Winter 2007

end­­eavors Winter 2007

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

Phonograph Effects How records changed music page 10

Dusan Jankovic

The magazine you’re holding is thicker than usual. Sixteen pages thicker. This

didn’t happen because of a marketing plan, or a readership survey, or a focus group, or a windfall of funding and staff. It happened because eight smart students showed up at our office asking to write for Endeavors, and we couldn’t turn them down.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. Very few universities use student writers for their research magazines. Penn State does, and a few others have tried it, but the conventional wisdom has been that students are too much trouble, that a magazine runs smoother if all of its writers are pros.

Well, we just flat disagree. Whatever trouble our students have caused us, they’re worth it. They learn fast. They bring a fresh view to a story. They’re a whole lot of fun to have around. And it just so happens that we’re in the education business here at UNC. To print the extra pages, we needed help from our publisher, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development. We got it. We also needed help from the UNC General Alumni Association, which provides about two-thirds of our distribution. We got that, too. So the sixteen extra pages you’re holding signify that this university didn’t miss a chance to give some of its talented students an opportunity to shine. And we think you’ll find they were worth the investment.

—The Editor

end­­eavors Winter 2007 • Volume XXIII, Number 2 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 is published three times a year by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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

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

contents

winter 2007

2 overview

Jonathan versus the volcano, super-strong proteins in clots, push-button politeness, a mutation that threatens pregnancies, you: film at eleven, bombs over Beirut, motivating moms to stay healthy after jail, and a river runs backward.

cover story 10 Phonograph Effects

From Brahms to Beastie Boys: how records changed music forever.

by Jason Smith

features 14 Powered by Proteins

Proteins, like pandas, have to be studied in the wild.

by Kelly Chi

16 A Gentle Revolutionary

Why would Edith Branson’s paintings still be under the bed?

by Margarite Nathe

19 DamNation

26 Defending the Galapagos

Invaders threaten Darwin’s enchanted isles.

by Mark Derewicz

28 Unbroken Bonds

end­­eavors

A chemist cultivates the science of success.

by Danielle Jacobs

31 Life Down Deep

Hard-core critters below the bottom of the sea.

by Jessica McCann

34 Freeing a History

The hard fact of slavery at UNC.

by Colie Hoffman

36 Bathing Beauties

Ancient Greece and the culture of clean.

by Margarite Nathe

38 An Evil Disease

After 25 years, HIV is still one step ahead of us.

by Mark Derewicz

42 The Conflicted Voter

Do we really put our votes where our values are?

by Mark Derewicz

44 Smog under Glass

Let my rivers go.

by Colie Hoffman

22 Hip-hop at the Crossroads

City air in a small town.

by Colie Hoffman

Freestylin’ in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

by Mark Derewicz

46 in print

24 Parlor Talk

49 endview

Health and a haircut.

by Margarita De Pano

Editor: Neil Caudle, Associate Vice Chancellor, Research and Economic Development Associate Editor: Jason Smith Writers: Kelly Chi, Julia Connors, Molly Davis, Margarita De Pano, Mark Derewicz, Laura Granfortuna, Colie Hoffman, Danielle Jacobs, Jessica McCann, Jan McColm, Margarite Nathe, and Jason Smith Design: Neil Caudle and Jason Smith Print production and online design: Jason Smith

Sticker nation, and the Sputnik generation.

Life in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

On the cover, Carolina music professor Mark Katz holds Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, allegedly the third-best-selling album of all time.

Katz considers it an icon of the age of recording.

Photo by Steve Exum.

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

©2007 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without the consent of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by UNC-Chapel Hill.

Adam Stinton

overview

Tungurahua, one of Ecuador’s dozens of volcanoes, erupted August 17, 2006, killing five people and leaving thousands homeless.

Each tiny puff

J

onathan Lees holds a fond place in his heart for the smell of rotten eggs. “I crave that smell,” he says. It means that he’s close to the action.

Since 2002, Lees and his research team have monitored the pulse of Tungurahua—one of Ecuador’s many volcanoes and one of the most active in the world. “Every day there’s a tiny puff,” he says.

Its eruption on August 17, 2006—much more massive than the daily puff—left five people dead and five thousand displaced.

The other side of the volcano, where the popular tourist town of Baños is wedged between the foot of Tungurahua and the Amazon Basin, was spared.

But pyroclastic flow, the major killer in volcanic eruptions, desolated farmlands and livestock. The flow consists of a cloudy mixture of hot gasses—around 750˚F—that’s too dense to rise into the air. So the mixture tumbles wildly down the mountainside, pick2 endeavors

ing up rocks and debris along the way. Lava flow, which creeps along at about a hundred meters a day, “is usually pretty benign because people can run out of the way,” Lees says. Pyroclastic flow travels much faster, up to a hundred kilometers an hour.

Matt Welch

Lees installs a seismic station, which consists of a tiny computer chip in a bulky case.

Baños, which is built atop old pyroclastic flow, got lucky this time. But Tungurahua has been active for at least the last five hundred years. Can scientists predict the next eruption?

“We never say prediction,” Lees says. That involves knowing the precise time, location, and size of an event. Forecasting, on the other hand, involves stating the probability that something will happen, and that’s the closest to prediction volcanologists can get—for now.

A look inside From the observatory at Tungurahua, Lees’ team of researchers haul equipment on their backs through the jungle to set up stations as close as possible to the volcano’s vent, where they record seismic and acoustic waves. And the stations talk to each other.

“Say you’re a seismic station and there’s shaking going on all the time,” Lees says. “If you’re by yourself, you don’t really know if it’s an earthquake, or a cow, or something

else.” So stations send out messages to other nearby stations to find out if they also felt a shake and, if so, they all send messages down to the observatory. Lees and his team secure the stations in the ground as close to the crater as they can safely get, hope the cows don’t stomp on the equipment, and watch from the observatory as the data come in.

Lees’ specialty is using seismic waves to create a picture of what’s going on inside the volcano. “We do CAT scans, just like doctors do with brains. But when doctors do a CAT scan, they’re hitting tens of thousands of points around your head. I only have three stations at Tungurahua.” And Lees’ team can’t get too close to the crater, he says, because a single breath from below would kill them.

Instead of just three stations, Lees wants a thousand. With that many tiny computer chips chattering away, he says, “we could do things I only dream about.” In the next fifty years, researchers could image the entire inside of a volcano—all from a helicopter.

“We could throw the stations out by the hundreds,” Lees says. “If we could see everything underneath the volcano and see how the fluids are moving up, then I think we could predict pretty accurately whether an eruption was about to happen.”

Lees is working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology to make his plan happen. JPL developed the Mars Seismometer, a station used to track seismic activity on Mars in the same way that Lees has in mind for Earth. If the Mars Seismometer is dropped to the surface and hits something hard, it emits gluey foam that connects it safely to the surface and ensures that it will vibrate during seismic activity rather than flop around uselessly; if it hits something soft, the station bores in and is stable. Lees plans to develop the software that will bring data from the stations straight to the lab’s computers. With equipment like this, he says, scientists wouldn’t have to go into dangerous areas at all. “You would just drop it from the helicopter and get the hell out of there.”

—Margarite Nathe Jonathan Lees is a professor of geophysics.

Mario Ruiz, an Ecuadorian doctoral student on Lees’ team, is studying the explosive mechanisms in volcanoes, and plans to return to Ecuador to continue collaborations with other research institutions and to manage the observatory at Tungurahua.

What makes a blood clot so tough?

S

cientists used to think that a blood clot got its strength from a weave of protein strands—much as a woven rug is stronger than its individual threads. But new research at UNC has shown that the strands of the individual protein that make up a clot—fibrin­—are one of the strongest proteins ever measured. And what’s more, they are elastic.

“It was extraordinary,” says Susan Lord, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, and one of the lead authors on the study. On average, the researchers could stretch an individual fibrin strand more than four times its original length before it broke. The strands could bounce back to their original shape even after being stretched out to three times their length.

The team from UNC and Wake Forest University developed a new way to measure the stretched protein. The researchers suspended a fluorescently colored fibrin strand over a microscopic groove in a glass plate. Then they pulled the tip of an atomic-force microscope through the groove, and recorded the changes in length and elasticity of the fibrin strand using a fluorescence microscope.

Turns out that fibrin is stronger than spiders’ silk. That means it’s great for stopping bleeding and healing a cut. But in heart disease, blood clots form inside your blood vessels—the last place you’d want them. Tough clots make heart disease prevention and treatment difficult.

Michael R. Falvo

A fibrin fiber, suspended across a channel, is stretched by the tip of an atomic-force microscope (the tip is invisible in this picture). The fibrin fiber is roughly 100 nanometers in diameter (10 million times smaller than a millimeter).

Current treatments use clot-busting drugs such as tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, which attacks the fibrin fibers directly and chops them up.

“Our study suggests that this is a good treatment for heart disease because it’s the fibrin fibers that are so strong, and if you can break the fibers then you can break the clot and restore the blood flow,” Lord says.

But some people don’t respond at all to tPA, and others respond too much—their blood stops clotting altogether. Lord says we need more investigations to solve these problems. But just knowing more about fibrin and how it strengthens clots will give her plenty of new avenues to explore.

—Jan McColm The study was published in the August 4 edition of the journal Science.

Martin Guthold, also a lead author on this study, carried out his graduate work at UNC and is now an assistant professor of physics at Wake Forest.

Other UNC authors are Louise Jawerth, now a doctoral candidate in physics at Harvard University; Richard Superfine, Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Physics; and Mike Falvo, research assistant professor in the Curriculum in Applied and Materials Sciences. endeavors 3

Wired for a smile

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mile. Look at people. Say hello. Come on, lighten up—you’re at a party! Easy enough, right? Most people don’t need these reminders. But for folks with autism, who often have trouble negotiating social situations, tips like these can be extremely helpful.

And thanks to new, specially programmed gadgets called PDAs, some autistic students have this help available whenever they need it.

“People with autism generally have difficulty organizing themselves, identifying relevant information, and understanding things happening in their environment,” says Gary Mesibov, psychologist and director of Division TEACCH Autism Program at UNC’s School of Medicine. Mesibov teamed up with his friend Ron Calvanio, a Harvard neuropsychologist who developed software for the PDAs, to give the devices to autistic students.

Mesibov and Calvanio started with a group of seven highfunctioning autistic teenagers in a Boston school, all of whom had Asperger’s Syndrome. The students learned to use PDAs to help them in social situations and with vocational training. The results were so successful that the team decided to try it with a small group of adults here in North Carolina.

The PDAs are individually programmed—one person might need more help with social cues, while another needs homework tips—and in addition to specific reminders, help students schedule their days. Scheduling can be tough for autistic students, who often don’t deal well with changes in routine.

Many autistic students also have difficulty weeding out irrelevant information, and so they’re better able to complete their homework—and learn—if the teacher does some of the weeding for them. “Rather than telling them to write an essay about tornadoes, you’d say, ‘Write down four things you learned about tornadoes from reading this book,’” Mesibov says. “Subtle things like that can make a big difference in how the students think about something and do it.”

The devices also help teachers, parents, doctors, and the students themselves get more accurate information about how treatment is going, and evaluate the child’s behavior twice a day—rather than once a week with a psychiatrist. This way, everyone can see how the assessments mesh or don’t mesh.

But the main reason the PDAs work: “They’re gadgets. A lot of kids with autism like gadgets,” says Mesibov. “You push a button and it does the same thing every time.”

—Colie Hoffman TEACCH (Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Communication-Handicapped Children) is part of UNC’s Division of Psychiatry.

The studies were funded by a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

4 endeavors

A city alive in shadow Adam Gori, research associate in UNC’s Office of Research Development, photographed scenes in Guanajuato, Mexico during 2005. His photos have been on exhibit at the University Center for International Studies. The photo above is of a confessional in one of the city’s old churches, which “are not just tourist attractions,” Gori says.

“They’re a living part of the city.” About the shot below, Gori says, “The city is hilly and has a lot of plazas and a vibrant outdoor culture, night and day. This is an alley that leads to one of the city’s plazas, and someone is out for a late stroll on the cobblestone.” For more of Gori’s photos, go to www.firstpersonphoto.com.

Genes and deadly pregnancies

S

ome of the scariest complications in pregnancy involve preeclampsia, the primary cause of maternal mortality worldwide.

The disorder leads to high blood pressure and organ damage, and the only treatment is to deliver the baby regardless of how far along the pregnancy is. Though scientists do not fully understand why or how preeclampsia occurs, they know that part of the problem stems from the fertilized egg’s inability to implant properly in the wall of the mother’s uterus.

Kathleen Caron and her team of researchers identified a gene involved in implantation. Their findings will advance research into reproductive disorders, such as preeclampsia, miscarriage, and infertility.

These types of pregnancy complications are common, with preeclampsia affecting up to 8 percent of pregnancies. As many as 50 percent of pregnancies are thought to end in miscarriage, and 10 percent of women in their reproductive years experience infertility.

Published clinical studies have implicated andrenomedullin, a small protein, in several types of pregnancy complications, Caron says. But so far the studies can only imply an association, not a causal relationship, between the protein and these complications.

Caron’s study is different. “We provide proof of principle,” she says.

Adrenomedullin widens blood vessels and helps form new ones, likely assisting the implantation process by allowing more blood flow to the site, Caron says. A deep implantation is crucial to the nourishment of a developing embryo.

D

uring a typical pregnancy, adrenomedullin levels increase about fivefold in the mother. “Both the mother and the fetus are making remarkable attempts to increase the level of adrenomedullin secretion right at the site of implantation,” Caron says.

When researchers genetically manipulated mice to secrete slightly reduced levels of adrenomedullin, they uncovered a lot of problems with implantation, Caron says.

Instead of implying a relationship between adrenomedullin and implantation problems like previous studies did, this study showed that mutating the gene that controls adrenomedullin secretion actually caused those problems.

The researchers found that the mice with reduced adrenomedullin levels had smaller litter sizes. Embryos were not well burrowed into the uterus, and they were spaced too closely together, restricting their growth.

These symptoms—decreased fertility, shallow implantation, and reduced fetal growth—are all associated with preeclampsia and other fertility problems in humans.

“Preeclampsia is probably caused by

multiple genes because it affects so many women,” Caron says. “Adrenomedullin is one of those genes.”

Caron and her team plan to move their research from mice to humans. They’re also studying two types of proteins associated with adrenomedullin’s functions that may one day become targets for new drugs.

—Julia Connors Julia Connors is a master’s student in medical journalism at Carolina.

Kathleen Caron is an assistant professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology in the School of Medicine. The study appeared in the October 2006 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Kathleen Caron

The top image shows that many mouse embryos from the litter of a mother with low adrenomedullin levels are growth-restricted or developmentally delayed, regardless of their own levels of adrenomedullin (indicated by +/+, ± or -/- genotype). Other common consequences of reduced maternal adrenomedullin are failure of neural tube closure (bottom left) and abnormalities with cardiovascular development (bottom right).

endeavors 5

In pursuit of perfect memory

A

re human beings meant to have a perfect memory?

In 1945, researcher Vannevar Bush proposed the memex (short for memory extension), a machine that would help people hold, organize, and make sense of the increasing abundance of knowledge they are forced to deal with daily. Today, researchers at UNC are testing a modern prototype of this machine.

The prototype, developed by Microsoft Research, uses software called “MyLifeBits” to collect, organize, and store information on your computer. It records everything that happens on your PC, from the files you open to the web sites you visit. You can also use the program to house external data such as bills, or even images from a SenseCam—a two-inch-square, plastic pendant with a set of sensors and a fish-eye lens you can wear around your neck. The SenseCam snaps an image every ninety seconds, or when 6 endeavors

it detects a change in light levels or acceleration. It also records the temperature and time-stamps the photo. MyLifeBits displays all of this information for you in a colorful line graph, and also allows you to search through data and images.

UNC is one of fourteen universities that received technology awards from Microsoft Research to explore memex technology, but, John Oberlin says, “We are the only people we know of trying to combine the areas of memex and context-aware technologies.”

A context-aware framework is a software environment that takes in sensory information from a combination of devices such as WiFi, GPS, and environmental or biometric sensors, and uses this information to make logical deductions about a person’s context.

For example, it might look at your location and the people around you and determine that you are in a meeting. Or let’s say you are in an unfamiliar town and you want to find

a pizzeria—your memex could read where you are and tell you how to get to the nearest pizza place.

“When fully realized, a personal academic memex would allow a student to easily find transcripts of all study group meetings with friends,” Oberlin says. “Or to retrieve all lecture notes where the professor talked about a particular topic, say, ‘radiocarbon dating.’”

At UNC, Oberlin and Jane Greenberg, along with other members of their research team, have been testing the SenseCam and the memex with biology students who are learning plant identification in the university’s arboretum. The goal is to use this new technology to assist students in learning about scientific taxonomy and the natural world, Greenberg says.

“Students learn better when they are actively engaged in the learning process and have time to reflect on their experience,” she says. “The memex records student experiences and memories and provides a rich opportunity for this type of productive learning experience.”

Oberlin says a memex with limited capabilities may become available for students within the next five to ten years. It could

Bombs over Beirut

Facing page, Stephanie Preston took this photo from her cot at the refugee camp in Cyprus. Hundreds fled to the converted fairgrounds when Israel began bombing Lebanon on July 12, 2006.

bombs, missiles, and artillery at Lebanon.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese radical Shi’ite Muslim organization, had captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. From the roof of her apartment building, Preston watched as the sky caught fire, jets roared overhead, and Israel’s retribution exploded around her.

