Johns Hopkins Magazine, Winter 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins W I NT E R

2009

MA GA Z I N E

Six Johns Hopkins scholars speculate on the promise and the shocks of the future.

Resisting categorization Getting What We Deserve

Health and Medical Care in America Alfred Sommer, M.D., M.H.S.

Former Dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Humorous, sometimes acerbic, and always well informed, Sommer’s thought-provoking book will change the way you look at health care in America. 978-0-8018-9387-2

$16.46 (reg. $21.95) hardcover

Get Smart

The War of 1812 in the Chesapeake

Dining on the B&O

No theater of The War of 1812 suffered more than the Chesapeake Bay region. Featuring a comprehensive list of more than 800 of the war’s historical sites in the region, this book is an indispensable reference to the second great war for independence.

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A Reference Guide to Historic Sites in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia Ralph E. Eshelman, Scott S. Sheads, and Donald R. Hickey

978-0-8018-9235-6

978-0-8018-9376-6

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Turtles

The Animal Answer Guide Whit Gibbons and Judy Greene Two internationally known turtle biologists provide complete answers to the most frequently asked questions about the more than 300 turtles, tortoises, and terrapin species of the world. 9978-0-8018-9350-6

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Good Vibrations The Physics of Music Barry Parker

Parker explains in clear, friendly language the out-of-sight physics responsible for the whole range of noises we call music. 978-0-8018-9264-6

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Recipes and historical photos capture the elegance and charm of the dining car experience. 978-0-8018-9323-0

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Railroads in the American Experience Wrong Place, African A Photographic Journey Wrong Time Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.

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Samantha Heller’s Nutrition Prescription for Boosting Brain Power and Optimizing Total Body Health Samantha Heller, M.S., R.D., C.D.N. “A funny, readable book spiced with great information on what you need to make healthy choices in nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle.” —Edward K. Kasper, M.D., Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age Thomas J. Greco and Karl D. Spence

Trauma and Violence This captivating book takes readers on an in the Lives of illustrated tour of the black railroad experience Young Black Men from slavery to Amtrak. John A. Rich, M.D., 978-0-8018-9162-5 $30.00 (reg. $40.00) hardcover M.P.H. “John Rich joins the ranks of Rachel Carson, Michael Harrington and Ralph Nader for bringing attention to a pervasive social problem with a fresh perspective and warranted urgency.” —Publishers Weekly 978-0-8018-9363-6 $18.71 (reg. $24.95) hardcover

Raise Winning Kids without a Fight The Power of Personal Choice William H. Hughes, M.D.

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foreword by John T. Walkup, M.D. “Dr. Hughes has written a guide for parenting based on a stepby-step progression to behavior change.” —Robert L. Hendren, D.O., President, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 978-0-8018-9340-7 $11.96 (reg. $15.95) paperback

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Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Winter 2009 1

Leader: \ lē-dər \ n. A person who leads.

Alum·ni: \ ə-ləm- nī \ n. pl Individuals who have attended or graduated from a particular university.

Johns Hopkins Alumni Leaders:

\ jahnz hahp’-kihnz ə-ləm-nī lē-dərz \ n. pl . The people who make your Alumni Association an engaging community.

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Johns Hopkins W i nt e r 2009

v o l. 61 n o. 5

MAGAZINE

Features 28

The Accidental Academic By Dale Keiger A Q&A with Ron Daniels, the university’s recently installed president, who envisions a Johns Hopkins that is interdisciplinary, engaged, and open to anyone of merit.

The Long View By Rich Shea The Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Bernard Guyer says that to make American kids healthier, you have to start early—before they are even conceived.

Now What? By Michael Anft We gather together six Johns Hopkins scholars for a spirited conversation about what the future may hold.

Dateline: Liberated Paris By Joseph R.L. Sterne Baltimore Sun reporters were the first Americans to file stories from a liberated Paris. An excerpt from Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II.

Cover illustration by Jon Krause

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 3

Departments 5

Contributors: All Eyes Toward the Future

The Big Question: How Does Curiosity Drive Research?

The Big Picture: The President, by a Stride

Editor’s Note: Boom!

Letters: Food, Bacteria, Greed

Essay: Food Fright

Golomb’s Gambits: Word Expansion

Wholly Hopkins: Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

16 Engineering: Nanoengineering with Legos

17 University: Lloyd Minor named provost

18 Sociology: Questioning the “net black advantage”

19 Environment: The paperless professor’s crusade

22 Education: Virtual environment teaches science

24 Biomedical engineering: The hunt for bad mutations

26 Peabody: A book 50 years in the making

Alumni News & Notes

Golomb’s Solutions

How To: Create a Championship Cross Country Team

55 4 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

C o n t r i b u to r s Vol. 61 No. 5 Winter 2009

Editor: Catherine Pierre Associate Editor: Dale Keiger Senior Writer: Michael Anft Art Director: Shaul Tsemach Design Assistance: Pamela Li Alumni Notes & News: Julie Blanker, Nora Koch, 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 the Johns Hopkins Publishing 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 local advertising: The Gazelle Group, 410-343-3362, gazellegrp@comcast.net POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Johns Hopkins Magazine, 201 N. Charles St., Suite 2500, Baltimore, MD 21201. Copyright ©2009, The Johns Hopkins University.

All Eyes Toward the Future Getting Ahead on Health For his story on the career of Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Bernard Guyer, “The Long View,” freelance writer Rich Shea concentrated on Guyer’s decades-long quest to get prospective mothers thinking about their health very early on. “What interested me most about his work is his belief in what he calls a ‘life-course orientation,’ which runs counter to what we all consider health care,” says Shea. “He’s a big proponent of not just treating illness as it arises—usually, later in life—but finding and eliminating causes of illness that begin pre-conception.” Formerly editor of Teacher magazine, Shea has also written for Bethesda, Edutopia, and Rutgers magazines. Peering into the Darkness To illustrate this issue’s cover, Philadelphia-based artist and teacher Jon Krause had to roll nothing less than “the future” out onto one flat page. “The challenge in the assignment was to distill so many different focal points into one coherent painting,” says Krause, whose work has appeared in Business Week, Forbes, and Time. “In the end, the simplest way to communicate it was to illustrate the headline, along with a graphic play on the question mark with the figure using it as a telescope to look ahead.” Documenting Change During his 12 years at Johns Hopkins, Jay Corey has used videotape to tell emerging stories about surgical techniques, star faculty, and student achievements. As director of video strategies for Johns Hopkins Creative Services, Corey captures those stories for a Web-wide audience. For this issue, Jay provided videography and editing for the roundtable discussion that led to our “Now What?” cover story on the future. “I thought the deans and professors had some fascinating things to say about the cause and effect of government policy and human interaction as they relate to the future,” says Corey. Clips from the conversation can be viewed at magazine.jhu.edu. —MA

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 5

The Big Question

John Davi s

How does curiosity drive research?

“I think of it kind of like surfing. Because when you’re surfing, you’re on a wave, and the wave is constant. Yet what is actually moving you forward is always changing. I started working on telomerase, and we made a fundamental discovery and that was exciting. And then there was a lot of work to do on the biochemistry of the enzyme. Then we got interested in what the enzyme does in human cells, and that took us into an area called cellular senescence. That led to the question, ‘If cellular senescence limits cell division, what about the role of short telomeres in cancer cells, which can grow independent of the cellular senescence phenomenon?’ So I had to learn the whole field of cancer research. Then it turns out there’s another pathway by which telomeres can be maintained, completely in the absence of telomerase! Every few years, I’ve had to learn a whole new body of literature and a whole new subfield within biology. The fields keep changing underneath me. “It takes discipline to not get stuck in your own beliefs—‘this is how I’m thinking about things, and just because that’s how I’m thinking about things, that’s how they are.’ We talk about this all the time when we do group meetings. You don’t do a series of experiments to show something.You do a series of experiments to test something. You’re testing whether something is true, not trying to prove something is true. “A lot has been said about the fact that funding agencies are pushing really hard toward application- and disease-oriented kinds of research. And yet, I have been continuously funded by the NIH for over 27 years. So there is room in the funding agencies for curiosity-driven research, which I think is fortunate.”

Johns Hopkins molecular biology professor Carol Greider’s office door recently bore a sign created by her young daughter: CONGRATS!!! UR THE #1 MOM, BOSS, COLLUEGE [sic] A A A A A N N N N N N N D NOBEL PRIZE AWARD WINNER!! Along with Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School, Greider won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The award recognized their discovery of the enzyme telomerase, which regulates telomeres, the DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that play a vital role in cell division.

—Interview by Dale Keiger

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 7

Will Kirk

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

8 Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Winter 2009

The President, By a Stride

The fit man in the blue shirt, shown here racing across the bricks of the Decker Quad, is Ron Daniels on the morning before his installation as the 14th president of Johns Hopkins University.The occasion was the RD2.5K Presidential Fun Run. An estimated 300 students, faculty, staff, and family members turned out for the event, which was part of a multiday celebration. The run was officially a “noncompetitive jog,” but we can’t help but notice that the man in the gray shirt, Bill Conley, who is dean of enrollment and academic services and a serious runner, is matching the president stride for stride. Daniels later thanked everyone for not passing him. —Dale Keiger

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 9

E d i to r ’s N o te

Boom!

read senior writer Michael Anft’s cover story, “Now What?” (page 40), with special interest. I say “read” rather than “edited” because I’ve spent the last three months on maternity leave. My particular interest in Mike’s story—a roundtable discussion among Johns Hopkins scholars contemplating the future—comes from a new mother’s suddenly profound investment in what lies ahead. I’m on the lookout for good news. And I’m not alone. We’re in the midst of perhaps the biggest baby boom in history. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were more babies born in the United States in 2007 than there were in 1957, the peak of the last baby boom. The economy is in the dumps, reports on the environment are abysmal, the world seems determined to blow itself up—and we’re making babies. What’s up? Well, one sort of practical theory I’ve heard is that in an economic downturn, couples who can’t afford to go out entertain themselves indoors instead. A variation is that those couples are actually seeking solace in sex rather than a good time, but either way, it produces lots and lots of offspring. Another theory is more bleak, proposing that what the human race is doing is akin to a dying oak throwing acorns in a lastditch effort to propagate the species. Yikes. I’m going for something a little brighter because having a baby is all about irrational optimism. We look at our

newborns and see promise, potential, a second chance—we messed up, but they’re going to do better. I like to think I’ve contributed to the next generation of problem solvers. Which is why, while reading “Now What?” I was encouraged not just by the fact that some very smart people are on the case, but that in the midst of their conversation about doom and gloom, mass migration, domestic terrorism, and falling governments, they so often return to the themes of hope, innovation, education, and favoring civic-mindedness over self-interest. If the academics are optimistic, maybe we’ve got a chance.

aving made it back to work just in time to pen this editor’s note, I hope you’ll indulge me as I use the space to express my gratitude to two extraordinary groups of people: First there are the doctors and nurses at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center who delivered my beautiful, healthy daughter. Then, of course, there’s the magazine staff, led this issue by associate editor Dale Keiger. With help from consulting editor Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, not only did they put together a great issue, they made it possible for me to enjoy my leave without worry and to focus all of my attention on my new baby at home. Many, many thanks to all.

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L e t te r s Food, Bacteria, Greed Timely research The article by Dale Keiger regarding the research of Ellen Silbergeld [“Farmacology,” June 2009] was interesting, informative, and timely. The emergence of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens is well recognized as a major cause of morbidity and mortality among hospitalized patients in the United States and elsewhere. The health care community is working at many levels to decrease the unnecessary use of antibiotics and to develop antimicrobial stewardship programs to optimize their use when clinically indicated, in an effort to decrease the emergence of resistant bacteria. This article emphasizes the point that these bacteria are no longer confined to the hospital setting and are now widespread in the community. While one can debate the genetic and other distinctions between “community acquired” and “health care acquired” bacteria such as MRSA, it is difficult to avoid the author’s conclusion that the overuse of non-therapeutic doses of antibiotics as described is a huge potential problem. Absent a paradigm shift in consumer food consumption patterns, confinement feedlots will likely remain a part of our food-production system for some time. Working with agribusiness and the farming community to find alternatives, based on sound science and public policy, to this misuse of antibiotics is a public health imperative. Douglas Johnstone, MD, JD Medical Director for Quality and Patient Safety St. Francis Hospital Beech Grove, Indiana The price of greed The article [“Farmacology”] demonstrates that Big Ag’s message—like Big Oil’s disinformation on global warming and Big Insurance’s distortion of the issues surrounding health care and Big Finance’s incessant scamming of the public with shell games and Ponzi schemes and Big Tobacco’s systematic

lies about the health risks of its products—points us to a perverse version of the good life, as conceived and offered up by the oligarchs who run things in the United States (our political and business leaders). The Founding Fathers would be astonished that their descendants have managed to thoroughly corrupt the institutions of our government and society with the ethic that GREED IS GOOD and the idiotic notion that MONEY = SPEECH. Believing we can share in the wealth the oligarchs accumulate at our expense, we common folk have sold out, trading principles for stuff, and we have thereby encouraged the blossoming of the oligarchic power that has produced a mountain of public debt and dysfunctional government. Thanks for the timely and depressing article. Bill McCauley Auburn, Washington Questionable hires I read that two members of the failed Bush administration, Hank Paulson and Eliot Cohen, are joining the SAIS faculty [“Paulson now a SAIS fellow,” April 2009]. Who next—Don Rumsfeld to lecture on how to invade other countries? SAIS, and by extension Hopkins, is in danger of damaging its reputation if it continues to add such faculty. Bill Schenck, A&S ’67 Falls Church, Virginia Editor’s note: Eliot A. Cohen has been on the faculty of the Nitze School of

Advanced International Studies since 1990. He is currently the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies. What’s in a word? Bravo to Dr. Golomb for his “Word Shortenings” puzzle [April 2009]. However, I was surprised that the puzzle omitted a primarily British word for “line” that can lose an astonishing 80 percent of its letters and still retain its tonal value. I also note that Dr. Golomb has mentioned a popular condiment named for a town in the West Midlands of England. However, he did not mention two other English towns, one in the East Midlands and another in the South West. When spelled phonetically, the first reduces length by two-thirds, the second by 70 percent. What are the names of these two towns? Henry Baker A&S ’98, SAIS ’07 Louisville, Kentucky

Golomb responds: The familiar British word for “line” is of course “queue,” which has the same pronunciation as the name of its first letter, Q. However, I don’t consider the names of letters or symbols as words. Thus, aitch is pronounced like the name of its last letter, H, also for an 80 percent reduction, and double-u is shortened even more to W. (Note how much shorter 777 is, with three characters, than seven hundred

We get the word out.

