Johns Hopkins Magazine by The Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins Fa l l

MA GA Z I N E

2010

IN PURSUIT OF

HAPPINESS Where Pleasure Lives in the Brain What Makes Homo economicus Happy? Emotional Resilience in Medicine

Plus, “happy” thoughts from Farai Chideya, Stephen Dixon, Barbara Ehrenreich, Benjamin Ginsberg, Bill McKibben, and P.J. O’Rourke

Johns Hopkins FA L L

2010

v o l. 62 n o. 3

MAGAZINE

Features

SPECIAL ISSUE: In Pursuit of Happiness

Pleasure on the Brain By Michael Anft Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden explains why we seek pleasure, where we find it, and how it can steer us away from true contentment.

More Money, Less Mirth By Dale Keiger Economist Carol Graham, SAIS ’86, tries to fathom the sometimes paradoxical relationship between prosperity and happiness.

Keeping On By Deborah Rudacille How do you stay compassionate, energized, and optimistic when it’s your job to treat some of medicine’s toughest cases?

What Makes YOU Happy? We asked you, our readers, what makes you happy. And you told us: Children. Puppies. Mozart. Inner peace. Adam Sandler?

Essays 35 36 37 44

Happy Now? by Barbara Ehrenreich Happy Together, by Bill McKibben Happiness in Maine, by Stephen Dixon Happy Face, Glad Hand, by Benjamin Ginsberg and Alexander Ginsberg

Our Declaration of Happiness, by P.J. O’Rourke

The Happy Adventurer, by Farai Chideya

Cover Illustration by Noah Woods Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 1

Departments 3

Contributors: Is Everybody Happy?

The Big Question: Can Democrats and Republicans Agree?

The Big Picture: Gilman’s New Light

Editor’s Note: Happiness Is . . .

Letters: Unworthy Matters

Essay: Star, Lite

Golomb’s Gambits: Specialty Endings

Wholly Hopkins: Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins 16 Paleonutrition: Crocs, hippos, and the brain’s evolution 17 Space: Did asteroids bring water and life to Earth? 18 Business: First Global MBA class hits town 20 University: New at the top

21 Books: Henry and Bernard and Stanley

22 Education: Advancing autism education, near and far

24 Arts and Sciences: Quantifying literature

25 Medicine: What killed Bolívar?

26 Music: Still solvent after all these years

Alumni News & Notes

Golomb’s Solutions

How To: Find Serenity

2 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

C o n t r i b u to r s Vol. 62 No. 3 Fall 2010

Editor: Catherine Pierre Associate Editor: Dale Keiger Senior Writer: Michael Anft Art Director: Shaul Tsemach Designer: Pamela Li Alumni News & Notes: Lisa Belman, Nora Koch, and Kirsten Lavin Business Manager: Dianne MacLeod

Johns Hopkins Magazine (publication number 276-260; ISSN 0021-7255) is published four times a year (Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer) by The Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Produced in cooperation with University Magazine Group. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland, and additional entry offices. Address correspondence to Johns Hopkins Magazine, Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Via e-mail: jhmagazine@jhu.edu. Web site: magazine.jhu.edu Telephone: 443-287-9900 Subscriptions: $20 yearly, $25 foreign Diverse views are presented and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the university. Advertisers: Representative for advertising: Alter Communications; Kristen Cooper, Sales and Marketing Director; 410-468-2700; jhu@alteryourview.com POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Johns Hopkins Magazine, 201 N. Charles St., Suite 2500, Baltimore, MD 21201. Copyright ©2009, The Johns Hopkins University.

Is Everybody Happy? The author of four books, including The Color of Our Future and the novel Kiss the Sky, Farai Chideya (“The Happy Adventurer”) is best known for her on-air work for ABC, CNN, and NPR. Her pilot project, Pop and Politics Radio, will debut nationally this fall. She is an alumna of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

Stephen Dixon taught at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars from 1980 to 2007. He recently released his 28th book of fiction, What is All This? (Fantagraphics Press). His contribution to this issue, “Happiness in Maine,” is part of His Wife Leaves Him, a work in progress that he has been crafting for the past four years.

Known for her many examinations of working-class life, and 37 the short shrift lower-level laborers too often receive, Barbara Ehrenreich (“Happy Now?”) is the author, most recently, of Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Holt). She is also the author of 10 earlier books, including Nickel and Dimed, written in 2000 and nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the coauthor of five. 35

Benjamin Ginsberg (“Happy Face, Glad Hand”), a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty since 1992, is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science in the Krieger School. The author or editor of 20 books, Ginsberg most recently published Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction ( Johns Hopkins University Press). His son and co-author of the essay in this issue, Alexander Ginsberg, is a Washington 44 attorney and a former congressional and White House staffer. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, Bill McKibben (“Happy Together”) is a journalist, environmentalist, and author of 13 books, including his latest, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books), and co-author of several more. He is also the founder of 350.org, a global climate campaign.

P.J. O’Rourke, A&S ’70 (MA), has been wickedly sending up American politicians since the 1970s, when he served as editor of The National Lampoon. These days, he writes as a correspondent for The Atlantic, serves as a panelist on the NPR game show Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me! and is a research fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. His essay in this issue, “Our Declaration of Happiness,” is adapted from his soon-to-be-released book, Don’t Vote— 54 It Just Encourages the Bastards (Grove/Atlantic). A veteran science and medicine writer, Deborah Rudacille, A&S ’98 (MA) (“Keeping On”), is news editor for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative in New York. She is also the author of several books including, most recently, Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town (Pantheon). —Michael Anft

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 3

The Big Question

Q: A:

Can Democrats and Republicans agree on anything?

“There are a lot of things we can agree

on.We can start by facing reality: Government can’t solve all of our problems, but we have to admit that it can play a role in the solution. For example, it used to not be as big a deal to extend unemployment benefits in hard times. Now, because of demagoguery and political posturing, it takes too much arm wrestling to do what should be a simple thing. I think we can agree that it has to stop. “I also think we can agree that the quality of our political discourse has deteriorated to a pathetic degree. What we have now is constant hyperbole, fear mongering, and YouTube ‘gotcha’ moments. We’re in an age when access to information is such that I can go for years never reading a word I disagree with. We’re all guilty of spending so much time reading only what we agree with, that when we’re confronted with things we disagree with, we freak out. If we can’t pull back from that and begin to think more critically, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. “Finally, we need to return to an era—if one ever existed—when we trusted each other’s motives and intentions. We need to get to the point where we can debate intellectually on policy rather than making personal attacks and questioning people’s patriotism. I think we can agree on that.”

MI KE CIESI ELSKI

Daniel Hochman, a senior political science major, is president of the College Democrats at Johns Hopkins.

4 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

“As an eternal optimist, I believe there are myriad issues Republicans and Democrats can and should agree on. Despite the efforts of demagogues, mudslingers, and pugnacious groups, our leaders have fought for and preserved many American freedoms. (Recent examples include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s support of a proposed Manhattan mosque and the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of the Second Amendment in McDonald v. Chicago.) Now more than ever, we face a turbulent road ahead, against international, social, and especially financial pressures, for which our government needs true leadership by those capable of discarding partisanship for progress. Both sides of the aisle can agree that our country is in desperate need of health care, insurance, immigration, tax, and other reforms. “In my home state of New Jersey (notorious for Democratic partisanship), recently elected Republican Governor Chis Christie has accomplished a multitude of significant reforms by working with the largely Democratic (and traditionally inept) legislature. The governor’s bipartisan success in curbing the state’s multibillion-dollar deficit is analogous to the nation’s need to surmount its financial woes. I think we can agree that the government needs strong leaders who are willing to make difficult (and often unpopular) decisions, rather than weak individuals who pass today’s problems on to tomorrow.”

Michael Riecken, a senior Near Eastern studies major, is president of the College Republicans at Johns Hopkins.

—Interviews by Catherine Pierre

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 5

J AY VA N R E N S S E L A E R

T h e B i g P i c t u re

6 Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Fall 2010

Gilman's New Light The original Gilman Hall opened its doors in 1915. The new Gilman opened in July after a three-year, $73 million renovation. All 10 of the Krieger School’s humanities departments now are under one roof, occupying sleek new offices with heating and air conditioning that actually works. From the quad, the exterior and trademark clock tower look the same, albeit spiffed up, but the interior received quite the makeover. Most arresting is Gilman’s new atrium, pictured here, with a huge skylight and a suspended sculpture by Kendall Buster, called Vessel Field. The shapes were inspired by items in the university’s archaeological collection, which will be displayed in a new museum beneath the courtyard. Let the pedagogy resume. —Dale Keiger

E d i to r ’s N o te

Happiness Is...

orking on a special issue that allows you to learn about a single subject—in this case, happiness— in its many forms and functions . . . Asking readers to write in and tell you what makes them happy, hoping to get maybe a handful of letters, and getting so many responses you can’t fit them all in the print edition . . . Having those responses be thoughtful and funny and earnest and truly insightful about what brings contentment . . . Asking a wish list of big-name authors—Farai Chideya, Stephen Dixon, Barbara Ehrenreich, Benjamin Ginsberg, Bill McKibben, P.J. O’Rourke—to contribute an essay about happiness and having them all say yes. I’ve spent the past few months doing quite a bit of reading and thinking about happiness as background for this issue, and one thing I’ve learned is that, as a society, we spend a lot of time talking about it. (As the mother of a 1-year-old, I’ve been especially interested in the flood of surveys conducted and essays written about how miserable parents are. So far at least, I disagree.) I’ve also learned that the inherited bits of wisdom, and even most of the clichés, about how to be a happy person make for pretty good advice: Simplify. Be grateful for what you have. Spend time with the people you love. Do something you’re good at. Learn something. Take care of your body and mind. Help others.

As we were planning this issue, we decided to leave the “how to find happiness” material to other publications. Instead we’d pose some probing, intellectual questions to Johns Hopkins researchers. What’s funny is that, in their way, our experts all circled back to that same advice. Neuroscientist David Linden tells us that the evolutionary drive that makes our brains respond positively to food and sex also makes us feel good about meditating, learning, and volunteering (“Pleasure on the Brain,” by Michael Anft, p. 30). Happiness economist Carol Graham, SAIS ’86, explains that money, beyond what you need for the basics, really doesn’t make us happy, though consistency does (“More Money, Less Mirth,” by Dale Keiger, p. 38). And several Hopkins health care providers teach us that dealing with tragedy day in and day out is managed by focusing on the positive impact you have on people (“Keeping On,” by Deborah Rudacille, p. 46). It seems that happiness, though sometimes elusive, isn’t that much of a mystery—and that there’s truth to that biggest cliché of all: It’s the little things. My mood really did soar when readers’ “What Makes You Happy?” letters and e-mails started rolling in (p. 52). And statistics be damned, I am definitely happier because I got to play in the surf with my daughter for the first time this summer.

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L e t te r s Unworthy Matters Unworthy and superficial It is a pity that “The Big Question” [“Will the Gulf of Mexico Recover from This Spring’s Massive Oil Spill?” Summer] did not take advantage of the opportunity to interview an expert at greater length about an important issue. I hope the magazine was not trying to trivialize one of the greatest ecological accidents in our history, one whose consequences affect millions of people and cost billions of dollars. “With such a massive release, there will be substantial harm to the ecosystem. . . . But once the source has been stopped, most of the acute damage will no longer be present within six months to a year.” The interviewer needed to explore this in much greater depth. Dr. Bouwer’s research interest concerns how microbes transform contaminants in soil and water, and he thinks microorganisms will clean up the oil spill quickly. Microorganisms exist that can biodegrade oil, since it is a naturally occurring substance. But what about the chemical dispersants that BP has introduced into the Gulf of Mexico? And the oil leak may kill a substantial fraction of the aquatic life (fish and shellfish) in the Gulf. That’s an acute effect. Aren’t they part of the ecosystem? Does Dr. Bouwer think those populations will recover in six months to a year? And this does not even get into the impact of the oil spill on the ecology of coastal areas and wetlands of the states that border the Gulf. Surely Dr. Bouwer understands these issues. It would have been very interesting to your readers to have more detail on his opinions about them. A superficial article like this one is unworthy of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Matthew Lybanon Memphis, Tennessee A serious addiction I was extremely disappointed to read the disparaging comments by anonymous professor “Guido Veloce” about sexual addiction [“The Opposite of Sex,” Summer]. This piece was accompanied by a lurid cartoon depicting a sex addict as a slovenly unshaven individual, staring

at his computer with breasts in place of his eyes. I am shocked that Johns Hopkins Magazine would publish any piece that denigrates a group of individuals seeking treatment for behaviors that are negatively impacting their lives. As a Hopkins faculty member who has suffered from sexual addiction or compulsivity for at least 17 years, I can assure Professor Veloce that whether or not sexual addiction has yet earned its place as a designated disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, sexual addiction represents an understudied affliction that, like alcoholism and other substance abuse disorders, continues to destroy the lives of thousands of individuals and their families. Compulsive sexual behavior has exploded in response to the increasing availability of pornography on the Internet. Forty-one percent of corporate employees reprimanded for abusing computer privileges at work were using pornography. One author noted that “upwards of two and a half hours per day may be spent engaging in [online sexual activity]” by workers during business hours. Professor Veloce might be interested to learn that Johns Hopkins has been a leader in the treatment of disorders of compulsive sexual behavior through its Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit and the Center for Sexual Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The staff members at the Hopkins Faculty and Staff Assistance Program have assured me that my problems with sexual addiction are by no means unique in the Hopkins community. Professor Veloce disparages 12-step approaches to the treatment of sexual addiction. In fact, four 12-step fellowships focus on the recovery of people with sex addiction: Sexaholics Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Sexual Compulsives Anonymous. Several fellowships also help the spouses and partners of sex addicts (S-Anon, COSA). SA has saved my marriage, career, and indeed my life. I know several fellows in the Hopkins community who are similarly benefiting from programs of recovery offered by S-fellowships.

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Remembering Reds The article concerning M. Gordon Wolman [Wholly Hopkins, “In Memoriam,” Summer] was excellent. In earlier days, I had the good fortune of knowing “Reds” when he was an undergraduate at JHU. We were teammates on the lacrosse team. In 1949, he was our team captain. He was an outstanding playmaker and leader of our championship team. To know “Reds” was to like him. James F. Adams, A&S ’50 Charlottesville, Virginia Neither lapsed nor fallen As someone who has written in the area of Catholic religious studies for many years, I thought it unfortunate that in explaining the Anabaptist movement for readers of his excellent article on the work of Dr. Richard Kelley with Mennonite and Amish children [“The Disease Chaser,” Summer], Michael Anft referred to the Anabaptist religious leader Menno Simons as “a lapsed Catholic priest.” Why not say Simons was a “former” Catholic priest? Catholics in the past, and less often now, refer to former Catholics as people who have “lapsed,” or as “fallen away Catholics,” or people who have “lost their faith.” Those never Catholic are sometimes referred to as “non-Catholics.” This gives the word “Catholic” a weight and significance it should not possess

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Sex may remain a titillating subject. Professor Veloce may chuckle at the very serious problems of celebrities who have brought this subject into the forum of newspapers and gossip columns. I believe that Johns Hopkins Magazine would better serve the Hopkins and alumni community by publishing a serious discussion of this and other compulsive behavioral disorders which no doubt plague many of your readers, as well as the various treatment modalities which are available to help them and their families. I regret that the stigma associated with sexual addiction in our society requires that I send this letter anonymously. A Hopkins Professor Baltimore, Maryland

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amid the many ways men and women can exercise their beliefs. I seldom see any writer describe someone as a lapsed Methodist minister for example. In the case of Menno Simons, he did not lapse, he did not lose his faith, he found his faith in the Anabaptist movement. Judith Church Tydings Ijamsville, Maryland Bees, death, and taxes I must have missed something. What do bees tell us about climate change [“The Buzz,” Summer]? This implies global warming, but my reading suggests global cooling. Given that bees are doing well in the Southwest and not in the Northeast suggests that one should not keep trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. Grow the bees in the Southwest and help along other pollinators here in Maryland. One thing that typically gets missed in a discussion like this is the effect of taxation. The “death tax” kills the family farm. Many of Maryland’s family farms used to keep live hives, but the “death tax” has made that land available for development. This one factor alone puts a bigger hurt on beekeeping in Maryland than any incremental change in the atmosphere. [Wayne] Esaias did mention the loss of family farms, but neither he nor the author mentioned the effect of the “death tax.” The climate change question asked in the subtitle is sophomoric and reflects badly on the magazine and, thereby, the school. Robert A. Farmer, Engr ’70 Bel Air, Maryland E before I, not after C As Solomon Golomb says in the Summer 2010 issue [“Golomb’s Gambits, “The Mnemonic Plague”], the rule of “I before E except after C” for spelling the long-E sound has dozens of exceptions. Here’s a mnemonic for the most common exceptions: May neither financier seize either species of weird leisure. Henry Harlan, A&S ’54 (MA) Churchville, Maryland

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Essay

Star, Lite

t doesn’t take much to be a “star” today. Precipitating that comment was a grizzly murder, bizarre even by Southern California standards. The killer stabbed his victim to death and wounded two colleagues using a sword that was his trademark as an actor. The press described the murderer, whose professional name was Steve Driver, as a “porn star.” It is difficult to gauge Mr. Driver’s cinematic achievements without arousing suspicions about one’s computer use, but according to a Los Angeles police officer his employers “weren’t happy with his product.” What made this guy a star of anything? At least he had the adjective “porn” limiting his stardom. The late Anna Nicole Smith appeared in the media as a “star” without any kind of qualification, in all senses of the term. Although her credits included Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, hers was not an extensive body of work and mostly involved playing herself. The same is true of three current “star” reality-show sisters, Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney Kardashian. In fairness, Kim’s reality “star” credentials soared when her sex tape began floating around the Internet. Khloe, at last word, was considering making one. (Remember when sibling rivalry was about who mom loved best?) In Hollywood’s glamour days stars had their scandals, but they also had charisma, a solid list of movies behind them, and a lot of us wanted to be just like them. It’s different in this time of promiscuous starring. Many new “stars” haven’t done much except attract attention, and most of us either don’t want to be like them or don’t want to be caught being like them. What parent hopes a daughter will say, “I want to be like Kim and pose nude when I grow up?” Or wants to hear a son declare, “I’m going to be Ashton Kutcher and star in cool stuff like Dude, Where’s My Car? and marry some hot old lady who used to be in movies or something.”

14 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

This is an era when, according to the press, Meryl Streep is a star, but so is her former co-star, Lindsay Lohan. One has a long, distinguished acting career. The other appears more regularly in mug shots than movies. Curious to find out who the real stars are today, I went to the logical place, the popular television show Dancing with the Stars. Anyone appearing on it has to be the genuine article. Would television lie? Over the show’s five-year run, half the victorious stars were athletes. At least they won something in the past. Here are the names of the five triumphant stars from the world of entertainment: Kelly Monaco, Drew Lachey, Brooke Burke, Donny Osmond, and Nicole Scherzinger. These may be everyday names in your household, but I only recognized one, and “star” wasn’t the first word that came to mind. Research on their credentials revealed a few television and movie credits (including Baywatch and a couple of soap operas), a little work in theater, some Playboy modeling, a series of infomercials, a role in a video game, and fronting the Pussycat Dolls. And Donny Osmond. Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, we need you now more than ever. Just as I was writing this essay, The New York Times ran a front-page article reporting that so many stars were in court that it was straining the Los Angeles legal system’s budget. The story, bearing the headline “Stars, Cameras, and Theatrics: It’s All at Court,” included among the “stars” Don Johnson, Ken Osmond, and Leif Garrett, at least two of whom are answers to trivia questions. Has the word “star” lost all meaning? Case closed. About the same time, Lindsay Lohan, bearing an obscene message on her fingernail, was sentenced to 90 days in jail. The good news? Meryl Streep remains at large. There is hope. Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins University professor.

Gilbert Ford

B y “ G u i d o Ve l o c e ”

Golomb’s Gambits TM

honor ⋅ respect ⋅ humility ⋅ integrity ⋅ excellence

Specialty Endings By Solomon Golomb ’51

The most common noun ending to indicate a profession, a special capability, a philosophical leaning, or the like, is -ist (e.g. chemist, hypnotist, socialist, etc.). There are literally hundreds of such English words, far too many to ask you to try to list all (or most, or many) of them. Here are a few other endings that serve a similar function, but where it is reasonable to attempt to list many of them. –ician Certain scientists, medical specialists, and others are indicated by this ending. How many can you think of in half an hour? (18 = good, 23 = excellent, 25 = extraordinary) –eer There is often, but not always, a negative overtone to professions or specialties or other activities having this ending. How many can you list in half an hour? (15 = good, 18 = excellent, 21 = extraordinary)

Tri-

–ologist This ending narrows the –ist list considerably. (Most but not all are specialists in a corresponding –ology, and not every –ology has an –ologist.) How many can you come up with in 30 minutes? (48 = good, 54 = excellent, 58 = extraordinary) –ier Some of the words you may have thought of for –eer are spelled with -ier, as preferred in French, and a very few words can end with either spelling. How many –ier words can you find in 20 additional minutes? (5 = good, 7 = excellent, 8 = extraordinary) –alogist A much smaller class than the –ologist words, usually from fields that end in –alogy instead of –ology. Which ones can you think of? (1 = good, 2 = excellent, 3 = extraordinary) (Solutions on page 70)

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Wholly Hopkins

Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

Pa l e o nu t r i t i o n

ow human brains became large enough during the march of evolution to vault our ancestors ahead of chimps and other primates has long been a puzzle. In an attempt to fill in the pieces, scientists have focused on the prehistoric diet. Because the brain is an energy guzzler—in modern humans, it requires

20 percent of the body’s energy to effectively operate, even though the organ makes up about 2 percent of the body’s weight—scientists have theorized, but lacked evidence, that an early precursor to modern humans regularly ate an array of foods that included large amounts of animal flesh. Such a diet would provide the energy and nutrients needed, over time, to expand the brain. It would also help explain how hominins, our ancestors of millions of years ago, evolved into 16 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Homo erectus, a successful and relatively brainy link in the evolutionary continuum that has so far led away from monkeys to the development of Homo sapiens. Now, a research team that delved 20 meters deep into the Turkana Basin region of northern Kenya has uncovered evidence of such a diet among a trove of stone tools, fossils, and soil. The research team, which included Naomi Levin, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the Krieger School, found that 2 million years ago the basin was grassland and the hominins who lived there ate several species of animals, including “brain food”—fish, aquatic reptiles, and mammals. Scientists also discovered cut marks on animal bones that indicate stone tools were used for butchering, and they found samples of the tools. The team, made up of scientists from Australia, Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, reported its results in the June 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. “What’s exciting is that the hominins were eating a very wide range of things—they were very opportunistic,” says Levin, a geologist whose role on the team was to analyze the soil and bits of fossilized teeth that might explain hominins’ diet and environment. “That’s a sign of human success. People probably assumed that Homo erectus’ predecessor had access to these resources, but we needed to prove it.” Growing larger brains over long periods of time would require pre-humans to regularly use as many sources of nutrition as possible. Among the animals hominins consumed, the research

Alex Nabaum

Crocs, hippos, and the evolution of the brain

team discovered, were crocodiles, hippopotami, and turtles. All are especially rich sources in the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids crucial to brain growth. Because the human brain’s development is so central to scientists’ conception of evolution, the subject has garnered a large amount of research interest from archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and geologists. The Turkana Two million years Basin research ago the basin was team did its work grassland and the during 10 days in 2007. hominins who lived February Since then, Levin there ate several and the others species of animals, have been anaincluding “brain food” lyzing the find—fish, aquatic reptiles, ings. Her job has been to look for and mammals. clues within onesquare-inch bits of excavated earth by analyzing isotopes that lie within soil and bone. The Turkana Basin now is dry and sere, but it wasn’t 2 million years ago. Levin, who studies prehistoric climates, discovered oxygen and carbon isotopes in animals’ fossilized teeth that reveal they ate grasses. Using an “aridity index” she developed in 2006, Levin also determined that many of the mammals at the site, including hippopotami, had teeth containing isotopes that indicate they lived in watery areas. “This is important because it places the record of hominin behavior in an environmental context,” she says. Other members of the research team theorize that hominins didn’t hunt their prey but scavenged dead or dying animals or ones injured by predators, and perhaps corralled catfish, hippopotami, and water turtles when water levels dropped. The team found that hominins also devoured antelopes, rhinoceroses, and other land mammals, while avoiding predatory mammals long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation. Because the research team lacks evidence of fire at their dig site—a common woe for anthropologists seeking to pinpoint when fire was first used—they assume that the meat was consumed raw. Not found at the site were bones of the hominins. “We don’t have the hominin fossils,” laments Levin. “They didn’t die at the Turkana site, or if they did, we can’t identify them.” —Michael Anft