The photography gig was supposed to last three and a half weeks. Before the fighting began on July 12, 2006, she shot photos for stories about a car rally, a kite show, and cheese pasteurization. Afterward, while she waited to evacuate from the city, she snapped images of the empty streets as tourism trickled away and residents and businesses suffered from a bread shortage.

Almost three weeks after she was supposed to have left Beirut, Preston still hadn’t been called to evacuate. The bombs usually fell far away, but sometimes they were closer. Her building shook when bombs hit the nearby

airport and its fuel tanks exploded.

“Then a friend of mine from the newspaper pulled some strings with the U.S. Consul,” Preston says. On July 22, she climbed aboard the first available ship, the Orient Queen, bound for a refugee camp in Cyprus. She sailed for five hours with seven hundred fifty other Americans, escorted by a Navy destroyer.

Preston stayed with hundreds of other refugees on fairgrounds under a huge dome.

“People slept on cots,” she says. “The lights were always on. It wasn’t really comfortable, but everyone’s basic needs were met.”

After two days in the refugee camp, Preston went to stay for a week with the family of her friend, a Cypriot UNC student, before returning safely to her own family.

—Margarite Nathe Preston, now a junior and a global economics and Chinese major, spent the Fall 2006 semester studying in Xiamen, China.

store lectures, notes, papers, records of group meetings—all the information pertinent to any student’s academic life. It would use the context-aware framework to know when to record, and enable the user to conduct searches of the data later on. Oberlin says the memex would function primarily as a memory augmentation device, a concept he says has long-term application.

Dan Reed wore the SenseCam for almost

a month and got to record what a typical “day in the life of Dan” is like. Although unexcited by his record of personal activities—which, he jokes, consisted primarily of drinking coffee, going to meetings, and checking e-mails—he sees potential in the memex. “How do we, in some sense, amplify intelligence?” Reed asks. “What matters is not just what you know, but knowing how to find out what is known.”

But there are still some hurdles to overcome—the amount of space memex data occupies on a PC; the obtrusive appearance of the SenseCam; the tricky issue of privacy laws. At the very least, Reed says, we’d have to decide what is and is not okay to record, and how memex data could be used. And the questions don’t end there. What would you want to remember?

—Laura Granfortuna Laura Granfortuna is a senior majoring in journalism and international studies at Carolina.

UNC’s Department of Biology, School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and Information Technology Services (ITS) are collaboratively testing the Memex Metadata (M2) for Student Portfolios project. Principal investigator Jane Greenberg is an associate professor in SILS and Director of the SILS Metadata Research Center. Co-principal investigators are John Oberlin, associate vice chancellor for information technology, planning, and technology assessment with ITS; Peter White, director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden and a professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Debbie Barreau, an assistant professor in SILS. Dan Reed is vice chancellor for information technology and director of ITS.

S

tephanie Preston was asleep in her bed when the first bombs hit at 3:45 in the morning. “Those aren’t firecrackers,” the other tenants murmured nervously in the hallway. Hezbollah had been setting off fireworks in celebration of their captured prisoners, but these sounds were different.

Rumors buzzed through the night in Beirut, Lebanon.

She had arrived in the city weeks earlier for a journalism internship at The Daily Star, Beirut’s English-language newspaper.

The next day, Preston—a junior at Carolina—learned that Israel had begun to fire

Jason Smith

The SenseCam, a clever camera that uses context clues to know when to take photos, records a photolog of your day.

endeavors 7

Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé

Jail and HIV risk

W

hat makes a person likely to acquire HIV? Serving time in prison is one risk factor among many. The Bureau of Justice reported in 2003 that the rate of confirmed AIDS cases was more than three times higher among the prison population than in the United States overall. But that’s not to say that prison time is the cause; it’s much more complicated than that.

What motivates a person to reduce his or her risk of acquiring HIV may, on the other hand, have a relatively simple answer—at least for a certain group of incarcerated women during their transition back into society. One UNC research team is basing its study on the idea that mothers want to stay healthy for their families. And when families are stable and bonds are strong, that motivation is even stronger.

Cathie Fogel works with incarcerated women, testing HIV risk-reduction and prevention interventions. She says that these women have a higher risk of acquiring HIV because of factors in their personal histories: substance abuse, depression, childhood violence or sexual abuse, current violent relationships, and exchanging sex for drugs.

8 endeavors

The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded Fogel a grant to explore what it’s like to be a mother leaving prison. As part of her study—“Incarcerated Women, Parenting, and HIV Risk”—Fogel plans to research the women’s reentry and reunification into society, and examine programs inside the prison system as well as the resources that are waiting for mothers after serving their terms. An incarcerated woman has an elevated risk of acquiring HIV upon returning to her community, Fogel says.

“They have so many risk factors, much of what got them into prison to start with.”

Unstable and violent childhood experiences, which are common among incarcerated women, increase the likelihood of substance abuse later in life—and substance abuse is one risk factor for HIV. Fogel and co-investigator Anna Scheyette, a clinical associate professor in UNC’s School of Social Work, will explore ways to reduce HIV risk for women during the transition back to society after serving time.

They’ll also investigate ways to help the women strengthen their bonds with their children, and improve their relationships with other people. “You can’t be a mother if you weren’t mothered,” Scheyette says.

As the project’s expert on community

resources, Scheyette will explore programs that address the needs of an incarcerated woman’s family.

A community resource that helps parents provide food and housing also enables mothers to focus on protective behaviors, such as condom use. Returning to a community after serving time means returning to stressful responsibilities and relationships. With a lower stress level, a mother can prioritize her own sexual health, thus reducing her risk of acquiring HIV. “So children themselves, and also learning to be better parents, motivate women to stay healthy,” Fogel says. Her ongoing study made it clear to her just how important the women’s children are to them, even though the families are separated. Fogel recognized that motherhood alone can motivate women to reduce their own HIV risk. “You can’t be a good parent if you’re not healthy, right?” she says. “So that’s how the two pieces come together.”

—Molly Davis Molly Davis is a master’s student in medical journalism at Carolina.

Catherine Fogel is a women’s health care nurse practitioner and professor in the School of Nursing.

Jacques Descloitres; MODIS Land Rapid Response Team; NASA/GSFC

The Amazon’s mysterious past

R

ussell Mapes was trying to determine how fast age-old Amazon River sediments travel from the Andes Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean when he uncovered a bizarre truth—the Amazon once flowed in the opposite direction.

Mapes found ancient zircon grains in sedimentary deposits in the center of South America that could only have come from the eastern part of the continent. If the Amazon had always flowed west to east, as it does today, Mapes would’ve found much younger minerals in the sediments from the Andes.

“But we didn’t see that,” he says. “All along the basin, the ages of the mineral grains pointed to very specific locations in central and eastern South America.”

How could this happen?

Mapes’ advisor Drew Coleman says geologists suspected that sections of the Amazon had flowed westward but lacked the data to prove it. “But the Amazon is so flat that a tilt in either direction can change things drastically,” Coleman says.

Mapes says that during the Cretaceous Period—between 65 and 145 million years ago—what are now South America and Africa separated and formed a highland area in northeastern South America. The high-

lands caused river sediment to flow westward before the Andes were formed.

Also during the Cretaceous Period, a ridge called the Purus Arch rose in the middle of the continent. As the eastern highlands cooled and eroded over millions of years, water began flowing from the arch to the Atlantic. Meanwhile, water on the west side of the arch began flowing toward the Pacific.

But as intense seismic activity caused the Andes to grow, water and river sediment began filling the basin between the mountains and the arch and formed a huge lake.

The Andes continued to grow and send sediment into the basin over the course of tens of millions of years. Eventually the water and sediment breached the arch, resulting in the Amazon’s current flow pattern from deep within the Andes to the Atlantic.

“We think this last change happened within the past five to ten million years, which is really fast, geologically speaking,” Mapes says. “This shows how transient the surface of the earth is.”

As Mapes continued to analyze mineral ages, he found another nugget of information. Sediment at the Amazon’s Atlantic headwaters contained zircon from the entire river basin, not just from the Andes,

debunking assumptions about how ancient landscapes evolve and river basins erode.

For example, geologists studying zircon samples in Arizona and New Mexico hypothesized that almost all of the zircon there came from the Appalachian Mountains some 160 million years ago.

“I just didn’t think that made sense,” Coleman says. “And it’s easy to test. We can go to a big river and see what a big river does.”

And that’s what sent Coleman and Mapes to the Amazon to begin with.

“Some geologists think that 90 to 95 percent of the sediment coming out at the end of the Amazon is from the Andes,” Mapes says. “But they’ve been studying the suspended sediment, which is the stuff that makes the river muddy. And most of that does come from the Andes. But a much higher percentage of the stuff moving along the river’s bottom comes from the old flat part of the continent—the stuff that’s more than a billion years old.”

—Mark Derewicz Russell Mapes is a geology doctoral candidate.

Drew Coleman is an associate professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences. They received funding from the American Chemical Society.

Russell Mapes

Left, highlands formed along the Atlantic Ocean between 65 and 145 million years ago, sending the Amazon River westward (as shown by the arrows). Middle, the formation of the Andes mountains and the Purus Arch caused the Amazon to flow both east and west. Right, the rising Andes and eroding eastern highlands created the Amazon’s current flow pattern.

endeavors 9

Kat z photo: Steve

10 endeavors

Exum. Illustration

: Jason Smith

WHAT’S MORE MIND-BLOWING?

The fact that I can now carry ten thousand songs around in my pocket and listen to one any time I want? Or the fact that just four or five generations ago, people could only hear music live and in person? Let that sink in for a minute: recorded music did not exist.

This is the kind of stuff that gets Mark Katz going. Katz is part music professor, part music junkie, part technology geek. He’s a long-time violinist and a budding turntablist (more on that later). He wrote his dissertation on how recording has affected classical music. But when he decided to write a book, he realized that classical alone wouldn’t cut it. “If you’re going to talk about recording,” he says, “how could you not talk about pop?”

He’d been hooked since 1983, when he was thirteen and the Herbie Hancock song “Rockit” scratched its way into America’s living rooms. So professor Katz let his inner thirteen-year-old help write the book.

The result was Capturing Sound, a book about how and why recordings, from Schubert to Public Enemy, influence musical life, and how technology, from the phonograph to the MP3, has turned the musical world on its ear.

Katz calls these things phonograph effects, and over the years they’ve changed the way we listen to music and the way performers create it. They’ve even pushed new genres of music into existence. And they all started with Edison’s simple little machine.

THE WAY WE LISTEN

Back in, say, 1905, the family who cued up a record for the first time heard “performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes,” Katz says. They could listen to that music over and over again. And they were the ones to decide what they wanted to hear, when they

wanted to hear it, and who they wanted to hear it with.

A record was tangible—sound frozen into shellac, Katz says. People started collecting them (there are more than I care to mention in my attic). They were portable—it’s hard to move an orchestra around, but records made it easy.

And once they became popular, records shook up the social status quo: in 1923, Katz says, British writer Orlo Williams argued that it should be perfectly acceptable to listen to recorded music any time of the day.

It was a radical, indecent suggestion: Music at breakfast? But some ideas—say, listening to music with no one else around—were too far-out for even Orlo. He described how it would feel to walk in on a friend who was listening alone: “You would think it odd, would you not? You would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room, and if you found no such one would painfully blush, as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.”

Katz says that at first, the performers’ invisibility—the disembodied voice—was a problem. People were more than a little freaked out to hear someone singing or playing while having nothing to look at but a spinning disc on a box. So inventors came up with machines that, when attached to a phonograph, would rotate images in time to the music. One British listener created elaborate sets, characters, and costumes to look at while listening to his favorite operas, and he would change them all for every new scene. (And I thought I was a music geek.)

Listeners who were used to getting cues from a live performer’s gestures and movements no longer got those cues from records.

In 1925, after seeing violinist Jascha Heifetz

play live, one critic called him “cold, calm, dispassionate,” and yearned for “less mastery and more humanity.” But after listening to Heifetz’s recordings, the same critic called him passionate and tender. “With the visual channel off,” Katz says, “Heifetz no longer seemed emotionless.”

Records artificially delimited music into little chunks. For more than seventy years, one side of any given record could hold no more than about four and a half minutes of music. Anything longer had to be broken up onto multiple discs. So listening to Beethoven’s Ninth at home was an exercise in, well, exercise, as it meant getting up around fifteen times to turn your records over. Newer technologies have still tended to play fast and loose with listeners: eight-track tapes rudely interrupted songs to clunk over to the next track and pick up where they left off, and cassette tapes often had a puzzling few minutes of silence at the end of one side, intended, as the liner notes put it, “to preserve the album continuity.”

INSTANT REPLAY

But the most resounding effect of records, Katz says, has been their repeatability. He uses a simple example: sing a note. Then sing it again, and try to recreate the first one exactly. You can’t. The sound you just made has far more qualities—pitch, volume, length, intensity, timbre, attack, decay—than a human can precisely duplicate. And there’s no way a band or orchestra can play a whole song or symphony twice in exactly the same way. But that’s precisely what records do.

And that, Katz says, has had consequences.

We come to expect things based on the recordings we hear: for instance, “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones will always begin with that same riff. Katz sometimes plays a snippet of “Satisfaction” to his students. “I don’t even

endeavors 11

play the entirety of the first note,” he says.

“But the students can identify the song because that particular note has been repeated in exactly that form so many times that it’s instantly recognizable.”

These expectations are so strong that we sometimes expect qualities unique to a specific recorded performance to be the same when we hear the work live or on another record—even if those original qualities were mistakes. Katz says that whenever he hears Zigeunerweisen, a violin piece by Pablo de Sarasate, he expects to hear the violinist pluck his open E string thirty-four seconds into the music. But that’s because as a youngster, Katz “listened obsessively” to Jascha Heifetz’s 1951 recording of the piece.

Heifetz goofed when he plucked the E. Even though Katz knows that, part of him still expects to hear that goof every time anyone performs Zigeunerweisen. And part of him is still a little surprised and disappointed when he doesn’t. “Though I know better,” he says, “on a certain level I regard that wayward note to be a part of the piece.”

Back in recording’s early days, Katz says, the goal of capturing any work on shellac was to make it sound as close as possible to the live performance of that work. After all, for thousands of years, that’s the only way people had experienced music.Now,

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after only a little more than a century of recorded music, we’ve completely flip-flopped: we expect the live concert to live up to the recording. The recording now comes first; it’s the ideal, the reference, the prototype. Live music is just a subsequent interpretation. Touring bands hire extra musicians so they can make their live performances sound as full and fleshed-out as they do on record. But when performers feel the need to adhere too closely to note-perfect recordings, Katz says, something suffers. One critic blasted the Chicago Symphony for playing this way, saying that they were “machine-like” and that “they sounded like a phonograph record.”

THE WAY WE PLAY

Once records came along, musicians, both virtuoso and amateur, could listen to and learn from other artists. They could emulate what they heard, for better—the study of recordings has been crucial to the development of jazz, Katz says—or for worse (no “Stairway to Heaven,” please). But musicians can also listen to and evaluate their own recordings. Katz says that’s had humdrum results—if a performer hears an error, she can correct it for the next performance—as well as booming consequences: after hearing themselves on record, early twentiethcentury classical players actually began to change the way they approached rhythm.

Composer and pianist Camille SaintSaëns said that he “at once saw, or rather heard, two grave mistakes” upon listening to his first recorded performance. One involved tempo, the other, rhythm. “But what was Saint-Saëns really hearing?” Katz asks. He points out that countless recordings of the era are full of the same kind of rhythmic

inflections Saint-Saëns regarded as mistakes.

Katz feels that as classical performers got used to making and hearing records, they gradually shunned little fluctuations in tempo, and they all but cut out the oncecommon practice of altering the length and placement of notes. Recordings, Katz believes, have “led to a striking change in the way modern classical performers approach musical time.”

Recording affected musicians’ playing time, too. Because of the limited amount of time on a record, Katz says, many early twentieth-century performers simply chose to record shorter works. Concert programs, on the other hand, continued to feature longer works. But concert audiences began to demand what they had been listening to on record at home.

Composers from Elgar to Stravinsky wrote works specifically with records’ time limitations in mind, and were sometimes even commissioned to do so by phonograph companies. In general, some composers saw records as an advantage, since they helped the music be heard by more people. Others saw a down side, as records sometimes immortalized inferior concert performances that composers would rather forget. And some seemed to simply regret the technology: Aaron Copland wrote that the “unpredictable element, so essential in keeping music truly alive…dies with the second playing of a record.”

Modern pop has been subject to its share of phonograph effects, too. Musicians from early blues singers to Duke Ellington wrote to fit the playing time of the 78. Then, in the late 1940s, Columbia Records developed the long-playing 331⁄3-rpm record, or LP, which held about 23 minutes per side. To compete, RCA Victor introduced the 45-rpm record. Even though the 45 didn’t hold much

more music than a 78, it quickly became the standard for pop singles when jukeboxes and radio stations started using it. In fact, the typical length of today’s pop songs—usually about three minutes—is a phonograph effect of the original 45-rpm record.

BRINGING IT UP TO SCRATCH

By the late 1970s, DJs had learned to “cut” at parties: they’d use two turntables and two copies of the same record to isolate and repeat the catchiest few seconds of a song over and over again, in order to form a “loop” that people could dance to. But no one really considered DJs to be musicians.

Not until a thirteen-year-old Bronx kid figured out that a record player could be an instrument.

One day in 1977, Theodore Livingston was playing records in his bedroom. “My moms came and banged on the door, you know, boom boom boom,” Livingston said in the documentary film Scratch. “She said, ‘If you don’t cut that music down, you’re gonna have to cut it off.’” Theodore didn’t want to lose his place, so he left the needle down and pulled the record back. He let the record spin, then pulled it back, let it spin, and pulled it back.