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seventy-seven, with 24 characters, not even counting the hyphen and the spaces!) Lots of place names, especially in the United Kingdom or its former colonies, can be spelled phonetically with fewer letters. We save three letters going from Bournemouth to bornmuth or from Warwickshire to woriksher, and five letters going from Gloucestershire to glostasher. (The British already write Lancashire instead of Lancastershire.) French names can also be shortened frequently, as from Marseille to marsay. (Some notoriously long Welsh place names can also be shortened significantly.) However, I was only willing to include proper nouns that, even if still capitalized, had acquired commonnoun status, e.g., as comestibles (the way Gouda is a cheese and Bordeaux is a wine) or as apparel (as Cardigan is a sweater and Homburg is a hat). Thus, I was willing to include Worcestershire as a sauce rather than as an English county. Elastic time I’m always pleased when the magazine arrives and today, September 10, 2009, it arrived. I retired to read the fine article “Too Much (Bad) Information About Science” [Fall 2009] and was diverted to “Quote, unquote” on page 26. “Dad, you need to come here right now,” caught my eye and I smiled at the size of the fee assessed for the [phantom credit card] overdraft. Then I looked at the attribution. It was quoted from The New York Times of 09.22.09. My question is this: Is the quote a prediction? Penny Elliston, SPH ’74 (MSc) Albuquerque, New Mexico Editor’s note: Well, not a prediction, exactly, but rather what is known in professional publishing as a mistake, a flub, a gaffe. The quoted article actually appeared in the Times on July 22, 2009. Reading list Re: “The Autodidact Course Catalog” [Fall 2009]: What? No reading list for art? My students at Johns Hopkins University’s Osher Institute for Life12 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

long Learning would be dismayed! I therefore offer the following: Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (Yale University Press, 1979). An oldie but a goodie that examines the way we are accustomed to thinking about artists. John Anderson, Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection (W.W. Norton, 2003). People often think more about who owns the art than the art itself. One of the supreme collections of modernism in the world and it has mostly been a pawn in power struggles. Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (William Morrow, 1991). Until recently, artists and scientists were just coworkers in the arena of genius. Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (Scribner, 1999). Beauty, reality and the American way. Of course, I could go on and on, but couldn’t we all. Ellen B. Cutler Lecturer, JHU Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning Aberdeen, Maryland Terrorist nation The letter “Indecent Praise” [Fall 2009] attacks writer Trita Parsi’s common-sense proposal for dealing with the Iran-Israel conflict. Iran has not attacked another country in centuries, has no nuclear weapons program, has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has never been in violation of it. Meanwhile, Israel has twice invaded Lebanon, has bombed Syria, and continues to brutally occupy and oppress millions of Palestinians while stealing their land and water. Also, Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and has refused to sign the treaty. Based on their actions rather than Zionist propaganda, it is clear that Israel is the terrorist nation in the Middle East and not Iran. The United

States should be dialoguing and trading with Iran, who is no threat to our national interest. We should also end our support of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, the root cause of the violence in the region. Ray Gordon, A&S ’66 Bel Air, Maryland Book recommendation In her article in the Fall issue, Sarah Richardson doesn’t mention Nelson Peery [“Finding Her Grandfathers, Through Books,” Fall 2009]. If she is not familiar with him, she might be interested in his two-volume autobiography: Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary and Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary, 1946–1968. Mr. Peery relates his experiences as an African American in the U. S. Army in World War II. He was trained at bases in the South and fought in the Pacific. As you might guess from the titles of his books, he was radicalized by his experiences and continued as a Communist after the war, since in his experience the Communists were the only group who supported the African– American struggle for equality. Michael Anderson, A&S ’69 (PhD) Bellevue, Washington Attribution Thank you very much for the Fall 2009 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine. I was particularly taken by the back-to-back articles on malaria research [“The Forever Enemy”] and on Basil Gildersleeve, the pioneering classicist [“To Understand Ourselves”]. “The Forever Enemy” was particularly enlightening because it gave an excellent brief history of modern attempts to combat the disease. Professor Gildersleeve would have approved of such contextual work, for “not to see a thing in its connections is not to see it at all.” Yet I could not help but notice something in the article that would have annoyed Professor Gildersleeve—a misattributed quote from a classic text. Charles

Dickens may have said “the poor will always be with us,” but he would have been quoting the words of Jesus, as reported in the gospels of Matthew (26:11), Mark (14:7), and John (12:8). So much for a laudable attempt, in the words of Gildersleeve, to “make our own literature live through allusion.” Joel Carpenter, A&S ’84 (PhD) Grand Rapids, Michigan

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Enjoy fixed payments for life. Name that pest I do believe the mosquito pictured in the fall edition of the magazine [“The Forever Enemy,” Fall 2009] is a culicine mosquito (genus Culex) and not a member of the Anopheles genus. In Anopheles mosquitoes, the head, thorax, and abdomen are in a “straight line.” The beastie pictured on page 40 has her head bent forward—typical of the culicine tribe. John E. Eisenlohr Dallas, Texas Editor’s note: Our eagle-eyed letter writer is correct. The insect pictured is, indeed, a culicine mosquito of the genus Culex, and not Anopheles—the type that spreads malaria. This would no doubt be good news to the owner of the human arm that also appears in the photograph. Decoding construction practices Your article on hurricane damage [“Better Design Could Lessen Disasters,” June 2009] quite naturally features the engineering essentials for survival of buildings in hurricanes; however, it omits the single most important element in hurricane-resistant design: the architect. My experience spans 40 years of the practice of architecture in Florida, though it has extended from Key West to Massachusetts and west to Pensacola. From Donna in 1959, Andre in 1992, Eloise in 1975, Frederick in 1979, and Juan in 1989, we have not lost a single structure, to my knowledge, though one church in Pensacola did suffer some damage in 1985. The majority of our

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Essay

Food Fright

ould you eat at a place called The Frog and Peach? Probably not. That was the point of a classic bit of British comedy, viewable once again on the Internet. In it, a gruff and daft Peter Cook attempts to convince a skeptical Dudley Moore that the world needs such a restaurant, a place where a young couple hungry for frog and peach could go for an inexpensive romantic dinner. By his own admission, none did. The combination of frogs and peaches is just not to everyone’s taste, but neither is British comedy. Even so, maybe Cook had a point: There is at least one U.S. restaurant by that name. It’s in New Jersey. That sketch came to mind recently in an odd way, via an email exchange about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the character Long John Silver. It was a reminder that I’ve never figured out why a seafood restaurant chain came to be named after him. Like The Frog and Peach, the phrase “Long John Silver” does not evoke romantic dining, let alone anything family friendly. Fried chicken from a Kentucky Colonel I could understand—he had people fry it for him. But fish-andchips from a frightening, treacherous pirate with one leg and a parrot perched on his shoulder? I don’t think so. You don’t want a parrot or a pirate in the kitchen. Other restaurants raise similar qualms. Clint Eastwood’s Hog’s Breath Inn still flourishes in Carmel, California, but the name doesn’t stimulate the palate in positive ways. Not much about a pig smells good until it’s on the table. I also don’t understand the appeal of imagining Dirty Harry or a psychopathic cowboy with no name in the kitchen. There are, however, Dirty Harry items on the restaurant’s menu, but it is hard to imagine the character we know and love from the movies savoring a namesake dinner of chopped sirloin with wild mushrooms, horseradish, and whole-grained mustard sauce, and garlic smashed potatoes. Unless he killed the critter and smashed the potatoes himself. Long John Silver and Dirty Harry aren’t the only scary front people for restaurants. As a child I was dis14 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

concerted by the Bob’s Big Boy chain’s pudgy, goofylooking logo. That’s what I was trying not to be. Then there is the scariest character of them all: the hamburger chain Wendy’s cute little girl, with her red hair in pigtails. At that age she might eat a burger. Give her a couple of years and she’ll be an adolescent, eyerolling, tofu-nibbling, soy milk–sipping vegan. When forced to dine with carnivores, her mealtime conversation will link meat and murder, and cows with methane gas and global warming. By the time dessert arrives, the last thing the carnivores will long for is a nice, juicy hamburger. At the other end of the scale, among the most distinguished American restaurants is The French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley. Do you really want to spend a lot of money to eat among dirty clothes? If so, consider the spin-off possibilities: The Chinese Laundry (Asian cuisine), The Hand Laundry (local, natural, and healthy cuisine), and The Money Laundry (Mafia cuisine, and back to New Jersey). The notion of a My Laundry restaurant is too gross to consider. You don’t have to look to national chains or California enclaves of preciousness to find restaurant names and namesakes whose stomach appeal is dubious. Run your own test and check out your local telephone directory. Here is an annotated sample from Baltimore’s: Soups on Baltimore (punctuation might make that one more appealing). The Ugly Muffin, Bare Bones Restaurant, and Grind on Café keep expectations low. What about the Yeti Restaurant and Carry Out? The Abominable Snow Man in the kitchen is not much better than having Long John Silver and Dirty Harry there. It may be a canny assessment of the market that led a cardiovascular medical practice to place three ads on Baltimore’s restaurant yellow pages. Recent bestsellers remind us that it is a good idea to think deeply about what we eat. Maybe it’s a good idea not to think deeply about where we eat. Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins University professor.

Wally Neibart

B y “ G u i d o Ve l o c e ”

Golomb’s Gambits TM

Word Expansion By Solomon Golomb ’51

A. It is often easy to add a letter inside a short word to form a very different new word. Thus CAT can be lengthened to CHAT or CART or CAST, etc. There are fewer choices, and often none at all, for lengthening a long word. In the following, you get a clue for the shorter word, the letter to be inserted, and a clue for the longer word. The shorter words gradually increase in length from six to 10 letters as you proceed. See how many you can discover.

B. The same word can be tacked on to the end of each word in each of the following lists to form very different new words. The added word is different for each list. Find the words to be adjoined. 1. HE, IMP, RAMP, REST.

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1. Add C to “defective” to get a “mental capability.” 2. Add R to “on a current subject” to get “like a hot region.” 3. Add L to “looking intently” to get a type of “bird.”

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5. Add R to a “male gland” to get “lying horizontally.”

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8. Add E to a “military rank” to get “having a physical body.”

(Solutions on page 67)

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7. Add L to a “runs aground” to get a type of “bottom fish.”

4. CAST, GENE, MODE, PI.

year after year. Your generous support excellence that has become a hallmark 6. Add C to a “supplement” to get “causing dependence.”

3. COOPER, DESIGN, LITER, PRIM.

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possible for us to rank among the 4. Add L to an “outsider” to get a type of “murderer.”

2. CAR, DAM, DO, STAG.

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9. Add T to an “attempt to reach a settlement” to get “deep thought.” 10. Add R to “leaving no will” to get a “major highway.” 11. Add R to “not merited” to get “inadequately provided for.” 12. Add T to “imitation” to get “arousal.”

www.andyo.org Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 15

Wholly Hopkins

Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

Engineering

Toying with Legos to solve a nanoengineering problem

Will Kirk

ou could mistake it all for the jerry-built geeky kid stuff of a high school science fair: a small fish tank, some bricks, balls, viscous goo, and several pieces of Lego-brand building blocks. And yet, the simple-if-tortured setup has yielded Johns Hopkins engineers some clues as to how nanosized particles travel through liquids. The findings could lead to cheaper and more effective medical tests, and technology that more accurately measures toxic substances in water. The Legoland that Joelle Frechette and German Drazer, assistant professors of chemical and bio molecular engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, pieced together in the basement lab of Maryland Hall helped them investigate how wee bits of matter travel through fluids and around obstacles—a key factor in determining how elements of blood or particles of DNA could best Legos for science: Engineers devised this Lego be sorted for testpegboard to test how nanoparticles travel ing. Their observathrough liquid. tions, published this summer in both The Journal of Fluid Mechanics and Physical Review Letters, could be especially useful to developers of an emerging technology called “lab on a chip,” a millimeters-long glass device that can separate and measure aspects of certain molecules. Companies see the lab on a chip as a boon to researchers who need to quickly separate cells to study them individually, or to companies that want to sift materi-

16 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

als to detect the presence of particular things in the environment. Scientists developing the lab on a chip have sought to shrink down the functions of a fullsized medical lab to a microchip so they can process molecules faster, more efficiently, and more safely. But sorting those molecules has presented bioengineers with several problems. In labs on a chip, molecules or particles fall through a lattice of obstacles designed to funnel them into specific landing spots based on their size. The sorted materials are then ready for testing. But understanding how this process works has proven tricky because the particles are so tiny that the dynamic forces that part them are difficult to study. And for the chip to reach its potential, the means of separating particles must be improved. Enter Drazer and Frechette. “What we wanted to do was create a macro model built to scale that gives you a sifting process that is as slow as possible, so you could observe it,” says Drazer. The model would mimic, at larger scale, the sorting of nanoparticles a micron wide or smaller. Two years ago, Drazer and Frechette were discussing the possible benefit of teaching kids engineering by using Legos as a visual aid. Then Frechette hit upon the idea of using Legos as larger stand-ins for the sifting action in the lab on a chip. “She thought it was cool and I thought it was cheap,” says Drazer, who adds the whole setup cost a couple hundred bucks. The ability to change the configuration of the Lego pieces— which serve as stand-ins for obstacles designed to sift particles on a chip — could replicate several nanoscale sorting scenarios, making the DIY setup even more attractive. Using a six-inch square gray Lego pegboard backed with reinforcing Plexiglas as a macro model of a lab chip’s base, the duo then plugged in blue, oblong pieces smaller than a half-inch to represent obstacles that particles must travel around. They placed their gray Lego board — one that most kids would use as a flat floor or base — in an empty aquarium at a 90-degree angle, adjusting it a few degrees at a time. They found bricks left over from the construction of the new Mason Hall at Homewood to take up some tank space so they wouldn’t have to pour in so much glycerol — a thick, sticky, transparent liquid used as a medium in the experiment to slow down the actions of the balls. After taking a picture of the board and its configuration, the duo and some graduate students spent five to 10 hours per week drop-

Keith Weller

ping steel balls of various sizes into the top of the Lego maze, noting their trajectories as they zigged and zagged through it, and jotting down in a series of spiral notebooks the time it took balls to reach the bottom. Using a magnet on the outside of the tank’s glass, investigators fished out the steel balls, washed them off, changed the Lego board’s layout of obstacles, and dropped the balls again — hundreds of times. The boiled-down figures from those observations offered some answers — ones that could guide the development of labs on a chip that are more accurate and versatile. Drazer and Frechette saw how various configurations lead to predictable forces acting on the balls. “Our contribution is to say, maybe we can simplify this down to a model where you can see how separation tends to take place, and at different angles,” says Drazer. Beyond the importance of finding a practical model, the two say they appreciate the attention their downscale methods have earned them. “It’s cute,” says Frechette. “You spend so much time and energy trying to devise these elaborate things for investigations. And here, we came up with something very simple that works.” —Michael Anft U n i ve r s i t y

Minor named provost

eeks into his tenure as Johns Hopkins’ new provost, Lloyd Minor had yet to unpack all the boxes from his move to the Homewood campus. The books had made it to the shelves, but framed diplomas and photographs still sat neatly stacked in cardboard. Minor had not had time to get to them. As the university’s chief academic officer and the secondranking member of senior administration, Minor, 52, devoted his first days to getting to know the intricacies of nine schools spread across Baltimore and beyond. What’s more, he found himself standing in for President Ron Daniels at some public occasions after the latter entered the hospital for abdominal surgery. In his first days on the job in September, Minor walked the campus, canvassing faculty and students about their experiences. “I wanted to know what was working for them and what wasn’t,” he says. His move to Homewood was a short one, just a few miles across town from the School of Medicine, where he served as director of the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and

Lloyd Minor is now the university’s chief academic officer. Neck Surgery for six years. During his 16 years at the School of Medicine he built a unique program around balance disorders, developed a successful clinical practice, and attracted and retained talented faculty while garnering resources to help them thrive. As provost, that formula is something he hopes to cultivate throughout the university. “Recruitment, retention, and resources are the most important things we do here,” Minor says. “Getting the right people and helping those people succeed is a big part of the job.” Minor sees himself as a collaborator, a team builder who believes in pollinating ideas across disciplines. He hopes to foster new connections among the schools and build areas of research and academic study, he says, and adds that he looks forward to meeting with deans to Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Wholly Hopkins native-born African Americans. The story about their findings ran under the headline “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?” Gates and Guinier were working in an area that Bennett, whose research focuses on education and segregation, knew well: a sociological finding called the “net black advantage.” Research dating back to the 1960s reveals that while a smaller proportion of black high school graduates enroll in college than whites, blacks are more likely than whites actually to attend college, hence the net advantage. Gates and Guinier challenged the value of that advantage by questioning where, exactly, those black students were coming from: If more blacks were going to college, but few of them had been born in the United States, what did that say about African Americans and higher education? The article sparked a debate around the country about why a black kid from West India is more likely to go to a prestigious American school than a third-generation black kid from the west side of Detroit, and that debate revolved around long-held notions about race, culture, and education, including the assumption that native blacks devalue education because they Photos.com

identify those areas where the university might grow. “We want to build more programs where we are preeminent around the country and around the world,” he says. But that doesn’t mean hemming in the various schools with overarching agendas. “At a university as large and diverse as ours, there doesn’t need to be one set of goals. What we have is something much more important than a single set of goals — we have a shared set of values.” Collaboration, collegiality, and excellence being top among those values, in his view. By way of example, Minor points to the success of Hopkins faculty in earning sought-after grant dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. As of early October, the university had been awarded 304 grants worth $149 million from ARRA. “One thing the Hopkins faculty does so well is respond to a challenge. The whole system is geared up when there is opportunity,” he says. Sitting at the conference table of his office, Minor remembers when he and his wife, Lisa Keamy, a primary care physician, first came to visit Hopkins. Today, they have a son, Samuel, 15, and a daughter, Emily, 18, who started Harvard this fall. (“I ask her about programs there,” he says, joking that he pumps her for information for his new job.) “When I came here in 1992 to talk about a position,” Minor remembers, “it felt different from the other excellent places I was looking for a job. That feeling has never left. Making sure that that atmosphere continues is an important part of central leadership.” —Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson Sociology

Questioning the “net black advantage”

pend time with Johns Hopkins assistant professor of sociology Pamela Bennett and you begin to realize how much of life is premised on assumptions. Take post-secondary education in America. In 2004, when Bennett joined the Hopkins Sociology Department, she remembers reading a New York Times article about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (This was well before he made headlines for police profiling and presidential beer summits.) Gates, along with Harvard professor Lani Guinier, had found that of the black students attending Harvard, the lion’s share was immigrants versus

18 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

don’t want to “act white.” Some previous studies had argued that immigrants had an advantage because they came from predominantly black cultures without the racial tensions implicit in America. Others contended that once an immigrant’s family became more assimilated in the