Space

Did asteroids bring water and life to Earth?

pace scientists have put several men on the moon, robotically explored the farthest reaches of the solar system, and calculated the age and composition of the universe. But they’ve had a hard time nailing down two of the most basic questions about life on Earth: How did the surface of the planet become mostly water? Especially since the massive collision that formed the moon 4.5 billion years ago would have vaporized any water then present? And how did Earth acquire the organic compounds that cooked up life? The common wisdom has been that comets, cooled by ultrafrosty temperatures beyond the solar system, smashed into Earth sometime after the moon’s creation, bringing water in the form of ice, possibly along with organic matter essential to the creation of life. But a recent pair of studies, one led by Andrew Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Applied Physics Laboratory, questions this longheld notion. Using infrared telescopes in Hawaii to measure the reflected light of asteroids, Rivkin’s team has discovered substantial ice and evidence of prebiotic, carbonaceous compounds on one of them. The finding, detailed in the April 29 issue of Nature, puts hypotheses on the origins of life on Earth in a new light and blurs distinctions scientists have long made between asteroids (orbiting rocky bodies that formed within the solar system) and comets (which typically come from outside our planetary system). A separate experiThe new discovery adds ment run by an astronomer information that helps at the University of Central Florida (UCF) recently support the long-held confirmed the Rivkin hypothesis that the team’s results. basic materials came “This tells us that there to Earth from outwere more ways for Earth side sources some 4 to to get water than we previously thought,” says Rivkin, 4.3 billion years ago. who has been searching for water on asteroids since 1993. “Fifteen years ago, we thought that there were clear boundaries between different types of objects in space and where they came from. This underscores how nature doesn’t like playing within those strict lines.” Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Wholly Hopkins

NASA

Rivkin’s research was conducted between 2002 and 2008 and centered on 24 Themis, a 123-mile-wide, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1853. It is one of hundreds and possibly thousands of bodies that collectively orbit the sun in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers had thought that 24 Themis’ orbit

even in the dust between the stars in millions of other galaxies. The new discovery of water and organics on Themis does not change our view on the origins of Earth’s life, but adds information that helps support the long-held hypothesis that the basic materials came to Earth from outside sources some 4 to 4.3 billion years ago.” The question, Rivkin says, is how many sources. More and more asteroids are being charted. And the 2006 discovery of a band of comets within the asteroid belt expands the possibilities. “There’s a lot more to look at now than I could have told you about 15 years ago,” he says. —MA

Business

First Global MBA class hits town

L An artist’s concept of the asteroid belt. These orbiting rocks may harbor water in unexpected quantities. brought it close enough to the sun that any surface ice would evaporate. But after using infrared technology to study light at extremely low wavelengths, Rivkin and his team learned that enough frozen water is present within two kilometers of the asteroid’s surface to continually replenish a coating of ice on its surface, while maintaining some reserve inside the asteroid. The UCF-led team hypothesizes that collisions with micrometeoroids vaporize ice below the asteroid’s surface. That water vapor then re-freezes and forms the ice on the asteroid’s surface. Scientists say the findings of Rivkin et al. support their broader theories about the role celestial bodies played in hydrating Earth. “The new results broaden our perspective,” says Dale P. Cruikshank, a planetary scientist at NASA and a follower of Rivkin’s work since the latter’s days as a student at the University of Arizona. “We know that water and complex organic chemicals exist throughout the solar system, throughout our galaxy, and 18 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

ike any successful entrepreneur, Trevor Kuchar knows fortune often boils down to timing. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the former combat medic and Gulf War veteran planned to find post-graduation riches in Silicon Valley. But during his junior year the dot-com bubble burst. He recalls, “Everyone lost their job overnight, it seemed. Unless you had a PhD, you didn’t stand a chance.” The East Asian studies major saw greener pastures in China. In 2004, after turns as an English teacher and human resources professional in Beijing, Kuchar founded Alternate Paradigm, a company that provided IT services to small and mid-size companies. The firm flourished, buoyed by Olympic fever and oodles of foreign investment. At its peak, Alternate Paradigm had eight employees and grossed roughly $300,000 per year. Then the global recession hit. “After the [2008 Summer] Olympics there was nothing,” he said. “Everyone stopped spending.” He sold his shares to his partner, got married, and moved back to the United States just as the Carey Business School began planning its new Global MBA. The program welcomed its inaugural class this month, and Kuchar, 35, was among the first cohort of 89 students. He chose the Carey program because of its promise of a unique approach to business education with an innovative academic structure, a global perspective, and an avowed goal of producing graduates who want “to profit society as well as turn a profit.”

Vign e t t e In the tradition of violin making, Giovanni Paolo Maggini holds a distinguished pedigree and place. The Italian, who made instruments between 1590 and 1630, learned his trade from Gasparo da Salo, dubbed the father of all fiddle makers. An exacting craftsman, Maggini only made 60 or so instruments in his lifetime. Collectors have long prized his violins and violas for their rich, deep, and powerful sound. One particular Maggini, finished in 1620 (and pictured here), has been owned by three of the most important string instrument collectors in history: Luigi Tarisio, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, and Royal De Forest Hawley. Now it calls Peabody home. Karl Kostoff, 85, a former professional musician and longtime employee of the Applied Physics Laboratory, recently gave to Peabody the 1620 Maggini. Kostoff, who retired from APL in 1988, says that he wanted the instrument to be played and heard by current and future generations, not hidden behind glass in a museum. Some 40 years ago, he says, he saw the violin at a dealer’s shop, plucked it, and wrote a check on the spot, not knowing the instrument’s historical significance.The check was for $9,000. The Maggini was recently appraised at $350,000. Kostoff joined APL in the mid-1950s and worked on the ground level of the lab’s computer programming efforts, writing programs for early IBM computers that filled an entire room. Before joining the lab, he played violin for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra. He brought his love of music to APL, where he was rehearsal director of the lab’s brass ensemble and principal conductor at the annual company concert. Keng-Yuen Tseng, chair of Peabody’s Strings Department, says that thanks to Kostoff, Peabody has acquired a magnificent instrument. “In terms of sound, it has a darker quality, and with such an old age, it still has good power, which surprised me,” Tseng says.The instrument will be cared for by Peabody’s Ensemble Office, which provides instrument loans and rentals to ensemble participants, faculty, and students for practice, performances, and recordings. —Greg Rienzi

Rich Lauver

“I understood the risks [of entering a new program]. I also understood the rewards,” Kuchar says. He sampled another business school and was dissatisfied. “I went to some classes there and they were good, but each felt like a separate entity. You could forget what you learned in one and move on to the next.” In the Hopkins program, classes interconnect. Students will look at the same issues and case studies through different lenses, whether it’s accounting, marketing, management, human resources, or ethics. “You really understand is going The program aims to what on. That really educate students to appealed to me,” think critically and act Kuchar says. The twoethically, in line with year, full-time the school’s motto: new “Where business is program’s curriculum is taught with humanity interdisciplinary in mind.” in orientation and emphasis. It draws upon Johns Hopkins science and research and has tenets anchored in liberal arts, medicine, engineering, and public health. A distinctive feature is the Discovery to Market project, meant to provide insight into translating a Hopkins research discovery into a product or technology with potential for commercialization. In the first year, students attend seminars and workshops to learn about the discoveries; in the second year they try to adapt selected products and services to the marketplace. The program also aims to educate students to think critically and act ethically, in line with the school’s motto: “Where business is taught with humanity in mind.” In the intersession after year one, students will go overseas to work on a business problem within a developing nation, learning to work in low-resource countries with inadequate infrastructures. Shahd AlShehail said it was this humanistic and international approach that attracted her. AlShehail, who earned her bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Evansville in 2009, recently worked as director of operations at Al Qadem Fashion House in her native Saudi Arabia, a family business she helped start in 2006. She had conducted a thorough search of the top-tier business schools but kept coming back to Carey. William Kooser, the school’s associate dean for students, argues for the uniqueness of the Carey School’s program: “Others might offer single pieces of what we’re doing, but nobody puts everything together and requires what we’re

asking of our students. Our emphasis on humanity and an integrated, team approach to teaching makes us fundamentally different.” About a third of the charter-class students are women and half are international. They range in age from early 20s to early 40s; their professional experience ranges from zero to 15 years. They hail from the United States, Ghana, the Netherlands, Greece, Turkey, India, China, Japan, IndoJohns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Wholly Hopkins U n i ve r s i t y

New at the top

The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School welcomes its first Global MBA class this fall. nesia, and elsewhere. Kuchar and AlShehail said that while they understand the risks involved with an unproven product—the new program has no elite business school brand power like Wharton or the Harvard Business School—they are relying on Johns Hopkins’ stature and the substantial investment the Carey School has made in this program. “If Johns Hopkins is willing to gamble such a large sum of money and scout the world for some of the best teachers, I know they are really trying hard to make this work,” Kuchar said. “Their reputation depends on it.” The first cohort also likes being first. “You know that you’re part of this experiment on what will work for the future,” AlShehail says. “But we’ll always be remembered with prestige as the first class. We’ll be pioneers.” —GR 20 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

wo divisions of Johns Hopkins introduced new directors over the summer. In June, the School of Education announced that David W. Andrews would become its new dean on September 1. In July, Ralph D. Semmel, Eng ’85 (MS), became the new director of the Applied Physics Laboratory. A highly regarded expert on database systems and artificial intelligence, Semmel has been at APL for 23 years, the past five as the first head of the Applied Information Sciences Department, which was created in 2005 to respond to rapid changes in information technology. Prior to that, he had been assistant head of the Power Projection Systems Department, and deputy director of the lab’s Milton S. Eisenhower Research Center. He also chairs two programs in the Whiting School’s Engineering for Professionals graduate program. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Semmel holds advanced degrees in computer science and systems management. He succeeds Richard T. Roca, who served as APL’s director since January 2000. Andrews comes to Johns Hopkins from Ohio State University, where he was founding dean of its College of Education and Human Ecology. He succeeds Ralph Fessler, who retired last year as Education’s inaugural dean. “I have always been fascinated with children and their well-being, and since high school I’ve never changed from that direction,” Andrews said in a press release. “The opportunity to work at Johns Hopkins with its strong reputation is phenomenal.” He holds degrees from Auburn, Kansas State, and Florida State, and has been a faculty member in human development and psychology departments at Oregon and Oregon State. In 1998, he became dean of Ohio State’s College of Human Ecology; eight years later, he led the merger of that school with the College of Education and became dean of the new college. As a researcher, he has worked on initiatives to improve schools, especially those in urban areas with vulnerable populations. He was instrumental in developing a partnership with public schools in Columbus, Ohio, that established a model early childhood laboratory in a low-income section of the city. —Dale Keiger

Books Henry and Bernard and Stanley How Stanley Mazaroff—who has been a Baltimore employment lawyer, a 62-yearold Johns Hopkins freshman, and Blue Jay lacrosse legend Jerry Schnydman’s Little League baseball coach—became the author of an art history book is a complicated story. That’s appropriate given the complex and conflicted relationship of the title characters in Mazaroff ’s tight, focused work, Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson: Collector & Connoisseur (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). The book explores the peculiar background of the Walters Art Museum’s acquisition of Italian Renaissance paintings. After the death of his beloved father, William, in 1894, Henry Walters became caught up in the collecting of Italian Renaissance artwork, an obsession that afflicted many American captains of industry. With one sweeping $1 million purchase in 1902 ($25,700,000 in 2010 dollars),Walters acquired most of the highly touted collection of Don Marcello Massarenti, a priest and member of the papal court, netting approximately 930 paintings. About 520 of them were by Italian artists, and many were dubiously attributed to giants like Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian. By this single purchase Walters hoped to become one of the nation’s preeminent collectors of Renaissance painting— and to acquire a cornerstone collection on which to build a museum to honor his late father. Walters’ purchase put him on the radar of Berenson, one of the world’s preeminent Italian art connoisseurs and dealers. To ingratiate himself with Walters, Berenson offered in 1909 to prepare an illustrated catalog of his Italian paintings. Walters accepted the offer. But in 1914, when Berenson finally came to Baltimore to examine Walters’ trove, he was scathing about what he regarded as the true creators of the works. Of 293 Italian paintings from Massarenti then on display in Walters’ gallery, only 30 retained their original attributions. By 1917, Walters had severed his relationship with Berenson and washed the latter’s name from museum records. Five years later, Walters was finished with the art collecting business and began getting rid of many of the formerly valuable paintings. From the Massarenti trove, he retained only

the handful that were actually works by masters. In 1975, a new catalog noted that while Walters’ collection turned out not to be a compendium of master works, it was one of the nation’s best surveys of Italian Renaissance painting. After Mazaroff decided to retire early from active law practice in 2000, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins as an art history freshman. After two years of attending class with 17- and 18-year-olds (and a minimester in Florence) as a “special student,” Mazaroff soon upgraded to graduate level coursework and met Steven Campbell, chair of the Department of Art History. Mazaroff produced a research project for Campbell about the Massarenti collection, and with Campbell’s encouragement ended up expanding his research into what became a book manuscript. At last, a field guide to one of the most perplexing, confusing, and irrational creatures on Earth: the human adolescent. The Teen Years Explained: A Guide to Healthy Adolescent Development (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) by Clea McNeely and Jayne Blanchard of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, acknowledges the realities of trying to explain smart decision making to teenagers. (Short version: It’s really, really hard.) But the book offers good strategies that can at least give kids something to think about before they engage in the risky behavior they’re not quite ready to leave behind. Finally, if you’ve always wanted to learn of the genesis of Johns Hopkins Hospital but preferred the tale to be told in the form of a play, you’re in luck: The Flowering of an Idea, by the late dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School Alan M. Chesney, is once again available, in softcover on demand from Johns Hopkins University Press. Chesney’s one-act play (based on Helen Hopkins Thom’s 1929 book Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette), written in 1939 for the 50th anniversary of the hospital’s opening, imagines conversations among the heavies from the hospital’s creation: Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, George Peabody, John Garrett, state and local politicians, merchants, and others. —Geoff Brown, A&S ’91 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Wholly Hopkins Education

Advancing autism education, near and far

Kim Rosen

ny veteran special education teacher will tell you: There’s no way to predict how a student with autism will fare in the classroom. Jason could have an aversion to loud noises, making recess his daily hell. If Kate

doesn’t eat lunch—a plain bologna sandwich and three Oreo cookies—at precisely noon, she could launch into a screaming fit. Christopher might be fairly even-tempered, with a rich vocabulary and mild obsession with the solar system, but he can’t sit through a lesson without flapping his hands. Autism—defined by the triad of social anxiety, communication impairments, and repetitive behaviors—is notoriously diverse, which is intimidating to teachers, according to Danielle

22 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Liso, assistant professor of special education at the School of Education. “You could put a dozen students in a lineup, all of whom have autism, and you wouldn’t necessarily know why they’re all standing in the same line,” she says. “It’s a huge challenge.” And a growing one: Today in the United States about one in 100 children are diagnosed with autism—up from one in 150 just three years ago. Before advising parents and teachers on how best to teach these children to learn and communicate, Liso says, it’s imperative to raise awareness of what autism is—an incurable disease of early brain development—and to dispel myths about what causes it and how best to treat it. For instance, one popular and controversial hypothesis contends that autism stems from a gut problem. Many parents claim that a strict alternative diet, such as one lacking wheat or milk proteins, improves symptoms of the disorder. “Those things don’t have any empirical base,” Liso says. “Some families, understandably so, are trying to latch on to anything they think might help their child, when in fact it can be a detriment to their finances as well as to their child’s time.” Instead, parents and teachers should focus on behavioral training that has been proved effective, especially if begun at an early age. Liso recommends “pivotal response training,” which is based on the idea that children with autism must learn a handful of “pivotal” skills before they can learn more complex behaviors. For example, before a child can learn to have a conversation, she must learn how to get someone else’s attention. The best way to learn these pivotal skills is during natural interactions, such as in play time or as part of a daily routine, so that children have many opportunities to practice throughout the day. When a child carries out an appropriate behavior, the parent or teacher should immediately reinforce it with a positive comment, and make sure the child understands what the praise is for. “The key for families and teachers is to make it as naturalistic as possible, and move away from a strict drill-and-practice type methodology,” Liso says. She has advice for teachers who continue this training in the classroom. One suggestion

is simply to give children more opportunities for social interaction. For instance, instead of a teacher passing out materials, students could pass them to one another. Children might be assigned buddies to walk with in the hallway. During an art project, two children might have to share one glue stick. Another piece of advice is to take advantage of the particular interests of a child with autism. If Christopher is obsessed with outer space, then a teacher could incorporate stars and planets into the day’s math lesson. To help incorporate training into a child’s everyday life, Liso is now turning to technology. She wants to develop videos and online resources that can reach any parent or any kind of autism teacher—whether an elementary school teacher or a speech or physical therapist—in any situation, from big-city school district to tiny rural community. “We would get a family started by providing some face-to-face training in the home, and then eventually taper that off and replace it with live interactions with a professor on the computer,” she says. “That puts more emphasis on the parents’ role.” Liso has put autism awareness and behavioral training strategies into practice through an outreach program in South Africa, where there is little in the way of autism support or education. In some poor regions of the country, for instance, there’s no electricity or indoor plumbing, let alone modern medical services. In these communities, the older generations too often believe that autism is a curse, and curable with rituals or food concoctions. To combat this misinformation, Liso works with a nonprofit called Autism Action South Africa. On her first trip to Cape Town, in February 2009, she visited nearby schools and universities, in both rich and poor communities, and families of children with autism, to teach people about the disorder. She answered questions from parents—My 3-year-old doesn’t talk, does that mean he has autism? How common are coordination and motor problems, like holding a pen?—on a live radio show. In August, Liso made a second outreach trip to the region. Her efforts are part of a broader push by Johns Hopkins to provide focused programs that help teachers navigate the rocky course of the autism spectrum. In the fall of 2008, the School of Education launched a certificate program— five courses, conducted partly through online sessions and partly in person—to help special education teachers in rural areas of the state learn techniques for working with kids with autism. Similarly, this year the school began

Now we k n ow …By using Internet search strings such as “pro-anorexia,” “probulimia” and “thin and support,” Bloomberg School researchers found dozens of websites that present dangerous ideas and encourage eating disorders. The study, led by associate professor Dina L.G. Borzekowski, analyzed the content of 180 such sites. Ninety-one percent were open to the public, and 84 percent offered content promoting anorexia, including online body-mass index calculators, photos of ultra-thin models, and advice on fasting, purging, and how to hide rapid weight loss from family and friends. The study was published in June by the American Journal of Public Health. …A review by Johns Hopkins researchers of 146 pediatric clinical trials in five leading journals found that 41 percent had improper or poorly described randomization techniques, and 57 percent had other shortcomings that could result in bias. The review appeared in the August issue of Pediatrics. Lead investigator was Michael Crocetti, a pediatrician in the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. …A team led by Dean F. Wong, professor of radiology and psychiatry at the School of Medicine, successfully tested a radioactive tracer compound that distinguished the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease from healthy brains in PET scans. The compound, florbetapir, could permit better and more widespread diagnosis of the disease, as well as help in development of therapeutics. The results were reported in the June edition of Journal of Nuclear Medicine. …From 2001 to 2008, exposure to beer and liquor advertising among youths (ages 12 to 20) declined by 48 percent, according to a new study out of the Bloomberg School’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. The study analyzed 29,026 advertisements for alcohol in U.S. magazines, and correlated those ads with demographic data to determine how many appeared in magazines with significant youth readership. The study appeared on the center’s website: www.camy.org. …School of Medicine neurosurgery faculty Rafael Tamargo and Ian Suk (who is also a medical illustrator) believe they can explain peculiarities in the rendering of God in one section of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling: Michelangelo, for unknown reasons, incorporated accurate images of the brainstem and spinal cord in God’s neck and red cloak. “It’s an unusual view of the brainstem, from the bottom up,” said Suk in a press release. “Most people wouldn’t recognize it unless they had extensively studied neuroanatomy.” The study appeared in the May Neurosurgery. —DK

offering a master’s degree in severe disabilities with an emphasis in autism—one of the few autism-focused advanced degree programs in the country. —Virginia Hughes, A&S ’06 (MA)

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Wholly Hopkins the ‘that’s’ by the ‘which’s’ and looked for a pattern, there was a straight line—you could tell when a novel of his was written, almost down to the year. At a very simple level, I would love esse Rosenthal began his scholarly career by to know these kinds of facts about the novelists earning a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore I read all the time. College in English, no surprise for someone “There’s a huge amount to know about these recently added to the Krieger School’s English fac- low-level things that are true but hard to put your ulty as an assistant professor. But his minor was finger on as a reader. [With data analysis] you mathematics, and he programmed computers for come up with results that sometimes back up what fun. So the idea of applying computers and quan- you know, and sometimes show things you don’t titative analysis to the study of literature held some know that leave you scratching your head, saying, fascination for him. His doctoral dissertation at ‘Why is this so significant and consistent Columbia University, “Moral Sensibilities: across this body of work?’” Rosenthal Ethical Feeling and Narrative Form cites work by critic Stephen in the Victorian Novel,” concerned Ramsay that graphed how Victorians felt about what how characters move happened to them when from location to locathey were carried by a tion in Shakespeare’s novel’s narrative to what dramas. “It’s almost they believed would impossible to notice, be an ethically or morwhile you’re reading, ally better state of the pattern that the affairs. The scholcomputer picks up, but arship was done it can, with near perin the customary fect precision, sepaway: Rosenthal alone rate the comedies with a stack of books, from the tragedies. reading, making notes, It has a hard time thinking, reading, making separating the tragedies more notes. But when he from the romances.” Conneeded some distraction, There is an ever-expanding ventional critics have long there was always the com- electronic library of digitized noted the latter, which is puter and his lingering texts that, like any other data set, a successful test of the interest in mathematics. new methodology. He says, “I got interested can be mined by computer for Data analysis can in quantitative analysis as meaningful patterns, associations, deal with problems a way to blow off steam and defining features. caused by an overwhelmwhile working on the dising volume of material. sertation.” During the Victorian era, presses churned out He has continued to think about how he a seemingly endless stream of novels, most of might apply computers to supplement his stan- them awful but, nevertheless, the literary backdard, scholarly close reading. For example, ground to the classic works. “There’s this huge “Something that I’d like to do would be to really amount of text and you find yourself studying get a firmer handle on the styles of the novel- the little bits that float to the top while just gesists I deal with and the genres that I teach,” he turing at the larger body that it’s part of,” Rosensays. “Let me give you a kind of silly example. I thal says. Among the novels he considered in his was playing around with scatter graphs”—data dissertation was Dickens’ Oliver Twist. “Though points plotted on the axes of two variables—“of I have a sense and can point out in traditional Dickens’ use of words over his career. I was just ways how Oliver Twist does things differently,” taking words and sticking them in various sta- he says, “I couldn’t actually show any real evitistical black boxes.” One thing he played with dence for it being different from the larger body was the author’s use of “that” and “which.” He of the genre.” He doesn’t have enough hours in says, “In poring over these graphs, if I took all his lifetime to analyze more than a tiny sample of his books and [using the computer] divided of what he calls “the inert piles of text just sitting Arts and Sciences

Quantifying literature

24 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

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there,” but computers do, and there is an everexpanding electronic library of digitized texts that, like any other data set, can be mined by computer for meaningful patterns, associations, and defining features. Rosenthal does not expect this sort of analysis to supplant his standard way of working, but he’s curious to see what might be possible. “I have a computer and I can program it, so let’s see what I can do.” —DK

Medicine

What killed Bolívar?