He had just discovered scratching, one of modern music’s most recognizable—and indescribable—sounds. “When she left,” Theodore said, “I was like, ‘hmmm, that’s a pretty good idea.’” He experimented, perfected his technique, and unleashed it at parties. Scratching took off fast and far: whether art form or hi-fi abuse, it’s con-

sidered one of hip-hop’s four fundamental elements. Young Theodore came to be known as GrandWizzard Theodore and was a marquee name at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 1999 conference on hip-hop.

Nowadays, you can enroll in a DJ academy to learn how to scratch, as Katz did. Each time a new technology—from cassettes to digital downloads—sounded the turntable’s death knell, scratching helped keep the phonograph alive. And it gave birth to a new form of music—something called turntablism.

NEEDLES TO SAY

Turntablism isn’t using records to listen to music; it’s using records to make music.

As hip-hop grew, rappers gradually stole the spotlight from their own DJs. But by the mid-90s, hip-hop was so popular that there was room to focus again on the DJ, or turntablist. These guys are true vinyl junkies: they sniff out, covet, and collect obscure records, looking for catchy instrumental passages, offbeat vocal snippets, and anything else that they can combine into new routines—live, in front of a club crowd, using two turntables and a mixer, often in a head-to-head battle to see who’s got the sharpest skills. Good turntablists are hip-hop’s virtuosos—Paganinis with needles; the Jimi Hendrixes of scratch.

Their hands are a blur. Their music can be funky, abrasive, bombastic, bewildering. If you’re over, say, age thirty-five, listening to this stuff may make your fillings hurt.

In Capturing Sound, the professor in Katz analyzes a battle routine by DJ I.Emerge: “Every time there is a snare, I.Emerge uses the crossfader to switch from the turntable with the word ‘that’ to the one with the drums. In doing so, he creates a seamless flow of sixteenth notes.”

Katz the technology geek informs us that “the next set of scratches consists of a

combination three-click forward and fourtear reverse.”

And Katz’s inner thirteen-year old basically tells us that this particular DJ’s competitors just got served—that I.Emerge’s routine would please any crowd but would also cause his competitors to give up all hope.

Turntablists come in all colors—black, white, Latino, Asian—but most of them are men, Katz says, and he wants to find out why. “What makes this such a guy thing?” he asks. “There’s no overt misogyny, as far as I can tell.” He also wants to figure out if and how the cultural aesthetics of DJing have changed as the phenomenon has spread beyond its origins in the African American community.

The National Science Foundation, as part of its program on the history and philosophy of science, engineering, and technology, gave Katz a grant to study turntablism and to write a book he’s calling Groove Music.

“It’s probably pocket change for them,” he jokes, “but it’s enough for me. I’m going to go shopping for turntables soon.

“The things I like to study are things I started out just enjoying, for their own sake—not really caring whether they were particularly deep or not—but then finding that the more I got into them, the more I could engage in them as a scholar and as a teacher,” Katz says. Often, when he’s dazzled by something he’s listening to for pleasure, the academic side of his brain kicks in and he’s got a new assignment for his students.

“That’s why it’s fun to be a music professor,” he says. “I just like music, and now people are paying me to talk about it.” e Katz is an assistant professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences. His book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, is available from University of California Press.

endeavors 13

On the seventh floor

David Goodsell

powered by

proteins A Pioneer Award doesn’t get you out of doing the dishes.

by Kelly Chi Jason Smith

Gary Pielak amid photos of his kids, a bent valve from his ‘68 Fiat, cans of hot and spicy peanuts and Ye Olde Oak American Style Hot Dogs in brine, and his faux coonskin cap.

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of Kenan Laboratories, afternoon sun beating through the south windows warms the hallway to an uncomfortable temperature. Ice machines hiss and groan, trying to stay cool. On a neglected blackboard nearby is a drawing of a cactus, and a scribbled “Science is kicking my ass right now.”

From around the corner, a faint, whistled rendition of the Indiana Jones theme grows louder. Chemistry professor Gary Pielak strides down the hall in a pair of high-water Levi’s and socks with sandals. Among the prized possessions in his office: a fake raccoon-skin cap he bought on eBay, and a plaque from the National Institutes of Health. He is the first UNC scientist to win an NIH Pioneer Award, which will give him $2.5 million for five more years of protein research. He has worked long and hard for it.

“I’ve been thinking about proteins since Richard Nixon was president, and it just blows me away,” he says. “Still, there are so many things we don’t know.”

Proteins and pandas Proteins, which are made up of amino acids, have many roles in the cell. For example, some regulate or speed up chemical reactions. Some help a cell stay structured, and others act as channels to control the flow of fluid or ions through membranes. Still others regulate how genes turn on and off. Understanding the spatial structure of proteins helps scientists determine what proteins do and how they do it. Once they know how proteins are supposed to work, scientists such as Pielak can figure out how they’re misshapen in diseases or other conditions.

But take a protein out of its natural environment, the cell, and you may not be able to learn much about it.

It’s kind of like studying a panda in a zoo, says Brian McNulty, who worked with Pielak as a graduate student.

You might learn a lot about a panda while it’s in captivity, but you’ll learn more about one while it’s munching bamboo in the mountains of China.

The natural environment of a protein is a cell filled with many proteins, Pielak says. And if he’s been thinking about proteins since the Nixon years, he’s been trying to develop a way to see them in their natural environment since Reagan was president. Not many have tried it. Not many would fund it. And, especially for Pielak’s students, it hasn’t always been easy.

Early in his career, Pielak says, he sat in committee meetings while his students presented their work on protein stability. Back then, a student isolated protein from cells, then measured the protein’s stability while it bathed in dilute buffer solutions. “This is all well and good,” another committee member said to Pielak.“But proteins live in cells,

One day, it worked. Dedmon processed the data and took the printouts to Pielak to show him the fuzzy but readable spectra. It was clear to them that they had something.

not buffer solutions. And cells are crowded with things.”

“It bugged the heck out of me,” Pielak says.

As an assistant professor, he had to crank out reliable experiments, publish, and publish.

“When I was finally a tenured professor, I took advantage of what tenured professors are supposed to do—work on something wacko,” he says.

He followed his colleague’s advice and started to work on proteins in their natural environment—living cells. In his case, the living cells were from E. coli.

A sea of proteins But it’s a challenge to study one protein in a cell, where it’s in a sea of many proteins and other large molecules, Pielak says.

Right now, the only way to get atomic-level information about a protein in solution is to lower it into a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR). Carolina’s NMR looks like a six-foot-tall tin can, and Pielak’s group affectionately calls it “the magnet.”

The magnet tells Pielak about the atomic environment of his “favorite” protein. The atomic environment can give clues about whether the protein is folded in certain conditions, which can help determine whether it can carry out its function in the cell, he says.

Before the year 2000, only one other lab had published its findings on NMR inside cells. But that year, Pielak and then-undergraduate Matthew Dedmon began a “swingfor-the-fences experiment,” Pielak says.

Pielak knew of a certain bacterial protein they might detect using in-cell NMR. They knew that it unfolded and lost its structure when in dilute solution, but, when crowded by other proteins, it partially folded and gained some structure. The protein, categorized as intrinsically disordered, was a type that could only be studied in a living cell instead of in isolation, Dedmon says.

So they tried it out both ways—in living cells and alone in the magnet.

Dedmon learned how to use the magnet and worked for about two months on preparing his samples. He remembers carrying his iced E. coli cells to the magnet on many

hot summer days, careful to keep them alive during their journey.

One day, it worked. Dedmon processed the data and took the printouts to Pielak—a twenty-minute hike from the magnet to Kenan Laboratories—to show him the fuzzy but readable spectra. It was clear to them that they had something. They could take readings of this protein in a sea of many proteins, in a sea of many E. coli.

They published the findings in 2002.

Playing protein favorites Pielak’s strategy for students has been “one student, one protein,” he says. Once a student finds a detectable protein, that student can work for years on altering the protein itself or conditions that may affect the protein’s properties. With so many variables to alter, the possibilities for one protein alone are endless.

First, Pielak’s group tells E. coli cells to make a lot of a certain protein in an environment enriched with an isotopic label, 15N. Then they take a sample of the cells—which looks like a straw full of melted vanilla shake—and load it into the NMR spectrometer.

Pielak’s group does things differently from other labs, says graduate student Lisa Charlton.

“We’re sticking live E. coli into an NMR tube, and we have no idea what’s going to happen with each experiment.”

Two-thirds of the proteins don’t “work” in the magnet, and it takes anywhere from two weeks to a month to figure that out, Pielak says. The problem is that the insides of cells are packed with proteins, twice as many as are found in a goopy egg white. So it’s hard to see one protein amid the others.

Sometimes a protein is too large. Sometimes it can attach to other molecules or the cell membrane. Or the group can’t get cells to make enough of the protein.

Charlton found her favorite protein about three years ago, and it has been rife with problems ever since.

First, her cells settled into the sensitive spot of the detector region of the magnet.

Then she noticed that the cells acidified after

a few hours in the magnet. Once, she even had to create twenty variants of the protein.

Each problem took her an entire summer to solve, she says.

Trouble in protein paradise Pielak’s new path had its drawbacks.

Though his work is basic science, he knew it could apply to proteins involved in diseases, he says. In his application for the Pioneer Award, he wrote a paragraph called “Persistence in the face of failure.” He had submitted nine applications to NIH over five years, he wrote. None was awarded. His reviewers wrote that the work was “not highly developed enough” or “too novel.” No one wanted to take a chance on his work.

Smaller grants from the National Science Foundation maintained the research in the lab, he says. He had students apply for research scholarships. His lab shared equipment with other labs, which relieved some of the costs of maintenance and repair.

The lab works together, Charlton says.

They wash dishes, refill tanks of deionized water, and order materials.

“When something breaks, we don’t call someone in to fix it,” she says. “We fix it ourselves.”

Proteins galore More cells are on the horizon for Pielak.

With the Pioneer funds, he plans to develop equipment to measure the proteins in yeast, insects, and eventually human cells. The lab will use the money to design attachments for keeping these “higher-maintenance” cells alive while they sit in the magnet, he says.

Though the money will fund Pielak’s work in the field of in-cell NMR, Charlton says some things will stay the same: “We’ll still be doing our dishes.” e Kelly Chi is a master’s student in medical journalism at Carolina.

Gary Pielak is a professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. Lisa Charlton is a graduate student of chemistry, and Brian McNulty is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology. Matthew Dedmon is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School. endeavors 15

Courtesy of Patricia Thompson

Untitled oil pastel by Edith Branson (date unknown). Branson exhibited her work in New York City whenever she had the opportunity, but some reviewers from that era had nothing nice to say about female artists.

a gentle revolutionary Why are so many women artists overlooked or forgotten?

Pat Thompson has found one well worth remembering.

By Margarite Nathe

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one early afternoon in February of 2006, Pat

Thompson was on a train, heading to Virginia.

She was going to see Jacqueline Branson Smith, who wanted to show her some of her mother-in-law’s artwork. Thompson wasn’t sure what she’d find, but when she got there, “everything was stored under the beds, in closets,” she says.

So on tiptoes and hands-and-knees, she drew out canvas after canvas, portfolios marked “Do Not Destroy.”

And the work was good.

Disappearing act All artists have to struggle against anonymity, but women have had a harder time of it, says Thompson, UNC’s art librarian.

Even beyond historical sexism, women have come up against plenty of obstacles in gaining admission to the boys’ club of “great” artists. Until the late nineteenth century, most women weren’t even allowed the same kinds of art instruction as men—including access to nude models and figure-drawing classes. Critics scoffed at the feminine attempt at creativity, Thompson says, and countless women artists have vanished from sight—if they were even on the radar in the first place.

“When I was in school, Janson”—the staple survey art history text—“didn’t even have women artists,” Thompson says. “Frida Kahlo, Angelica Kauffman, Lavinia Fontana, the big names—they weren’t in the surveys.”

And while art history texts have gotten better over the last thirty years, she says, “it’s like being part of any other minority in your field. It takes a long time.”

Almost every day of her career, Branson painted in her studio, Thompson says.

From the 1910s, when Branson was a young woman, until she could no longer draw a straight line, she sat down in front of her easel at 8:30 every morning, five days a week. But when she died in 1976, she left her work with her family, and her name fell off the map—until the year 2000, that is. That’s when Thompson published the list of artists included in the library’s North Carolina Women Artists file. And that’s how

Smith found her mother-in-law’s name in the collection.

The file consisted of newspaper clippings and postcard-size exhibition announcements for North Carolina women artists.

For some women, the scraps of paper were the only evidence that remained of their art and careers.

Rhythm and movement Edith Branson was one of a growing number of female Modernist painters at a time when that meant a precarious break from other, more traditional types of art.

And although Branson knew how to draw and paint accurately, Thompson says, she moved toward abstract art as a way to represent things she saw in real life. “Her work was abstract, but abstracted from natural forms,” Thompson says.

For most of her career, Branson lived and worked in New York City. Although she attended some classes at the Art Student League and Teachers College, she never went to a formal art school. Instead she sat for hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, copying works, practicing. “She considered that her art school,” Thompson says.

But Branson’s work is different from that of her contemporaries. “She was trying to push the envelope and develop her own style in the context of the Modernist movements of the time, movement away from representation,” Thompson says.

During her “classes” in the Met, Branson studied the classical sculpture and decided that instead of copying rigid characters onto

Above: Branson used ribbons to capture a sense of musical rhythm.

This untitled work is one of the few paintings she actually framed.

Every five years or so, she culled the paintings she’d accumulated and threw out much of her work.

Below: a portrait of Edith Branson, probably taken in her early twenties.

Images courtesy of Jacqueline Branson Smith.

endeavors 17

her canvas, she wanted them to move.

Few of her paintings are titled, but one group, which Thompson and Smith have begun to call “Nudes with Ribbons,” are most likely based on those sculptures. “She was trying to capture rhythm and movement,” Thompson says. “And I think she was successful.” Branson experimented with creating visual music and synchromy, which is a style that consists solely of color and shapes.

“She was very rebellious, and a revolutionary in her art,” her daughter-in-law says.

“But she was also a very gentle person, very modest and sensitive.”

Trail of crumbs Branson’s husband—then dean of Columbia’s law school—was well-to-do, and they managed to be comfortable even through the Great Depression. Branson knew that unlike many of her fellow artists, she didn’t have to rely on selling her paintings to make a living.

She paid most of the rent for the studio she shared with several other artists, and decided that, while she’d like people to see her work, she wouldn’t try to sell it.

“She didn’t want to compete with her fellow painters, who needed the money,” Smith says.

Her lack of self-promotion may be why no one knows her name today, Thompson says. Branson ran with a circle of New York avant-garde artists over the course of two decades. Many of the other women artists in that scene eventually abandoned their work for homes back in the Midwest and more profitable types of painting. “From then on, they did still lifes and other representational work,” Thompson says. “Branson never changed to a marketable style.”

Branson exhibited her work whenever she had the chance. In a rare interview from 1961, she recalls, “Those were exciting days.

We were all outcasts, more or less. Alfred Stieglitz, owner of Gallery 291 and just

as she got sicker and sicker, she begged her son and Smith, his wife, “please take care of my paintings.”

In this abstract painting, two women are almost overpowered by a house—possibly Branson’s statement about domestic life, Thompson says. Image courtesy of Jacqueline Branson Smith.

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returned from Europe, was the only person interested in showing our work. He became Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband, you know.”

Branson moved with her family to North Carolina in the 1960s. When she grew too old to paint precisely, she turned to crafts such as weaving, costume design, and painted furniture.

And by the 1970s, as her health was failing, she began to wonder what would happen to her life’s work when she was gone. As she got sicker and sicker, she begged her son and Smith, his wife, “Please take care of my paintings.”

“Sometimes when you get old, you have regrets,” Smith says. “Edith did not talk too much about her work. But I knew it was extremely serious and important to her.”

For decades after Branson’s death, Smith and her husband continued to write letters to museums and archives, trying to find someone who would take the paintings, care for them, and keep Branson’s legacy alive.

Branson submerged When Smith found Thompson, the two continued the research Smith began years ago. Branson didn’t leave much in the way of diaries, letters, or even notes about her art, and so they’ve been working together to connect the pieces of her life and career.

“Branson had talent,” Thompson says.

“And she was devoted to her art. She wasn’t after fame and fortune—she just loved to create art, even until her old age.”

And now that she’s gone, Thompson says, you won’t find much about her or her work in any art history texts.

Yet. “There are a number of good biographical dictionaries of women artists, and more and more are being produced,” she says. But the few entries that exist for Branson are incomplete and, in some cases, incorrect.

Thompson plans to change that.

“I’m not about to throw my hands up any time soon,” she says. “I didn’t start out trying to resurrect forgotten women artists, but it seems to be my mission.” e Pat Thompson is the librarian of UNC’s Joseph Curtis Sloane Art Library. Her research on Edith Branson’s life and work was supported in part by a Wildacres residency. In the coming year, she will post her findings, as well as an online Branson archive, to the library’s web site at www. lib.unc.edu/art/.

Courtesy of Restoration Systems

Removal of the Carbonton Dam on the Deep River in North Carolina. The site spanned Lee, Moore, and Chatham Counties.

Busting walls and freeing streams in

By Colie Hoffman

T

DamNation

he Bearwallow Dam collapsed on February 22, 1976, in Buncombe County, North Carolina. A wall of water rushed downriver and killed four people. In 1989, multiple dams in Fayetteville failed, killing more people and destroying property.

During Hurricanes Floyd and Dennis in 1999, thirty-five dams in North Carolina crumpled under rapidly flooding rivers.

