knocked out the gene that produces JHDM2A in mice and found that both males and females became obese after six months. The mice became less effective at generating body heat. They also had insulin resistance and increased lipid levels—characteristics linked to human metabolic disorder.

Zhang and his colleagues investigated JHDM2A’s role in metabolism after testing the enzyme’s function in spermatogenesis, the process of sperm-cell development. Zhang originally impaired the mice’s JHDM2A enzymes to test for infertility and discovered that the enzyme is required for spermiogenesis, the final step in the development of a sperm cell. (See Endeavors, Spring 2008, “A suspect gene for faulty sperm.”) A few months after having their JHDM2A enzymes knocked out, Zhang’s mice became noticeably obese.

Scientists will have to do more research to determine whether the mouse results would be similar in humans. But Zhang’s study offers a potential solution: enhance the gene’s function to increase the body’s basal metabolism (the number of calories you burn by sitting or being inactive all day). “It will be important to test whether the gene is relevant to human obesity,” he says. “If so, then an agonist, which promotes the function of the gene, can be an antiobesity drug.”

—Deborah Neffa Deborah Neffa is a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Carolina.

Yi Zhang is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the School of Medicine, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

These one-year-old mice are littermates.

The mouse on the right cannot produce the enzyme JHDM2A. Photo by Yi Zhang.

4 endeavors Common genetic variations can lead to schizophrenia. • Three genes influence waist circumference and obesity. • Toddlers with autism are more likely to have an

Keeping score, saving lives

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ediatrician Keith Kocis was a medical resident in the 1980s when his mentor created a way to assign mortality risk scores to critically ill children. Twenty years later, doctors still assign such scores when a child is admitted into the ICU but don’t update the scores after treatment begins.

Kocis thought there was room for improvement. He devised a way to analyze vital signs to provide a continuously updated mortality risk score. In real time, doctors could see on screen how a variety of biological factors, such as a varying heart rate and blood pressure, interact and contribute to a worsening score.

Doctors could then alter treatment accordingly.

COURTESY OF THE KENAN INSTITUTE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

Kocis worked with his brother Daniel Kocis, a statistician in New York, and Carolina’s Renaissance Computing Institute to build a prototype model that predicts mortality risk. The team received funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in clinical trials the model worked well. But part of the NIH grant required a commercialization plan. “I had no idea what that meant,” Kocis says. “I’m trained to develop studies and do clinical trials.” So he met with Randy Myer and Ted Zoller, business school professors who run a program called Launching the Venture to help UNC students and faculty develop business plans for startup companies and new products.

“Without the entrepreneurship programs, there’s no doubt our idea would’ve ended in my lab,” Kocis says. Kocis and his team now have a medical device that’s ready for the commercial market and a business plan to back it up. He’s searching for investors and ways to partner with manufacturers of ICU monitors.

—Mark Derewicz Keith Kocis is a professor of anesthesia and an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Medicine. Launching the Venture is run jointly by the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Office of Technology Development, the only UNC-Chapel Hill office authorized to execute license agreements with companies. In 2008, Kocis received a grant from the University of North Carolina Research Competitiveness Fund to develop two other devices, one for neonatal intensive care and the second for pediatric care outside the ICU.

Treating age-related vision loss

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ome thirty to fifty million people around the world have agerelated macular degeneration, a disease that claims some or all of a person’s eyesight. Scientists fear that the number of sufferers will double in the coming decade as the baby-boom generation gets older. But Carolina scientists, along with lead investigators at the University of Kentucky, have found what could be a better way to diagnose and treat the condition.

Doctors usually treat macular degeneration with drugs that block a protein called VEGF—vascular endothelial growth factor—which helps abnormal blood vessels grow and attack the eye’s macula. But researchers are concerned that long-term use of these medicines could interfere with normal blood-vessel growth and health. And about two-thirds of patients with macular degeneration don’t even respond to the treatment.

The researchers at Kentucky and Carolina found that blocking a different protein—CCR3—in mice and in cultured human cells may prevent abnormal growth of blood vessels in the macula as well as or better than anti-VEF agents, but more safely and effectively.

The scientists were able to detect the CCR3 protein in early bloodvessel growth, says Mary Elizabeth Hartnett, principal investigator of the UNC study site. This allowed them to prevent structural

Left: This right eye has a normal macula. Middle: This right eye shows drusen, which are deposits in the deep retina that predict later development of visionthreatening AMD. Right: This left eye shows fibrovascular scarring and a later stage of age-related macular degeneration. Left and right images by Sarah Moyer; middle image by Rona Esquejo-Leon.

damage to the retina and prevent loss of vision.

Macular degeneration is the most common cause of blindness worldwide, researchers say, and catching it in its earliest stages can help patients begin treatment early.

—Margarite Nathe This study was published in the journal Nature on June 14, 2009, and was funded by the National Eye Institute. Mary Elizabeth Hartnett, professor of ophthalmology in the School of Medicine, is coauthor and principal investigator of the UNC study site. endeavors 5

enlarged amygdala, a brain area associated with emotion and the processing of faces. • Liraglutide may be safer and more effective than current drugs for type 2 diabetes.

6 endeavors

Left: Outside old Dimmock’s Mill in Hillsborough, North Carolina, six solar trees track the sun to pump energy onto Orange County’s power grid.

UNC researchers designed the units to be cheap and effective alternatives to fossil fuels and existing rooftop solar panels. Photo by Coke Whitworth.

cians hooked up his solar collectors, Chris Clemens noticed that the panels weren’t collecting enough sunlight to produce the amount of energy he wanted. Two weeks later, a gust of wind blew the collectors out of alignment with the sun. And two weeks after that, electronic components began to rust and then fail completely.

It wasn’t the best month for MegaWatt Solar, a company that Clemens had started with fellow physicist Chuck Evans and computer scientist Russ Taylor. Sure, they’d known that something would go wrong. After all, they hadn’t just plopped solar panels on a rooftop; they had built a new kind of solar collector that tracks the sun across the sky and pumps energy onto the power grid. The sixteen units in Caswell County were the first ones they’d deployed in the field. Still, they hadn’t thought that the problems would be so big or surface so fast.

By July 2008, Clemens, Evans, and Taylor had been living and breathing MegaWatt Solar for nearly three years, taking no vacations and using all the skills they had to build a better kind of solar collector. They weren’t about to give up.

“Everyone we hire gets a little speech,” Clemens says. “Not about being philosophically ‘green’ but about changing the way we make energy for everybody. It’s about the fact that we’re going to be looking at each other in the dark in fifty years, huddled around fires, if we don’t get off our butts and do something about this country’s energy problem.”

The malfunctions at the Caswell power plant weren’t insurmountable, but the solutions had to come fast. The company was running low on money. And the solutions had to be cheap, or else Clemens, Evans, and Taylor would fall short of their goal: to produce solar energy at a price that beats coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. They knew that this was possible.

“If this works, and I think it will, then it won’t be long before you see these kinds of solar arrays popping up all over the place,” Clemens says. “It will be like satellite dishes for television. One day there were none; the next day, they were everywhere.” endeavors 7

Sixteen of the sixteen-panel units were pumping power onto the grid in Caswell County, North Carolina, by autumn 2009.

CASWELL COUNTY, NC, July 2008— As soon as the techni-



Three UNC professors and a Chapel Hill energy entrepreneur try to crack the code for cheap solar power and make energy companies take notice.

by Mark Derewicz

MegaWatt Solar built its first sixteen-unit solar-power plant in three months.

s

omething new under the sun

From left, physicists Chris Clemens and Chuck Evans and computer scientist Russ Taylor wanted to help solve our power-grid problems. They wound up creating a solarenergy company. Photo by Coke Whitworth.

“If this works, and I think it will, then it won’t be long before you see these kinds of solar arrays popping up all over the place,” Clemens says. “It will be like satellite dishes for television. One day there were none; the next day, they were everywhere.”

8 endeavors

PASCAGOULA, MS, August 30, 2005—Chris Clemens had never been interested in solar power before Hurricane Katrina slammed into his hometown and wreaked havoc on the lives of his friends and family. He delivered supplies twice to the Gulf Coast, the second time with Dan Gregory, an energy analyst Clemens didn’t know but who had volunteered his truck and time.

The storm had not only wiped out oil refineries but also destroyed parts of the nation’s power grid—transmission and distribution lines. Gregory, it turned out, had been thinking about the fragility of the power grid for a long time. He knew that the grid was vulnerable to brownouts and blackouts, even without a storm. He knew that the grid wasn’t good at dealing with changing levels of demand for electricity. And he knew that utility companies struggled to pump different kinds of renewable energy onto the grid. That’s one of several reasons why power companies have been reluctant to embrace alternative forms of energy.

On that trip to the Gulf Coast, Gregory had the idea that scientists from different fields would have unique perspectives on alternative energy. He asked Clemens to start a consulting company with two or three other UNC professors interested in energy issues.

Then, with Gregory, they’d work with utility companies to solve energy problems.

racking the sun didn’t seem like a problem. Clemens had twenty years of experience as an astrophysicist tracking objects in the night sky, and he and Evans had helped build UNC’s SOAR telescope in Chile. (See Endeavors, Fall 2004, “Star Power.”)

They met with Dan Gregory, who loved their idea because the unit they described

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CHAPEL HILL, NC, Fall 2005—First, the team had to make a concave reflective surface that would focus light into a narrow band. Clemens thought that expandable foam would work—think fake wood, not Styrofoam. “It’s cheap,” Clemens says. “And I knew it would be strong enough.”

Evans was skeptical. They’d have to make a mold in order to shape the foam. Clemens started searching online and found lots of possibilities, some of them not so cheap.

“At this point, we were funding everything ourselves,” Evans says. “When it comes to convincing your wife that you need to take money out of the bank, well, that kind of narrows your choices a little bit.”

Clemens found an inexpensive material

endeavors 9

A sixteen-panel unit generates 3,000 watts.  A four-panel unit generates 750 watts of electricity.

called Dibond that’s used to make advertising signboards—think, Waffle House, next exit. He thought he could tease the Dibond into the proper shape for a mold. He ordered some and then drove to Raleigh with Evans.

They strapped the four-by-ten-foot piece of Dibond to the top of a pick-up truck and drove very slowly back to Chapel Hill.

During a brainstorming session, they realized that they wouldn’t need to make a mold if the Dibond itself could serve as the mirror.

The Dibond seemed perfectly malleable but wasn’t very shiny. Evans, though, knew of a reflective material that lines the insides of tubular skylights. “We thought maybe we could cut open those tubes, unroll them, and laminate them onto our Dibond,” Evans says. They bought some tubes.

Then they found a company that makes aluminum parts to spec. “You pay online and they ship it to your door,” Evans says.

“We opened the box and had hardware to start putting this thing together like an Erector Set.” That spring of 2006, they struck up a friendship with a scientist at BP Solar, who sent samples of BP’s special silicon cells suitable for concentrated sunlight. Then, while assembling the collector at Evans’ house, they attached the cells to their receiver— just a flat piece of aluminum about four feet long. Evans laminated the tubular reflective surface onto the Dibond panel, which they flexed into a concave shape. They secured the mirror in place with metal brackets and then attached the solar-cell receiver.

It took a few hours to assemble. Then, since it was still sunny, they recruited Evans’ teenage sons to haul the four-by-ten-foot solar collector from the back deck to the front yard. They torqued the aluminum frame so that the mirror could focus a band of light onto the narrow strip of silicon. And there it sat, collecting sunlight. Then they used jumper cables to take the energy off the receiver. Current was charging through it.

They had their proof of concept.

“That was a lot of fun,” Evans says. “I remember we had to go get sunglasses because that band of light was really bright.

But we were all proudly beaming. Excuse the pun.”

Clemens says he allowed himself a second of celebration before thinking of the next step. “This whole thing is a like a series of battles in a war,” he says, “and we had just cleared a checkpoint.”

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would be mostly infrastructure—metal and mirrors. It would last a long time, as long as a coal plant, with minimal upkeep. It would use much less silicon than conventional solar panels. And when the silicon cells needed upgrading, they could easily be replaced without scrapping the entire unit.

Gregory thought that utility companies would be interested, especially if the power plant came equipped with low-cost inverters to convert direct current from the solar collectors into alternating current, which is what utility companies use.

And Gregory saw a major role for himself.

His company, Plymouth Systems, Inc. in Chapel Hill, could build control systems to monitor the solar-power plant’s performance, detect power failures, and perform off-site diagnostic tests through a secure website. Also, this solar-power plant could be tied to the grid at landfills where some communities already recover methane to pump electricity onto the grid. Wind, methane, and solar technologies could be tied to one system that Gregory knew how to manage.

Another fact excited all four men: no other solar-power company was making the control systems and inverters that utility companies needed.

Clemens, Evans, Taylor, and Gregory met with engineers and top executives at a large utility company in North Carolina. The company liked the idea and even considered investing money in the project. “But they told us we needed to become a real company and find a lead investor,” Clemens says.

And there was another small matter: they still had to build the solar collector and make the thing work.

Each unit is equipped with special silicon cells that can produce energy from concentrated sunlight.

Clemens approached his friend Chuck Evans, a theoretical physicist with a love for building things. Evans had been studying the concept of peak oil—the hypothetical point in time when oil cannot be extracted from the ground any faster, resulting in decreased production and, eventually, decreased supply.