aul Auwaerter does not, as a rule, invest a lot of time in considering what might have killed a South American liberator 180 years ago. As clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the School of Medicine, Auwaerter is a busy man. But this was a compelling case. The liberator was the liberator, El Libertador, Simón Bolívar, who waged war against Spain early in the 19th century and secured independence for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. Bolívar died in 1830 at age 47, the cause of death recorded by his physician as tuberculosis. But when Auwaerter read the physician’s autopsy report, there were too many inconsistencies. He had agreed to dig into all of this for the 17th annual Historical Clinicopathological Conference. The conference, staged in April by the Medical Alumni Association of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, takes the standard clinicopathological conference, a teaching exercise in which the history of a patient’s illness is presented to an experienced clinician for analysis, and applies it to the case of some historical personage. Prior HCPCs, as they are known in shorthand, have examined the medical histories and proposed deathbed diagnoses for Edgar Allan Poe (not long-term drug or alcohol abuse but, improbably, rabies), Abraham Lincoln (might a modern trauma center have been able to save his life?), and George A. Custer (cause of death: ill-advised attack on a superior force of Lakota and Cheyenne Indians; underlying condition: histrionic personality disorder). When conference director Philip Mackowiak approached Auwaerter to present the case of Bolívar last April, the Hopkins physician was intrigued. For his analysis, Auwaerter was provided with key documents translated and synthesized by John

Q u ot e , u n q u ot e I couldn’t understand why a disease like schizophrenia persists in humans. People who have these diseases don’t reproduce very well, either because they’re sick, or they’ve been locked up, or because they were killed. —Robert H. Yolken, director of developmental neurobiology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, quoted in the Baltimore Sun, 07.31.10. Yolken is investigating a possible link between Toxoplasma gondii, a common parasite spread by cats, and schizophrenia. Now President Obama has found himself in a position where the military wields far too much influence on Capitol Hill; controls too much of the depleted U.S.Treasury; and has the leading policy voice on both security and diplomatic issues. He would do well to take heed of the philosophy and advice of Eisenhower, who had a far better understanding of America’s infatuation with military power. —Melvin A. Goodman, adjunct professor of government at the School of Advanced International Studies, quoted in the 07.6.10 issue of Middle East Online. As much as we owe the nature of our current existence to the evolutionary forces Darwin first discovered, or the cultures we grow up in, or to the chemical states affecting our brain processes at any given moment, none of this impacts on our freedom. I am free because neither science nor religion can ever tell me, with certainty, what my future will be and what I should do about it. The dictum from Sartre gets it exactly right: I am condemned to freedom. I am not free because I can make choices, but because I must make them, all the time, even when I think I have no choice to make. —William Egginton, professor in the humanities at the Krieger School, quoted in The New York Times’ Opinionator blog, 07.25.10. Dove, his conference co-presenter, a retired spinal surgeon in Britain who has researched Bolívar’s medical history, including the autopsy report written by his personal physician, Alejandro Próspero Reverand. It was Reverand who declared the cause of death as “a pulmonary catarrh that degenerated into a tuberculosis phthisis.” Various factors supported Reverand’s conclusion. Records indicate an increase in tuberculosis in South America in the early 19th century. Bolívar’s parents were believed to have died from the disease, which at the time was thought to be hereditary; it’s not, but if his parents had been tubercular, that might have resulted in transmission to El Libertador at a young age. The most convincing evidence was Reverand’s description of tubercles in Bolívar’s lungs. “It does make some sense,” Auwaerter says of the diagnosis. But there was no record of hemoptysis: coughing up blood. Plus Reverand noted that when he opened Bolívar’s chest, he found the heart bathed in green fluid; he had also stated Bolívar had been producing green expectoJohns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

The Imageworks

rant. To Auwaerter, that did not sound like tuberculosis. Nor did the lack of any mention of other tuberculosis infections among the people close to him. Auwaerter says, “His woman friend, his aides-de-camp, his physician, no one else seemed to develop a pulmonary illness, which would be unusual if someone had tuberculosis.” He made a list of afflictions that might account for all of the items in Reverand’s autopsy: bronchiectasis, chronic meningitis, pericarditis, vertebral and epidural infection, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, hemochromatosis, leishmaniasis, syphilis. Arsenic poisoning. The last occurred to Auwaerter because Reverand had recorded that during his 30s Bolívar had endured repeated bouts of fever leading to shivering and loss of consciousness, and that his skin had mysteriously darkened. “We know that chronic arsenic administration can cause skin changes, certainly constitutional complaints like malaise and headaches, and interestingly can cause bronchiectasis.” The last is a wasting illness—Bolívar weighed but 50 pounds at death. Auwaerter’s final diagnosis, delivered to the conference, was chronic arsenicosis. “That was the best fit I could come up with to link everything together.” Exclude the skin discoloration, Auwaerter says, and there’s a second possibility: that Bolívar had been infected by Paracoccidioides brasiliensis, a fungal infection endemic to South America that can reside in the lungs for many years before causing problems throughout the body. Paracoccidioides is not contagious, which would explain why Bolívar’s closest associates did not fall ill. But it was the theory of arsenic poisoning that got wide play in the press and on the Internet. Had someone assassinated El Libertador by poison? Auwaerter could not rule it out, but he says, “Arsenic was then a health tonic, as it were. High-level people [like Bolívar] would have wanted the best medicine of the day, and that was thought to be these arsenic compounds.” There is written record of Bolívar

26 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

taking an arsenic remedy. What’s more, arsenic was likely present in some of the groundwater in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, countries in which Bolívar conducted military campaigns. One person seems disinclined to accept Auwaerter’s suggestion of inadvertent poisoning: Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, who in 1999 renamed his country “the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” In a recent televised speech, Chavez told Venezuelans, “They killed him. Here in my heart for years I’ve had the conviction that Bolívar didn’t die of tuberculosis. I don’t know if we’ll be able to prove it, but I think they assassinated Bolívar.” He has taken up the HCPC findings as support for his theory, something Auwaerter says misconstrues them. Nevertheless, on July 16, at Chavez’s direction, Bolívar’s tomb was opened so Venezuelan forensic experts can conduct tests to confirm, or not, that El Libertador died from arsenic poisoning. —DK

Music

Still solvent after all these years

ephta Drachman does not believe in debt. As the president of the board of trustees for the Shriver Hall Concert Series, which produces chamber music concerts on the Homewood campus, Drachman has overseen the organization, through 18 years of highs and lows. When she began, the series had gone from years of soldout seasons to near empty concert halls, and there wasn’t a cent in the bank. “We probably had 300 people in a hall that holds 1,100. No one had ever done any fundraising. I kind of panicked,” she says. In October, the Shriver series embarks on its 45th season with a 75 percent subscriber base and an endowment of $1 million. The organization has survived an economic recession that put many arts organizations in peril, owing in no small part to its thrifty nature. “We’ve always been very careful, and we’ve never fallen into serious debt,” Drachman says. The series has also thrived due to its reputation for quality music. Drachman is the daughter of famed cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and her love of music has kept the series focused on its core strength: the performances. The series has become known for booking both established stars

Bot t om L in e

$333,333.33: The

amount Chuck Bennett received as one of three winners of the $1 million Shaw Prize for excellence in science. Bennett, a professor of physics and astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, split the loot with two Princeton faculty, physicist Lyman A. Page Jr. and astronomer David N. Spergel. The trio was honored with the prize, created by centenarian Hong Kong media magnate Run Run Shaw, for their work in pinpointing the age and makeup of the universe. “I’ll pay off some debts and give some of it to charity,” Bennett says of his winnings. “About half of it will go to my favorite charity—the U.S. government.” Seven years ago, Bennett and several others shook science by reporting that measurements of cosmic microwave radiation—the remnants of the oldest light in the universe—dated the universe at 13.7 billion years, and quantified The Great Beyond as only 5 percent atoms, the rest consisting of shadowy forces and bits called dark energy and dark matter. Their ongoing research into the origins of the universe remains popular among scientists. Two papers Bennett and his group published became the most read scientific journal articles in 2009. Now, Bennett is using a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a telescope in Chile that will determine why the universe became astronomically large. “To find that out, we’ll have to detect gravitational waves that might be responsible for the universe’s inflation,” he says. “It’s all about finding out what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second.” —MA

For legendary pianist Leon Fleisher, the Shriver series is “an integral part of my Baltimore musical life.” Fleisher, holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in Piano at Peabody Conservatory, is both a series performer and a subscriber, and he will play in the upcoming 2010–2011 season along with musicians like violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Nelson Freire. Fleisher says the series has a strong global reputation among musicians: “I know from my own personal experience and from speaking with colleagues from all over the world that they come to Shriver Hall with particular anticipation and pleasure knowing that it’s a very committed and serious public.” —Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

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and gifted newcomers, and for a carefully curated eight-concert series spanning a vast repertoire of music. Over the years, the series has had an almost prescient ability to book talent before fame strikes, presenting early performances by Dawn Upshaw, Jacqueline Du Pré, and the Emerson String Quartet. Then there are the series’ established luminaries, such as Jean-Pierre Rampal and the Kronos Quartet. “One of the most important parts of my job, artistically, is to spend time speaking with peers at organizations across the U.S. and abroad about who they’ve been hearing, who was successful, and who may be interesting to us,” says executive director Stephen Jacobsohn. Jacobsohn, a cellist himself, also pores over periodicals, attends performances in other cities, and sifts through hundreds of unsolicited materials from agencies and musicians hoping to get a coveted spot on the Shriver Hall stage. Every potential musician is vetted through a music committee composed of staff and board members before being offered a slot. Ernst Bueding, a pharmacist and amateur violinist, founded the Shriver concerts in 1966, and it became Baltimore’s first chamber music series. He enlisted the help of a number of Johns Hopkins professors, mostly in medicine, and the group endeavored to remedy what they perceived as an imbalance between the vast growth of the medical sciences and the atrophied expansion of the arts. “Dr. Bueding was concerned with the imbalance in Baltimore and nationally,” Jacobsohn says. “In fact, he had previously started chamber music societies and series in Cleveland and New Orleans before settling in Baltimore for the remainder of his career and life.” Hopkins administered the series for the first five years, after which it became an independent organization housed on the Homewood campus. Honoring its founding tradition of making art accessible, the series does not require that its audience take on debt, either. A single ticket runs just $38 ($19 if you’re a student, free if you’re a Hopkins student). There are also free concerts held at the nearby Baltimore Museum of Art. “We strive to keep it affordable,” says Jacobsohn.

Aren’t we all? Happiness is practically enshrined as an American pursuit, and it seems there’s no end to studies telling us how happy we are (or are not) as individuals, as genders, as parents, as a country, as a species. No end to accounts of having achieved happiness through eating, praying, loving, etc. No end to selfhelp books telling us how to find happiness in seven steps, 21 ways, nine rooms, or 75 (!) secrets. Yet, in the absence of universal happiness, questions linger. In this special issue, Johns Hopkins Magazine seeks answers to some of those questions. From neuroscientist David Linden, How do our brains respond to happiness—or rather to pleasure, which is what researchers can actually study? From happiness economist Carol Graham, Does money make us happy? From several health care providers, How do you stay happy when faced with so much tragedy? And from some of our favorite authors—Farai Chideya, Stephen Dixon, Barbara Ehrenreich, Benjamin and Alexander Ginsberg, Bill McKibben, and P.J. O’Rourke—Hey, what do you think about happiness? Finally, we asked our readers what makes them happy, and we got far more responses than we could fit in these pages, even though several were compact haikus.To read them all, or to join the conversation yourself, visit the magazine’s online edition at magazine.jhu.edu. In the following pages, you won’t find the secret to happiness. (Someone mentioned it, but we forgot to write it down.) What you will find is a lively exploration of the topic and, we hope, some new ideas to ponder in your own pursuit.

28 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Noah Woods

Pursuit of Happiness

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 29

Pleasure on

the Brain

Emerging brain science tells us a lot about pleasureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;why we seek it, where we find it, and how it can steer us toward deep contentment, or into deep, deep trouble. By Michael Anft Illustration

30 Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Fall 2010

Noah Woods

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 31

or the sake of happiness, indulge in this fantasy: Think of a tropical island where the sun shines and the fish jump, where exotic fruits fall off the trees into your hands and gracious people move through their paces as they have for centuries, and where time passes as slowly as the days unfold. Who wouldn’t be happy in such a slice of heaven? Now consider the people of Nauru. A 13-square-mile coral oval in the Pacific, just south of the equator, Nauru was an Eden for centuries. Outside of an internecine skirmish or two, it was a sun-drenched haven filled with mostly healthy, happy people. Then, after World War I, European companies found gold in the accumulated guano—seabird droppings rich in phosphates, prized in the West for their value as fertilizer and as an ingredient in gunpowder—that covered much of the island. By 1970, when the islandersowned Nauru Phosphate Corporation made Nauruans the second-richest people per capita in the world, their diet had begun to change. Fish and coconuts had given way to fatty meats, junk food, and soft drinks that island residents imported. Alcohol and tobacco abuse became rampant. Because guano was mined and shipped off by others, Nauruans didn’t have to work—a situation prominent in many of our fantasies, for sure, but one with repercussions. A sedentary lifestyle, bad food, and too many vices eventually saddled Nauruans with the world’s highest rates of diabetes and heart disease. (The life expectancy for a Nauruan man now is only 60.) Now, more than 80 percent of the island’s populace is obese. What’s more, the riches wrought from bird poop were largely squandered or gambled away, or put into bad investments. The island is now destitute, with only meager phosphate reserves remaining, and largely despoiled to the point where its people might never produce enough food on their own to fill their potbellies. So much for paradise. While Nauru has become a case study of sorts for how small, distant cultures can clash with the wealthy Western lifestyle, the island’s sad saga is also a be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale that says a lot about how our brains’ hard-wired penchant for strong satisfying sensations, located in something scientists call “the medial forebrain pleasure circuit,” can turn the pursuit of happiness into a diversion to danger. Scientists began more intently focusing their gaze on pleasure—how and why we respond to it—about 15 years ago, when advances made in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans made it possible for them to look at our brain on drugs, during orgasm or exercise, and while praying or gambling. Because of those technological leaps, there’s now a clearer picture emerging of what our brain looks like on pleasure, how it drives our behavior (good and bad), and why we seek mental challenges. Researchers already knew from invasive, ethically questionable studies in the 1960s and ’70s that implanting elec32 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

trodes deep inside gray matter would lead people to respond almost maniacally to direct hits of brain stimulation. Echoing the behavior of electrode-outfitted rats in earlier lab investigations, human subjects would press the lever of pleasure over and over again, hundreds of times per day, even as their health, hygiene, and relationships suffered. One woman, hooked up to relieve chronic pain, experienced a zing of sexual pleasure as a side effect. She twisted an intensity knob so often she developed an ulcer on her finger. Like those frazzled subjects, we’re all addicts of sorts, trained by millions of years of evolution to seek out things— food, water, sex—that help us survive and propel our genes into the next generation. When we anticipate and attain those things, we are happy and in the moment—for as long as that moment lasts. But happiness is a philosophical concept, and a slippery one at that. The ancient Greeks considered happiness to be something earned over a lifetime, or as a series of pleasurable experiences tied end to end, depending on who was doing the thinking. But they realized the quest for it—and its definition—was hard to pin down. In the modern world, happiness is still a trick of sorts. We often say we’re at our happiest when we’re not, according to those who study such things. Parents might say they’re delighted to be raising their children, but virtually every survey shows that people are more likely to report being unhappy while they’re busy parenting, and that they’re much more content once the kids have grown and left them alone. How many of us know people who say they’re happy, until they break down and start telling us how miserable their lives are? So, researchers who delve into the basic biological sciences sidestep “happiness” entirely. “We can’t get to happiness,” says David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at the School of Medicine. “We know that there are places in the brain that will tell us the existence of pleasure, whether it’s hard-wired or not. There’s no neurophysiological correlate for happiness. We don’t know where in the brain its structure or activity lies.” Because pleasure—which Linden calls “the kid brother of happiness”—lights up the room like a buxom belle or a buff bachelor at the ball, it announces itself ripe for inspection. Linden doesn’t research pleasure himself—his work focuses on the ins and outs of subconscious motor learning and memory—but he’s gladly assumed the role of popularizer of the brain and why it is what it is, first in his 2006 book, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, and in the forthcoming The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, which will be released by Viking Press in the spring. With his graying hair pulled back from a broad forehead and banded into a ponytail, and while sporting a Central American guayabera and wire frame specs, Linden looks a bit like Jerry Gar-

cia’s kid brother, someone who may have had some experience with several types of “pleasure” over the years. Linden will tell you that unless we’re afflicted by Parkinson’s disease or other disorders that mess with our circuitry, we’re all fellow travelers on the path to pleasure. “There’s a rich database of brain imaging out there now that tells us that there’s a central brain circuit, and that it’s activated by every form of pleasure we know,” Linden says. What’s more, our pleasure systems have developed so that they do more than help guide us in a way that befits evolution. We can drink, ingest, inject, smoke, or snort substances that hijack our circuitry and offer us temporary transcendence, as well as the morning after, though we don’t remember that anywhere near as readily as we do the high. Thinking abstract thoughts and meditating can also tickle our mental fancy. It appears that learning itself can give us a predictable rush. Apparently, evolution has rewarded us for learning to behave and think in certain ways by giving us a momentary “high” when we put the proverbial two and two together. “The pleasure circuit lights up when you take a bite of delicious food, have an orgasm, or use alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine, or amphetamine, or when you’re taking part in virtuous behaviors like giving money to charity,” Linden says. “It’s all the same system.” Pleasure functions as a linchpin in many of our brain schemes, albeit one that we have to police a bit. Because of the way evolution built our brains, pleasure works hand in hand with our associative memory. It’s why we tap our foot to that Captain and Tennille ditty we first heard at the dance where we met a now long-lost sweetheart, even though we usually have better taste in music. Since pleasure and learning are linked, scientists refer to pleasure as “reward,” something that shapes much of our behavior and can be measured in experiments on humans and rodents. We often work to learn how to repeat behaviors that set off clumps of neurons and the neurotransmitters, primarily dopamine, that flood several parts of our brain with a heady sensation—our gratifying reward for performing a certain act. As you might expect, the pleasure circuit doesn’t reside in the top of the brain, where we do much of our thinking and reasoning. Instead, it’s deep in the center, where its influence can be felt in many regions of gray matter. “You’re closer to it if you go through the roof of the mouth than through the top of your head,” advises Linden. He compares the brain’s structure to dessert making. As our brains evolved, they added new parts, kind of like adding an extra scoop to an ice cream cone. Pleasure developed in several scoops early and often. Foremost among them is

the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, where brief electrical impulses run along information-carrying fibers called axons. Curiously, some of the VTA’s axon terminals exist in an entirely separate region called the nucleus accumbens. When electrical impulses reach the axon terminals, they release dopamine—the dope of the mind, the substance that makes us happy, at least temporarily. Through a complex set of interactions, dopamine molecules and receptors also trigger responses in the amygdala, a brain region that regulates fear, and the anterior cingulated cortex, an emotion center. Dopamine-based reactions also occur in the dorsal striatum, the center of habit learning. Other VTA neurons send dopaminereleasing axons to the hippocampus, our repository of memories regarding facts and events. (Cue up “Love Will Keep Us Together.”) Meanwhile, even more of those feel-good axons head toward the prefrontal cortex, our center for judgment and planning. All of these outposts in the brain also get infusions of glutamate, another hopped-up neurotransmitter, by way of something called the medial forebrain bundle. What all this means is that pleasure-inducing experiences will be felt in all areas of the brain where dopamine is sent and activated, and all that we sense and the events we recall that surround those experiences will be associated with feeling really good. As an example, Linden points up how associations can make it difficult for hard-core addicts to kick a habit: A cocaine abuser who is used to snorting the drug in a club bathroom might associate the drug with the friends he regularly meets at the club, dance music, a martini, and cigarette smoke. If he’s trying to quit, a trip to the club probably wouldn’t be a good idea, as all those cues might lead to a relapse. The idea that pleasure is a key mover of behavior is relatively new and has grown along with our understanding of the brain. Prior to the 1950s, scientists thought “punishment avoidance” directed our actions—the application of the stick, never mind the offering of a carrot. Nowadays, entire pharmaceutical companies, new casino cities, fast food chains, and scores of advertising campaigns attempt to shape aspects of our behavior by appealing to our pleasure centers. Many of the chemicals that trip our dopamine centers carry an odd echo from the world of botany. As plants evolved chemicals to help fight off pests, some evolved to emit substances such as nicotine in tobacco or cannabinoids in marijuana to protect themselves from predation. Bugs stopped buzzing around, and we ended up with the buzz. Over time, humans have discovered the pleasurable qualities of some plants and fungi to get the dopamine flow-

Pleasure

functions as a

linchpin in many of our brain

schemes, albeit

one that we have to police a bit.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 33

ing. The ones that jumpstart our pleasure circuits most directly or strongly, including cocaine, nicotine, and opiates, are the most addictive. Method of the drug’s delivery is also important. A Bolivian farmer, Linden notes, can chew on raw leaves of coca and receive some mild stimulation—usually not enough to become a lifelong addict. But a crack smoker who inhales the deeply concentrated burning rock of cocaine gets a knockout punch of pleasure, a punch he wants to take over and over again. Similarly, a cigarette smoker who takes 20 puffs a day from each of 20 cigarettes “gets 400 tiny hits,” Linden points out—hits that reinforce his or her pleasant association with nicotine. Nearly 80 percent of people who try cigarettes become hooked, eclipsing the number who get addicted after giving injected heroin a shot (35 percent), and leaving alcoholics relatively dry (4 percent). Even though many pleasure circuit triggers are illegal, Linden points out that we’ve been designed to respond to them. The same is the case with so-called behavioral addictions, like gambling or excessive video game playing. Of course, it’s our responsibility to rein in our worst impulses, but we’re not that good at overcoming our attachment to things that light us up. Otherwise, we’d have no addicts, and 12-step program centers would be used for, say, pleasureigniting meditative yoga. We can put on too much weight from eating too much, but the very act of trying to take it off releases hormones that command us to eat. Dieting, in a real biological sense, is largely a farce. While genes lay down the brain’s foundation, our wiring is tweaked by how we think and what we do, Linden explains. Our experiences shape the strength and patterns of how our brain fires—a concept that neurophysiologists call plasticity. Studies in twins have shown that genetics is responsible for half of general intelligence levels; nature takes care of the rest. It’s how and what we think that matters. But some of us are hard-wired for addiction. Given a certain stimulus in the environment, we can become hooked. Let’s revisit those Nauruans. Over the course of many centuries or longer, their ancestors were regularly forced to live through famine and long canoe trips between islands. Like many Micronesian and Polynesian peoples, the Nauru developed a genetic survival mechanism that encouraged their bodies to eat and pack on weight during times of plenty to get through times of little food. When big money and imported fatty, sweet food came from the West, the islanders were genetically ill-equipped to handle it. They packed on pounds continuously, making many of them sick; despite their illnesses, many remained hooked on the food and booze. For people whose pleasure circuitry has already been commandeered by bad habits, the brain grows in ways that accommodate and encourage the abuse. Memory and 34 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

association become a curse. “Addiction is nothing more than a memory you can’t shake,” says Linden. Fortunately, our brains can become turned on by things that don’t hurt us. Generosity, meditation, and prayer can float our boats as well. But just as behavioral addictions tend to have a weaker hold on us than substances, virtues thrum their way through our pleasure centers at yet a lesser rate. Still, Linden says our ability to embrace “good” behaviors with the help of pleasure in the brain is nothing to sneeze at. “When you have these pleasure drives develop along with evolution, and then add in associative learning, a miracle happens. We humans can hijack our reward system arbitrarily, so we can get rewarded by abstract things that have no relationship at all to getting your genes out into the next generation,” he says. And that might get us to the point where “pleasure” and “happiness” can catch at least a glimpse of each other in the mirror. Because people find meaning in abstract thinking and higher causes, their pleasure centers can start humming when they’re fasting or abstaining from sex. “People push the happiness scale upward when they feel like they’re doing something like making a statement or being artistic or following cultural pursuits—things that are embedded in a social context,” Linden says. A social context in which we invariably see ourselves at the center. “It really seems clear that we get pleasure from virtuous behaviors we initiate ourselves,” he adds. Playing a concert or taking part in a political rally announces to others—and to our brains—that we’re taking meaningful and pleasurable action. That self-interest can cross over to lesssavory events that are hard to predict. “Even something as totally random as gambling, if we throw the dice at the craps table, our pleasure center is very attentive. But if someone else has the dice, not so much. We’re hard-wired to get pleasure from outcomes we have a hand in,” Linden says. Research into pleasure could lead us toward some solutions to age-old problems. For example, scientists have found that our brains become excited enough by learning to wire themselves in specific and original ways—leading Linden to conclude that educational systems might one day devise better methods for teaching children. “Everyone, including do-gooder parents in Western societies, has decided that children’s learning experiences should be more regimented. But educational systems should spend less time shoving things down kids’ throats and more in letting them take pleasure in self-directed learning,” he says. “If you give most people, particularly kids, the chance to express themselves and be creative, and let them come to it on their own, they’ll surprise you. And they’ll take more pleasure in it than when someone tells them, ‘It’s 11 o’clock. Now’s the time when we draw.’” Michael Anft is senior writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Happy Now? By Barbara Ehrenreich

