Spring 2010

end­­eavors Spring 2010

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

Climate change isn’t coming.

(It’s already here.) page 8

More than fifteen years ago,

when I arrived at

UNC, I began hanging a framed cover of each new issue of

JASON SMITH

Endeavors in my office in Bynum Hall. As the years passed, people would ask me, “What happens when you run out of wall space?”

“I’ll have to leave,” I said.

This issue will be my last. After thirty-one years at universities, I am kicking the habit, going cold turkey. The magazine will be in good hands. Jason Smith has been running things, more or less, since I moved into South Building a year ago. And the staff and students who contribute are first-rate.

Endeavors has always been the best part of my job. For a guy like me, addicted to new ideas, there was no better place than a research university to indulge the habit.

I have some people to thank. First, the faculty members and students and staff who took lots of time to explain what they do.

It’s been an honor to learn about their work. Next, my bosses. Not one of them interfered with my job as editor, or attempted to recast Endeavors as a brag rag, or succumbed to the notion that a smart way to save money is to gut your magazine’s printing budget and dump the text online. It is a great credit to the people in South Building that we have never been required to serve as a mouthpiece for the administration, or as a vehicle for somebody’s ego. Our job was simple: tell good, honest stories about the research and creative work of a great university. For writers and editors, a job doesn’t get any better than that.

Finally, I thank our readers, who are, I believe, among the finest in the world. As we planned each issue, we knew that our readers could grasp what we wrote, no matter how daunting the science might be. We could imply as much as we explained, and we could be playful with image and word. In our workshops we exposed each and every story to group critique, and we listened very carefully for the music in the language, knowing that our readers heard it too.

With such readers we celebrated, page after page and year after year, the adventure of discovery. What a pleasure.

—The Editor

end­­eavors

Spring 2010 • Volume XXVI, Number 3 Endeavors engages its readers in the intellectual life of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by conveying the excitement of creativity, discovery, and the rigors and risks of the quest for new knowledge.

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

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

Holden Thorp, Chancellor Bruce Carney, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development

contents

Spring 2010

essay 2 A Bucket of Chum

26 Rock Solid, Sort Of

4 overview

30 Holy Work

In which the editor, retiring, reflects on three decades of love for the story.

by Neil Caudle

Putting the brakes on bacteria, serious gaming, exercise and pregnancy, and four stories about fat.

cover story 8 Climate Change is Already Here

Rising waters, bigger storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts: How will North Carolina weather a changing climate?

by Mark Derewicz

features 18 Building a Bomb

Two women, two views of safety on the Manhattan Project.

by Susan Hardy

22 The Doctor’s Writing

After he became an MD, Terrence Holt’s stories took a bold new turn.

by Mark Derewicz

In the overlooked Appalachians, a young seismologist hears rumbles of mountain-building.

by Susan Hardy

Muslim Americans and the forgotten heart of Islamic tradition.

by Mark Derewicz

34 Sharing, Enduring, Believing: Being Asheville

A sixth-generation chairmaker, an evangelist on a Harley, a boxing girl, and an artist who won’t quit.

by UNC photojournalism students

39 Happy Lungiversary

A good lung is hard to find, but Tom Egan’s got it in the bag.

by Margarite Nathe

44 in print

Erica Eisdorfer and the ick factor, the politics that polarize voters, and one last story about fat.

49 endview

The ice at the bottom of the world.

Editor: Neil Caudle, Associate Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development

On the cover: What will climate change mean for North Carolina? Photo by Douglas Kim.

Associate Editor: Jason Smith

Design: Neil Caudle and Jason Smith

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

Print production and website: Jason Smith

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

Writers: Darren Abrecht, Mark Derewicz, Ramona DuBose, Susan Hardy, Lee Langer, Beth Mole, Margarite Nathe, and Meagen Voss

©2010 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.

A Bucket of Chum

In which the editor, retiring, reflects on three decades of love for the story.

by Neil Caudle

Thirty-one years ago, at eight o’clock in the morning, I walked into an office at NC State University, introduced myself to the two women in charge, and sat down to a stack of page proofs in sore need of pencil work. Before an hour had passed, one of the women blurted out, “It wasn’t our idea to hire a man to do this job.”

T

hey assigned me an errand—a test. I was to drive to Morehead City, find the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, and interview Frank Schwartz, the resident expert on sharks. The idea was to tape-record an interview on the topic of sharks and summer swimming, so that we could produce a public service announcement for radio.

Suspecting a trap, I ventured down the hall and inquired about this fellow Schwartz: Smart guy. Likes sharks. Hates wasting time with dingbatters from Raleigh. Don’t tick him off. He’ll chop you up and dump you overboard like a bucket of chum.

A few days later, in the middle of a hot afternoon, I sat in the parking lot at the institute, working up my nerve. I rehearsed my interview questions. Sweat trickled into my eyes. At the appointed hour, I climbed out of the station wagon with my portable tape recorder and microphone, crossed the baking asphalt, found my way to his office, and tapped on his half-opened door. The weatherbeaten older man who wheeled to face me sized me up in one indignant scowl. Yes, I was chum.

He barked at me for at least fifteen minutes, railing against government nitwits and meddlers who didn’t know dolphin from dogfish, and at last allowed me to begin the interview. He gave me clear, cogent quotes about sharks, and then about sea turtles too. I turned off the recorder, said, “Thank you, sir,” and fled.

Back in the car, which was an oven by then, I set the cassette recorder on the vinyl seat beside me, drew a deep breath, mashed Rewind and Play. Nothing. I had failed to engage the correct combination of buttons to make the thing record.

2 endeavors

For several minutes, I sat in the car. As hot as it was, I was chilled. Who needs this crap? I’ll just quit and find a job that doesn’t involve hostile women and belligerent, over-salted old men. But then I got out of the car, braved his tongue-lashing, and got another round of good quotes—better, actually, than the first one. The man knew his stuff; he was just warming up.

Over the next month or so, the women decided that I was okay. They taught me well. Tell a good story, they said. Perhaps I am especially grateful for this word of advice because I had to earn it first, by the sweat of my brow. At any rate, I cannot resist, in my final edition of Endeavors, saying that I made the right choice on that broiling day in May, in a dinged-up, state-issued wagon.

I

love a new idea, and this is where they are. This is a garden where something is always in bloom. I was here to collect a little nectar, make a little honey.

The honey, of course, is a story.

I wish the job had always been that simple: tell a good story, and tell it true. We inhabit a glorious garden full of subtlety and nuance, and yet we lapse into simple-minded rhetoric, bombarding our audience with bullet points and stats. We stamp our brand on sound bites and peddle them like soap. We propagate a plague of PowerPoint slides, and brag on ourselves as though bragging weren’t rude. Bragging is rude.

In the course of three decades, I have heard a great many big shots opine on the topic of “getting the word out.” Job candidates

Without emotion, there is no story, and all the lovely data in the world will not convince the public of our worth…When we tell a good, true story that touches a reader’s heart, we have accomplished something far more lasting and meaningful than an information dump or an impressive array of stark facts.

for executive positions especially favor this theme. “This is a great university,” they say, “but we’re hiding our light under a barrel. We need to brag on ourselves a lot more. We need to tell everybody how great we are.” This message plays well, in a stump speech, much like the phrases “We need a middle-class tax cut” and “We just need to get government out of the way.” For some reason, intelligent people are prepared to buy—hook, line, and sinker—the notion that if everybody understood us they would give us their love and their money, and the way to help them understand us is to tell them how great we are.

I disagree. When the audience is strictly internal, bragging is harmless enough—sort of like pep-rally talk. But when we want to connect with people who don’t sport Carolina blue, bragging is rude and unworthy.

What should we do instead? If we want to share our devotion to this marvelous garden of ours, we’ll have to start with humility and sympathy. We’ll have to care about our audience and assume that they are more important than ourselves. What do they want to know? What gives them pleasure, reassures them, inspires them, appeals to the better angels of their nature?

Let’s pay attention to our psychologists, our neuroscientists, and our developmental biologists. They are telling us how the brain works, how it sucks up a perpetual flood of sensation and renders it meaningful. Plain facts may have significance if your job, your kids, or your love life depend on them. But for most people, a page of bullet-listed facts has about as much appeal as a swarm of red ants.

Unless we have a vested interest in the topic at hand (This lion will eat me if I stick around…), facts absent narrative are almost useless. Artists and musicians and poets and fiction writers and rhetoricians have known this for ages, but they couldn’t prove it, scientifically speaking. Now science is giving us proof. The brain is wired for visual information, especially, but it digests experience best in the form of a story. And if that story is rich in detail—if it appeals to more senses than vision alone—we are far more likely to retain it and use it. But the surest way to get a story across, and

make it stick, is to invest it with genuine, honest emotion.

Heresy, right? Here we are, on a campus where we value above all else cool, objective rationality, and this guy is telling us we have to sully our work with emotion? Dream on.

About this, I am stubborn and have been for thirty-one years.

Without emotion, there is no story, and all the lovely data in the world will not convince the public of our worth.

Emotion doesn’t have to be messy, and it doesn’t have to cloud the facts. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express precise thought.”

I

began this piece with a story about a long-ago hazing I took from two women, so it’s time now to balance the scale. We all know that when women venture into the sanctums of men, they generally face all manner of hazing far worse than the kind I received. Several times, over the years, young women scientists have come to us saying they loved science but didn’t want to do it anymore. The lab was too hostile and macho, and they wanted to write about science and thereby enjoy it again. Often, these women had been accused of being “too emotional.” But women and men unafraid of emotion may well be the very people who could help us make science meaningful to the people outside our domain.

Emotional precision is fiendishly difficult. Writers labor for years to master it, and some never do. But it’s worth the effort.

When we tell a good, true story that touches a reader’s heart, we have accomplished something far more lasting than an information dump or an impressive array of stark facts. We have conveyed something meaningful that will remain in the public mind and contribute to the public good.

I can almost hear Frank Schwartz now, having a snort at such fanciful notions. He is still on the job, by the way, and so outlasted me. Here’s to your sharks, Dr. Schwartz. Bluster all you want. I know how you love them. endeavors 3

overview To paralyze a bacterium, take away calcium

A

nyone who’s seen one of those milkmustache commercials knows that humans need calcium. But scientists Matt Redinbo and Matt Wolfgang discovered that the mineral is vital for microbes as well: without calcium, some bacteria can’t move.

Bacteria use different strategies to get from place to place. Redinbo and Wolfgang were interested in a type of movement called twitching motility, in which bacteria use spiky extensions called pili to pull themselves around.

“When the pili extend they can grab onto surfaces,” Wolfgang says. “They act like little grappling hooks so that when they retract, they can pull the bacteria forward.”

One bacterium that uses twitching motility is Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

According to Wolfgang, this opportunistic pathogen is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. Healthy individuals can live with Pseudomonas twitching around on them, but the bacterium can be deadly for people with weakened immune systems or patients with complicated wounds such as severe burns.

Redinbo and Wolfgang imagined that one way to reduce infections could be to stop the bacteria from moving onto people in the first place. The proteins that move pili are like small engines. If the protein equivalent of a piston could be removed, then the engine would stall and Pseudomonas would be stranded.

The two scientists started with a small protein called PilY1. Wolfgang’s lab showed that pili needed PilY1 in order to move and to infect a host, but no one knew why this was. Redinbo thought the team could learn more by

figuring out the protein’s structure. His group crystallized pure PilY1 and then used special x-rays on the crystals to gather data about the protein’s shape and generate a picture of it.

The structure Redinbo’s group produced looked like a flower that was missing some petals. Redinbo had expected to see the flower shape, yet there was a peculiar feature that piqued his interest, he says: a calcium-binding site sitting in one of the flower petals.

Wolfgang and Redinbo thought it was a bit odd to find a calciumbinding site in a pili protein, so they decided to see what would happen if they stopped calcium from binding to PilY1. Using genetic manipulations and a process called calcium chelation, they reduced the amount of calcium in their Pseudomonas cultures. Without calcium, the bacteria couldn’t produce enough pili to move.

Both researchers were astounded.

“Calcium ions are all over the place,” Redinbo says. “To see calcium in a protein was not a big surprise. To have calcium play this central a role in motility—that was a big surprise.”

Wolfgang says that calcium may be important for bacteria besides Pseudomonas. Other microbes including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, have proteins that are similar to PilY1. Disrupting calcium binding could be a new angle to prevent disease transmission. Pseudomonas needs

functional pili to traverse different environments, to attach to surfaces, and to find food. “That all hinges on a single atom,” Wolfgang says. ­—Meagen Voss Meagen Voss is a graduate student in neurobiology in the School of Medicine.

Matt Redinbo is a professor of chemistry and chair of the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. Matt Wolfgang is an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine. This work appeared in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences in January 2010. Funding for the project came from the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

When researchers blocked a single calcium atom (shown here in light blue) the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa could no longer use its pili to move.

Image courtesy of Matthew Redinbo.

4 endeavors CAROLINA FINDINGS

Obese children as young as three years show early warning signs of possible future heart disease. • Children who have been abused psychologically,

Virtual phobias, virtual obsessions

I

n February 2010, Joyce Rudinsky and her collaborators exhibited Psychasthenia, a work of art in the form of an immersive video game. As players make their way through the game’s tension-inducing world, they are asked a series of questions that shape their experiences, leading inevitably to a “diagnosis” of psychasthenia—a condition, no longer recognized by mental health professionals, that was once thought to be characterized by phobias and obsessions.

Rudinsky created the game as part of a movement on campus to encourage collaboration between arts, humanities, and technology scholars. Psychasthenia unites digital artists from UNC and a researcher from Duke with technologists from UNC’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). It’s an example of serious gaming, an emerging category of media that uses video games for education, advocacy, and art.

Psychasthenia takes place in a 3D virtual space and uses a first-person point of view. Players move freely through a series of rooms, each of which is meant to induce some form of anxiety. In one room, strangers converse loudly at a party. In another, players walk down a dark hallway and are bombarded with eerie historical imagery. From time to time the action is interrupted and players must answer questions about themselves in order to proceed.

The questions were taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test used to evaluate people for personality disorders. Rudinsky says she used these questions to explore the ways that researchers quantify human emotion. “Everyone has psychasthenia,” she says. The components that make up the disorder—including doubt, social anxiety, and stress—now seem to most people to be ordinary challenges of living in the modern world.

Mark Robinson, a colleague of Rudinsky who collaborated on the project, sees its purpose somewhat dif-

A visitor plays Psychasthenia, a video game created to explore the potential of games as artistic media, in the Showcase Room at RENCI’s UNC facility on February 18, 2010. The room uses surround sound and a fifteen-footwide tilt dome display to create an immersive experience. Photo by Josh Coyle/RENCI.

ferently. He’s interested in the potential of video games to treat real personality disorders. “A prime example might be those who suffer from the symptoms of Asperger syndrome,” Robinson says. “A carefully engineered game might allow users to practice social tools and codes so that they could employ them more adeptly in reality.”

Immersion and interactivity drew Rudinsky to explore gaming as an artistic medium. Psychasthenia is displayed in RENCI ’s 180-degree Showcase Dome, making the player feel entirely surrounded. It also employs a headmounted accelerometer which causes certain details, such as lights, audio, and pacing, to change based on where the player is looking.

Pregnancy: no sweat?

According to a UNC study, fewer than one in four pregnant women meet current physical activity guidelines for pregnancy: thirty minutes or more of moderate exercise daily. Women in their first trimester were more likely than those in later stages of pregnancy to meet the recommendations, Kelly Evenson says. Women with health insurance and non-Hispanic whites were more likely than others to meet the guidelines. Walking was the

“There’s something about being able to interact with these spaces, control what happens, and feel like you’re part of creating the experience as a user that’s very attractive to people,” Rudinsky says.