When this will happen is up for speculation.

Some people, including Evans, think that it already has happened. Clemens didn’t need to persuade Evans to study energy issues.

Clemens then called Russ Taylor, who has made it part of his mission at UNC to team up with researchers from different fields.

Taylor loves solving problems, especially when he can use new codes, algorithms, and models.

Still, they weren’t consultants; they were professors. Clemens told them, “We need a history, a problem that we’ve solved to show people how we think.”

They began studying alternative fuels that might help ease the pain of oil depletion.

They looked at solar power, and although so many people had already worked on it, Clemens and Evans saw a lot of room for innovations. “We started thinking about how we could make the price of solar energy drop way down to coal’s level,” Evans says.

They knew that any solution would have to include much less silicon than typical solar panels use. Silicon is too expensive. Any new solar collector had to be cheaper than dirt or else power companies wouldn’t care.

They found that other researchers had come up with ways to concentrate sunlight.

Clemens and Evans thought that they could use some kind of cheap mirror to concentrate the sun’s rays and then reflect a very bright band of light onto a narrow set of solar cells.

This kind of solar receiver would be much smaller than the large rooftop panels. It would use much less silicon, which means that it would be much cheaper but still create the same amount of electricity. And if they could make a collector that mechanically tracked the sun across the sky, they’d get even more bang for their buck.

Small silicon cells absorb a band of concentrated sunlight. This solar receiver uses much less silicon than conventional rooftop panels while producing the same amount of energy. Photo by Coke Whitworth.

By this time, Clemens, Evans, Taylor, and Gregory had created MegaWatt Solar and named Gregory CEO. In December of 2006, still on their own dime, they moved MegaWatt Solar into an old mill building in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Four months later—still teaching full-time and running their labs at UNC—they got a major boost when two solar companies in Norway agreed to pump venture capital into MegaWatt Solar. Gregory immediately handpicked a marketing expert and a systems operations manager. The company hired local electricians and a few Carolina and NC State graduates. lemens, who is more comfortable building things than theorizing about them, set out to design the double-axis drive—the motors that would allow the collectors to track the sun. Evans headed the production of the mirrors. Taylor was in charge of creating the computer systems, and his team also wrote software to make the unit track the sun. Clemens and Evans worked on the solar receiver—the narrow aluminum part with small silicon cells.

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10 endeavors

Most silicon cells are five inches by five inches. For MegaWatt’s purposes, they’re too big and don’t produce the right voltage or number of amps. So Clemens and Evans used a laser to cut the cells down to size and stack them in a series. These cells produced the proper voltage and number of amps, but they still generated too much heat. A fan would help cool the receiver, but fans break and are often too expensive. So Evans and his team designed a heat sink, a series of flat aluminum prongs that absorb heat and allow it to escape through the back of the receiver.

In July 2007, MegaWatt Solar constructed a unit—they called it a solar tree—on a grassy hill next to the company’s facility.

The tree had only four mirrors and four receivers. At first, Taylor used a joystick to test Clemens’ drive unit. It moved smoothly and didn’t budge in the wind. Then, to make the unit track the sun on its own, they used sensors to measure the voltage that each receiver was generating. By this measurement, the sensors determined whether the mirrors were aimed at the sun. But when clouds rolled by, the mirrors still needed to

track the sun. Adam Crain, a former physics major at UNC, wrote an algorithm to make the solar tree follow the sun by counting motor steps. At the end of the day the solar tree clicks back to its dawn position. It’s a solid, patent-pending model that each unit still uses.

But Clemens pointed out that the units didn’t really know where they were aimed.

“If a unit blew off course, it would keep counting as though nothing had changed.”

It took a long time for the sensors to find the sun again. “It was clear to me that we were missing a piece of technology,” he says.

Meanwhile, Gregory signed a contract to build a solar-power plant for Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation in Caswell County, north of Hillsborough. This plant would have sixteen solar trees, each with sixteen solar collectors. MegaWatt’s twenty employees built the units as fast as they could, but there was no time to test the technology in an environmental chamber, and the company didn’t have ninety thousand dollars to buy one.

“Our thought was, ‘We’ll put the units out there and see how they function,’” Clemens

But Clemens pointed out that the units didn’t really know where they were aimed. “If a unit blew off course, it would keep counting as though nothing had changed.” It took a long time for the sensors to find the sun again.

“It was clear to me that we were missing a piece of technology,” he says. would have two separate receivers right next to each other. No flexible joints. This was a sturdier design and produced the same amount of power.

Joey DeSena, another former UNC physics major, found a better encapsulant to protect the solar cells from the elements, and he helped redesign the aluminum plate

In MegaWatt’s shop, Clemens led the team to attach these mice—what the company is calling the optical navigation system—to the smaller units. He’s still tweaking the design, but the system helps the solar trees track the sun better than ever before.

These mouse sensors have two other advantages. When you lift a mouse off your endeavors 11

Materials: motors, electronic circuits, aluminum, steel, concrete, silicon, plastic, polyethylene, and mylar.  The units are designed to last fifty years.

n the original design, the Dibond mirrors were part of the metal truss. Clemens and Evans knew that if the truss bent, then the mirrors would also bend. They just didn’t realize that this would mess up the band of light so much. “So we had to go back to a concept used in building major telescopes,” Evans says. “What’s called a kinematic mount.” They framed the mirrors individually and attached them to the truss with special mounting brackets. This way, when the truss bent, the mirrors didn’t. This new design is patent-pending.

Next, they scrapped the four-foot-long solar receiver. Instead, each solar collector

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that housed the silicon cells.

The company still couldn’t afford a new environmental chamber to test DeSena’s sealant, so Evans searched for a used chamber and found one on eBay for twelve hundred dollars. It didn’t work, but with help from a couple of electricians MegaWatt had hired, Clemens fixed the old, olive-drab contraption. The environmental tests were successful.

Third, the wind. The smaller units would survive hurricanes, but very strong gusts could still blow the mirrors off track. The sensors and tracking algorithm would eventually find the sun, but both were too slow.

Clemens knew that he could’ve bought an expensive piece of technology that would actually read the position of each axis in the drive unit and then tell the mirrors where to move to find the sun. “But we needed a five-dollar solution,” he says.

During a board meeting, Clemens had an idea. “I saw one of our guys pushing his computer mouse,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Now that thing knows where it is. How can my tracker be stupider than that mouse?’”

After the meeting, Clemens took apart a mouse and attached its sensors to the drive unit’s stationary metal post. The sensor read how the axle was moving in relation to the metal post, just as a mouse arrow knows where it is on your computer screen.

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headquarters, which meant that the solar trees had to withstand hurricane-force wind.

“Our large unit, as it was, could never survive that,” Clemens says. “But we remembered that four-mirror unit we built for some early tests. Storms never budged that thing. We decided that for the next six months, that’s our product. And that’s what we’ll ship to Florida.”

But building a smaller solar tree would solve only part of the wind problem and none of the other issues. And building smaller units would mean producing less energy per tree, which could be a big blow to MegaWatt’s claim of providing energy at a cost cheaper than coal.

Each unit uses 95 percent less silicon than typical flat solar panels.

says. “That’s kind of cheeky. But we had a set of milestones we needed to meet to continue our funding.”

MegaWatt Solar hired FLS Energy, a North Carolina solar company, to install the units in the spring and summer of 2008.

As soon as FLS technicians assembled the trusses—the big metal frames that support the mirrors—they knew that MegaWatt should’ve assembled the trusses in the factory to ensure consistent assembly. And right away, Clemens saw a problem. On some of the receivers, the bands of light were too wide, which meant that those units would not produce enough energy. The mirrors were permanent parts of the trusses, so there was no way to make adjustments on-site.

These solar trees worked—just not as efficiently as the team had hoped. Some of the other collectors focused perfectly. All of them, though, were affected by the wind.

MegaWatt hadn’t done any wind-tunnel tests—again, no time or money—and the trusses couldn’t handle strong gusts. The trees only tracked the sun properly in winds less than fifteen miles per hour.

Then there was the rust. The narrow solar receivers were composed of three panels that were tied together with tiny circuit boards so that electrical current could flow between the panels and then into wires and onto the grid. The circuit boards weren’t sealed well enough. Moisture seeped in. Within a month they corroded and the units started to fail.

In the backs of their minds, Clemens and Evans knew that problems like these might happen. They were scientists, after all, and scientists depend on failure to learn. So Clemens saw no reason to panic.

“Our whole approach has been to see the entire system at once to see its functionality,” Clemens says. “Not just parts. Suppose we had taken a long time to do a methodical job, which means that the whole system wouldn’t get built and tested. We would’ve encountered each problem in a serial fashion. And then we would’ve found other problems once we were finished. That’s why people take ten years to do something. In our philosophy, we encountered problems in parallel because we built the whole thing at once. We knew we’d probably do things wrong. We hoped they’d have minimal effect.”

Turned out it was good that problems popped up so fast. A major energy provider in Florida called to do business. The utility company wanted to test some units at its

desk, the sensor goes blind and stops working. So Clemens drilled holes in both axles.

When the mouse sensors come to the holes at the end of the day, they go blind and realize that their tasks are done. Then, thanks to code that Taylor’s team wrote, the axles move back to their dawn positions.

The invention did what Clemens needed.

The double-axis drive knew exactly where the sun was, and if the mirrors were blown off course the mouse sensors would find the sun again within thirty seconds.

All the problems from the Caswell plant were solved. Only one issue remained.

The four-mirror unit produced 750 watts of electricity instead of 3,000, which is how much a sixteen-mirror unit produces. When Clemens and the group crunched the numbers, they saw that the metal pole and drive unit would cost too much to make their power plants competitive with coal plants.

They needed something even cheaper than metal but just as strong.

Clemens found something stronger: concrete. MegaWatt contracted with a company in Siler City, North Carolina, that could make precast concrete posts and platforms that weigh 5,550 pounds each and are as cheap as, well, cement. The cost of the solar trees dropped way down.

In April of 2009, MegaWatt Solar planted six newly designed units in the company’s back lot. And for weeks, the units tracked the sun better than ever before, though still not perfectly. They withstood strong winds and generated power.

The final step was getting that energy onto the grid. ll along, MegaWatt Solar had been working with NC State’s engineering department and CREE, Inc.—an NC State spin-off—to develop an inverter.

Evans says that inverters are well-known weak links in solar and wind technology because they tend to burn out after ten years. “And if you have to install a thousand inverters, and a few burn out each day, then that’s not a good thing.”

MegaWatt is now testing the new CREE inverters in Hillsborough and planning to ship six solar trees to the Florida utility company. The pilot plant is designed to last fifty years. Over that span, the average price of the energy it produces is estimated to be cheaper than coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy. Much cheaper.

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MegaWatt Solar is now in discussions with that same power company to produce 20 megawatts of power. That’s 26,400 fourmirror solar trees. The Piedmont power co-op in Caswell County expects to produce 50,000 watts with the 16-mirror units that MegaWatt Solar reengineered for redeployment by the end of 2009. Piedmont also wants an additional one megawatt of power—1,320 four-panel trees. And as Endeavors went to press, MegaWatt Solar was negotiating with another large utility company about a second project in North Carolina.

Despite these possibilities and MegaWatt’s many innovations, the company has been affected by the recession just like many other start-ups. The original Norwegian investors—Scatec and iEnergies—had agreed to fund MegaWatt for two years.

Those two years are up. MegaWatt found

potential investors, but not that coveted lead investor.

In the summer of 2009, though, the founders struck a deal with iEnergies to keep MegaWatt chugging along. The Norwegian company stepped up to take majority ownership of MegaWatt Solar. Clemens, Evans, Taylor, and Gregory remain significant minority owners. In turn, the Norwegians injected new capital into MegaWatt Solar, which can now continue tweaking its new design while negotiating with utility companies. Gregory stepped down as MegaWatt’s chief executive and returned his focus to his “smart grid” company, PSi. Mark Conroy, who has been part of the iEnergies team in the United States, took over as CEO. From MegaWatt’s inception, Gregory says, its founders knew that the time would come to bring in “big company” management to take MegaWatt to commercial

During a board meeting, Clemens had an idea. “I saw one of our guys pushing his computer mouse,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Now that thing knows where it is. How can my tracker be stupider than that mouse?’”

Clemens invented this optical navigation system to help each collector track the sun. Photo by Coke Whitworth.

MegaWatt Solar worked with UNC’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) to provide the university limited stock ownership in the company.

Contact OTD at 919-966-3929.

megawatt time line ÒÒAugust 2005: Hurricane Katrina strikes Gulf Coast; Chris Clemens drives supplies to Pascagoula, Mississippi. ÒÒSeptember 2005: Clemens and Dan Gregory drive van full of supplies to Gulf Coast and discuss the nation’s energy-grid problem. ÒÒOctober 2005: Clemens, Chuck Evans, and Russ Taylor form Navitas Research, LLC, to address problems with power grid. ÒÒNovember 2005: Clemens, Evans, and Taylor decide to study solar energy; begin designing collector. ÒÒJanuary 2006: The three UNC researchers and Gregory form MegaWatt Solar. ÒÒMay 2006: Team finishes prototype of solar collector and receiver. ÒÒApril 2007: Two Norwegian energy firms invest in MegaWatt Solar. ÒÒJuly 2007: First fully functional solar tree goes on-line outside MegaWatt’s workshop. ÒÒJuly 2008: MegaWatt signs deal with power co-op in Caswell County, North Carolina. ÒÒOctober 2008: Caswell plant comes on-line. ÒÒNovember 2008: MegaWatt signs deal to build demo power plant for major utility company in Florida, begins redesigning solar units to withstand hurricane-force winds. ÒÒMarch 2009: Clemens invents new tracking system. ÒÒApril 2009: MegaWatt plants six four-panel units behind its workshop. ÒÒJuly 2009: MegaWatt tests demo plant before shipping units to Florida power giant.