Luckily, residents received adequate warning to evacuate, and no one was killed.

As America’s seventy-five thousand dams age into critical status—long past their design lives and into their geriatric years— they become less and less stable, in danger of failing at any time. What will happen if no one takes care of them?

No exit plan Most U.S. dams will exceed their intended design lives by 2020. They must be inspected before then for structural stability, says

Martin Doyle, associate professor of geography. North Carolina is home to some five thousand dams, twenty-two percent of which are considered “high hazard”—meaning failure could result in loss of human life or significant damage to property. But the state has only fifteen dam inspectors.

There are two options for taking care of a dam: restore it to full stability, or remove it from the river or stream. Because many dams aren’t making money anymore, no one wants to invest in repairs. But removal isn’t easy and can come with a hefty price tag.

From a structural engineering standpoint, dams are made (and licensed) to stand for a set time, often fifty years. But most dams weren’t created with exit strategies or any thought of what would happen when fifty years were up, Doyle says. In that time—and often much longer in the Northeast and Midwest—impeded river flow has restricted movement for fish and other organisms, and

stored up decades’ worth of hazardous pollutants. So dam removal is an issue of human safety and of the environment.

That’s where Doyle comes in. An environmental firm called Restoration Systems (home to four Carolina alums, including Adam Riggsbee, one of Doyle’s graduate students), together with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wanted to know exactly what happens when a dam is removed. They asked Doyle for help, and since then his team has been gathering information with what he calls “the buckshot approach”—a little bit of data on everything, including water samples up- and downstream, surveys of fish, vegetation, bugs, and mussels, and measurements of the river’s shape before and after removal.

Opening the floodgates So what does happen when you take a dam away? It depends on how you do it, Doyle endeavors 19

says. If you “blow and go”—dynamite the entire dam and just let the chips fall where they may—the results can be ugly. In 1972 a dam was removed on the upper Hudson River in that way, and shortly afterward sixteen miles of the river were heavily contaminated with PCB —a potent carcinogen—from an industrial plant upstream.

That kind of disaster can also happen when a dam breaks on its own, which becomes more likely as it gets older and decays.

The safer solution is to remove the dam in chunks, Doyle says. Cut a few feet off the top each year, and the water lowers and exposes some of the reservoir. Then plant trees and vegetation on the reservoir sediment, and repeat the whole process annually until the dam is gone. Pollutants are often attached to the sediment, and vegetation makes the sediment stable.

“With gradual removal, you’re more in control of the situation,” Doyle says. “With ‘blow and go,’ it’s all or nothing—if Jimmy Hoffa’s buried in the sediment somewhere, he’s going downstream.”

The results of removal also depend on where the dam is situated. Here in North Carolina, farms, municipalities, and other sources are loading the streams with nitrogen and phosphorus, Doyle says. “Which, ironically, are stored very effectively in reservoirs. So when we remove a dam, not only do we potentially release all the stuff that’s been stored, but we also remove this sink.”

In the Pacific Northwest, on the other hand, there’s not as much chemical runoff from fertilizer-based agriculture, so reservoirs don’t store as much waste. But sediment release isn’t consequence-free there, 20 endeavors

either. The Condit Dam in Oregon, for example, is slated for removal, mostly to allow salmon passage. But studies showed that dirty sediment released during removal will kill all the salmon downstream for several generations, Doyle says.

“People had to ask themselves, ‘Can we live through a few years of almost one hundred percent salmon mortality in order to get to this long-term benefit?’ And they went with ‘yes,’ because they knew this salmon run would eventually go extinct if they kept the dam. Removal was the only alternative.”

Even though the “blow and go” approach is less predictable, environmental restoration groups sometimes opt for it anyway, often for political reasons. “The reality is, you don’t know how long you’ll have a person friendly to the cause in the local state agency,” Doyle says. “So people do it when they have the window. A more complicated, staged removal adds costs and drags the whole thing out.”

The best dam town in Wisconsin Most dams were created to provide hydropower for textile or grain mills, hydroelectricity for cities, or flood control. While few dams are still industrially useful, many still serve recreation purposes. Anglers and duck hunters, for example—people who consider themselves conservationists but not environmental purists—often want dams to stay put.

In some places, dams have been around longer than most of the population. No one can remember them not being there, so people see those dams as part of the natural landscape, Doyle says. “It’s this weird

dichotomy: if you ask people why they want to remove a dam, they say ‘environmental reasons.’ If you ask them why they want to keep a dam, they say ‘environmental reasons.’

People just have very different views about what is the natural environment.” And those views have a strong geographic component, both within states and nationwide.

Local communities in the Midwest and Southeast are usually adamantly opposed to dam removal, despite pro-removal attitudes in the larger community. In 2001 an environmental activist group called the Sand County Foundation removed a dam in the small town of Lavalle, Wisconsin, even though citizens wanted to keep it. “People had always known it to be there,” Doyle says.

“The town motto was ‘We’re the best dam town in Wisconsin.’” Property values are worth more along a lakefront compared to a small creek, so there are economic reasons for resistance, he says.

In the Lavalle case, the owner wanted to sell the dam because it wasn’t profitable. But the town wouldn’t buy it from him. Then the Sand County Foundation heard about the situation, and bought the dam with the sole purpose of removing it.

Whose dam is this?

If the public balks at removal, who has the final say? Removal of a dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers literally requires an act of Congress. In other cases, the state owns the dam.

The top-down approach to removal— where the government trumps the local community—is physically effective, but can create generations of resentment.

Restoration Systems removed the Lowell Dam in Johnston County, N.C., in 2005. Photos courtesy of Restoration Systems.

Education, though, can increase local support. In Wisconsin, a tiny nonprofit group called the Wisconsin River Alliance traveled all over the state, going to town meetings and talking with people about what effect dam removal would have on their communities. For example, people often assumed their property values would go down—but the Alliance showed that they could go up, depending on what people did with the land next to the river.

With other dams, jurisdiction is unclear.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 15 percent of U.S. dams have “undetermined ownership.” Often no one maintains them. How could this happen?

Well, Doyle says, suppose a farmer built a dam in 1860. Fifty years later, it’s part of the landscape. And it’s on the river—not on the farmer’s property. If he built it, does that mean his descendants own it? What if the land near the dam is now a neighborhood?

And if you do own a dam, you have to make it safe. “Once you have liability, if a twelve-year-old kid drowns in your dam,

you’re responsible for it,” Doyle says. “So you want that thing out of there. If you’re not making any money off it, there’s really no impetus to keep it.”

Wisconsin’s government has tried to solve the problem by enforcing a rule that every dam has an owner and assigning liability—a move that has gotten rid of a lot of dams.

Sexy fish On the other side of the country, in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll find no such resistance. “Dams there are evil,” Doyle says.

“Just hell. Because the main thing they’re associated with is salmon passage. Environmentally, salmon symbolize the Wild West.

We know if we remove the dams, the salmon will be able to run free.”

Support in the region is largely due to a case that has captured public imagination during the past decade, Doyle says—the Elwha dams in Washington’s Olympic National Park. These dams will be removed beginning in 2008. The park is a World Heritage Site situated just outside of

Part of Lowell Dam explodes during removal.

Seattle—the mecca of environmentalism.

Though the dams were originally built for hydropower, they haven’t been generating it for quite some time. Now salmon passage is nearly nil.

“Removal gets more complicated in the Midwest and Southeast because we don’t have this big sexy fish that people love to latch onto,” Doyle says. “We have pigs, and a lot of pollution.”

One for one Despite our lack of sexy fish, North Carolina has become a hotbed for dam removal and other wetland restoration, Doyle says.

The state has turned the dam situation on its head by adopting a system called “mitigation banking”—a sort of environmental quid pro quo in which businesses get marketplace credit for environmental restoration.

Here’s how mitigation works: a business wants to build a new store or road on land that crosses a river. To make up for environmental damage, by law the company must restore another ailing river elsewhere in the state. The business itself doesn’t do the restoration. Instead, it buys “mitigation credits” from a mitigation bank. The mitigation bank buys land in need of restoration, does the dirty work—including removing dams—and makes its money selling credits.

Tearing down dams in North Carolina is especially beneficial to the environment, Doyle says. “We have really flat rivers, and a small dam can create a three-mile reservoir. So if you remove a small dam, you’ve restored three miles of a river.” e Martin Doyle is an assistant professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences. endeavors 21

HIP-HOP AT THE CROSSROADS

BY M A R K DER EW IC Z

A L I N E F F ’ S VA N B R O K E D OW N at the crossroads where, legend has it, Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for a few guitar licks. Right down the street from where Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Charley Patton used to dazzle their fans.

Those bluesmen and their juke joints are hard to find now. Neff wanted to see what was left.

She was in the mood for an adventure. And after reading books such as Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and William Ferris’s Blues from the Delta, she went to Clarksdale, Mississippi—the heart of Delta blues—not just to visit, but to live there and maybe even write a book. But on the cracked streets she heard another kind of music coming from cars and rickety porches. It was hip-hop.

Beats and raps made up on the spot—reminiscent, she thought, of old bluesmen trading guitar licks.

“Hip-hop in the Delta,” she thought to herself.

“Makes sense.”

Photo: Matt Dente. Illustration: Jason Smith

22 endeavors

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eff had been a music writer and then—across the tracks—the and DJ in San Francisco black part of town called the New before trekking cross-country in a World District. van that broke down thirteen times.

Williams says that hip-hop is Once in Clarksdale, she rented just about what artists see, and a dumpy shack outside of town, what he sees in his neighborhood worked odd jobs, and searched for is economic depression. “We’re the blues. But it took time to find actually saying that we’re tired of what she was looking for. this,” he says.

“The color line in the Mississippi Delta has always been illiams, who was a good especially thick,” she says. “And the student in school and later entire community has traditionally joined the Army, could’ve stayed been closed to outsiders.” clear of Clarksdale. But he came Clarksdale rapper Jerome Williams, a.k.a. Top Finally, at Red’s—one of the only back to be with family and friends, Notch the Villain. Photo by Tim Gordon. juke joints that’s not overly toursome of whom he joined together in isty—Neff met blues musicians and a music group called Da Fam. singers, one of which she compliife and energy just start flowing,” Wil“People really look up to him,” mented between sets. liams says in a documentary called Let Neff says. “He grew up in a house with The female singer replied, “You think that the World Listen Right, which he and Neff eighteen people. He ate once a day, getting was good? You should hear me tomorrow made. “It comes up through my feet and so dizzy that his head would ache and he’d at church.” ankles and legs and hips and belly, to my just go to bed early.”

Neff showed up at that black church. heart and mind until it just gets to the point Today, he’s twenty-seven and reads heart Friendships deepened, and she was finally where I can’t hold it in my body no more, monitors at the local hospital as a telemetry invited to a fish fry at a secluded, out-of- and it just comes out like a big old blur and technician. And although he’s respected town blues bar where she was told Clarks- it’s like beautiful music.” for that, Neff found that his influence runs dale’s de facto king of hip-hop was scheduled Neff says that William Ferris, now her deeper. to perform. mentor at UNC, documented improvisatory Williams’ cousin Taurus Metcalf says, “I Once there, Neff realized that there was blues in the late 1960s, when bluesmen had can remember him rapping as a kid, ‘keep no official hip-hop show. Her new friends to conjure lyrics on the spot—they often your head up, keep pushing; keep your head merely brought Jerome Williams (a.k.a. Top played to people at house parties, just as up, keep pushing.’ We were in second grade.

Notch the Villain) to do his thing outside the Delta rappers do today. Bluesmen would Now I have a wife and kids and I can still club between blues sets. occasionally re-use a favorite line from their hear that—keep your head up, keep pushing.

“So we went outside,” she says. “Palmetto other songs—same as hip-hop artists, who It keeps my blood flowing.” bugs hitting me in the head. Really hot. All also borrow from popular songs, proverbs, At one point during the documentary, these blues guys gathering around, and and even local lingo, such as calling Clarks- Williams sits on a street corner with eleventhen this young guy starts rapping. It was dale Clarks Vegas. Such borrowing helps year-old Kevon Jurden. The two rap back amazing.” rappers bridge thoughts in midstream, like and forth, a rhythmic conversation. WilHis raps were all off the cuff. Lyrics a poet’s stream of consciousness. It also helps liams smiles, intones some advice, and then referred to people around him. It all rhymed. artists compete. listens to Jurden do his thing—a soul cry, as It was all in tune and in time. And the Ferris documented competition forty Williams calls it. rhythms were true. years ago when Joe Cooper’s ditty trumped The kid’s gifted. He’s got hope like Wil“The blues guys were freaking out,” Neff James “Son” Thomas’s before a raucous liams. And he says things you wish no elevensays. “They really got it.” What they got was crowd that served as judge. Neff says that year-old had to say. freestyle hip-hop—an art form that shares such skills developed from games such as “If I make it, my rap ain’t gonna be about the same roots, lyrical structures, and soulful the dozens, in which kids use rhymes to insult drugs and killing,” Jurden says. “My raps are realism as the blues. each other’s mothers. Most rappers don’t gonna be about God and about what people Neff was sold. She had gone to Clarksdale like to admit that they played the dozens as need to be doing and stop doing.” e to research the blues, but Williams inspired kids, she says, but the game did train them to Ali Colleen Neff, a graduate student in the her to study Delta hip-hop instead. form rhymed couplets—an ability that helps folklore curriculum in the College of Arts and While commercial rappers usually write artists perform without a script.

Sciences, is writing a book about Delta hiptheir rhymes before hitting the studio, Delta But for Williams, the strongest link hop. Brian Graves, a communications studies hip-hop still puts a premium on improvisa- between hip-hop and the blues is Clarksdale graduate student, was the documentary’s third tion, or freestyling. The best rappers have itself. Boarded-up buildings line the main co-director. They received funding from the the quickest wits. street. Sky-high unemployment looms over Center for the Study of the American South.

Williams, though, says the best rap comes town, and segregation isn’t some old forgot- The documentary is online at www.folkstreams. from someplace spiritual. ten word. There’s Clarksdale’s white section net/listenright.

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endeavors 23

parlor talk Christina Boyd is a stylist, and something of a psychiatrist. When women sit down in her chair, she hears stories they might never tell anyone else. s “They feel comfortable talking to me, and I think it’s because I don’t know anyone who knows them,” says Boyd, who owns the Hair Estate in Durham, a beauty salon popular among black women.

“They tell me things they don’t even tell their husbands or doctors or best friends.”

Jason Smith

by Margarita De Pano 24 endeavors

I

t’s also because, like many stylists, Christina’s a good conversationalist, says Veronica Carlisle of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Customers have developed a relationship with their stylists such that they feel comfortable sharing information with them, and also trust what their stylists share with them,” she says.

In 2002, researchers at Lineberger surveyed forty local salons frequented by black women. They found that about 75 percent of salon customers visit their stylist once every four weeks, and about 17 percent visit at least once a week. Many spend more than two hours per visit—partly to have their hair done, and partly to chat with their stylists.

One in every five of these conversations was health-related, Carlisle says.

Building on their findings, researchers asked these salons to participate in the North Carolina BEAUTY (Bringing Education And Understanding To You) Project, a four-year health and cancer intervention study in salons in eight North Carolina counties.

Cancer incidence and death rates in the United States are disproportionately higher among black women, says Laura Linnan, who leads the BEAUTY Project.

The research study expands on work Linnan’s group completed in 2002, when they first partnered with cosmetologists, beauty school directors, a beauty product distributor, a local health department representative, community residents, and a community outreach worker from the Cancer Information Service to find out what kinds of health messages would work best in beauty salons, and how to most effectively deliver them.

“We told the researchers that they had to get the stylists involved, because the stylists are the ones dealing with the customers,” says Morris Boswell, chairman of the cosmetology department at Guilford Technical Community College and a member of the BEAUTY advisory board. “If they can get the stylists to buy into the concept, then it can work.”

It turned out that most of the stylists were excited about the project, Linnan says. They also preferred messages that were easy to communicate.

So researchers kept the messages simple: eat three to five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, engage in physical activity

for at least thirty minutes most days of the week, talk with your doctor about personal risks for cancer and recommended cancerscreening tests, and dial 1-800-4-CANCER to get more information.

They put these messages on interactive display boards in each salon, changing the displays once every three months. Each board had a picture of the stylist and a quote, such as, “Ask me how you can maintain a healthy weight!”

A few of the displays had pictures of large food portions on flaps that customers could lift to see how much a single serving of that food actually is; a “rate your plate” section; quick tips on lowering fat intake; and a scale that customers could use to estimate their body mass index. Small pockets attached to the boards also contained brochures, activity calendars, and other materials customers could take home with them.

“The displays were there so customers would get curious and start asking their stylists about what they saw,” Carlisle says.

“We’ve trained the stylists on these health messages, so they can share them with their customers.”

Linnan’s group also trained the stylists to latch on to a comment a customer might make any time during a visit, even if the comment wasn’t related to the displays.

Because many salon conversations were already health-related, Carlisle says, it was easier to introduce topics related to reducing cancer risk.

“We encouraged stylists to use their natural skills to weave the health messages into a typical conversation, and to encourage their customers,” Carlisle says. “If the customer says, ‘I want to walk but I can’t stick with it,’ then the stylist can say something about walking with a friend.”

But the researchers don’t expect the stylists to be nutritionists, physicians, or physical therapists. “If they don’t know the answer to a question, they recommend that the customer speak with their doctor or dial 1-800-4-CANCER,” Carlisle says.

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esearchers used three groups of stylists for the study: the first received health magazines in the mail for their customers, the second received four-hour health training sessions every three months, and the third received both magazines and training.