United States, they, too, would lose the desire to achieve higher education. In other words, race and American cultural realities kept African Americans from attending college. Bennett wasn’t buying it. “People were going off of a lot of observations and impressions. Those kinds of initial observations are fine. They get you thinking. But in terms of getting a solid answer to this question, you need to bring accurate data,” she says. “I wanted to know why. I never accepted these things as a given.” This summer, she and Syracuse University professor Amy Lutz released findings from their new study in the journal Sociology of Education. Called “How African American Is the Net Black Advantage? Differences in College Attendance Among Immigrant Blacks, Native Blacks, and Whites,” the report dissects a number of prior studies and statistics and puts them into context. The duo concluded that the real issue is socioeconomics — the disparity is more about resources than racial ethos. Bennett and Lutz studied the proportion of immigrant black high school graduates attending prestigious colleges and universities in America as compared to native black or white students. They analyzed data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, a study of students who were in the eighth grade in 1988 and were tracked for 12 years, and confirmed what Gates and Guinier had noted, that among immigrant children (those new to the country or born to firstgeneration immigrant parents), 9.2 percent enrolled in elite colleges compared with 2.4 percent of native black students and 7.3 percent of white students. But Bennett argues that the common explanation for those disparities — that immigrant blacks’ cultural values propelled them while native blacks shunned higher education — overlooked that these immigrants were not the poor, huddled masses we assume them to be. Instead they were ambitious, educated families who had enjoyed middle and upper-middle class status in their countries of origin. Their success in America was being measured against performance in poor AfricanAmerican communities —it wasn’t an apples-toapples comparison. “If the cultural explanation

really held water, you would see fewer middle class blacks going to college. In fact, the exact opposite is true,” Bennett says. Bennett and Lutz found no significant differences in college enrollment between immigrant blacks and African Americans when they come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. “There’s this idea that because a group dis“There’s this idea that because plays higher rates of a group displays higher rates post-secondary enrollof post-secondary enrollment, ment, it’s a reflection of their values, rather than, it’s a reflection of their values, say, the fact that both rather than, say, the fact that parents went to colboth parents went to college lege and they have the and they have the resources and resources and knowledge to help their child knowledge to help their child do do the same,” she says. the same.” —Pamela Bennett The study could be a game-changer in how educational policies are structured. Bennett points to President Barack Obama’s goal of leading the world in college graduates by 2020. To achieve that, she says, the country must focus on the real hurdles to higher education. “Why does going to a private school improve your chances of going to college? Why do certain parents know what math class their child needs to take in order to get into college, but others do not? My hope is that we get beyond this question of culture and start to question the true structural obstacles that explain the different outcomes.” —EED

E nv i ro n m e n t

The paperless professor’s crusade to save trees and time

f you’re reading these words on paper, George Dimopoulos, Bus ’08, would like to have a word with you. How about we step into his office? Oh, it can’t be this one— there’s not much more lining the walls and shelves here than a few stray plants in pots. And yet: Here is Dimopoulos, sitting in a corner in the back—behind an unadorned desk that holds nothing more than three connected video monitors, a keyboard, and a phone—and smiling like the cat that just figured out how to use a can opener. There’s not a scrap Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Wholly Hopkins of paper to be scribbled on, or even a book to crack open. Once you get over the shock of viewing a space that is as empty as it is (apparently) functional—a charge Dimopoulos obviously loves to give—and ask him what is going on, he’ll tell you: Going paperless and living through electronic gadgets is better for the environment, frees you from carrying around and storing real documents, and allows you to work from wherever you want. And, er, it gives you lots more space. Then, Dimopoulos, an associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, might sheepishly open a drawer and hand you a copy of Paperless Joy, the book he self-published last year and which is made of (horrors!) pure pulp. “I’m an organizer and a bit of a minimalist,” explains Dimopoulos, 43, in an accent that betrays his Swedish background. “Going paperless really suits my lifestyle and the way I like to think.”

Bot to m Line

1,350: The number of freshmen who came to Johns

Hopkins University this fall, defying expectations that the economic downturn would dampen enrollment at Homewood. This is the largest freshman class ever, capping a seven-year run of record enrollment.This year also saw a 1 percent increase in admissions applications, with 16,124 applicants competing for spots. Back in March, as admissions letters were about to go out to potential students, the economy was in turmoil. John Latting, admissions director, says, “With so much uncertainty, we thought that lower-cost universities would provide more competition in this cycle than in the past.” So admissions staff hedged their bets and extended regulardecision admissions to a larger than normal pool. But the yield—or the percentage of admitted students actually enrolling—didn’t fall as predicted. Rather, it was 15 percent higher than anticipated, far exceeding the admissions goal of 1,235 students. By August, Hopkins staff were scrambling to find places for so many freshmen to live. The university leased the Hopkins Inn, a bed-and-breakfast near campus, and reopened Rogers House, an apartment building that had been closed for renovation. “I still find it a remarkable result,” Latting says. “It’s a comment on the value that families place on a Hopkins education.” —EED

20 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

He’s made eliminating piles of documents and books a priority since Johns Hopkins hired him in 2003 to study the inner working of mosquitoes. (His lab searches for clues to the transmission of malaria.) While moving to Baltimore from London, where he taught and did research at Imperial College, Dimopoulos was surrounded by file cabinets full of academic and personal papers. “I had to go through this mountain of stuff,” he says. “I don’t like to throw things away. When documents are electronic, it doesn’t matter whether you keep things because they don’t pile up and take up real space.” To prove his point, he’s amassed and electronically cataloged tens of thousands of messages he’s received over the years. “I haven’t thrown out any emails since the early 1990s,” he says. Dimopoulos’ transition from scraps of paper to bits of electronic matter began much earlier, when he was studying in Germany. He bought his first personal digital assistant, or PDA, in 1996, realizing that he could keep an almost unlimited amount of calendar and Rolodex information without cluttering up his desk. Later, he bought a scanner that converts information on paper into electronic documents. He bought more monitors, learning how to connect three of them into one computer with a continuous screen on which he could read one document, write another, and leave one open for email and housekeeping stuff. He bought a laptop and an “electronic tablet” on which to take notes, effectively thumbing his nose at the tradition of the pad and paper. And in 2005, he bought an “e-reader,” a device that downloads books and allows the owner to retrieve a ton of reading material. (The Kindle is the most prominent of the new generation of e-readers.) “People think it’s expensive to do this, but it’s really not,” he says. “The scanners, video cards, and a Kindle each cost about $300 to $350.” A good computer with lots of memory, a laptop, a PDA, and the devices to connect them all into one safe electronic system that can be accessed anywhere there is wireless capability will cost more than that. But in the long run, they’ll prove cheaper and less constraining collectively than endless cabinets full of files, Dimopoulos claims. He got the idea for sharing his “joy” of a life without paper in book form while he was pursuing an MBA at the Carey Business School three years ago. (He received his degree in 2008.) While taking part in a group presentation in a course on integrating information technology for business use, he was encouraged by the class’s response to the anti-paper polemic he delivered,

Robert Neubecker

as well as their fascination with his daily use of an electronic tablet. The book outlines his basic points: Working without paper will kickstart creativity by allowing people to work whenever and wherever they want. “Stimulating energy- and creativity-replenishing activities are, in many cases, impossible to perform in the typical office environment,” he writes. Plugging into the portable electronic world can make a worker “location independent.” In the long run, it can save companies money on office space because workers will be more productive and happy toiling elsewhere. Going paperless will make connections with other people quicker and more consistent. And it will cut down on all the waste created by printing things that clutter office space and clog landfills. To which Richard H. R. Harper, coauthor of The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2001), says: Bosh. A principal researcher at Microsoft in the United Kingdom, Harper envisions piles of ditched Blackberrys and PCs leaching the toxic metals they are made with into the groundwater of slums in faraway South Asia, and elsewhere. “Paper is much more environmental than the other things we use—it’s made from recyclable trees,” Harper says. “The materials we use to make these new technologies are not renewable and cause a lot of other problems.” What’s more, when offices installed computer systems and printers a decade or more ago, their use of paper increased by 40 percent. That number has likely gone up, Harper adds. “There are instances in an office when the use of paper is preferable and that’s not likely to change. The mind grasps the physical geography of an argument much better while reading a long paper than reading the short bits on a computer screen,” he says. None of which Dimopoulos disputes. The office world hasn’t caught up with the need to reduce its paper waste, he says. Besides, he doesn’t want to abolish paper. Instead, he wants to “achieve a balance between the world of new communication technology and paper.” (In fact, if you look at his office hard enough, you’ll find a printer.)

Still, he has tried to light a paperless fire under his colleagues by asking that memos and minutes of department meetings be recorded and communicated electronically only. He also Dimopoulos believes going helped convert the paperless and living through Molecular Microbiology and Immunology electronic gadgets is better for Department’s admisthe environment, frees you from sions process to a carrying around and storing real paperless one. “I think documents, and allows you to most of us admire his ‘paperlessness,’ but work from wherever you want. have only been able to make small inroads into getting there ourselves,” says Diane Griffin, the department chair. “Nevertheless, he shows that it can be done.” Elsewhere, progress has been a slog. The book has sold only about 500 copies. But Dimopoulos is happy viewing his crusade as a long march. One colleague on the third floor of the School of Public Health building has made the Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Wholly Hopkins

Vignette

Photo by Will Kirk

magine moving into a townhouse in Baltimore’s tony Bolton Hill neighborhood. It’s 1936 and the previous tenants have left behind a few things in the cupboards, in particular some drawings on paper— magnolia flowers blooming on a branch, a mother nursing a child— rendered in chalk, colored pencil, pastel, and graphite. Now imagine the previous tenants were F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. In 1932, the Fitzger alds moved to Baltimore so Zelda could receive treatment for schizo phrenia at Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic. The couple would reside in Baltimore for about five years. While Scott penned Tender is the Night, Zelda took to making her own works on paper, like this abstract of orange and yellow flames with flowers, dated October 6, 1934. Mr. and Mrs. Sewell Weech found 10 of her drawings when they moved into the Fitzgeralds’ former residence at 1307 Park Avenue, a year after the Fitzgeralds left. Over the years they debated what to do with them— even contemplating destroying them—until two Johns Hopkins English professors convinced them of their cultural value. In 1974, the couple donated seven drawings to the English Department, and today they are stored in the collection at Evergreen Museum & Library. This fall, Evergreen curator James Abbott mounted an exhibition of Zelda’s art in the museum’s Reading Room when the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society held its biennial conference in Baltimore for the first time. The four-day event highlighted Fitzgerald’s relationship with the city (he was, among other things, a descendant of Francis Scott Key) and featured several Hopkins professors and locales. While the drawings are not exactly rare—Zelda was a prolific sketcher, according to Jacqueline O’Regan, curator of cultural properties at the Sheridan Libraries, and the pieces were assessed at just $1,500 each by Sotheby’s in the late 1980s—they are of historical and cultural significance. “They are fine examples,” O’Regan says. “They are sure-handed but not overdone. They have a very distinct vision.” —EED

22 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

paperless switch, he notes. And while some there view him as a bit of an eccentric because of his vacuous office space, he has his admirers. “My group has been very productive,” he says. “That tends to quiet any thoughts that this idea doesn’t work.” —MA

Education

A virtual environment teaches real science

ust last year, Room 10 at Chesapeake High School in Baltimore County could have served as the model for the uninspiring classroom. Two-chambered, built with blocks painted off-white, and without windows, it was a place where students sat quietly at desks copying instructions from a chalkboard. Students returning for this school year could be forgiven for not recognizing the place. Now, the walls glimmer with colors in motion—the glow of state-of-theart computers that surround students with visual graphics and dynamic gaming technology. The rear chamber has been outfitted with a series of wide screens and work stations that mirror the effect of sitting in a cockpit. There, groups of students in math and science attempt to unlock the secrets of the geography surrounding Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in 1980, wiping out hundreds of square miles of plants and thousands of animals, and killing 57 people. Once a by-the-books business classroom, Room 10 is now abuzz with action more akin to video games than lectures. With software created by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and educational programs developed with the help of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Technology in Education (CTE), the project—named Seahawk—gives kids the chance to fly virtual planes over the rubble of the former peak, pilot boats in nearby mountain lakes, or get behind the wheel of a fourwheel-drive vehicle. But instead of killing people, as in Grand Theft Auto, or overcoming obstacles to amass hoards of gold, as players of World of Warcraft do, students at this public high school in an aging, working-class suburb of Baltimore virtually test air and water quality, investigate what types of plants and animals have returned to the region, and calculate the effects humans have had on the land surrounding the volcano.

The virtual learning environment (or VLE) may be the first of its kind, says Dave Peloff, program director for emerging technologies at CTE. It features high-powered computers that keep learning simulations moving almost in real time on video monitors that surround the students who work—or “play”—on them. What’s more, the VLE more closely resembles the actual terrain of Mount St. Helens by incorporating real geographical data into the program. “We’ll see more and more of these [VLEs] in the coming years,” says Peloff, whose office wall is adorned

Swapping one context for another wasn’t as easy as it might sound. “We’re not game developers—we don’t have the budget that the Xbox people [at Microsoft] have to figure all this out and plug in all the bells and whistles you find in games,” says Timothy Frey, assistant group supervisor at APL. “Kids will likely try to compare this to those games. But we thought what was most important was to get them into it within the first half hour, or we’d lose them. Game designers call that ‘stickiness.’ That was probably the most difficult aspect for us to deal with.” Teachers and administrators at Chesapeake High School say that, so far, the Seahawk VLE is plenty sticky. Students in environmental science and geometry classes took to the program immediately. “We saw as we trained some students on this during the summer that not only did they like it, but that they could learn differently from it,” says Maria Lowry, principal at the school. “Some kids who were worried about taking an environmental sciIt may look like a game, but this video learning environment teaches science ence class really like it now.” Besides keeping to high school students. students interested, with a 1950s-style poster that, tongue in cheek, the VLE allows them to work in squads where reads: VIDEO GAMES: WHY WASTE GOOD they try to figure out plans of action, solve probTECHNOLOGY ON SCIENCE AND MEDICINE? lems, and come to conclusions together. The pro“We wanted to get out in front on this kind of gram will be expanded idea, so we hooked up with APL to see if any- to include English and “We saw as we trained some thing they were doing with defense technology social studies classes by could work in education.” the end of the school students on this during the Urged on by Joe Hairston, superintendent year. summer that not only did of Baltimore County Public Schools, and armed In October, science they like it, but that they with $1.5 million in grant money from the students took part in a could learn differently from U.S. Department of Education, Peloff and staff five-day “challenge”— it. Some kids who were worried drafted APL’s help four years ago. The lab the first of many—to had previously developed three-dimensional find out what caused about taking an environmental visualization software to acquaint soldiers a fish kill on a lake science class really like it now.” headed for duty in Iraq with the terrain and near Mount St. Hel—Maria Lowry movements of people in and around Bagh- ens. Manipulating two dad, as well as train prospective astronauts for devices similar to ones NASA. A crew of 10 working part time trans- airlines use to train pilots, they swooped into lated that software into something useful in view the simulated dead fish floating on top of the classroom. the lake, then led a boat into various parts of it Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Wholly Hopkins

Dale Keiger

to take water samples. They delved into the landuse history of the region for clues. Divided into “red” and “black” teams, students navigated their vehicles over or across a 15-by-22-mile swath of terrain on 10 70-inch LCD monitors (five per team) situated in a circle on the walls around them, and then responded to commands from a fictional headquarters. A “virtual fuel tank” was used as a time limiter to keep students on task. Each team scored points for unearthing correct answers. Despite requiring students to get through tasks completely—and ultimately for grades— the key is to make the learning fun. Pop music is pumped in to accompany the simulations. “You don’t want to suck the fun out of the game. One worry we have is that teachers would go too far too fast on the educational content,” says Peloff, who adds that teachers can customize the software to match their curriculum. Future VLEs on the South Pole and other areas might be forthcoming. “The Chesapeake Bay

would be another logical environment to create,” he says. While the program runs at Chesapeake High, Peloff says CTE and Baltimore County Schools will measure how well kids are motivated to use the environment, how many of them may be swayed toward a math and science career, and whether their attention and school attendance are affected by using it. Peloff says there is interest from other school systems nearby, and from afar: An education minister from Chile has inquired about the program. But Peloff’s most impressed with the reactions of local kids he called in to CTE to test Seahawk when it was still in its early phases of development. Some of them rarely attended school. “One kid from Baltimore City told us that if we had a VLE at his school, he’d come every day,” Peloff says. “There’s no question kids like that can pick up this technology fast.” Students might eventually have even more say in how the technology develops. “One of the goals we have is to get the kids involved in customizing these environments, so they more readily buy into it. We’d like them to be able to pick certain characteristics or scenarios,” he says, “just like they can in a video game.” —MA Biomedical engineering

Software hunts for malignant mutations

B Johns Hopkins football had just qualified for the NCAA national championship playoffs as the magazine went to press, and the man carrying the ball in this picture had a lot do with that. Senior Andrew Kase spent the season securing his status as the greatest running back in Blue Jays history. He became only the fourth player in Maryland state history to amass more than 4,000 rushing yards in a career. With each game he reset Hopkins records for most career rushing yards, most all-purpose yards, most touchdowns, most rushing touchdowns, most 100-yard rushing games, and most points scored. As one sportswriter observed accurately, he has turned the Hopkins football record book into a personal diary. 24 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

ert Vogelstein and Kenneth Kinzler, codirectors of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins, liken themselves to detectives— only instead of hunting criminals, they hunt rogue cells. Vogelstein and Kinzler are among the pioneers in uncovering genetic mutations responsible for the onset and development of cancer. They work to better understand the DNA changes, or mistakes, in genetic instructions. In particular, they focus on the somatic mutations—or cell mutations—that reduce the activity of proteins that suppress tumors or hyperactivate proteins and thus make it easier for tumors to grow and spread. Cancer cells develop lots of mutations, Kinzler explains, but not all of them are relevant. Finding the 5 percent to 20 percent that are worth studying can be time consuming. It’s not unlike a detective’s need to narrow down a long list of suspects. “You need to know what suspects to investigate further and rule out others,” he says.