Eighty percent of each unit’s infrastructure stays the same throughout the plant’s life. 

Chris Clemens is a professor of astrophysics, Chuck Evans is a professor of theoretical astrophysics, and Russ Taylor is a research professor of computer science, physics and astronomy, and applied sciences and engineering, all in the College of Arts and Sciences. Dan Gregory is the CEO of Plymouth Systems, Inc.

The units have minimal ecological impact and can be built alongside wind turbines and on top of landfills or brownfields.

success. If all goes well, MegaWatt will soon become a revenuegenerating, profitable company.

“There is no chance this is going away,” Clemens says.

Early in 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy said that solar energy will have to grow at a rate of 26 percent each year until 2025 to keep up with energy demand and replace what the nation will be losing as oil and natural gas production peak and then sink into permanent decline. No energy source has ever grown so fast, according to Evans. Still, solar will have to be one of several alternatives to fossil fuels and traditional nuclear energy.

“We’re not so outlandish as to think that what we’ve developed will solve the energy crisis,” Evans says. “We just decided that if you’ve got the right training and if you’re at an institution that owes a debt to the public, wouldn’t you be remiss if you didn’t try to contribute to a solution? How much of a contribution this will be remains to be seen. There will be other competing solar and wind technologies. But we don’t worry about them because the market is so huge. We’ve just been competing with ourselves to get this right.” e

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a solar future?

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hen you think of solar power, you probably picture silicon solar panels.

Tom Meyer doesn’t. He thinks of solar fuels.

He thinks of using sunlight to tear apart water molecules and storing the resulting hydrogen in tanks. He imagines shining sunlight through a thin layer of titanium dioxide stretched atop a shallow pool of water to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Or using a different catalyst and shining sunlight through it to create methanol.

Meyer thinks that if solar power is going to play a large role in our energy future, then solar fuels must become reality.

“On average around the world, the sun is out only about six hours a day,” Meyer says. For solar panels, no sun means no energy. “One good thing about solar fuels is that you make them when the sun is out and then store them to use later.”

Meyer has been working on this concept, artificial photosynthesis, for much of the past thirty years.

“The principles are understood, and we’ve had some recent breakthroughs,” he says. “I can almost see it all the way to the end. I think if we can get enough support quickly, we could know in two or three years whether any of these ideas work.”

Meyer got a boost this summer when the U.S. Department of Energy sent a check for $17.5 million to start UNC’s Energy Frontier Research Center, one of forty-six new centers created to combat our dependence on fossil fuels, and the only one focusing mainly on solar fuels.

Meyer put together a team of twenty research labs from UNC’s physics and chemistry departments, as well as from NC State, NC Central, the University of Florida, and Duke, to do basic research on artificial photosynthesis and next-generation photovoltaics—solar panels made of material cheaper than silicon that would be like shingles on rooftops.

Meyer’s goal is to create products that are viable for commercial use.

“This is a high-risk, high-reward research area,” Meyer says. “The payoffs could be huge, but so are the hurdles to making the technology practical.”

—Mark Derewicz Tom Meyer is Arey Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the director of Carolina’s Energy Frontier Research Center.

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BEN PHILPOT

Seeing Light in the Dark

by Meagen Voss

A pyramidal neuron. In Angelman syndrome, neurons have fewer connections and less plasticity than do normal neurons.

Forty-four years after Harry Angelman wrote about a syndrome that robs children of their ability to learn, neuroscientist Ben Philpot and his team have discovered how a single gene mutation leads to this debilitating neurological disorder.

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LEARNING IS EXTREMELY

difficult for children with Angelman syndrome. Developmental milestones such as sitting up or speaking come late. As they get older, children with the syndrome have trouble walking and sleeping through the night, and suffer from seizures.

But the most prominent symptom of Angelman syndrome is impaired speech.

Normally children learn up to three thousand words a year while they’re in school.

But many children with Angelman learn only one or two words over their lifetimes; most never learn to speak at all. With a lot of instruction, people with the syndrome can learn to do simple tasks, but they never become completely independent, and require lifelong care.

Philpot suspected that the source of the learning deficits was the brain’s inability to process sensory experience. “Your sensory experiences leave a trace on the connections of your brain that can be recalled later on,” he says. “All of our experiences modify our brains in some way. Sometimes the modifications are simple and sometimes they are robust.”

Essentially, brains develop like paintings, colored over time by the sights, sounds, and smells that we experience. Each sensation is like a brush stroke, adding a new detail to the emerging picture. In the brain, these sensations stimulate formation of new connections between neurons, ultimately changing how the brain is wired. But with Angelman syndrome, the colors drip out of place. Instead of developing a clear portrait of the world, the brains of children with Angelman form a muddled collage.

SCIENTISTS HAVE KNOWN

for years that Angelman syndrome is caused by mutation of the UBE3A gene. UBE3A instructs the body to destroy unnecessary or damaged proteins. A mutation that deletes UBE3A leads to Angelman syndrome. But relatively few studies have examined how a lack of UBE3A could affect brain activity.

Philpot’s group began to study mice that lacked UBE3A and had learning deficits similar to those in human patients. Koji Yashiro, a graduate student in the lab, took electrical recordings of neurons using electrophysiology. Like an electrician who uses a meter to check the current running through wires, Yashiro used microscopic electrodes to measure the activity of neurons. Based on

these recordings he was able to determine how well neurons were connecting to each other. He also measured the plasticity of the connections, which is the ability of the connections to change in response to experience. Not surprisingly, the neurons in the mice with Angelman-like symptoms had severely impaired plasticity and had fewer connections than neurons in the normal mice did.

Most of Yashiro’s recordings were performed in the visual cortex, a part of the brain where neurons process visual signals from the eyes. But how can the visual system reflect the severe learning deficits in Angelman syndrome? “By studying sensory experiences and how they modify visual areas of the brain, we can determine how they might affect learning in other areas,” Philpot says.

The visual system is so well studied that scientists have developed a map of the visual cortex. They know the exact type of visual cues that activate different parts of the cortex, and so they can study how the brain is affected by sensory input. Hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling are difficult to manipulate in live animals, but vision can be changed simply by putting animals in a dark room.

The scientists wanted to understand how a complete lack of visual experience would affect the study mice’s neuron activity, and so they raised the animals in the dark. Yashiro expected the mice to show a little improvement once their vision was impaired, but what he found was startling: the neuronal connections in Angelman-syndrome mice regained their plasticity.

“It looked like what was causing the defect was sensory experience,” he says. “This finding is a catch-22. In order to keep the mice normal you have to deprive them of sensory experience, but without sensory experience their brains won’t develop properly. It would be tough to develop a treatment based on this finding.”

But Philpot believes that there could be other treatment approaches. For example, patients with Angelman may be able to learn tasks better if they are in a limited environment with minimal distractions.

Another option, since Yashiro has shown that the study mice are capable of normal brain plasticity, is to develop a medication that could prevent damage from sensory experience. But researchers first have to

determine which molecular changes are causing the damage.

“We don’t know too much about what UBE3A is doing,” Philpot says. UBE3A marks a lot of proteins for destruction. So the undestroyed proteins have to be the source of the problem. The question is, which ones? Philpot’s group is working on a project that will help them identify the harmful proteins. They are also participating in a preliminary drug-discovery project; they hope that certain compounds may be able to reverse the defects in the study mice.

UBE3A has connections to another devastating neurological disorder. “Too little UBE3A and you get Angelman syndrome,” Philpot says. “Too much of it and you get autism.” According to Philpot, 5 percent of autism cases have been linked to excess amounts of UBE3A. Scientists aren’t sure how a high amount of UBE3A leads to autism. But the idea that Angelman syndrome and autism are on the same spectrum means that researchers may be able to develop UBE3A-based treatments to target both disorders.

NEW TREATMENTS WILL

take several years to develop, but Philpot believes that there is more hope for Angelman syndrome patients now than ever before. The dominant idea in Angelman syndrome research has been that without UBE3A, the brain would never be able to function normally. Now that Philpot’s study has shown that the brains of mice with Angelman-like symptoms are capable of normal plasticity, there may be more interest in finding a way to restore brain activity in humans.

A smile spreads across Philpot’s face as he thinks of the possibilities. “Over my seventeen years in neuroscience,” he says, “this is the most striking finding I have ever observed.” e Meagen Voss is a doctoral student in neuroscience in the School of Medicine.

Ben Philpot is an assistant professor in the UNC Neuroscience Center and in the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology in the School of Medicine. Koji Yashiro, the primary author of this work, earned a doctorate from the School of Medicine in 2008. Their study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Funding came from the National Institutes of Health, the Angelman Syndrome Foundation, and the Simons Foundation. endeavors 15

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the air over there In a Gulf nation that’s bursting at the seams, scientists find ways to keep people and the environment healthy.

by Margarite Nathe Indoor and outdoor air pollution are some of the biggest threats to public health in the United Arab Emirates, researchers say. Pollution from cars and construction sites often combines with airborne desert sand to create a haze that hangs over the cities of the UAE. Below: One of Dubai’s six desalination plants, which pump out some 275 million gallons of water every day. Photo by Fritz Mueller.

endeavors 17

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“In the United States, when you apply for a research grant, you’re not usually invited to a dinner with your competitors,” MacDonald says. Months earlier, the World Health Organization and the Environment AgencyAbu Dhabi had called for proposals from universities around the world to help the United Arab Emirates develop a plan for the country’s environmental health. Researchers from all three finalists—Carolina, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins—were at dinner that night. It was a little tense, MacDonald says.

But two months later in March 2008, MacDonald, an environmental engineer and principal investigator on UNC’s proposal, got word that Carolina had beaten out the competition. The UAE wanted to get started quickly. Within one year, officials said, they would figure out which environmental problems posed the greatest danger to public health and come up with a strategy to solve those problems in a decade’s time. (Things have been happening fast in the UAE ever since oil moguls discovered that Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates, sits on top of 8 percent of the world’s remaining petroleum reserves.)

MacDonald and the team at Carolina found that a population explosion, a real-estate boom, and whirlwind industrialization have brought air quality and occupational risks to the top of the list of the UAE’s environmental troubles. At UNC, teams of epidemiologists and environmental scientists are taking a close look at pollution in the UAE, including both outdoor and indoor air pollution. And in a related study, nutritionist Barry Popkin is examining the changing Emirati diet and working on a solution to the UAE’s skyrocketing rates of diabetes and obesity (see “New diet, new dangers,” page 20).

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n less than forty years, the UAE has evolved from a country of Bedouin nomads and fishermen to the title-holder of several global superlatives. It’s home to the tallest man-made structure on Earth (the Burj Dubai is almost double the height of the Sears Tower). It has one of the world’s biggest shopping malls, two of the world’s four seven-star hotels, and the largest desalination plant. And, according to Popkin, one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world.

“The country has developed at lightning-quick pace,” MacDonald says, “and it’s a little frightening for some people.” Where, not long ago, the empty desert stretched all the way to the sea, the ultra-modern coastal cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai are filled with thousands of luxury cars and SUVs and, above those, cranes and construction workers that toil over the UAE’s $582 billion in building projects. Of course, construction has slowed down lately with the world’s economy (although only slightly in Abu Dhabi), but a lot of the environmental damage has already been done, MacDonald says. A haze often hangs over the cities. Toxicants have even begun to cling to particles of desert sand, and the wind flings them across the entire Middle East region.

Airborne dust is one of the main dangers of outdoor air in the UAE, says environmental scientist William Vizuete, whose team is now beginning to test an air-quality model it created for the

he chefs brought out a roasted baby camel on a silver platter, and Jacqueline MacDonald took her seat. A few of her colleagues were in the banquet hall with her, and so were a few of their competitors. His Excellency Majid Al Mansouri, Secretary General of the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi, had invited everyone.

The United Arab Emirates. Map by Jason Smith.

XX COORDINATES: 22° 47’ 0” N, 54° 37’ 0” E XX AREA: 32,278 SQUARE MILES (SLIGHTLY SMALLER THAN MAINE) XX WATER AREA: NEGLIGIBLE XX CAPITAL: ABU DHABI XX LARGEST CITY: DUBAI XX ESTIMATED GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT, 2008: $260 BILLION XX GDP PER CAPITA: $54,606 (RANKED EIGHTH IN WORLD BY INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, 2008) XX OIL EXPORTS, 2005 ESTIMATE: 2.7 MILLION BARRELS/DAY (RANKED FOURTH IN WORLD)

region. “Sandstorms and dust events in the UAE are huge, and they happen frequently,” he says. The UAE lies near the equator and on the crossroads of long-range dust plumes from Europe and Central Africa. The sun’s irradiative energy combines with aerosols to create some interesting photochemistry, Vizuete says. The conditions are nothing like what we see in the United States or other Western countries, where models of the kind Vizuete is working on are standard.