All three groups received displays. The magazines, training, and displays contained

similar messages. Meanwhile, a comparison group received unrelated health messages.

The research team compared surveys completed by customers at the beginning and end of the four-year study to assess if BEAUTY resulted in changes in health behavior among customers, stylists, or the salon environment.

They are still finalizing the results, Linnan says, but preliminary data indicate that in all of the salons, there was a modest increase in the number of health conversations customers had with their stylists, in self-reported physical activity, and in self-reported cancer screening tests such as mammograms, Pap tests, and colonoscopies. Almost all of the salon owners said that all salons should offer programs such as BEAUTY.

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here are over twelve thousand licensed salons in North Carolina alone, Linnan says. If BEAUTY succeeds, stylists could become health promoters, communicating messages of health in salons all over the state.

“Now we need to find the right methods and the right amount of information to ensure these efforts are effective in producing health behavior changes,” Linnan says. “Once we identify highly effective programs, we can disseminate them widely here in North Carolina and beyond.”

Boswell adds that it’s difficult to estimate the project’s benefits, since health messages could travel far beyond the salons. “Customers who learned something from their stylist might talk about it with family and friends and other people,” he says. “It might even have a bigger effect than what we intended, but we can’t measure that.”

All salons that participated in BEAUTY were privately owned. Linnan says the researchers will look at franchises next.

They’re also examining ways to deliver health messages in barbershops visited by black men. e Margarita De Pano is a first-year master’s student in Medical Journalism at Carolina.

Veronica Carlisle is a research associate at Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Laura Linnan is an associate professor in the School of Public Health. BEAUTY is funded by the American Cancer Society. The journals Preventive Medicine, Health Education and Behavior, and Health Promotion Practice published the pilot study results. endeavors 25

defending the

Galapagos Steve Walsh

by Mark Derewicz

For the past two centuries, Ecuadorians in the Galapagos Islands have farmed a tiny piece of land, part of which is shown in this satellite image. The rest of the archipelago is the famous national park. Guava, a plant foreign to the archipelago until farmers brought it from the mainland, is shown here in red. Because it is overrunning native species, conservationists called on Steve Walsh (below) to create digital maps and models that show where invasive species are and how they might spread.

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he Galapagos Islands are under attack.

Invasive plants and animals, once foreign to the archipelago, are overwhelming landscapes and threatening the existence of unique native and endemic plants and animals, including those famous giant tortoises for which the islands are named.

Humans caused this problem. And geographers Steve Walsh and Carlos Mena hope that humans can solve it.

For centuries, people have been introducing foreign species into the archipelago’s fragile ecosystem. Pirates, whalers, and sealers released goats and pigs for food sources for return visits, and these animals trample plants and eat tortoise eggs, imperiling ancient nesting grounds. But some of the most damaging invasive species arrived after Darwin’s maiden voyage in 1835. Ecuadorian settlers brought several species, including cattle, guava fruit trees, and blackberry shrubs called mora.

“But the guava and mora got away from 26 endeavors

the farmers,” Walsh says. “And now these plants are in the national park.”

When animals eat mora and guava, they don’t digest the seeds. Some of these seeds eventually sprout. Also, guava’s roots are laced with seeds that quickly germinate.

“Guava is choking landscapes, changing natural grasslands into extensive guava forests,” he says. “They’re overtaking indigenous flora and fauna that appear no place on Earth other than in the shadows of the islands’ volcanoes.”

Although few endemic species have become extinct, the problem is so severe that the United Nations is considering listing the archipelago as a World Heritage Site “at risk,” which is causing the Ecuadorian government and conservation groups to take this problem seriously. Environmentalists have been battling invasives for years, but they’ve never been able to sufficiently map them or model where the plants might spread—until Walsh’s team visited last year.

Paola Pozo

Mapping the enemy Walsh has been generating maps based on high resolution satellite images to document changes in land use and land cover in the Ecuadorian Amazon since 1997, working with CLIRSEN, an agency within Ecuador’s Ministry of the Environment. CLIRSEN agents asked Walsh if his technology could be used to map invasive land cover in the Galapagos.

In February 2006, Walsh visited the Galapagos with Brian Frizzelle of the Carolina Population Center’s Spatial Analysis Unit and Mena, a UNC doctoral candidate and citizen of Ecuador. Once they found invasive plants, they scanned them with a handheld field spectral radiometer, which measures the specific amount of sunlight that reflects off of various kinds of plants. The team used a plant canopy analyzer to document plant type, condition, robustness, and other characteristics. Then, using a fish-eye lens, they measured the crown density of the guava forest from below the forest ceiling—this added detail to help process and interpret the satellite images.

While still in the field, the team downloaded all the data onto a laptop, and then pinpointed their exact location with a global positioning system. Finally, back at UNC, they superimposed their data onto satellite-generated images of the islands to map selected invasive plant species in test areas.

The work yielded the first-ever digital maps detailing how guava and mora are wreaking havoc, swallowing up thousands of acres of grasslands and threatening endemic plants. One area called the Sierra Negra is completely overrun with guava, and will likely never recover, Walsh says, because eradication techniques—such as spraying chemicals or pulling up entire plants—only work when guava patches are small and trees are young.

Although park conservationists aren’t trying to kill guava forests, Mena says, “What we can still learn from Sierra Negra is how the guava is spreading, so we can give scientists insights on how to control newer populations.”

Modeling the unknown Last summer, Walsh’s team returned to the Galapagos to show their preliminary maps to environmentalists from the Galapagos National Park, CLIRSEN, the Nature Conservancy, and the Charles Darwin Research

Station. The team collected more field data to validate previous work, and also taught environmentalists stationed in Ecuador how to use the same technology to continue mapping when Walsh’s team isn’t there.

“So far, our preliminary analysis shows where the invasive plants exist at a single point in time,” Walsh says. “We plan on building up a satellite time series to track the spread of these invasives, and then modeling the spread so we can show what the islands could look like in five, ten, or twenty years, and how the plants may respond to factors such as climate change and environmental policies.”

Walsh’s team will consider what-if scenarios and create models accordingly: what if park officials spray plants here or cut there?

What if people introduce new invasives from mainland Ecuador? And what if more people come?

Models are crucial, Walsh says, because the interactions between people and the ecosystem are still evolving. Thirty thousand people now live on the Galapagos Islands permanently, many of them working in the tourist industry. In 1991, 41,000 tourists visited; in 2006, 125,000. With this influx have come more hotels, gift shops, boutiques, internet cafés, and restaurants—all in small areas restricted to four of the islands.

More human activity means more pollution, consumption, and stress for a famed ecosystem that had probably been pristine for millions of years. Yet, more tourism means more money for a developing country, and more confrontations between conservation and development.

And, as Walsh points out, farmers need to farm, and fishermen need to fish.

Walsh says, “If you’re looking to make money for your family to live, you might have a very different vision of conservation and development than if you’re a scientist or a resource manager trying to deal with fish and bird populations and their habitats. So this is a complex issue.”

Walsh formed a team of UNC ringers—from marine scientists and biologists to city planners and anthropologists—to

research the problems and help him create long-standing research relationships with people in Ecuador who want the Galapagos Islands to remain a unique place.

“This work isn’t just about eradicating invasive plant species,” Walsh says. “It’s about trying to understand the story of invasive plants and animals as a people story.

It’s about understanding how many people these islands can handle.” e Steve Walsh is a professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences and a fellow at the Carolina Population Center. During his second visit to the Galapagos Islands, he was accompanied by Ron Rindfuss, Robert Paul Ziff Distinguished Professor of sociology, and Flora Lu, an assistant professor of anthropology, both fellows at the Carolina Population Center. Geographer George Malanson from the University of Iowa was also part of the team, as were Carolina students Carlos Mena, Amy McCleary, Julie Tuttle, and Patricia Polo. Walsh’s lab includes doctoral candidates Laura Brewington and Yang Shao.

Walsh received funding from UNC’s Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, College of Arts and Sciences, Carolina Population Center, Department of Geography, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Julie Tuttle

The traditional nesting grounds for the Galapagos’ famous giant turtles have been trampled by feral goats and pigs that humans brought to the islands during the past two centuries. The area has been so threatened that scientists started breeding programs to assure the turtles’ survival.

endeavors 27

Jason Smith

Unbroken Bonds Valerie Ashby knows that with the right chemistry, polymers can stretch and stay strong. The same works for people, her students say.

By Danielle Jacobs 28 endeavors

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alerie Sheares Ashby got to where she is today by being new.

“It’s great being new in an area, because you can do things that nobody else who knew any better would try.

And they’ll work. I love being new.”

In spring of 2003, when she moved her lab from Iowa State back home to UNC—

only fifty miles from her hometown of Clayton—Ashby wasn’t just choosing between corn and tobacco; she was itching for change. So to be hip with the times and place, she ventured into a hot new territory: biomaterials. The chemistry remained the same, but the rules had to change. “We now have to look at materials that are FDAapproved, biocompatible, and biodegradable,” she says. And there aren’t very many on the market—yet.

Ashby discovers, designs, and synthesizes new bioelastomers—soft materials which can be incorporated into human tissue. She encountered them by accident while finding new ways to combine the long chains of molecules that we call polyesters. Typically, materials that are FDA-approved for health purposes, from joint replacement to drug delivery, are crystalline and rigid, providing little flexibility or malleability. On the other hand, bioelastomers are very…well, elastic.

Anything doctors put into patients’ bodies, Ashby maintains, should possess mechanical properties that allow it to mimic the tissue that’s around it, because doing so reduces scarring, irritation, and other incompatibility issues.

An elastomer’s network of cross-linked polymers makes it flexible and strong. Imagine a spiderweb, with each ring of silk connected to the adjacent ones by smaller silk segments. The greater the number of these small links, the tighter and more durable the web; if the web were to have fewer, it might be flimsy and collapse. And without the links, the web would have no shape at all. Elastomers behave the same way, except instead of silk rings, straight-chain polymers are connected to one another via cross-links, or covalent bonds.

Before Ashby’s investigation, bioelastomers generally fell into one of two categories: thermoplastic or thermoset materials.

Thermoplastics are easy to prepare and manipulate, but many of them are crystalline—likely to swell, but not break down in the body. These materials can remain in a person’s body anywhere from six months to several years. Thermoset materials don’t have those drawbacks but are tedious and difficult to make, and they do not allow for easy variation of the number of cross-links.

Ashby’s research group has discovered a hybrid that combines all the useful characteristics of these two bioelastomers. Their method involves using a simple reaction

of commercially available ingredients—the kind of technique a student would learn during their first semester in Ashby’s organic chemistry course—and yet allows the team to control the number of cross-links and therefore the strength of the material. After synthesizing countless materials and investigating their mechanical properties, the group realized they had discovered several soft, biodegradable, malleable elastomers that could easily mimic human tissue.

Mentoring as a lifestyle Joe DeSimone, professor of chemistry, was one of Ashby’s mentors. He asked her what she wanted to do. Not in the next five minutes. Not in the next five years. But what did she actually want to do? With her life? No one had ever asked her before. “I didn’t even care what he did,” she says. “He immediately bought into me.” Now, Ashby says that most of what she’s accomplished depended on the enthusiasm and encouragement she got from her mentors.

As an undergraduate studying chemistry at UNC, she knew she wanted to teach, but she didn’t know how to go about it. In 1988, the summer before her senior year, she met Henry Frierson and participated in the inaugural program that would come to be known as the Summer Pre-Graduate Research Education program ( SPGRE ).

Frierson, professor of educational psychology and evaluation, instituted the program

to encourage minority students to go to graduate school. “The typical undergraduate student who has academic talent and research aptitude is not encouraged to pursue a Ph.D.,” Frierson says. “Instead, there’s more focus on traditional careers such as law, medicine, or business. I see this program as a possible avenue for students to gain opportunities that they ordinarily would not have received.” (See “cultivating new scientists,” page 30.)

With encouragement from Frierson and SPGRE, Ashby went to work on a doctorate in chemistry with DeSimone, then a young professor who was unpacking his boxes. Two internships, a doctoral degree, a post doc, and fifteen years later, Ashby still credits DeSimone with some of her forward momentum as a polymer chemist.

In DeSimone’s lab, Ashby found a culture that valued diversity—in people and ideas. “There’s no more fertile ground for innovation than to have diversity of experience around the table,” DeSimone says.

He recalls giving a lecture to a small group of polymer chemists in Germany in the early 1990s. “Not only were they all white men, but they were all white men that had graduated from the same group over the last thirty years. So they all knew the same stuff.

It really reinforced to me how important diversity of thought is.”

Shaping a new generation

David Olson

Scanning Electron Microscope image of a biodegradable bioelastomer, which scientists could use for tissue engineering.

endeavors 29

In the classroom, Ashby cultivates that diversity by focusing on individual students.

While she claims that teaching is just in her blood, her students say she works hard at it. “She knows all of her students’ names,” says Benjamin Pierce, a fourth-year graduate student in Ashby’s lab. “She prints out seven or eight pages of faces and names and studies them. And she’ll get them.” This fall she’s teaching introductory chemistry, and with about four hundred students, it’s one of the largest classes at UNC. But Pierce doesn’t doubt she’ll know even their pets’ names by the end of the semester. She makes herself available, adds Andy Brown, a third-year graduate student, to talk to anyone, about anything, anywhere.

Brown says Ashby’s patience and adaptability have enabled her research group to rack up ten patents, a host of publications, and collaborations with DuPont, 3M, and Chevron Phillips. “It seems like some advisors have their style set, and it’s dependent on the student to interpret and work around that,” Brown says. “But she works around you.”

Rising above adversity?

When some people think of successful African American women, they think of Oprah. Or The Color Purple. Or Oprah in The Color Purple. An underprivileged female rises above adversity despite opposition from every front. Ashby says that’s not her story.

But she knows that the path generally hasn’t been easy for many other women and minorities in science. In the year 2000, fewer than 3 percent of graduate students earning their doctorates in a scientific field were African American women. Ashby wants to change that. She’s active in programs that promote minority scholarship. Domonique Downing, a senior chemistry major who joined Ashby’s lab as an SPGRE student, was a 2006 finalist for a national undergraduate research award.

Ashby first taught Downing, whom she calls “my child,” in an organic chemistry class during Downing’s sophomore year.

Ashby says, “My role in this is to say, ‘I appreciate that you are a minority, or a minority woman. So what? At the end of the day, you need to get your work done.’” e Danielle Jacobs is a doctoral student studying organic chemistry at Carolina.

Valerie Ashby is an associate professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a 2006 Bowman and Gordon Gray awardee for outstanding achievement in teaching.

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cultivating new scientists

E

leven years ago, Tomeiko Ashford told us, “I really would like to teach on the college level, to become a professor.” (See Endeavors, Fall 1995, “Working Their Way into Place.”) Now she’s the associate director at Carolina’s Institute of African American Research, and she’s just one of many who achieved their goals with the help of minority programs on campus. And though the names and acronyms of the individual programs seem to evolve and change almost daily, their aim remains the same: the promotion and advancement of minority scholarship.

In 1974, armed only with a doctorate in educational psychology, Henry Frierson booked a gig as assistant professor at UNC’s medical school. One of the first things he did was overhaul the Medical Education Development Program, now one of the most effective preparatory programs in the country for aspiring medical and dental students from underrepresented minority and disadvantaged groups. Soon after, he developed the Learning and Assessment Laboratory, an academic support program within the medical school. “We helped professional students to perform better academically by providing test-taking and time-management skills, learning strategies, academic counseling, and effective note-taking skills,” he says.

In 1988, the dean of the Graduate School asked Frierson to set up something similar, but with a focus on recruiting minority students into graduate, particularly doctoral, programs. So Frierson created the Minority Pre-Graduate Research Education program, now known as SPGRE, which is open to undergraduates across the country. Next came the social science and humanities component of SPGRE, originally known as the Minority Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP), which typically focuses on students in the natural sciences.

Unlike their parent programs, SPGRE and MURAP are research-based, and are designed to help minority students adjust to the graduate school atmosphere.

Each undergraduate gets involved in a research project under the supervision of a faculty member. SPGRE and MURAP have paved the way for other undergraduate research-based programs at UNC. Research Education Support, along with Science and Math Achievement and Resourcefulness Track, are now increasing the number of underrepresented students pursuing graduate education.

—Danielle Jacobs Jason Smith

Henry Frierson, professor in the School of Education.

Leg 201 Shipboard Scientific Party

life down deep

by Jessica McCann These dark sediments, recovered from more than 100 meters below the seafloor beneath 5,000 meters of water at the Peru Trench, contain methane hydrate (the white material here). It quickly fizzes away at room temperature and sea level.

Go thousands of feet down to the bottom of the sea. Feel the cold, dark, weight of the ocean. Then tunnel down farther, deep below the seafloor, and find there an overwhelming abundance of life: countless single-celled organisms that live at extreme pressure and feed where most life would starve. The members of this microbial universe might be tiny, but they affect everything from nutrient cycling in the ocean to global climate change.

Leg 201 Shipboard Scientific Party

The JOIDES Resolution at sunset in San Diego Harbor. Equipped with almost twelve thousand square feet of lab space, the ship carries a multinational group of scientists for twomonth voyages to study the earth’s history as recorded in sediments and rocks beneath the seafloor.

endeavors 31

Life at the extreme Resolution is operated by the Integrated record of life and geology in the deep-sea Andreas Teske studies Archaea, one of Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), a multi- sediment. While often tens of feet long and the three main “kingdoms” of life. The national group of scientists that conducts packed with microbes, each sample contains other two kingdoms are Eukaryotes— seagoing expeditions to study the history of limited material for the diverse needs of the everything from plants to humans—and Earth as recorded in sediments and rocks scientists on board.