—Darren Abrecht Psychasthenia was part of the Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology Festival. Joyce Rudinsky is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and the associate director for digital arts and humanities at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Mark Robinson is the multimedia lab director for the Department of Communication Studies. Other collaborators were RENCI’s Eric Knisley and Jason Coposky, and Duke’s Victoria Szabo.

most common leisure time physical activity reported. “Physical activity during pregnancy may help prevent gestational diabetes, support healthy gestational weight gain, and improve mental health,” Evenson says.

—Ramona DuBose Kelly Evenson is a research associate professor of epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. The findings were published in the March 2010 issue of Preventive Medicine.

endeavors 5 physically, or sexually are at an increased risk of suffering unexplained abdominal pain and nausea or vomiting. • Exercise may be the best prescription for people with arthritis.

Weighty words: four stories about obesity and health

The high cost of fast food

P

eople who live in communities where fast-food prices increase have a lower risk of diabetes and gain less weight. On the other hand, when fast-food prices fall, people eat more, and both their weight and risk of diabetes increase.

Barry Popkin and his colleagues used data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study, which followed more than five thousand participants living in forty-eight states. The researchers collected information on the average prices of products including restaurant pizza, burgers, soft drinks, and whole milk in the counties in which each participant lived.

When prices of fast foods and sodas went up just 10 percent, participants consumed on

average 7.1 percent fewer calories from soda and 11.5 percent fewer calories from pizza.

That translates to about fifty-six fewer calories a day—a reduction of about three to four pounds a year per person, Popkin says.

Some states have proposed taxes on fast foods and soft drinks, Popkin says. Denmark uses such taxes to discourage consumption and encourage healthy diets.

“This study gives us strong scientific evidence that price policies, including taxes, could actually be effective at helping control obesity and the resulting chronic diseases, such as diabetes,” Popkin says.

—Ramona DuBose The study was published in the March 8, 2010 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

To fight the flu, be lean

O

besity may limit the body’s ability to develop immunity to influenza viruses, particularly secondary infections, by inhibiting the immune system’s ability to remember how it fought off previous bouts of the flu.

Nutrition researchers at UNC have shown that obese mice are not able to develop protective influenza-specific memory T cells.

The body generates these cells during an initial influenza infection.

They help protect against a second infection by targeting internal proteins common to most strains of influenza viruses.

The researchers infected lean mice and obese mice with a mild influenza virus. The lean mice had been fed a low-fat diet, and the obese mice had been fed a high-fat diet. When the mice recovered from the first bout of flu, they were infected a second time, with a larger dose of a more lethal influenza strain. Lean mice were able to develop the infection-fighting T cells and ward off a second bout of influenza.

“We lost none of the lean mice, but 25 percent of obese mice died,” says Erik Karlsson, a doctoral candidate in nutrition and lead author of the study.

In a previous study, UNC nutrition researcher Melinda Beck showed that an influenza infection could be much more dangerous to obese mice than to lean mice. A single infection killed 42 percent of the obese mice in the study, but only 5.5 percent of lean mice.

During flu seasons, health-care practitioners often see obese patients who struggle with influenza viruses. Some researchers and doctors have speculated that excess fat constricts lung volume, or that obesity causes chronic inflammation, which influences the immune response.

But Beck and her colleagues hypothesize that the increased severity may be due to lower memory-T-cell defenses in obese patients.

“This kind of research could influence public health by changing our views of what the risks factors of obesity are,” Karlsson says.

“The risks are potentially much more complicated than we’ve thought.”

—Ramona DuBose Karlsson’s study was published in the March 15, 2010 issue of The Journal of Immunology.

6 endeavors A mother’s flu during pregnancy may increase her baby’s risk of developing schizophrenia. • Eating trans fats increases the risk of strokes caused by blood clots. • Nearly three-quarters

Mommy, what’s for snack?

C

hildren are snacking between meals much more than they did thirty years ago, and these snacks are becoming less healthful, two UNC nutrition researchers say. These snacking habits, beginning as early as age two, can set the stage for adult obesity and other chronic health problems.

Since there are few studies that look at the eating habits of children over long periods of time, Carmen Piernas and Barry Popkin compiled data from several surveys of children’s eating habits that took place between 1977 and 2006. Piernas and Popkin found that virtually all children aged two to eighteen snack at some point during the day, up from 74 percent of children in the late 1970s.

Kids are also snacking more frequently.

“Children, including very young children, eat snacks almost three times a day,” Popkin says. The youngest group studied, those aged two to six, showed a higher increase

in number of snacks per day than any other age group.

It’s not only how often children are snacking, but also what they’re eating that concerns Popkin and Piernas. “Kids still eat three meals a day, but they’re also loading up on high-calorie junk food that contains little or no nutritional value,” says Popkin.

Now Piernas and Popkin are focusing on portion sizes and where kids eat (in restaurants or at home) in order to build a more complete picture of how their eating habits have changed.

—Lee Langer Lee Langer is a doctoral student in neuroscience in the School of Medicine.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and was published in the March 2010 issue of the journal Health Affairs.

Baby fat: not so cute?

ILLUSTRATIONS: SIMON OXLEY

I

nfants who are overweight may be slower than thinner babies to develop motor skills.

The finding is based on observations of 217 African-American first-time mothers who participated in the Infant Care, Feeding, and Risk of Obesity Study, a UNC research project funded by the National Institutes of Health. The project is examining how parenting and infant-feeding styles relate to infant diet and the risk of babies becoming overweight. Researchers visited the mothers and infants between 2003 and 2007. They weighed and measured the children on each visit, and assessed their motor skills at three, six, nine, twelve, and eighteen months.

The researchers found that overweight infants were about twice as likely as nonoverweight infants to have a low score on the Psychomotor Development Index, reflecting delayed motor development. And infants with high subcutaneous fat were more than twice as likely as babies without fat rolls to have a low score.

“This is concerning because children with motor-skill delays may be less physi-

cally active and thus less likely to explore the environment beyond arm’s reach,” Meghan Slining says. “There are a number of studies that show that weight status during infancy and the toddler years can set young children on an obesity trajectory that may be hard to change. Our study shows that there are actually immediate consequences as well.”

—Ramona DuBose Slining’s study was published online in The Journal of Pediatrics. Funding came from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Mead Johnson Children’s Nutrition Small Research Grants Program at UNC.

{

The researchers in these stories are all in the Department of Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Carmen Piernas, Erik Karlsson, and Meghan Slining are doctoral candidates, Melinda Beck

is a professor, and Barry Popkin is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor. Popkin’s new book The World is Fat explores the link between sugar and obesity (see “Sugar Time,” page 48). endeavors 7

of 300 North Carolina mothers studied had some amount of toxic flame retardants in their breast milk. • The drug sorafenib can shrink advanced kidney-cancer tumors prior to surgery.

FLOODS. DROUGHTS.

POLLUTION.

SEA LEVEL RISE. INTENSE STORMS.

ALTERED FISHERIES. DEPLETED MARSHES.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY HERE,

AND IT WON’T SPARE NORTH CAROLINA.

by Mark Derewicz 8 endeavors

In February of 2010 huge winter storms blasted the northeastern United States, where major news organizations and political leaders are headquartered. On FOX News Channel, Sean Hannity said, “The storm seems to contradict Al Gore’s theory of global warming.” Senator Jim DeMint tweeted, “It’s going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries uncle.” Senator James Inhofe’s grandsons built an igloo on Capitol Hill, topping it with a sign that read, “Al Gore’s new home.”

Three mentions of Al Gore, but nothing about the unusually balmy weather in Alaska, throughout the Arctic Circle, or at the Winter Olympics in Whistler, British Columbia. No mention of the fact that January 2010 was the world’s fourth warmest January on record or that only 5 percent of Earth’s surface experienced cooler-than-usual temperatures in January.

The year 2009 was the second-warmest ever (tied with 1998). The past decade was the warmest since humans started keeping reliable records in the mid-nineteenth century.

The truth is that a rare high-pressure system sat atop the Arctic for much of the winter, causing the jet stream to weaken and cold air to pour southward.

Scientists, even those few dubious of man-made climate change, say it’s ludicrous to think that individual weather events can debunk climate science. But many Americans still see the snow and doubt global warming. Other people point to a few hot summer days as proof of global warming.

Both thoughts are misguided.

“There’s a huge gap between what the vast majority of climatologists understand about climate change and what the average person thinks,” says climatologist James Hansen, who came to UNC in 2010 as a visiting professor. “Part of the reason for that gap,” he says, “is that scientists are not very good communicators.” (See “Blame the messenger,” page 10.)

Every scientist I spoke to for this story— fifteen at UNC plus Hansen—said that the evidence in support of human-induced climate change is overwhelming and that too many people are missing the main point about climate change. Earth does have and will always have natural climate patterns, says UNC climatologist Chip Konrad. But greenhouse gases that come from burning fossil fuels have loaded the dice and are causing variations within that natural cycle.

PORTRAITS BY JASON SMITH, EXCEPT AS NOTED

0.5 to 5.0: range, in meters, that sea level is expected to rise in North Carolina by the end of this century.

“We’re performing an incredible experiment, the likes of which has never been performed before,” Konrad says. “We’re loading the atmosphere with CO2, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen.”

Some climate models predict frightening changes: massive sea level rise, category 5 hurricanes, decade-long droughts, mass extinctions. Those models are, to say the least, imperfect. Scientists readily admit this. But they don’t need perfect models to understand how the climate works. If we perturb the natural climate cycle by, say, trapping heat in the atmosphere and oceans, then the resulting environmental changes will likely include longer droughts, considerable sea level rise, and more intense storms.

Many Americans still see the snow and doubt global warming. Other people point to a few hot summer days as proof of global warming.

Both thoughts are misguided.

Some people point out that the scientific community is uncertain about the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. But we are already seeing changes in the climate, UNC scientists say, especially in the

oceans and at the poles. These changes aren’t the stuff of science fiction movies.

They are real and touching people’s lives right now.

It’s not a stretch, scientists say, to think that if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the present rate, things will get worse. We just don’t know exactly how much worse.

One thing, though, is clear: the case for human-induced climate change is a matter of physics, chemistry, and the biology of the environment—not seasonal and local weather phenomena or Al Gore’s activism.

And if we want to know what’s going on, we can listen to the scientists.

Mountains of data Hansen, a physicist who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, created a climate model in 1981 that predicted an unusually warm decade ahead, and an even warmer one after that. Another of his models calculated that 1990 would be the warmest year on record. In 1991 it predicted that the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines would cause global temperatures to drop, but that in a few years they’d start climbing again. Each time the models were right. Today Hansen warns that we’ve experienced only about half of the warming that we will eventually see from greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. That’s because of Earth’s massive oceans, which warm slowly in response to added heat from greenhouse gases.

Think of CO2 as water in a pan on the stove. Applying heat to the pan doesn’t make the water hot immediately. And CO2 that’s released into the air doesn’t immediately increase atmospheric temperatures.

Hansen came to UNC in early 2010 as a Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor. When we met, I asked him what the most convincing evidence is for manmade climate change. He answered: “The proof that the planet is out of energy balance: human-made greenhouse gases trap the earth’s heat radiation, which causes the planet to emit less energy into space than it did before the gases were added.”

Much of that energy goes into the ocean.

“We’re performing an incredible experiment, the likes of which has never been performed before. We’re loading the atmosphere with CO2, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen.”

—Chip Konrad, Department of Geography

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“We know how nature has affected climate because we have records from ice cores that date back millions of years. In the past fifty million years, the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere has never been as high and rapid as it is now.”

—Jose Rial, Geological Sciences

“And we can measure it by measuring how the internal ocean temperature is changing. It turns out that the planet is gaining heat at the rate we had calculated: threefourths of a watt per square meter.”

Before the Industrial Revolution, the CO2 in the atmosphere was measured at 280 parts per million. Today CO2 is at 387 parts per million and is rising at a rate of 2 parts per million annually. Over the same span, average global temperatures have fluctuated from year to year because of natural climate variations such as El Niño and La Niña. Over the long haul, though, temperatures have increased consistently.

And fourteen of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last twenty years.

But things could have been worse had the sun cooperated.

North Carolina will likely see more intense droughts and storms that will cause severe flooding and landslides.

When climatologists began studying global warming, they first suspected that the sun was the main culprit. At a solar maximum, hundreds of sunspots and solar flares heave massive amounts of energy toward Earth. But from 2008 to 2009 the sun was

Blame the messenger

in a deep solar minimum, the deepest since 1913. Very few sunspots were detected. In the next five years, as the sun approaches its maximum phase again, any solar impact on our climate will be in synergy with the warming trend already in place.

Scientists know this because they can measure the eleven-year solar cycle precisely. On a graph, the amount of energy released by the sun looks like a wavy line, with the maximum phase at the top of the wave and the minimum at the bottom. But global temperatures don’t match that cycle: they’ve been increasing for more than a century.

Hansen says that many things alter the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy that seeps through the atmosphere and into space. The things that disturb this balance the most are what concern climatologists the most.

The vast majority of climate science experts—including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science—agree that greenhouse gases, more than anything else, are affecting Earth’s energy balance. These gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and water

Climatologist James Hansen and many of his colleagues say that the media play a role in the confusion about man-made climate change. So I asked Philip Meyer, UNC professor emeritus and godfather of precision journalism, to weigh in. (See Endeavors, Fall 2007, “Fixing the news.”) He tells me that journalists, for the sake of what they consider objectivity, sometimes seek sources that disagree with the scientific consensus. And so news articles and television segments come off as being fifty-fifty: maybe climate change is man-made, and maybe it isn’t.

“That’s terrible journalism,” Meyer says. “Objectivity is a process, not a result. It’s the journalist’s job to find the logic in the science and present the facts as they are.”

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62 percent of North Carolina’s energy comes from coal.

Geophysicist Jose Rial sets up sensors to monitor ice quakes near Greenland’s moulins—gaps in the ice that send meltwater to the ice sheet’s base and then to the ocean. Rial is trying to measure how moulins affect Greenland’s peripheral ice. Photos by Jose Rial.

Many journalists have reported brilliantly on climate change, Meyer says. But too many don’t tackle the science or form an understanding about why there’s a scientific consensus on global warming. “And the reason some journalists don’t do this,” he says, “is because it’s a lot more work.”

Meyer also says that specialized media such as FOX News and MSNBC are doing better economically than mass media. “People now tend to go for those channels that fit their own special views,” Meyer says. The internet has only exacerbated the problem. It’s now more difficult for scientific findings to rise above the din of pop-culture punditry and the blogosphere. “The media,” Meyer says, “are polarizing us.”

—Mark Derewicz

vapor, are now driving climate change.

What this means for the global climate and North Carolina in particular is not easy to forecast. But scientists at UNC are already seeing some of the results.

A warmer world Tamlin Pavelsky, a UNC geologist who studies how water moves in the Arctic, tells me that the climate at higher latitudes is changing faster than in most places. The classic case is the Arctic sea ice, which has been receding during the summer for years.

In the winter the ice continues to extend great distances from the poles. “But it’s getting much thinner,” Pavelsky says. And that changes atmospheric temperatures.

Typically air is warmer near Earth’s surface; the farther up a mountain you go, the cooler the air gets. But Pavelsky’s research shows that in the Arctic winter, the ice is so frigid that the coldest air is near the surface. The thicker the ice, the colder the temperatures. “But if the ice is thin, you get more cracks and you get more ocean water circulating through the brine channels,” he says. This allows more heat to transfer from the relatively warm seawater to the atmosphere. And the warmer the Arctic gets, the more likely that the ice will be thinner, adding more heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.

In Alaska, Pavelsky’s home state, temperatures have risen about 1.9 degrees Celsius—3.5 degrees in the winters—since the 1950s. Sea ice has retreated more than 14 percent since 1978. Spring and summer are longer. Melting permafrost has caused erosion and landslides. And millions of acres of spruce trees on the Kenai Peninsula have died since 1992 from beetle infestations brought on, scientists think, by warmer temperatures.

In the lower forty-eight states, changes have been far less drastic, and future changes are less certain. The prevailing theory is that dry areas of the country will get drier and wet areas will get wetter.