ut are you happy?” That’s the killer question I’ve faced repeatedly since the publication of my book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I take a deep breath because I know what’s at stake. If I come across as unhappy or even a little conflicted, I can be dismissed as a sourpuss, a whiner, or an old-fashioned melancholic with a perverse attachment to suffering. Unhappy people, according to the conventional, positive-thinking wisdom, just aren’t worth listening to, unless you’re willing to join them in a “pity party.” But how to answer honestly and accurately? The first problem is that happiness is not a momentary sensation, but a kind of average of the fluctuating moods we experience over many hours or months. I may have been feeling pretty good this morning—until I opened the MasterCard bill, that is—so what am I really? In one psychological experiment, subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire on “life satisfaction”—but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For some of the subjects, a dime had been left on the copy machine, and these lucky ones reported “substantially” higher levels of happiness than those who had not found a dime, leaving us to wonder what a few pennies, scattered randomly on sidewalks, would do for world happiness. Whenever I’ve sat down to take one of the happiness or life satisfaction tests devised by psychologists, I’ve been baffled by many of the questions. One well-known test wants to know if I’m “pessimistic about the future.” But whose future—my own personal trajectory or the fate of the species? I’m usually feeling pretty confident about my own but scared to death about the fate of humankind on our hot, overcrowded, and increasingly poisoned planet. So I confessed to pessimism—and thereby knocked my happiness score down from a possible 5 to a less-thanjubilant 3.67. Weeks later, when I interviewed the psychologist who had designed this test and told him I found the question confusing, he suggested I undergo “optimism training” to improve my score. Now I’m all for designing social policy to maximize the amount of happiness. I’m just not sure anyone knows what it is or how to reliably measure it. Consider the recent fuss over a study titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” by two professors at the Wharton School, which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972, when the women’s liberation movement

first arose. A number of conservative commentators leaped to the conclusion that we should roll back the gains of the women’s movement and restore the “feminine mystique.” But strangely enough, the study found no differences in happiness between single and married women, working women and homemakers, affluent women and poor women. In fact, the “happiest” women of all turned out to be African Americans, who suffer more poverty, single motherhood, and of course discrimination than their apparently gloomier white sisters. Then there are the philosophical issues, which go back at least to Aristotle. Today’s psychologists usually conflate “happiness” with “life satisfaction,” or contentment. In the widely used “Satisfaction with Life Scale” from the University of Illinois, respondents are asked to agree or disagree with such statements as, “I am satisfied with my life” and “So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.” Well, sadly, I have to disagree: I’m not satisfied with what I’ve accomplished so far in my life largely because it doesn’t include such “important things” as world peace or universal social justice. But does this make me unhappy? Not if happiness involves a deep engagement with the world and its people. Albert Camus concluded his essay on the perpetually unsuccessful Sisyphus by saying, “The struggle itself . . . is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” So one of the things I’m not happy about is my ability to deal with the happiness question in a sound bite. On the one hand I want to say that if happiness is contentment, then it is immoral to be happy in a world filled with so much poverty, suffering, and violence. But on the other hand—the one that is more connected to the id than the superego—I want to say that if happiness is contentment, why settle for that? What about adventure, exhilaration, or creative obsession? In our focus on the nebulous goal of “happiness,” we seem to have forgotten the far more acute and searing possibility of joy. But in my experience, the hedonistic and socially responsible answers ultimately go together. There’s probably no greater adventure, and no better way to boost your own mood, than to work with others to make the world a happier place for everyone. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 11 books, including the National Book Critics’ Circle Award–nominated Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan Books, 2001).

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 35

Happy Together By Bill McKibben

ince I work on a college campus, I have a front row seat to that annual spring rite, the arrival of the reunion classes. About a week after Commencement, the surviving members of the 25th and the 50th and sometimes even the 75th classes arrive, for a round of cocktail parties and lectures and golf tournaments and heavy petting from the development office. But what interests me most is how happy all these returnees seem to be back in the dorm rooms of their youth—how happy their memories of college are. If there were a common sentiment, it would be “those were the best years of my life.” But why? Because of the intellectual stimulation? Perhaps, though I confess I can barely even remember most of the classes I took. Here’s my guess: For an average American, college is the only four years of your life when you live the way most human beings have always lived, in close emotional and physical proximity with a lot of other people. We like it because we’ve more or less evolved to like it. Consider: Since the end of World War II, Americans have devoted themselves assiduously to one task above all others: building bigger houses farther apart from each other. As we’ve sprawled out across the landscape, the chance that we would run into each other on any given day has steadily decreased. It’s a trend reinforced by all the other effects of our access to endless cheap fossil fuel: We don’t get food from our neighbors, we don’t need our neighbors for safety or security. Truth be told, we’re the first of our species who have no practical need of our neighbors for anything. Which may explain why we barely know them. By some accounts, more than half of Americans have no real relationship with the people who live next door. It may also explain something else: why Americans haven’t gotten any happier over the last five decades. Statistically we’ve stayed even at best; the number of Americans who rate themselves as very happy has gone down since the 1950s, even though our standard of living has trebled. If economics worked the way we think it does—if more stuff produced more satisfaction—then we’d be pleased as punch. That we’re not demands some explanation (especially since all that growth has come at tremendous cost to, among other things, the environment—if we’re going to wreck the climate, we should at least get some serious pleasure in return). The data is still murky, but I think it’s increasingly clear what’s happened. The American dream was the

36 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

independence I’ve already described—rattling around in a big house separated from the next one by as broad a swath of grass as you could afford. But that dream doesn’t actually fit with who we are. The average American eats dinner with friends and family half as often as 50 years ago. The average American has half as many friends as someone 50 years ago. That’s what happens when you live an ever-more-privatized life. And it turns out to be a bad bargain—there aren’t enough flat-screen plasmas and beach-villa vacations and all-you-can-eat buffets to make up for the loss of those friends, the loss of those networks, the loss of that community. We are, it’s useful to remind ourselves, socially evolved primates—it wasn’t that long ago that we spent our days crouched on the forest floor grooming each other. It’s no wonder we’re a little out of sorts in our lonesome new world. And it’s no wonder we’re looking for alternatives. For a decade now, the farmers market has been the fastest growing part of our food economy—their numbers have doubled and then doubled again. Partly that’s because the food tastes better. But it’s also because the farmers market is a different social experience from the supermarket. When researchers followed shoppers around the Stop and Shop, they found it an arid experience: Visit the stations of the cross around the store, emerge with the same collection of stuff as last week, maybe discuss that eternal question “credit or debit” with the cashier. That was it. But when they watched shoppers at the farmers market, they found that on average they had 10 times more conversations per visit. Not 10 percent more, 10 times more. The funny part, of course, is that we tell ourselves we’ve invented some chic new thing, when the farmers market is how everyone got their food till 80 years ago, and how 80 percent of the world still does. Of course we like it—we’ve evolved to. And of course we like college. Sometimes it’s a pain in the butt to have noisy parties down the hall or an obnoxious roommate. But the sheer pleasure of always having someone to talk to, play with, hang out with— that’s straight joy. The irony, of course, is that colleges devote themselves to helping us make enough money that we’ll never live that way again. Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is a journalist, environmentalist, and author of 13 books, including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, 2010).

Happiness in Maine By Stephen Dixon

ere’s a memory that’s come back a lot of times. He doesn’t know why, but it’s just stuck. They’re in the minivan. Left Belfast about a half hour before and were heading south on Route 1 toward Bath and 95, which they’d take to the Kennebunkport exit. They’d spend the night at an inn there and next day drive to their apartment in New York and the day after that to Baltimore. He was driving, she was in the passenger seat next to him. The kids and cats were in back. They’d stopped in Belfast for sandwiches and toasted bagels at the food co-op there, and rain forest crunch coffee for him—he always got it when they stopped there; no other place seemed to have it—and carrot juice for her and other kinds of juices for the kids. The van’s windows were open. He doesn’t think the radio was on. They were passing a long lake on the right. It was a beautiful sunny day, temperature in the mid-70s, the air dry. People were diving and jumping off floats in the lake and others farther out were kayaking and canoeing. Lots of people on a sand beach and there was laughing and squealing from the kids in the water and he thinks he even heard splashing. It was a happy lake: That’s what he thought. And no motorboat noises—not even in the distance—so those boats were probably banned on that lake. It was a Saturday. They always left Maine for home on a Saturday. That way, they could drive into New York on Sunday, when traffic would be lighter in the city and there’d be far fewer trucks on the road and it was easier finding a parking spot on their block, or at least it always seemed like that. If they left New York around 10 or 11 Monday morning and took the George Washington Bridge, traffic would also be lighter all the way to Baltimore. They never traveled on the Labor Day weekend. Too much traffic, and most times the kids started school the week before. Anyway, they were driving past the lake, whose name he looked up on a road map but now doesn’t remember, and he had

that “happy” thought and looked at her and everything. She turned to look at him, as if she’d seen from the side he was looking at her or just sensed it, and smiled and seemed happy and content too. This is a good moment for us, he thought. He’ll no doubt forget it, but it’s good to have it now. Then he faced front and concentrated on his driving. He looked at her again soon after they were past the lake. China Lake, was it? No, that’s the one going the other way from Belfast to Augusta. She was looking at him, smiling the way she did before. Did she look away after he’d looked back at the road? he thought. Probably. He just didn’t see her continuing to look and smile at him after he’d stopped looking and smiling at her. No matter. She’s feeling good about me, he thought, and I’m feeling good about her, but especially good. It’s going to be a nice stopover in Kennebunkport. They’ll go to the beach. He and the kids will run around on it and jump in and out of the water and she’ll read. Maybe they’ll all walk out to the end of the breakwater together. When they get back to their room, they’ll shower one at a time and wash the sand off their feet. He’ll have a couple of vodka on the rocks before dinner while he reads yesterday’s Times. She’ll have a cup of tea. They’ll go to a good restaurant within walking distance of the inn. He’ll order a bottle of wine and drink most of it. He’ll say to her when they’re having dessert, “This has been a great day, one of the best, and it isn’t over yet, and I continue to love you more and more each day.” She’ll say to the kids, “Same with me to your father. And although I believe him, I think he’s had a little too much to drink.” Later at night, after the kids are asleep in the other bed, they’ll quietly make love. Stephen Dixon was a longtime professor in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars until his retirement in 2007. This chapter is excerpted from a work in progress called His Wife Leaves Him. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 37

The

GRAHAM窶認inal

38 Johns Hopkins Magazine 窶｢ Fall 2010

Money LessMirth Happiness economist Carol Graham is trying to fathom the sometimes paradoxical relationship of prosperity to happiness. Why does a booming economy not make everybody smile? Should governments track gross national happiness? And whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s up with those happy Afghans? By Dale Keiger Illustration

Noah Woods

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Fall 2010 39

arol Graham’s transition from Dr. Poverty to Dr. Happy began in the late 1990s when something she found in Peru did not make sense. Graham, SAIS ’86, was born in Lima in 1962, and spent so much time there as a child that she sometimes says “we” when speaking of Peruvians. (Her father, George C. Graham, founded a research institute for malnourished infants in Lima while on the faculty of the Bloomberg School of Public Health.) As a development economist at the Brookings Institution, she studied inequality in poor countries. She says, “I was always puzzled by why inequality seemed to create deep unrest and unhappiness in some contexts and not in others. What does it mean to people?” Peru was one locus of her work. In the late 1980s, hyperinflation and a deep recession ravaged the country. From 1988 to 1990, Peru’s gross domestic product fell by about 25 percent; by 1990, poverty affected 54 percent of the population. But four years later, Peruvians had turned their fortunes around and created what was then the world’s fastest-growing economy. Near the end of the 1990s, when Graham reviewed objective economic data, she found the boom still booming sufficiently for Peruvians to have more economic mobility than Americans. Now for the part that didn’t make sense. According to standard economic theory, Peruvians were striving for utility—which is how an economist says “satisfaction gained from consumption”—and achieving it. The country’s soaring GDP translated to more utility and that, said conventional wisdom, should have meant lots of smiling, happy Peruvians. Yet when Graham went to Peru and interviewed people who had been the subjects in the original objective surveys—that is, when she gathered new subjective data simply by asking them if they were happy—Peruvians told a different story. Sure, they said, they were making more money. But when asked to compare their present to their past, more than half of those who had experienced the most upward mobility characterized their situations as either “negative” or “very negative.” Says Graham, “The people who had done the best were saying their situation was bad, or at least half of them were.” Peru seemed chockablock with what Graham calls frustrated achievers. They reported less overall satisfaction, more fear of unemployment, and more concern with relative income differences than before the boom. She and her collaborator, Stefano Pettinato, now a pol-

icy adviser for the United Nations Development Programme, repeated the survey several years in a row and got the same results every year. Says Graham, “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s Peruvians. Maybe we’re just weird.’” But when she and Pettinato surveyed Russians, another people experiencing a rapidly expanding economy and lots of new opportunity, they found the same thing. Many Russians achieving the biggest economic gains reported that their new prosperity had not made them happy. They said they actually felt worse. Graham could not explain this by any conventional economic model, so she began to review the happiness literature. Yes, economics, the “dismal science,” has a happiness literature, produced by an emerging subdiscipline called simply “happiness economics.” Graham found this line of inquiry— which often combines economics with methodologies from other social sciences, especially psychology—to her liking. For the last 10 years she has traveled the world, an economics naturalist studying people in their consumer habitats and mapping the intersection of economic theory and what actually seems to make people happy. She frequently finds paradoxes that belie longheld assumptions of economists. Begin with those more-prosperous-less-happy Russians and Peruvians, for example. The cause of their disgruntlement wasn’t more money—they didn’t object to that—but the rapid and unpredictable change that came with it. “People can be happy in the midst of unpleasant certainty,” Graham says. “Uncertainty is unsettling and that makes people unhappy.” Under the old Soviet system, most Russians were not materially well off, but they could count on tomorrow being pretty much like today. When the Soviet Union collapsed and a new Russian market economy lurched into gear, who knew what tomorrow would be like? For many Russians, more rubles did not soothe their anxiety about this new, disorienting world. Graham, a thin, intense woman who conveys the impression of really, really enjoying her work, can happily reel off a list of similarly unanticipated findings. For example, people in Afghanistan, living in an impoverished, corrupt nation plagued by 30 years of continuous warfare, report levels of happiness higher than the global average. When the Japanese quintupled their income from 1958 to 1986, their happiness declined. The prosperous French seem not much happier than the comparatively poor Guatemalans. Outside Africa, optimism correlates

Yes, the “dismal science” has a

happiness literature, produced by

an emerging

subdiscipline called

simply “happiness economics.”

40 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

with income. Within Africa, the most optimistic people are the poor. Not a few of happiness economists’ findings could fall under the heading Go Figure. The biggest contributors to happiness everywhere, Graham has found, are a stable marriage, good health, and sufficient income. Divorce, instability, and unemployment are bad factors everywhere, especially the last item. “Long-term unemployment seems to be one of the few things that people don’t seem able to adapt back from,” Graham says, adding that this holds true even if they return to their previous income levels. Everywhere Graham has looked, there’s a U-shaped relationship between age and happiness. Personal happiness declines until we reach our 40s, stays steady for a few years, then begins a continual rise as we age. As exemplified by the aforementioned Afghans, people show striking adaptability to bad situations, almost as if humans possess an imperative to find a reason to smile. Graham studied recent changes in American mood as the U.S. economy fell apart. From the onset of the recession in early 2008 to November of that year, average happiness among her respondents fell 11 percent as the Dow Jones average plunged. But once the market stopped falling in March 2009 and uncertainty began to dissipate, Americans started to get happy all over again, even though the economy was no better. By June 2009, they reported being happier than they’d been before the crash. Context matters. Good health makes people happy, but more so if people around them are healthy, too. Crime leads to unhappiness, but less so if crime is prevalent. The effect of inequality on happiness varies according to other contextual factors, such as politics and net worth. For example, Graham says, “Democrats, philosophically, believe the system is stacked against some people, that it’s unfair, and that it needs to be changed. Republicans are more likely to believe that the system is fair and people who work hard merit their just rewards. In the U.S., the only group made unhappy by inequality is left-leaning rich people, because they worry about it. Everybody else still thinks they can be Bill Gates, although our mobility data do not bear that out.”

raham, now a senior fellow holding the Charles Robinson Chair at Brookings (she also teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park), has published two books since data from Peru changed the course of her research. Brookings Institution Press brought out Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies in 2002, and Oxford University Press published Happiness Around the World:

The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires last year. When Graham gave the manuscript of that first book to the then director of economic studies at Brookings, she recalls him saying, “Carol, this is great, but you’ve got to take ‘happiness’ out of the title because nobody is going to take you seriously.” She didn’t do it, and adds, “I didn’t sell too many copies, either.” Now, 10 years later, she routinely fields invitations from economics journals to join their editorial boards just to handle the influx of papers from economists jumping on the happy wagon. A search of the literature using Google Scholar produces the following sampler: “Happiness and Economic Performance” from The Economic Journal; “Crossnational Differences in Happiness” from Social Indicators Research; “Maximizing Happiness?” from German Economic Review; “Climate and Happiness” from Ecological Economics. By way of the National Bureau of Economic Research, there is “Do Cigarette Taxes Make Smokers Happier?” Graham sifts a stack of papers on her desk and pulls out one titled “The Happiness of Economists: Estimating the Causal Effects of Studying Economics on Subjective Well-being”—that is, a study of whether studying economics makes economists happy. Happiness as a subject for economic thinkers has a longer history than the recent flurry of interest suggests. Adam Smith pondered it in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Early in the next century, Jeremy Bentham advocated measuring social action by its ability to provide “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” But over ensuing decades, economists adopted methodology that made economics more quantitative and more invested in a central idea: that humans are Homo economicus, beings who dependably behave as rational actors and make decisions intended to enhance their individual welfare, or in econospeak, to achieve greater utility. To study utility in a rigorous, scientific way, economists developed means of analyzing what they regarded as the most reliable objective data: the statistical record of what people consume, their savings habits, and their participation in the labor market. The objective data were what economists refer to as “revealed preferences”: the daily, rational economic decisions made in the pursuit of happiness. Buy this, don’t buy that, save money, spend money, invest money, all rational choices measurable by analyzing economic statistics. In his book Deep Economy, Bill McKibben describes it this way: “An orthodox economist can tell what makes someone happy by what they do. If they buy a Ford Expedition, then ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes them happy. That’s all you need to know.” Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 41

(An old joke about revealed preferences has two economists watching a hot Porsche roadster go by. “I’d really like one of those,” says the first. “Apparently not,” says his colleague.) Revealed preferences could be trusted, economists believed, because people might lie in response to a survey, but their actions—what they actually do with their paychecks—inevitably revealed the objective truth. And the truth was that rising gross domestic product, rising employment, and rising personal income produce rising happiness. But in the 1960s there were changes afoot as psychology and economics began to ply common turf. Daniel Kahneman, who would win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, was a psychologist who crossed over by comparing cognitive decision-making models to economic models. Another Nobel laureate, Gary Becker, wrote a book in 1967 titled Theory of Crime that examined, among other things, the psychological elements of economic decisions. Yet another Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon, produced the theory of bounded rationality, which argued that the rational actors who were central to the conventional economics model often encountered limits to their ability to make rational choices, and so sometimes made irrational choices. By paying more attention to “expressed preferences”—what people say when asked about their decisions—Kahneman et al. began to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom about Homo economicus. Then came Richard A. Easterlin. Easterlin now is professor of economics at the University of Southern California. In 1974, as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he published a paper titled “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” He had studied happiness surveys conducted in 19 countries, developed and less-developed, after the Second World War, to see what evidence there was of an association between income and happiness. What he found was that within a given country, people with higher incomes were indeed more likely to report being happier than those with lower incomes. No shock there. But when he compared countries, those with higher national income levels paradoxically were not appreciably happier than those with lower. Furthermore, as countries grew materially wealthier, on average their people reported themselves to be no happier. These findings have been grouped under the rubric “the

Easterlin paradox.” Thirty-six years on, economists still debate its validity. But to the extent that you can arbitrarily designate the advent of a new discipline, by his paper Easterlin had launched happiness economics. “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” proved to be about 25 years ahead of its time. In the last 10 years happiness economics has burgeoned. More sophisticated econometric tools have allowed economists to control for more variables and impose more analytical rigor. Growing computational power permits mining ever deeper datasets as organizations like Gallup recruit economists and psychologists to improve their polling. “But there is much more to it than that,” says Andrew J. Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England. “My sense is that happiness economics has caught on because it chimes, deep down, with our subconscious concerns about whether materialism—ever more Lexuses, ever more stuff—is really a rational path for society.” In a way, after years of just sifting data that they believed bespoke happiness, economists began to go into the field and ask, Was it good for you, too? Says Oswald, “Economists were attracted to logical purity, and still are. Some still prefer a beautiful theory to a true one. Asking people things about their feelings was too straightforward to appeal to the last two generations of economists.” Says Easterlin, “Economics in the 20th century was strait-jacketed by the paradigm of behaviorism, which explicitly rejects subjective testimony as relevant to understanding human behavior.” Andrew Clark, research scientist at the Paris School of Economics, adds, “There was great reluctance to believe what people say and a preference for looking at what they do. This was all bound up with the worry that subjective reports were so full of noise as to be useless.” Traditional mistrust of expressed preferences is unfounded, Graham believes. “If you think about it,” she says, “there’s less incentive to lie to a happiness survey than almost anything else. The idea behind revealed preferences was that you can’t trust what people say because there’s no consequence to what they tell you, right? They can say anything. Versus you can trust the data from consumption choices because people have to make a tradeoff within budget constraints. My view is that you still can model economic behavior, but one needs to build in a much larger error term that explains irrational decisions

Besides, Graham

points out, certain

kinds of discontent

can be beneficial. “Do we want

happy peasants, or frustrated

achievers? Do you

know what I mean?”