Bacteria. Bacteria and archaea live as beneath the seafloor. And IODP includes Before the cores are brought on deck, single cells with simple structures, and, subsurface microbiology in its mission. the seagoing scientists and IODP staff careeven with their microscopic size, make up The Resolution houses seven floors—nearly fully plan how to divide samples between at least one tenth of the weight of all life twelve thousand square feet—of laboratory researchers and projects. Once the core on Earth. Some scientists believe many of space equipped for research in microbiology, arrives at the surface, it “has to be inspected the harsh environmental conditions that geophysics, paleontology, and several other and measured,” Teske says. “How much of foster microbial growth, such as the it is actually sediment; how much is sediment found below the ocean water? Core recovery is sometimes Leg 201 Shipboard Scientific Party floor, might resemble conditions on not complete.” The cores are often early Earth—or perhaps another over-pressurized and in danger of planet. “These environments harbor exploding once they come to the extremely tough microorganisms that surface, so the IODP lab staff drill challenge our usual conception of little safety holes through the plastic where life can exist and under which core liner to let gases escape safely. In conditions,” says Teske, associate the meantime, the scientists stand by professor of marine sciences. And with their various tools and laborathese microbes are old. The microbial tory equipment, waiting to get their history of life on Earth accounts for precious core samples.

3.6 billion years. Animals have been Aboard the Resolution, one of Teske’s around for only 600 million years. jobs was to carefully inspect each core Archaea are similar to bacteria for seawater contamination. Whenin basic cell structure, but differ ever the crew harvested a core, he in numerous features of genome used a syringe to take samples from its cont ent , how t hei r gene s a re margin and center. Seawater contamiexpressed, and metabolism. “They nation could render a sample useless, are as different from bacteria as because scientists wouldn’t be able to from all eukaryotes, such as animals discriminate between organisms that and plants; they are a life form of live in the seawater and those that can their own,” Teske explains. Often survive deep in the sediment. called “extremophiles,” some archaea can live in habitats where most Naming names Onboard the Resolution, Teske samples halfother life would perish—shallow The information that comes out of cores from a Peru Basin core. pools nearly saturated with salt, the each sediment core is a molecular rim of a boiling-hot deep-ocean signature of what is growing in vent spewing sulfuric acid, or cold, the subsurface sediment. Typically, oxygen-depleted mud at the bottom scientists can use laboratory tests of the ocean. disciplines. Once the ship has reached the to identify and describe new bacterial and drill site, the Resolution can retrieve sediment archaeal species after isolating and growing Drilling for microbes from a depth of over five miles—just over them in pure cultures. Since many of the Teske’s team wants to identify the micro- nineteen Empire State Buildings stacked one subsurface extremophiles can’t grow at sea bial species that are alive and kicking deep on top of the other. level or in a lab, Teske and other scientists in the subsurface sediment. To do this, they Teske was on board the Resolution for rely on new tools to describe these species. first collect sediment cores from several feet Ocean Drilling Project Leg 201, during Teske’s team identifies organisms based on below the ocean floor during two-month- which scientists obtained cores from deep a molecule required for generating proteins long voyages aboard the JOIDES Resolution. below the subsurface at a site off the coast of in any cell—ribosomal RNA. It’s useful for (JOIDES stands for the Joint Oceanographic South America, known as the Peru Margin. classifying Archaea, Teske says, “and, in fact, Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling). The The cores represent a vertically stratified for the entire tree of life that encompasses

32 endeavors

Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes.” Ribosomal RNA is essential for life, but every species has a few unique RNA sequence changes. So scientists are able to isolate total RNA from sediment samples, make copies of what ribosomal RNA is present, and then sequence each molecule, matching the different sequences with their parent species.

Teske and collaborators have published a study that categorizes deep-subsurface archaea based on their RNA sequences. In the past, scientists have used DNA to identify families of organisms that reside in extreme environments.

But DNA can be present in fossilized form, long after individual cells or whole species have died off. Only living cells can generate RNA, and so examining it gives scientists a snapshot of what is alive and active deep in the sediment.

Teske’s group also collaborated with German scientists who studied archaeal lipids in the sediment cores. Lipid components of cellular membranes are made only by active cells, and differ between species— another tool for putting together a complete census of deep-sea microbial life.

Tiny cells with a big impact It’s good to know what’s living in the deep-sea sediments, but more useful to know what they do. While most life emits carbon dioxide as a waste product, some archaea in the subsurface emit methane instead. At the cold temperatures and extreme pressures where the subsurface microbes thrive, the methane remains solid and in the form of methane hydrate, says Mark Lever, a graduate student in Teske’s lab. But temperatures are rising across the globe. As the water near the bottom of the ocean begins to warm, the methane hydrate could effectively melt into its gaseous form, bubble up to the surface, and become part of the atmosphere.

Why should we care?

Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, absorbing twenty times more energy from infrared radiation (think heat) than carbon dioxide does. If the solid methane in the deep subsurface begins to enter the atmosphere, a dangerous feedback loop may begin: melting and release of methane leads to more warming of the deep oceans, which leads to even greater methane gas release.

Subsurface solid methane stores are far

greater than Earth’s known coal and natural gas reserves, and could threaten the global climate, Lever explains. Scientists such as Teske believe that studying the microbial biosphere below the ocean floor will add to our current understanding of climate cycling and change.

Teske and his students have traveled the world’s oceans and seas examining life at the extreme. He insists, however, that you don’t have to go far to find microbes living where nothing else can. “When traveling, look at new or seemingly familiar corners of the world with a microbiologist’s eyes. Visit a smelly salt marsh. Look at hot springs. Each of them is a microbiological universe.” e

Shipboard technicians measure and cut a fresh core. Once the core is cut, the science crew can begin detailed sampling.

Technicians sample sediment cores from the Peru Margin. Their gas masks protect against toxic hydrogen sulfide.

Jessica McCann is a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine at Carolina.

Andreas Teske is an associate professor in the Department of Marine Sciences. He and collaborators Kai-Uwe Hinrichs of the Max Planck Institute, and Chris House and Jean Brenchley from Penn State, published their work describing subsurface microorganisms in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Leg 201 Shipboard Scientific Party (all)

Crew members carry a fresh 9.5-meter core onto the catwalk, where it will be cut into 1.5-meter subcores.

endeavors 33

freeing a history what do we choose to remember about Carolina’s slaves?

by Colie Hoffman

T

Above, After 1865, Wilson Swain Caldwell got paid to do the same university jobs he had been doing as a slave. Photo courtesy of North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives. Below, Dilsey Craig’s stone is the only place in the old Chapel Hill cemetery where you’ll find the word “slave.” Photo by Jason Smith.

im McMillan was sitting in a dark room with his Intro to Black Studies students, watching the PBS series Africans in America for about the millionth time.

When Thomas Jefferson died in great debt, several of his slaves were sold to the University of Virginia, the narrator said. McMillan was struck. It was the first time he really heard that sentence.

“I’d never thought about universities as corporate entities, owning slaves,” he says.

If UVa owned slaves, did UNC? McMillan wanted to find out. So he consulted every source he could find: the UNC archives, the censuses of 1860 and 1870, popular histories of UNC and Chapel Hill, newspaper articles—even the Carolina graveyard. He never found records that the university owned slaves outright. But he did find an awful lot of slaves passing through university hands, working for the university, and being called “servants.”

Here’s how it worked. An employee of the university—for example, the steward—owned a certain number of slaves.

They would cook and clean for him and for the students. When the steward died or left the school, his replacement would own exactly the same number of slaves. Other times, when a slave-owner at UNC died without a will, the school sold the slaves.

Slaves owned by professors (and by students, who brought them from home) also did university work, which could include almost anything—hauling water, guiding hunting expeditions, or driving carriages (See “the hard facts,” next page).

Wilson Swain Caldwell It’s difficult to tell the stories of black people in UNC’s past, McMillan says, when the records that could lead us to them are sketchy, inaccurate, or missing altogether.

“You can only find out slaves’ names if they’re mentioned in other peripheral documents,” he says. “A couple black people we know well, because they were owned

34 endeavors

by presidents of the university.” So that’s where he started.

Joseph Caldwell was UNC’s first president. His monument stands in McCorkle Place near Silent Sam; he’s mentioned in every campus tour. But Wilson Swain Caldwell—a central figure in McMillan’s upcoming book on racial identity and representation at UNC—served the university, both as slave and paid employee, for most of his life. And his history has been largely forgotten, if it was ever told.

Joseph Caldwell owned Wilson’s father.

And David Swain, UNC’s second president, owned Wilson’s mother. But at birth Wilson Swain had neither of his parents’ names—he had his owner’s. Only after 1865, when Wilson was a free man, did he take his father’s last name. Wilson Swain Caldwell worked for the university as a gardener, a waiter, and an assistant in the chemistry lab, among other jobs. When the Civil War ended he got paid to do the same jobs he had been doing as a slave. His case isn’t unique, McMillan says, but we know about him because of his relationship with David Swain.

Wilson Caldwell received some education in the Swain household, and also taught himself. When the university closed during Reconstruction, he opened a “colored” school and taught there, and later he became one of the first black people elected to the Board of Aldermen. He owned twelve acres of land in what is now Carrboro, some of which is still owned by Caldwells who are his descendants.

“Everybody knows Hinton James.

Everybody knows Dean Smith,” McMillan says. But Wilson Caldwell? “There’s a monument to him, but no one knows about him.”

Wilson Caldwell’s memorial stands on his grave in the black part of the old Chapel Hill cemetery—still divided from the white part by a low stone wall. It’s a pillar, and looks like a smaller version of Joseph

Caldwell’s memorial in McCorkle Place.

That’s no coincidence—the marker now over Wilson’s grave was originally built for Joseph, but later alumni decided Joseph required a fancier one. So the class of 1891 moved it to the graveyard, and built the one for Joseph near Franklin Street.

Black women and families While it’s hard to find records about black men in UNC’s history, it’s even harder to find information about black women.

“They were the invisible of the invisible,” McMillan says.

To fill in the blanks, McMillan reads between the lines. He’s been checking the 1870 census, which lists occupations, against the 1860 census. “If somebody is black and a servant in a house, you can usually match them up with somebody who’s a slave in that same house ten years before.

You have to piece together what you can.”

Dilsey Craig, one of the few black women about whom McMillan has been able to find information, was a slave in Cornelia Phillips Spencer’s home. Craig is buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery, and her stone is the only place in the cemetery where you’ll find the word “slave.”

“The university, and southerners in general, liked to call slaves ‘servants,’ because it sounded better,” McMillan says. “But her memorial says, ‘60 years a slave—principally in the home of James Phillips.’ And I think that’s great. I think that’s the best memorial there could be. It says, ‘Okay. We owned slaves.’”

Fiction as fact Because historical documents rely on biased narrators, McMillan constantly consults multiple sources. He read a story about Wilson Caldwell in a Chapel Hill newspaper that contradicted information he’d studied in the North Carolina Collection. When he spread his net to fictional sources, he found that Caroline Hentz, wife of a UNC philosophy professor, wrote novels in which prominent black people in Chapel Hill were characters—Caldwell, Rosa Burgess, and George Moses Horton among them. “Lots of what showed up in later writing as fact were things that were in her novels,” McMillan says.

Rosa Burgess, for instance, is named “Venus” in one of Hentz’s novels. In later nonfiction writings by other authors,

she’s called Venus, not Rosa Burgess. And McMillan’s students regularly hand in papers for his class—based on “histories” they’ve read—saying that George Moses Horton was freed for being such an extraordinary person.

But that only happened in Hentz’s novel.

Horton had tried to buy his freedom numerous times, but was kept enslaved.

“The novel was one of these namby-pamby retellings where of course, because he was a ‘good’ black man, he got his reward. Well, he didn’t! And after the war he got out of Chapel Hill as fast as he could. It’s interesting that the iconography of him is exactly opposite of what he was,” McMillan says.

Using what you know While McMillan’s upcoming book covers nineteenth-century history, his cultural focus is on how we remember that century today. “What physical reminders of the past dominate the landscape? What interpretations do we put on these objects?” he asks.

The book will look at UNC’s relationship with slavery and explore the differences between memory and myth—what McMillan calls “the complex cycle of forgetting and remembering.” But he is adamant about not calling it a history.

“I’m never going to be able to say, ‘This is what most black people were doing in Chapel Hill.’ But I can say, ‘This is what Wilson Swain Caldwell was doing. He’s the person we know the most about. This is what we can say about George Moses Horton.’”

And what if we discover ugly things about the people and places we’ve revered?

Should we only honor people who never did anything wrong? No, McMillan says.

“I don’t think forgetting about it makes it all okay. I’m more of the school of thought that we should dig our history up and stare at it.” When the project’s done, McMillan hopes it will have a real-world effect. He wants people to think of UNC as a physical place to learn from, not just learn in. e Tim McMillan is an adjunct assistant professor of African and African American Studies.

Several times each semester, he leads a “Black and Blue” tour of campus, highlighting monuments and stories important to black history at Carolina. A virtual tour will soon be available online. University archivist Janis Holder provided information for this article.

the hard facts Slaves built Old East (in 1793) and also worked on Old West (1823) and Gerrard Hall (1837). In fact, slaves built or worked on every antebellum building on campus.

After the university opened in 1795, slaves cooked, cleaned buildings, and tended fires. In 1845, trustees forbade students to bring their own slaves to campus.

Trustee Thomas Ruffin, for whom Ruffin dorm is named, served on the North Carolina Supreme Court, where he wrote one of the most notorious decisions in the law of American slavery. In the case of State v. Mann (1829), he ruled that masters could not be prosecuted for mistreating slaves because “the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.”

Sexual abuse was common in slavery. Harriet, a slave of university trustee James Strudwick Smith, married a free man of color, but her white mistress’s brother Sidney forced the couple apart.

Later, Harriet gave birth to Sidney’s daughter, and then was abused by Sidney’s brother Francis.

George Moses Horton (1798– 1883), a slave in Chatham County, taught himself to read and write.

Horton was also a poet-for-hire: he penned love poems for university students to give to their sweethearts. He charged 25 cents for an average poem, 50 cents for a good poem, and 75 cents for a great poem.

In 2005, the university dedicated a memorial in McCorkle Place to the slaves and free people of color who built UNC. Called Unsung Founders, the piece features bronze figures supporting a round stone tablet.

To learn more, visit the Virtual Museum of University History (http://museum.unc.edu) and Slavery and the Making of the University (www.lib.unc.edu/mss/ exhibits/slavery/).

Sources: Virtual Museum of University History and Tim McMillan endeavors 35

A bath house at Thessaloniki from the first century BC. Twenty-five sitz-bathtubs encircle a central base, where a cauldron held hot water. Some bath houses had hot-water taps and heated floors. Photo by Monika Truemper.

Bathing beauties The Greeks had their share of good clean living.

By Margarite Nathe

36 endeavors

M

onika Truemper spent her summer on the sunny Greek isle of Delos—but not so she could soak up some rays.

She was there to clean the ancient latrines.

“It was sometimes disgusting,” she says.

The archaeologist scrubbed her way through some one hundred ancient Greek lavatories dating from the second century BC, clearing away plants and debris that had built up since the sites were first excavated decades ago.

As she examined the architecture of the structures, drew floor plans, and took photos, she found that the ancient Greeks weren’t exactly shy. Public privies on Delos could seat twenty to thirty people at once, all along a wooden bench situated over a deep drainage trench. Water was scarce, she says, but they sometimes used buckets of it to flush the toilets.

Other archaeologists dream of studying the spectacular ancient Greek sites, Truemper says—the grand temples and theatres. “I’m more interested in their daily life,” she says. Toilets and bath houses, for instance.

It was the ancient Greeks, Truemper says, who turned bathing into more than just a way to clean the grime off your feet and hands.

During the Hellenistic Period—around the third century BC—public and private bathing facilities began popping up all over the Greek world, even right next to rivers and the sea. The Greeks bathed mainly to clean themselves, Truemper says, and later for relaxation. But they also used the bath houses as remedies for ailments, as part of religious ceremonies, for massage, and sometimes for erotic encounters.

“Greek culture was obsessed with the body, especially with beautiful, young bodies,” Truemper says. “It was important to keep the body clean, to oil and perfume it, and to groom it.”

And while they were at it, they even rigged the bath houses so that they could wash in luxuriously warm water.

In hot water Some think that the Romans were the first culture to bathe for pleasure. And while the Romans did improve upon a lot of the Greeks’ inventions, Truemper says, “many of what we usually consider to be Roman features, such as bathing communally and for relaxation, were actually already present in Greek bathing culture. And then the Romans made it perfect.”

Before the third century BC, most bathers in the Greek world—which spread across southern Italy to Egypt to Turkey—used what is called a sitz-bathtub, Truemper says.

“They had to sit crouched and all they could do was shower themselves with either cold or hot water. This was not a very comfortable, relaxing bath. It’s more of a cleansing bath.”

But as early as the third century BC, Truemper says, people began experimenting with different bathing forms, “and they were relaxing. You had hot water tubs where you could actually take an immersion bath.

Some were individual, and some were communal, which means that you had a large pool that you could use with other people.

This was a completely new concept.”