According to Larry Band, director of UNC’s Institute for the Environment, there’s nothing that suggests North Carolina rainfall averages will change substantially in a warmer world. But he tells me that the state will likely see more intense droughts and storms that will cause severe

53 percent of U.S. citizens live in coastal counties.

flooding and landslides. In the mountains, Band points out, we used to build roads and villages in valleys, mostly to be closer to farm fields. Now we’re building homes and winding roads on ridges, resulting in more landslides and erosion. More intense storms will only exacerbate the problem.

If there are droughts, Band says, we’ll face greater water supply issues and pollution problems, especially increased surfacelevel ozone that contributes to respiratory illnesses. Methane, the main component of natural gas, plays a major role in the creation of ozone. In fact, methane is much more efficient than CO2 at trapping heat, says UNC environmental engineer Jason West.

“That’s why methane was controlled under the Kyoto Protocol,” West tells me.

“But it’s not much talked about from an air quality perspective.”

West conducted a study showing that reducing man-made methane emissions by 20 percent would prevent an estimated 370,000 deaths worldwide between 2010 and 2030. Using computer models, he calculated that each metric ton of methane eliminated would produce $240 in public health benefits. And it would cost less than $100 per metric ton to reduce methane emissions by 20 percent.

Right now the United States is one of the few nations where methane emissions are declining, though West says that more can be done. North Carolina, for instance, could capture all methane released from landfills and water-treatment plants.

Band made sure to address droughts, floods, and health issues in UNC’s 2007 Climate Change Report, a 180-page document that forty Carolina faculty put together for the North Carolina General Assembly. Band, who spearheaded the report, says that two major issues for North Carolina will be intense storms and sea level rise, both of which could alter the coastline in significant ways.

Rumblings Rising sea level is often tied to dire predictions about the collapse of the Green-

land ice sheet, though sea levels have been rising for decades without such a catastrophe occurring.

Jose Rial, a geophysicist at UNC who conducts research in Greenland, tells me that all of Greenland’s major outlet glaciers, where the ice sheet sends water to the ocean, are seismically active. Don’t think of tectonic earthquakes. “They don’t last a few seconds or minutes,” he says. “They last forty-five minutes to an hour. They happen when ice slides over ice. Basically, these rumblings are the ice sheet cracking.”

The global network of seismographs records some of the rumblings, but data are spotty, Rial says. Last year in Greenland he placed sensors next to moulins, large shafts where water from seasonal snow and ice flows through cracks toward the bottom of the permanent ice shelf. Moulins are ground zero for Greenland’s rumblings.

If there are droughts, we’ll face greater water supply issues and pollution problems.

When combined with past research, Rial’s data show that summertime moulin rumblings are intensifying. This is a big deal, he says, because moulins occur along Greenland’s periphery, and that peripheral ice acts as a buttress holding up the entire ice sheet. Moulins, with their melting water and cracking ice, undermine the integrity of the buttress. As the peripheral ice goes, so goes the Greenland ice sheet. At least that’s the theory.

A collapse of less than half of Greenland’s ice sheet would cause sea levels along the eastern U.S. seaboard to rise two meters, enough to inundate coastal cities.

This year Rial will put sensors around moulins to measure how deep the water goes. “We use all the noise that water and cracking produce to detect that,” he says.

“And we’re going to find out exactly how moulins work and at what time of year they form. We don’t know if a collapse will happen, but things are changing there much faster than we’d like them to.”

For years, the Arctic sea ice has been receding during the summer. In the winter the ice continues to extend great distances from the poles, “but it’s getting much thinner.”

—Tamlin Pavelsky, Geological Sciences

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“Marshes, sea grasses, and oyster reefs are all capable of keeping up with sea level rise, but at some point they will reach a backstop. And that’s us—humans are the backstop.”

—Mike Piehler, Institute of Marine Sciences

Rial is hesitant to say that the cracking and melting are definitely tied to temperature increases and global climate change, though temperatures there have risen steadily for decades. And as for the connection between moulins and total collapse of the ice sheet, Rial tells me, “There are no models for this. The physics is not well understood.”

That’s why the IPCC doesn’t include Greenland in sea level models. James Hansen, though, published research in 2007 showing that polar ice will not melt gradually. According to the geological record, ice sheets can suddenly destabilize when a certain temperature threshold is reached.

What that threshold is, no one knows. But warming the Arctic won’t help, and may cause Greenland to reach a tipping point, Hansen says.

Yet IPCC scientists and others point out that Greenland’s ice sheet doesn’t have to collapse for sea levels to rise. Nearly every glacier in the world is melting faster than scientists a decade ago predicted. Also, when water warms it expands, making sea levels rise. And the oceans have been warming.

The rising tides Oceans absorb 80 percent of the heat added to our environment from greenhouse gas emissions. This absorption is part of the climate system’s inertia, Hansen tells me. “The ocean is essentially a fourkilometer-deep heat sink.” Ocean temperatures near the surface have definitely risen over the past forty years, though the ocean depths are harder to gauge.

This warming, along with melting mountain glaciers, is expected to cause sea levels to rise 18 to 59 centimeters by the end of the twenty-first century, according to the 2007 IPCC report. But many scientists, including Hansen, think the IPCC’s estimates are low. The IPCC does not conduct research; it gathers more than 2,000 scientists from 154 countries to review peerreviewed scientific papers and come to a consensus. Then the scientists draft carefully worded reports. Each country’s repre12 endeavors

$8,000: amount that North Carolina would need to spend

annually, per acre, to denitrify marshes, sea grasses, and oyster reefs should sea level rise destroy them.

sentative has a say, which makes the final documents conservative. For instance, the 2007 IPCC report does not include current melting rates of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland because such rates are difficult to quantify with the physics equations that climate modelers use. Yet scientists agree that those glaciers are melting and contributing to sea level rise.

Still, the waters off North Carolina’s coast have been rising for decades. Rick Luettich, director of UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS), has created highresolution models to show what further sea level rise will look like.

If ocean waters were to rise half a meter, half of Dare County would be under water—at least during high tide. The county would become an island. At two meters, hundreds more acres would be permanently flooded and nearly every bit of the Outer Banks would be gone.

After Hurricane Isabel hit North Carolina 2003, Luettich’s team collected all the data available—tides, winds, topography, flooding—and plugged it into his models, which have been time-tested and honed to near perfection. Now Luettich can tinker with these models—adding higher sea levels, for instance—and see what would happen at the coast. If ocean waters were to rise half a meter, according the model half of Dare County would be under water—at least during high tide. In fact, the county would become an island. At two meters, hundreds more acres would be permanently flooded and nearly every bit of the Outer Banks would be gone.

Luettich and marine sciences colleague Tom Shay have also modeled hurricane storm surge with and without sea level rise. And this year, Luettich and Shay are constructing models to show how storms of varying intensity would affect the coast, assuming higher sea levels. That kind of

This model shows what will happen to the North Carolina coast as sea levels rise. The top image shows a normal sea level. In the second image, sea levels have risen by half a meter: at this level, half of Dare County is under water. In the third image, sea levels have risen by one meter. The fourth image shows a sea level increase of two meters. Images by Rick Luettich and Tom Shay.

Mike Piehler collects organic matter samples from an oyster reef near Beaufort, North Carolina. Reefs and other habitats perform processes, such as removing nitrogen from estuaries, that humans would have to do should rising sea level force marine habitats to the brink.

model might be more valuable, because storm surge happens over the course of hours. Long-term sea level rise would take decades, which means that we’d have time to respond. And so would the marine habitats we rely on for food.

IMS researcher Mike Piehler studies how sea level rise would affect marshes, sea grasses, and oyster reefs. Piehler says that these habitats could adjust to rising sea levels; they’d move inland along with the water. But in parts of North Carolina, marshes and other habitats would bump into wooden walls or move into people’s back yards.

If a rising sea level wouldn’t wipe out those habitats, Piehler says, it would definitely change them. He wanted to find out what the economic value of those habitats was.

Marine habitats are involved in several valuable processes that no one had put a dollar amount on. One process is denitrification. Sea grasses, marshes, and oyster reefs remove nitrogen from ocean water and sea-floor sediments. (Too much nitrogen is bad for water quality.)

Piehler calculated the value of the pro-

2030: the year by which China, at its current rate, will produce as much CO2 as the entire world did in 2008.

Geochemist Justin Ries ran experiments to see what happens to calcifying marine organisms in waters with high concentrations of carbon dioxide. Above: Clam shells, conch shells, and sea urchins dissolve.

(In each pair, the organism exposed to high levels of CO2 is on the right.) Other organisms also don’t do well, but a few marine animals grow their shells when CO2 is increased. Scientists fear that CO2 is altering marine habitats in significant ways. Photos courtesy Justin Ries.

Left: Lake Taihu in Southeastern China has full blooms of cyanobacteria throughout most of the year because of pollution from industry and too much nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff. Right: The Neuse River turned green with cyanobacteria after a particularly dry spring and hot summer in 1985.

Cyanobacteria are gaining footholds around the world—even as far north as the Baltic Sea—partly because of warming waters. They can be toxic to humans and can decimate marine habitats. Photos by Hans Paerl.

cess by multiplying the mass of nitrogen that these habitats remove each year by the cost per mass for things we’d have to buy to remove the nitrogen, such as storm-water treatment ponds. In his calculations Piehler also used the North Carolina trading credit number for nitrogen—essentially the amount of money people get paid for doing things that keep nutrients such as ni-

trogen out of water. He says it would cost eight thousand dollars per habitat acre per year to perform the same denitrification that marshes, sea grasses, and oyster reefs do automatically. There are hundreds of acres of such habitats at the coast.

If nutrients such as nitrogen are allowed to accumulate in water, then blue-green algae and other undesirable inhabitants will

“Temperatures of Lake Taihu in China have increased two to three degrees Celsius since World War II. The water’s not warming for any reason other than the climate is changing.”

—Hans Paerl, Institute of Marine Sciences

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“Because of the Outer Banks, there’s not much of a tide in the Pamlico Sound. But as sea level rises and those barrier islands degrade, the whole nature of the sound— ecosystems, habitats—would change because of a strong tide.”

—Rick Luettich, Institute of Marine Sciences

have a field day. Some blue-green algae are toxic, and once they start to dominate they can change an entire habitat for the worse.

Hans Paerl, also at IMS, has seen that happen in China, where he conducts research on Lake Taihu. (See Endeavors, Fall 2008, “Slime and the City.”) Paerl tells me that blue-green algae blooms—also known as cyanobacteria—are now appearing in northern Europe and boreal regions of Canada, largely because of warming. Longer warm seasons mean that the blooms have more time to take over an area. And once they take hold, they trap heat, which produces positive feedback—the water keeps getting warmer. Because they often form surface scum, blooms block sunlight that bottom-dwelling plants need for photosynthesis. This leads to oxygen-deprived bottom waters that can harm plants, fish, and other organisms.

Paerl has seen cyanobacteria in North Carolina lakes, rivers, and estuaries. So far only a few dominant species have shown up during hot droughts. But if waters continue to warm or accumulate nutrients from storm runoff, then cyanobacteria could have their way here, too.

On the other hand, right now some fish and other creatures aren’t minding the warmer waters.

Something fishy Joel Fodrie, an IMS biological oceanographer, was studying fish habitats in the northern Gulf of Mexico when he started reeling in a lot of snapper and grouper, which usually prefer warm tropical waters.

He decided to conduct research on fish populations and compare his findings to research from the 1970s.

“Parrotfish, grouper, and snapper are just way more abundant now,” Fodrie tells me.

Lane snappers are the fifth or sixth most abundant fish species in northern Gulf seagrass meadows. They were completely absent in the 1970s. “Gray snappers are now one hundred times more abundant,” he says. “Gag grouper, two hundredfold. Parrotfish, we caught twenty to thirty times more.” All those fish prefer warm water 14 endeavors

and will die if winter waters get too cold.

But winter waters are no longer getting too cold, he says.

Fodrie found that water temperatures have increased about 2.8 degrees Celsius since the 1970s. He says there’s a correlation between ocean warming and changes in fisheries. “But we know there could be other things going on,” he says. Some people say that red snapper fisheries in the Gulf are depleted. If so, it’s possible that other snapper are filling the void. Competition between adult fish may have opened a niche for other snapper and grouper. Seagrass habitats may have changed, possibly because of warmer temperatures. Or water quality might have changed.

“It’s a complex system,” Fodrie tells me.

There’s still debate about manmade climate change. But this debate is not among climate scientists. Nor does any reputable organization dispute the physics of how greenhouse gases work.

“We can’t say absolutely that the changes are due to climate change. It’s likely, though, that climate change is interacting with all these other things, because we’re not talking about just one kind of fish. It’s all these different species.”

A strong snapper fishery in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico is probably not a bad thing, Fodrie says. But now he’s studying how these new species interact with endemic species.

In North Carolina, fishers and divers have spotted lionfish, which thrive in warm waters. Lionfish are native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean; they were introduced into the Caribbean and have worked their way north. Now they survive off the North Carolina coast. “They are a voracious predator,” Fodrie says. “They eat smaller fish of many other species, including grouper.”

Fodrie says that wherever researchers look they see changes in fish populations.

Natural fisheries are slowly shifting toward

1,300 to 1,800 square kilometers of land in North

Carolina are less than one meter above high-tide sea level.

A red snapper. Photo by Jason Smith.

the poles. Spawning and feeding times are changing. And Fodrie says it’s tough to know whether the things fish eat will be available when the fish need them.

Another concern, Fodrie says, is carbon dioxide, which makes the oceans more acidic. It’s unclear how fish will respond to ocean acidification, but marine geochemist Justin Ries has done lab experiments to show what happens to some crustaceans and shellfish. He grew eighteen species of economically and ecologically important marine animals that make their shells out of calcium carbonate. Ries added CO2 to their tanks. CO2 mixed with water makes carbonic acid and raises the amount of carbon in the water while reducing the carbonate ion that organisms need for calcification.

Scientists have suspected that acidification would negatively affect all calcifying creatures.

But Ries found that seven animals, including crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, got bigger when the water was more acidic.

Ten organisms, including oysters and scallops, got smaller. And some—clams and conchs—dissolved altogether. Mussels showed no response. “The organisms that responded positively are apparently more adept at converting inorganic carbon in the seawater back into a form they can use for calcification,” Ries says. “Others appear to be less adept at manipulating carbon.” His work shows that there’s no magic formula to predict how different species will respond. For one, his team kept the creatures well-fed. But with ocean acidification, no one knows what the nutrients in seawater will be like.

“One thing you can be sure of,” Ries says, “is that ecosystems as a whole will change because of these varied individual responses.” Simply put, increased CO2 will disrupt the food chain.

A male Carolina anole. Photo by Piccolo Namek.

Hot and bothered?

UNC biologist Lauren Buckley started off

with metal lizards. Made simply from copper pipes painted gray, they’re a cheap and easy way to simulate the internal temperature of real lizards. Buckley’s goal was to understand how a lizard’s environment—ambient temperature, sun, wind, and precipitation— determines body temperature and energy.

So, in the tropical forests of the Lesser Antilles, she hunted for sunbathing lizards, waited for them to squirm away, and left a metal lizard on the spot.

Before Buckley started her work, many climate change scientists assumed that ani-

Better tests and models In the last five years, toxic bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus have become more prevalent off the coast of North Carolina and elsewhere. This species is native to estuaries, and it proliferates as water warms. It infects oysters and has now been found as far north as Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. In significant numbers Vibrio vulnificus can be lethal to humans.

Rachel Noble, an IMS microbiologist, has created a quick method to test water for microbial contaminants, including Vibrio species. The test takes between one and two hours to get results and can be done on-site. Other methods take at least eighteen hours and are typically done in a lab. Noble has also created rapid methods to test for E. coli and Enterococcus from fecal matter that can enter coastal waters during extreme weather events such as hurricanes

710,000 people are exposed to unsafe levels of particulate matter pollution in Guilford, Davidson, and Catawba counties, according to the EPA.

mals would simply follow their climate range around as conditions changed. “When I was an undergrad I read some of these papers,” Buckley says, “and thought, ‘Is that all we know?’”