42 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

and innate character traits.” For example, people driving two hours and spending $15 on gas to save a few bucks on a purchase, and irrational consumer choices driven by addiction, self-control issues, or social norms that the consumer is powerless to influence. Is buying cigarettes really a rational choice for a heavy smoker addicted to nicotine? “Standard revealed practices would say that smokers are smoking by choice,” she says. “They have a budget constraint and they’re choosing to buy cigarettes versus other things. That’s it. That’s the story.” With his finite resources, Homo economicus does what makes him happy. “But then why are smokers significantly less happy in every survey I’ve looked at in Russia, the U.S., everywhere?” If obesity is the result of rational consumption choices, why are the obese also among the unhappy in every country Graham has studied? When a member of India’s untouchable caste elects not to send his daughter to school, is that a perverse rational choice among other options, or something forced on him by a social context that he cannot change? Graham says, “As economics grew more rigorous and mathematical and sought precision in its models, more and more parsimonious concepts of what makes people happy were necessary. That was good from a mathematical modeling standpoint, but in the end imposed much more rationality on the average individual than we actually observe in reality.”

overnments have noticed what happiness economists are up to and have begun considering metrics of national well-being comparable to GDP. Canada now has the Canadian Index of Wellbeing that tracks eight factors, including community vitality, education, environment, and democratic engagement. Bhutan officially measures gross national happiness. In September 2009, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his country planned to begin including happiness and well-being as measures of economic progress. Graham applauds efforts to create national wellbeing indicators that take into account what economists have been learning about human happiness. But she’s skeptical about the prospect of a national happiness policy. She says, “I’m not ready to jump on the Pollyanna bandwagon and say it should be a national policy objective because there are still a lot of unknowns. I worry that if governments get into the business of engineering happiness, they will also be tempted to get into the business of engineering polls that could produce either bad policy outcomes or really manipulate people.” A public “happiness policy” presumably would require the government to define happiness, which would impose that definition on its constituents. And as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, people may report being happy or unhappy in an economist’s survey, but

that does not mean they are all that good at predicting what will make them happy. He wrote, “One conclusion from this research is that people do not know how happy or satisfied they are with their lives in the way they know their height or telephone number.” Besides, Graham points out, certain kinds of discontent can be beneficial: “Do we want happy peasants, or frustrated achievers? Do you know what I mean? The frustrated achievers are making progress happen, and progress in the aggregate makes people’s lives better. It’s great that people can adapt to adversity and remain cheerful. But I think it could result in collective tolerance of a very bad equilibrium. If people in Guatemala are more satisfied with their health care than people in Chile, how are they ever going to make their system better without some rude awakening? Their kids are still condemned to shorter life spans and likely to die of preventable diseases. If people are ‘happy’ because they have no alternative vision, should we just say, ‘Fine, they’re happy, so what?’ I’m not comfortable with that.” Graham prefaces a chapter of Happiness Around the World with an epigram from Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen: “The grumbling rich man may well be less happy than the contented peasant, but he does have a higher standard of living than the peasant.” These days, Graham has so many new avenues to explore, she can sound as if she hardly knows where to go first. Throughout her career, as both a developmental economist and Dr. Happy, Graham has been fascinated by human adaptability. Now she is curious to study places on the globe where some kind of beneficial change has been set in motion, but at the cost of an unsettling near future. “How do we value inter-temporal trade-offs in both health and income arenas?” she says, sounding very much like an economist. “How do we say to somebody, ‘This is going to make you unhappy today, but two years from now, you and your family will be better off?’ People with low prospects for upward mobility or low expectations may be less likely to invest in their and their children’s future, in savings, education, and health.” She’s looking for funds to go back to Afghanistan, to repeat a survey she did there two years ago. She’d like to study migrants: When they first arrive in a new country they are probably unhappy, but how are they five years later? “The coolest thing about my work is how much I have learned about the complexity of human well-being, and the intersect between economic thinking and other disciplines.” She adds, “I see this stuff as a research tool, not as lessons in how to live your life. I don’t want to be in the business of telling people how to be happy.” She smiles when she says it. Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 43

Happy Face, Glad Hand By Benjamin Ginsberg and Alexander Ginsberg

n the coming months, we’ll be seeing a lot of smiling, handshaking politicians asking for our votes. But behind their cheerful public faces, politicians tend to be gloomy individuals. During the course of America’s history, many leading politicians (and even their spouses) have been given to long bouts of severe melancholy and even depression. Well-known cases include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and wife Rachel, William Henry Harrison and wife Anna, Abraham Lincoln and wife Mary Todd, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and wife Ellen, Lyndon Johnson, and a host of governors, senators, and members of the House of Representatives. One reason that politicians are such a morose group is the elusive and ephemeral nature of their goals. Of course, all politicians claim to be motivated by high principles and the desire to serve (and some are), but most are driven by a narcissistic need for affirmation. Many are ready to assert whatever principles seem to be politically useful or to sacrifice principle altogether for another few years in office. Take the recent case of Senator Arlen Specter, who changed parties and ideologies as easily as the rest of us change coats and shoes. Typically, politicians seek affirmation through a never-ending quest for power and status. Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, “A restless desire for power is in all men . . . a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Every year, thousands of individuals compete for local, state, and national political office. Some seem driven to constantly strive for higher and higher office, seemingly equating the desirability of the position with the power its occupant commands. A number of well-known American politicians invested years, even decades, seeking election to the presidency. Men like Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and Albert Gore Jr. devoted large portions of their lives to unsuccessful presidential quests. Others, like Richard Nixon, struggled for years and finally, if temporarily, succeeded. But what drives such individuals to commit themselves to endless meetings, official dinners and deals, fundraising and negotiations, and invasive media scrutiny? According to presidential scholar Richard Shenkman, these aspirants for high office are “frighteningly overambitious, willing to sacrifice their health, family, loyalty, and values as they [seek] to overcome the obstacles to power.” The modern presidential selection system, which virtually requires aspirants to devote years 44 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

to a single-minded quest for office, probably selects for an extraordinary level of ambition and, perhaps, ruthlessness among the major contenders for office. In addition to seeking power over their fellows, many politicians crave the related but not identical goal of status—the esteem of the community or nation. Competition over status is a common theme in the literature of politics. Indeed, one of the oldest literary accounts of a political assassination involved a rivalry over status: “And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering; but unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth. . . . And it came to pass that when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” Shakespeare also saw competition over status as an important force in politics. In Julius Caesar, Cassius seeks to turn Brutus against Caesar, telling him, “‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’: What should be in that ‘Caesar’?/ Why should that name be sounded more than yours? . . ./ Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed/ That he has grown so great?” Brutus, of course, is swayed by Cassius’ appeal to his pride and joins the conspiracy to murder Caesar. Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that the desire for status is among the most powerful human drives. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, for example, writes in his book How the Mind Works, “People everywhere strive for a ghostly substance called authority, cachet, dignity, dominance, eminence, esteem, face, position, preeminence, prestige, rank, regard, repute, respect, standing, stature, or status. People go hungry, risk their lives, and exhaust their wealth in pursuit of bits of ribbon and metal.” Two of the most important forms of status politicians hope to acquire are fame and rank. Fame is public renown and widespread recognition of an individual’s superior endowments and accomplishments. John Adams said, “The desire for the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger.” For many individuals in public life, the desire for fame seems, indeed, to be a potent driving force. One notable example is America’s first president, George Washington. Unlike most men of his era, Washington did not fully believe in the concept of an afterlife. As a result, he was determined to become famous in this life and to live in the memory of succeeding generations. Washington even saw his post-revolutionary retirement as contributing to his subsequent fame. He viewed himself as a latter-day Cincinnatus, trading current power for subsequent fame. John Adams was another prominent member of America’s founding generation who eagerly

sought fame. Adams was jealous of the renown won by men he regarded as his inferiors, particularly George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. In one letter to his friend Benjamin Rush, Adams wrote, “The History of our Revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electric rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington.” Rank refers to the rung on the ladder or place in the pecking order that an individual occupies. Individuals seek political rank for its own sake as well as for the status such rank can confer in the larger society. Of course, societies vary in the extent to which even the most ambitious and talented persons are able to enhance their social and political rank. In societies, however, where mobility is a possibility, talented individuals who began life near the lower rungs of the social ladder are sometimes intensely driven to improve their rank in society through political effort. For example, as a young man, George Washington aspired, without much success, to be accepted into the elite social circles inhabited by his half brother, Lawrence. This was another factor spurring Washington to greater and greater effort. Throughout his life, Washington seemed determined, through military success, marriage, and prodigious political effort, to achieve the rank he desperately desired. Joseph Ellis writes of Washington, “Because he lacked both the presumptive superiority of a British aristocrat and the economic resources of a Tidewater grandee, Washington could only rely on the hard core of his own merit.” Another famous American politician whose original lack of social standing led him to strive for rank was Alexander Hamilton, whose illegitimate birth in the West Indies was often, as he wrote, “the subject of the most humiliating criticism.” Hamilton hoped, however, that his facility with words “would someday free him from his humble berth and place him on a par with the most powerful men of his age.” More recent American politicians driven to prodigious efforts to overcome humble beginnings include Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. And, of course, Lyndon Johnson strove for rank after the failure of his father’s business interests and political career left him feeling deeply humiliated. Power and status are notoriously elusive goals and those who seek them in the political arena are generally doomed to lives of disquiet and unease. In the democracies, at least, political power is inherently evanescent.

After Benjamin Disraeli was elected England’s prime minister he described his achievement as climbing to the top of a “greasy pole.” From the top it became clear that a sudden slide back to the bottom was inevitable. Status, for its part, is always uncertain and ambiguous. Most politicians are only too aware that someone who is famous one day can easily be forgotten the next. One prominent former member of Congress told a Johns Hopkins alumni group that not long after his retirement, a passerby stared at him at the airport and said, “You used to be somebody, right?” No wonder politicians are unhappy. Should we care whether our politicians are happy or not? We might not be concerned with their happiness per se, but as we watch leaders surrender party and principle in a perpetual and inherently futile effort to retain their grip on power and status, their unhappiness becomes ours. And, just as our politicians never will achieve the affirmation they seek, most will forever fail to meet the lofty expectations we have for them. Our politicians are not heroes and sometimes they are not even appropriate role models. In many cases, they are flawed individuals whose underlying narcissism manifests itself in a variety of unsavory ways, including sexual misconduct. Yet, many among us are eager to follow them, to be inspired by them, to “believe” in them, only to be doomed to disappointment. Andrew Young, John Edwards’ former aide who initially claimed paternity of Edwards’ illegitimate daughter, explained in his recent autobiography that he was willing to ruin his own life to protect Edwards because he “believed” so strongly in the politician. Two days before former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, aka Client No. 9, announced his resignation, he held a brief press conference and stated in part, “I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good, and doing what is best.” If only our politicians truly focused on doing what is best rather than climbing the greasy pole they—and we—might be happier.

As we watch leaders surrender party and principle in a perpetual effort to retain their grip on power and status, their unhappiness becomes ours.

Benjamin Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science in the Krieger School. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). His son, Alexander Ginsberg, is an attorney in Washington and a former congressional and White House staffer. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 45

Keeping

All of your patients have an incurable, inevitably fatal disease. Or they are actively dying. Or they are traumatized children. How do you stay compassionate, energized, and even happy when it’s your job to treat medicine’s toughest cases? What keeps you coming to work? By Deborah Rudacille, A&S ’98 (MA)

46 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Illustration

Noah Woods

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 47

ometimes waking life resembles a nightmare. Picture a graduate student walking through a Romanian orphanage that has hundreds of cribs. In each of them are two or three emotionally or physically malnourished infants, many crying or catatonic, with the student slipping from room to room like a ghost. For six hours she just wanders, never encountering another adult, unable to comfort the babies because there are simply too many of them. Half a world away, another young woman steps into a different kind of bad dream. She is 17 years old and training to be a licensed practical nurse. She doesn’t know how to do much, so in the hospice unit to which she has been assigned she mostly talks to her elderly patients about their lives. The next day she comes back eager to continue the conversations, only to find that the patients have died. One right after the other, over and over again. Or every Monday, clinic day, a physician sits across his broad desk from two or three new patients and tells them they have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and what that means—they have a terminal neuromuscular disease that within two years will take from them their ability to walk, to speak, and ultimately to breathe. Some immediately begin to cry, or scream uncontrollably. Others take the news stoically, but the physician knows that at some point, an hour from now, two weeks from now, they are going to absorb the news and fall apart. Such is waking life for many Johns Hopkins health care professionals. These are the doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other caregivers who, day in and day out, treat some of medicine’s most challenging and often tragic cases. They are not unmoved by the pain and grief they encounter in their work, and bearing witness day after day puts them at risk for what psychologists call vicarious traumatization. (Health care workers more likely call it burnout or compassion fatigue.) Research shows that an individual’s susceptibility to vicarious traumatization depends on a host of factors, including personal history, coping strategies, and support network, combined with the type of work they do and the sort of clients they serve. Those who find their calling in these professions stick it out by adopting— consciously or unconsciously—a variety of protective

strategies, and by doing so, manage to maintain an emotional equilibrium. One strategy is to bear in mind that they have the capacity to make an awful situation better. Laura Murray, now an assistant professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, was the young graduate student who found herself all but helpless in the Romanian orphanage shortly after the 1989 fall of the Ceausescu regime. She gets through tough times on the job by reminding herself that she has something to offer—and that the traumatized children she encounters in her work will benefit from her involvement in their lives. She works with children around the world who have experienced severe trauma: sexual abuse, sex trafficking, HIV and AIDS, combined with poverty and other stressors common in lowresource countries. She (along with her Applied Mental Health Research team) has also helped set up counseling programs for torture victims in Iraq, women raped in Congo, and Ugandan youths abducted and forced to fight and/or provide sexual services to soldiers. It’s heavy stuff, she admits. When people at parties ask what she does, she thinks, “Hmm, what do I say here? It’s such a buzz kill.” She says, “Because I’m a clinician, because I’ve treated kids, always in my head is the way you watch kids turn around and improve. We know very effective ways to treat kids who have been through trauma. I’ve seen it and experienced it so much myself that [when I need to] I envision it. That’s one of my real tools when I get into the field or when I’m supervising and I hear these awful stories. I know these people are going to get better if we give them the right treatment.” In public health, feelings of helplessness can be compounded by the fact that clients are dealing with a host of issues beyond the health care professional’s power. “It’s not just the trauma or the HIV deaths in the family, or the poverty,” says Murray. “It’s everything. We’re going in to fix one thing, but we can’t fix the legal system, we can’t change the poverty or so many other factors.” Even with all of her awareness and experience, there have been times, she says, when working with a child, she’s had to “leave the room for 20 seconds to take some deep breaths, to come back in and be effective. It’s tough. It’s really tough.”

“Always in my head is the way

you watch kids

turn around and

improve. We know very effective ways to treat

kids who have been through trauma.”

48 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

o one makes a moral commitment out of a need to cope with an emotionally exhausting environment. But a sense of moral vocation is another source of resilience. Clare Ferrigno was the 17-year-old encountering the realities of hospice care for the first time. Now a nurse practitioner at Johns Hopkins’ Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, she recalls those days. “While all my peers were taking care of the same patients for days on end, I was getting a new patient every day or two because I just couldn’t seem to keep mine alive. After about six weeks I said, ‘Can you please get me off of this unit? Because I am killing Baltimore.’” Nevertheless, she has been working with terminally ill patients ever since she began training as an LPN in 1982. “At that time, hospice was just taking root in the United States,” she says. Though it would take some time for her to understand that she had found her calling, she early on assumed a sometimes-controversial role as an advocate for patients. She challenged the visiting policy of institutions where she worked by calling in family members to sit with dying patients in the middle of the night. She criticized the lack of pain management and symptom control and other policies that she felt harmed patients. As a mission she adopted speaking for those unable to speak for themselves, and she’s been doing it ever since as an RN working in chronic care units, hospice, and home health, and in her current job at the Kimmel Cancer Center. “I truly believe that all the patients we take care of should have some improvement in their quality of life, or why did we bother being part of the process?” she says. “I question everything. I am not satisfied with mediocrity. I do not do well with being told, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’ That is like a red flare in front of my face.” Ferrigno is frustrated by what she sees as society’s preference for ignoring the obvious fact that we are all going to die, some sooner than others. “People are living and dying every day,” she points out. “But we don’t talk about death. It’s as if, if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen.” Health care providers “teach people to walk again, we teach people to use insulin, we talk about bad experiences they go through. Why is it that we can’t talk about death?” She firmly believes that individuals and families have the right to “make memories” when death is imminent. “That memory may be putting lotion on your

hands and giving somebody a massage when they are dying. It might be reading a favorite story. It might be recording your voice for your 2-year-old child who is never going to know what your voice sounded like, to say, ‘You are 2 years old and you did this today and I absolutely adore you. I won’t be there for you but this is my hope for you.’” Admitting that not all dying persons or their families are up to the task, she nonetheless believes that health care providers should give them the opportunity to do so by being purposeful and raising the issue themselves, saying, in effect, “Your disease is here and we’ve been treating it. This is the general trajectory. You might want to start doing these things.” Ferrigno has practiced what she preaches. “Last year my father was dying and my heart was crumbling. Being in the field does not make you immune to such grief,” she says. “I held him as he took his final breaths.”

nother way in which people like Murray, Ferrigno, and Jeffrey Rothstein handle stress is by keeping themselves open to the good in people, which can manifest itself in the worst of circumstances. Rothstein is director of Hopkins’ Robert Packard Center for ALS Research. Delivering the diagnosis of what colloquially is known as Lou Gehrig’s disease is never easy—“I don’t know how to be comfortable in that situation,” he admits—but he describes working with patients and families he admires as one of the most fulfilling aspects of his work. Sometimes, he finds himself exhilarated by the ways that spouses and children come together to support a stricken family member. Even in that traumatic first visit, when he delivers the diagnosis, he knows, he says, which families are going to rise to the challenges they will face and which will not. “Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you pick up all these nuances watching people when they come in. Beyond the medical, it’s how they interact, how they communicate with each other.” He is particularly moved by older couples. “I remember this one couple that was just fantastic. He was an absolutely doting husband, in a good way. Kind, caring, quiet, a strong person. The hard part of that particular case was that he developed his own medical problems, severe cardiac dysfunction, and he did not take care of himself. He wouldn’t. All he cared about was taking care of his wife. That sticks in my mind. How much he Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 49

threw away of himself to take care of her. People are phenomenal in that way.” On the flip side, he sees dysfunctional families. “I think of one fellow that came in and basically no one cared about Dad, and it was a mess. Children, wife. It was a disaster.” Then there are the poignant cases in which the ALS patient has no one. “I had a thirtyish young guy who came in with his girlfriend, a relatively new girlfriend. His mother and father had already died and he was an only child. He’s going to die of this disease and he has no one to support him because the girlfriend was going to leave him, of course.” The young man eventually moved into a nursing home, where he was surrounded by elderly strangers. “That’s sad. That sticks in my mind as being a horrible situation,” Rothstein says. “You are alone. You can’t relate to the people around you. You have no one there for support.” Rothstein says that his research, with its potential to understand the causes and provide treatments for ALS, provides a critical counterbalance to his sometimes emotionally grueling work as a clinician. Like Murray, he sustains himself in part by knowing he can help. “That’s what keeps me going. That’s what provides the backbone for me, the ability to come back and offset something that is essentially a hopeless condition.” In addition to his lab work, Rothstein funds the best researchers in the field through the Packard Center. “I’ve raised $60 million for research,” he says. “We bring together 30 researchers worldwide every month. We demand that they work aggressively on ALS. If they don’t, we take the money back.” Last year, Packard Center investigator Jonathan Glass was approved to run the first FDA-approved trial of stem cells for ALS. Half of the new ALS drugs currently in the pipeline have been developed by Packard Center researchers. In that first difficult session when he must deliver the diagnosis, he can be positive, Rothstein says, by not just delivering the diagnosis but also presenting options like new drugs, new treatments. “It’s the science that allows me to say, ‘Yes, you have ALS and here’s what I have to offer you.’ So my conversation with them is, ‘Here’s what we’re going to try to do for you.’ And patients will more often than not walk away with ‘Gee, there is some hope.’ I like that.”

ew strangers would guess that the vivacious Murray, who bears a startling resemblance to the actress Cameron Diaz, spends her days listen-

50 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

ing to stories that would depress the most hardened cynic. As a clinical psychologist, she is fortunate, she says, in having learned to deal with the potential for vicarious traumatization and self-care strategies as part of her training, something that is not always true of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers. “I think that’s a real advantage versus a lot of other professions. Because we deal by nature with tough situations and depressed clients, part of our training is how you handle that effectively and not take it home so that it doesn’t affect other parts of your life.” Each individual, she says, manifests vicarious traumatization differently. Early on, some people notice physical symptoms. “The first signs are usually very, very minor,” she points out—a tingling in the hands, a twitch in the eye. Alternately, someone may notice one day that they have stopped doing things they once enjoyed. “Maybe they haven’t been to a movie in a long time,” Murray says, “or they’ve stopped exercising, or drastically shifted their eating.” Another red flag is reduced productivity at work. “Paperwork is a big thing,” she says. “They find they just can’t keep up with things.” One of the strategies Murray learned in training and has passed on to her own supervisees is cognitive reprocessing— reframing a distressing situation in a more positive way. It can be applied to everything from getting caught in a traffic jam to dealing with a particularly heartwrenching care situation. “If you are seeing this really depressing case, you may think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do anything,’ and start feeling very helpless and hopeless and sad, and as a result, not be very effective,” she points out. Mentally restructuring the situation to acknowledge the challenges and your own feelings of sadness subtly shifts your emotional state, she says, and restores balance. “You can see this person has a not very great life, but you think, ‘I’m here and we’ve got services, we’re moving in the right direction.’ Now, I feel a little more hopeful. I’m still sad but the whole demeanor and mentality shifts.” Over the past few years, Murray has been pleased to see a greater awareness in public health that researchers and care providers need training and support to manage the emotional burdens of their jobs. “Today, there is more awareness among NGOs that they have to train staff on self-care,” she says. “I’ve seen way too many young kids go out into the field thinking it’s this

glamorous fun thing, and they are not well prepared and not effective on the ground.” They may do things that are problematic for the country and for the project, she says, like engage in excessive drinking or promiscuity. She has found it helpful to have someone on the outside—“not necessarily a work colleague but someone who knows you well, whether a spouse or a best friend”—who will be likely to notice and comment on little changes in her appearance or behavior. “I had a supervisee once who had a friend who said, ‘You don’t do your hair anymore. It’s always back in a bun.’ It was such a small thing but enough of a change that this person noticed.” In fact, the young woman who’d stopped doing her hair was indeed struggling. Her friend’s comments were the trigger she needed to admit the strain she was under and seek help. Recognizing and respecting their own limits is also important to health care providers. Rothstein, for example, used to schedule four new ALS patients on Monday, his clinic day. “I can’t do that anymore,” he admits. He now tries to schedule only two new patients. “The exam is nothing,” he points out. “I typically know within minutes of examining them. It’s the discussion part that is really demanding.” That usually takes hours. “You see the full range of emotions and you just have to let someone go through that. Even though I do this all the time, that’s still a stress for me.” When he gets home on Mondays, Rothstein says, he will walk, run, or ride his bicycle to decompress. Ferrigno has found release in impulsive trips with her children. “Sometimes when my kids were little, in the middle of cleaning the kitchen floor, they’d say, ‘Let’s go to Six Flags.’ The bucket stayed where it was and in 15 minutes the sandwiches were made and the cooler was packed and we were at the gas station getting gas.” She and her husband, a social worker who deals with end-of-life issues too, developed a practice early in their marriage to help deal with the challenges of their emotionally demanding professions. “We made a commitment to each other when we were married that for our own sanity we would take 15 minutes every night together to defuse our day. Even when we had little kids running around, there were days when we literally locked ourselves in the bathroom and put the kids in a safe zone and took our 15 minutes.” Conversation with colleagues can also help providers manage the emotional demands of their work, including strong emotional responses to particular patients and families. “I have a clinic that’s been together a long time,” Rothstein says. “[The staff] are highly experienced and we’ll exchange stories, talk to one another about the things we see. Like, ‘this one is really tough.’ We agree. There are ways in which we work it out.”

Though rarely discussed in the workplace, religious faith provides grounding and support for some. Ferrigno alludes to a time when her life felt so unmanageable that “the only place I could look was up.” Her resulting Christian faith became the core of her selfidentity and informs her work as a nurse dealing with very sick patients. “At the end of the day, I just want to be doing what God has in mind for me. Some folks don’t understand that, and that’s OK,” she says. “But my job is to love whom God puts in front of me.” Rothstein says that he is not religious at all. “I am Jewish, but I haven’t practiced in years.” Though he does not feel an emotional or spiritual need for faith, many of his patients do. When a patient raises the issue, sometimes asking Rothstein bluntly if he believes in God, “I have to sidestep that issue because what I don’t want to do is undermine their relationship with me. They have to trust me, but religion can’t be the basis of that trust.” Instead, he will say, “Clearly, religion is important to you and I think that’s fantastic.” Murray too, finds that the issue of faith often rears its head in her work overseas. “I find it a lot internationally,” she says. “It is helpful to have some kind of comfort dealing with it and talking about it because it comes up so much.” Whether one is religious or not, working with terminally ill people forces care providers to confront their own mortality. “You can’t do this work unless you’ve dealt with your own death issues,” Ferrigno says bluntly. “People who fear their own death cannot help anyone else.” And Rothstein admits that his work with ALS patients has caused him to reflect on his own life. “My wife and I were not fortunate to have kids and I see what that’s like [for patients]. It’s your kids who are going to be there for Mom or Dad. Patients can hire aides, but it’s the loving, caring person who can smooth out the difficult end-of-life issues.” It is impossible for people like Murray, Ferrigno, and Rothstein to build an impenetrable emotional wall separating themselves from the suffering people they encounter daily. All the while, they face the delicate task of creating enough emotional distance to be effective, while remaining emotionally engaged enough to create trust and offer support and healing. That might seem like an impossible balance, but, Ferrigno says, “pain comes in life no matter how we spend our days. As for career stress, what is high stress to one is joy to another.” Science writer Deborah Rudacille is based in New York. Her latest book, Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town (Pantheon), was released last spring. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 51

What Makes YOU Happy?