It wasn’t long before the Greeks started to relish a bathing form still popular today—the sauna. “This was specifically communal because it was costly to run,” Truemper says. The largest of the saunas, which could fit thirty to forty people, were

in the gymnasia; these were for men only, which were made only in Athens in the and a highly exclusive privilege. sixth and fifth centuries BC, and show both The ancient Greeks—who never enjoyed men and women in different bathing situathe same abundance of water as the ancient tions. “Most of those images show fictional Romans did—used sophisticated rainscenes,” she says, “and cannot be taken as catching systems to channel as much fresh faithful depictions of reality.” water as possible into underground reserBut the best way to study ancient Greek voirs. Water supply, waste-water disposal, bathing culture is from the actual, physical and heating were the biggest challenges architectural remains, Truemper says. And of keeping the baths running, Truemper while there are more than enough of those says. There may have been periods during to go around, getting access to them is not which there was no water to spare, and so always as easy as it seems. the baths were shut down. When there was There are so many architectural remains plenty of rain, though, the ancient Greeks in Greece today that archaeologists can heated small amounts of water and mixed hardly keep up with the rate of excavation. it in with cold water to make hot baths. Bath building excavators, particularly in the They also developed pipe and tap systems as nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early as the sixth century BC in some cities. often never even published their excavaSome of the technical features, Truemper tions, and so the ruins are sometimes gone has found, were quite posh—for example, before researchers have time to examine by the third century BC, they were using them. “By the time I get there, it doesn’t heated bathtubs. exist anymore,” Truemper says. “It’s a park“They had a kind of double f loor,” ing lot.” she says. “There was a channel Monika Truemper underneat h t he bottom of t he bathtub, and outside the room was a furnace room. The heat of the fire was then directed into the channel under the bathtub. Or water could be heated in boilers over the fire and then led into the bathtub.”

Braziers filled with hot coals heated the saunas, and in more refined systems, wood fueled underfloor heating.

But we don’t know much about how the ancient Greeks managed to keep all that water clean.

Part of a gymnasium (second century BC, “There was no link yet between Sicily) that featured a sauna. Only young male hygiene and the transmission of disathletes were allowed to use the gymnasia for eases,” Truemper says. “They didn’t exercise. know that bacteria and viruses were transmitted in baths and latrines, and were For now, though, Truemper has plenty of responsible for illnesses. Even the Romans work to do. “I still have forty buildings or so had no idea.” Most likely, though, bathers to study,” she says. And she’s looking forward were required to wash their hands and feet to attending a conference in Netherlands in before slipping into communal pools. “Some 2007, pertaining exclusively to latrines in sources tell us that the water in Roman baths the ancient world. e was often dirty,” she says, so it may have been “In Delos,” she says, “latrines were astonthe same for the ancient Greeks. ishingly popular.”

Monika Truemper is an assistant professor Down the drain of classical archaeology in the College of Arts There are only three sources we have for and Sciences. She has received funding for her learning about the ancient Greek baths, research from the Alexander von Humboldt Truemper says. One is literary references, Foundation and from U NC’s University which are few and far between. Another is Research Council and Office of the Executive from images on a certain group of vases, Vice Chancellor and Provost. endeavors 37

“This picture gets me up in the morning,” says Carolina’s Bob Johnston, who is working on an HIV vaccine. “It was taken by Clive Gray, a colleague of mine in South Africa. It’s called ‘I Am the Future,’ and it says to me, ‘Hey, I deserve something out of life, too.’”

An Evil Disease T

HIV vaccines haven’t worked. Scientists don’t talk about curing AIDS. Can new approaches change the course of the epidemic?

by Mark Derewicz

38 endeavors

he young hemophiliac lay feverish in a UNC Hospital bed, his glands the size of baseballs. His body was deteriorating.

Tests for cancer were negative, and as he worsened, doctors suspected a new mysterious illness. Hematologists Harold Roberts and Gil White sent a lymph node to Robert Gallo, who was studying retroviruses. In that sample Gallo found the HTVL III virus, and, along with other scientists, including White, wrote the first paper about HIV/AIDS to appear in the journal Science.

Back home at UNC’s Center for Infectious Diseases, Myron Cohen watched that hemophiliac die—the first AIDS death at UNC. That was 1982. Within months the hospital’s thirty-bed AIDS ward was filled to capacity.

Many of Carolina’s hemophiliacs died before scientists learned in 1985 that heating blood products killed the virus.

“It was unbelievable,” Cohen says. “Our

nurses watched patients die every week.”

Scientists searched for a cure, and in 1984 the federal government vowed to have a vaccine ready for testing in two years.

Other scientists worked on treatments, and today there are more than twenty antiviral drugs that Cohen says have helped doctors turn HIV into a manageable disease. Still, forty thousand Americans are infected each year, and therapies, which many patients worldwide don’t have access to, are far from perfect.

So what happened to that vaccine? Why don’t scientists talk about curing AIDS anymore?

Playing with fire Scientists initially thought that they could quickly develop a vaccine because vaccines for polio, smallpox, and hepatitis B were so successful.

“But we didn’t take into account the unique nature of HIV,” says microbiologist Bob Johnston, who is developing an HIV vaccine at Carolina.

Unlike other viruses, HIV knocks out the body’s ability to produce an immune response. So the body doesn’t even recognize the virus as an intruder for weeks.

Also, as Cohen points out, the virus mutates when the body does recognize it.

“So think about this,” he says. “We put an antibody in front of it. The antibody kills a few particles in the swarm. But the virus replicates as quick as it can, throwing off mutants at a very high rate—higher than many other viruses. That’s a big advantage it has.”

Still, researchers tried to make a vaccine like the one for hepatitis B. They took a protein from the outer coating of the virus and genetically engineered the protein’s gene into cells, then grew the cells in culture and purified the protein from them. This worked for hepatitis but not for HIV. “The HIV protein induced immune responses,” Johnston says. But the neutralizing antibodies that could fight the virus weren’t activated. “So the vaccine didn’t stop the virus at all.”

Scientists also considered the Salk polio vaccine model, in which either heat or chemicals render the virus harmless. The body recognizes the vaccine and builds immunity. But Cohen says that scientists don’t completely understand how that virology works.

“Most of the vaccines for other diseases somehow mystically provide enough immunity so that you either never get infected or the infection is aborted so you never become ill,” Cohen says. “But we clearly don’t know how to do this for HIV.” An attenuated HIV vaccine modeled after the Sabin polio vaccine would also be too dangerous. The Sabin vaccine is made from live mutant viruses, but they’ve caused polio in rare cases. Since HIV mutates as a part of its natural behavior, that’s too risky.

“I’ve come to think of HIV as evil,” Johnston says. “I’m assigning it adjectives that a scientist probably shouldn’t assign to such an organism. But whatever we do, it seems to have already thought of a response—so far.”

Johnston and others are now concentrating on vectored vaccines—putting genes that provide immunization against HIV

“I’ve come to think of HIV as evil. I’m assigning it adjectives that a scientist probably shouldn’t assign to such an organism. But whatever we do, it seems to have already thought of a response—so far.”

—Bob Johnston

into a different benign virus. Once inside the body, the immune system recognizes the HIV protein that’s expressed by the vectored virus—the vaccine—and builds immunity.

“There’s some hope for vectors,” says Johnston, “but none have made it to phase three trials. In primates, these vaccines have induced an immune response to the disease but they fail to protect against infection. The primates have the virus but the viral load is low. Their immune response suppresses the replication of the virus enough so that they don’t have overt disease.” The animals, though, get sick when exposed to a slightly altered version of the virus.

Johnston is trying to get around these problems by making a vectored vaccine particle that looks like HIV so the body creates antibodies strong enough to fight off actual infection. The vaccine replication occurs in the cell’s cytoplasm through an RNA intermediate—not DNA like HIV—so the host cell is destroyed rather than being persistently infected.

“The virus will replicate like an acute infection with no persistence,” he says. “We think that will make it safe.”

For this work, Johnston received two

grants totaling $2.5 million from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which receives funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Johnston’s team also received a $5.2 million grant last fall from the National Institutes of Health for developing an adjuvant—an agent designed to turn on multiple cell signals so that the immune system response is stronger and triggered faster. In essence, Johnston says, the adjuvant boosts a vaccine’s intensity. So far, it has worked in mice that were exposed to the adjuvant plus flu vaccine. The grant funds primate trials.

The push for a successful vectored vaccine gained momentum after Science writer Jon Cohen wrote a book called Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine in 2001. Cohen wrote that we need a “March of Dollars” effort in vaccine research. Last year the Gates Foundation gave $287 million to vaccine research, and in 2005 the National Institutes of Health created the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), spearheaded by Barton Haynes at Duke. It’s a $300 million worldwide effort that includes Myron Cohen’s UNC team. He’s one of six CHAVI core leaders.

Susan Fiscus

The Kamuzu Central Hospital Labs in Lilongwe, Malawi, where researchers log data as part of UNC’s effort to process samples for HIV research.

endeavors 39

As part of CHAVI, Carolina clinicians and microbiologists led by Cohen, Joe Eron, and Susan Fiscus gather and process blood samples and mucosal secretions from people who had been infected just days before getting tested for HIV. Finding such people is a tedious task that involves an RNA test to detect acute infection, which the typical HIV antibody test can’t do. Then the UNC team tries to enroll patients in research studies in North Carolina and certain African countries so that other CHAVI scientists can determine how HIV is transmitted and how it evolves. For instance, Carolina virologist Ron Swanstrom is trying to figure out if sexually transmitted particles are randomly selected from a patient’s virus population or if these particles have special characteristics that allow them to be transmitted.

“If there are special properties of that virus envelope protein,” he says, “then we would want to know that the antibody response we’re generating in a vaccine works against those properties.”

So the clarion call for an HIV vaccine has gone out. But there’s no such trumpet blast for curing AIDS.

Latency means that HIV infects the cell but doesn’t kill or damage it. The virus just sits there as genetic information that persists for a long time.

Margolis says, “This is probably the major reason why we can’t eradicate HIV infection with current therapies, which only target active enzymes, not the genetic information of the virus.”

A latent cell’s chromatin—the stuff around which DNA is wrapped—is closed, he says.

That’s one reason why the virus’s genes are unexpressed. Margolis found that the natural enzyme histone deacetylase helps keep chromatin closed, but valproic acid curbs that enzyme’s production. So Margolis thought that if valproic acid could help open the chromatin, maybe the virus would be forced out of latency.

In a preliminary study, Margolis intensified drug therapy for four long-term HIV patients and then prescribed valproic acid.

All patients saw a decline in latency, and three of four saw a statistically significant reduction of latent infection. Next, Margolis gave valproic acid to six patients but didn’t boost therapy. Three of six patients showed a significant depletion of latent infection; one patient’s decline was not significant; and the other two saw no drop.

These are the first experiments to indicate that breaking latency is possible.

Margolis says, “We’ll try to do our job to figure out how to get the virus out of latency, and the rest of the field will continue to make better and more potent antiviral therapy.

Someday we’ll be able to put them together in a treatment, sort of like cancer therapy, to eradicate infection.

“We don’t imagine that this is ever going to be, ‘take a dose of penicillin and you’ll be fine.’”

Other problems will pop up, he says.

For instance, a 2006 study at Case Western Reserve University showed that a patient’s viral load is not the only factor in determining how HIV affects the immune system.

Viral load is measured in blood. But Margolis says that HIV is probably in tissue too, and we can’t measure that right now.

Because developing a cure will either never happen or take a very long time, Margolis and Cohen say, most scientists don’t want discussions about cures to give patients false hope.

Margolis also says that some scientists fear that people will take AIDS less seriously if researchers push the idea that curing AIDS is possible.

“Quite frankly, people already do that,” Margolis says. “In a lot of people’s Jason Smith minds, AIDS is already a problem that’s taken care of by medicine, or that happens in other countries to other people.”

But that mind-set doesn’t jibe with reality. For instance, medication doesn’t work for everyone, and about half of patients who’ve been on long-term medication have serious side effects such as nausea, dizziness, nerve pain, bone thinning, severe tissue loss, liver damage, and diabetes. Because of this, volunteers lined up quickly when Margolis wanted to study the effects of stopping medication. His findings show that HIV persisted and then replicated. Some patients had to go back on medication within two years because their immune systems could not control HIV.

Hope versus false hope In the late 1990s, highly active antiretroviral therapy worked so well that scientists thought that HIV could be completely eradicated from patients in a few years, essentially curing the disease. But then doctors found that the virus hides in reservoirs where it doesn’t express the genes that drugs target, making AIDS seemingly impossible to cure. Since then, very few journal articles have even mentioned the word cure, and most scientists don’t even talk about it, Cohen says.

“Because these researchers are powerful, vocal, and articulate, they kind of walled off the idea that a cure is possible,” Cohen says.

“Younger investigators have been afraid to touch the idea for fear of criticism, humiliation, and maybe even of being called stupid. To my knowledge there are no grants for Bottles full of natural substances line the walls curing AIDS. There are only grants at Carolina’s Natural Products Research Laborafor researching what’s called persistories. One of them holds birch tree bark, which tent latency.” contains betulinic acid—a potential curative David Margolis, also a CHAVI agent for HIV. researcher, has one of those grants.

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Reducing replication Margolis is the first to admit that patients desperately need less toxic therapy. K.H. Lee’s Natural

Products Research Laboratories here at Carolina may have found one—in the bark of a birch tree.

Lee’s team screens thousands of natural compounds to see if any hold curative ingredients. In the case of HIV, that means finding herbs that naturally disrupt virus replication. Lee found that the Taiwanese herb Syzigium claviflorum contains betulinic acid, which slightly hinders HIV replication.

Knowing that betulinic acid is plentiful in North American birch trees, Lee’s lab began a series of experiments to modify the betulinic acid’s chemical structure, in effect amplifying its natural tendency to suppress virus replication.

It worked. The medication blocks HIV’s ability to form its outer protein layer—the last stage of replication. This type of maturation disruption is a completely novel thing in HIV therapy. Currently, all HIV drugs except one stifle viral enzymes needed to complete DNA replication and make functional viral proteins. The other drug blocks HIV from fusing with the host target cell altogether. Because HIV mutates and builds resistance to these therapeutic approaches,

“We don’t imagine that this is ever going to be, ‘take a dose of penicillin and you’ll be fine.’”

—Peter Margolis Lee’s drug—bevirimat—could add another layer of defense while helping patients avoid severe side effects. It’s passed several trials and could be on the market in two or three years.

Lee says that better treatments are like vital pieces to a puzzle that’s far from complete. And there’s a chance it may never be fully solved.

Everyone would like one solution to AIDS, but Margolis says that’s not going to happen.

“There’s not one answer to cancer or heart disease or poverty,” he says. “So we need treatment, we need a vaccine, we need a cure, and we need prevention.”

And even if we eventually stop the epidemic, HIV won’t go away.

“All you need to cure syphilis is one dose of penicillin,” Margolis says. “And do we still have cases of syphilis? Yes we do.” e Bob Johnston is a professor of microbiology in the School of Medicine, director of the Carolina Vaccine Institute, and founder of Global Vaccines, a nonprofit company that aims to develop inexpensive vaccines for developing countries. Myron Cohen is J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and director of the Center for Infectious Diseases. Ron Swanstrom is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, and director of the Center for AIDS Research. David Margolis is a professor of medicine. K.H. Lee is Kenan Professor of medicinal chemistry in the School of Pharmacy and director of the Natural Products Research Laboratories.

Other UNC researchers who are part of CHAVI are Jeffrey Anderson, Michael Case, Shannon Galvin, Irving Hoffman, Melissa Kerkau, Ryan Kerr, Robert Krysiak, JoAnn Kuruc, Peter Leone, Sandi McCoy, Milloni Patel, Kristine Patterson, Chris Pilcher, Li-Hua Ping, Nobutoki Takamune, and Yuyang Tang.

Prevention would be best At least forty thousand Americans have been infected with HIV every year since 1998, and 50 percent of them are African Americans.

“Handing out condoms and advocating abstinence are really important things, but they haven’t solved the problem,” says Giselle Corbie-Smith, an associate professor of social medicine at UNC. “We need to think about something better.”

Risky individual behavior causes HIV to spread in any community, Corbie-Smith says, but behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum, especially in underserved minority communities. Poverty, high unemployment, disproportionate incarceration rates, drug abuse, lack of education and opportunities—all affect behavior.

So Corbie-Smith gathered activists, politicians, educators, police, public health officials, ministers, doctors, and others to address these issues in the black communities of Nash and Edgecombe counties.

Together, they drafted a grant proposal and

received $1.4 million for Project GRACE, whose goal is to generate prevention ideas and solutions.

The group will train local citizens who will collect and analyze needs, assets, and insights of community leaders. CorbieSmith could’ve hired interviewers from UNC, but that would’ve undermined the grant’s intention—create knowledge in the community and keep it there.

This has been the spirit of the project from the beginning, when Corbie-Smith called on Barbara Council and Melvin Muhammad of Tarboro’s Community Enrichment Organization for help just weeks before the grant application deadline.

“Within two days, they put together a forum with all these folks who had something to say,” Corbie-Smith says. “I had the typical academic presentation planned: handouts, everything regimented. Then Melvin said, ‘Listen, I think we need to go in a different direction.’”

Corbie-Smith trusted Muhammad, so she backed off and let him show a documentary about AIDS in African American communities.

“It really grabbed people,” she remembers. “It was magnificent. My presentation would’ve been fine, and people would’ve understood and signed on to help or not. But the immediacy of the problem—that’s what Melvin hammered home with that video.”

Everyone joined the project. And several people at that meeting helped write the proposal.

“We’re hoping that these kinds of individuals—with leadership training and support—will be the force that makes change happen,” Corbie-Smith says.

—Mark Derewicz Project GRACE (Growing, Reaching, Advocating for Change and Empowerment) is funded by the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. endeavors 41

Illustrations by Mary Jane Felgenhauer

the conflicted voter Do our votes square with our values? Not always.

by Mark Derewicz

A

re you liberal? Or conservative?