Once the model is complete and tested, he and his team will be closer to understanding just how all the particulate matter in the UAE affects human health. “Say you have a dust particle that goes across the Arabian Peninsula and then enters Dubai,” Vizuete says. “You have all these man-made chemicals, and maybe there’s some partitioning of those toxic organics onto the particle. And then you breathe in that dust particle. What does that mean for public health?”

Air monitors in Abu Dhabi have already shown high levels of PM10—airborne dust particles that have a diameter of up to ten micrometers. But scientists want to know what percentage of that is actually PM2.5, much smaller particles that could be more damaging to human health. And how much of the PM10 in UAE comes from desert sand rather than, say, gasoline combustion, construction, or quarrying? Vizuete and his team are working with the Environmental Agency-Abu Dhabi to gather more airquality data, test their model, and, they hope, answer some of these questions.

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ost Emiratis, though, don’t actually spend a whole lot of time outdoors, MacDonald says. The environment is harsh—temperatures during the summer months can climb above 120˚F, and the coastal humidity is high. Many Emiratis spend their days in air conditioned houses, office buildings, and shopping malls. So UNC epidemiologists are studying the air quality inside six hundred homes in the UAE to find out if Emirati families are exposed to pollutants there.

“This is a country with a lot of new housing,” says epidemiologist Karin Yeatts, who’s helping to lead the indoor air study. Walls, furniture, and carpets in new buildings can emit formaldehyde and other gaseous pollutants that can aggravate respiratory problems.

Pollutants from outside—including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate

At 2,600 feet, the Burj Dubai is the tallest building in the world. “Even though the tower can be seen miles away,” says Carolina researcher Tiina Folley, “the air is often so hazy that you have to be pretty close to get a good picture.” Photo by Tiina Folley.

Wind can carry particles across continents and oceans. A breath inhaled in North Carolina could carry a speck of dust from California or China. matter—could make their way into the homes, Yeatts says, and the researchers will take measurements of all of them. For the sake of cooling efficiency, most air conditioning units in the UAE are positioned high in the walls or in other difficult-to-reach spots. So changing the filters isn’t easy, she says, and families could be exposed to bacteria or different types of mold from the AC units.

Yeatts and her team are collecting data on indoor air, health, and nutrition from six hundred homes in the UAE as part of a vast epidemiological study on the potential health effects of the air pollutants. So researchers equipped each of the homes with a handful of passive diffusion tubes, slim vials of a spongy material that change color to indicate the concentrations of different gas

compounds in the air. In the United States, the tubes typically are used to measure high concentrations of industrial compounds at work sites or in schools over eight-hour periods, but UNC researchers will use them to measure low concentrations over the course of a week. No one’s done this before, says environmental scientist David Leith. “It’s all easy-to-use technology that doesn’t require expensive equipment,” he says. “You don’t have to send the things off to be analyzed and wait two months. You just look at the color, divide by the number of hours, and that tells you how bad the exposure is. You get the result right away.”

Each house will also get a passive aerosol sampler, a small metal disk that Leith invented with doctoral student Jeff Wagner. It’s the size of a bottle cap and, endeavors 19

In U.S. households, the kitchen is one of the main sources of indoor air pollutants, says environmental scientist Bill Funk. Compounds from cooking food get trapped inside our houses. But most Emirati homes have detached kitchens to keep cooked-food smells from settling in the house. Researchers expect to find other indoor pollutants, though.

Many Emiratis smoke, burn incense, or make incense and perfume as a hobby—all these things can contribute to the particulate matter floating around in indoor air, Funk says. like the passive diffusion tubes, doesn’t require electricity. Particles floating in the air come to rest on the disk throughout the day, and researchers then use a scanning electron microscope to see what settled there. Some of the houses will also have active monitors (which do require electricity) that will pump out real-time measurements of whichever compounds are in the air.

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o one’s ever conducted a nationwide study like the UAE project in the United States, MacDonald says. U.S. environmental policy, as in most developed countries, has evolved in reaction to disasters, and only then if there’s money to make the changes. (Take water pollution, she says. It wasn’t until Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 that the Clean Water Act stopped mills and factories from dumping their waste into local rivers.) “A lot of countries go through decades or a century of industrialization before they can afford to start thinking about their environmental problems,” she says. “But the UAE has a lot of wealth and they’re looking at solving environmental problems right away, before these problems get out of hand.”

MacDonald hopes that their work in the UAE will not only help the country to sidestep some major environmental catastrophes, but also lay the groundwork for developing an environmental health strategy here in North Carolina; some public health 20 endeavors

officials have already expressed interest in using the same approach UNC researchers are using in the UAE, she says.

For now, her team is aiming to complete a national strategy to protect the UAE population from environmental pollution. There’s talk that the World Health Organization will use results as a model for other countries in the Middle East. But even after the initial studies are finished, there are years of work ahead for the UAE. “It’s a traditional, ancient place that’s been thrown quickly into this modern world,” Will Vizuete says. “So they’re modernizing like crazy and importing all these Western things, but they still want to be traditional and maintain their history and who they are.

They want to do the right thing, but how do you do that? And is the Western model really the best way to do it?” e Jacqueline MacDonald is an assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Carolina researchers partnered with RAND Corporation, Resources for the Future, the United Arab Emirates University’s Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, and the Norwegian Institute for Air Quality Research. The Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi is funding the $12.1 million study.

The Office of Technology Development (OTD) is the only UNC office authorized to execute license agreements with companies. For information on reporting inventions, contact OTD at 919-966-3929.

Passive aerosol samplers (above left) and passive diffusion tubes (above) tell scientists what particles and compounds are in the air inside Emirati homes.

Photos by Jason Smith.

new diet, new dangers

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he relatively new luxury of indoor life has also created a more sedentary Emirati population, says nutritionist Barry Popkin. Restaurant options (which now range from fast food to some of the world’s finest cuisine) have moved the Emirati diet away from traditional Bedouin foods (camel, fish, dates) to one that’s bringing on many of the same health problems we face in the United States: obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. “Emiratis of all ages and genders now eat out more, consume different types of foods, and ingest more processed and high-sugar foods,” Popkin says. “The population is snacking and consuming more highcalorie, high-sugar beverages. Physical activity has decreased.” The UAE now has an obesity rate similar to that of the United States. Over half of Emiratis are overweight, Popkin says, and one quarter of the population is obese.

Popkin and a team of researchers are working to collect data on what kinds of foods Emiratis consume, where they eat, and how the food has been cooked.

Those data, along with statistics about weight, height, and physical activity levels, could help get the Emirati diet back on track, he says.

—Margarite Nathe

People say science can’t explain how a bumblebee can fly, or how a moth with no rudder can turn.

That’s about to change.

ED YOO

By Susan Hardy A HUMMINGBIRD TURNS and zips away in an instant when startled. A bat dives at its prey. A tiny fly zigzags through the air so quickly that a human can’t catch it.

Birds and bugs make these maneuvers seem effortless, but flying with that degree of precision is harder than it looks. “A moth doesn’t have a tail to use as a rudder,” Ty Hedrick says.

“But we can’t design a little airplane, even with a rudder, that has the stability and maneuverability of an insect.” For the past year, Hedrick and his lab have been working on understanding just one type of maneuver: how animals use their wings to turn around when they’re upright in the air.

Sounds simple enough—but it’s taken a lot of physics just to get flight research off the ground. endeavors 21

IN HEDRICK’S LAB, a hawkmoth

hovers in front of a vial of sugar water, its wings beating rapidly like a hummingbird’s.

A little more than a decade ago, Hedrick explains, scientists had only a general understanding of the physics behind how moths and many other creatures stay aloft.

As an undergraduate biology student, Hedrick worked with birds, raising (read: getting bitten by) Canada Geese and training starlings to fly in experiments. He didn’t get hooked on animal-flight research then; after graduation, he went to work as a software engineer for two years. He didn’t know that in the late 1990s, while he was taking

his break from birds, scientists were making key discoveries in the field he’d be coming back to soon.

At that time, when scientists wanted to study animal flight they’d usually use a wind tunnel: a space where they can learn about flight mechanics under controlled wind conditions. In a wind tunnel, sensors attached to a stationary wing—of a bird or an airplane, for example—measure how much the wind pushes on the wing and how much the wing pushes back.

Some animals, including most birds, pass the wind-tunnel test: their wings can keep them aloft without flapping. “If you JASON SMITH

do that with a bumblebee, it turns out that the amount of force isn’t nearly enough to support the weight of the bee,” Hedrick says.

That’s how that rumor got started that science can’t explain how bumblebees fly. Other insects, as well as hummingbirds, also flunk the wind tunnel test.

Scientists knew these animals got their ability to fly from something about the aerodynamics of flapping. The trick was to find a way to study the creatures’ small, fast-moving wings. One research group built a large moth wing and stuck it on a propeller, simulating part of the figure-8 path of a flapping insect wing. Observing this sloweddown model, the scientists could figure out how flapping wings generate enough force to resist gravity.

“It turns out that insect wings are always operating at an angle of attack that would be stalled if they were in a wind tunnel,” Hedrick says. A stall happens when a fixed wing is tilted too high for air to move over the leading edge of the wing. “With a flapping wing, the air flow that would otherwise stall the wing spins up to the tip instead, generating some lift.”

Around the same time as this discovery, another group of scientists made a huge model of a fruit-fly wing and flapped it in a vat of mineral oil. The resistance of the oil increased the force on the wing, making it act like a smaller-scale wing. This group found that at the turnaround point, the wings generate some additional lift.

THE NEW STUDIES CAUSED

Ty Hedrick and one of his research subjects.

22 endeavors

a revolution in the field, Hedrick says. Scientists could now write simpler mathematical models to explain the forces involved in all kinds of animal flight. They could create computerized simulations of flapping wings.

And they could start to study how animals do tricks that machines can’t match.

Hedrick went to grad school at Harvard not knowing what area of biology he wanted to study. But he ended up in the lab of a flight researcher who needed help learning to use an enormous wind tunnel. Hedrick figured out how to collect data in the tunnel, combining images from multiple video cameras, arranging the lighting, and training birds to fly against the wind. (That was harder than expected. Ducks flew straight to the top of the tunnel, and pigeons just shuffled around.

He finally settled on cockatiels, because they seemed to enjoy flying in the tunnel.)

TY HEDRICK

Following grad school and a postdoc spent building computational models of flappingflight control, Hedrick took a job at UNC, where he left wind tunnels and birds behind to start working with hawkmoths. “They’re pretty stupid,” he says. “But they’re easy to store and they don’t bite.” The hawkmoth is also good for studying general flight principles because its size is somewhere in between that of average insects and birds.

Hedrick’s new setup is a transparent box holding a large-bodied moth, Manduca sexta.

Outside the box, video cameras that cost tens of thousands of dollars each capture the moth’s movements at a thousand frames per second. The cameras can capture up to five thousand frames per second to record tiny, fast-flapping creatures such as fruit flies.

Flight researchers have been recording and analyzing films of animals for decades, Hedrick explains, but the new high-speed digital cameras have allowed them to get more data much more quickly. “It used to be you’d shoot and hope for the best, and find out two weeks later when your film came back whether you’d gotten it right,” he says. A grad student might have written an entire dissertation analyzing just a few good sequences of film. Now, researchers take digital footage that they can play back right away and redo if necessary.

WHEN HE CAME TO UNC

in 2007, Hedrick started studying films of hawkmoths making yaw turns—one-hundred-eighty-degree turns executed while the body is vertical in the air. By this time, he was starting to think that these yaw turns might be similar in all flying animals, from the littlest insects to the largest birds, regardless of factors such as wing-to-body-size ratio.

He started comparing published data on the physics of turns in different animals. Hedrick writes his own software for analyzing flight videos and distributes it to other researchers. In return, some of them let him use data they’ve collected on birds and bats.

When he ran the numbers, Hedrick found something surprising: from the fruit fly to the Rose-breasted Cockatoo, flying animals don’t need to use active deceleration to come out of a turn.

“Usually we expect things—at least, things that aren’t really small—to operate in a Newtonian world,” Hedrick says. “So if I push off with my foot and spin my chair, I put my other foot down and I stop. We

A hawk moth beats its wings dozens of times per second to stay in the air as it feeds.

expect that when things turn they’re going to keep turning unless they do something to stop.”

One study had showed that this rule might not apply to insects as small as fruit flies.

But scientists thought that larger insects and birds would have to flap their wings asymmetrically in order to come out of a yaw turn. Hedrick discovered that when any flying animal makes this kind of turn, the difference in velocity between the animal’s inside and outside wings creates friction, decelerating the turn without asymmetric flapping or any other special effort. The finding was unexpected enough to earn it a place in the journal Science.

Hedrick’s next move is to study pitch— how flying animals rotate their bodies up and down. But what he really wants to do is to get flight studies out of the lab and into the wild. Thirty-thousand-dollar cameras are great, he says, but only when you have time and electricity. A four-second recording uses four gigabytes of storage and takes about half an hour to save onto a memory chip. Even powerful batteries can’t keep up with that kind of energy demand for long, so high-speed cameras haven’t been used much to film animals in the wild.