Now, a team of Johns Hopkins engineers has developed groundbreaking computer software that will help narrow in on those relevant suspects. Rachel Karchin, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, supervised development of mathematical software that enables scientists to speed up significantly the hunt for cancer triggers. “The simple idea is to prioritize these mutations for researchers,” Karchin says. The new computational method, called CHASM—short for Cancer-specific High-throughput Annotation of Somatic Mutations—can sift through thousands of newly discovered genetic mutations in cancer cells to highlight the DNA changes most likely to promote tumor growth and rule out those just along for the ride. The software was developed via the university’s Institute for Computational Medicine—a joint effort of the Whiting School and the School of Medicine that focuses on research aimed at identifying, analyzing, and comparing basic biological components and processes that regulate human disease. Karchin, along with doctoral student Hannah Carter, tested CHASM on brain cancer DNA. The team put 600 potential brain cancer mutations through an algorithm that would classify them as either “drivers,” mutations likely to initiate tumor genesis or progression, or “passengers,” those present when a tumor forms but not involved in its development. The researchers used a machine-learning technique in which roughly 50 characteristics associated with known cancercausing mutations were given numerical values and programmed into the system. Karchin and Carter then employed a classifier to help separate and rank the drivers. In this mathematical forest, hundreds of if-x-then-y “decision trees” consider each mutation and vote for whether it is a driver or a passenger. The more driver votes a mutation receives, the more likely it’s a cancer trigger. The results of the study, co-authored with Kinzler, were published in the August 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research. With the drivers identified, researchers can examine the functional consequences of these mutations to develop cancer-fighting therapies, such as mutation-specific drugs. “Cancer cells are competing with the normal cells for resources: space, blood, and nutrients. It’s survival of the fittest,” Karchin says. “Certain mutations can give cancer cells an advantage over their neighbors. But which ones are they? That is what we want to know.” Kinzler takes his criminal analogy one step further: “This new software will help identify

Quote, unquote There are a lot of myths about [childless adults] in the sense that they are all healthy and they are all young. Some of them are sick. Most of them can’t afford coverage. —Lisa Dubay, associate professor of health policy, Bloomberg School of Public Health, quoted 10.11.09 in The Wall Street Journal It feels degrading, somehow. —Diego Ardila, Hopkins undergraduate, as a film crew prepared to make Johns Hopkins stand in for Harvard during the filming of The Social Network, quoted 11.03.09 in The Baltimore Sun I prefer to think that we play Harvard better than Harvard can play Harvard. —Johns Hopkins spokesman Dennis O’Shea, quoted in the same Sun story. It has always been so obvious to me why we need the liberal arts. It’s like asking, “Why do you need your hands, or why do you need the blood that flows through your veins?” . . . Imaginative knowledge is a way of looking at the world, relating to the world, and at the same time changing the world. —Azar Nafisi, research associate at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11.09.09

mutations that we can put up on the ‘post office wall.’ Researchers might see the picture—the mutation—at several different crime scenes, or gangs of them active in many cancers.” To date, Karchin’s lab has helped score genetic mutations involved in pediatric brain cancer, chronic lymphatic leukemia, melanoma, and lung cancer. The method has since been adapted to rank the mutations that may be linked to other cancers, such as breast and colorectal. Karchin admits that the machine learning, “Cancer cells are competing with the normal cells for resources: while useful, doesn’t give a perfect predicspace, blood, and nutrients. It’s tion. Just because a survival of the fittest. Certain mutation has been seen mutations can give cancer cells an a number of times in cancer cells, she says, advantage over their neighbors. But which ones are they? That is that doesn’t mean for certain that it’s a driver what we want to know.” mutation. “We are mak—Rachel Karchin ing the assumption that these recurrent mutations are drivers,” she says. “So there is some room for error.” The actual error rate falls between 15 percent and 20 percent, but Carter says that the rate will only decrease as the sysJohns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Wholly Hopkins

Now we know …Physicians may have less respect for obese patients. Data collected from 238 individuals at 14 urban community medical practices in Baltimore found that as a patient’s body mass index increased, physicians reported lower respect for them. The study, led by Mary Margaret Huizinga, assistant professor of general internal medicine at the School of Medicine, was published in the November issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. …Men with lower cholesterol have a 60 percent lower risk of developing high-grade prostate cancer, according to research published online in November in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Elizabeth Platz, associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and codirector of the cancer prevention and control program at the Kimmel Cancer Center, helped direct the study, which suggests that targeting cholesterol metabolism may be one way to treat and prevent the disease. …In recent decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in diabetes, with African Americans developing a higher occurrence of type 2 diabetes and other related complications compared to whites. A study led by Thomas LaVeist, professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School, available in the October edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that the discrepancy may have more to do with living conditions and socioeconomics than genetics. …For 50 years, the heliosphere—the region around the sun that encompasses the solar wind—was thought to have been comet shaped. Now images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft show that the sun travels through the galaxy more like a big, round bubble. Researchers from the Applied Physics Laboratory used the images to develop new models of how the sun moves and published a paper on their findings in the October 15 edition of Science. …The Johns Hopkins Children’s Center produced a video to teach teen girls diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) how to cope with the sexually transmitted disorder. A study published online by Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology found that patients who viewed the video before being discharged were more likely to talk to partners about seeking treatment. Led by investigator Maria Trent, assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, the study also shows little change in overall risky behavior, suggesting there is still work to be done to prevent and treat these infections in the first place. …Johns Hopkins professor of electrical engineering Jin U. Kang has developed a way to provide instant high-resolution pictures of small segments of the brain without touching the tissue. This “virtual biopsy” has not yet been tried on human patients, but a $450,000 federal grant will enable Kang to begin animal and human cadaver testing. Human patient trials will likely begin within five years. —EED 26 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

tem’s training set gets populated with more known drivers. Karchin’s group is preparing to distribute free CHASM software tools to academic researchers worldwide. The software, Karchin says, will be used to determine what mutations should be further explored in cell culture and animal models. “Learning which mutations are the ‘drivers’ will bring us closer to the goal of personalized cancer treatments, in which therapies are selected based on the genetic profile of an individual’s tumor,” she says. —Greg Rienzi

Pe a b o d y

A book 50 years in the making

ustav Meier sits on a bench on the campus of the Peabody Institute flipping through his new book, The Score, the Orchestra, and the Conductor. The director of the graduate conducting program at Peabody grabbed this particular copy from a student shepherding stacks of the book to a signing due to start at any moment. Meier still can’t quite believe the text is complete and in his hand. He has spent decades training aspiring conductors in the subtle art of the baton, and it took years to put those teachings into print. “This book is 50 years in the making,” he says. At 80, Meier is a man who has led symphonies around the world and inspired a generation of musicians through his teaching. Before coming to Peabody in 1997, he taught at the Yale School of Music, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He also directed the Conductors Seminar at Tanglewood for 16 years. His students, like Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, have gone on to lead the world’s greatest orchestras. Yet Meier is nothing like the stereotype of the egomaniacal maestro. Clad in dark jeans and a stylish Oxford shirt, he commands presence without demanding attention. Meier is affable yet measured, verbose but not bombastic. He is a passionate teacher and leader with a deep reverence for music and a respect for the musicians who perform it. The title of his book says it all: the conductor is listed last, in service to the other elements. “He is so very Swiss,” says Marin Alsop, referring to Meier’s childhood in Switzerland. Alsop considers Meier a mentor, and over the years the

in four languages. He addresses everything from tempo to choosing the right soprano. Meier may counsel on methodology, but his students say that he does not foist a set of dictates. “He fosters individuality,” says Bobby Meier is affable yet measured, McFerrin, the Grammywinning musician verbose but not bombastic. known for his 1980s He is a passionate teacher hit “Don’t Worry Be and leader with a deep Happy.” McFerrin first reverence for music and a met Gusty, as he calls him, in 1989 at a party respect for the musicians honoring Leonard who perform it. Bernstein’s 70th birthday. McFerrin was preparing to conduct his first concert and signed up for seminars with Meier at Tanglewood. He remembers watching Meier stand in front of an orchestra. “It was amazing what he could do with a simple flick of the wrist. Every move was full of meaning, nothing was superfluous.” Over the years, McFerrin would fly to Ann Arbor for private lessons at Meier’s home. He says Meier’s greatest gifts as a teacher are his insight and generosity. “He understands the fact that a conductor’s language is so personal, and he allows his students to do things and to experiment as long as it works. That takes incredible insight into the personality of each individual,” McFerrin says. Meier still lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Emy, and he commutes to Peabody every week. He admits the flying takes more of a toll than it used to. Inside Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library, students and faculty have gathered to celebrate the book’s release and to get the great maestro to sign their copies. The group surprises Meier with a cake in honor of his 80th birthday, which was this past August, and he looks slightly abashed at the attention. He cuts into the buttercream and doles out slices to the crowd. “What about you, Gustav?” someone asks. “No, no, you first, you first,” he says, as he passes the plates. Gustav Meier: “As a conductor, you are an ambassador —EED

Will Kirk

two have gone from a teacher-student relationship to professional collaborators, including a program that brings talented Peabody students to the BSO. “I would say his style is understated. He is very attentive, but he’s not a lunatic jumping in your face. He’s not prone to huge outbursts.” A considered demeanor is very much a part of the Meier pedagogy. It is paramount, he says, to earning the trust of both the musicians and the audience. “As a conductor, you are an ambassador to the music. You have to learn the right mannerisms, show humility, talk to the audience,” he says. Meier goes into great detail in his book about how to approach a score, breaking down the elements of the composition through a unique marking system that he illustrates through examples. The 512-page volume has 200 line illustrations and 500 music examples as well as a cross-indexed glossary of orchestral instruments

to the music.”

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

The

Accidental Academic Ronald J. Daniels has a vision of Johns Hopkins: interdisciplinary, fully engaged with its many communities, open to anyone of merit.

By Dale Keiger Photos by Will Kirk

he president of Johns Hopkins University is by definition a very busy person. Ron Daniels, No. 14 on the list of men elected to his office, will be no exception, by the looks of it.Ten days after an unforeseen event crowded onto his calendar—successful surgery for a gastrointestinal stromal tumor on his duodenum—Daniels was walking campus with Provost Lloyd Minor, conducting conference calls, and trying to heed his doctors’ advice for recovery in the face of what he called his “constitutional inability to remain at rest for very long.” In late September, Johns Hopkins Magazine secured an hour (54 minutes, to be precise) on Daniels’ schedule to talk about his ideas for leading Johns Hopkins into the interesting times ahead. He seems fond of the phrase “from the get-go,” so here he is discussing what he has in mind for Johns Hopkins, from the get-go. 28 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Winter 2009 29

How did you find your way into the academy? At the dinner the trustees hosted the night before my installation, my wife, Joanne, talked about how I found my way to the academy and referred to me as “the accidental academic.” Joanne and I were in law school together, and although I loved ideas and did a fair amount of writing and found scholarship rewarding and exciting, I wasn’t destined, or so I thought, to be an academic. After graduation from law school I went out and worked a year at a law firm. During that time, one of my closest friends, who had been a professor of mine, was persistent in making the case for going into the academy. I had deep reservations. But he persuaded me to go off to graduate school at Yale, which I did. I loved the courses, loved the intellectual environment, but was pretty disengaged in the path to the academy. I was really resistant. Why were you so resistant? I thought that I didn’t have the temperament to be an academic, that I was too restless, that I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy the highly solitary character of research. What was so remarkable was that people saw things in me that I didn’t see in myself. But for the intervention of those people I would never be here today. For me, it’s a real lesson about mentorship. For a number of people who find their way to the academy, as graduate students and as faculty members, it’s not so much that they knew in their heart of hearts that it was great for them, but it was the intervention of a mentor who encouraged them to make a commitment to the life of the mind. I’ve felt enormously, enormously blessed to have been touched that way. Why did you want this job? These are simply the best jobs that anyone could possibly dream of, to be able to lead a research-intensive university. It’s enormously challenging, but it’s enormously rewarding. This was such a great stroke of luck that came my way. From the get-go I’ve always been passionate about the 30 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

commitment to excellence. I’ve been passionate about my commitment to the value of research in the university, to the way research can align with and foster a rich teaching environment. I’ve been moved by ways the university is really part of the community, and how its research and teaching and service activities touch and enrich the community. In all these dimensions, Hopkins epitomizes the best of the researchintensive universities. Its commitment to excellence is passionate and deep. Its commitment to fostering, at a very early stage [in a student’s career], connections between research and education—I think that’s unique. Then there’s the number of ways, whether we’re talking about the city of Baltimore or our activities in Africa, in which a spirit of community engagement pervades the institution. So for all of these reasons, I think this is simply the best platform for higher education and leadership in the United States. You come here at an interesting time of economic dislocations, changing demographics, science like genomics and computational biology that didn’t exist 20 years ago, the spiraling cost of college. When you look now at what’s before you, what do you anticipate as the biggest issues that you’ll have to deal with in this hyperdynamic environment? The truth is we’ve always been in an environment that has presented us with enormous challenges. The challenges you’re talking about today are intense, and they’re daunting in some ways. But the reality is that when you look back at our history, there have been many other moments when we faced equally daunting challenges that called for a brave and imaginative response on the part of the university. So in truth, that’s not new for us. I don’t sense on the part of colleagues or students whom I’ve talked with or staff members that this is particularly intimidating or overwhelming. In fact, what I sense is that people see that in this climate of competition and pressure and change, this really plays to the fundamental strengths of Johns

Hopkins, and the willingness to resist any instinct for complacency and drive our mission hard. I’m very encouraged by that. Having said that, what I think for me constitutes a driving priority is the idea that however we respond to these challenges, we must do so in a way that fosters our sense of being one university. Johns Hopkins is an enormously nimble, entrepreneurial, and decentralized institution, and that has served us very well. Increasingly, the problems that we face as a society cannot be addressed—whether we’re talking about research or teaching— through the prism of one disciplinary perspective alone. Most of the really commanding challenges that we face, whether we’re talking about science, or politics, or economics, do not present themselves in watertight disciplinary compartments. They’re problems that span a number of different fields and require that we find creative ways to connect the different disciplines in the service of understanding those issues and contributing to them. When we talk about challenges, I regard my role as serving as a catalyst, along with members of the senior administration and all the deans, in promoting an environment in which we’re able to look broadly across the university and put together clusters of colleagues and students who can respond to those challenges by bringing their particular disciplinary perspectives to the enterprise. Hopkins, at the level of the individual department or school, has done extraordinarily well in being able to support the kinds of collaborative enterprise that responds to that challenge. But there’s more that we can do to knit the various parts of the university. For example? One of the striking examples is the role that Hopkins has played in biomedical engineering. That’s where we were able to overcome the loyalties of school and department and develop a new discipline that spans the School of Medicine and the Whit-

ing School of Engineering, and now appears to be the preeminent program in the world. That broke molds. It required a new vision of how you would actually connect disparate parts of the university, and it has yielded handsome rewards for us. But if one looks today at how we think about the whole field of neuroscience, to what extent our behavior is shaped by nature or nurture, and how our understanding of the behavior of the brain translates into understanding the motivations for human conduct, these are important and profound issues that require not just a firm grasp of the brain from the perspective of the classic fields of neurology and other cognate schools within the School of Medicine. In the Krieger School it requires that we connect with colleagues in the Whiting School of Engineering. This is all at the level of trying to model, understand, and probe the behavior of the brain both at a cellular and molecular level. From there, one could think about how we correlate the structure with actual function, which may have significant implications for core understandings we have of human behavior, and thus inform the social sciences. In my field of law, if one could demonstrate, as some neuroscientists have, that the brains of some habitual criminal offenders are structured in a fundamentally different way from the brains of the background population, what does this do to our understanding of notions of criminal responsibility? Do we think about the way our justice systems operate and the kinds of penalties that we visit upon people in the same way if we start to garner a more nuanced understanding of behavior as being much more determined than we had previously thought? What I am getting at is that a better understanding of neuroscience has

We are a great change-agent in terms of our capacity to give people remarkable opportunities to change their trajectories. This is the great engine of social transformation that is the modern university. powerful implications for the ways in which we think about problems in a number of different spheres of human activity. The university should be able to develop mechanisms to connect the various parts of itself so that conversation can be supported, and the kinds of inquiry following from that conversation are appropriately nourished. One could duplicate the examples in genomics, in astrophysics, in issues around sustainability. These are not problems confined to one discipline. We have to find ways that we can transcend the silos of department and school to allow our colleagues to benefit from the fruits of that kind of interaction. The university has recognized this in a number of different initiatives now under way. But having said that, when I talk to colleagues across campus, for all that we’ve done in promoting collaborative activity, there’s still a sense that the sum is not yet greater than its constituent parts. How we’re able to focus that conversation stands as a very, very important challenge for us.