Are you sure?

Political scientist James Stimson pored over thousands of public opinion polls—decades’ worth—and discovered that each year about 22 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, even though they take a liberal view on nearly every domestic policy issue, and some major social ones. These voters—average Main 42 endeavors

Street Americans—believe that the government should spend more money on education, environmental protection, and health-care reform—each one a liberal view of governance. In 2004, that meant these citizens sided with nearly 80 percent of the American public. In fact, the majority of voters support most of the liberal views, even though Americans label themselves conservative by a two-to-one margin.

You might think that these voters actually consider themselves social conservatives who cherish hard work, strong family life, and patriotism. All of that’s true, but most of them also believe in gay rights and a woman’s right to choose, among other socially liberal views.

They’re economic liberals and social liberals, but they peg themselves as conservative.

“These folks are really conflicted,” Stimson says.

How come?

The power of language Stimson says that Americans’ preference for the word conservative over liberal dates back to FDR and the New Deal, when pollsters began asking people about their political leanings.

Knowing this, conservative politicians have linked conservatism to cherished ideals—which Stimson calls political symbols—such as patriotism, hard work, and family values. Voters relate to these things and associate themselves with politicians who do, too.

Meanwhile, an opposing force is at work.

Stimson says that the media, simply by covering the issues, constantly prod the government to do more to help people.

This influences voters to believe that the government should do more. The media, Stimson says, essentially promote changing the status quo—a liberal activist view. For instance, Stimson says, “Almost no one says that education is good enough, the government should do less. No one thinks that health care is good enough, the government should do less; the environment is fine, the government should do less.”

Because of this paradox, Stimson says, elections often come down to which candidate best controls the campaign conversation. If it’s a largely slogan-like conversation about ideals, Republicans generally fare better. If it’s a domestic policy discussion, Democrats generally have the upper hand.

Foreign policy issues present more complications because the politicians switch perspectives too often, he says. Yet rhetoric comes up big in these debates too. The Iraq debate, Stimson says, was all about ideals—patriotism, steadfastness, and decisiveness.

All of this may sound simplistic, Stimson says, but the conflicted swing voters at the heart of his research don’t really care about politics; they’re less involved and less knowledgeable than truly conservative or liberal voters. “Yet these folks vote in substantial numbers.”

And politicians know that.

Again, the code is aimed at the true-blue conservative Republicans, not the moderate Americans, who are by far the majority of the electorate and who cherish their families, Stimson says.

But many of them believe in gay rights, thus the need for code.

These voters don’t hear anti-gay rhetoric when a politician talks about family values, Stimson says. They hear Lake Wobegon.

Stimson says that Democratic candidates should turn rhetoric into a policy discussion. For instance, a candidate could respond to family values rhetoric by saying that he too believes in family values, and that a fundamental value is education. And then have a good plan for education reform.

Would that work?

Maybe, maybe not.

Out of touch electorate Stimson says that a huge portion of the electorate simply doesn’t pay close attention to policy issues, which may be why rhetorical symbols work so well and why so many Democratic politicians are now using phrases such as honest government and real security.

“Clearly the level of public knowledge is not remotely what democratic theory expects it to be,” Stimson says. “A very large number of people are going to polls without knowing the names of either candidate and are still pulling the lever.”

Stimson found that voters often don’t know where candidates stand on key issues. He used polling data from 2000 to isolate a group of religious conservatives who said abortion was their top issue. But just two weeks before the presidential election, only 44 percent of these voters knew that Al Gore was pro-choice.

Fifty-six percent either got the question wrong or didn’t answer it. “And these are religious conservative voters,” Stimson says.

“We always overemphasize how much people care.”

Sadly, these results suggest that Stimson’s research is more about indicting a huge swath of the American electorate, not a particular political strategy. And this doesn’t include the majority of Americans—the ones who don’t even vote.

“We get the sense from the media that people are all worked up out there, and that’s just not true,” Stimson says. “The electorate is pretty much tuned out.” e James Stimson is Raymond Dawson Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for his research entitled The Liberalism of Professed Conservatism in America and is currently writing a book on his findings.

Code Red Family values is one of the most famous examples of politicians appropriating a popular social ideal. Republican leadership introduced the catch phrase at their 1992 national convention.

But that event, Stimson says, was filled with anti-gay rights rhetoric, not speeches about education, the divorce rate, or raising a family based on ethics and virtues.

“It’s well known in the political science field that family values is code for anti-gay rights,” Stimson says. “They have focus groups for all of this.” endeavors 43

Kenneth Sexton

smog

under glass

In this rooftop greenhouse, the air could be L.A. or New York.

by Colie Hoffman 44 endeavors

Kenneth Sexton

O

n rooftops in cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York, you’ll find places to relax: pools, bars and restaurants, patios. On the rooftop of UNC’s School of Public Health, you’ll find a smog chamber full of the air those city folks are breathing. Or something like it.

The smog chamber is a giant structure made of Teflon film that looks similar to a greenhouse. In a lab just underneath it, the One Atmosphere Research Team—Ilona Jaspers, Ken Sexton, and Harvey Jeffries, along with several graduate students—have been cooking up what they call a “synurban mix.”

Usually scientists study one atmospheric substance at a time—ozone, for instance. But this is limited in scope. The mix, on the other hand, imitates the average composition of the smog in America’s forty largest cities.

And that’s what we’re really inhaling.

“You study ozone by itself, and you get the effects of ozone,” Jeffries says. “But in the real world, ozone is a soup of all kinds of organic material—aldehydes, radicals.”

That material makes a big difference to our lungs, especially after it’s been in the air for a few hours, reacting with other toxins, particles, gases, and sunlight. In a short time, the original toxins can change into different toxins and compounds. “People are regulating the parent compound, the precursor,” Sexton says. “But they’re not regulating the secondary compound.”

“Congress wants to simplify the problem,” Jeffries says. “They say, ‘We want to make a law on air toxins. What’s an air toxin?’ So they just add items to a list. But it turns out lots of stuff on the list turns into even more hazardous air toxins. One that wasn’t on the list can become one that is, through a transformation. Some air toxins on the list even transform into non-toxins.”

lungs—no surprise there. “But daily exposure to it in the urban air is more complex than what comes directly out of the tailpipe,” Jaspers says. So far, the preliminary data show that diesel responds to sunlight, making it more toxic after a few hours outside the car.

The team is also aging the exhaust, simulating what happens to it when it mixes with urban smog. The results aren’t pretty: diesel aged in smog is about twice as inflammatory as fresh exhaust, Jaspers says.

Sending out papers and applying for grants has been an uphill battle because of the combination of chemistry (Jeffries and Sexton) and toxicology (Jaspers). “You have to have a reviewer who knows both,” Jaspers says. “And you don’t usually find that in one person.” But One Atmosphere’s graduate students start their research careers well-

versed in both areas. “People ask, ‘Are you a chemist, or a toxicologist?’” says Melanie Doyle, who worked extensively with the project as a graduate student. “And I say ‘Neither. I’m both.’” e Harvey Jeffries is a professor of environmental sciences and engineering in the School of Public Health. Ilona Jaspers is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Jeffries and Jaspers are principal investigators for the One Atmosphere Research Program. Ken Sexton is a research associate in the School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. Melanie Doyle graduated in summer 2006 with a doctorate in environmental sciences and engineering. One Atmosphere receives funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Kenneth Sexton

S

o how does the team figure out what’s toxic? While Sexton and Jeffries determine the composition of the air samples, Jaspers grows human lung cells in incubators. Then they expose the cells to the air, and see whether and how much they’re inflamed. This strategy helps the team determine which air components the government should regulate. And then they tell the Environmental Protection Agency.

These days the team has turned its attention to the effects of vehicle emissions on lung cells, comparing exhaust from diesel and gasoline engines. Diesel is toxic to the

Facing page, top, the One Atmosphere Team’s smog chamber is on the roof of McGavran-Greenberg Hall. Facing page, bottom, tubes in the chamber floor go through McGavran-Greenberg’s roof and into the team’s lab. This page, the smog chamber under construction in April, 2004.

endeavors 45

in print Sticker Nation: The Big Book of Subversive Stickers, Volume One. By Srini Kumar. The Disinformation Company Ltd., 61 pages, $14.95.

S

tamp out hunger. God is other people. We are connected.

These are memes.

Curb your hypocrisy. We shall overcome. Angst is lame.

Memes are ideas that are transmitted by repetition.

Smash patriarchy. Understand the homeless.

Abandon anger.

And if these ideas strike the right chord…

Follow your heart. Feel the oneness. Start today. They can kick-start creativity and change the world—at least someone’s world.

That’s the hope of Srini Kumar, an affable Carolina MBA student, entrepreneur, and former punk rocker who’s been putting ideas on stickers and selling them at www. stickernation.com since 1994. He’s also the author of Sticker Nation, a new book of peel-off stickers and somewhat philosophical explanations.

The sticker: Cynics go to hell. Kumar’s explanation: The poison of cynicism is an anesthetic. There are always alternatives and oblique strategies.

Kumar sold more than fifteen thousand copies in three months, landing Sticker Nation at number nine on the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestsellers list in July 2006.

The book was also a featured prop in the new NBC drama Kidnapped last fall.

46 endeavors

Being Hip is Not Enough “And I haven’t even been trying to market it yet,” he says, laughing. “I’ve been in grad school.”

Kumar published Sticker Nation in the name of fun. But many of his stickers are quite serious, or should be considered so if readers dare to be smart and go beyond slogans.

He believes that memes work like genes.

“Ideas can spread as if they have a biological process, leaping through minds and media like a gene in an ecosystem,” he says.

Kumar fell in love with stickers as a teenage musician when he realized that a good sticker was like a Ramones song—to the point and catchy. Then, while his sticker design company was just getting off the ground, he watched the Got milk? meme rescue milk sales from a twenty-year slump.

He figured that deeper memes transmitted via stickers might trigger meaningful conversation, and even mutate or create change.

“A sticker book ideally gets used up, and then those stickers start seeping into your mental world and maybe even affecting your behavior and attitude,” he says. “These are the kinds of things that I believe activists ought to be thinking more about—not just feeling good about holding a sign at a protest, but actually shaping attitudes.”

He says that advertisers, mass media, and politicians don’t hesitate to shape attitudes.

Why should the rest of us? Especially the creative class.

“We’re not working hard enough,” he says of artists, including himself. “We’re maybe too elitist or just not thinking about how art and grassroots communication can shape people’s attitudes. Stickers are a way to cut through that because everyone likes them even if they’re totally insane.” Admit that Goth is ridiculous. I am the best artist.

Kumar wants his book to inspire young adults to declare independence from mass media while using art not apathy to reboot America. That’s why his stickers plead for people to ask questions frequently, defeat boredom, incite cooperation, accelerate the positive, discover the earth, and pledge allegiance to the entire world.

Kumar says, “Most good art and music just up the level of general intensity in the mind and push you a little closer to saying, ‘Hey, I want to do my thing now.’ Promoting my own ideas doesn’t matter as much to me as inspiring teenagers to do something with their creativity instead of just tabling it.” ­­­—Mark Derewicz Srini Kumar is a second-year MBA student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. Visitors to www.stickernation.com can create their own stickers or buy Kumar’s creations.

Sputnik Generation

Courtesy of A. A. Konstantinov

Spring 1965: An eighth-grade class photo of some of Donald Raleigh’s Russian interviewees. “I’m exactly the same age as this group,” Raleigh says. “We have children the same age, parents getting sick, empty nests—all of these have to do with age as much as where we grew up.”

Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives. By Donald J. Raleigh. Indiana University Press, 299 pages, $22.95.

A

s a kid, Donald Raleigh knew that America was the biggest, strongest country in the world. He almost didn’t believe My First Book of Countries when it showed him the Soviet Union sprawling over the globe, vast and sinister. Then the air raid drills began in his elementary school in Chicago in the 1950s. “At church, we prayed for the conversion of the atheist communists,” he says. “I logged hundreds of hours on my knees.”

And when the Soviet Union’s Sputnik— the world’s first artificial satellite—surged into space in 1957, “it electrified the world,” Raleigh says. American education felt the jolt, and suddenly science and physical fitness were the big subjects in school. “Don’t eat candy!” Raleigh’s German gym teacher had growled as she snatched a piece away from him. “Eat bread, like the Russians!”

Rumors of the Russians’ advanced educational system rippled through the country.

They’re beating us, Americans thought.

Russian and East European study centers sprang up at universities all over the United States.

“What’s ironic is that Russians were then

studying our educational system and concluding that ours was better,” Raleigh says.

From Sputnik to Dr. Strangelove Fascination with and fear of the Soviet other—“these people who wished us harm,” Raleigh says—occupied a vital place in his childhood. “I was very much a product of Sputnik, and the Cold War, and Dr. Strangelove’s America.” As an undergraduate in 1971, Raleigh was in one of the first groups to study abroad for a full semester in the Soviet Union. And he saw something that his American education, which cast the Soviet Union only in terms of communism and ideology, had left out. endeavors 47

Courtesy of A. A. Konstantinov

Locals stared as Alexander Konstantinov brazenly danced the Twist with his future wife in Briansk, Russia. The Russian government had outlawed the dance, along with other such symbols of Western decadence. Photo taken in 1966.

“We didn’t realize that we had been on the verge of war. I, for one, didn’t know.”

—Alexander Konstantinov

Saratov was a closed city until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. When Raleigh asked his interviewees about their childhoods, they all said they had been happy. “They liked Americans; they were fascinated by Americans,” Raleigh says. Below, Saratovian students line up for the last school assembly before graduation in 1967.

Courtesy of V. N. Kirsanov

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“These were people just living ordinary lives,” he says.

For Raleigh’s newest book, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives, he interviewed thirty graduates of a school in the provincial Russian town of Saratov. Russia’s Sputnik Generation consists of eight interviews with men and women who had been children on the other side of the map, hardly the faceless enemies Raleigh had imagined.

The Saratov group is from the first generation conceived during a relatively peaceful time in the Soviet Union after World War II. “Between World War I and 1945, it was cataclysm after cataclysm after cataclysm,” Raleigh says. World War I, revolution, civil war, famine, Stalin’s revolution, collectivization, industrialization, the Purges, World War II, more famine. “And then—forty years of peaceful, evolutionary, organic change,” he says.

Published first-hand accounts of everyday Russian folks are hard to come by, Raleigh says. “We have no idea about people growing up in these provincial towns or what their attitudes were.” What accounts do exist were generally written by dissidents, and don’t reflect the lives of ordinary Russians. These Saratovians’ stories, Raleigh says, “give human expression to otherwise remote historical developments.”

In chatting with the former students about their youth, it didn’t sound all that different from Raleigh’s own teen years. For example, every one of the interviewees mentioned the Beatles. But there were some differences.

Almost all the students admitted to drinking in the staticky BBC’s Voice of America from their radios. Some of the techier students used converted phonographs to press recordings of banned Western rock ‘n’ roll songs onto used X-rays, which were cheap on the black market. Kids sat around together straining to make out the words to the song “Michelle.”

“Is it saying ‘we shall’?” they asked each other.

Another difference between his own classmates and the group from Saratov, Raleigh says, is that most of the Russians weren’t frightened by the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. It simply wasn’t a dominating memory during their childhood, they said. Some mentioned that they felt a little anxious about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but even then, Raleigh says, their view of events was a watered-down version that came from the Soviet government.

“We didn’t realize that we had been on the verge of war,” one interviewee said. “I, for one, didn’t know.”

Liquid history “Memory was dangerous in the Soviet Union,” Raleigh says. “Ideology had replaced it.” Unsavory historical figures were airbrushed out of photographs and clipped from encyclopedias. History became fluid as people went in and out of favor. “There was an official national text, and Stalin himself had edited it—The Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” After Stalin died and Khrushchev publicly denounced him, the canon was redone for the first time—the past reconstructed on the printed page.

“I believe there are alternative histories to the official history, which are passed down orally in families,” Raleigh says. “Russia’s Sputnik Generation is about how people remember the past, and our memory is very malleable.

Simply put, people tell their stories in different ways throughout their lives. This book is not only about specific events but also what they mean to Russia’s Sputnik generation today.”

—Margarite Nathe Donald Raleigh is Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. Russia’s Sputnik Generation is part of a larger book project entitled Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of the Class of ’67, which will include interviews from alumni of schools in Saratov and Moscow.

endview Stephanie Preston

I

n Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a young woman collects goat’s milk for cheese.

She belongs to a family of more than twenty, including three generations of extended family.

“They were very traditional, especially when it came to gender roles,” says Stephanie Preston, who was taking pictures in the valley for a newspaper story (See “Bombs over Beirut,” page 7). “Their homes were large, comfortable tents, where the men would sit while being served by the women. And then the women and children would wait outside to eat the leftovers. The women did most of the work making the cheese, cooking, and cleaning, and the men’s roles seemed to be herding and preparing the meat.

“In celebration of us being their guests, they killed a lamb, which they regard as a holy animal. They served it first raw to the men and some of the female guests—I was the only girl curious enough to try it—and then cooked the rest for dinner. This was by far my favorite story that I got to cover.”

endeavors 49

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endeavors

Page 28: Valerie Ashby knows that with the

Page 19: Many of America’s dams, closing in

Page 22: Ali Neff packed her stuff into a van

right chemistry, polymers can stretch and stay strong. The same works for people, her students say. Photo by Jason Smith.

on their geriatric years, are dangerously unstable.

Do we tear them down, or let the rivers destroy them? Photo courtesy of Restoration Systems.

and moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to find the blues. She found hip-hop instead. Photo by Tim Gordon.

50 endeavors