Buckley set out to use biological data to forecast how animals will respond to climate change. “Where animals are on a map is a function of a lot of different elements,” Buckley says. It’s related to their biology and how much energy they can gather from their environment.

The lizards, for example, are only active when it’s warm enough to forage. If it gets too hot, they stop. “We know from their foraging pattern how much food they can take in during an activity period,” Buckley says. Using the body temperature data from the metal lizards, Buckley knows how long real lizards are active and can calculate their energy for survival and reproduction.

Scientists in the field are just beginning to understand a few organisms, Buckley says.

“Most of my work has focused on reptiles and amphibians because we understand their physiology, and because they’re really sensitive to climate change since they don’t

regulate their body temperature.”

Now Buckley is expanding to other organisms. Her research group has teamed up with Joel Kingsolver’s in the biology department to understand how climate change will affect butterflies in the mountains of Colorado.

“These butterflies have black and white spots on their wings, so the amount of light that they absorb is related to their number of dark spots,” Buckley says. The amount of absorbed light determines body heat, and thus the amount of time they fly to find food and lay eggs. Buckley and Kingsolver will manipulate the patterns on butterfly wings to test how increasing body temperature alters their flight time. Once they’ve included physiology and traits in the models, they hope to improve predictions of how species respond to climate change.

—Beth Mole Beth Mole is a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine. Lauren Buckley is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Funding for her work comes from the National Institute for Climate Change Research.

or torrential downpours. Down east there are huge lagoons full of hog waste that hurricanes have already disrupted. There are also a lot of septic systems.

“Some people don’t realize that in the eastern part of the state, the water table is only sixteen to eighteen inches below the surface in some places,” Noble tells me.

When there’s a lot of rain—not necessarily from a hurricane—the ground can get so saturated that the water table and septic systems mix. “This is happening now,” Noble says.

Bacteria also pose a more global threat.

They release CO2 into the atmosphere like humans do. With warmer oceans, there will likely be more viruses and bacteria.

Such organisms account for more biomass than any other species living in the ocean.

“The problem right now,” Noble says, “is that scientists are using models that don’t accurately show the roles of bacteria and viruses in current global CO2 models of the ocean.”

Noble is now working with researchers from Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and California to understand those roles. They are creating a single data set from all the disparate studies on ocean viruses and bacteria, and they hand over their findings to climate modelers.

UNC marine ecologist John Bruno has a similar goal. He’s been in Australia working with other scientists and economists to put together data for the next IPCC report about the economic implications of losing coral reefs. In the past decade, Bruno has seen warmer ocean water imperil coral

“There’s a lot of ozone pollution forming over cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta. But if you go to the remote South Pacific, the amount of ozone is also increasing. It’s increasing everywhere, not just over cities.”

—Jason West, Environmental Sciences

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“In the eastern part of the state, the water table is only sixteen to eighteen inches below the surface in some places.” Heavy rains can cause the water table and septic systems to mix. “This is happening now.”

—Rachel Noble, Institute of Marine Sciences LISA COLWELL

around the world. Along with former UNC grad student Elizabeth Selig, he found that more than fifteen hundred square kilometers of coral reefs around the world have disappeared every year since the mid1980s. They are now dying at a rate of 1 to 2 percent a year. (See Endeavors, Winter 2008, “In Hot Water.”)

Researchers had placed some of the blame on seaweed, which thrives so much in warm water that it chokes baby coral. But in a separate study with Australian collaborators, Bruno found that seaweeds are not dominating coral nearly as much as other scientists had suspected. His team analyzed scientific reports on eighteen hundred reefs and found no general trend of seaweed dominance over coral since 1995.

Because coral death is a global phenomenon, Bruno places most of the blame on diseases that like warm water. Disease spreads easily among coral. Reefs die and can no longer provide buffers from storms.

And those storms, thanks to warmer water and air, will likely be much more intense in the future.

But will there be more of these storms, as some scientists have speculated? Not necessarily, Chip Konrad says.

Storms of our grandchildren Konrad, a synoptic climatologist, looks at long-term climate records, particularly extreme weather events and atmospheric patterns of the past. When he studies those patterns, he sees way too many variables to predict accurately what the details of our future hurricane seasons will look like.

“There’s no telling where the Bermuda High will be when a hurricane comes,” Konrad tells me. No one can predict the positioning of fronts and other weather features that could keep future hurricanes from pounding North Carolina. Konrad also says that it’s difficult to pin down how future hurricanes will form.

When Atlantic hurricanes form off the coast of West Africa, they start as large thunderstorms and then organize into hurricanes over the ocean with the help of warm air, warm water, and little wind shear.

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“Our hurricane season starts June 1 because the ocean is definitely warm enough to support a hurricane,” he says. “But we don’t see many until August because the mid and upper-level winds blow too strongly until then. Stronger winds aloft tend to mix things up so storms have a hard time organizing.”

“I don’t know any major scientific issue for which there’s no dissent,” says Larry Band. But our society has never operated on the premise of 100 percent certainty: think of the housing market, oil, and interest rates. “We’ll wager billions of dollars on highly uncertain speculation. But we’re unwilling to even take small steps toward mitigating climate change? We don’t make decisions in life based on knowing things for sure. If we did that, then we’d never do anything.”

1.5 million North Carolinians breathe air that the EPA considers to be high in ozone.

He tells me that the upper-level winds will probably blow a bit stronger in a warmer world, making it more difficult for storms to organize into hurricanes.

“Still, there will be periods when upperlevel winds relax,” Konrad says. “And with a warmer ocean you could breed some exceptionally strong systems.”

There has never been a category 5 hurricane documented in North Carolina history. But in a warmer world the chances would increase, according to Konrad. “A category 5 storm would be just unbelievable,” he says. “Billions of dollars of damage and lots of lives lost.”

How likely is it? No one knows.

That’s the thing about climate change.

We don’t know exactly what the changes will be or how fast they’ll manifest. We don’t know whether the Southeast will be drier or wetter, or how future floods and droughts will compare to historical trends.

We don’t know whether the Greenland ice sheet will collapse or how crucial snow pack will respond to increased temperatures. We don’t know exactly how fisheries, marshes, coral, and oysters will respond.

But what we do know is that events have been unfolding faster than scientists predicted not that long ago. We know that temperatures have been increasing steadily since 1880, the earliest date scientists say

A pier in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. North Carolina’s Outer Banks may be particularly affected by climate change.

Photo by David Coleman.

Coal-fired facts UNC’s cogeneration plant uses coal and

natural gas to create steam and electricity at the same time, allowing it to harness nearly twice as much energy as a traditional coalfired plant from one pound of coal. That reduces sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide, mercury, particulates, and other emissions while saving millions of dollars in energy costs, according to UNC’s campus services division. If the plant hadn’t been built, in 1991, the university would likely have had to use more electricity from the power grid, which receives energy mostly from coal and nuclear reactions. Coal, environmentalists say, is removed from mountains

they can trust the instrumental record. And thanks to ice core samples, we know that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been so high, or its rate of increase so rapid, in the past fifty million years. Rial says that scientists have looked back at the geological record to see how fast nature has responded to natural climate changes.

Never before have such changes occurred as fast as they are today, he says.

The 2007 IPCC report states that there’s a 90 percent probability that greenhouse gases are now the biggest cause of climate change. Some powerful people clamor about the remaining 10 percent.

“But I don’t know any major scientific issue for which there’s no dissent,” Band tells me. There’s still debate about man-made climate change; every scientist I spoke to readily admits this. But this debate is not among climate scientists. Nor does any reputable organization dispute the physics of how greenhouse gases work.

Moreover, Band says, our society has never operated on the premise of 100 percent certainty. “We’ll wager billions of dollars on highly uncertain speculation,” he says, pointing to the housing market, oil, and interest rates. “But we’re unwilling to even take small steps toward mitigating climate change? We don’t make decisions in life based on knowing things for sure. If we did that, then we’d never do anything.”

Band, Hansen, and everyone else I spoke to agree that it will be too late to address climate change if we wait until we’re 100 percent certain that greenhouse gases have

and mines in ways harmful to the environment and people.

The coal-fired plant, which provides heat, power, and steam for 175 campus buildings, produces greenhouse gases. But the university is taking steps to limit CO2 emissions.

In 2009 the campus upgraded its thermostat monitoring system, and thermostats are now set lower during winter and higher during summer to conserve energy— heating, cooling, and powering buildings accounts for 90 percent of the university’s carbon footprint. These improvements, along with other heating and cooling changes, save the university an estimated four million dollars annually.

Over the next fifteen years, UNC hopes to replace 20 percent of coal use with biomass such as torrefied wood—a dense charcoal-like substance that would help reduce carbon emissions.

For the long term, UNC has set a goal to become carbon free by 2050 and is exploring renewable energy sources such as wind power, solar thermal panels, heat recovery chillers, and biomass gasification.

In January 2010 Chancellor Holden Thorp appointed a task force to evaluate ways to reduce UNC’s carbon footprint in the short term and over the long haul. The task force will provide recommendations to the chancellor by the end of 2010.

—Mark Derewicz

caused wild environmental changes.

At the very least, scientists tell me, we should think of taking action now as a kind of insurance. The government forces homeowners to buy insurance even though it’s unlikely our houses will burn down.

Regarding climate change in North Carolina, this “buying insurance” could mean several things, including improving energy efficiency and changing development patterns, especially at the coast and in the mountains.

Every scientist I spoke to also agreed that, on the national and global scale, we must drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. And according to Hansen, holding the CO2 level steady at 387 parts per million won’t be good enough; we need to reduce that to 350 parts to avoid drastic climate change. He says we ought to cut out coal entirely from the energy picture within the next decade. That’s unlikely to happen, given the current political climate

and the weight of the coal industry. Hansen knows this. But he also knows the science.

When he was in Chapel Hill in February 2010, he gave a talk at Memorial Hall and lectured in campus classrooms. But he also attended a protest at UNC’s coal-power plant, the leading emitter of CO2 in Orange County. In 2009 Hansen was arrested for trespassing during a protest at a coal-power plant in West Virginia. It’s this sort of activism that has made him a target. He’s supposed to be a scientist, his critics say, not an activist.

But Hansen, often dubbed the father of global warming, is also a grandfather, a fact he points to when discussing his activism.

“I can’t desert my grandkids,” he tells me.

“Climate change is an enormous intergenerational injustice. The present generation should know that there will be consequences for continuing to burn fossil fuels, consequences that will be borne by our children and grandchildren.” e

From the College of Arts and Sciences: Larry Band is the Voit Gilmore Distinguished Professor of Geography and director of the Institute for the Environment. Chip Konrad is an associate professor of geography and director of the Southeastern Regional Climate Center. Tamlin Pavelsky is an assistant professor and Jose Rial is a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences.

John Bruno is an associate professor and Justin Ries an assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences. James Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

He came to Carolina in February 2010 as the Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. From the Institute of Marine Sciences: Rick Luettich is a professor of marine sciences and director of the institute; Mike Piehler is an assistant professor, Rachel Noble is an associate professor, and Joel Fodrie is a research assistant professor. Hans Paerl is the Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences. From the School of Public Health: Jason West is an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering. endeavors 17

AIP EMILIO

L ARCHIVES,

SEGRĂˆ VISUA

LLECTION

WHEELER CO

Katharine Way and her nowdeclassified letter about a safety hazard related to plutonium production at the Hanford plant

When it came to safety on the Manhattan Project, these two scientists pursued very different agendas.

by Susan Hardy 18 endeavors

A

s the Manhattan Project got under way in 1942, the U.S. government suddenly needed scientists—lots of them.

Katharine Way, who’d earned her Ph.D. in physics at UNC just a few years before, wanted in. She called up an old faculty mentor who had been recruited for the project, and a few days later she was headed for the University of Chicago. There Way helped design the facility in Hanford, Washington, that would make the plutonium used for the bombs dropped in the Trinity test and on Nagasaki.

You won’t find Way’s name in many histories of the Manhattan Project, says Jordynn Jack, who spent four years researching and writing about the experiences of women scientists in World War II. Like thousands of other people, including almost all of the hundreds of women who worked in scientific and technical roles on the project, Way was lost in the shadows of a few key figures such as Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi.

And because the Manhattan Project had to be kept secret, Way and her colleagues couldn’t publish their work. What we know about their contributions comes from the project’s declassified memos and reports— many of which still haven’t been closely examined by scholars.

These documents fascinate Jack: they show how people from the different cultures of science, industry, and the military communicated with each other. “The project didn’t have a well-established organizational structure or culture, just an ad hoc one that arose out of these three distinct groups,” she says.

Jack followed the paper trails left by Way and another scientist, Leona Marshall, who were researching safety issues at the Hanford production site. The fact that both scientists were women and working on safety may not have been a coincidence. “With a few exceptions, the roles that women were given weren’t the glamour jobs,” Jack says.

As important as safety research was, it was

Leona Marshall (highlighted) accepted more risk for the sake of higher production. In this photo dated December 2, 1946, Marshall appears with members of the Met Lab, posing on the steps of Eckhart Hall on the campus of the University of Chicago.

DIGITAL PHOTO ARCHIVE, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, COURTESY AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES

endeavors 19

less prestigious than work that contributed directly to building a nuclear weapon, so it was more likely to be assigned to women.

Jack wanted to find out how the women on the Manhattan Project participated in the rhetoric of science: the way scientists use language to make the case for their conclusions. And in the memos that scientists and engineers exchanged while working on the Hanford site, Jack found an interesting difference between some of the scientists who seemed to be good at persuading and others who weren’t. Way and others who argued in terms of safety were less effective than scientists such as Marshall who argued in terms of what would move the project forward. This was true even when it was the scientists’ job to think about hazards to people involved in making nuclear weapons.

W

ay was working on potential radiation hazards around reactors at the plutonium production site. In one memo, she wrote to a DuPont engineer working on the Hanford plant about the part of the facility where workers would move used fuel rods into storage basins of water: Dear Charlie: In one of your recent weekly reports… you say that under normal operating conditions a man may spend three minutes daily in the discharge area. I am unable to check your results and wondered if you would be kind enough to go over the following figures to see where the discrepancy is.

Way then laid out her calculations and suggested some possible explanations for why she and the engineer might have gotten different results. But in his reply, the engineer didn’t seem interested in whether his statement about the safety of the discharge area was correct—instead, he seemed to want to pretend that he’d never made it. “No change…will result from an upward revision of estimates on the hazard in this area,” he told Way, “since the lowest estimate was already too high to permit access during operation.” But he would go ahead and reconcile his calculations with hers anyway, the engineer said, “to keep the record straight.”

What happened during this exchange?

Way saw a safety hazard in a report. She tried 20 endeavors

to handle it tactfully by giving the problem back to the engineer instead of jumping to her own conclusions. This polite tone was the norm in technical memos, Jack says, and it discouraged Way from expressing her concerns more strongly.

In another back-and-forth with the same engineer, Way had to recruit a senior colleague to help defend her estimate of the radiation risk in a reactor’s control-rod room. The engineer countered by trying to show that Way’s estimate wasn’t valid.

And anyway, he said, there was a plan to use heavier sheet metal covers to block the radiation “if this danger appears.” At that point, the memos about the control-rod room end, so we can’t know how the situation was resolved—or whether addressing it was put off until after danger actually did appear.

Way may have had trouble being heard because she was a junior member of the team, but also because of the limitations of memos. The system of memos came from the military and industrial officials, Jack says, and it dealt only with technical information and calculations. Ethical considerations were never an explicit part of the discussion.

Leona Marshall was also a junior scientist, but she had an easier time with the memo system, Jack says, because she focused on what would make the plants most efficient and productive—not on how to minimize the risk to people working and living nearby. Marshall and John Wheeler (Way’s old mentor at Carolina) were working on the problem of what the upper limits of plutonium production at Hanford should be. And they succeeded in getting those limits raised.