We asked you, our readers, what makes you happy. And you told us: Children. Puppies. Mozart. Inner peace. Adam Sandler?

Listening to Mozart while reading a book. Going out to dinner, so I don’t have to cook. Snuggling a puppy from my Lab’s new litter. Watching baseball when they have a good hitter. Gathering family for good conversation. Volunteering for the Child Health Foundation. Solving a crossword or creating a rhyme. Hugging my sweetheart any old time. —Jo Sack, wife of R. Bradley Sack, SPH ’68 (ScD)

We are happy for the things we did. We are in our 70s and can no longer do the hiking/biking and sailing on the Chesapeake Bay as we did for so many years. One saying that keeps running through our minds and that keeps us happy is: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Henry, Med ’59, and Sherry Starr

Slight chill in the air Spring Saturday afternoons Johns Hopkins lacrosse! —Evelyn Alexander, A&S ’92

“Summer afternoon. Summer afternoon. The two most beautiful words in the English language,” said Henry James. Looking at fluffy white cumulus clouds on their blue background and searching for pictures in the sky still brings me a childlike joy on a summer afternoon. —Lois Halley, Bus ’92 (MS) 52 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Happiness is sitting in the front of the concert hall hearing and seeing the orchestra playing Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor after hearing it only on the radio since childhood. —Sheila Cohen, A&S ’82

Adam Sandler. Late afternoon naps. Uncontrollable baby belly laughs. Hugs and kisses from loved ones. Tear jerker movies that end happily. Waking up slowly without a pressing need to get going. Reading a good book, by an open window during a rainstorm. Enjoying a performance so much that tears well up in your eyes. —Jennifer Boon, wife of Alexander C. Boon, Engr ’03 (MS)

When my 4-year-old son launches superhero-style onto my stomach from the arm of the couch, I am happy that I have abs to withstand the impact, and I am even happier that his joy can completely distract me from everything else. —Stacy Gwatura, student in the School of Nursing

A huge sandwich with extra cheese. —Alex Wald, A&S ’08

Knowing that there is a God . . . and that He cares about us. —Stuart Fairfax Sands, Bus ’87 (MS)

Playing the fife in Monumental City Ancient Fife and Drum Corps. The corps has taught me to love who you are, even if who you are involves dressing up like General George Washington’s army and blasting tunes on sticks with holes in them. Because that is what I think is awesome! And I’m proud of it. Do what you love. Love what you do. Oh, and drinking water out of coffee mugs makes me happy, too. —Emily Barone, daughter of Michael Barone, assistant professor, School of Medicine

Happiness is . . . Home Big sky, Broad fields, Winding drive, Small house, Blue mountains; Calming view. —Emily Beaton, Engr ’98 (MS)

Strong cup of coffee The promise of a new day Realizing it —Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, student in the Krieger School

Spending time with family and friends makes me happy, as does being out in nature. Increasingly, happiness has more to do with finding contentment than with acquiring something. —Sara Lazar, A&S ’89, a meditation researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital

Some think it’s the cars, new clothing, and stuff which there never seems to be quite enough. While others pursue the adrenaline rush in places exotic, exciting, and lush. But a life full of purpose and meaning each day feeds my happiness needs in the very best way. —Charlotte Eliopoulos, Nurs ’73, SPH ’75 (MS)

Emotions under pressure so great they enter the heart like bullets, like water lying quietly in a pool but leaping from a fire hose with a force that knocks down doors. Macduff trying not to weep for his slaughtered family, a Bernini statue that seems to want to speak, Keats’ odes: These flood me with joy. —David Kirby, A&S ’69 (PhD), co-editor with Barbara Hamby of Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else

Happiness is a tangible peace at the core of the soul: a sense of calm joy. Rumi wrote that a moment of happiness is being “indifferent to idle speculation.” Moments of happiness offer solace in time of hardship and hope in times of sorrow. Happiness comes and goes, like waves of the roughest oceans—unpredictable yet constant. —Wafa Khadraoui, student in the Krieger School and author of the blog “A Moment of Happiness: Wafa explores life as a History of Science and Technology/Neuroscience double major at JHU”

The pure joy of relationships that knew me when. —Sharon Gilchrest O’Neill, mother of 2006 graduate Matthew O’Neill, and author of A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage

Rowing at dusk down Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River Four oarsmen propelling a sleek, fast quad Mimicking every motion of the rower before me While Boathouse Row’s ancient structures shimmer in the setting sun —Steven Asher, A&S ’69

Gratitude is a sine qua non for happiness. I am grateful for my family and all the other wonderful people in my life. I was blessed with devoted parents who provided me with a medical education. As a physician I feel a great deal of happiness when I can relieve my patients’ concerns, anxiety, and help them improve their health. —Richard Ellis, A&S ’57, Med ’61, retired physician who leads talks called “Secrets of Happiness” and is a member of the Fairfield, Connecticut Happiness Club

Maryland summer Sharing a bushel of blues While watching the O’s —Scott Najaka, A&S ’06 (MS)

I am happy walking the Hoh River Trail on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington down to the Pacific Ocean. Especially now that I am six years post heart transplant! —Pamela Magnuson, Nurs ’71

When a student tells me, “I feel like I can do anything.” There is amazing power in that statement! —Tracy Porter, Bus ’91 (MS)

Adequate food, water, shelter, health, and education for myself, my loved ones, and all of humanity. And pinball. —Adam Ruben, A&S ’08 (PhD), author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

Living in Connecticut and reading about Michael Bloomberg at Commencement extolling graduates to have one last Natty Boh at PJ’s Pub before heading off into the real world. It shows that Hopkins folks can have fun and be cool. —Patrick Russell, A&S ’89

Being exceptionally hungry and then getting served delicious Tandoori chicken. —Siddharth Gupta, graduate student in the Whiting School

Not having to turn on the alarm, snuggling before getting out of bed, sleepwarm babies crawling between the sheets, and realizing that everything is going to be OK. —Brandy Monts Winn, graduate student in Advanced Academic Programs

Observing my German iris bud unfold into a thing of beauty. —Charles Nuttall, A&S ’67

Happiness, for me, is adventuring, especially when the outcome of the adventure is unknown or unexpected, such as when exploring earth’s frontiers, researching a scientific mystery, discovering an innovative idea, creating a piece of art, crafting an original story, or sailboat racing in heavy wind! —Elinor F. Downs, Med ’37

I am most happy when my family are happy. Consequently, unhappy when one or more are unhappy. Being happy tends to have its ups and downs. So, I believe being contented, which is a more grounded feeling, is more important. I may, at times, be unhappy, but still contented with how I feel about myself. —Bob Cramer, Engr ’58

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 53

Our Declaration of Happiness B y P. J . O ’ R o u r k e , A & S ’ 7 0 ( M A )

merican exceptionalism annoys the world. Happiness is the source of annoyance. Other countries are built upon battle, blood, nationality, culture, language, and territory. America is the exception. Our foundation is the pursuit of happiness. It appears in the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence—the one novel feature of the document, coming as something of a surprise after the predictable boilerplate calls for Life and Liberty. We can examine mankind’s other covenants, conventions, protocols, compacts, and concordances and not find happiness. No talk of happiness appears in England’s Magna Carta or the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. The constitution that was proposed for the European Union never addressed happiness, although, at 485 pages, it addressed practically everything else including regulatory specifications for “edible meat offal.” In the New Testament happiness is mentioned just seven times and never in a happy context. Jesus is quoted as saying the word “happy” only once, on the occasion of washing his disciples’ feet. We admire the Son of Man, but we sons of a gun who populate America do not pursue our happiness in this manner. The United States is the first—and so far only—among happy nations. Not that Americans are necessarily happy at any given moment. But the Declaration of Independence reads, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” not, “Life, Liberty, and YIPPEE!” Perhaps Jefferson chose to insert “the pursuit of” before “happiness” to remind us of what happens to the poor devils who, in their pursuit of happiness, catch the thing. America’s legion of former minor reality television stars can tell the story. But what’s happiness doing in the Declaration of Independence anyway? The original phrase is “Lives, Liberties, and Estates,” a brief catalog of man’s natural, inherent rights that appears several times in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration he was referring directly to Locke’s statement that men are “willing to joyn in Society . . . for the

mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general name Property.” Every educated person understood the reference and many must have wondered about Jefferson’s substitution of laughter for valuable possessions. It may have been a matter of definition. Locke died in 1704, when “Estates” was still synonymous with land and land was still synonymous with riches. Until Adam Smith succeeded in improving the understanding of economics (if he ever did), land was considered the only ultimate source of profit. The Declaration was written by Jefferson, but it was revised by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson was a man of property in the sense of land and chattel (of animal and other kinds). But Adams, although a farmer, had no Jeffersonian vision of America as a pure, agrarian society. Perhaps this was because Adams, unlike Jefferson, made a living from his farm. Franklin understood that trade, manufacture, and finance would be as significant to America as “real” estate. And Franklin had an interest in a type of ownership different from a land title—what we would call intellectual property. Yet we can understand why, for reasons of tact, the rights in the Declaration of Independence weren’t listed as “Life, Liberty, and Stinking Wealth.” Roger Pilon, constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute, believes that Jefferson also detected a flaw in the logic of Locke’s “unalienable” rights. Property has to be alienable, in a legal sense, or we can’t sell it. If we lived in a country were property was unalienable, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would still have the pocket calculator that they sold to start Apple. When we went to work there’d be nothing on the screen of the computer that wouldn’t exist at the job we wouldn’t have because we’d still be farming the tobacco patch our ancestors bought the last time anybody was allowed to sell anything, in the reign of George III. “Pursuit of Happiness” doesn’t denigrate material wealth, it expands the idea of materialism. America was established as a way for Americans to make and do

America was established as a way for Americans to make and do things. What sort of things Americans make and do is nobody’s business but our own.

54 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

things. What sort of things Americans make and do and whether these things lead to great riches, pious satisfactions, or transitory pleasures is nobody’s business but our own. America’s political institutions are supposed to be the machinery for our making and doing. America is a tool. America is the only place on earth or in history created to be both free and teleological, at liberty and guided by a purpose. And America is guided by a purpose. But we Americans get to individually, personally, separately decide on any purpose that we want. What’s the point of other nations? Conquering the world seems to be a purpose for some—fortunately they never succeed. Maybe nations arise to provide their citizens with mutual protection against external and internal threats. But, if this were the usual case, history would read like an account of the interrelations among the can-

tons of Switzerland. Certain nations seem to exist only to torment their citizens. Other nations are simply… there. Notice how in Paris people go to cafés and just sit around all day being French. This gives Americans the heebie-jeebies. We have to be making and doing. Albeit what we make is often a mess. And what we do is often our undoing. But at least we’re busy. William Blake was an American in spirit, with his happy combination of the naïve, the profound, and the rebellious. Blake said, “The busy bee has not time for sorrow.” We Americans owe our joy to three little words in our Declaration of Independence. This essay is adapted from a chapter of P. J. O’Rourke’s forthcoming book, Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards (Grove/Atlantic), due out this fall.

The Happy Adventurer By Farai Chideya

bet my ancestors never thought meeting the Klan would make one of their descendants happy. But picture this: A blizzard has transformed the parkn-ride lot in Frederick, Maryland, into the interior of a treasured snow globe. The few cars in the lot must have been left the night before. They are covered, gentle snow-capped hills in miniature, except for one vehicle puffing exhaust into the frigid air. As the friend who agreed to drive me and play lookout pulls our car into the lot, three people get out of that lone car. One of them leads a klavern and the other two, a husband and wife, are members. While my friend, a white Southern man, stands beside his car, I go up to them and say hello. How did I get there? I had recently profiled a black musician named Daryl Davis for ABC News. In his book Klan-destine Relationships, Davis details a friendship, such as it was, with a man who heard him in a bar and said he liked the music, then, seeking to get a rise out of Davis, mentioned that he was in the Klan. Davis showed curiosity instead of fear or disgust, and the two began a years-long dialogue. I interviewed Davis’ friend, an Imperial Wizard, for that piece. When, later, I got the idea to interview a Klanswoman for a

magazine article about women in hate movements, I asked the Imperial Wizard to put me in touch with someone. He did, but she and her husband would only meet me out in the open. Then the blizzard happened. What had started out as a meeting in a well-trafficked public space became more beautiful, and potentially more dangerous. You can tell a lot about a person from how her skin has weathered, and this woman’s face was chapped and toughened. Her mouth pinched tight, and she was missing a few teeth. Her husband was wearing a full-body camo jumpsuit and kept patting a pocket area, as if he had a weapon. (I’ll never know.) I didn’t speak to the husband—he was there strictly to protect his wife, as my (unarmed) friend was there to protect me. When the Klanswoman and I spoke, the narrative was achingly simple: They—white people in general, and her family in particular—used to feel safer and be better off financially, and it was blacks and race mixing that had ruined their way of life. She wanted a world without race mixing, where blacks know their place, so her family could do better. Obviously, I did not agree with her thesis, but I related to her sense of how difficult it can be to make Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 55

it in America. My own family had struggled to lift itself from poverty into the professional class. By investing in education, we succeeded—despite discrimination, a lack of resources, and the slings and arrows of common misfortune. My grandfather had dropped out of high school to support his family, and my grandmother put herself through college as an adult with six kids. Two generations later, my cousins and I have graduate degrees and top jobs. My family is this woman’s nightmare. And yet, I had compassion for her. For me, journalism is a mix of adventure sport and philosophy. I constantly seek the center of the human experience by going to its edges. I have walked Los Angeles’ skid row and seen a man smoking crack drop his glass eye on the pavement when startled by police; been on Air Force One with the presidential press pool; spoken with actress Gabrielle Union about the night she was raped in the shoe store she worked in part time during college; spoken with Nelson Mandela at his home in South Africa; and gone out on high-speed chases and border patrols with law enforcement. I also spent a time as a celebrity reporter, chasing stoned rappers and rock musicians into the interview chair before their attentions wandered elsewhere. All of these experiences, in their way, make me happy—because of the rush, and because of the connection they enable me to make with other people. When I think about being a journalist, I think about the power of writing what Washington Post co-owner Phil Graham called “the first rough draft of history.” That was a privilege once reserved for whites, like so many of the fruits of America’s bounty once were. Today, race remains a real struggle in the newsroom. Last year, all three branches of journalism with major tracking metrics—print, radio, and television—saw declines in diversity while America is becoming more diverse. This too is part of my adventure in journalism: to stay employed in a business that is shrinking, and doing so at the expense of people of color. I’ve fought hard to stay in a changing, dwindling, unsparing business that many of my friends have left or been forced out of—not just black or Latino, but white reporters, too, especially those in their 50s and 60s. And indeed, I have found that part of my happiness

is directly challenging the rollbacks in diversity and the downsizing of experienced journalists that typify this era of our business. My first job was at Newsweek, a magazine that may not even exist by the time you read this essay. American newspapers have lost tens of thousands of jobs. The emotional toll of seeing your industry in decline and your friends in pain is rough, even if you don’t lose your own job. Recently I’ve started building a new journalism nonprofit, Pop and Politics, that will produce and market journalism that reports on and analyzes race, diversity, and the changing demographics of America. We are starting with midterm-election specials for public radio. We will be going to the Arizona/Mexico border to do frontline reporting, and visiting several other parts of the country to look at how issues of race, rage, and reconciliation affect us all. Trained as a journalist, I now find myself host, nonprofit manager, and fundraiser. I never, ever thought I would be doing this kind of business development work, but journalism is my passion and my mission, and I’m not giving up. The stories you do as a working journalist are often mazes that lead you back to things you worked on many years ago. So, to circle back to my visit with the Klan, I posted a blog update recently that mentioned the story. Daryl Davis, the musician, read it and got in touch with me. As it turns out, he is no longer friends with an Imperial Wizard—because the man in the robes put them down and left the Klan. Today, Daryl remains friends with an older white man whose mind and life he changed forever. See? News can have a happy ending! I’m a sucker for that. But even when I’m digging up stories of malfeasance, pain, and suffering, at least I’m holding a mirror to the world. And this is what brings me joy— an emotion far deeper than happiness. The happiness is in the adventure. The joy—a deep, spiritual joy—is in knowing that I play a small role in connecting one human to another and, perhaps, even bringing a little extra understanding and compassion to the world.

I have found that part of my happiness is directly challenging the rollbacks in diversity and the downsizing of experienced journalists that typify this era of our business.

56 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Farai Chideya, an alumna of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth, is the author of four books, including The Color of Our Future and the novel Kiss the Sky.

Alumni

News & Notes from our graduates and friends

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Alumni went “back to school” with the Baltimore’s Great Architecture Alumni College. The July weekend excursion included lectures and visits to some of the city’s architectural gems—the George Peabody Library, the B&O Museum and Roundhouse, the Mount Washington Octagon, the Engineers

Club at the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, Homewood Museum, and Evergreen Museum and Library. The tour also visited the Baltimore Basilica (below), where parish administrator Robert Reier, Bus ’98 (MS), led alumni to discover the celestial details of Benjamin Latrobe’s stunning dome.

58 59 60 60 62 65

This Old Lockhouse How Green Is Your Salad? The Power of Percussion Math Wiz Malaria’s Frontline Alumni Notes

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 57

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Stephen Voss

Alumni

C&O Canal Lockhouse 22, built in the 19th century and restored in the 21st, is now open for overnight guests, thanks to the work of volunteer Robert Mertz.

Robert A. Mertz, SAIS ’68, ’75 (PhD)

This Old Lockhouse

unning alongside the Potomac River, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal wends its way from Washington, D.C., to the Appalachian Mountains in Western Maryland. In the late 1800s, this 184-mile manmade waterway served as a conduit for freight boats carrying heavy loads of coal, lumber, and grain. Today it’s the centerpiece of a 19,000-acre national park. Built over uneven terrain, the C&O Canal used 74 locks to lift or lower boats between its different levels. Each lock required a locktender to be on hand around the clock to operate the locks for passing ships. These men lived nearby in company homes, known as lockhouses. After severe flooding damaged the canal in 1924, officials shut down the waterway, and the lockhouses were abandoned. When the National Park Service took over in 1971, the deteriorating buildings stayed empty— that is, until several years ago when the park’s superintendent had an innovative idea: Why not restore the 26 standing lockhouses and rent them out? The public could learn about the history of the canal by bunking in a restored lockhouse, and the National Park Service could bring in money to help with the buildings’ upkeep. Enter Robert Mertz, a Bethesda, Maryland, resident and longtime fan of the canal. “My wife and I have enjoyed using the C&O Canal for biking, canoeing, bird-

58 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

ing, running, hiking, and fishing for the last 40 years,” he says. Now a member of the board of the C&O Canal Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and promoting the park, Mertz became involved in the Canal Quarters project a couple of years ago when he decided to volunteer with the organization. Mertz, a retired financial analyst for the World Bank, first assessed the economic feasibility of the project by looking at tourism along other canal trails, particularly the Erie Canal in New York. When the actual restoration began, Mertz turned to his cousin, retired foreign service officer Tain P. Tompkins, SAIS Bol ’68 (Dipl), SAIS ’68, A&S ’70 (MA), to do some of the plastering and painting. Now he is focused on the interiors. “My job is to figure out period-appropriate furnishings,” says Mertz, who enlists the help of local historians and specialists to research, locate, and purchase everything from furniture to bedding, glasses, dishes, cutlery, and curtains from three distinct time periods. Outfitting the houses with beds presented several challenges. For example, due to space constraints, Mertz had to hunt for trundle beds, designed to pull out from under the traditional rope beds. Nineteenth-century trundle beds, however, are scarce and expensive. So he collaborated with historians from Mount Vernon and local cabinetmakers to build reproductions. Lockhouse 22, near Potomac, Maryland, was renovated to represent a locktender’s life in the 1830s and is

David, A&S ’99, and Leslie Silverglide, Engr ’02

How Green Is Your Salad?

specialties, such as Moroccan-spiced grilled tuna, green papaya, and white-truffle potatoes. “In the past couple of years, a lot of restaurants have jumped on the green bandwagon,” by using organic ingredients, Leslie says. Mixt Greens, however, has made all aspects of its business sustainable, recycling or composting more than 90 percent of its daily waste. Every fork, napkin, and to-go box is made of compostable corn. The kitchens are scrubbed with nontoxic cleaning products; uniforms go to eco-friendly dry cleaners. “Customers know that we’re the real deal,” she adds. David and Leslie met at a party more than a decade ago, when David was a senior at Johns Hopkins University and Leslie a freshman. When she graduated, they traveled together before heading to Oxford, where she studied biodiversity, conservation, and management and he got his MBA. When they returned stateside, they began talking business with Leslie’s brother, Andrew Swallow, who had worked at several major restaurants and was ready to branch out on his own. They opened their first Mixt Greens in San Francisco in April 2006. Since then, David says he has eaten at Mixt Greens just about every day. Amazingly, he’s never made his own salad. “It’s too overwhelming,” he says with a chuckle. Leslie usually starts with one of her brother’s salad creations and then doctors it, swapping the lettuce variety or dressing. Mixt Greens has a new D.C. restaurant opening soon. Although the team recently sold the concept to an international private equity group, David remains involved as a board member and envisions 50 branches in the next five years or so, in every major U.S. market. —Virginia Hughes, A&S ’06 (MA)

In the summer of 2006, Leslie Silverglide was riding her bike around San Francisco’s Financial District when she spotted the perfect location for the second outpost of her restaurant, Mixt Greens. She immediately called her business partners—her then fiancé, David, a businessman, and her brother, Andrew, a chef—and told them to grab the brokers and come down right away. The men were in for a letdown. A month earlier, they had ruled out the same spot because it sat on a dingy side street that played host to some of the neighborhood’s sketchier characters. But Leslie was adamant: She could envision its potential, and convinced them to take it. Today, the alleyway is filled with small outdoor tables, and the restaurant looks like it would fit right in on a quaint corner in Paris. And, as David is proud to note, it brings in more revenue than any of Mixt Greens’ seven other locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. The restaurant transformed the street just as its founders have transformed the “green” food industry. Using local, organic ingredients, the Mixt Greens menu offers a designyour-own salad, with choices ranging from upscale “staples”—hearts Rush hour at Mixt Greens, the eco-conscious make-your-own-salad of palm, edamame—to more exotic chain launched by David and Leslie Silverglide and Leslie’s brother.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 59

PHoto Courtesy of Mixt Greens

the most basic—no heat, no running water, no electricity. “Only those who like a more rustic and adventurous experience stay there,” Mertz says. Further to the north, near Clear Spring, Maryland, Lockhouse 49 re-creates the 1920s, the canal’s heyday. Lockhouse 6, near Washington, D.C., has all the modern conveniences available in the 1950s and tells the story of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas’ fight to protect the canal as a sanctuary for public recreation. Each house sleeps up to eight people and rents for $70 to $100 a night, and the trust hopes to open more lockhouses soon. Unlike visitors at a museum, guests who stay at the lockhouses can interact with their surroundings. “Rather than just walking by cordoned-off rooms, you can actually sit in Naugahyde chairs or sleep on rope beds,” Mertz says. “It’s a totally unique experience that you simply can’t have elsewhere.” —Cassandra Willyard, A&S ’07 (MA)

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Svetoslav R. Stoyanov, Peab ’03, ’05 (GPD)