Hedrick pulls out a box holding a data

chip about a centimeter across. The chip is light enough to attach to a hawkmoth, and it records data on how the insect’s muscles move during flight. But it has power limitations much like a camera’s. “A hawkmoth can carry the chip, but it can’t carry a battery to run it for more than twenty minutes—and that’s pushing it to the limit,” Hedrick says.

But he estimates that within five years someone will design a recording system efficient enough that researchers can glue it onto a bird or moth to create data about how the animal accelerates, turns, and moves through its environment.

Researchers could then release an animal outdoors and see the differences between how it moves in the artificial setting of the laboratory and what it does voluntarily in the wild. And it would bring Hedrick much closer to understanding the effortlesslooking maneuvers that attracted him to flight research in the first place.

“I study this,” he says, “because it’s beautiful and interesting.” e Ty Hedrick, an assistant professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, was lead author of the study that appeared in the April 10, 2009, issue of Science. Funding came from the National Science Foundation. endeavors 23

W

When Darin Waters was growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, people told him that George Vanderbilt forced blacks off their land to create the Biltmore Estate—some 120,000 acres and a huge chateau in the middle of Appalachia. Waters was told that African Americans had owned most of what became Vanderbilt’s property. Waters also heard that so few blacks had lived in western North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century that their contributions to society were minimal.

“This is what we all heard growing up,” Waters says.

“And none of this is true.”

In fact, on the corner of Eagle and Market Streets in downtown Asheville there’s a large historic building that houses the Young Men’s Institute (YMI), which has been an educational, recreational, and cultural refuge for African Americans since 1893.

And it probably would never have existed, Waters says, had black leaders and Vanderbilt not worked together.

24 endeavors

Historian Darin Waters in the archives at the Biltmore Estate. Photo by Renato Rotolo.

More than Biltmore

by Mark Derewicz

endeavors 25

O

On his first day

researching the YMI at the Biltmore Estate, Waters mentioned to the archivist that his great-great-grandfather had probably been a freed slave who moved from South Carolina to Asheville in 1850. Waters’ greatgrandfather, Louis Waters, had owned an apple orchard in Edneyville. But that’s about all he knew.

For the heck of it, the archivist did a quick database search for Louis Waters. She got three hits—handwritten letters from the 1890s that Louis Waters sent to Charles McNamee, Biltmore’s manager. Turns out, Waters’ great-grandfather had a business and hauled debris off the estate during construction of the Biltmore House. In one letter, Louis asked for his pay in advance so he could buy a team of horses. In another he asked McNamee to renew his contract.

“I was shocked,” Waters says. “Not only was my great-grandfather literate, but he was a businessman, a contractor with a crew, and he was working for one of the richest men in the world. And this is probably how he earned the money to buy the land for that apple orchard, which the Waters family still owns.”

It was an inspiring first day for Waters, a historian and UNC doctoral student. And though he didn’t discover anything else about his family, Waters did eventually find—over the course of six months—what he was looking for.

Vanderbilt did buy some land from black families, but not nearly as much as he purchased from whites such as the prominent Patton family. And blacks were not cajoled to sell out to Vanderbilt. “The letters from the black leaders show it was a mutual agreement,” Waters says. “Vanderbilt paid the black community of Shiloh to move and

Darin Waters’ great-grandfather Louis Waters was married to Emer Hall Waters. In 1896, in a letter to Charles McNamee, the Biltmore Estate manager, Louis Waters wrote, “Mr. McNamee will you pleas do me a favor. Mr. Ed Blight wants to sell his teem and I and him was talking about it and I thought I would see if I could get you to buy it for me and employ the teem on the estate until it is paid for, if you pleas. And pleas don’t think no ways a hard of me for writing to you. For you is the only gentleman I know of that will do a colored person a favor. It is a good teem and the price is $250. And a blidged to you.” Photo by Jason Smith.

agreed to build the infrastructure for that new location—a new church, for instance— and the community grew from there. That’s where I was raised; that’s where my brother still lives.”

Then Waters found a letter that Charles McNamee had sent to the Asheville CitizenTimes about how the Young Men’s Institute began. “The traditional story is that Vanderbilt wanted to build the YMI for black workers on his estate,” Waters says. And this became the common refrain passed down throughout the twentieth century.

“But Charles McNamee clearly states that the YMI was not Vanderbilt’s idea. It was the black community’s.”

Edward Stephens, who led Asheville’s black public school system, forged a relationship with Vanderbilt and urged him to invest in the YMI, Waters says. Vanderbilt agreed to loan thirteen thousand dollars to black leaders in 1892. He hired architect Richard Sharp Smith, a protégé of Richard Morris Hunt, who had designed the Biltmore House. The same black craftsmen who had constructed Biltmore also built the YMI. Through a trusteeship, Vanderbilt and McNamee oversaw the institute for thirteen

In 1906, Vanderbilt offered the YMI building outright to the black community for ten thousand dollars. “I couldn’t find any evidence that they raised that much money,” Waters says. “But they raised six thousand.” And Vanderbilt accepted it.

26 endeavors

years, Waters says, but the black community had exclusive control of its membership and activities, which included classes for children and night school for adults; Stephens wrote the curricula for them. The YMI had a library, gymnasium, meeting space, and reading rooms. Its leaders invited black singers. It hosted concerts and lectures. Black churches that didn’t have their own buildings met at the YMI. Women had an auxiliary program there. And from the beginning, it was for the entire black community, not just Vanderbilt’s workers.

The institute leased spaces on the ground floor for black-owned businesses—a pharmacy, a restaurant, a dentist’s office, and a doctor’s office. “The YMI became the hub for Asheville’s black business district,” Waters says.

In 1906, Vanderbilt offered the building outright to the black community for ten thousand dollars. “I couldn’t find any evidence that they raised that much money,” Waters says. “But they raised six thousand.”

And Vanderbilt accepted it.

In McNamee’s letter to the Citizen-Times, he says that Vanderbilt’s investment was a business transaction, not a gift. But records in Biltmore’s archives show that Vanderbilt contributed close to thirty-two thousand dollars over those thirteen years—nearly one million dollars in today’s currency. Vanderbilt paid for a kindergarten program for black boys and girls. He paid for the building’s upkeep and the salary for the YMI’s general secretary.

“This organization was unique because it was based on the YMCA, and Vanderbilt could have made it a YMCA,” Waters says.

“But he clearly wanted the African American community to have exclusive control.”

And this decision allowed the YMI to hire several prominent leaders after Edward Stephens, including John Love, an Asheville native who went on to teach in the public schools of Washington, D.C. William S. Trent, the YMI general secretary in 1906, became president of Livingstone College.

Today’s YMI doesn’t have consistent membership records from back then, Waters says, but he did find that Alfred Manley, one of Spelman College’s more successful presidents, had been a member.

“I didn’t know any of these people before I started this research,” Waters says, “or what they contributed to society.”

Waters’ findings fit nicely into his dissertation. They also served as the basis for a book he’s writing—his first project for a nonprofit he started called the Institute for Historical Research and Education, which tells the stories of little-known organizations and people. Waters will also help the YMI create exhibits to tell its story.

One reason why he chose the YMI as his institute’s first project is that its story flies in the face of what historians previously reported—that Southern blacks at the turn of the twentieth century had little say or influence over their daily lives. “When you

study Asheville you see this bustling town in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains with an African American community that is not isolated from the rest of the town,” Waters says. “They’re actively engaged in what’s happening there, so much so that they’re coming up with their own ideas about what they want to do.”

Back at Biltmore’s

archives, Waters discovered more about Vanderbilt’s philanthropy, including how he helped individuals such as Harvey Higgins, a young Biltmore butler who dreamed of becoming a doctor. Vanderbilt paid for Higgins’ tuition, books, and travel costs for attending Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. Then Vanderbilt covered costs when Higgins attended medical school at Shaw University and saw to it that Higgins would do his residency in New York. Higgins eventually became a prominent doctor in Providence, Rhode Island.

“What I find interesting is that, according to historians, white philanthropists focused a lot of their money on southern Appalachia after Reconstruction because they thought there weren’t many African Americans there,” Waters says. “But in Asheville, you have two very prominent white philanthropists— Vanderbilt and George Pack—supporting African American initiatives.”

Darin Waters is writing the history of the YMI Cultural Center, which has offered educational programs and other services for African Americans in downtown Asheville since 1893. Photos by Mark Derewicz.

Waters says that, in some ways, such efforts to engage the black community could be boiled down to appeasement to keep things calm for northern tourists who began coming to Asheville in droves when the railroad was built. But he also says that the black community, which was small and fairly easy to ignore, took full advantage of the appeasement. Still, Waters is convinced that the black community and white philanthropists, including Asheville’s own Patton family, worked together for the betterment of Asheville despite threats from some white folks.

Waters found a letter from Edward Stephens, who, along with a white teacher, had received an anonymous written threat on his life. Stephens, before the YMI was built, forwarded the note in a letter to Charles McNamee, who responded by saying that he and Vanderbilt knew how difficult things were for blacks, but that in time, they hoped, race relations would improve. Waters says that Vanderbilt’s decision to fund the YMI may have been an effort to improve race relations.

“Some historians might argue that there’s a degree of paternalism in all this philanthropy, and I would probably say, yeah, there was,” Waters says. “But Vanderbilt is interesting to me because he did all this without any fanfare. Many other people—Carnegie, Rockefeller—helped others and supported different things. But the only thing most people know about Vanderbilt is that house he built in the mountains.” e Darin Waters is a doctoral student in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences, and is executive director of the Institute for Historical Research and Education. In 2008, Governor Mike Easley appointed Waters to the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which is charged with advising and assisting the state’s secretary of cultural resources in the preservation, interpretation, and promotion of African American history, arts, and culture. Waters received funding for his research from the Kimmel Foundation in Asheville and from Thomas Klingenstein of New York City. endeavors 27

Fidel Castro, June 1961, gloating to the press two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Photo by Alan Oxley/Getty Images.

the stubborn persistence of

Cuba

For decades, the United States tried to squeeze Cuba and Castro into submission. Now what? Here are three stories about Cuba’s past, President John F. Kennedy thought long and hard about the Bay of Pigs Invasion, but did he have all the facts?

Photo by Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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present, and future.

By Mark Derewicz

some serious shenanigans

P

aging through endless archives in Washington, D.C. , Lars Schoultz came upon a curious memo from 1962: a list that the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara suggesting ways to lure Cuba into a war.

“Sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida,” the memo read.

Or, fake an attack on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. “Lob mortar shells from outside the base.”

Or, “Demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.” The Pentagon suggested, “The passengers could be a group of college students.”

“When I read this,” Schoultz says, “I broke out into such laughter that a couple people around me asked what I had found.” They all had a good chuckle. Schoultz says that the Pentagon would likely have shot down a drone airplane and then leaked misinformation about college students being on board.

“But when I tell my students about this, they don’t think it’s the least bit funny.”

Schoultz found all kinds of mind-boggling memos, candid phone recordings, and wacky schemes while he was researching his latest book, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, a history of U.S. policy toward our onetime ally. There was Operation Dirty Trick, which would “provide irrevocable proof” that if NASA’s manned Mercury mission failed, Cuban communists would be to blame. There was the written record of Fidel Castro’s curse-laden outburst when he heard that the Soviet Union had caved to the United States to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And then there was former CIA director Allen Dulles’s obscure, unpublished memoir, a document Schoultz found in the most unlikely fashion and which could change the way historians view the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Schoultz has been following U.S. policy toward Cuba since the early 1960s. He wrote three other books before he published Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in 1998.

The book was a huge undertaking, but one he enjoyed so thoroughly that he immedi-

ately dove into another exhaustive project: detailing every U.S. policy discussion, decision, and action regarding Cuba from the mid-1940s on. “No one’s ever done that,” Schoultz says. “Not that my book is better than anything else; there just isn’t anything else.”

In 1999, the National Humanities Center awarded him a fellowship to get started. An early riser, he’d arrive each day around dawn at the center’s Research Triangle Park headquarters, and spend the next twelve hours in the books or at the microfilm reader, making notes on three-by-five note cards.

“I just took notes from every document and read everything that had ever been written, including a lot of partial histories of U.S. policy toward revolutionary Cuba,” he says.

Each summer he visited a different presidential library, and for ten years he collected material from every archive he could find.

At the Library of Congress he found a letter from 1906 that inspired his book title.

President Theodore Roosevelt, frustrated that Cuban rebels were about to sack the U.S.-backed Cuban government, confided to a friend: “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth.”

That was not the president’s official response, Schoultz says. Roosevelt instead sent Secretary of War Howard Taft and nine warships to Cuba to quell the rebellion and work out a deal.

Roosevelt was not alone in his vitriol toward Cuba. Schoultz found many similar statements, including one revealed in Nancy Reagan’s memoir.

According to the memoir, Secretary of State Alexander Haig was meeting with President Reagan about Cuba’s support for rebel guerrillas in Central America when Haig, a former general, blurted out, “You just give me the word and I’ll turn that [expletive] island into a parking lot.”

How did Nancy Reagan know of such a statement? “She went to a lot of Reagan’s meetings,” Schoultz says. “She didn’t sit at the table or say anything but she was in the room.”