At first they advocated for limits that they said were “calculated on the most probable assumptions, rather than the most conservative ones.” They were thinking about how the products of nuclear fission would most likely behave, rather than about how they might behave in a worst-case scenario. They took this risk because they wanted to supply more plutonium: “To superpose…a safety

factor any more substantial than necessary might result in a serious limitation of batch size,” they wrote.

Just a few weeks later, Marshall and Wheeler started advocating for even higher limits of production. They managed to do this, even though they’d found that some of their original calculations were incorrect, by showing that they were aware of all the potential risks and then minimizing the appearance of those risks. They described a possibility that too much nuclear material might collect and cause an uncontrolled chain reaction, but then quickly added, “This is only remotely conceivable.” Later, they repeated that “the uncertainty just mentioned is not so serious as it appears.”

Marshall’s willingness to take risks wasn’t just on paper: after moving to the Hanford site, she got pregnant and decided to hide her condition rather than stop working.

She’d heard from the doctor who monitored the Chicago lab that being around radiation was dangerous to women’s reproductive health, but she thought that his concern was exaggerated. She stayed on the job until two days before she gave birth, and the baby was born healthy.

T

hese are incomplete portraits of Way and Marshall’s experiences, but they raise questions about the idea that the Manhattan Project is a good model for other scientific work, Jack says. The U.S. government and researchers funded by the government have used analogies with the Manhattan Project to talk about solar energy projects, finding a cure for AIDS, and research on how to prevent terrorist networks from forming and increasing their numbers. “It came to represent the gold standard for high-paced scientific research,” Jack says.

That’s understandable, because the Manhattan Project got the job done. But the technical memo system discouraged people

JASON SMITH

from bringing ethical concerns into their work, Jack says, and the focus on fast results seemed to encourage risk. The scientists and engineers were still uncovering potential hazards and revising plans while the Hanford site was already under construction.

We can do more than just not rush scientific research, Jack thinks. We can also keep in mind that although we may ask scientists to be objective, it’s impossible to separate scientific research from ethical questions.

We can also remember that people low in the hierarchies of expertise and authority, doing the day-to-day work of science, may be the ones closest to these questions—but also have a harder time raising them.

Even on the Manhattan Project, some people made a last-minute attempt to contribute more than just their scientific knowledge and skill. In July 1945, seventy scientists affiliated with the project signed a petition asking President Truman not to use atomic bombs on Japan, at least not without first trying to make it easier for the country to accept surrender.

Katharine Way signed the petition. Leona Marshall didn’t. e In 1968 Katharine Way joined the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, a nuclear physics research collaboration of Duke, UNC, and NC State. Way died in 1995 in Chapel Hill at age ninety-two. After World War II, Leona Marshall researched nuclear power, particle physics, and cosmology; she also advocated for nuclear power as a safe source of energy. She wrote a memoir, The Uranium People, about the Manhattan Project.

Jordynn Jack is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. The University of Illinois Press published her study of women, science, and rhetoric, titled Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II, in September 2009.

Jordynn Jack: It’s impossible to separate scientific research from ethical questions.

epresent r o t e m a roject “c P n a cientific t s t a d h e n c a a M p The for high d r a d n a t s says. k c a J the gold ” , research endeavors 21

Terrence Holt sat close as his father lay dying in a hospital bed. He leaned in and told his dad that he was going to be a doctor. “He couldn’t respond,” Holt remembers. “He just gasped for air.

I think he heard me. I don’t know.”

His father was the first person Holt told. For an entire year he had let family and friends think that he was working on a book. In reality, Holt was a premed student.

“I was thirty-nine years old,” Holt says. “I didn’t tell anyone I was changing careers because I wasn’t really sure I could do it. Even my mother was shocked.”

Holt had been teaching literature and creative writing happily at Rutgers University for ten years when he walked away. Today, he walks the halls at UNC Hospitals, stethoscope dangling around his neck, taking care of our fathers and mothers. He’s a geriatrician. And that was supposed to be the end of that story.

But along the way the plot took another turn. Being a doctor inspired Holt to write again. And thanks to a former student’s persistence, Holt did write a book—and published it to rave reviews.

e

The Doctor’s Writing

by Mark Derewicz

22 endeavors

JASON SMITH

endeavors 23

H

olt can’t recall a time when he wasn’t coming up with stories.

He published his first in his elementary school “literary” magazine. “I was four years old,” he says. “I couldn’t write.

Someone must have transcribed it. It was about a rocket taking off.” Space travel would play a role in Holt’s writing for years to come.

He majored in English and then pursued a master’s degree at Cornell, where he jumped at the chance to take an astronomy course taught by Carl Sagan. “One of his lectures was about the Voyager mission,” Holt says. “He told us that NASA had considered dropping a probe into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. That idea captured my imagination. It reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’—the idea that at the bottom of this enormous vortex you’ll find something terribly important, something hidden since the beginning of the world.”

Walking home after the lecture, Holt began composing a short story about a man isolated on a spaceship approaching Jupiter. He called the piece “Charybdis,” after the whirlpool in the Odyssey that has come to symbolize—along with Scylla, the monster that devours Odysseus’s crew—an existence between two dangers. Holt finished the story for his master’s thesis, but he had no idea of the role it would play later in his life.

MFA in hand, but concerned that he still didn’t fully understand his craft, Holt stayed at Cornell for a doctorate in British literature. “I felt like a complete freak,” he says. “That kind of move from creative writing to literary criticism didn’t happen very often, and those two worlds didn’t speak to each other. Lots of mutual suspicion and hostility,” he jokes. “But I’m glad I did it because I found myself with a couple of job offers.”

Holt chose Rutgers and stayed there, happily, for ten years. But during his midthirties, Holt was forced to spend less of his free time conjuring imaginative stories and more time in hospitals. Close friends and closer relatives were battling cancer, and Holt visited them often. His father’s health was failing. Holt was there, frustrated at his inability to help.

“I watched the doctors,” Holt says. “I saw them make these huge impacts on people’s lives and I was just so terribly impressed.”

24 endeavors

“Some people on the committee were concerned that I was doing all this just to collect material for a book. I laughed. I had drained my savings, put myself through no end of stress, and when my dad and my wife’s father died within four weeks of each other, I’d barely been able to take my nose out of my books to go to them. No, I wasn’t doing this for grins.”

This was not Holt’s first experience watching doctors work. His father had been a doctor. His mother, a nurse. His brother, a surgeon. Holt, though, had never wanted to be a doctor. He still liked teaching. The idea of becoming a doctor just stirred inside him, he says.

Holt is emphatic about one thing: there was no epiphany that triggered his desire to change careers. “Sometimes the most important things that shape our lives happen out of our sight and out of our conscious thoughts,” Holt says. “We don’t like to think that way. We’d rather imagine we’re in control, so we invent stories with dramatic turning points, moments of decision.

Life isn’t really like that.”

One day, during a routine checkup, Holt asked his own physician what she’d think of him pursuing a career in medicine.

“I think that was the first time I actually voiced the idea,” Holt says. “She gave me the funniest look.” Holt didn’t know it at the time, but his doctor was on the medschool admissions committee at the University of Pennsylvania. “And then she said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”

Holt took premed courses at night at Penn, but immediately he encountered resistance.

“My advisor looked at my dossier and said, ‘You’re too old,’” Holt remembers.

“Then she listed a bunch of medical schools that had never even looked at a student who was over twenty-five. She said, ‘They can’t admit this because it’s illegal, but it’s the truth. Here’s what you have to do: get a 4.0, and do it in eighteen months.’”

Holt thought he’d never be able to take all the biology, chemistry, and physics he needed in a year and a half—not to mention pass calculus, a subject he had failed twice already in high school and college. But he did it. He applied to several schools, including Temple University, which requested a second interview. “I thought that was odd,” Holt says. “So I asked them why, and they

said that some people on the committee were concerned that I was doing all this just to collect material for a book. I laughed. I had drained my savings, put myself through no end of stress, and when my dad and my wife’s father died within four weeks of each other, I’d barely been able to take my nose out of my books to go to them. No, I wasn’t doing this for grins.”

A few schools accepted him, including Penn, whose admissions committee told him they hoped that he would write about the school. But Holt, determined to devote his life to primary care medicine, chose UNC. Then in 1996, during his second year of med school, everything changed. Again.

J

unot Díaz, one of Holt’s former students, signed with a young agent named Nicole Aragi and published Drown, an instantly acclaimed collection of short stories. Soon after, Díaz gave Aragi a copy of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, pointed her to a story that Holt had written, and said, “Here is the best unpublished writer in America.”

Aragi read “In the Valley of the Kings,” a story about a dying Egyptologist who wanted to make one last big discovery.

“I hate to talk in clichés, but that story completely blew my mind,” Aragi says.

“It’s one of those stories that kept me up at night. Just so creepy and wonderful and insidious.”

TriQuarterly didn’t have Holt’s contact information, but Díaz did.

“There was no one out there writing like Professor Holt and it seemed a travesty that this genius was not being recognized,” Díaz says. “I owed him a tremendous debt. He was the writer who got me firmly planted on the road to being a writer, and as soon as I was in a place where I could help, I helped.”

Aragi asked Holt to put together a collection of short stories, which he did. There

were no takers at first, but Holt wasn’t concerned; he was busy with med school and gave little thought to writing.

In 2000, the year Holt earned his MD, Aragi placed one of Holt’s stories in Zoetrope, a quarterly literary magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola. The piece, titled “O Logos,” is a modern version of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Full of tension and fear, it’s a story rooted much more in the unknown than the known.

Throughout his residency Holt still had little time or desire to write. When his residency ended, the first thing he felt like doing—to his surprise—was writing. Except this time his work was completely different.

Gone were the eerie, mysterious, imaginative stories set in the black vacuum of space or the dank tombs of pharaohs. Instead Holt wrote stories steeped in conventional mainstream realism.

“Very straightforward stories, almost always set in a hospital,” he says. “Stories where I try to arrive at some sort of understanding about situations that I was in during my residency. Not memoir or reportage. They’re fiction, but they’re as true as I could make them.”

Holt published one of them, called “Orphan,” in Boston Review in 2005. Another, “Bad News,” appeared in the same magazine a year later. And last summer Granta published “A Sign of Weakness.” With Aragi’s help, Holt joined Men’s Health as a contributing editor in 2006. He’s written two or three short pieces for the magazine every year since. Writing for a mass circulation audience was a new experience, and Holt began thinking that his foray into medical writing could have a positive impact.

“I don’t think medicine, especially hospital medicine, is well-represented in popular culture,” he says. “There’s a lot of pernicious mythology and mystification that surrounds it.” Television programs are most guilty, he says. “The way doctors on TV talk about their work—I mean, if real humans talked that way in a hospital I’d worry about them.”

Holt’s stories are never about patients. He can’t really know their stories and he says it would be wrong and harmful to convince himself that he could. “I write my story,” he says. “It’s the only one I’ve got to tell, and I think it’s worth telling because I think it would be helpful for people to know what health care looks like from the other side.”

In 2008, the same year Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, W. W. Norton & Company decided to publish a collection of Holt’s short stories. Holt spent the next eight months rewriting old stories and writing new ones, and in 2009, Norton published In the Valley of the Kings.

The collection’s third story, dreamed up after that Carl Sagan lecture, is one of three set in the stark places of our solar system, where the main characters grapple with the consequences of technology and their own decisions. The other five stories are Earthbound but no less imaginative and tense.

They are, to say the least, very different from Holt’s current realistic stories.

“I’ve wondered if being a doctor has changed me somehow,” Holt says. “I don’t think it has, but when I sit down to write this is what comes out. I’m happy to find I can write in an entirely different mode.”

In February of 2010, while trying to finish a second collection of stories based on situations he’s faced as a doctor, Holt got a call from Aragi. The New Republic wanted to hire him as a contributing editor and website columnist. “Despite the additional demand on my time, the opportunity to write about medicine from such a platform was something I couldn’t turn down,” he says.

On a particularly cold day, amid a few interruptions from his two kids, Holt sat in his home office to gather thoughts for a column. There on his desk was the nameplate from his father’s old office door. Their relationship had never been easy. His dad, a complex man, had been difficult to know in the best of times.

“My mother tells me that my father would have been proud of me,” Holt says.

“I take her at her word. And I do think of him. I wonder, sometimes, what he’d think of all this.”

But Holt has no second thoughts about anything. “I’m happy my life has taken a couple of right-angle turns,” he says.

“They’ve been good. I suppose I could’ve said no to any of them and I’m glad I didn’t.” e Terrence Holt is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Medicine and in the Center for Aging and Health’s Division of Geriatric Medicine, both in the School of Medicine. His most recent published story, “A Sign of Weakness,” can be found at http://www.granta. com/Contributors/Terrence-Holt.

A narrative drug?

After Terrence Holt became a doctor and a professor of social medicine, he began thinking of ways to incorporate his former life as a writer into his new work.

He decided to conduct a pilot research study, asking several cancer patients in UNC’s chemotherapy clinic whether they’d be willing to write their personal stories. Those who agreed were given laptops and parameters for writing narratives. The patients filled out questionnaires about their moods before and after the exercise.

It was a small study, but Holt found a trend: people who wrote about their experiences as cancer patients did not feel as good about themselves after the exercise as people who were part of a control group.

“I was troubled by this,” Holt says.

“Not that I believed the reigning dogma about narrative medicine was wrong, but I wondered if this kind of study could harm people.

“Narrative is powerful. It’s the oldest cultural practice we have. It’s universal.

And I respect it. But it’s like any drug; it can have toxicities.”

Holt is more certain of another project he’s helped spearhead: a collaboration with faculty in the School of Medicine and the Department of English to create a multidisciplinary cluster of undergraduate courses on literature, medicine, and culture. The cluster will be available for students in the fall of 2010. There’s also talk of creating an interdisciplinary master’s degree based on those three subjects.

“My hope,” Holt says, “is that this would be a place where humanities students and med students would wind up in a class together, thinking about what it means to do medicine.”

—Mark Derewicz

endeavors 25

ROCK SOLID, SORT OF YES, THE APPALACHIANS ARE ANCIENT, BUT THEY CAN STILL SHAKE IT.

BY SUSAN HARDY

26 endeavors

WHEN LARA WAGNER STARTED SHOWING UP ON PEOPLE’S DOORSTEPS in the

spring of 2009, it’s pretty likely that she was the first seismologist folks had seen in western North Carolina.

For many seismologists, “the East coast is kind of the ugly stepchild of the country,” Wagner says. Scientists who study the movement of the earth tend to gravitate toward places such as the Rocky Mountains or the eight hundred miles of the San Andreas Fault in California. The eastern half of the country gets a lot less attention.

“For a long time, the story has been that there isn’t anything to find,” Wagner says. The ground under the eastern seaboard is relatively stable, and the Appalachian Mountains are about four hundred million years older than the more active Rockies.

But when Wagner visits the Blue Ridge in North Carolina, the story she hears is different. “People will tell you that there are earthquakes all the time. Little ones: glasses clink, someone’s favorite plate falls off the wall. An old timer might tell you about a few larger ones.”

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

This detail from a NASA satellite image shows the wave-like pattern of weathered ridges in the Appalachian Mountains. Despite their age and placid appearance, these mountains are not immune to seismic disturbance.

endeavors 27

S

cientists can’t explain why these quakes happen, because they just don’t know all that much about the lithosphere— the top layers of the earth that can be anywhere from about 15 to 185 miles thick— under this part of the country.

And the mountains aren’t the only place in the East where the earth moves: rare, larger earthquakes can happen in unexpected spots.

In 1886 a quake that modern seismologists estimate was a magnitude 7.0 or 8.0 leveled Charleston, South Carolina. An 8.0 earthquake doesn’t surprise scientists when it happens on one of the faults between Earth’s tectonic plates—but on the eastern U.S. coast, well inside the borders of the North American plate? “There’s no reason that we know of for there to be an earthquake of that size,” Wagner says. “We’d like to have explanations for the activity we see here, and for those rare freak events.”