In 1998, management consultant Peter Drucker said that he thought the traditional Western university would be obsolete by 2028. As president, how do you go about effecting change so that Drucker’s prediction doesn’t come true? Let me start by saying that I see very little evidence of Drucker’s prediction coming true. In fact, just the opposite. Our institutions—that is to say, the research-intensive university—have never been more important. We live in a world in which knowledge creation is at the core of our society. Rather than becoming anachronistic or marginal to society, we stand at the very core of it. We are simply society’s most important institution, not just a source of ideas but a source of independent criticism. We are a great change-agent in terms of our capacity to lift people up from their circumstances and give them remarkable opportunities to change their trajectories in life. This is the great engine of social transformation that is the modern university. What a president can do is to challenge, to inspire, to support scholarly and educational innovation. Elaborating Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 31

just a bit, in my zeal to promote interdisciplinary collaborations, these are things not just at the level of research but also very important in terms of their linkage to the graduate and undergraduate program. We’re increasingly seeing students coming to us and saying, I want to pursue a program that straddles a number of different areas of the university. I want to pursue a program in public health at the undergraduate level that not only exposes students to a lot of the work that’s being done at the Bloomberg School but also allows them to cobble that experience together with work in international relations on the Homewood campus, or in economics, so they can understand the challenges in global health in a broad frame. As I emphasized during my installation address, in our zeal to foster a spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration and marshal resources in the service of understanding phenomena that aren’t restricted to one particular discipline, it’s important to maintain the discipline of the disciplines. That is, disciplines have existed in some cases for centuries, and they are very powerful ways of organizing research and teaching. So although we want to foster collaboration, we don’t want to see the disciplines impaired by that exercise. Just the opposite. We want disciplines to grow strong from interdisciplinary collaborations, and those collaborations to be stronger because of the methodological rigor that the disciplines bring. What I think is very powerful about Johns Hopkins is this spirit that I’ve talked about before, in terms of the entrepreneurial character of the institution and the ways in which colleagues within particular departments and schools have been able to work to advance the mission of their departments or schools. And I think what is interesting is that colleagues are understandably proud of their affiliation with particular schools within the university. For me, what I’m hoping I can work with colleagues to do is to foster a sense of pride with their affiliation not just with a school that happens to be at Johns Hopkins University but with the idea of the university as a whole. 32 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

You’ve expressed the need for Johns Hopkins in its admissions to become need blind. What about that matters so much to you, and what needs to be done? Right now, if you look at the top 15 research universities in the United States, we are one of two that are not need blind at the present time. To my mind, that’s an issue that requires urgent rectification. What we are as an institution, how we pursue our academic mission, turns intimately on the quality of the people that we bring to this university, at all levels, and ensuring that we have an environment here that is enriching and rewarding to them. When it comes to students, of course, the question is, are we in a position to recruit students on the basis of their merits, or are we limited in our capacity to do that because

cial aid. You make it a major capital campaign priority. You work to persuade the broader community of the importance of this ideal and how it will make us stronger as an institution. It also requires that we think about ways in which we can invest our own resources in strengthening that program, in some cases making difficult reallocative decisions within our budget to be able to support that. As president, I have shared with the trustees how important this priority is for me. Another thing that you’ve indicated means a lot to you is how Hopkins fits into and works with its various communities. What do you see as the principal needs there? We start off, again, with a foundation in which Johns Hopkins is not just in Baltimore but very much of this commu-

Right now, if you look at the top 15 research universities in the United States, we are one of two that are not need blind. To my mind, that’s an issue that requires urgent rectification. of our challenges in providing appropriate financial aid? I am really struck by a lot that has happened over the last several decades in terms of enriching our financial aid program. But the reality is we stand out right now as being an institution that is need aware but not need blind, meaning that our financial aid resources are unable to allow us to recruit without regard to the financial wherewithal of the students whom we regard as most meritorious. That’s something that impairs the strength of the institution. It’s important in terms of what we are as an institution that we understand that admission to Hopkins is based on the ideals of merit and not the absence of financial wherewithal. So what do you do? You double and redouble your efforts to increase benefaction going to finan-

nity. If one looks at the range of ways in which Johns Hopkins contributes to the betterment of Baltimore, it’s quite a remarkable record. This year there’s about $200 million of uncompensated medical care provided by the health system. There are significant contributions being made by faculty, staff, and students throughout the university to a range of different community needs. The role that we’ve played in public health within the city of Baltimore is quite remarkable. But there is one area that for me, at least at the present time, stands out as a very compelling priority, and that is the contribution that we have made— and I would like us to increase—to the Baltimore City public school system. Our principal obligation is to the Hopkins students who are currently enrolled in programs throughout the

university. But I think we have the capacity to contribute beyond those constituents to the public school system in the region. And we already do a lot of this now. There’s a range of programs that involve our students in which we are making significant contributions in mentorship and tutorial assistance. We have colleagues in the School of Education contributing to curriculum development and evaluation. We have programs based in East Baltimore seeking to support nutritional counseling for students in the

public school system. These are all important and remarkable initiatives. Of course, I am particularly proud of the program that Bill Brody launched, where we dedicated full-ride scholarships to students who graduate from Baltimore City schools, the Baltimore Scholars program. Having said that, I still think there’s much more that we can do to build on that foundation. We have in excess of 5,000 undergraduate students currently enrolled in programs on the Homewood campus. If we could increase the fraction of students who are currently contributing to mentorship and tutorial assis-

tance to students in the Baltimore City school system, I think we could have a profound impact. I think we have a reservoir of intellectual and moral energy that exists in our undergraduate student population that could make a marked impact. And that’s something, in these early days, that I would really like to be able to encourage. We had a wonderful moment last weekend during the installation. We thought it would be nice to complement the pomp and circumstance with

a commitment to community service, and so we called for a day of service. At the time the idea was broached, there was hope that if we were lucky we’d get 400 to 500 students who would come out on a Saturday to contribute to a variety of good works in the Baltimore City area, and demonstrate in a very tangible way that we are determined to give back to the community of which we are a part. Due to a number of different people, in particular Bill Tiefenwerth and Paula Burger, we ended up having more than 1,000 individuals who came out for that day of service. I think it underscored the yearning on the part of our student body to be part

of something greater than themselves. What I’ve sought to do, in the short time that I’ve been here, is to remind our students that life isn’t always pursued where there’s nice, neat compartments: “I’m going to be an undergraduate, and I’m going to immerse myself in the educational environment of the university. Then I’ll go off and think about graduate or professional studies. I’ll become well established, and then there will come a point in my life that I’ll be able to give back to the community.” What we’ve encouraged them to think about is that, no, it starts right from the get-go. It’s an earned privilege to be part of Johns Hopkins, and you have an opportunity to share your significant bounty with the community that surrounds us. I think the students embrace this idea with gusto. It gives me a great sense of optimism that as we find more ways to develop opportunities for our students to contribute, that they will do that in an unprecedented way. Do you have a clear image in mind of what you want Johns Hopkins to look like five years from now? I know the challenges that we have to address. The precise way in which we respond to those challenges is something that has to be determined by the community. The only thing that I am dogmatic about is that we actually marshal responses to a number of these challenges, whether we’re talking about interdisciplinary collaboration or deeper engagement with the community or fostering an environment conducive to individual pursuit. How we think about ways in which we can respond to the globalized world, how we use technology—all these things ultimately, in the best tradition of the academy, have to come from the conversations we have on campus. The only thing I’m confident about is that in five years’ time we will have responded, in the true tradition of Johns Hopkins, in a bold, daring, and imaginative fashion. Dale Keiger is the associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 33

34 Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Winter 2009

The

Long View

Bernard Guyer believes that to improve the health of American children, the health care system needs to start early—before those children have been conceived. B y R ich S hea P hotos

Keith Weller

alf an hour after it was scheduled to begin, a September meeting of the East Baltimore Early Child Development Working Group gets under way. A dozen of the group’s members—representing Johns Hopkins University, the mayor’s office, and various community organizations— nosh Danish and sip coffee as Margaret Williams, director of the Maryland Family Network, reports on available grant money. “As for the state,” she says, “it’s a short report.” In a couple of weeks, the Maryland Legislature will approve a budget that, like those of other financially strapped states, cuts funding across the board. “The department most hurt is the health department,” she adds. “I mean, it’s just tragic.” Seeing as the recently established working group is supposed to help provide East Baltimore residents with family, child, and health care services, this is not good news. Regardless, the members discuss the best ways to map out a strategy tailored to the target population. Toward the end of the meeting, taking place in a fourth-floor conference room in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health building, Janie McCullough, an assistant deputy mayor, makes a striking suggestion: To best serve the health of East Baltimore children, reach out to families before women get pregnant. The quality of a child’s life, she says, is dependent upon the health and education of both the mother and the father. “You have to address all those things. If we think in that fashion, we’re thinking about families. It has to be pre-conception on through.” What McCullough is talking about is known in public health as “life-course orientation.” It’s the idea that health care profes-

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 35

sionals should consider a person’s entire life course and, in the case of children, intervene not just when a child becomes ill but even before he or she is born. Knowing the medical histories and dietary and lifestyle habits of a child’s parents, for example, as well as the home and community environments into which the baby will be born, helps service providers apply those interventions that might reduce, if not eliminate, the need for much more expensive services later in life. If, for example, a mother-to-be can be taught how to quit smoking and eat healthy, her child will be much less likely to suffer from hypertension, obesity, and heart disease as an adult. Lifecourse orientation shifts the health care focus from doctor’s offices and hospitals to home and community. One of the idea’s biggest proponents, in attendance at this meeting as a member of the East Baltimore group, is Bernard Guyer, a professor of children’s health in the Bloomberg School. He’s a renowned expert on immunization, a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, and has chaired the department now known as Population, Family, and Reproductive Health in the Bloomberg School. But he’s happy to let McCullough bring up the idea. These days, at 66, he says he prefers to play the role of the “gray-

ast May, a study conducted by a Guyer-led Hopkins research team was published in the journal Academic Pediatrics. “Early Childhood Health Promotion and Its Life Course Health Consequences” concluded that preventing health problems in preschool children born in the United States could save up to $100 billion in future health care costs. But the study, funded in part by the Partnership for America’s Economic Success—a nonprofit group of economists, business leaders, and advocates—offered more than a bottom-line assessment of health promotion. Guyer and company reviewed 10 years’ worth of literature on four child health problems: tobacco exposure, mental health, unintentional injury, and obesity. Looking at the causes of each, and the effects on children ages 0 to 5, they discovered that “one-third to one-half of each U.S. birth cohort children”—1.3 to 2 million children per year—“are affected by one or more of the four health issues,” as the report states. Substantial progress in prevention has been made in two areas, tobacco exposure and unintentional injury, due largely to public awareness and policy changes—smoking bans, for example, and the mandatory use of seatbelts. But there’s room for improvement. Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death and disabilities among 1- to 19-year-olds, and half a million babies are born annually to mothers who smoked during pregnancy. The cost of childhood illnesses caused by parental smoking alone is estimated at $7.9 billion a year, according to the Hopkins study. Obesity is a bigger problem, in part because there are few interventions aimed at what’s considered a relatively new phenomenon. The Hopkins team discovered that, in the past 30 years, “the obesity rate nearly tripled among preschool children, from 5 percent to 14 percent,” making preschool children five times more likely than others to be overweight at age 12. In addition, “an estimated 50 percent to 80 percent of obese children and adolescents stay overweight in adulthood,” with health consequences ranging from diabetes to impaired mobility to hypertension. The costs, both direct and indirect: $184 billion per year. Although it’s been called an epidemic, obesity doesn’t share the same history as, say, tobacco, revealed as cancerous decades ago and the subject of numerous lawsuits since. The Hopkins team lists a few root causes— increased caloric intake, decreased physical activity, aggressive junk-food marketing—and Guyer thinks that the media’s conflicting reports on causes, including socalled obesity genes, are “rubbish.” “We have the same

Life-course orientation shifts the health care focus from doctors’ offices and hospitals to home and community. haired guy with the gray beard” who, with expertise and research data in tow, can serve more as a team player than a leader—preferably at the local level. “The whole idea is that what happens early in life makes a big impact on what happens later in life,” says Guyer, in a later conversation in his office. “Most of what goes on around adult chronic disease in health care is contemporary.” If you’re diagnosed with diabetes, for example, doctors ask about your present habits—smoking, drinking, diet, exercise. “They don’t say, ‘What was your birth weight when you were born?’ or ask about your mother’s diet when you were in utero, or your growth patterns in early life.” Treatment, which often includes expensive medicines, caters to the patient after he or she has contracted a disease, which, Guyer says, “costs society a huge amount of money.” True prevention demands a life-course approach, “looking, early on, at what influences the risk of diabetes or hypertension in fetal life and in early life. We need to start putting our resources there.” 36 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

genes we had 30 million years ago, and we weren’t obese then,” he says. “It’s simple. The more you eat, the fatter you get. The less energy you use, the fatter you get.” Which brings us to a teachable moment, a specialty for Guyer, who’s won excellencein-teaching awards from both Harvard and Hopkins. One tenet of life-course orientation is that there are multiple determinants of health. In “The Embarrassment of Riches,” an article published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal in 2001, Guyer wrote that the forces that shape the health of a population are not just medical but social, environmental, economic, political, and cultural as well. So, when it comes to obesity, he says, “I think, ‘What are the lives of children like?’ If a child lives here in East Baltimore, she might be in an apartment where there’s not a decent cooking facility—a hot plate, maybe, and no good refrigeration—and no stores where her family can buy decent fruit or vegetables. Instead, the best food you get down at the Eastern Market is fried chicken. It’s absolutely delicious, and it’s cheap. You can buy it in quantities that kids and their families really fill up on. “And then you combine that with an environment where it’s dangerous to go out on the street. There are no play environments, and there are drug dealers and guns and cars zooming by on one-way streets. You’ve created the perfect environment where you can get these rapid changes in how obese the population is.”

any in public health now are proponents of life-course orientation. Holly Grason, an associate professor at Hopkins whom Guyer recruited to his department 16 years ago, says this is thanks, in part, to Guyer’s “writings and teachings disseminating it, really infusing the field with it.” What he’s disseminated includes work from colleagues abroad, people like David Barker, a British epidemiologist who, in 1989, after studying various cohorts’ medical records,

linked low birth weight to a high risk for coronary heart disease—now known as “the Barker hypothesis.” “Both of us have learned a great deal from looking across the ocean at research done in countries where they have better longitudinal data than we have here,” says Neal Halfon, a Guyer colleague and community health services professor at the UCLA School of Public Health. “We’ve used that to connect the dots between early and later life.” “Life course,” however, is far from a household term. As commonsensical as it sounds, it doesn’t jibe with traditional health care, in which “we diagnose and then treat ourselves to better health,” explains Halfon. “Our whole system—the medical-industrial complex, the hospital companies, the insurance and drug companies—has built an infrastructure at the end of a life span.” An infrastructure, he says, that powerful players have a vested interest in maintaining. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 37

“If you want to do more [for health care], you must have a public health approach,” says Deborah Walker, another longtime Guyer colleague and vice president at Abt Associates, a health policy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “You’ve got to deal with the policies on prices of fruits and vegetables and on what’s happening in communities—the social marketing campaign. We don’t usually do that. And I know Bernie shares that view.” He does, indeed, and has strong, not-so-positive views on the health care industry and current reform efforts. But it’s because he’s not politically naïve that Guyer chooses to focus on local or regional efforts—a bottom-up approach, Halfon calls it—to effect change. “The way innovation happens in this country is if you can get enough local places to try something and do it well,” Guyer says, “that becomes the model that may eventually be national. Or it may not. But, at least, you’re on the right track.”

uyer started down his own track in 1968, after taking a year off from medical school at the University of Rochester to do field work in Nigeria. The son of working-class parents who’d left Poland just ahead of the Nazi invasion, he’d been raised in Detroit and had attended Antioch College as a biology major. He’d also married Jane Mason, an anthropology student from Liverpool, England, whom he met while studying abroad in Scotland. As Jane, who now chairs the Anthropology Department at Hopkins, did research in Nigeria, Guyer worked out of a virology lab, conducting studies in villages to detect diseases among children. “There were vast needs of a population that just couldn’t be met by retail medicine,” he recalls. In 1974, after earning his MD and working for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he returned to Africa, the Cameroon specifically, as part of a CDC immunization team. “It was a very formative experience,” Guyer says, “because, in those communities, I got to see a part of medicine that related to preventive, population-based treatment.” Public health, he realized, was for him. Three years later, with three kids in tow, the Guyers returned to the States, where Jane accepted an academic post in Boston. Guyer, meanwhile, worked at earning his master’s in public health and, in 1979, inquired about a job with the Massachusetts Department of Health, figuring he’d make some money moonlighting. Shortly after Guyer was hired as a preventive medicine resident, the director of his unit moved away. Guyer replaced him. Politically green and scientifically minded, he was soon asking colleagues, “So, what kills kids in Massachusetts?” The top cause, he discovered, was unintentional injuries, but no one knew why. So his first big 38 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

investigation—funded by a federal grant—was, according to Guyer, “the largest study of children’s injuries done at that point.” It involved a dozen cities and towns in Massachusetts and research on 100,000 children, documenting injury rates for burns, poisonings, fires, car accidents, and other causes. The study resulted in a state injury-prevention program that would eventually spur legislation and spinoff programs, including those for suicide and traffic and home safety. “The way he operated—using assessments and asking all those questions—is what public health should be,” says Walker, who joined Massachusetts’ health department after Guyer left to teach at Harvard in 1986. “Before he came along, there had never been that kind of attention paid to injuries in children. Now, in almost every health department, there is an office of injury prevention, for intentional and unintentional injuries. Not that it all leads back to what he did, but he was at the forefront.” Guyer is quick to undersell his own significance. Public health, he preaches to everyone he comes across, is a team effort—involving not just medical personnel but, in the case of traffic safety, for example, businesspeople, politicians, engineers, and law enforcement. “The only way you get these things done,” he says, “is by having teams of good people who complement each other’s skills and ideas.” It’s a theme he took with him to Harvard, seven years after he’d started working for the state, and after he’d had his fill of politics. Which is not to say he lost faith in fieldwork. “Quite the opposite: I had great war stories, including positive ones, I could share with my students,” he recalls. “And I developed these case studies they loved—real government situations where you have to make quick decisions, use research information, and deal with the politics. “I tell students that the definition of public health is, ‘It’s where medicine meets politics.’ There’s no public health situation that isn’t political. It can be heavy-duty politics; that’s when it’s really tough. Or it can be politics with a small ‘p.’ But it’s always political.”