The Power of Percussion

Steve J. Sherman

hen Svet Stoyanov finished high school in Bulgaria, he resolved to study percussion in the United States. It was a risky idea because if he couldn’t find a conservatory willing to take him, he would be required to serve in the Bulgarian military. Still, he only applied to one school: the Peabody Institute. “I really wanted to study with an amazing teacher in an amazing place,” Stoyanov says. Stoyanov was not only accepted into the Peabody Conservatory, he studied with top percussionist and marimba virtuoso Robert van Sice and earned a bachelor’s degree and a performance diploma. He won the 2003 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, which landed him a solo debut at Carnegie Hall. And last year, he released his first solo album, Percussive Counterpoint, and accepted a teaching position at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. This year,

comfortable tapping out Bach on the marimba as he is beating traditional rhythms on the tapan, a Bulgarian drum with a wooden frame and two heads. Percussive Counterpoint, which came out on the CAG Records label, features some of Stoyanov’s favorite percussion music, including traditional works and less conventional fare, such as a video of Stoyanov performing “Musique de Table,” a theatrical percussion piece. The CD also includes Stoyanov’s transcription of “Electric Counterpoint,” a piece written by Steve Reich for electric guitars that Stoyanov plays on marimba and vibraphone. Stoyanov now divides his time between performing and teaching. As a percussion professor and director of percussion studies at Frost, he leads all the percussion ensembles—there were seven last year—and works with about 10 students one on one. Since Stoyanov took over, the studio has grown dramatically. “Almost everybody we accepted came this year,” he says. Even non-percussionists have asked to join Stoyanov’s ensembles. Stoyanov hopes to do more recording in the near future. In fact, he has an ambitious plan to record everything that has been written for him in the past few years. “I don’t think one CD is enough,” he says. “I think I’ll need two or three.” —CW

Arthur T. Benjamin, Engr ’85 (MSE), ’89 (PhD)

Math Wiz

Svet Stoyanov, behind the beat. he will have one more accolade to add to his CV: the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association’s Outstanding Recent Graduate Award. “I feel that I should be giving an award to Johns Hopkins for what they have done for me,” he says humbly. Not yet 30, Stoyanov has already become an influential percussionist, performing as a soloist with the Chicago, Seattle, and American symphony orchestras and premiering Phillip Glass’ Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. One of only a handful of solo percussion performers, he is as 60 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

t a sold-out show one Saturday morning in June, Arthur Benjamin—aka the Mathemagician— added a surprise guest to the end of his act. Tenyear-old Ethan Brown, wearing a tie for the occasion, timidly took the stage from his seat in the front row. Three months earlier, Ethan had picked up Benjamin’s book, Secrets of Mental Math, and every day after practiced progressively more difficult number tricks. Now, in front of a packed auditorium at a New York City science festival, he was ready to show off his skills. Standing stage left next to an easel, Benjamin asked Ethan to calculate the square of 987. The young protégé rattled off the answer—974,169—even before Benjamin could scribble it down. “I see this, and I just get all choked up,” Benjamin said to the crowd. Benjamin’s act includes no poofs, pyrotechnics, disappearing assistants, or magic wands—all he needs is his brain. He can calculate the square of a five-digit number—a product too large for most pocket calculators to handle—in about 15 seconds. If you tell him your date of birth, he can tell you what day of the week it was. Best of all, at the end, he’ll show you how he does it. He puts on this riveting math show for about 50 groups a year, ranging from business and creative leaders attending prestigious TED conferences to children living in rural Africa. (Offstage, he’s a professor of

Photo courtesy of Harvey Mudd College

Arthur Benjamin works his mathemagic. mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, in California, where his research looks for patterns within the famous Fibonacci sequence. He is also a husband and father of two.) Benjamin was in the eighth grade when he first started doing standard “rabbit in the hat” magic shows at birthday parties. By high school, “The Great Benjamini” was performing all over Cleveland. His father suggested he add his other passion—math tricks—to the act. “I was skeptical, but it turned out to get the best reaction of the show,” Benjamin recalls. As his popularity grew, Benjamin faced a tough decision: Would he be a true magician—keeping all the sneaks to himself—or reveal his techniques to the audience? “I decided that the explanations of how all this works were as interesting as the demonstration itself,” he says. “It’s all about sharing the mathematics and getting people excited about it.” Not surprisingly, Benjamin has much to say about improving basic math education in the United States, including his recommendation that elementary school teachers specialize in math and that students do more mental math, rather than paper-and-pencil exercises. He also argues that statistics replace calculus at the top of the math educational pyramid. “Learning about randomness, risk and reward, statistical significance—it teaches critical thinking skills and has much more applicability in daily life than does calculus,” he says.

Shelf Life Stay Healthy at Every Age: What Your Doctor Wants You to Know, by Shantanu Nundy, Med ’08 (Johns Hopkins University Press) Using the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force as his major source of recommendations, Nundy prescribes healthy practices attuned to one’s years, flags symptoms, and recommends timely screenings and/or counseling for 23 chapters’ worth of medical threats, from aortic aneurysms to tobacco. Indeed, smoking clouds prospects for avoiding most of the maladies included in the book, and alcohol, in excess, also makes the lists in excess. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism, by Julian E. Zelizer, A&S ’94 (MA), ’96 (PhD) (Basic Books) This rigorous political history begins with a poignant encomium to bipartisanship by Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg after WWII: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” It didn’t then, and it hasn’t since, as America evolved into a full-fledged national security state. For all the wrong decisions by both parties made at most of the turns through Korea, the Cold War, Cuba, Africa, and the Middle East, the outcome we now endure seems, roughly, to have been inevitable. Congress produces more checks than balances. Voters are reluctant to have one political party control both branches. The military evolves roles that the Constitution failed to anticipate. After 510 pages, Zelizer ruefully notes that in 2007, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice co-authored a New York Times op-ed titled “Politics Starts at the Water’s Edge.” —Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 He may be a tad biased, given that operations research and discrete mathematics were the topics of his doctoral work at Johns Hopkins University. In his 1989 dissertation, he calculated how to maneuver a set of marbles across a Chinese Checkers board to devise general rules for efficient traveling. On October 7, Benjamin will return to the Homewood campus for a show. (Earlier in the day he will deliver an academic lecture in honor of his former professor, Alan J. Goldman.) If you catch the show, don’t bother asking him how he does the card tricks. “I’d get kicked out of the Magician’s Union,” he says. —VH For a sample pop quiz from the Mathemagician and information on his October 7 Homewood campus appearance, visit magazine.jhu.edu. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 61

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Fighting Malaria on the Frontline

eep in the African bush, malaria has been a tragic part of life for as long as anyone has been counting. So when cases of the mosquito-borne disease at the Macha Mission Hospital in southern Zambia fell by half in 2005, public health researchers were astounded. And when four years later the malaria caseload had dropped by 95 percent? “It’s kind of hard to believe,” says Phil Thuma, HS ’83, a second-generation physician missionary who was 62 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

David Colwell

Alumni

4 years old when his family moved from Pennsylvania to the Macha region, his father charged with building a hospital under the Brethren in Christ Church of North America. Thuma returned to the United States for college and medical training (including a residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where in 1982 he received the Kamsler Award for the outstanding pediatric resident) before following a calling in 1983. Along with his wife, he went back to Macha to continue his parents’ missionary work, treating patients and studying diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis in a small center adjacent to the hospital. His malaria research efforts ramped up in 2003, when Thuma partnered with the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, headquartered within the Bloomberg School of Public Health, to establish the Malaria Institute at Macha. At that time—before the rural population began to use insecticides or bed nets—the hospital admitted 270 children each month for malaria treatment during the disease’s five-month season; since 2008 that number has been less than 10. In June, Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels visited the remote research center, 40 miles from the nearest post office or bank, with a group that included Peter Agre, Med ’74, director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Center, and Michael J. Klag, SPH ’87, dean of the Bloomberg School. Their visit was, in part, a celebration of the Malaria Research Institute’s successes and of the strides that can be made by combining focused philanthropy and research. For Macha, the partnership brings an influx of resources and access to some of the world’s foremost malariologists; for Johns Hopkins University, it creates opportunities for scientists to study malaria in the field and for young researchers to train there. The drastic local decline of the disease can be traced to several factors: access to new drugs; a major drought, which led to a near-vanishing of the most transmissive mosquito breed; and a proactive public health effort to identify and treat asymptomatic carriers in the Batonga community. The Macha institute, set on 16.5 acres adjacent to the 208-bed hospital, includes a research lab and insectary, meeting rooms, and housing for resident scientists and their families. Thuma, who is managing director of the research operation there and holds a faculty appointment at Johns Hopkins University, oversees 60 full-time employees, most of them Zambian nationals. Just a few miles away, the indigenous Batonga farming community still lives much as they have for a century, without electricity or running water and many still under thatched-grass roofs. Most of the 100,000 community members are subsistence farmers, growing maize crops and raising cattle. At Macha, Johns Hopkins researchers collaborate with colleagues from around the world, conducting epidemiological surveys, collecting field samples, and studying how malaria spreads. One extensive and

David Colwell

University president Ronald J. Daniels, in Macha with Phil Thuma, director of the Malaria Institute at Macha, Michael J. Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School, and Michael C. Eicher, the university’s vice president for development and alumni relations. ongoing study, led by environmental surveillance investigator Gregory Glass, a professor in the Bloomberg School, uses GPS to map the community’s homes, waterways, and wetlands. Using an overlay of epidemiological data, researchers are beginning to understand the complex relationship between the ecosystem and malaria. They may possibly even be able to predict when and where a malaria epidemic might appear, with hopeful implications. For example, Glass said, the information could be used to choose locations and times to apply insecticide so that it is most effective and most safe: “Not only can you achieve greater results, but you can limit damage to the environment.” “Our primary interest is, as humanitarians, to do what we can to make people’s lives better, and Macha has been a place for that,” says Agre, a Nobel laureate in chemistry who became the institute’s director in 2008. “The lessons learned at Macha now have to be distilled and refined and, we hope, translated to other places in Africa.” Agre heads up a group that—from East Baltimore to Zambia and beyond—is doing some of the world’s most promising work in the global effort to fight a disease that, each year, infects 253 million people and is responsible for more than 850,000 deaths worldwide. Launched in 2001 with a gift from Michael R. Bloomberg,

Engr ’64, the institute was established to mount a broad program of basic science research to treat and control the disease. Since its inception, other organizations have supported the effort, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Fogarty International Center, both of the National Institutes of Health. In less than a decade, Johns Hopkins researchers have made many breakthroughs, including discovering a virus that could be used to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes, taking early steps to develop a vaccine for humans, and identifying the molecular components that enable the malaria-causing parasite to infect mosquitoes. The Malaria Research Institute has trained more than 100 young scientists, many of whom are emerging as leaders in the field, and has convened annual conferences for malaria researchers from around the world. Back home in Baltimore, Klag reflected on how the visit gave him the opportunity to consider the success— and the promise—of the work under way. “Most of the people who die from malaria are children,” he says. “The partnership between the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute and Macha is producing the knowledge necessary to control and conquer the disease.” —Nora Koch Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 63

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Alumni

News & Notes

1942

Doris K. Avery, Nurs ’42, received the Non-Commissioned Officers Association World War II Veterans Medallion at a ceremony held at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii on February 5. The medal recognized Avery for service as a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps.

1943

Walton E. Stevens, A&S ’43, is the senior member of three generations of Johns Hopkins men, including his son, W. Craig Stevens, A&S ’74, SPH ’77, and grandson, Brendan Grady Stevens, A&S ’13, a member of the Blue Jay men’s lacrosse team.

1947

Laura “Lolly” Brautigam June, Nurs ’47, and her husband, Roy, received the President’s Volunteer Lifetime Service Award for their work at the Palm Springs Air Museum on April 21. They have volunteered at the museum once a week, and each has accrued more than 5,000 volunteer hours.

1948

Richard A. Sindler, A&S ’48, HS ’56, does full-body CT scanning on a part-time basis. He also runs an antique shop, Richard Sindler Fine Art and Antiques, in Baltimore.

1949

Janice Cordray Benario, A&S ’49 (MA), ’52 (PhD), was awarded the Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa from Goucher College in May. Benario is a former officer in Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), a World War II–era U.S. Navy program.

1950

Sidney Offit, A&S ’50, recently published Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

1951

George D. Arnold, Peab ’51, is now conducting the New Ches Kellam Big Band in Baltimore. Nicholas D. Depasquale, Engr ’51, is taking art lessons and working with pastels. He writes that he’s “getting good!”

1953

George Kiorpes, Peab ’53 (TC), ’54 (AD) ,’55, ’56 (MM), recently retired from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, where he taught and performed for 45 years. Prior to that, Kiorpes taught at Greensboro College and the Peabody Preparatory.

1956

Joseph Dukert, SAIS Bol ’56 (Dipl), ’93, ’05 (PhD), writes: “Members of the very first class at the Bologna Center of SAIS (1955–56) will hold a 55th-anniversary reunion in Washington, D.C., October 1–3.” For details contact Dukert at dukert@verizon.net. Norma G. Jackson, Nurs ’56, is retired and spends time traveling, working with her church, and volunteering at a hospital. Mary Leed McIntyre, SAIS ’56, married John R. Parker on January 16 in Chestertown, Maryland.

1957

Lewis Sank, A&S ’57, Med ’61, and his wife enjoyed a trip to Peru with the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association in January. This was their third trip with the Alumni Association’s Alumni Journeys program.

1959

Ken Phifer, SPH ’59 (ScD), writes: “I recently published my memoirs, The First Seventy-Five Years. One of the major sections deals with the wonderful and challenging years as a graduate student and a resident of the Bradford Apartments at 33rd and St. Paul streets.”

1960

Wes Patterson, A&S ’60, has published an ebook titled Wherever You May Be Searching (Smashwords, June 2010).

1961

Clarinda Harriss, A&S ’61 (MA), a poet and English professor at Towson University, was honored in January 2009 with the establishment of the CityLit Project’s Clarinda Harriss Poetry Award. Harriss also received a 2009 Excellence in Teaching award from the University of Maryland.

1962

Martin L. Pall, A&S ’62, writes that he “returned from a speaking tour in Europe, talking about NO/ONOO-cycle mechanism, the probable

from our graduates and friends

disease mechanism for chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, and many other chronic inflammatory diseases.”

1963

Ronald P. Spark, A&S ’63, a Tucson pathologist and clinical associate professor at the University of Arizona School of Medicine, was appointed to the Arizona Tobacco Revenue Use Spending and Tracking (TRUST) board. In addition, Spark received the 2010 Sattenspiel Award given by the Arizona Medical Association.

1964

Howard B. Dickler, A&S ’64, was appointed chief operating officer for the Center of Human Immunology, Autoimmunity and Inflammation of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Carol Hofmann Herr, Nurs ’64, retired from her career as a certified registered nurse anesthetist in 2000 and has been spending time with family and friends and sailing on her boat. Newsmakers Mark Monmonier, A&S ’64, received the Mercator Medal for interShlomo Zvi Sternberg, nationally outstanding contributions to A&S ’53, ’55 (MA), ’56 the advancement of cartography from the German Cartographic Society in (PhD), the George Putnam September 2009.

1965

Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, was elected to the American Philosophical Society on April 24.

Margarte Huff Leiendecker, Nurs ’65, is enjoying her retirement. Her son Drew was promoted to lieutenant colonel and her other son, Jeff, is planning his 2011 wedding. Leroy E. Hood, Med ’64, a Robert Shilkret, A&S ’65, the Norma Cutts Dafoe Professor of Psycholleading scientist in systems ogy at Mount Holyoke College, received biology, biotechnology, im the 2010 Meribeth E. Cameron Award munology, and genomics, was for Faculty Scholarship on February 22. Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., A&S ’65 selected by the Foundation (MA), retired from the University of for the Future as the 2010 Massachusetts Amherst Department of English in May 2009 after 36 years on winner of the Kistler Prize. The prize, which the faculty. comes with a $100,000 cash award, is given E. Michael Spruill, Peab ’65, is an organist at St. Joseph Fullerton Roman for original work in genetics research that Catholic Church and a music teacher at increases understanding of the relationship the church school. between the human genome and society. Leslie P. Weiner, HS ’65, Med ’69 (PGF), is chair of the Peer Review Committee for the State of Connecticut Department of Public Health Stem Cell Research Program.

1966

Raymond “Ray” Copson, A&S ’66, ’71 (PhD), is chairing the Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee for the Yates County Genealogical and Historical Society in the heart of New York’s Finger Lakes region. Susan M. Epstein, Nurs ’66, spent time at Cape Cod last summer with fellow members of the class of 1966. Richard J. Jones, SAIS Bol ’66 (Dipl), SAIS ’66, is retired from teaching mission and world religions at Virginia Theological Seminary and is now the first Al-Alwani Chair in Muslim Christian Dialogue at the Washington Theological Consortium, in Washington, D.C.

1967

Richard L. Clark, Med ’67 (PGF), HS ’71, emeritus professor of radiology at UNC School of Medicine, has been retired from academic radiology for five years, providing Clark with more time for music, travel, and volunteer work. Richard W. Garner, Med ’67, is an orthopedic surgeon at the Anchorage Fracture and Orthopedic Clinic in Alaska. Stephen Kramer, A&S ’67, lives in Israel with his family and writes a weekly opinion column for the Jewish Times of South Jersey. He travels to the East Coast twice a year and meets up with Johns Hopkins friends in New York. William Reznikoff, A&S ’67 (PhD), a senior research scientist since 2007 for the Marine Biological Laboratory, the oldest private marine laboratory in the Americas, was named director of education in March. Reznikoff is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. Louisa Worthington Rogers, A&S ’67 (MLA), and her husband enjoy the trips they frequently take with the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 65

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Christopher Ross, SAIS ’67 (MA), retired from the U.S. Department of State to accept an appointment as personal envoy of the U.N. Secretary General for Western Sahara in January 2009. Linda Emerson Sabin, Nurs ’67, is a professor of nursing and teaches online classes. Sabin also researches and writes articles on the history of nursing.

1968

Newsmaker

James A. Addy, A&S ’68, ’69 (PDF), Ed ’76 (PDF), was elected mayor of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, for his fifth two-year term. Dan Riker, A&S ’68, has published a novel, A Light Not of This World (Create Space, 2010), about nuclear terrorism. Riker, who has been a journalist, a telecommunications executive, and a bookseller, operates a virtual used bookstore called bassetbooks.com. Constance T. Siskowski, Nurs ’68, founder and president of the American Association of Caregiving Youth, received the Civic Ventures 2009 Purpose Prize. In 2009, Siskowski was also elected to the Ashoka Fellowship, sponsored by the global organization that “enables the world’s citizens to think and act as changemakers.”

Samuel J. Palmisano, A&S ’73, was elected to the Ameri can Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies, on May 13. The chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of IBM, Palmisano will be formally inducted into the society at a ceremony on October 9 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1969

A. Everette James, Med ’69 (PGF), SPH ’71, is a doctor, author, and noted collector of American art. He is on the boards of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the Center for Study of the American South, as well as a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution. Sam Oglesby, SAIS Bol ’69 (Dipl), SAIS ’71, has just published his second book, titled Encounters: A Memoir— Relationship Journeys from Around the World (BookSurge, 2010). Eitan D. Schwarz, Med ’69, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, is the author of Kids, Parents, and Technology: An Instruction Guide for Young Families (lulu.com, 2009). Gary Smith, A&S ’69, is semi-retired and living in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, three houses away from Lake Michigan. Smith has two children and three grandchildren.

1970

Wesley “Wes” Fredericks, A&S ’70, is still practicing law in New York and is now an empty nester, since his youngest son, Wesley C. Fredericks III, A&S ’07, has moved out. He enjoyed working on the planning committee for his class’s recent reunion and connecting with old friends. L. Ronald Gilbert, Bus ’70, is retired after selling his business in 2008. He and his family are enjoying many motor home vacations. Michael Ross, A&S ’70, currently works for Paradigm Packaging, a molder of pharmaceutical packaging in New Jersey. Ross and his wife have lived in New Jersey for the past six years following a 23-year sojourn in Cincinnati.

1971

George R. Cotter, A&S ’71 (MS), was honored by the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association Central Maryland Chapter when a scholarship was recently established in his name. The first scholarship was awarded to a senior from Howard High School in Ellicott City, Maryland. Joseph D’Ambrosio, A&S ’71, is the Internal Medicine-Pediatrics and Transitional Program director at the Kalamazoo Center for Medical Studies, Michigan State University.

1972

Glenn M. Grossman, A&S ’72, has been named bar counsel for the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland, effective July 1. Grossman has been with the commission since 1981 and served as deputy bar counsel for the past 13 years. The commission is responsible for investigating complaints against attorneys practicing law in Maryland. Stephen P. Yeagle, A&S ’72, Bus ’74, is chair of the Department of Anesthesia for the Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California.

1973

Cresencio S. Arcos, SAIS ’73, was recently appointed senior adviser at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University. 66 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Robert C. Kellner, A&S ’73, is chair of the employment and labor law department at the Baltimore firm Gordon, Feinblatt. Kellner is also the president of the William H.M. Finney Foundation, the fundraising arm of the Shepherd’s Clinic, which provides comprehensive health care to thousands of uninsured Baltimore residents. Lena Dale (Satorsky) Matthews, A&S ’73 (MA), who lives in Montreal with her husband, published her first book of poems, Wait for the Green Fire (New Orleans Poetry Journal Press, 2010).

1974

Cecile DeSweemer, SPH ’74 (DrPH), who was a faculty member of the Bloomberg School of Public Health in the 1980s, has worked in India for five years and is currently running an NGO in the Congo. Janet H. Schwartz, A&S ’74, writes that her son, Adam Saltz, A&S ’10, just graduated from the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

1975

Tom Connor, A&S ’75, writes that his daughter Elizabeth Connor, A&S ’10, who spent her junior year at Oxford, graduated from the Krieger School in May. Tom Connor works in advertising in New York. Fred H. Gage, A&S ’75 (MS), ’76 (PhD), professor in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego and a professor at the Laboratory of Genetics in the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, was elected to the American Philosophical Society on May 6. Mark Jank, A&S ’75, lives in Ocala, Florida, with his wife and their five children. Juan D. Lora, HS ’75, has retired after 35 years of practicing neurosurgery. After spending some time in Peru as an assistant professor at the Peruvian University and in private practice, Lora spent the majority of his career in Ocala, Florida.

1976

Alan Fink, A&S ’76, is vice president of Baltimore’s ABC Box Company. He and his wife are proud of the many achievements of their three children.

1977

Robert F. Buchanan, A&S ’77, writes that he was recently named the 2010 Graduate Business Professor of the Year by MBA students at the John Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University. Linda H. Collins, SAIS Bol (Dipl) ’77, SAIS ’78, is retired and enjoying living in Orlando, Florida. Andrew “Andy” J. Davis, A&S ’77, has retired after 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Davis recently founded and now manages the Music Empowers Foundation, funding music and education programs in underserved communities. Russell R. DeLuca, A&S ’77, is the chief of medical oncology for the Baltimore Washington Medical Center and president of Chesapeake Oncology-Hematology Associates. He was named a Top Doc of 2009 by What’s Up Annapolis. Arlen Keith Leight, A&S ’77, retired from dentistry six years ago and recently moved his psychotherapy practice to Wilton Manors, Florida.

1978

Ernrique Hernandez, HS ’78, Med ’83 (PGF), was elected to the National Board of Directors of the American Cancer Society.

1979

Stuart Davidson, A&S ’79, a partner with the Philadelphia law firm of Williams & Davidson, was elected chairman of the board of directors of the America Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center in March 2009. Barbara Gittleman, SAIS ’79 (Dipl), A&S ’80, is a grants management specialist for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and lives with her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Rhonda K. Winegarner-Feldman, A&S ’79, is a school counselor for Brattleboro Union High School in Brattleboro, Vermont.

1980

Ellen Feld, A&S ’80 (MA), has published her first children’s book, Paragon and Jubilee (Edgecliff Press, March 2010), illustrated by Peruvian artist Martin Moratillo. David Spivey, A&S ’80, is a senior copywriter for MGH Advertising in Baltimore.

1981

Jack Kushner, HS ’81, has written a new book, When Universities Are Destroyed; How Tulane University and the University of Alabama Rebuilt after Disaster (iUniverse, 2010). Kushner has previously published Cop-

ing Successfully with Changing Tides and Winds; A Neurosurgeon’s Compass (iUniverse, 2010).

1982

Evan Bauman, Engr ’82, who lives in Houston with his family, has begun his latest assignment as global manager for Tech Service Tools and Models in Shell Oil’s Criterion Catalyst and Technologies division. Harindra Joseph S. Fernando, A&S ’82 (MA), ’84 (PhD), was appointed in January as the Wayne and Diana Murdy Professor of Engineering and GeoSciences at the University of Notre Dame.