Seismologists look for these answers in the lithosphere, which is divided into tectonic plates that bump up against each other, scraping past or forcing each other up or down. Sometimes, pressure inside a plate makes the rocky top of the lithosphere bulge up. “It’s sort of like taking a notebook and bending it just slightly,” Wagner says, holding one up and pressing on the edges so that the center rises. That bulging pressure is what some scientists have thought could be supporting the Appalachian Mountains.

iceberg, and if you scrape off the top, more just keeps coming up from below.”

Wagner and other seismologists explore the structure of the lithosphere by measuring how energy moves the ground near the earth’s surface. A broadband seismometer in North Carolina can record the movement of waves of energy at certain frequencies that reverberate from quakes all around the world. “It’s like living in an apartment and the guy who lives over you is playing music at two in the morning,” Wagner says.

“You don’t hear all of the music through the walls, but you get the thud, thud, thud of the bass line.”

Any time a significant quake happens, Wagner’s seismometers record how much the ground moves as waves of energy come JASON SMITH

M

ountains don’t stay the same year after year: they erode. In fact, scientists estimate that most mountains would erode after about 90 million years if they didn’t have more mass slowly coming up from the ground underneath. The Appalachians have been around for about 450 million years and they’re still good-sized mountains, so they must be getting more mass from underground. But Wagner is the first person to put broadband seismometers in the Appalachians to find out how this happens. The evidence is in the thickness of the crust under the mountains: a thin, flexed crust would tell her that the high pressure hypothesis was correct. A deeper crust would suggest that the Appalachians are like big icebergs, with lots of mass underneath, Wagner says. “You see the tiny tip of the 28 endeavors

Wagner’s six broadband seismometers can use movement from an earthquake anywhere in the world to look deep under the Blue Ridge Mountains.

up from under the earth. When some waves hit a major change in the composition of the lithosphere, they scatter: some of the energy keeps on going straight up to the surface, while the rest shakes the ground from side to side as it rises. That scattering effect always happens where the upper mantle of the earth changes to the base of the crust. So the dif-

ference in speed between the primary wave and the shear wave that follows tells Wagner how thick the crust is under her stations.

Wagner has half a dozen seismometers spread out in a line from the North CarolinaTennessee border down past Mount Mitchell and ending east of Asheville. Finding a good spot to put a seismometer isn’t easy, she says. The device runs on solar power, so the location has to be sunny year-round.

Tractors, large animals, and well-traveled roads all create too many vibrations, so she has to stay away from those—also from the Southern Rail, which is never all that far away in the North Carolina mountains. And the seismometer is housed in a thirty-gallon drum that sits just under the surface of the ground, so Wagner had to find landowners who were okay with her digging on their property, and who would let her or her students come out every three to six months to dig the electronics box up and retrieve the data.

In one part of the Blue Ridge, UNC’s geology department happened to have a contact, a mineral collector who was happy to let Wagner stick a seismometer in the ground on his land. After that, she pored over a terrain map, looking mostly for spots that were up on ridges, away from major roads and the shadows of mountains, but looked like they were accessible by car.

“Then I just went knocking on doors,” Wagner says. When she found a landowner with a likely site, she’d introduce herself and explain that she was interested in finding out what the mountains were doing deep underground. Most people were friendly enough and willing to help.

At one farm, a herd of baby goats escorted her and her students around the property as they worked. At another, Wagner came home from a data retrieval trip with cartons of free chicken and duck eggs in odd colors.

The seismometers have been in the ground since the spring of 2009, and there were enough major seismic events that year—earthquakes in Italy, others in Chile and Bolivia, some events around the Aleutian Islands and in ocean ridges—to give Wagner and her students the data they needed to map the crust. They got a clear result: the crust underneath the mountains is thick, disprov-

JASON SMITH

ing the high pressure, thin crust hypothesis.

This means that the Appalachians follow the iceberg model. And there’s still so much crust left for them to use up that it suggests the mountains aren’t eroding nearly as fast as scientists have thought.

Wagner was satisfied with that result.

But as she was preparing her data to present to colleagues at a conference, she found something strange: the pictures from her two easternmost seismometers showed that the structure of the lower lithosphere looks very different on either side of the Brevard fault, an ancient, shallow structure that runs in line with the mountains.

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he lower crust and mantle underneath the mountains is supposed to be a relatively homogeneous mass from one ancient source. As you move east through the state, the ground changes: different bands of terrain got tacked onto the coast as the North American continent was being formed. If there really is a major discontinuity at the fault—and every seismic wave that rippled through the ground to Wagner’s seismometer seems to confirm it—that would shake up our understanding of where a huge chunk of rock underneath North Carolina came from. “This isn’t what any of the models say about how this part of the country was formed,” Wagner says. We won’t know for sure until more seismometers collect data on the east side of the fault.

Wagner has been using six of the ten seismometers she owns on her Appalachian Mountains research. The equipment is expensive, the waiting lists to use government-owned seismometers are at least a year or two long, and she’s always working on several projects at once. So after Wagner had enough data to publish her results, she was planning to move all her seismometers in the summer of 2010 for a round of data collection in the Andes.

But now she thinks she may just need to keep one foot in the North Carolina mountains. e Lara Wagner is an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. She received support for her work in the Blue Ridge Mountains from the John and Barbara Rogers Fund for Geochemical Excellence.

Above: Lara Wagner double majored in history and sociology as an undergrad. Later she signed up for a seismology class almost at random—and was hooked.

Below: The seismometer’s control box monitors how much energy it takes to keep a mass, buried nearby in a thirty-gallon drum, from being displaced when the earth around it moves even the tiniest bit.

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endeavors 29

On the night of September 11, 2001, Omid Safi feared for the lives of his wife and two young children. A Muslim American living in upstate New York, he knew he could become a target for retribution because of his Iranian ancestry. “People were shooting Sikhs, and the first person to be killed was an Egyptian Copt, a Christian,” Safi recalls. “That night in Chicago three hundred people surrounded a large mosque, shouting, ‘U-S-A, U-S-A.’ But the people inside were also Americans.”

Holy Work What Muslim Americans are doing to limit homegrown terrorism

by Mark Derewicz

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JASON SMITH

Those were scary days, says Safi, now a religious studies professor at UNC. The numbers bear him out. According to the U.S. government, there were 481 reported hate crimes against Muslim Americans in 2001, the vast majority coming after 9/11. In 2000 there had been twenty-eight.

Since 9/11, there have been at least one hundred reported hate crimes every year. These cases have received little press. Homegrown terrorism, on the other hand, has become a hot topic.

But what risk do Muslim American radicals actually pose? And what, if anything, are Muslims doing to thwart radicalization in their midst? Researchers at UNC and Duke decided to find out.

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JASON SMITH

ccording to UNC sociologist Charles Kurzman, the kind of radicalization that leads to violence is much less common in the United States than in Western Europe. One reason could be demographics.

Europe has a large population of workingclass Muslims, many of whom immigrated for guest worker programs. They are less educated than most Europeans, poorer, and sometimes sequestered in ghettos. By contrast, Muslims typically have migrated to the United States for higher education or professional jobs, Kurzman says. Most foreign-born Muslims living in the United

States are as educated—or better educated—than the average American, and they live intermingled among our citizenry.

But such broad-scale demographics can’t explain everything, Kurzman says. He teamed up with Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke Islamic studies professor, and David Schanzer, a public policy professor at Duke and UNC, to dig a little deeper.

They found that 139 Muslim Americans since 9/11 have committed violent terrorist acts, have been convicted on terrorism charges involving violence, or have been arrested with such charges pending. Fifteen

of the 139 were successful in their attack.

And twenty-five of the 139 were successful in leaving the United States to join a foreign fighting force.

The findings proved the researchers’ thesis: compared to Europe, there aren’t that many Muslim radicals in the United States. There had been about 136,000 murders in the United States since September 12, 2001; Muslim American radicals committed thirty-one of them.

“Statistically, Muslim American radicals are far less likely to kill you than a member of your own family is,” Kurzman says. “That said, the problem is still serious.” Domestic terrorism, as it relates to Muslims, wasn’t as big an issue prior to 9/11.

Before they began this project, Kurzman, Schanzer, and Moosa knew of some examples of Muslim Americans trying to limit radicalization in their communities. They decided to find out more. They secured a grant from the National Institute of Justice, the independent research branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. With help from Moosa’s contacts and legwork by UNC and Duke graduate students, they interviewed 120 Muslim Americans in Buffalo, Seattle, Houston, and Raleigh-Durham.

They wrote case studies and documented their findings in a 2010 report titled AntiTerror Lessons of Muslim Americans, which also recommends steps that the researchers think would help curtail radicalization.

The report has been circulating at the Department of Justice and in Congress since January, and Schanzer has briefed several top officials in the Department of Homeland Security. They’ve also made efforts to bring the report to the attention of Muslim groups.

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ince 9/11, leading Muslim Americans have been denouncing violence—publicly, in mosques, and in private conversations. This is vital work, the report states, though Kurzman points out that it isn’t often covered by the media. The list of public denunciations is a long one, and the report states that Muslim Americans should continue to denounce violent acts publicly as often as possible.

Second, Muslim Americans self-police their communities. They often confront fellow believers who say radical things. They help youth identify peers who might need counseling. They bring concerns to local endeavors 31

police and the FBI. But the report indicates that Muslim Americans would benefit from professional training that would help them identify people with mental illnesses. Most people who radicalize are perfectly healthy, the report states, but there have been some notable exceptions.

The report also suggests that law enforcement officers could consult better and communicate more with Muslim Americans, especially about how police use informants to root out criminals.

Third, Muslim Americans have become more politically active. They are organizing like other groups to defend their rights and interests as minority citizens. They are channeling grievances through the political system instead of letting frustrations fester. This limits radicalization. The report states that politicians should embrace these efforts, reach out to Muslim Americans as they do to other groups of citizens, and take a cue from President George W. Bush, who regularly visited mosques and hosted annual Iftaar dinners at the White House (a tradition President Obama has continued).

Lastly, community building, especially of youth programs, has helped limit radicalization. “It’s the lone wolf who typically commits violent acts,” Kurzman says. But according to case studies in the report, Muslims sometimes shun people who espouse radical ideology. In lieu of guidance,

Kurzman says, youth often turn inward or to the internet, where all manner of extremist dogma propagates. Even though focusing on youth will help, some loners will likely slip through the cracks.

Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, the former UNC student who drove an SUV into a group of students in 2006, was such a loner.

“He had very little connection with the local Muslim community and was not participating in any organizations on campus,” Kurzman says. “No one, not even his family, knew what was going on with him.”

Such radicals are often called religious extremists, but according to the UNCDuke report, they don’t have a solid understanding of their own religion: “Most of those who engage in religiously inspired terrorism have little formal training in Islam and, in fact, are poorly educated about Islam.”

The report recommends that Muslim Americans continue to work hard to improve religious literacy within their communities. Since 9/11, Safi has tried to do his part.

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afi, an expert in Islamic history, has given more than one thousand talks about Islam in the past nine years. Each time, he gauges the religious literacy of his audience.

“People always know a lot about Jesus,” Safi says. “And that makes sense. They know less—a few stories—about Moses. Then I ask about Hinduism and Buddhism. A few people know religious concepts or about Gandhi’s nonviolence movement, but no stories. And then Muhammad and Islam—a deafening silence. This is religious literacy at zero.”

As Safi wrote his book, Memories of Muhammad, he realized that Muslims, too, would benefit from a refresher course.

“We’ve forgotten so much of what’s at the heart of the Islamic tradition,” he says.

Take the story of Muhammad’s mystical transportation to Jerusalem and his ascension to heaven to meet past prophets and come face to face with God. “I argue that this story is as central to Islam as the crucifixion story is to Christianity,” Safi says. “Yet in modern biographies of Muhammad it’s covered in one page.

That’s how spiritually deficient many of the modern biographies are.” Safi devoted a chapter to the spiritual message of the ascension, one of three stories Muslims once studied well.

The second is about when Muhammad received his first wave of revelations. He doubted his prophethood and sought comfort from his wife. In the details of this story, Safi says, Muslims can see how Muhammad treated women as equal partners.

Self-portrait stories In the years after 9/11, Todd Drake grew weary of people stereotyping Muslim Americans. As an artist who’s always been interested in marginalized groups, Drake decided to contact Muslims in North Carolina to help them create photos and personal essays that told their stories.

“I cold-called mosques, networked with UNC students, and kept an eye on the news,” says Drake, a Christian. “One contact led to another.” For two years he traveled the state, spending time with Muslims from the Outer Banks to the mountains. “Now I have several good friends who are Muslim,” he says. “They taught me that peace and coexistence are priorities to many Muslims. I discovered that many of them know more about my religion than I know about theirs.”

The resulting photo essays, titled Esse Quam Videri—Muslim Self Portraits, will be exhibited at UNC’s FedEx Global Education Center from June 1 through September 11, 2010, and can also be found at http://www.muslimselfportrait.info/.

—Mark Derewicz Todd Drake is an artist-in-residence at UNC’s Center for Global Initiatives, which helped fund his project.

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Left: Ola, a Muslim American from North Carolina, collaborated with artist Todd Drake to depict her closeness to God through nature. Right: Halona, also a Muslim American from North Carolina, feels she has been a victim of discrimination in the classroom. Photos by Todd Drake.

The third story is about Muhammad’s flight from Mecca and his subsequent persecution. Radical Muslims use Quranic verses revealed during this time to justify violence. And non-Muslims use such verses to demonize Islam. Safi, though, treads the middle ground.

“If our goal is to find scary verses in each other’s scriptures, then this is a game we can all play and we will all lose,” he says.

All holy books have scary verses. As for the Quran, Safi points out that using Quranic passages to justify violence is not consistent with Muhammad’s eternal spiritual teachings or the prophet’s deeds.

Muhammad did not seek war, Safi says.

When threatened, Muhammad fled Mecca for Medina, where he gained followers. Meccan leaders, though, tracked him down and attacked. Bloody battles ensued.

And Muhammad did allow his followers to defend themselves when attacked by the oppressors—the Meccans who worshipped idols at Abraham’s temple and strove to keep a caste system in place. During this time of war, Muhammad preached that women and children were not to be harmed. And suicide was forbidden.

Most important, Safi says, is that people today—including too many Muslims—forget what Muhammad did after he returned to Mecca victorious.

“By the weight of Arabic tradition and

“We’ve forgotten so much of what’s at the heart of the Islamic tradition.”

—Omid Safi biblical legacy, when you conquered the enemy you were entitled to kill their men, enslave their women, and confiscate their property,” Safi says. “But Muhammad didn’t do this. He declared full amnesty for his enemies.” He set up a constitution, the Charter of Medina, that included Muslims, Christians, Jews, and the pagan tribes that had persecuted him.

“Real mercy,” Safi says, “is when you have the power to gain revenge but you choose forgiveness.”

But Safi doesn’t see himself as a Muslim apologist. He says he just wants to show that Muhammad’s religion is compatible with American democracy, and that the term Muslim American is not an oxymoron.

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hen U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim from Minnesota, was sworn into office in 2006, he chose to place his right hand on a copy of the Quran. Pundits were outraged. But that Quran, borrowed from the Library of Congress, had been Thomas Jefferson’s.

“Jefferson’s interest in Islam was no passing fancy,” Safi writes in his book. “He studied Arabic and bought many books on the history of Islam and Muslim civilization. He supported the establishment of academic programs for the study of ‘the Orient.’” Safi found several instances where Founding Fathers made positive comments about Muslims and Islam.

Safi says that Ellison’s use of Jefferson’s Quran was a deft statement: If Jefferson could study Islam, why can’t we?

“We are so religiously illiterate in this country, and part of the reason is that we’re afraid of religion,” Safi says.