ednesday, 1:30 on a September afternoon, and about 70 Bloomberg School students are scattered across the wood-paneled, cozily lit Sheldon Hall auditorium, a third of them with laptops open. They’re gathered for department chair Robert Blum’s Life Course Perspectives on Health, a class Guyer created when he was chairman, a position to which he was recruited from Harvard in 1989 and held until 1998. He’s here today, tieless in a khaki suit, to take part in a panel presentation on infant mortality. One co-panelist is Rebecca Dineen, of the Baltimore City Health Department. This past April, as the

result of a study Guyer helped conduct, the mayor’s office announced a three-year plan to decrease the city’s infant-mortality rate, which is especially high among African-American families, at 15.5 per 1,000 live births. In 2008, Dineen says, 120 babies under the age of 1 died in Baltimore—the highest rate in the state. The new program targets 12 of the city’s 55 neighborhoods, providing medical and family-planning services aimed at preventing such causes of death as low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome, which, over the last decade, have accounted for up to 20 percent of the mortality rate. The solution, with SIDS, is simple: Teach parents the basics of “safe sleep,” including not allowing an infant to sleep in the same bed as a sibling or its mother. Explaining to the students that homes in Baltimore’s underprivileged neighborhoods often lack adequate bedding, Dineen adds that education is also a challenge. More than any other source, young mothers, she explains, turn to their own mothers for advice. So, as part of the program, they are going into churches to disseminate safe-sleep tips to grandmothers. When someone asks whether other cities’ programs served as models for Baltimore’s, Guyer pipes up, “I don’t think any other place has done this.” But each program, he adds, must cater specifically to its beneficiaries. “I’m a great believer that you have to look at, and understand, the local population. You can’t just borrow someone else’s intervention.” You can learn from it, however. Case in point: the program that excites Guyer the most, the UK-based Sure Start. It’s a government-operated network of 3,500 centers, each providing health, education, child-care, and family-support services to families within “pram-pushing” distance. Guyer, who visited a few centers last summer, says they’re also equipped with “brilliant” kitchens, in which nutritious lunches are made for the kids, staff, and parents, who are taught how to prepare and cook healthy meals. But replicating the Sure Start system in the United States isn’t possible at this time, according to Guyer. The British government was able to pass legislation funding the centers, he explains, because, while “the British believe that parents are responsible for their children, they also believe that the community and the government have a stake in that responsibility.” Americans, he adds, “haven’t shown the willingness to make such a largescale investment. We tend to ignore the structural, society-wide forces that shape the futures of these families.

We have the tendency to look only at the individual family characteristics and focus on how they can make it on their own.” But, as a life-course-oriented model, Sure Start is valuable, especially when thinking about the future of public health in the United States. “What I would like to see as a next step is that we begin to think about the earliest period of childhood, including prenatal and preconception, in a way that we may need to create an entirely new institution, to begin to put into place those changes which will result in maximizing health,” Guyer explains. “Some of it has to do with parenting, some with nutrition, some with environment, some with medical care. But right now, we don’t have a way of maximizing kids’ potentials.” Asked what the American version of Sure Start might look like, he says that, without government assistance, it might have to be created in small steps at the local level, starting with young mothers bringing discussions and resources to places where they usually gather—anywhere from a school to a coffee shop. “When I look at my neighborhood, in Baltimore, where do you find all the young moms? They’re running with their push-strollers to Starbucks, and they’re all sitting there, drinking coffee. That’s where they’re talking about their babies.”

“I’m a great believer that you have to look at, and understand, the local population. You can’t just borrow someone else’s intervention.” Guyer doesn’t claim to have all the answers. “My biggest role now,” he explains, “is to put the research out there and try to make the case for a life-course approach. Then some clever person will come along and figure out what is the model that links these things together better than I can.” Neal Halfon, Guyer’s counterpart at UCLA, sees in the Obama administration, and its attempts at health care reform, the seeds of such an approach. “We’re hoping that Congress will serve up the tools, resources, and direction that will allow that to happen,” he says. How long it will take, no one in public health seems to know. But Guyer hasn’t given up hope. “We used to think it was impossible to reduce tobacco exposure or to protect people in cars,” he says. “I just don’t believe in the impossible.” Rich Shea is a freelance writer who lives with his family in Columbia, Maryland. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 39

What?

Interview

Michael Anft

Photos

Dale Keiger

40 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

hink back, if your memory banks extend that far, to the heady days of the 1960s. Amid civil disturbances and a generational revolt against a war, Americans—no matter their differences— faithfully shared one civic religion: progress. The 1964 World’s Fair in New York highlighted the “miracles”—jet packs, flying cars—that would come to those who survived long enough. A TV-cartoon family from the future piloted rocketish bubbles through the skies. Government officials spoke of winning the war on cancer. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. There seemed to be no constraints on the wonders technology and medical science would bring. Push the fast forward button on the DVR to the present. Amid the blur of dystopian, even apocalyptic images, one thought becomes clear: The future ain’t what it used to be. Millennial movies like The Children of Men and 2012 foresee the worst: environmental catastrophe, the wholesale jailing of immigrants, the end of the world. Books that richly imagine a post-human future, such as The World Without Us, or a post-apocalyptic one, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Christian fundamentalist Left Behind novels, are best sellers. Global warming. Pandemics. Peak oil. Heightened tensions between groups of people. It’s clear our era is

not only a harbinger of change but a time when we realize we soon must make some transformations—or face some deathly consequences. With all that in mind, Johns Hopkins Magazine gathered a handful of professors and thinkers to peer into the dark to glean what might be ahead in the next 50 years or so. In October, six of them—the head of the business school; a medical dean who is also a leader in cancer research; a military strategist; a biomedical engineer on the forefront of discoveries in nanotechnology; a pediatrician who also teaches bioethics; and a 31-year-old historian—got together for a 90-minute discussion on the Homewood campus to confront the questions of our coming times: Are our visions of the future being swallowed up by the dark of the present? Or will the optimism of yore return, as we find answers to many of our global dilemmas? Aided by an open-minded, collegial spirit of inquiry, here’s what they had to say: Michael Anft: When we think back 40 years or so, we might remember that Americans had a more sanguine view of what was coming. Nowadays, the future doesn’t beckon so much as it looms as a series of entangled threats. Are these fears likely to be realized? Or does this spate of dystopic visions indicate a lack of imagination about what we’re going to see in the future?

Jon Krause

Now

Six Hopkins scholars speculate on the promise and the shocks of the future.

Margaret R. Moon, SPH ’86, Med ’90, is an assistant professor of general pediatrics and adolescent medicine at the School of Medicine, and at the Berman Institute of Bioethics.

Michael Vlahos is a military expert who is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, and the author of Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change.

Chi V. Dang, Med ’82, is the vice dean of research and a professor of hematology at the School of Medicine.

Yash Gupta is the inaugural dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

Denis Wirtz, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, is associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology.

Nathan Connolly, assistant professor of history at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, is author of the forthcoming book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow in South Florida.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 41

Yash Gupta: I think the gloom and doom phenomenon is temporary. People extrapolate from the current conditions to what their future would look like. If you look at today, you see high unemployment and foreclosure rates. But all this will pass. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, there was optimism because that was something new the world had created. That will be the feeling the next time innovation comes. MA: The economy is casting a pall. So is the environment. YG: What do you see when you turn on the television? That global warming will leave 200 million people without homes, and that when 2030 rolls around we’ll have 85 percent of the population and 40 percent of the GDP in areas where we consume more water than we have. The reporting of these things really has an impact on the psyches of people. Nathan Connolly: I think it’s important to pay attention to some of those projections. Many of these [apocalyptic movies and books] are trying to inspire a certain psychic change—to almost scare people into action. We should pay attention to them as a cultural phenomenon. There are certain projections that are, for lack of a better word, depressing about where the economies are going and the consolidation of wealth and the greatly increasing gap between the poor and the rich. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be like that, but you should not ignore the signs simply because the future’s not going to be a holocaust on a Mad Max scale. Certain things—economic flows, migration flows, the future of housing— are very much questions that we should be answering now in hopes of avoiding a certain kind of, if not apocalyptic, at least unfortunate, future. Chi Dang: I’m going to echo that I think that these are signs that we need to readjust, to recalibrate, with the thought in mind that right now our society has a lot in hand. This country’s very wealthy. There are people worried about losing 42 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

what they have, so they have a sense of gloom and doom about what’s ahead. We also have lost this whole issue of spirituality in terms of getting back to fundamentally what existing and having a meaningful life means. Margaret Moon: When I think of gloom and doom, I interpret that as anger and suspicion. I think it emerges from a sense that the people we have trusted to protect our future aren’t doing it for us. Or there’s some question about whether things are moving too quickly for people to have an impact on them. Recalibration ought to focus on why people feel so angry and suspicious and left out. NC: It’s a great example of the importance of emotion. One of the things that was so remarkable about the presidential campaign of 2008 was it was the first time in a long while where folks tried to build a mass movement around hope as opposed to fear. Now, regardless of what you thought of the politics involved, that was a new kind of sensation that many people had. It reminded folks of the Depression years because when things were actually at their economic worst in the 20th century, you had an administration coming out of the White House that tried to tap into this politics of hope. They’re telling people to be free from fear, from want. I think there is acknowledgment that we have to have some kind of emotional movement in the right direction. CD: There is hope and a recognition that we have to go from this culture

of me back to the culture of the community, and I think that’s what we need to teach the next generation. I tell my children, you know what? The only thing I expect of you is that you make society better in some way. Don’t just look out for yourself. I think that’s the fear—self-preservation. We’re wired to preserve ourselves, right? But we need to preserve more than us. That’s where this hope comes from. I think that’s why young people came out in 2008. They see that it’s not just about me; it’s about everybody else, too. MM: As educators, this question of fear is a part of our lives and it’s an incredibly powerful force. How do we educate students in our democratic society to make better use of fear so that it doesn’t turn into anger? The doom and gloom we were talking about is all about giving into anger, much of it generated from suspicion. So, what is it about our education? How can we make it better so that fear becomes less damaging, while protecting the parts of fear that are creative? Denis Wirtz: I feel that we are succeeding in some way. I see kids in the classroom today who are so much more interested than the kids in my classroom 20 or 30 years ago. Really, they think much more in terms of collective responsibility, of wanting to do good in the world. MM: I was thinking about what sort of education works best for a democratic society, and is it that? Is it teaching people to make the world a better

place? Or is it an education that sort of insists that people ask hard questions and focus on becoming the loyal opposition, if that’s what’s needed? YG: That sense of trusteeship that Professor Dang talked about in terms of making a difference in other people’s lives, that is missing. We need to teach people that they will become the trustees of the future. They may not accrue the benefit of what they do today for themselves, but maybe in 100 years, 200 years, the world will be very different as a result of what they do. CD: Individualism, the creativity to advance technology, and the ability to disseminate that technology for the public good are all intertwined, in that we need to solve disparities in how technologies get out to the public, and who benefits from them. YG: To get there, there has to be a different business model. A year ago, GE announced it would spend $3 billion to create 100 new health care technologies. One of them is this ultrasound machine that costs about $15,000 to $25,000 for the Chinese market, and is of a significantly smaller size than the usual device. There is no way you could sell the typical machine for $300,000 in rural China. Through that innovation, they developed an EKG machine for about $1,000. They are now being used at the sites of accidents in the United States. So, there is a possible way to remove those disparities by producing technologies that are for those nations that simply cannot afford and benefit from the costly original technology, and then using them in applications here as well. But companies and organizations in society are going to have to believe in that. And they will because there are undersold markets and organizations that can create enormous amounts of profit. MM: How we respond to technology really ought to be understood as a reflection of our sense of justice. I don’t think we ever have public debate about that. So we have businesspeople, and if we’re lucky they’re thinking about what

they want to happen and how they see themselves as members of society, but then again maybe they don’t. Really, it would be great if we could have a more open public discussion of our sense of justice and what we mean by that. Because we’re not a society that really is about equity, right? YG: There is a capitalistic effect that’s likely to happen. I mean, if you take the world population now—about 6.8 billion—that is going to grow to about 9.4 billion in about 30 years, and where will the growth be? In sub-Saharan Africa. South Asia. A little bit of Latin America. We have an interest in that part of the world because that’s where the customer is, and that’s where workers will be. The social justice issue has to be combined with the cause and the purpose of economic development. Michael Vlahos: My research focus is on what I call this crisis of globalization that you’re alluding to. I’m not predicting this, but my sense is that we’ve now passed the lowest possible threshold for a global crisis to occur. I’ve tried to create three baskets that need to be holistically integrated so we can look at this. One I call earth shocks. That includes an imminent decline in liquid energy. The second is human shifts. There, I’m interested in how populations that are under stress transform themselves. The incredible mixing of people in the period of globalization has really opened the door to this emergence of new identities, these shifts in consciousness. And large numbers of people are going to be facing the acceleration of physical stressors in the next few years. The final basket I call network stress, and we have a huge network of networks in this world—a financial network, information network, transportation network, and human network. All of these networks are depen-

dent on each other, and I think there’s a lot of fragility to the network and that under stress things could begin to come apart. Part of network stress is not simply a function of earth shocks; it’s also a function of how people respond to the challenges. You can have all sorts of negative feedback loops that could tip things over the edge. We were one weekend away, this past fall, from a financial collapse—and that was the one network that we had the most leverage over. These other networks, they’re not so easily adjusted. So, what I’m trying to do is get a sense of not the most negative but something realistically negative. In other words, I’m not looking at a Permian extinction in 40 years. But in a moderate worst case, where could we be in 40 years? YG: If you look at the migration issue that you mentioned, there is some selfinterest on the part of the society to adjust immigration policies to the needs of our world, such as how we man our laboratories and take care of our engineering processes. MV: I think it’s likely we’ll see more migration, but it will be driven by other factors, including in North America. It’s possible we’ll see extreme desertification extending up to Nebraska. Mexico’s going to have to go north. A lot of America will have to go into Canada. And these are challenges that just haven’t been explored yet. I mean you could have hundreds of millions of Americans living in Canada. NC: On the immigration question, the reducing of the restrictions on immigration is obviously an important story about American innovation, but it also coincides with a kind of systemic manicuring of the domestic population and the de-skilling of the domestic population at the same time. Culling the top Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 43

1 percent from the rest of the world and facilitating a brain drain of sorts in the Third World, that’s not really a recipe for an effective kind of global management, either. Globalization is a word we bandy about kind of fast and loose, but it’s kind of ironic given the fact that our workers once did come from subSaharan Africa, in the 17th century. I would like to hope that we would have a better moral imperative, just to echo your point earlier, but I don’t think we can rely on markets to provide that morality. If this current moment teaches us anything, it’s that individual selfinterest is not the recipe for facilitating social justice. MM: At least it never has been. MV: Part of the shifts in the U.S. that most worry me is that we’ve moved our value structure toward the exultation of not just consumption but self-interest, and that may have some harsh effects on our future. We’ve made the consumer a narcissist. MA: How do we change that? MV: Well, I think the great thing about crisis is that it forces change. MM: I want to add a question on what we can expect, what we should expect of the government in terms of this sort of crisis. How much are governments actually going to matter? For so long our model has been a national model, discrete national models. But this issue of immigration shows how porous all of our sort of emotional and physical borders are. What are we going to mean by government as this crisis plays out? MV: Sixty percent of the world’s population has been left behind—effectively abandoned by governments. If you look at the transformation at the end of Antiquity, you see a well-governed and cohesive globalized world—the Roman world—transformed so it still was made up of states whose main relationship with Rome was what one author called “elite sociability.” And you see so many states in what we call the Third World 44 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

today that are really very similar to states in the Roman world in the seventh century. We maintain this artificial structure of states as almost a way of protecting our preferred paradigm of a nationstate–centered world without realizing that below that all these identities are shifting. And the effective states today are really very few. The worry I have is that the U.S. today is engaged in places like Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth, trying to maintain this fiction of the primacy of the nation-state. We bring cultural creative destruction to these societies. We clear the space. We allow the petri dish to germinate and flourish. And by doing so, we become critical participants in the very transformation that we fear, which is the hollowing out of the nation-state. One of the problems here is we see terrorism as deviant, criminal behavior, whereas what it really is is an expression of the emergence of new identities that are in competition with what residual elites still call a state. The result is that we fight all of these people that we shouldn’t be fighting—and there are many of them in Somalia, Yemen. We are a critical enabler. We’re engaged in this process that I don’t think we fully understand. MA: Will it get worse in 30, 40 years? Or is there some sense that we can turn that around? MV: My sense is that the energy shortage is going to hit fairly quickly and will be caused mostly at first by the resumption of global growth, and then things will become worse a little bit later when the quantity of liquid energy actually declines. This will stress the system to the point where the residual altruistic impulses of the U.S. are turned inward again. The U.S. has gotten much more selfish as a nation. And much of our relationship with the world is militarized.