1983

Alan D. Frankel, A&S ’83 (PhD), director of the HARC Center at the University of California, San Francisco, was elected in May to the American Academy of Microbiology. Constance Soloway, SAIS Bol ’83 (Dipl), SAIS ’85, was named vice president of human resources for Northrop Grumman’s Enterprise Shared Services organization in March. Soloway has been with Northrop Grumman for 25 years. Brenya Twumasi, A&S ’83, is enjoying teaching law and psychology classes in San Antonio, Texas. She is also involved in advocacy and Ghana politics.

1984

Beatrice Li Morris, Nurs ’84, retired from the Baltimore City Health Department in February.

1985

Susan Coventry, A&S ’85, a pediatric pathologist at Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, is excited to announce the publication of her first novel, The Queen’s Daughter (Henry Holt and Company, 2010). Shaival Kapadia, A&S ’85, lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his family and works for a cardiology practice that is integrated with a health system. Stephen M. Levine, A&S ’85, is a full-time litigation partner in a West Los Angeles law firm by day and a magician by night. Known as “Stephen the Spectacular,” Levine, who rediscovered a childhood passion, has been performing magic shows for the last four years at schools, libraries, fairs, and charity events. Lisa Nalven, A&S ’85, has returned to New Jersey, where she is the director of developmental pediatrics at a local hospital. Colin Phoon, A&S ’85, HS ’91, ’93, is in the Pediatric Cardiology Program at NYU School of Medicine. In February, Phoon writes, “I was honored as a ‘Rock Star of Research’ by the American Heart Association, Founders Affiliate.” Gregory M. Wilkins, Engr ’85 (MS), writes, “My son, Logan Staten Wilkins, was born on October 1, 2009. He has an older sister, Tatiana Charity Wilkins, born June 14, 2006.” Clarice Jones Wood, A&S ’85, who was in commercial banking for 24 years, is now an associate treasurer for banking and operations for the District of Columbia.

1987

Michelle Boymann Kravitz, A&S ’87, has been living in Dallas since 2007 and is a pediatrician in a private practice. She and her family have recently traveled to Israel. Edward L. Mohr, SAIS Bol ’87, ’89, was named in May vice president for business development for Henry Schein, a distributor of health care products and services.

1988

Amy Marshall Lambrecht, A&S ’88, and her husband have purchased property outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, which they look forward to using as they head toward retirement.

1989

Jason Klitenic, A&S ’89, is a partner in the law firm of Holland & Knight, working in its Government Contract Enforcement Defense Group. Previously, Klitenic served as deputy general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Philip Kouyoumdjian, A&S ’89, has joined Cozen O’Connor as a member of the New York Downtown office. Kouyoumdjian specializes in commercial litigation, including complex insurance coverage matters, as well as bad faith and punitive damages claims. Karen E. Seiger, SAIS Bol ’89 (Dipl), SAIS ’90, has published Markets of New York City; A Guide to the Best Artisan, Farmer, Food, and Flea Markets (The Little Bookroom, 2010).

1991

Genevieve M. Eichman, Peab ’91, continues to balance teaching flute and playing with the Annapolis Symphony, along with being a mom to her three active boys. I-Chow Joe Hsu, Med ’91, was inducted as a fellow in the American College of Radiology during a convocation ceremony at the annual conference held in May in Washington, D.C. Mark A. Melanson, SPH ’91,’99 (PhD), became the 16th director of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute on April 16. The AFRRI is a leading research institute studying the biological effects of radiation.

1992

Elizabeth Y. Attias, SPH ’92, is president and CEO of Atom Strategic Consulting, a strategic health care marketing and consulting firm located Newsmaker in Randolph, New Jersey. William “Paz” Haynes III, A&S Andrew E. Pevsner, A&S ’92, who married Aubaine M. Woods on April 17, is living in Nashville and is a ’10, who set a Johns Hopkins member of the law firm of Bone McAlrecord in relief appearances lester Norton PLLC. Several other Johns Hopkins alums were in attendance at during the Blue Jays 2010 the wedding. winning baseball season, was Deirdre Wheatley-Liss, A&S ’92, drafted by the Los Angeles of the New Jersey law firm Fein, Such, Kahn & Shepard, P.C., was selected as Dodgers in the 2010 Major League Baseball a 2010 New Jersey Super Lawyer and Draft in June. Pevsner’s 16th-round selection a Rising Star in the areas of business and corporate law, estate planning, and marks the highest a Johns Hopkins player has probate and elder law.

1993

ever been drafted.

Edward Tuvin, Bus ’93 (MBA), received the Washington Metropolitan Area’s SBA District Office’s 2010 Small Business Community Rural Lender of the Year Award on behalf of Capital Bank of Rockville, Maryland. Tuvin is Capital Bank’s vice president of SBA & Commercial Lending.

1995

Asaf Hahami, A&S ’95, was recently named a member of the law firm Cozen O’Connor in May in the business law department of the New York office. He concentrates his practice on mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, venture capital, private equity, securities matters, technology licensing, and related agreements. Dina Durrer Miller, Bus ’95, married Jan Miller on September 24, 2008, in Los Angeles. Rachel Schwartz Smithers, Engr ’95, and her husband, Eric, welcomed their first child, Benjamin, on September 15, 2009.

1996

William E. Colligan, A&S ’96 (MA), recently retired from the U.S. Army after 22 years of service and is now an instructor at the National Defense Intelligence College. Deborah Ricker, SPH ’96 (PhD), was named dean of Academic Services at York College of Pennsylvania, effective July 1. Michael S. Ruth, Engr ’96, a geologist with the Federal Highway Administration, has settled in upstate New York after 12 eventful years in Savannah, Georgia.

1997

Michelle (Snyder) Drager, Bus ’97 (MS), an adjunct instructor in the business department at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, was named adjunct instructor of the year in 2009. She is also president and founder of the Drager Group, a strategic business planning, marketing, and public relations firm she co-owns with her husband, Jim Drager. Dominic Frisina, A&S ’97 (MA), a patent attorney and scientist announces the opening of Dominic Frisina & Associates, a patent trademark and copyright law firm in Akron, Ohio. Aime Poldmai Goad, Engr ’97, and her husband welcomed their new baby girl, Olivia Grace, on January 31.

1998

Howard Steven Friedman, Engr ’98 (MS), Med ’99 (PhD), a statistician and health economist for the United Nations, is writing a regular blog for The Huffington Post.

2000

Katherine Rouse E. David, A&S ’00, and Ryan David, Bus ’09 (MBA), welcomed their first child, Claudia Marie, in December 2009.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 67

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Kanupriva Kumar, A&S ’00, Med ’08, married Ramesh Kasarabada on April 24. Luke A. Tougas, SAIS ’00, joined Consolidated Edison Company of New York as a project manager in the Energy Markets Policy Group.

2001

William Faria, A&S ’01, and Gitanjli “Tanya” Arora, A&S ’98, SPH ’99, were on assignment with Doctors Without Borders in Aweil, in southern Sudan, when they discovered their shared Johns Hopkins connection. Faria was there as a hospital logistic coordinator and Arora as a pediatrician. Jeremy Gorelick, A&S ’01, SAIS Bol ’01 (Dipl), SAIS ’02, and Chantelle Schofield, A&S ’01, were married on April 24 at the Peabody Library in Baltimore. Several Johns Hopkins alumni joined in the celebration. Zenia Yang, Ed ’01 (MS), is the head of school for the Yang Academy, a private day school for grades K-12 in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

2002

Timothy Lloyd Browne, A&S ’02, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 2008 and is currently a surgical resident at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Darryl A. Gomez, Engr ’02 (MS), earned a PhD in systems engineering on January 31 from George Washington University. His disNewsmaker sertation is titled System of Systems Engineering: Prescribing the Technical John E. Osborn, SAIS ’92, Development Effort to Engineer a Conwas confirmed by the U.S. stituent System. Joanne Grossi, SAIS ’02 (MIPP), Senate to serve as a comwas appointed regional director of the missioner on the bipartisan U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Region III, which includes Advisory Commission on the mid-Atlantic states and D.C. Grossi Public Diplomacy, which evalpreviously served as deputy secretary of health and as director of the Office uates the nation’s public diplomacy policies of Women’s Services for the state of and programs. Osborn is also executive vice Pennsylvania. president and general counsel with TexasBrian Smigielski, A&S ’02, received his doctorate in theoretical based US Oncology, Inc., a leading cancer nuclear physics from the University services company. of Washington, Seattle on May 7 and has accepted a post-doc position at the Institute of Physics, National Centre for Theoretical Sciences, within National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan. Franz Wiesbauer, SPH ’02, a fellow at the Medical University of Vienna, announces the launch of his lab’s new echocardiography blog— www.123sonography.com—which regularly posts videos on basic and advanced echo skills.

2004

Jennifer Farrelly, A&S ’04, recently earned an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and has joined Edelman, a global public relations firm, in the Corporate & Financial Communications Practice in New York. Robert W. Ogburn, Bus ’04, is a senior rule of law advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

2005

Gautam Bhatia, A&S ’05, received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of South Alabama College of Medicine in May. Bhatia accepted a residency program in general surgery with the Greenville Hospital System, University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Linda C. Brown, Ed ’05, is director of special education for the York City School District in York, Pennsylvania. Steven Chen, A&S ’05, married fellow Octopode Susie Jang, A&S ’05, in the spring of 2010. The Octopodes is Johns Hopkins University’s oldest a cappella group. Yann Leei Lee, Engr ’05, A&S ’06 (MS), received a Doctor of Medicine degree from University of South Alabama College of Medicine in May. Lee accepted a preliminary year of general surgery with the University of South Alabama Hospital System in Mobile. Katherine Mandel, A&S ’05, is completing requirements for a Master of Architecture degree at the University of Pennsylvania and relocating to Atlanta with her fiancé. Flori Berrocal McClung, SAIS ’05, writes, “I recently led coordination efforts at the U.S. Postal Service for international affairs to help restore postal service to Haiti. I also coordinated donation of postal equipment and vehicles and led efforts to send surplus water and medical supplies to Haiti.” 68 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Yamuna Menon, A&S ’05, was awarded first place in the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute Dukeminier Student Writing Competition. This national award is given to the best law review note on sexual orientation and gender identity law. Dana Morse, Nurs ’05, who recently married and moved from Hawaii back to Washington state, is working at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Victoria E. Rossi, SPH ’05, is a senior HIV treatment officer at John Snow Inc., a public health research and consulting firm, in Arlington, Virginia. Rossi lives in Washington, D.C. Divya Singh, A&S ’05 (MA), ’09 (PhD), is currently working with chip giant Intel in Portland, Oregon, doing process development for manufacturing next-generation chips. He also volunteers locally and online for issues in his home country, India. Joycelyn Tate, SAIS ’05, is the host of “Telecom Talk” on the im4Radio Broadcasting Network. “Telecom Talk” is an Internet radio segment that focuses on technology and telecommunications issues. James Walton, Peab ’05, is the instrumental music teacher at Callaway Elementary School and was named a LEAD teacher for Baltimore City Public Schools. In August 2009 he was appointed music director at St. Rita’s Catholic Church in Dundalk, Maryland.

2006

Tony C. Chang, Engr ’06, received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of South Alabama College of Medicine in May. Chang is set to begin an anesthesiology residency at the University of California Hospital System in San Francisco. Brian Kinsella Jr., A&S ’06, was part of the relief effort in Haiti as of February. He writes: “Capt. Jenna Grassbaugh, A&S ’06 (MA), and I are both serving in separate capacities to support Operation Unified Response. I deployed to Haiti shortly after the earthquake and am currently in country serving as a member of the Joint Logistics Command–Haiti.” Karen M. Lopez, A&S ’06, is a third-year veterinary student at Cornell University. Alfredo Mireles, Nurs ’06, a graduate student in Health Policy at University of California, San Francisco, was nominated as University of California Student Regent for 2011-2012. Alida Alden Wagner, Nurs ’06 (MS), married William Wagner on October 10, 2009, in St. Thomas, USVI.

2007

Melissa Matarese, A&S ’07, will be matriculating in Harvard Business School’s MBA class of 2012 as a Robert S. Kaplan Life Sciences Fellow. Benjamin A. Raymond, A&S ’07, will be entering his third year of medical school in Erie, Pennsylvania, and plans to move to Pittsburgh to do rotations at the UPMC-affiliated hospitals. Glenn M. Small, A&S ’07 (MA), is a manager with Deloitte Consulting LLP in Washington, D.C.

2008

Ashley Ferranti, A&S ’08 (MA), received an MA in teaching from Brown University in May. Ferranti was recently selected for the William J. Clinton Fellowship for Service in India, where she will collaborate with a leading NGO to work on issues pertaining to education reform. Catherine A. (Pevtsova) Hartkorn, A&S ’08, who is married and has a daughter named Juliet, accepted a part-time faculty position at New Mexico State University. Susana Vega, Nurs ’08, celebrated her birthday by hosting an event to raise money for two Baltimore organizations, House of Ruth of Maryland and Adelante Famila.

2009

Zoe Bell, A&S ’09, is a producer for Zynga, a social gaming giant. Susan J. Billet, Nurs ’09, is a Johns Hopkins pediatric gastroenterology/nutrition nurse. Ryan David, Bus ’09 (MBA), and his wife, Katy Rouse David, A&S ’00, welcomed their first child, Claudia Marie David, on December 11, 2009. Benjamin Krause, SAIS ’09, writes: “Catholic Relief Services sent me from Ethiopia to Haiti to help coordinate the relocation, flood mitigation, and many other needs for the 50,000 or so people living in Petionville Club Golf Course.” Molly E. Steele, A&S ’09, works for the Advisory Board Company in Washington, D.C., a research and analytics firm for the health care industry. Rashawna Sydnor, Ed ’09, was accepted into the School of Education at Loyola University.

In memoriam

1930: William S. Miller, Engr ’30, a retired mechanical engineer who worked in the Navy Yard for 30 years, died on March 17 in Pikesville, Maryland, at the age of 101.

1957: Grover M. Hutchins, A&S ’57, Med ’61, died on April 28 while traveling in Africa. Hutchins served as the director of autopsy services at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1976 to 1998.

1935: Bertie Rodgin Cohen, Ed ’35, a civic leader with a passion for volunteering, died April 17 in Charleston, West Virginia.

1958: Herbert S. Denenberg, Bus ’58, a consumer advocate who went on to become a local media legend, died on March 18 in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

1936: Lorraine Diekmann Stanley, Nurs ’36, died in Allentown, New Jersey, on March 18. Stanley served as a nurse during World War II.

1958: Alberta B. Gamble, A&S ’58 (MA), an accomplished singer, sculptor, and ceramist, died March 19 in Baltimore.

1939: Alice Axelby, Nurs ’39, passed away on May 28, 2008.

1959: Murray Wilson, HS ’59, a psychiatrist, artist, and avid journalist, passed away on April 29 in Toronto.

1940: Madeline D. Jenkins Rohlfs, Nurs ’40, died March 24 in Baltimore. Rohlfs worked as a private-duty nurse to a rheumatoid arthritis victim, Floyd B. Odlum, who became a founder of the Arthritis Foundation.

1962: Eldon R. Lucas, A&S ’62 (PhD), of Alameda, California, passed away on March 25.

1941: Walter Miller, A&S ’41, a resident of South Carolina, died on August 11, 2009.

1963: Omar V. Pulliam II, Ed ’63, a retired high school teacher, died April 4 in Towson, Maryland.

1941: Ellis Rivkin, A&S ’41, ’46 (PhD), who died on April 7 in Cincinnati, served for more than a half century as Adolph S. Ochs Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.

1966: Ruth Ryan Hays, Bus ’66, A&S ’70 (MLA), died March 12 in Baltimore. Hays worked for the U.S. Public Health Service and later for Measurement Inc.

1943: Mason Andrews, Med ’43, was recognized posthumously by Eastern Virginia Medical School through the renaming of a main campus building in his honor. Andrews died on October 13, 2006, in Norfolk, Virginia. 1943: Jacob Klein, Engr ’43, ’50 (MSE), who worked on the Manhattan Project, died in Baltimore on September 23, 2009. 1943: Henry M. Seidel, A&S ’43, Med ’46, a former dean of students at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and professor emeritus of pediatrics, passed away on March 24. He spent his entire professional career at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. Seidel was one of the founding editors of the Harriet Lane Handbook, the indispensable reference book for pediatricians for the past 50 years. 1943: John Stearns Thomsen, Engr ’43, A&S ’52 (PhD), a physicist who spent the majority of his career at the Homewood campus, passed away in Baltimore on April 28. 1944: James Robert McVay Jr., Med ’44, of Boca Raton, Florida, passed away on April 17. McVay was chief of surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. 1944: Robert W. Young, Med ’44, an orthopedic surgeon and U.S. Army veteran, passed away on April 14 in Orlando, Florida. 1947: Bernard Lipnick, A&S ’47, a rabbi, educator, and civil rights activist, passed away on April 20 in St. Louis, Missouri. 1947: Wallace L. Salzman, A&S ’47, a veteran and past president of the medical staff at the Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, Illinois, passed away March 18 in Riverwoods, Illinois. 1949: Charles M. Miller, A&S ’49, of Bellaire, Texas, passed away on August 19, 2009. 1950: Shirley F. Sohmer, Nurs ’50, who helped to develop the Johns Hopkins Department of Neurology and Nursing Service, died March 13 in Baltimore. 1951: John “Jack” Hutton Jr., Peab ’51, ’54 (MM), an organist, choirmaster, and teacher, passed away on March 10. 1951: Charles P. Lach, Engr ’51, passed away on April 24 in Lutherville, Maryland. 1952: Francis R. Hama, Engr ’52, of Munich passed away on March 31. 1952: Hannah Mary (Early) Karicofe, A&S ’52 (MEd), died April 25, in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. She taught in Baltimore County until her retirement. 1952: Pearl H. Scholz, HS ’52, a retired child psychiatrist, died March 10 in Baltimore. 1953: Robert Lee Taylor, A&S ’53, a retired bank official, U.S. Army Air Force veteran, and freelance writer, died April 24 in Timonium, Maryland. 1956: Anthony J. Cristoforo, A&S ’56, father of Andrew Cristoforo, A&S ’88, passed away on April 4 in Lumberton, New Jersey. 1957: Lucien Campeau, Med ’57 (PGF), a cardiologist who introduced a technique to lessen the discomfort of cardiac patients, died on March 15 in Montreal.

1969: Wood Coleman Hiatt, Med ’69 (PGF), a noted psychiatrist, died March 25 in Jackson, Mississippi. 1970: Donald P. Panzera, SAIS Bol ’70 (Dipl), the chief of European and Latin American acquisitions at the Library of Congress until his retirement in 2007, died March 22 in Washington, D.C. 1973: Larry Wayne Cox, A&S ’73 (MA), ’76 (MS), who worked for TRW at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, and was an active member of the Great All American Youth Circus, passed away on March 12. 1974: Kenneth A. Freeman, SPH ’74, a former mental health specialist with the Washington, D.C., government, died April 9 in Baltimore. 1976: Patrick A. Coyne, HS ’76, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, died March 21 in Managua, Nicaragua. 1980: Philip G. Koga, Med ’80 (PGF), ’83 (PGF), a molecular biologist and biodefense expert, passed away on May 5 in Churchville, Maryland. 1982: Lydia Nunes Garner, A&S ’82 (MA), ’88 (PhD), an American literature teacher, passed away May 6 in Austin, Texas. 1984: Robert Kay, Engr ’84 (MS), a scientist who retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, died March 18 in Bethesda, Maryland. 1986: Eugene McLean Munnelly, Ed ’86 (MS), founding headmaster of Salisbury School, died in Towson, Maryland, on March 13. 1991: Timothy Allen Rhodes, SAIS Bol ’91 (Dipl), ’92, a lawyer who transitioned to investment banking, passed away on March 19 in New York. 1992: Elliot V. Yasnovsky, A&S ’92, died on March 21 in San Francisco. 1993: Thomas Sean Holland, A&S ’93 (MA), passed away April 5 in Montreal. He was marketing manager of Table and Vine.

Alumni News & Notes Alumni Association President: Gerry Peterson, Nurs ’64 Editors: Nora Koch (koch@jhu.edu), Kirsten Lavin (klavin@jhu.edu) Class Notes Editor: Lisa Belman (magnotes@jhu.edu) Contributing Writer: Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 Contact us at: The JHU Office of Alumni Relations San Martin Center, Second Floor 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2696 410-516-0363/1-800-JHU-JHU1 (5481) alumni@jhu.edu alumni.jhu.edu Please send class notes to magnotes@jhu.edu. By submitting a class note, you give Johns Hopkins University permission to edit and publish your information in Johns Hopkins Magazine and in online publications. The Alumni News & Notes section of Johns Hopkins Magazine is made possible by your annual Alumni Association Membership dues. Annual dues are $50, $25 for classes 2006–2010. Lifetime membership dues are $1,000 or four annual installments of $250 each. For more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu/dues.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010 69

Golomb’s Answers

“Specialty Endings” Solutions

Puzzle on page 15. –ician academician, beautician, biometrician, clinician, diagnostician, dietician, econometrician, electrician, geometrician, logician, magician, mathematician, mechanician, metaphysician, metrician, mortician, obstetrician, optician, patrician, pediatrician, phonetician, physician, politician, pyrotechnician, rhetorician, statistician, tactician, technician, theoretician. (I don’t include Phoenician.) –eer auctioneer, balladeer, buccaneer, cannoneer, caravaneer, charioteer, engineer, fusileer, gadgeteer, marketeer, mountaineer, musketeer, mutineer, pamphleteer, pioneer, privateer, profiteer, puppeteer, racketeer, rocketeer, sloganeer, sonneteer, volunteer.

–ologist anthologist, anthropologist, apologist, archaeologist, Assyriologist, astrologist, bacteriologist, biologist, craniologist, criminologist, cryptologist, cytologist, dermatologist, ecologist, Egyptologist, embryologist, entomologist, etymologist, geologist, gerontologist, graphologist, gynecologist, hematologist, herpetologist, histologist, ichthyologist, ideologist, immunologist, kinesiologist, metagrobologist, meteorologist, metrologist, mixologist, mycologist, myrmecologist, mythologist, neurologist, odontologist, oenologist, oncologist, ophthalmologist, ornithologist, paleontologist, pharmacologist, phonologist, phrenologist, physiologist, proctologist, psychologist, rheologist, Scientologist, semiologist, serologist, Sinologist, Sovietologist, Sumerologist, Syriologist, teratologist, theologist, topologist, typologist, urologist, virolo-

gist, zoologist. (In case you were wondering, a metagrobologist is an expert or specialist in puzzles.) –ier bombardier, brigadier, cashier, cavalier, financier, fusilier, gondolier, grenadier, sommelier. (There are surely more of these.) –alogist From analogy, genealogy, mineralogy, we have analogist, genealogist, mineralogist; but despite mineral/mineralogist, we have criminal/criminologist. Are there other –alogists? Note: Some previous Gambits columns have included –eer words, or –ology words, from different perspectives than the present column.

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H o w To :

Find Serenity T 1

played for the women’s lacrosse team at Johns Hopkins, then spent four years in the Army. She is now the mother of two little girls and a teenage stepson, and an expert in Ashtanga yoga, a vigorous style that focuses not just on poses but on meditation, concentration, breathing, and being a good person. —Catherine Pierre

Simplify. We make to-do lists all day long, but we never make lists of things not to do—the time sappers, the emotion sappers, the things that take away your time and energy. What if you made a list of all you wanted to cut from your life?

Get into the present. Don’t worry about the past, don’t worry about the future. Be in the present at each moment of every day. If you’re at your kid’s soccer game, be at the game, not on your BlackBerry.

You know that little voice in your head that’s constantly telling you negative things about yourself? Tell it to shut up. Give yourself 10 minutes every morning and 10 minutes every night to let your mind be quiet.

72 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Fall 2010

Get to a yoga class. Move. Stretch. Strengthen. Move the toxins out of your body. Unlike other exercises, yoga nurtures, Dasso says. Plus, you have to be in the present to stand on your head.

Wesley Bedrosian

he only place to find serenity is in the moment, says Sara Dasso, Engr ’00, owner of the Two Rivers Yoga studio in New Braunfels, Texas. “You can’t find it in the past, and you can’t wait around for it to happen in the future. Now is the only time there is.” Dasso studied materials science and engineering and

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