He greatly admires Martin Luther King Jr., whose books and sermons line the walls of Safi’s office. “We should understand that Christianity has helped shape our history,” Safi says. “And if we want to understand Chinese history, then we have to look at Confucianism. If we want to look at Muslim civilizations’ contributions to humanity, then yeah, we have to look at the Islam in the background.”

Otherwise, he says we’ll continue teaching our kids a watered-down history, and current events will make no sense.

Ultimately, Safi agrees with Schanzer, who says that Muslim Americans should become more involved in public discourse.

This is why Safi gives so many talks and why he felt so strongly about writing a biography of Muhammad, even though HarperCollins had contracted him to write a different book.

He also says that this discourse can be very informal. “It’s about sitting down with your neighbors,” Safi says. “It’s been my experience that when people eat together, when they visit in each others’ homes or work together on a community project, some amazing barriers are broken down and real changes take place.” e Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology, and Omid Safi is a professor of religious studies, both in the College of Arts and Sciences. David Schanzer is director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a consortium of UNC, Duke, and RTI International.

Ebrahim Moosa is an associate professor of Islamic studies at Duke. Two graduate students, Ali Mian at Duke and Timur Yuskaev at UNC, helped conduct interviews. The National Institute of Justice funded the UNC-Duke report: http://www.sanford.duke.edu/news/Schanzer_ Kurzman_Moosa_Anti-Terror_Lessons.pdf endeavors 33

Max Woody spins a chair post on his lathe. Photo by Alexandra Porter.

Sharing, Enduring, Believing:

Being Asheville

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Max Woody on Western North Carolina: “Just offhand I can’t think of another place I’d want to live on planet Earth.” Photo by Alexandra Porter.

In 2009, Carolina journalism students documented the lives and culture of the people of Western North Carolina as part of the sixth annual Carolina Photojournalism Workshop. These are a few of the stories they found. Hear and see more at: www.carolinaphotojournalism.org

Old Man Woody Reporting and photos by Alexandra Porter

“It may take just a little talent,

but it takes more desire than anything,” sixth-generation chairmaker Max Woody told Alexandra Porter. “You’ve got to put your heart—and put a little of yourself— into everything you do. But chairmaking is my life.” Woody is based in Marion, North Carolina, and has been making chairs by hand for almost sixty years. He bases the dimensions and contours of his chairs on his customers’ heights and weights. “Our chairs have gotten to be worth a lot more,” he says, “because Old Man Woody made them.

They’re made to last a hundred years.”

Woody, who is eighty, sharpens his own saw blades, plays the fiddle in a weekly

Marion music meet-up that he founded (the gathering hasn’t missed a Friday night in twenty-three-plus years, he says), and makes rolling pins for the “little girls”—ranging in age from five to fifty—who come into his shop. He boils wood in an outdoor tub before bending it to make chair backs. He says he has between three and five years’ worth of chair orders to fill. He considers himself successful simply because he’s happy and enjoys what he does. “I can lay down at night,” he says, “and not have to worry about anything more than maybe I’d like to have gotten a little more work done that day.”

Alexandra Porter graduated from UNC in 2009. endeavors 35

“I’ve got a lot of things wrong with me,” Gene Dickinson says. “I draw disability because of my body being so totally messed up from things that I did to it before. If I’d have known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” Photo by Andrew Dye.

Jesus Thunder and Iron Reporting and photos by Andrew Dye

“I’ve been shot, you know,” Gene Dickinson told

Andrew Dye. “I’ve been in prison; I’ve been run over; I’ve been pronounced dead at least three times that I know of.” Dickinson, who lives in Weaverville, North Carolina, says he’s a sixty-year-old man in a hundred-and-ten-year-old body. “I was a heathen until I was thirty-nine years old,” he says. “I didn’t find Jesus; he found me.” Dickinson became a Christian in 2003, and he says that now he just does what Jesus tells him to do—“most of the time, on a motorcycle,” he laughs. Once, after a car hit Dickinson’s motorcycle and knocked his Bible out of his saddlebag, he walked for miles to gather up the pages. Every week, he distributes food to the homeless, and one Sunday of each month, he and fellow volunteers make over one hundred and twenty meals to give away.

“It just excites something inside of you,” he says, “when you pull up and it’s ten degrees below zero and you’ve got these people standing there…and they trust you, that you’re coming to bring them something to eat.”

Andrew Dye is a junior majoring in journalism.

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Dickinson loads food for the homeless into the back of his van. Food recipients have nicknamed the van “Geno’s Deli.” Photo by Andrew Dye.

Crystal Hood helps her daughter Madison get ready for a sparring match with a taller, heavier, male boxer. “It’s hard to watch her get hit, “Crystal Hood says. “But after a few times you know it’s okay…Everything is going to heal; everything is still there.” Photo by Michelle May.

Out of the Box In her bedroom, Hood gets ready for a training session at the boxing gym. She says she was diagnosed at an early age with social anxiety disorder, never got along with girls, and “began to hang out with guys.” Photo by Michelle May.

Reporting and photos by Michelle May

“My whole life, I’ve just always been a tomboy,” seventeen-year-old Madison Hood told Michelle May. At sixteen, Hood dropped out of high school, earned a G.E.D., and started learning to box. Her mother, Crystal Hood, says she had mixed feelings about Madison dropping out. “School was just draining for Madison,” she says. “And when she dropped out, I think I got my daughter back.”

“I love to do girly stuff,” says Madison. “I love to shop—what girl doesn’t love to shop?” Madison’s coach won’t let her get her nails done, because he fears she’ll rip a hole in her gloves. “When I’m out there hitting bags and sparring with people, it’s just like an adrenaline rush. It just makes you feel free, like you’re not even there.

“Well, when I’m not being hit in the nose, I feel pretty good.”

Michelle May is a senior majoring in journalism. endeavors 37

Sean Pace, who works odd jobs during the day so he can create art at night, has learned that art soothes the soul, but does little for an empty wallet. Photo by Reiley Wooten.

Chasing a Dream Reporting and photos by Reiley Wooten

“If you’re not enjoying life, then you ought to quit,” Melissa Terrezza and Sean Pace laugh at a joke while they haul heavy equipment to a construction site for Pace’s employer. Photo by Reiley Wooten.

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artist Sean Pace told Reiley Wooten. “I mean, you won the cosmic lottery, really. You could have been a worm, or a rock, or a cockroach, or anything. But you’re human.”

Pace often incorporates both painting and sculpture into his artworks. “I think that all the pieces that I make are entrance signs into conversations,” he says. One of his works, titled “Fight or Flight,” launches rubber chickens at a four-legged contraption studded with boxing gloves.

“It’s really tough to juggle all the bills and debt that I have going on right now, so I’ve gotta spend a lot of time hustling for bucks,” Pace says. He occasionally does work for a biodiesel company that he cofounded, and he often spends his days hauling heavy-construction equipment from job site to job site. “I like the burliness of all the things I’m working with—just holding on to some chains…You can feel the weight, the strength of the steel, and how the machine works. And then I see the ingenuity in that, and I transfer that into my work.” e Reiley Wooten is a senior majoring in journalism.

Joy Cook with Tom Egan.

Egan is the surgeon who transplanted her new lungs and saved her life. Thousands of other people with end-stage lung disease haven’t been so lucky. Now, decades after he first shared an off-the-wall idea with a roomful of skeptical surgeons, Egan is on the verge of making sure there are finally enough lungs to go around.

by Margarite Nathe

JASON SMITH

Happy Lungiversary JOY COOK REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, GLANCED AROUND, and remembered that she was in a hospital bed. It wasn’t an unfamiliar setting. She was almost twenty-two years old and had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was seven.

Ever since, she’d had regular hospital stays, each lasting three or four days. But two things about this situation frightened her: the doctors swarming around her were in a panic, and she felt worse than she ever had in her life.

She looked at her mother across the room and could see that she’d been crying.

They’ve talked to my mom, Joy thought. They told her I’m dying. I’m pretty sure I’m dying. endeavors 39

For several days leading up to this, Joy had lain in her hospital bed watching the numbers on the screen next to her—heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation— jumping well out of the normal range. She tried to control them by taking deep breaths.

It didn’t work.

One of the doctors saw that Joy was awake and stood over her. “We need to transplant you,” the doctor said. “Can we do that? Is that okay?”

Joy couldn’t speak, so she nodded.

She woke again later in the day and the chief transplant surgeon had come into her

Egan uses CT scans such as these to detect pneumonia and other hidden conditions that render lungs unsuitable for transplant. The top scan shows a donor lung with bilateral pneumonia. In the middle scan, he found some patch infiltrate, probably from pneumonia.

And the lighter color in the bottom scan shows a build-up of fluid known as dependent edema.

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room. “You’re officially on the list,” Thomas Egan told her. “We’ll keep you as healthy as we can, but this is going to be a very hard surgery.”

Joy spent twelve hours on the operating table, including a session of emergency pulmonary bypass. She surprised everyone, though, by making a fast recovery. She went home just fifteen days later, able to walk and breathe on her own, the draining tubes finally removed from her chest. She spent the next semester—what was supposed to be the last of her senior year at Carolina—in recovery. But soon Joy was back in class, and graduated just after her next birthday.

“Before my transplant, even when I was at my healthiest, I still never felt as good as I do now,” Joy says today. “I just never knew what it was like to be really healthy. I don’t know if I’ve ever had lung function as ridiculously high as I do now.”

In May 2005, just a year and a half before Joy’s surgery, Egan had helped the Organ Procurement and Tissue Network (OPTN) make huge changes to the U.S. lung allocation system. If Joy had gotten sick before the system changed, Egan says, they never could have gotten her name to the top of the transplant list in time to save her, no matter how ill she might have been. Now Egan’s working on new research that will help patients like Joy in the coming years.

He wants to make sure there are enough lungs to go around.

A dying system Before the changes to OPTN in 2005, the U.S. lung allocation system was based on waiting times and geography, Egan says. The average waiting time was about a year and a half, and began the second a patient was put on the list. Even so, hundreds of patients died long before their names reached the top. And even for patients at the top of the list, the organs had to come from a donor close by.

For example, Egan says, when a set of lungs became available for transplant, it was offered first within the hospital where the donor had died, then to hospitals within the jurisdiction of the local organ procurement organization (OPO), and then within a radius of five hundred miles.

The arrangement created plenty of opportunities to cheat the system. Doctors wanted to champion for their own patients, Egan says, and if there was a way they could

JASON SMITH

After Joy’s surgery, her doctors asked her if she’d like to donate her lungs to the hospital for their research. “That would be awesome!” she said.

manipulate things in their patients’ favor, they would do it. Some would list patients long before a transplant was necessary, or even leave names of patients who had died on the waiting list, so that when the local OPO called to offer an organ, the hospital could quickly pull up the name of a living patient who could use it.

“I had some serious issues with that allocation system,” Egan says. So when OPTN asked him to chair a committee charged with proposing a fair, efficient system for lung allocations, he jumped at the chance. “My goal was to come up with a completely datadriven system,” he says. “One that couldn’t be manipulated.”

The committee set out to create a complex algorithm that would assign each patient on the list a score based on severity of illness, chances of dying without a transplant, and probability of survival after a transplant.

It took years of setbacks and negotiations, Egan says. When the committee finally

finished the algorithm and ran it through a simulator, it predicted that the number of patients who died on the waiting list would be reduced by 10 to 15 percent.

In fact, the new model reduced deaths by half. The number of deaths on the waiting list went from 500 a year to 250, and the number of patients getting transplants went from 1,000 to 1,400 in one year. In 2009 the number of transplants reached 1,500. Under the new model, patients who are in immediate danger of dying are offered organs. And now, OPOs don’t have to spend nearly as much time searching for recipients, Egan says. Before 2005, OPOs had to make about eleven phone calls before finding a match for a donor’s lungs; today, the median number of calls is three.

Lung in a bag Lung disease is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, and it kills some two hundred thousand Americans every year.

Most of those deaths are caused by emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, and pulmonary hypertension, the diseases that most commonly lead to lung transplants.

While there are usually only about eighteen hundred people on the lung transplant list, Egan says, there are thousands more whose names never make it to the roster.

This is because doctors tend to list only young patients, who have a higher chance for post-transplant survival, Egan says. Many patients with emphysema are in their seventies or eighties, and putting older people on the transplant list is incredibly controversial.

“Is it ethical to transplant a seventy-year-old if you’ve got a twenty-two-year-old waiting for lungs?” he asks. “I don’t have the answer to that. I just know that there aren’t enough lungs.”

Now Egan and his team are using a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to test and perfect a new technology that could drastically increase the number of endeavors 41

lungs suitable for transplant. Egan thinks it could also help surgeons to draw from a donor pool that no one has ever before considered.

Only about 20 percent of lungs in the pool of U.S. organ donors are suitable for transplant, Egan says. Most lungs come from donors who have suffered head injuries and have later been declared brain dead.

The initial brain injury sometimes causes simultaneous vomiting and gasping, which pulls fluid down through the airway. After a few days on a hospital ventilator, that person has developed pneumonia, and his lungs are not transplantable, Egan says. But the reason that most of those lungs aren’t eligible for transplant is called ischemia reperfusion injury, which happens when a patient’s blood flow stops and then starts again—for example, when doctors put a patient on life support.

A solution to the lung shortage first occurred to Egan one day in the mid-1980s.

He was reading a journal article about bronchial epithelial cell cultures when a small note at the bottom of the page caught his attention. It read: Human bronchial epithelial cells were retrieved from morgue specimens in the usual manner.

“Morgue specimens,” Egan says. “You can’t grow cells that are dead. You can only grow cells that are alive.”

After some investigation, Egan found that lung cells are different from the cells in other organs: lung cells don’t depend on a heart pumping blood to get oxygen, he says, because they can get oxygen from the air.

This means that unlike other organs, lungs don’t begin to decompose immediately after a person dies. “We know that when the heart stops, your brain dies within minutes, which is why we do CPR,” Egan says. “Your heart dies within minutes. Your liver dies within minutes. But your lungs—here’s this guy in the morgue, hours after death, and yet you can still grow his cells in culture.”

Egan’s thoughts kept going back to the article over the next few years. And he asked himself again and again: What if surgeons could have access to the organs of people who died outside of hospitals? Of “unconventional donors” who died at home, on the road, or in work accidents? “I thought at first that this idea was so crazy, someone else must have thought of it,” he says. But nobody had.

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“There are three quarters of a million sudden deaths in the United States every year,” he says. “If we could get our hands on just the youngest 5 percent, that’s more than thirty-five thousand donors. And since many of the patients we could transplant would need single lungs, we could be doing upwards of fifty thousand transplants a year, easily.”

But even after Egan had proven in the lab that he could successfully transplant lungs from dogs that had been dead for up to four hours, his colleagues around the country were still shocked and doubtful of the idea.

It’s taken years of battling with funding agencies and skeptical colleagues to get to this testing stage, Egan says. But now he’s found the technique that could allow him to carry out his unconventional idea.

Using a method called ex vivo lung perfusion (ex vivo means outside the body), Egan can treat donor lungs that have been injured by brain death or that have started to build up fluid during the hours after a donor’s death—and restore them to a transplantable state. A video he created to illustrate his technique shows human lungs in a plastic bag, breathing through a ventilator.

Five liters of dark-red, deoxygenated blood circulate throughout the lungs every minute in a process called perfusion. Bright-red, oxygenated blood filters away from the lungs through another tube.

Egan points at the bag on the screen.

“This is going on inside you right now,” he says. “That’s how much blood is going through your lungs.”

It’ll take time to perfect the technique and for it to take hold in the medical community, Egan says—but ex vivo lung perfusion by itself could double the number of lungs from conventional donors for transplant in the United States. “Although, if we only double the number in the United States from fourteen hundred to twenty-eight hundred, that’s still not anywhere near the number that we need,” he says. The real numbers will come from unconventional donors—people who die suddenly, rather than days or weeks after brain death.