YG: Don’t you think part of it is also a function of the unequalness in the distribution of resources, of wealth? MV: Oh, yeah. NC: It’s a scary thought because when you follow that formula to its logical conclusion, it only leads to the prospect of there actually being domestic terrorism in the United States. In terms of your question about 20, 30, 40 years, I think the police state of the United States is going to have to develop a really sophisticated arm for dealing with increasing despondency coming from people who are structurally disempowered and disenfranchised. MM: There’s a great cover on The Economist magazine from earlier this year that reframed a famous picture from the French Revolution, and it was relating the notion: Is our public about to revolt? It reminded me that domestic terrorism, or what we call terrorism, can also be revolution. That terrorism/ revolution balance is always a little bit unclear to me, but is that what we’re waiting for? NC: Yeah. Right now it’s just called crime. [Laughter] CD: When you were talking about networks, I was thinking that probably we could learn from biological systems to solve some of our issues globally. We’re really a growing organism with all these networks, and I still think that government will have to play a role in them. And if the governments are chosen correctly, they should serve as our nervous system to really make sure that the organism is synchronized. These

pockets of terrorist activity parallel cancer cells. They kind of want to go rogue because they want to disregard everybody else for their own sake. I think there is a role for government to really synchronize this growing organism. MV: Our military is barely able to function and manage the situation it has now. The same is true of government as a whole. People can run all of the systems of systems that have been created, but I don’t know how really adaptable they are. The problem with government generally is it can’t seem to get anything done. It’s not the same kind of government that you saw during the Great Depression, for example. MA: Where are the centers of power going to be in 30 or 40 years—whether they are based on this national model we currently have of government or not? MV: India and China will reach their full maturity as economic powers, maybe Brazil as well. And the U.S. is on a kind of a long, slow descent. If you throw in the kicker of an increasing crisis emerging from all of the factors put together, then the best-situated place to ride out that crisis is North America, and possibly northern Europe. YG: I think the power issue is going to be much more clustered. There will be energy-based clusters, where power resides. There will be human resource clusters or innovation clusters that will create some power structures. So, the days of what we used to call United States, Europe, Japan—that model of power structures is no longer going to be valid. What will emerge will be based primarily on what the society values. MV: Richard Florida has this nice thesis of clusters, nodes of cities. And that really replicates what Aristotle said about the Mediterranean. He said we’re like frogs around the pond. If you look at Roman and Greco-Roman Antiquity, it was all a network of cities. Those cities were the most highly valued thing in that world. That’s true now—cities are

where everyone wants to live. The people who don’t live in the cities, even in the U.S., are more and more left behind. They’re kind of abandoned. NC: Cities are going to maintain a certain kind of spatial significance. You might want to talk about how land and space aren’t going to matter because of all these other networks, but land is the absolute third rail in American conversations and also in these geopolitical conversations. If there’s ever going to be a kind of shift at all, we’re going to have to radically rethink the way that we talk about land and the purpose that it serves. We’re going to have a lot of movements that are coming out of the so-called Third World that are going to be about land justice. We’re going to have movements coming out of the First World that are going to be about land justice. This land question is going to come back in a major way and crystallize how we talk about injustice. MM: So, if we’re forced to see beyond our current boundaries, how do we approach that question of justice if it’s not the United States’ idea of legal justice? If it’s some broader notion of justice as fairness, how do we do it? NC: Partially we have to be honest about what government actually does. To continue with the biological metaphor, you need to have a strong skeleton to have a functioning organism. And I think infrastructurally the government’s role is still going to be very significant. We need to empower the government in that way, to provide support for the kinds of programs that help the poor and not having that idea be like a four-letter word. MV: Americans have a civil religion and it is considered un-American to be pessimistic. Everyone who makes a

speech that has difficult things in it will always say, “But in the end, I remain an optimist.” I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic. My role is to be a strategist. I tend to make assessments without these religious considerations coming into play. However, I have to say Americans have a huge apocalyptic streak that comes from the great awakenings and from Calvinism, and it is very intense. The point I’m trying to make is we have already transformed our relationship to the wretched of the earth as an us-versusthem situation. And so Americans are much less interested in justice because they see in these teeming barrios and favelas the roots of terrorism and of the illicit. And the government is the major agent promoting this. They’re drying up the very sources of altruism that would make us care for others as though they were brothers. That is one of the most worrisome developments. MM: And I think it’s one that we can work to change. MV: Right. Absolutely. MA: What are we going to have to look forward to? As an editor of The New York Times is fond of asking: Where are the flying cars? What are the things that might offer us some hope, either in terms of devices or cancer cures or just our ability to somehow get on with these environmental and resource issues? MV: The vision of The Jetsons was the high point, the apogee of American confidence and certainty of expectation. That world demanded ever-increasing energy consumption. Everything we have in this world is dependent on energy. We’re using up the creatures of the Cretaceous and the Triassic and the Jurassic and they’re all going to be gone. [Laughter] What I’d like to find out from people in the technology world is Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 45

how we can effectively substitute for a decline in available energy. That’s a huge question. Unless we begin to really seriously confront this question now, we’re going to go back to a 1950 standard of living, or a 1930 standard of living, in the next several decades. YG: The standard of living doesn’t necessarily become affected if we’re more efficient in our consumption. And education is a big part of developing technologies and consuming energy more efficiently. CD: This whole issue about Jetsonstype technology giving us more modern conveniences, I’m not sure that’s really that high of a priority. We definitely have innovations that could decrease mortality or morbidity from certain diseases, so people can actually age gracefully and die nicely. But really the priority has got to be energy. It’s not new gadgets to make us not have to do things. MM: Technologies can change the way we see ourselves as human, as well as change the way bodies work. They can change this notion of aging. How do we expect the nature of what it is to be human to change? How will technology help or hurt that? And again: How do we plan? DW: Actually from a social point of view, it’s interesting to think about aging. We have to watch out what we wish for, because living longer may actually be a complete catastrophe. [Laughter] CD: That’s why I said, “Age gracefully.” DW: That’s right. [Laughter] And still die quickly. It could actually be a huge problem to see an aging population sticking around. You still have to be productive. The people are saying we should retire when we are 60 or 65. Maybe it should be 85 or 90. Again, this comes from fear—which is so primal, right?—of aging and what comes after that. YG: But at the same time the reality is technology does allow people to 46 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

live better. There is the assumption that the average age will indeed continue to improve. Therefore, the aging question becomes a very valid one in the sense that if you live longer, someone has to be deprived of a certain amount of opportunity that existed before—unless opportunities themselves expand. NC: The zero-sum thinking is really dangerous in terms of the innovation question. Innovation is great, but it’s the social application of innovation that’s really the question here. I mean General Motors has been sitting on the technology for a car that runs on water for quite some time. Everybody knows it but nobody can force the intellectual property out of that company. Cars that have the fuel efficiency of a Model T are the going rate right now in American society, which is outrageous. There’s no innovation, right? The fear driving entrepreneurship and innovation is wonderful, but when fear actually causes you to hoard that innovation and entrepreneurship, well then, we have a problem. MM: That gets back to our question: What do we mean by justice? And if we ask the question differently—instead of celebrating innovation, we question the injustice—would it change the way we innovate? CD: I would personally fear that if we question justice that that would really diminish creativity. I think we need to sort of preserve that somehow but really pay more attention to justice. MM: I will never believe that by asking questions about justice we will stifle innovation or creativity. I just don’t think there’s anywhere in the world where those two problems co-exist. YG: How do we apply that innovation? Do we hoard it? You’re talking about the General Motors issue. It is not innovation itself that is the guilty party.

MV: But innovation is celebrated in this society and justice really isn’t unless you’re looking at criminal justice. The question is where does the urge for justice come from? The real downside with the U.S. is that it promoted over the last century individualism as narcissism and demoted civic responsibility. The civic virtue of the Founding Fathers is not much in evidence anymore. This is where crises can be helpful. A crisis can be great, but it can also lead to revolution, as it did in Russia and France. DW: This crisis was supposed to be the mother of all crises—financial crises at least—and we don’t seem to have learned anything from it. I’m doubtful that these crises can help us get out of bad habits. YG: I think it’s premature to say we haven’t learned anything. Crises really do create some innovations, like nylon or the jet engines created and developed during the Great Depression. MV: We learn from past crises, so we innovate backwardly. You can’t do that with things like climate change. The biggest shift in climate change thought is the emergence in the last few years of the possibility of huge negative feedback loops. So it isn’t that the first changes—say, going up three degrees in global temperature— would be that awful. But if we go up three degrees, and then all the permafrost melts, hundreds of billions of tons of carbon go into the atmosphere, you have methane hydrate in the ocean, the glaciers have gone, all the methane in the icecaps is gone, and then you have this further rapid rise in temperature—that is the really scary part. This is where you enter into unknown terrain. YG: But that brings you to the idea of civil society. Do we really care

about the world as a whole, or do we care about ourselves? And if we do care about ourselves, then the whole notion of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit is not that important. MM: But again, how can we bring caring for ourselves in line with caring for civil society? Caring for yourself is not necessarily different from caring for your society. So I think again this all gets back to how can we change the way we educate ourselves about that connection? DW: There are two major entities that don’t vote and that’s the environment and the young generation. Those two are getting screwed, big time, by us as we speak. There’s a realization that this growth may quickly slow down because of environmental catastrophe. So, those two aspects of individualism and government responsibilities may sometimes seemingly exclude one another. How we conciliate them is the real challenge for the next 30 or 40 years. MM: That’s exactly the question that I think is important. How do we channel them together? CD: Education. MM: But what about it? Is our current approach to education for a democratic society the right approach? Is there something we need to change? MV: It’s more than knowledge. There’s an element of socialization. I’m talking about a kind of civic socialization, like was done in this country to a much larger degree a century ago. CD: Yes. Civic education. MM: So you’d teach people their roles as members of a democratic society? MV: A democratic and just society. Justice comes out of the ability to empathize and a feeling of kinship with others. This gets back to the notion of the nation as an imagined community.

DW: The classic model is the one that says, We’re doing well, and we can help the rest of the family by distributing the wealth. Right? Except in this country it doesn’t happen. This is almost the only country in the world that doesn’t have that. MV: America has to learn altruism. DW: That’s exactly what would kill innovation. CD: I took off a week recently and went to an off-campus course and they had a game where there were five tables with different people. You’re supposed to create value and earn points. But if you were watching carefully, it actually was set up so you’re competing with the other tables, not with each other. So, the more you cooperate within a table, the more you’re going to win, right? And the table that discovered that won. The point is you can educate people to learn how to cooperate. MV: But “competition” is a holy word in the American ethos that tends to push us in the other direction. I would like to see as part of our socialization this notion that we can go further by helping each other and working together. MM: I don’t think that it stifles innovation. [To Wirtz:] I love what you’re saying about this. Especially coming from outside the U.S. and looking in at the way we do things, but sometimes we think that education in a democratic society means teaching people to be nice to their neighbors or to follow the rules. I would hate to think that that was what a democratic education meant. It should be about educating people to be the loyal opposition. It’s intellectual innovation. It plays out in the same way as scientific innovation—by asking the hard questions and demanding more of the world

around you. But do it with a sense that the idea is to make this society a better society. I can’t imagine that that would stifle innovation. YG: That means a fundamental change in the cultural values in some respects. We value individualism substantially more. Given that, it’s highly unlikely that we can create the kind of society you’re talking about. NC: In this country, we assume that you gain security by having capital, that’s what we’re taught. Capital or a gun, essentially. Quite frankly, if there’s anything that comes out of this moment, it’s that we need to rethink how capitalism actually works. MV: Capitalism in the corporate sense stifles innovation. We see it in this intense conservatism in our society today, and that comes because we’re a status quo power. We want to maintain the world that we like. We don’t want to let anything go, and I think that immobilizes us. DW: Those questions may come because the standard of living is going to stagnate, if not decline, in this country. People are going to have to look for other ways to get motivated and excited about their lives. Again, I can see it in the students at Hopkins. Working in South Africa or in villages in the middle of China, they are much more excited about that than taking a business course—[to Gupta:] sorry [Laughter]— and making money. They really want to see innovation, but they’d like to see it in more places, with more benefit for more people. Michael Anft is Johns Hopkins Magazine’s senior writer. This interview is an edited version of the conversation. To watch video portions of the original, go to magazine.jhu.edu. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 47

Dateline: Baltimore Sun war correspondents were the first American reporters to file stories from Paris after Allied troops liberated it in 1944. An excerpt from Joseph R.L. Sterne’s new book, Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II.

t’s 1939. Adolf Hitler has set his sights on Poland. In anticipation of war, London holds trial blackouts, and The Sun, Baltimore’s flagship daily newspaper, dispatches reporters to Europe. By fall, the Second World War has begun and during the next six years, the Sun’s war correspondents risk their lives to send home a series of powerful narratives, astute in their observations and often prescient in their military comprehension. Their bylines appear in reprints across the world as they break news, beating even The New York Times in their coverage of the war’s battlefronts. Joseph R.L. Sterne decided to honor that writing by revisiting the war as it unfolded in Baltimore’s preeminent daily newspaper. Now a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies, Sterne, 81, was a political reporter and editor with The Sun from 1953 until 1997. He spent three years scouring archived copies of the paper, culling the best pieces of war writing. “I was very well aware—as a guy who had written all his life— about the ephemeral nature of newspaper writing. It wraps the next day’s fish,” Sterne says. “These were great newspapermen, they were greatly respected. I wanted to take their writing and put it into a book and make it a little more permanent.” This fall, the Maryland Historical Society Press released the fruits of Sterne’s research. Combat Correspondents:The Baltimore Sun in World War II tells the story of the war through the eyewitness reports of Baltimore journalists. In the excerpted chapter that follows, Sterne brings us Lee McCardell’s and Mark Watson’s triumphant accounts of the liberation of Paris in 1944, as well as Price Day’s blunt reportage of war’s painful reality.

48 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

—Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

Liberated Paris

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Winter 2009 49

fter spending most of June and July fighting their way into Normandy, Allied forces in August broke out of that province and swept into tank country on the high road to Paris. It was an exultant moment for The Sun. In an era when it considered The New York Times as the only newspaper worth emulating, the liberation of Paris gave The Sun a dramatic opportunity to outshine its “good, gray” competitor. And it did so with enough resourcefulness and luck to make the last week of August a triumph that ought to be remembered as long as presses roll in Baltimore. Lee McCardell was the first American reporter to get into the French capital ahead of the authorized U.S. entry. He did so by befriending five members of the French Resistance who gave him a ride on the roof of their Citroën as they raced into Paris one day ahead of General Charles de Gaulle’s forces. “It wasn’t the easiest method of travel but the driver was in a hurry to get home,” McCardell wrote.