President Reagan, of course, didn’t turn Cuba into a parking lot. But as Schoultz’s book shows, the U.S. policy for fifty years has been to overthrow Cuba or squeeze it into submission—most aggressively in April of 1961 when President Kennedy ordered

the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a scheme that the CIA cooked up during the Eisenhower administration.

According to the common understanding of events, the CIA convinced Kennedy and his advisors that most Cubans were fed up with Castro and wouldn’t put up a fight against two thousand U.S.-trained Cuban exiles. The CIA also believed that many soldiers in Castro’s army would defect when they realized that the fight to dethrone Castro was on.

“This is what I was prepared to see in the archives,” Schoultz says. And he did find a lot to support the idea that the invasion’s success depended on help from defections in Castro’s army.

MARK DEREWICZ

Lars Schoultz dug up some wacky schemes and a new wrinkle on the Bay of Pigs.

“But then I read an article by Lucien Vandenbroucke,” Schoultz says.

As a junior professor at Tufts University in the 1970s, Vandenbroucke had written an article using material that Schoultz had never seen: unpublished memoir notes from Allen Dulles, CIA director during the endeavors 29

Bay of Pigs Invasion. Schoultz had already researched the Dulles papers at the Seeley Mudd Manuscripts Library at Princeton but never saw the notes Vandenbroucke had cited. Schoultz returned to the library, but the archivist there couldn’t find the documents.

Schoultz’s only recourse was to track down Lucien Vandenbroucke, who was no longer at Tufts. In fact, it seemed that he had dropped off the face of the earth.

“Fortunately, he had an uncommon last name, and so I called all the Vandenbrouckes I could find, searching for a relative,” Schoultz says. “And wouldn’t you know it, I found his brother.”

As it turned out, Lucien Vandenbroucke had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was spending the rest of his days on a macrobiotic diet in Sudan. Schoultz explained the Princeton mix-up to the brother, who said he’d contact Vandenbroucke, though he couldn’t promise anything. Two and a half months later, Vandenbroucke’s photocopies of the missing Dulles papers—sixty pages— arrived at Schoultz’s home, along with the original library form that Vandenbroucke had filled out so that the Seeley Mudd archivist would make photocopies. Princeton’s tag line was on each page.

Schoultz, ecstatic, dropped everything and began deciphering Dulles’s sloppy handwriting. On the fourth page, Schoultz found an extraordinary passage about how the CIA

knew that there were several factors on the ground in Cuba that could cause the invasion to fail. But Dulles wrote that the CIA did not want to raise these issues with the White House for fear that the President would cancel the invasion. The agency thought it had a trump card.

Dulles wrote: “[We] felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized, rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”

I

n other words, if Castro’s forces had the U.S.-trained Cuban exiles on the run— which is what wound up happening— then Kennedy would send in the Marines.

But the president decided not to.

“The Marines had been issued live ammunition,” Schoultz says. “They were on a carrier just offshore. People have since wondered: if Marines were given live ammunition and were just waiting to be airlifted onto the beach, then there must have been some modest contingency planning. Someone must have thought this through.”

Until now, historians had only speculated that the CIA had a bait-and-switch plan for using U.S. troops on Cuban soil.

“Well,” Schoultz says, “these Dulles papers confirm it.”

Years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Ken-

nedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said at an academic conference that Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director in charge of planning the invasion, was just the kind of guy who would go out on a limb and then hope someone would catch him if it were sawed off.

“There have been comments like these over the years,” Schoultz says. “You can go to an academic conference and say anything off the top of your head. But Dulles was a principal. He was standing next to Kennedy saying, ‘This is what you should do, Mr. President.’”

The Dulles revelations changed the way Schoultz wrote his chapter on one of the most infamous incidents in U.S. foreign policy—“a perfect failure,” Kennedy admitted.

Schoultz details many things that led to the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The CIA and the military had foreseen many of them.

But with the Dulles papers, Schoultz gives more weight to a theory that’s been tough to stomach—that the CIA never meant for the Bay of Pigs plan to succeed.

“At some point in the plan’s evolution,” he says, “the invasion became little more than bait designed to lure Kennedy into battle and end the Cuban Revolution.” e The CIA, it turned out, did screw up. Just not the way that everyone had suspected.

Lars Schoultz is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences.

ED CLARK/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

In the papers of Allen Dulles (left), CIA director during the Bay of Pigs, Schoultz found traces of a scheme to push Kennedy toward war.

30 endeavors

Cuba is our neighbor. It is also a ripe fruit and a bicycle. Cuba is a child, a woman, a damsel in distress, a beautiful mistress. Cuba is a disease, a virus, cancer.

Historian Louis Pérez has documented hundreds of such metaphors that U.S. policymakers and politicians have used. And for him, these comparisons are not mere oversimplifications, but dangerous linguistic traps.

Pérez says, “If you can persuade people that Cuba is a damsel in distress, then you know what you have to do: save her.”

In 2003, curious whether the Cuba-as-metaphor phenomenon had seeped into popular culture, Pérez searched travel books, tour guides, fiction, song lyrics, newspapers, and magazines.

“I spent more hours than I care to admit turning the microfilm reader, looking for editorial cartoons,” Pérez says. He found many examples of Cubans depicted as crying, savage babies being led aright by Uncle Sam. In 2008, Pérez published his book, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos.

The metaphor that portrays Cuba as a child is perhaps the most powerful. Used often during the early twentieth century, its meaning was clear: the United States had to be the parent. And how could a responsible parent hand over the reins of self-government to children? The result of this thinking was the Platt Amendment, which essentially allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it felt like it.

“But the Cuban leaders were educated men,” Pérez says. “Were the founding fathers of the United States children because they had never self-governed?”

In 1960, a year after anti-U.S. dictator Fidel Castro came to power, Cuba turned into a virus. Only two years earlier it had been a ripe fruit or a mistress.

“A virus can be cured,” Pérez says. It might even go away on its own. The Eisenhower administration pursued a wait-and-see policy toward Cuba. But, Pérez says, later that year and into the Kennedy era, when Castro would not bend to the will of the United States and turned to the Soviet Union, Cuba became a cancer that had to be contained or excised. (To wit, the Bay of Pigs or Operation Mongoose.)

Cuba might be a country with a leader you loathe and an oppressive government, Pérez says. “But it’s not cancer.” So don’t call it that.

“If you accept the metaphor,” Pérez says, “if you don’t challenge it, then you are hopelessly caught up in the premise. It’s the premise that has to be confronted.”

—Mark Derewicz Louis Pérez is the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

Cuba as we’ve spun it

“Now, Little Man, I’ll See What I Can Do for You.” A depiction of the passage of the Joint Resolution of Congress for war, from the New York Journal, April 20, 1898.

endeavors 31

MIGUEL VINAS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Baby steps or a new start?

I

n 1962, President John F. Kennedy placed an embargo on Cuba to contain communism and suffocate Cuba’s economy. The intended result: Cubans would suffer on a daily basis and would toss Fidel Castro out of power.

It didn’t work.

Today, many Cuban American hardliners—even those who liken Castro to Hitler—think that the time has come for a thaw in relations.

Endeavors asked historian Louis Pérez and political scientist Lars Schoultz how they would advise President Barack Obama on Cuba. Both agree that the United States should engage the island nation, not isolate it. And the best way to engage is to end the embargo.

“There are two schools of thought about how to do this,” says Pérez, an expert in Cuban history and culture. “One says: do things incrementally.”

Obama may subscribe to this way of thinking. In April 2009 he lifted travel restrictions for Cuban Americans who have family members in Cuba, and he allowed them to send as much money as they want to relatives in Cuba. That was an easy first step, Pérez says.

The president could take more incremental steps. He could promote more academic and cultural exchanges between the countries, as President Clinton did. “He could take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism,” Pérez says. “He could then allow any American to travel to Cuba.”

Obama could even make a bold speech announcing that the United States is ready to reconcile with Cuba, as it did with Libya, China, and Vietnam. “He could shut down Radio Martí, the anti-Castro, U.S.government-run radio station,” Pérez says.

And the president could then loosen trade restrictions.

But Pérez subscribes to the second school of thought: do all these things at the same time.

“Get it over with,” he says. “The way 32 endeavors

DEBORAH M. WEISSMAN

Top: A group of Americantrained Cuban counter-revolutionaries, members of Assault Brigade 2506, after their capture in the Bay of Pigs, April, 1961.

Left: Historian Louis Pérez believes the United States government should stop using illinformed metaphors to describe Cuba and start ending an embargo that has proved fruitless for both nations for almost fifty years.

Nixon went to China. He got on a plane and did it. If Obama makes changes in increments, then every step of the way he’ll meet resistance. And every step of the way, he’ll ask himself, ‘Do I want to do more of this?’”

S

choultz agrees and offers another reason for the all-at-once approach.

“Cubans know the history of U.S. domination, and we have to assume that some Cubans think it’s not in their country’s best interest to have the U.S. friendly,” Schoultz says. If the United States lifted only part of the embargo, these Cubans would have time to mobilize and thwart efforts at

normalizing relations. This appears to have happened in the past, Schoultz says, most vividly during President Carter’s administration.

So, what will Obama do?

Not much, Schoultz thinks. Obama appointed very smart but extremely cautious people to the state department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, he says. “You can’t be cautious and end the embargo.

There are too many variables—what will Castro do? Will south Florida protest?

There are so many imponderables and every one of them leads a cautious person to say, ‘Why spend my time doing this?’”

—Mark Derewicz

PHOTO CREDIT TO COME

Histoplasmosis can be confined to the lungs, or it can cause a fatal systemic infection. Histoplasma are a kind of fungus, but once inside a person’s body, the fungus begins to grow as a yeast. Histoplasma image by CDC/Libero Ajello.

Micrograph of the histoplasma fungus (green)

The Pharaoh’s Curse

Regal retaliation or a fungus common as dirt?

By Jessica McCann endeavors 33

In 1922, a team lead by Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. A few months later, one of the men died of a fever. When other members of the team also died, people blamed a curse.

But some scientists, including microbiologist Bill Goldman, suspect that the real cause was histoplasmosis.

Histoplasma capsulatum, a fungus, lives in the ground. In parts of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, where the soil is loaded with histoplasma, nearly 90 percent of residents test positive for having been infected—meaning that at some point they’ve breathed in the germ.

Bill Goldman knows all about it. “I grew up in St. Louis and on my chest x-ray it looks like I’ve had tuberculosis, but it was really histoplasmosis,” he says. It’s common for histoplasmosis to be mistaken for TB, a cold, or the flu. It can cause coughing, fatigue, and fever, just like lots of other respiratory diseases, so most people never even know that they’ve had it.

Caption to come

This chest x-ray, taken in 1963 at Lea General Hospital in Hobbs, New Mexico, shows acute pulmonary 34 endeavors histoplasmosis caused by H. capsulatum in an adult male. Image by CDC/M. Renz.

Histoplasma are a special kind of fungus: they’re dimorphic, meaning that they can grow in two forms. In the soil, histoplasma grow like mold. When the soil is dug up and disturbed, it releases the mold into the air. If inhaled, the histoplasma start growing like yeast, replicating rapidly in the lungs.

Histoplasma are special for another reason. While most fungi only cause disease in people with weakened immune systems, this fungus makes perfectly healthy hosts sick. In 1997 a histoplasma infection landed Bob Dylan in the hospital for weeks. He was so sick that Newsweek ran two cover stories about his illness. The first was titled “Death Scare,” and the second, “Dylan Lives.”

Johnny Cash even referenced the disease in his song “Beans for Breakfast.”

But Dylan and Cash and the Pharaoh’s curse didn’t get Goldman into studying histoplasma. It was because there are about 250,000 cases of histoplasmosis in the United States every year, and, as Goldman explains, it’s one of the most widespread respiratory fungal diseases in the world.

Good at hiding One of the reasons histoplasma are so successful is their ability to hide. “We wrote an article about histoplasma called ‘Fungal Stealth Technology,’” Goldman says. “The cover art had fungi dressed up as ninjas, sneaking up on cells.” Once inhaled by a person, the fungi find the perfect hiding place: inside immune cells in the lung.

These cells, called macrophages, are normally our first line of defense against bacterial and fungal invaders. Macrophages destroy germs by digesting them into bits recognizable to the rest of the immune system. But histoplasma can take control of the weapons that macrophages use against them. What’s more, histoplasma can hide in cells for decades after the infection, living inside the macrophage in little bags made of cell membrane. “Later, even years later, they can reactivate and make you sick,” Goldman says.

Goldman and his lab wanted to find out what makes histoplasma so good at being bad. They knew that mold histoplasma use one set of genes to survive in the soil, and another to survive as yeast in human cells. In the late 1990s, Goldman’s team discovered a small calcium-binding protein (CBP) that was made only by the yeast form of histoplasma. And the yeast made a lot of this

Bill Goldman and Bob Dylan have at least one thing in common: lungs scarred by infection from histoplasma. Photo by Jason Smith.

protein—in fact, the CBP gene is one of the most active genes in the whole germ.

Goldman recognized that the histoplasma were expending lots of energy to make and release whopping amounts of this protein, so he figured that CBP must be important for the yeast to survive and spread in the host. He was right. When his lab members disrupted the gene for CBP in histoplasma, the yeast could no longer cause disease.