Of course, getting access to donors who die in the field is going to be difficult, Egan says. EMS personnel, medical examiners, and emergency room personnel will have to be retrained, and outdated laws in some states about brain death in organ donors would

have to change. “But it’s a challenge we can deal with,” he says.

Happy Lungiversary In December of 2009, Joy Cook celebrated the third anniversary of her transplant. Her friends gave her a homemade cake, the words “Happy Lungiversary” spelled out in icing and lit by a candle in the shape of a 3. She has a job she loves in UNC’s biostatistics department, managing data from clinical trials. She can take trips without hauling her bulky therapy vest along with her. And her parents, who still live in Joy’s hometown outside of Boone, North Carolina, don’t worry so much about her anymore. “I’m totally selfsufficient,” Joy says. “I just bought a house.

When I told my dad I was thinking about buying a house, his response was, ‘Well, you can be in debt like all the rest of us!’ Before he might have said, ‘Do you think you can afford that with all your medicine?’”

Egan’s own health problems and several back surgeries left him disabled soon after Joy’s transplant, and he had to stop his work at the operating table after some thirty years as a surgeon. Photos of his patients still crowd the tops of his office bookshelves, though, which is part of the reason he still comes to the lab every day. He sees Joy occasionally when she’s in for a checkup, and they chat about where his research is going.

“I think it’s fascinating—I read everything I can find about it,” Joy says. “It’s research like they do here at UNC that saved my life and the lives of other people I’ve met since this. It might look like it’s really high-risk on paper, but in the end, you’re literally saving lives. That seems pretty legit to me.” e Thomas Egan is a professor of surgery in the School of Medicine. Funding for his current work is provided by the National Institutes of Health. Joy Cook is a research assistant in the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center at UNC. Peadar Noone, an associate professor of medicine and director of UNC’s lung transplant program, is coprincipal investigator of the current ex vivo lung perfusion study. Watch a video of ex vivo lung perfusion at www.lunginabag. net. Stig Steen, a professor of surgery at Lund University in Sweden, and Shaf Keshavjee, director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program at the University of Toronto, have already used ex vivo lung perfusion to successfully transplant lungs in humans.

Howell Graham is the longest-surviving double lung transplant patient in the world. Photo by Donn Young.

Howell Graham was the first cystic fibrosis patient to

receive a double lung transplant at UNC Hospitals. Thomas Egan performed the surgery on October 8, 1990, and Graham is now the longest-surviving double lung transplant patient in the world.

“I had end-stage CF and I was extremely sick all the time,” Graham says today. “I think my lung function was 25 percent of normal. I remember, toward the end, I would get short of breath just brushing my teeth. My life was miserable. But all that changed when I got my transplant.”

Lung transplant surgeries have come a long way in the twenty years since Graham’s surgery, when doctors warned him there was only a 50 percent chance of survival. “But I didn’t really have a choice. I just had to go for it,” Graham says. “And the surgery completely changed my life. Everything was different. For the first time in my life, I could keep up with my peers. I could water ski again, play baseball—do anything I wanted to.” Graham met his wife about a year and a half after his transplant, and he took off on a new career path. Today he’s a partner in his real estate firm.

“It’s all pretty much as close to a miracle as I can think of,” he says.

—Margarite Nathe

New Lungs, New Life Twenty years after his double lung transplant, Howell Graham is doing a lot more than surviving.

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in print One for the Books Taking on a topic most authors wouldn’t dare, Erica Eisdorfer claims her space on the bookshelves she’s tended for thirty years.

The Wet Nurse’s Tale. By Erica Eisdorfer. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 261 pages, $24.95.

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JASON SMITH

here was some strife, at first, over the title of Erica Eisdorfer’s new novel.

The Wet Nurse’s Tale was a little…icky, her publisher argued, and it might cause some pearl-clutching among the more sensitive readers. They weighed other options (Eisdorfer’s runner-up was Ample), but the original title won out. And sure, there have been a few noses wrinkled over all the leaking bosoms and flowing breast milk that fill the book. But what did those readers expect? Eisdorfer laughs. Leaking and flowing are unavoidable in her main character’s line of work.

In Eisdorfer’s The Wet Nurse’s Tale, which is set in early-nineteenth-century England, a young, unlovely woman named Susan Rose becomes pregnant while working as a servant in a manor house. Because selling breast milk would earn far more than cleaning houses or doing laundry, her father forces her to leave home and work as a wet nurse to help support her new child, her parents, and a horde of siblings. She has to leave her baby behind. Over the course of the novel, Susan Rose shows the ugly lengths to which a desperate, heartbroken mother will go in order to protect and nourish her child. endeavors 45

Eisdorfer has been the manager and trade book buyer for UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookshop for the past thirty years. In all that time, she says, she’s never seen another novel about a wet nurse, but she knew she wanted to create one. When she hit the library to research wet-nursing, she had to dig deep to find what she was looking for.

“I was amazed there was so little research about wet-nursing,” she says. “But I read everything I could. I even tried to track people down who’d written articles on wetnursing, if they were still living.”

Aside from a few offended sensibilities, The Wet Nurse’s Tale has gotten many rave reviews, even outside of the publisher’s target market of historical fiction and historical romance fans. The plot is fast-paced and thrilling, but Eisdorfer’s research helped her create something more than a simple genre novel. Her story offers readers hundreds of fascinating factual details about Victorian life and an almost-extinct profession that is thousands of years old.

Eisdorfer spent months in the stacks of UNC’s libraries, researching not only wetnursing but gypsies, dentistry, English Jews, folk legends about breastfeeding, sharecropping, peasant life, public transit in Victorian England, and even how to plait straw for hats—then boiled it all down for the tiny details that fill the novel. Eisdorfer’s research helped her form the story’s plot, she says, “and I think that’s what gives the book some validity, some historical resonance.”

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here were plenty of reasons why mothers in Victorian England hired wet nurses to feed their children, Eisdorfer says. Death during childbirth and postnatal breast infections were much more common then. (Many mothers who had trouble breastfeeding their children thought they’d damaged their milk production during years of lacing their corsets too tightly.) But some found that breastfeeding just didn’t fit into their schedules.

In the lower classes, having to breastfeed sometimes meant time away from working on the farm; in the upper classes, it meant time away from social engagements. Other times, mothers living in the city might have wanted their babies to have the benefit of clean country air during their first year, and so they sent them off to wet nurses in the countryside. In hopes that they would quickly become fertile again and conceive 46 46 endeavors endeavors

a male heir, wealthy women such as Queen Victoria often hired wet nurses for their female babies. These mothers were much more likely to keep baby boys at home to nurse personally.

Before nurseries, which didn’t appear in homes until around 1847, Eisdorfer says, mothers often sent their babies to live with their wet nurses for a year or more. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this was reversed—most wet nurses went to live in their clients’ homes. This was convenient for the employers, Eisdorfer says, because they could keep a sharper eye on the nurses.

“Intercourse was thought to sully the milk and the milk itself was thought to hold

“The culture of scholarship on this campus inspired me and made my research feel important to me, rather than just something to be hurried through.” —Erica Eisdorfer some ‘moral’ nature,” she says. “If the wet nurse was naughty, her milk wasn’t proper for the baby.” Wet-nursing as a profession was thought to be “just slightly on the slutty side,” Eisdorfer says. Rumors that some women tried to get pregnant just to be able to earn money as wet nurses didn’t help, either.

Eisdorfer found that many wet nurses in Susan Rose’s day lost their own babies to malnourishment and disease. Most wealthy

families who hired wet nurses wouldn’t let them bring their own children to their new homes. The working mothers, who had to find some way to support themselves, left their infants with family members, who used spoons, rags soaked in milk, or even solid foods to feed the babies. Some less wealthy employers grudgingly allowed wet nurses to bring their children (and paid much lower wages) on the condition that the employers’ babies always ate first. “A wet nurse losing her own baby was almost par for the course,” Eisdorfer says.

A single wet nurse would often nurse a sequence of babies in the same family; some were even written into the parents’ wills.

The wet nurses also got a lot of special treatment, Eisdorfer says, which caused strife among the other servants of the household: wet nurses were better fed, lived in the upstairs rooms of the house, and were harder to replace than the rest of the staff.

Choosing the right wet nurse caused no end of anxiety for women from the upper classes, Eisdorfer says. Many of them used Isabella Beeton’s 1861 book Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management as a guide; Beeton went into great detail about what to feed wet nurses to avoid colic in the babies, as well as how to screen wet nurse candidates (avoid a nurse with spots).

While wet-nursing is now considered taboo, Eisdorfer says, it may not be dead.

Cross-nursing—wet-nursing, but without the connotation of servitude—is alive and well. It comes with its own set of controversies, though. For instance, Eisdorfer says, actress Salma Hayek caused an uproar when she publicly nursed a starving baby in Sierra Leone.

Eisdorfer nursed her own children, and even spent a brief period cross-nursing for some friends who’d adopted a newborn.

“Since I wrote this book,” Eisdorfer says, “I’ve had people come into this office and shut the door—women my age—and say, ‘I haven’t told anyone else this, but…’ And they tell me about their experiences in nursing other people’s babies.” It’s the “ick factor,” she says, that kept those women silent for so many years.

—Margarite Nathe Erica Eisdorfer has worked in UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookshop for the past thirty years. The Wet Nurse’s Tale is her first published novel.

Her work was partially funded by an award from A Woman’s Write (www.awomanswrite.com).

MARY LB

Gap Land When the going gets tough, the voters go polar.

Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. By Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. Cambridge Press, 234 pages, $24.99.

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merican politics has always polarized voters, but the chasm between Republicans and Democrats seems wider now than ever. Political scientists Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington think they know why: it’s about how voters think, not just what they think.

People vote on issues, and in the 1930s, the major issues were unemployment and economic relief. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a progressive response to the Great Depression, and it helped create a strong coalition of Democratic voters from different parts of the country. In 1968, Richard Nixon knew he needed an issue that would help him shear voters away from the New Deal coalition of Northern Catholics and Southern conservative Protestants. He found one.

“Nixon began campaigning on race, particularly with regard to crime and welfare—things that would get people really mad and make them give up long-time affiliations with the New Deal coalition,” Weiler says.

Nixon’s tactic separated many voters into two groups: authoritarians and nonauthoritarians, which have very distinct “worldviews,” Weiler says.

According to political scientists, voters have been defined as authoritarian when they see the world in clear-cut terms, are less tolerant of nuanced judgments, and become more fearful of different groups of people. Political scientists say that authoritarians prefer aggressive responses to threats and don’t like changing the social order.

How does this play out in modern politics and policymaking? Weiler says it depends.

In their book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Weiler and Hetherington say that in the decades following Nixon’s first presidential election victory, issues such as feminism, gay rights, family values, and limited government became major topics of interest for voters. These are issues that play into how people view the world and how they cope with our changing social order, Weiler says. The issues don’t have much to do with how politicians solve problems, but they do polarize voters. As a result, the right and left wings of both parties have become more extreme.

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till, political tides are hard to gauge and often change in response to an event or a series of events. After the attacks of 9/11 the vast majority of Americans felt threatened and under siege. The danger seemed clear. Most people wanted swift action, not dithering about the context of the attacks. About 90 percent of Americans supported George Bush immediately after 9/11, and he rode that wave during his push for the Iraq War. We were, in a way, a country of authoritarians, Weiler says.

“But,” he says, “authoritarians always feel that kind of threat and sense that we’re under siege.”

—Mark Derewicz Jonathan Weiler is the director of undergraduate studies for the curriculum in international studies, and an adjunct assistant professor of international and area studies, in the College of Arts and Sciences. Marc Hetherington is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. endeavors endeavors 47 47

portion sizes,

When fast-food joints increased their

so did we—at home.

Sugar Time Blame it on human evolution: our sweet tooth will kill us if we don’t get a move on.

The World is Fat. By Barry Popkin. Avery, 229 pages, $24.95.

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ast night I drank a soda for the first time in years. It tasted so good that I considered finishing the entire two-liter bottle. What is it with our love of sweets, and why should we be wary?

Part of the answer was on the bottle label. And I found a fuller explanation in Barry Popkin’s book, The World is Fat, which explores the history of the human diet and how modern technology, marketing, and government intervention are mismatched with human biology.

Humans are hardwired to love sweets—a bit of evolutionary history that food companies understand well, Popkin writes. For millions of years, eating sweet and fatty foods helped hominids survive. Sweet fruits contain glucose, which fuels brain development.

Bitter plants and fruits are often poisonous.

Our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have our easy access to sugary beverages; they drank water almost exclusively.

Then, about five thousand years ago, humans started harvesting sugar from sugarcane and sugar beets. And within the past few decades we began devouring artificial sweeteners—some of which are hundreds of times sweeter than sugar—in all kinds of chemically processed substances that people before World War II would hardly have recognized as food.

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For Popkin, who’s been studying nutrition trends since 1965, the evidence is clear: sweet snacks and beverages are major contributors to the rising obesity rates. He suspects that they might be the main contributors.

Fifty years ago there were about 100 million obese people worldwide. Now there are about 1.6 billion. Rates of chronic diseases such as heart disease have risen substantially, too.

According to Popkin, we snack on sugary and savory treats much more than we once did (see “Mommy, What’s for Snack?,” page 7). But Popkin knows there’s more to the story. He dedicates a chapter of his book to the history of the modern diet and how we used to burn more calories during normal routines such as cleaning, cooking, and outdoor activities. We used to sweat during gym class. Gone are the days when many people walked to school or work and ambled around the neighborhood after a meal.

We eat at restaurants a lot more today.

And when restaurants, especially fast-food joints, increased their portion sizes, so did we—at home. Popkin found that from 1977 through the 1990s, serving sizes of french fries and hamburgers consumed at home in the United States were 30 percent larger than servings at fast-food restaurants. Serving sizes of Mexican dishes and pizza were equal to those in fast-food joints.

Ultimately, we get to choose our habits and what we eat and drink, but Popkin says that the federal government has made some

choices for us. For instance, it chose to subsidize corn, soybeans, beef, pork, and poultry.

Corn in the form of feed drives the beef and poultry industries, but the processed-food industry also took advantage, putting cheap, corn-based starches and sugars in everything from cheese puffs and bread to hot sauce and soda.

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overnment subsidies, totaling between $30 billion and $50 billion every year, help make a lot of our groceries cheaper. But cheap, processed foods have many more calories than vegetables and fruits that are typically more expensive and harder to keep fresh. It’s no wonder, Popkin says, that the poor are more susceptible to obesity and chronic diseases.

I don’t think I qualify as officially poor, but I hate wasting food. So when a friend left that bottle of soda at my house, I drank some with a meal. In a sixteen-ounce glass, there was the caloric equivalent of a quarter pound of beef. As for sweetness, I might as well have eaten twelve and a half teaspoons of sugar.

—Mark Derewicz Barry Popkin is the Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition in the Gillings School of Global Public Health.

BROOKS DE WETTER-SMITH

endview This ice near Lindblad Cove in the coastal waters of the Antarctic Peninsula is about two thousand years old. Music professor Brooks de Wetter-Smith took this photo from the deck of the National Geographic Endeavour.

The photo was part of Ice Counterpoint, a multimedia collaboration between de Wetter-Smith, artist Nerys Levy, and composer Terry Mizesko. Intended to call attention to the fragility and beauty of Earth’s remote polar regions in an age of climate change, Ice Counterpoint included Arctic audio, video, images, and a new composition by Mizesko for soprano, flute, and harp.

Brooks de Wetter-Smith is the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor of Music in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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

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

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Page 44: Taking on a topic most authors

Page 34: UNC photojournalism students head

Page 30: Building community, denouncing

wouldn’t dare, Erica Eisdorfer claims her space on the bookshelves she’s tended for thirty years.

Photo by Jason Smith.

for the mountains of Western North Carolina to learn about the people living in and around Asheville. Photo by Alexandra Porter.

violence, and telling their own stories—a look at Muslim Americans and the forgotten heart of Islamic tradition. Photo by Todd Drake.

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