But what CBP did, other than pick up calcium, remained a mystery. Scientists usually get an idea of what a gene or protein is up to by comparing its sequence to other known genes and proteins in a huge database maintained by the National Institutes of Health.

But the CBP sequence was unique.

Goldman and his lab decided that what they really needed was a picture of CBP. They used a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance. When certain types of molecules are exposed to magnetic fields,

they give off an energy signature that can be translated into a visual image of the molecule. The technique allows scientists to see what a protein structure looks like. And form often dictates function.

When they compared the 3-D structure of CBP to the published structures of other proteins, they were amazed to discover CBP looked just like saposin B, a protein made in the human body. “In terms of the structure, the size, the detail, and how the bonds are formed, it was nearly identical,” Goldman says.

But what is saposin B? In mammals, it helps maintain cell membranes such as the ones that form hiding places for histoplasma inside macrophages. But the protein also helps the immune system recognize bits of germs that are in places where they don’t belong.

Goldman and his team still don’t fully understand what CBP is doing, but they

now have some hypotheses to test. One idea is that histoplasma make so much CBP that the protein outnumbers naturally occurring saposin B in the cell. By taking over for the human protein, CBP might interfere with how the infected macrophages alert the rest of the immune system, allowing the fungus to remain undetected. So what now? Goldman says they’ll keep digging.

“There’s a lot more we don’t know about the organism and what it has to do to make people sick,” he says. “We’ve found a very good set of clues, and a good set of mysteries.” e In August 2009, Jessica McCann received a doctorate in Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine.

Bill Goldman is chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine. His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. endeavors 35

JASON SMITH

Learning to bust drugresistant bugs

Bacteria evolve fast, but Scott Singleton thinks that science can head them off at the pass.

By Beth Mole

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Pharmaceutical companies are coming up with more drugs to

treat erectile dysfunction than to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. “You can tell where the money is,” Scott Singleton says. The companies don’t think that antibiotics are a good investment, he says, because by the time they get a new antibiotic to the market and start paying off the high costs of research and development, bacteria might once again be a step ahead of the drugs.

Singleton and his lab are doing basic research on bacterial drug resistance and antibiotics, and their work could lead to a new drug that doesn’t need to pay off its costs. “We’re lucky,” Singleton says. “Our technology is being developed on NIHfunded grants.”

The real crux of the antibiotic-resistance problem is that we don’t know how bacteria become resistant. Scientists have worked out what bacteria do to beat drugs, but how they evolved to do those things in the first place and what drives that evolution is still a bit of a mystery. “Those mechanisms didn’t just arrive from aliens—they came from somewhere,” Singleton says. “So it occurred to us that if you could control those mechanisms you could slow down the rate at which bacteria evolve resistance.”

He and his lab work on an enzyme called RecA that’s in nearly all bacteria. RecA maintains and repairs a bacterium’s DNA. The closer Singleton looked into RecA, the more roles he saw it playing. It’s like an airline employee who does every job in the airport, he says. “You go there and a person takes your ticket. Then you see the same person take your luggage out to the plane, and pretty soon he’s flying the plane. RecA is like that,” Singleton says.

In most bacteria, RecA moni-

tors single-stranded DNA, which usually exists only for brief moments, such as when the DNA is replicating, before it goes back to its double-helix structure. But if a bacterial cell encounters harsh drugs or UV radiation, for example, its DNA can be damaged and break apart. RecA assesses the damage and patches the broken DNA by recombining other pieces of DNA to fill in gaps. If too much damage has occurred, RecA triggers an emergency system that generates new DNA to fill large gaps with speed, but not accuracy.

This sloppy DNA repair and recombining of fragments could allow bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics. “We know that if we genetically engineer the bacteria to be without RecA, they’re much more sensitive to antibiotics,” Singleton says.

On top of that, scientists have also found that antibiotics cause DNA damage. Even though an antibiotic may do its work outside the bacterial cell, the drug causes changes inside the bacteria that lead to bacterial DNA damage. “That’s why RecA helps them

survive,” Singleton says. When antibiotics attack, RecA is turned on, and it increases the mutation rate. More mutations might mean more resistance.

So Singleton did what a lot of drug companies would have done: he set up a screen for small molecules that could inhibit RecA. “I think we’ve screened about sixty-five thousand molecules,” Singleton says. The lab identified hundreds of RecA inhibitors.

“Finding the inhibitor is just the first step.

Then you have to figure out how it works,” Singleton says. Some of the inhibitors may completely shut down RecA, while others only affect one of RecA’s jobs. And inhibiting each of RecA’s jobs will give Singleton clues about what RecA is doing and which jobs are most important. “Is it okay if nobody takes your ticket at the airport?” he asks.

To answer those questions, Singleton and his lab are doing biological and genetic experiments. “For us that was the challenge, because we’re chemists,” he laughs.

In the meantime, he’s working closely with UNC’s Office of Technology Development to design a licensing agreement to develop the findings into a new drug.

The plan is to continue generating data on these small inhibitors, and maybe in the next twelve to eighteen months the project will have a confident investor. There is a catch, though—a part of the licensing Singleton is adamant about. “We carved out a piece of the licensing that will cover developing countries,” he explains. “The idea is simple— no pharmaceutical product manufactured in the United States will be sold for a profit in those places. Of all the things we sort of wrangled over, that was not one.

“The evolution of antibiotic resistance is making antibiotics useless and the places where that’s felt the hardest are developing countries,” Singleton says. In the United States it’s relatively rare to come across an infection that’s resistant to all the drugs in our arsenal, but in developing countries that’s not the case. “In a developing country you might only have access to a very limited number of drugs,” he says.

This is the kind of work that Singleton hoped he’d end up doing: helping people.

“I always thought I’d be a doctor. My dad’s a doctor,” he says. “I sort of jumped all the way to pure, basic chemical research and I’ve been slowly moving back. I think a lot of my friends are still shocked that I’m interested in anything practical.”

Singleton says that his lab does research that won’t get done in the private sector.

“It’s not the kind of thing a pharmaceutical company would focus on if it had to make a hundred million dollars next year selling something,” he says. “So, I think it’s exactly the kind of thing we should be focused on.” e Beth Mole is a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine.

Scott Singleton is an associate professor of medicinal chemistry and natural products in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Funding for his work came from the National Institutes of Health.

The Office of Technology Development (OTD) is the only UNC office authorized to execute license agreements with companies. For information on reporting inventions, contact OTD at 919-966-3929.

Lighting up the bacteria

E. coli bacteria cells (red) will fluoresce green when RecA triggers their SOS response to repair damage caused by antibiotics. Blocking RecA turns off the SOS response. From left: cells with no treatment, treatment with ciprofloxacin, and treatment with ciprofloxacin plus a RecA inhibitor. Microscopy by Tim Wigle and Jonathan Sexton.

endeavors 37

JASON SMITH (ALL)

born to run

by Scott Kelly

My pace slows as I enter the atrium of my laboratory building. The decision is always the same: elevator or stairs?

“We’re taking the stairs,” my wife says as she accelerates. I lumber behind her up to the fifth floor.

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People have always differed in how much they like to move. Mark Twain leaned toward the sedentary: “I am pushing sixty, that’s enough exercise for me.” My wife would have had an ally in Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator and philosopher: “It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.”

I don’t have a natural love of exercise, but as a physiologist I’m fully aware of the benefits of physical activity. People who engage in regular physical activity have lower rates of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, breast cancer, and depression. Yet many Americans don’t exercise regularly. What predisposes some people to exercise while others don’t?

n v

I

t sounds like a busy playground—the shuffling of a thousand little feet. The air feels sterile, a constant 72˚F, accented by fluorescent lights. This is the animalresearch facility of Theodore Garland Jr. at the University of California, Riverside. Next door, in a room lined floor-to-ceiling with cages, hundreds of exercise wheels spin as fast as mice can turn them.

Given a wheel, rodents will run. Laboratory mice are no exception, and as with humans, the amount of running that a mouse does is a trait that can be passed down from one generation to the next. For more than ten years, Garland has been giving mice access to wheels, monitoring how much they voluntarily run and breeding the mice that run the farthest. Some of Garland’s mice now run more than twelve miles a night, every night—three times more than a typical laboratory mouse. These mice are quite literally born to run.

The mice achieve their increased distances mostly by running faster, not for more

minutes each night. But these mice aren’t sprinters; they’re built more like marathon runners—lighter and leaner. And there are other differences between a runner and a typical mouse: larger hearts, more symmetrical hind limb bones (a trait often seen in the most successful race horses), and less body fat. These changes, called correlated responses, evolved in conjunction with the increased activity and are thought, in most cases, to aid the wheel running. Correlated responses are a common feature of selective breeding and, as Charles Darwin noted in On the Origin of Species: “If man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly modify unintentionally other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of correlation.”

For five years questions about these correlated responses dominated my focus. But as I completed my PhD, this research only heightened my interest in the question of why some mice and people run, while others run. endeavors 39

vF

rom sunny Southern California to Chapel Hill. In UNC’s School of Medicine, Daniel Pomp, renowned for research on animal and obesity genetics, investigates exercise, a powerful trait potentially capable of controlling and preventing obesity.

A trait is any property or characteristic of an organism. Exercise behavior, body composition, and blood type are all traits—some simple and others complex. Simple traits such as blood type are controlled by differences in single genes. Variation in complex traits, such as body composition and the predisposition to exercise, are controlled by many factors, genetic and environmental. Individual variation in complex traits can be extreme: think Homer Simpson versus Lance Armstrong. Scientists have studied complex traits in JASON SMITH

organisms ranging from humans to fruit flies, but Pomp’s experience and expertise has led him to Garland’s exercise-fiend mice.

Are these mice healthier? Do they live longer? Are they disease-resistant?

These questions dominated my conversations after arriving at UNC. Of course, there are no easy answers for questions related to health, longevity, or disease resistance, especially when comparing mice and humans. But the mice run voluntarily, aerobically, and for long distances. That was particularly important to Pomp when he contacted Garland and envisioned a population of mice he could use to discover genes underlying the predisposition to exercise.

Selective breeding over many generations tends to fix genes responsible for the chosen trait, minimizing the phenotypic differences between individuals. If a researcher keeps selecting and breeding only the mice that run the most, the population ends up dominated by exercise lovers that vary little in the amount that they choose to exercise or in the genes that control that choice.

This is great if you’re studying exercise physiology, but for mapping genes responsible for that behavior, it won’t do. At its most basic, genetic mapping is matching variation in regions of DNA with variation in a particular trait. The absence of variation in either equals a blank map. The genes that were potentially fixed in the high-runners as a product of many generations of selection must be recombined with those of a strain of average runners to produce the variation needed for mapping.

nI

These marathon mice obviously have an increased ability to exercise.

But behavioral and brain studies appear to show that they’re also more motivated to run.

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n Pomp’s lab, we were ready to see to what extent the new mice differed in the amount they ran and whether we could find regions of DNA associated with the variation. We’d completed the breeding. In order to understand the effects of exercise on weight control, we’d given each mouse an MRI before and after exercise to measure fat and lean mass.

It took the team over a year to arrive at this point, but the result was a powerful experimental tool for dissecting and understanding the genetic architecture controlling voluntary exercise. In our lab mice, voluntary exercise levels vary widely—some run as little as 1.5 miles a night, and others as much as 17.

The next step: identify in each mouse regions of DNA associated with particular traits of interest—running distance, running speed, amount of time spent running, change in body mass resulting from running. Within these regions of DNA, is there one gene with a very large effect, or many genes with small effects? Are these genes similar in humans? What does this mean for weight maintenance, weight loss, obesity?

My wife the busy bee, Scott the sloth . . . soon we may know why.

I turn off my computer, push my chair under my desk, take one look at the elevator—and promptly head for the stairs. e Scott Kelly is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics and is supported through an Interdisciplinary Obesity Training program funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health. Daniel Pomp is a professor of genetics in the School of Medicine. The National Institutes of Health is funding Pomp’s work. Theodore Garland Jr. is a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside. The National Science Foundation funds Garland’s work.

COKE WHITWORTH

in print Bill Ferris and the gutbucket Blues A new book of hard-won stories about an American music.

endeavors 41

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. By William Ferris. University of North Carolina Press, 312 pages (plus accompanying CD and DVD), $35.00.

The year was 1968,

and William Ferris was standing on the front porch of a house in Leland, Mississippi, knocking on the door. It opened after a minute and a woman peered out at him. He said, “I’m looking for James Thomas.”

“There’s no James Thomas here,” she said. Several children peeked at him from behind her. After a pause, she said, “Why are you looking for him?”

“I’m writing a book on the blues,” Ferris said, “and I’d like to have him in there.”

“Well,” she said. “He’s gone out. He’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

When Ferris had first started poking around Leland for good musicians, folks in town had pointed him straight to Thomas’s house in a neighborhood called Black Dog. So he went back in a few hours.

And he went many times after that. The kids would run to the door when he turned up and grab his hands, telling him jokes and stories for his tape recorder as they pulled him through the house to their father. James “Son Ford” Thomas was the nephew of a one-armed

Photos by Bill Ferris James “Son Ford” Thomas, 1968: “I heard them old songs when I was a young boy. I’d slip around to dances, and I’d hear them old-time blues.

There would be house parties back in the hills, out in the country at what you call juke houses. Those are them old raggedy houses way back out in the country. We didn’t have but one night to have a good time. We’d stay up all Saturday night and try to get some rest on Sunday. All in the late hours of the night, you could hear those guitars.

You could hear them for three miles either way. And if you be quiet, you could hear them singing.”

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grave digger, and he’d taken over the job after his uncle died. He told Ferris stories about that, about his life and his family. And then he’d pull out his guitar and sing the blues.

Ferris is a folklorist, and he has been ever since he started recording stories and songs by black Mississippians when he was a high school kid in the 1950s. He grew up on his family’s farm outside of Vicksburg, and their nearest white neighbors were three miles up the road. His parents taught him and his siblings to always respect others, regardless of race, he says. He was about nine years old when he saw a black child riding a mule on the side of the road, and white children shouting at him from their school bus. It’s haunted him ever since.

Have guitar, will travel Ferris made a lot of friends in the 1960s and 70s while hauling a tape recorder, a Super 8 camera, lights, and his Gibson guitar to homes, churches, and juke joints around Mississippi. He and the folks he met played music and told stories and generally had a good old time.

The blues had been around in Mississippi for decades by then, but plenty of people—particularly white Southerners—wrinkled their noses at it. “This was not what they wanted to be known for in

the South,” Ferris says. And there was certainly nobody who studied it. In black communities, though, there was no way around it. People played guitars, pianos, fifes, drums, harmonicas, fiddles, bottles, and even something called a one-strand-on-the-wall—a rudimentary, one-stringed instrument made by stapling a piece of wire to a wall and pulling it tight, with a rock or brick wedged under the wire to raise it off the wall. A man Ferris met named Cleveland “Broom Man” Jones perfected a deep, rhythmic backup to other instruments by spreading sand on the floor and rubbing a broom handle across it. People sang the blues at home to pass the time, Ferris says, or to chase away loneliness or despair or poverty or anger.

And in every region across the state there were “blues families,” regular people who lived for Friday and Saturday nights when they could all squeeze into a club or the back room of someone’s home to play the blues, or just listen and dance. “We didn’t have but one night to have a good time,” Thomas said. “We’d stay up all Saturday night and try to get some rest on Sunday. All in the late hours of the night, you could hear those guitars.”

And Ferris partied with them. “Corn liquor and catfish and chitlins,” he says. “It was called the gut-bucket blues circuit.”

Then on Sundays there was church. “Blues and sacred music are joined at the hip,” Ferris says. One blues musician told him that switching from church music to the blues was easy: just swap out “my God” with “my baby.” The rest of the song can stay the same.

A Nova full of mikes and tapes By the time Ferris got to grad school, he had a trunk full of tapes, and he kept adding to it during his summers back home. He traveled around the state in an old Chevy Nova full of microphones, cables, extension cords, blank tapes, and films. He’d work that way for a week or two at a time before the heat and the intensity of the job got to him. It was draining work, he says; there were always good jokes and music, but he heard plenty of stories that were brutal and sickening. So he’d head out to the family farm for a few days to transcribe interviews, develop photos in his homemade darkroom, and organize his work. He’s written plenty of academic books on the music and culture he studied all those years.

But Ferris’s new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, is different, and it delivers exactly what its title promises: the words and voices he collected of Mississippians who had it rough and, in telling about it, changed American music forever.

The book itself is made up of transcripts from Ferris’s recordings along with the portraits he took. They range from everyday black farmers, churchgoers, and the down-and-out, to blues masters such as B.B. King and Willie Dixon. And the accompanying CD and DVD put you there.

On the discs are original recordings made in people’s sitting rooms and on front porches and inside clubs and churches. There are radio segments and some songs that have never been released

Fannie Bell Chapman, 1972: “We just a family, you know. A family that prays together stays together as a hallelujah. You know what I mean by hallelujah? We be singing and having a jolly time, loving one another. When it gets to where the music be sounding good, we reach back and get our guitars and our drums. You talking about a hallelujah time. We have it then.

Yes, we have it together, oh my Lord.”

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anywhere else because they were made up on the spot. Some of the most spellbinding tracks on the CD, though, are from what was then called Parchman Farm (now it’s known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary).

Parchman was an eighteen-thousand-acre working farm in the heart of the Delta, full of mules, guards, and inmates. People said you could hear the black inmates singing from a mile and a half away while they plowed and chopped wood. “Both times I went to Parchman, I didn’t know what I was doing,” Ferris says. “I just showed up with my equipment and said I wanted to make some films of work chants. I think the people who ran it thought I was some sort of an official person, maybe from Jackson, who’d been sent up. But they allowed me to just walk in and film in the most intimate ways.”

Ferris set up his equipment in the field one evening and recorded the blues in Parchman in their most true, raw shape. One man stood away from the dozen or so other prisoners and started up a song about a beautiful woman named Rosie, who, the tales said, waited outside the gates for her man to be freed.

Oh Rosie…

Oh Lord, gal…

I would cut your kindling…

I would do your cooking if I just knowed how…

The other men raised their axes and called his verses back to him before thunking the blades down into the same long tree trunk on the ground in front of them. In the distance, a trustee stood and watched them. (Until the 1970s, Parchman officials gave longtime inmates loaded rifles and ordered them to guard the others.) It was hot, Ferris says—the middle of the summer. It was almost sunset though, and you can hear the crickets droning away in the background.

Lee Kizart, 1968: “I lost my wife because she was sanctified. I done a trick when I married her. I pretended I was sanctified to get her, you understand. I got her, and after I stayed so long, I went back to playing. I come home one Sunday morning, and she told me that if I wanted to play the blues, I could get my clothes and go on home. I said, ‘Thank you.’”

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Afterward, one of the inmates, a man named Ben Gooch, told Ferris, “Now those work songs, that just something just come to you out there on the job when you’re working. At the time when I come here, you couldn’t talk on the job. You just had to sing.”

Another inmate, James “Blood” Shelby, said, “When you’re working and you singing, it makes you get your mind off everything else and get it on your work.”

“That was a very disturbing place,” Ferris says. “It was all about survival for the inmates. And how do you survive a place in which your life is worth nothing? You have no recourse if someone chooses to whip you or kill you.” (Later, when civil rights activists uncovered the murders, rapes, and beatings within the prison, a federal judge decided that Parchman was an affront to “modern standards of decency,” especially for the black inmates, and ordered reforms.)

A “past strange” white man Plenty of folks said it was “past strange” that a white man would want to go into juke joints and spend time with black people, Ferris says. “My mother was very worried about me,” Ferris says, “and with good reason.” A highway patrolman once searched his car and demanded to know just what he was doing hanging around in a black church. And late one night a mysterious car chased him and blues singer Mississippi Fred MacDowell for miles down a gravel road. (Eventually they lost the other car, and neither of them mentioned it again.)

“But I’ve always had a problem with authority,” Ferris says soberly. “I thought that if it’s considered inappropriate for a white Mississippian to study black culture and to embrace it in this way, then that’s exactly what I should be doing.”

Many of the black people Ferris met asked him, “Why would you want to do this? These are just old songs and stories. This stuff’s been around for a long time. It doesn’t have much value, especially for people like you.”

Jasper Love, 1968: “It’s what you call a worry song. I know I gets worried right here at the house. I used to do a lot of blues singing, but I drunk so much of that good whiskey—and that bad whiskey before I got the good—until it got to my voice. Now I play me a couple of records, and it gives me ease.”

Louis Dotson, 1973: “My daddy used to play music. He used to play all the time.

That’s how I learned to play the guitar.

After he died, the other boys, they took the guitar. I couldn’t get another one.

So I decided to put me up a wire. I just call it ‘part of a guitar.’ It’s a one-string guitar, but it sounds like it’s got six strings on it. … Nobody else around here can play it but me. People, they come and listen to me. They say they don’t see how I can do it.”

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“But it was exciting work for me,” Ferris says. “I mean, I could tell this was strong medicine. It just felt to me like I was connecting with worlds that would really never be remembered if someone didn’t go in with a tape recorder and a camera and capture the beauty of what people were doing and saying.”

—Margarite Nathe William Ferris is Joel Williamson Eminent Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences and senior associate director of Carolina’s Center for the Study of the American South. Give My Poor Heart Ease is due out in November 2009. His work was funded by in part by the H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

Martha Dunbar (left), 1968: “When we got grown, we had nobody to plow. My sister went to New Orleans, and I hitched up two mares and went to plowing. I plowed four years and made my own crop.”

B.B. King, 1976: “The earliest sound of the blues that I can remember was in the fields, where people would be picking or chopping cotton. Usually one guy would be plowing by himself or take his hoe and chop way out in front of everybody else. You would hear this guy sing most of the time—just a thing that would kind of begin, no special lyrics, just what he felt at the time. The song would be maybe something like this: ‘Oh, wake up in the morning, about the break of day.’

And you could hear it, just on and on, like that.” endeavors 47

BACK TROUBLE Can we tune out those nagging aches and pains?

Stabbed in the Back: Confronting Back Pain in an Overtreated Society. By Nortin M. Hadler.

University of North Carolina Press, 190 pages, $26.

N

ortin Hadler, physician and professor of medicine, is a troublemaker.

In two previous books, he skewered a herd of medicine’s sacred cows and advised us all to stop running to the doc for every routine ache and pain. In his third book, Stabbed in the Back, Hadler’s quarry is lowerback trouble. Be warned: If you think your lumbago is a bona fide medical problem, you may decide that Hadler himself is a royal pain, afflicting a region of the anatomy just south of the lower back.

Sure, some of us do sustain real injuries in car wrecks, falls, and (in my case) ill-advised moves at the gym.

These injuries and various rare diseases have well-defined physical causes and can be diagnosed and treated.

But the vast majority of complaints about back troubles result from what Hadler calls “regional” lower-back pain, in which the symptoms have no discernible physical cause. This kind of back pain, he says, is simply “an intermittent and recurring experience of normal living.”

I

t’s not that Hadler is callous to those of us who suffer. He does want to help. But when he is certain that drugs and surgery won’t work and may in fact do more harm than good, he says so. He also 48 endeavors

strenuously objects when he believes that drug companies are inventing new diseases to peddle medications we don’t need. Such is the case, he says, for the catch-all category of aches and pains known as fibromyalgia, which Hadler calls “a social construction rather than a disease.”

Citing dozens of research studies to make his case, Hadler argues that people troubled with lousy jobs, bad marriages, and various other afflictions tend to feel bad generally, and some of their misery gravitates toward their lower backs. Does this mean that back trouble is all in our heads?

No. We feel actual pain, along with the

unsettling suspicion that something is wrong with us. So we head to our doctors’ offices to relieve both the pain and the uncertainty.

This middle-age migration to the clinic runs up the nation’s health-care tab as it gives our backaches legitimacy for the sake of disability benefits and an excused absence from heavy lifting. And even if we feel reassured when a doctor examines us, x-rays our spines, and prescribes something, in most cases we’ll be no better off physically than we were when we first hobbled into the clinic, Hadler says.

His advice? Get a grip and get on with our lives. Yes, this may just tick you off. But if you’re good and riled at Nortin Hadler, maybe you’ll forget about your aching back.

—Neil Caudle For a story about Nortin Hadler’s first book, The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the HealthCare System, see “ L e a v i n g We l l Enough Alone,” Endeavors, Winter 2005.

endview

Iron Works, Colebrookdale, 1805; aquatint, hand-colored. Created by Philip James de Loutherbourg and William Pickett as part of a series called The Romantic and Picturesque Scenery of England and Wales. Courtesy of the Ackland Art Museum and John P. Eckblad.

Progress, as it once looked Few of us today treasure the sight of smoking, noisy factories in our own towns. But when this image was made, says Ackland Art Museum curator Timothy Riggs, the flames and puffing smokestacks meant prosperity, jobs, and seemingly unstoppable progress. The iron works at Colebrookdale wasn’t just beautiful; it was sublime.

Iron Works, Colebrookdale is one of thousands of prints collected

by John P. Eckblad. Earlier this year, many of the prints from Eckblad’s collection—some two centuries’ worth of scenes depicting industry and labor and their effects on the landscape—were on display at the Ackland Art Museum in an exhibition called “At the Heart of Progress: Coal, Iron, and Steam since 1750.”

Colebrookdale was a longtime center for iron smelting. But its major innovations—including using processed coal, rather than charcoal, in the iron-production process—suddenly made iron cheaper and available in huge quantities, and it became the building material of choice. Entire landscapes were swiftly transformed.

“Today, with our economy and environment under siege, it’s useful to remember that crisis begets invention,” Eckblad says. As wind-power turbines and solar arrays slowly begin to transform our country’s vistas, “the seeds of our next reality have already been sown,” he says. “Once again, artists will be there to both document and interpret.” endeavors 49

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 28: For decades, the United States tried to

Page 38: What makes some lab mice couch

Page 41: How do you play a one-strand-on-the-

squeeze Cuba and Castro into submission. Now what? Three stories about Cuba’s past, present, and future. Photo by Alan Oxley/Getty Images.

potatoes, while others run up to twelve miles a night? The answer is in their genes—and it may be in yours. Photo by Jason Smith.

wall? What’s a hallelujah time? What should you do when your wife realizes you’re not sanctified?

Photo by William Ferris.

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