What happened? Weren’t New York reporters supposed to be everywhere? This author learned the answer only when, six decades later, I chanced upon an account of the recapture of Paris by A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker magazine. Both he and Harold Denny of The Times had been caught in huge traffic jams along all roads leading to the French capital on liberation day. Denny, after coming across some Germans, “saw he had a scoop of historic proportions since he was the only correspondent for a daily publication present,” Liebling wrote. So Denny tapped out his story, gave his dispatch to a public relations officer, and then suffered a correspondent’s worst nightmare. The press center at the Hotel Scribe managed to lose “poor Denny’s exclusive eyewitness story,” Liebling wrote. “At any rate The Times never received it. The big [Times] story about the surrender was an Associated Press dispatch that read as if it had been assembled in London.” All this on the same day The Baltimore Sun had two bylined dispatches by reporters who had much more to write about. First let McCardell begin his story: “It took me six days to reach Paris, traveling at times behind various reconnaissance and armored elements and finally entering the metropolitan area yesterday with tanks of a French armored division.” He described the five members of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) that he had fallen in with as guys “in summer sport clothes” who really knew their way around. “One afternoon they took us to call upon Danielle Darrieux, the French actress living in retirement outside Paris. They took us one night to the home of Andre Berthomieu, a French movie director, and his wife, Leni Norro, a French actress. We spent three nights in country inns and a fourth in a lavish country home of a lady who embarrassed us with apologies. Germans had run off with all her sheets and best wines.” In this name-dropping piece, McCardell also informed Baltimore readers that near Rambouillet he had encountered the great American writer Ernest Hemingway, an old hand at conflict. McCardell was worried that other correspondents might beat him to Paris. Hemingway assured him that would not be the case, and he was right. Watson was not to be outdone in high living. After arriving in Paris in the spectacular fashion mentioned above, he got himself a front-row seat at the historic Hotel Crillon to witness the surrender of the German headquarters command. He described this as “the main act of the day,” adding: “It was the end of the Master Race in the City of Light and it did not look at all like the visions Hitler had painted.” Old friends welcomed Watson and some of his fellow reporters to their home, gave them the use of a porcelain bathtub, and “seated us before the first white table cloth, shining silver, and glasses and china any of us had seen since quitting London.” Despite these highjinks, there was a war on, and McCardell told of passing through the village of MonfortLeMaury near Versailles. “The day before after a small American patrol had passed through, the villagers hung out all their

More to the point, the stories of both reporters carried Paris datelines. Not so with The Times. His colleague, Mark Watson, was hardly to be outdone. Riding into Paris next day with a U.S. armored column, he found himself the only fluent French speaker among his fellow Americans seeking directions to the Eiffel Tower. Desperate to join the victory parade, U.S. officers installed Watson in a car at the head of the column. “That is the sort of thing a newspaper correspondent dreams of but usually encounters only in the movies,” Watson mused. On August 28, 1944, Baltimoreans awoke to read a six-column front page headline: “Two Sun Correspondents with Allies Entering Paris.” Just below appeared an unusual home-office box. The McCardell-Watson race had turned into an unintended intramural competition: “McCardell by a Length” was the small headline. “Lee McCardell beat Mark Watson by a day,” the paper declared, tongue in cheek. “McCardell, going in with the French in a somewhat unofficial fashion, entered the capital on August 24 while Watson, traveling with the Americans, entered the city August 25. But McCardell’s first dispatch reached the Sun office in so short a time before Watson’s that a photograph was needed to determine the winner.” More to the point, the stories of both reporters carried Paris datelines. Not so with The Times. In that crucial liberation week, the New York paper did not have a single staff-written story from inside the city. The nearest it came was a “NEAR PARIS” dateline. Otherwise The Times relied on the Associated Press, the United Press, and staff reports from Supreme Allied Headquarters. 50 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

flags. That night the Germans the Resistance forces were came back, shot the Maire and divided between Communists his wife, and burned his house. and Gaullists. All were at least We understood then why united in hunting down Vichy French villagers were someregime collaborationists, a times cautious.” quest that resulted in gunfire at He also described evidence the Chamber of Deputies, a last of combat even as the Paris retreat for Vichy police units. As celebrations began. French for girls who had been friendly artillery was shelling German with German occupiers, their batteries in the Bois de Boureward was a shaved head. logne and the areas around the Watson told of one girl who Auteuil race track. “In several was left with “a small double instances crowds mobbed indiclump of short hair in imitation vidual German prisoners and of Hitler’s moustache.” snipers. Police had to fight to Watson wrote that “there protect the terrified Jerries.” is no doubt that the city’s enorWatson heard rumors shots mous resources as a rail and road were fired at General Charles center will prove valuable for the de Gaulle when he attended coming phases of the campaign.” services at the Cathedral of But he also told of growing supNotre Dame. He reported that ply difficulties as Allied armies two French priests present at rushed eastward, beyond Paris. the ceremony had confirmed Only later was it learned the great The photos that appear with this story were taken by Sun the stories. When visiting Notre French capital had escaped the correspondent Lee McCardell, who not only filed dispatches Dame himself, he saw “chairs fate of devastated Warsaw when but took pictures. Here, a female Army medic does her were still lying around overthe German commander decided laundry in a combat helmet. turned in the two side aisles”— to prove himself a European— signs the de Gaulle party had moved quickly outside the repeat, a European—daring to defy Hitler. line of fire. Those firing on de Gaulle were described as The next day The Sun carried reports by Watson and Germans, or Communists or Vichyites—perhaps all three— McCardell warning that the Paris situation remained danas the general took control of the city. gerous and uncertain. The French Resistance and German Both Sun reporters marveled at the exuberance of authorities had agreed on a three-day armistice during which Parisians when columns of American troops finally entered German troops would leave the city. “Time will tell whether their city. Their welcome was “hysterical,” wrote McCardell, the Paris committee was wise in granting the armistice at all,” “even while the streets still echoed and reechoed with the Watson commented. McCardell, for his part, reported rumors last hopeless resistance. I felt like I had been moving in a from Paris alleging outright combat between Nazi troops. But dream. Crowds of men, women, and children were screamin the end, Paris remained intact—one of the great achieveing ‘Bravo,’ throwing flowers at columns of Allied tanks, ments of Western civilization. It was a heady moment in the half-tracks, and jeeps. Tears were running down many a war, with Price Day reporting from Marseille that Germans Parisian’s cheek. Tears ran down my own once or twice.” were disorganized and offering only token resistance to the Watson made a similar observation as he told of racAllied offensive in southern France. “The present advance is ing to keep up with the American Fourth Infantry Division, in fact hardly a military campaign at all in many places. It is which had been given the honor of leading the official U.S. an expedition through friendly country.” He warned, howentry. “The citizenry tossed flowers and swarmed over every ever, that the Germans still held one-third of Marseille and truck or jeep that stopped, deluging non-reluctant soldiers had a battery of two hundred guns in the port area. with enraptured kisses.” He told of meeting a Frenchman, a By September 1, these precautionary comments termifellow veteran of World War I, who had lost a son in the curnated. German forces were in retreat in many areas, leaving rent conflict. “ This day is the first day of joy I have had since vast quantities of military equipment, food, and other supplies my boy’s death,” he told Watson. French crowds taunted and to rapidly advancing Allied troops. From the front in southern threatened terrified German soldiers. They shouted “AssasFrance, Day reported: “Remnants of the German 19th Army, sins . . . Pigs . . . Thieves” and “a few other expletives that after a painful crossing of the Drome River, limped toward would startle a Pratt Street longshoreman.” the area southeast of Lyon to join other depleted and motley Paris had been a scene of sporadic street fighting for units. Of the Germans who escaped the debacle, many were days as a German withdrawal hung in the balance and on foot, their vehicles lying in a gigantic junk pile. Elsewhere Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 51

throughout the northern half of the liberated territory, other Germans were also afoot because their vehicles had run out of gas or oil. Abandoned and intact cars and tanks are found in increasing numbers. In one area northeast of Grenoble the farmers disclosed that the Germans took their butter to use as motor lubricant. It is increasingly clear that except for the 19th Army, which retains a measure of cohesion, Germans in this area are in a state of confusion, out of touch with each other, and ignorant of the disposition of the Americans, French regulars, and Maquis troops [French guerrillas].” War is not only a tale of clashing armies. For Baltimore Sun war correspondents operating largely on their own, it also was a tale of individuals whose singular fate could mean life or death, good or bad luck, courage or cowardice, grand adventure or crushing misfortune. By happenstance, on September 3, 1944, the newspaper published two articles by Day that ran the gamut of human emotion. Filed in different places on different dates, they both arrived in Baltimore in time for the big Sunday edition. First, a tense horror story from Grenoble, a city captured by Allied forces moving north from the Riviera invasion:

The last man stood until after the coup de grace, and still remained half standing until the rope was cut away.” One is left to wonder how these young men would have lived their lives if war and German occupation had not intervened. In the very same issue of The Sun, Day had a long, sprightly interview with Gertrude Stein, the celebrated American writer and conversationalist who had spent the war in obscurity at the foot of a mountain in the lower Alps: “A stocky little woman with close cropped gray hair and lively brown eyes looked happily at the small task force of unarmed, worn, dirty, and unshaven war correspondents. ‘Can you get it through your thick heads how wonderful it is to see American children?’ We told Gertrude Stein how wonderful it was to see her. For the past four years of war the author of Portraits and Prayers, Four Saints in Three Acts, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and other volumes; one of the most brilliant of modern critics; friend and sponsor of Picasso and Hemingway, and proponent of the theory that ‘a rose is a rose,’ that ‘pigeons on the grass are melancholy,’ and that ‘the world is round’ has been living in this out-of-the-way corner. She, Miss Toklas, and a white poodle, Basket II, haven’t been hiding exactly. They simply haven’t let anyone know where they were. The villagers knew, but they didn’t tell. “At one time, as an eminent American citizen, she was offered a chance to get out. She thought it over and turned it down to stay with France through its abysm from which she never doubted for a moment it would emerge. By staying she got one of the great stories of the war, for it was in the region of cloud-filled valleys and rugged peaks that the Maquis arose in their fullest strength. She started her story in Paris on the day the war began. For almost five years the manuscript was kept in illegible shorthand so it couldn’t be deciphered if it fell into the hands of the Germans during the four times they occupied parts of her house. The Stein book is tentatively titled ‘All the Wars I’ve Known.’ Its opening sentence: ‘I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.’” Back to the war: Lee McCardell once again was writing about how correspondents covered the conflict [Sept. 4, 1944]: “Wars are now moving with such dispatch on such a vast front that scores of newspaper correspondents pouring into Paris from London have only the vaguest notion of what’s going on. If the situation seems confused to newspaper readers at home, they should have the satisfaction of knowing it’s the same way here. Separated by vast distances from the press censors, radio transmission points, and—most important of all —the briefing officers who formerly filled in the war story for them, all are trying frantically to piece the story together.” Holbrook Bradley, 60 years later, told this writer the business of getting his copy to the paper was often uppermost in his mind. Not only were his D-Day dispatches held up—a terrible disappointment. Since he typed

In the very same issue of The Sun, Day had a long sprightly interview with Gertrude Stein. “In miserable and rainy twilight, against a wall of a shabby metal works on the outskirts of Grenoble, six young men found guilty six hours earlier of treachery against France died before a firing squad. More than 10,000 citizens of Grenoble, packed in balconies, clinging to roofs and sneering from beneath a black flood of umbrellas that eddied through the streets leading to muddy Champs Bouchayer, cheered as a long line of Maquis sent a single fusillade into the men who, by their own admission, had borne arms as members of the hated militia [of the Vichy government]. The execution was scheduled for 7 o’clock. At three minutes to seven a black windowless van pushed its way through the crowds and through the lines of Maquis who had tommy guns cocked and pistols in hands. Within two minutes of seven, the men, ranging in age from 17 to 22, had walked firmly and rapidly to six L-shaped steel posts standing some six feet out from the wall and spaced 15 feet apart. Five of the men wore dark blue clothing, the other a brown coat and light trousers. One was red-headed, the others dark. They were not blindfolded. All faced the firing squad with open eyes and with their hands tied with new thin rope behind their backs. Precisely at 7 o’clock, without formality, a line of Maquis wearing the ridged helmets of the French army fired. The man on the right end fell first, knees forward and legs buckled under him. The next four men slumped slowly. 52 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

on single sheets of paper (no carbons), a lost dispatch was a loss forever. There were no rockets from Baltimore about transmission difficulties. The only message he got from the home office was to keep his head down, an instruction he knew he could ignore. As the Allied offensive swept across France, Watson reported from Soissons, “The farther one advances in this dazzlingly swift campaign the clearer is the evidence of the demoralized state of the enemy. Our infantry and artillery have been able to move in the armor’s trail, consolidating its gains and establishing a firm wall to block the enemy’s retreat.” In the same issue of the newspaper, McCardell reported that engineers building advance airfields for the Ninth Air Force had been hard put to keep up with the advancing front. “The construction battalions now are leapfrogging each other. Their reconnaissance teams are well beyond Paris in the race to keep the fighter-bombers on the heels of our armored columns and motorized infantry now rolling toward the German border.” A new theme crept into Watson’s reportage in mid-October when he was writing about Aachen—this time not as a military objective waiting to be taken but as a German city now under the occupation control of American forces. Here was a great opportunity, he wrote [Oct. 15, 1944] to demonstrate how the U.S. would administer conquered territory and populations. “Our performance in that stage is inevitably being witnessed by the Germans in the immediate area and their impressions are inevitably being communicated in one way or another to millions of Germans in the cities which lie on the other side of the combat line.” Occupation control must serve the military campaign, he asserted, citing the old army dictum that “one of the prime requisites for success in the forward areas is orderliness in the rear.” Watson estimated there were still 10,000 German civilians in Aachen who had defied Nazi orders (obeyed by 150,000 others) to evacuate the city. Some were the likeliest candidates “to accept our domination” having gone through a screening process whereby “a good many dubious sheep and undoubted goats” have been left in prison camps. To perform police duties, 80 persons had been selected as “reliable” and

had been outfitted with new uniforms—blue jackets and redstriped pants—that drew the envy of the populace. Nazis had long boasted they had brought order out of chaos after coming to power in the early ’30s. Watson wrote: “If now the American administrators can demonstrate that they, too, can and without savage oppression likewise establish and maintain civilian order, there will be a political victory which, in after effects, may prove commensurate with the military victory itself.” The Sun’s military expert said the Army’s program might not satisfy Americans who think “every German should be exterminated” or others who believe convinced Nazis will “immediately yield to generous treatment and become reformed characters.” “The Army is following a middle path which seeks to separate known goats from potential sheep. They are endeavoring to keep the goats isolated to provide the sheep with an opportunity to demonstrate their tractability and their willingness to live at peace with the world.” In assessing damage in Aachen, Watson reported that while many water mains were shattered, schools were more in need of teachers than repairs. During this optimistic period before the storm, Day and McCardell came up with vignettes mocking the Germans. Day told of a trio of would-be deserters, one of whom had a safe-conduct pass that had been dropped on enemy positions. But there was a problem. “They understood that they had only one ticket among them. Could they surrender on that, or should they go back and get two more?” McCardell described a German veteran of World War I who had attempted to surrender but his commanding officer was a “stinker” who would execute his whole squad to prevent defections. The vet defected anyway and, “ironically enough,” in the same locality where he had surrendered in the last war. There would be precious little time or inclination for Allied troops to belittle the German enemy in the grim weeks ahead. Excerpted from Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II, published by the Maryland Historical Society in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 53

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Alumni

News & Notes from our graduates and friends

Shiv Gandhi

Xiao Le, A&S ’13 (far left), and Ah Young Shin (far right), a graduate student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, went hiking with Joanne Dorrett, wife of Paul Dorrett, A&S ’69, and the young student she mentors in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. Their outing was supported by the

Alumni Association’s new initiative to connect alumni and students in the Baltimore area.TASTE, short for “Take a Student to Events,” matches alumni and students for one-time shared experiences, which this fall have included hikes, dinners out, and ballgames. Find out more at alumni.jhu.edu/taste.

Troop 759, Close Up

Escape from Liberia

Gift of a Kidney

The Precocious Mr. Hell

Student Aid: Paying It Forward

Alumni Notes

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 55

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Jake Boritt, A&S ’98, and Justin Szlasa, A&S ’94

Filming the Scouts of Harlem

hen Justin Szlasa and Jake Boritt first met a few years back — through a mutual friend and fellow Blue Jay—they immediately knew that they wanted to collaborate. Szlasa was looking to get out of Web design and into making films. Boritt, already a filmmaker, had just completed his first featurelength documentary (titled Budapest to Gettysburg, the film earned critical acclaim from the likes of Ken Burns) and was ready for a new project. Szlasa, an Eagle Scout, wanted to make a movie about the Boy Scouts. Boritt, a resident of Harlem, wanted to make a movie about his New York City neighborhood. “I immediately loved the contrast of two iconic American institutions, Boy Scouts and Harlem,” says Boritt. Their film, 759: Boy Scouts of Harlem, premiered in March at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem. It is the story of Troop 759, a group of four city kids and their two troop leaders, as they head off to summer camp. The troop defies common perceptions about the Boy Scouts—these are mostly black kids, from an inner-city neighborhood— but the film’s portrayal of Harlem is sometimes surprising as well. One troop member, nicknamed KC, is white. The Scoutmaster, Okpoti Sowah, is a Ghanaian

Despite the warm welcome Boritt and Szlasa received from Troop 759, it took a long time for the boys to become comfortable with the camera, the lavaliere microphones, and the constant attention. The pair spent 18 months with the troop, camping, attending Saturday meetings, and ultimately joining them at Camp Keowa, a summer Scout retreat on a lake in upstate New York. As a result, the boys in the film are remarkably vulnerable and open once they finally reach the woods. They voice fears about nighttime noises, comb each other’s hair, gossip about the “hot” Siberian girls working in the dining hall. “We really became part of the troop,” says Szlasa. “That was the burden after we had the footage in the can. We felt tremendous responsibility to tell their story in a way that was honest and true and accurate.” The duo shot about 180 hours of footage, which they edited down to a compelling 70 minutes. The film’s narrative arc is supplied by 11-year-old Keith Dozier, a summer camp greenhorn and a ham in front of the camera. He fails his first “dock test,” unable to swim even a few feet in Crystal Lake. Szlasa could relate; long ago, he failed his first dock test, too. “What I love about Keith is that he didn’t give up. He kept trying,” Szlasa says. In the film, Keith’s determined attempts to learn to swim are interspersed with scenes from Harlem and the camp, as well as interviews with the Scouts’ families and troop leaders. The film made its Johns Hopkins premiere in November at a special screening sponsored by the Baltimore Chapter of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association and is scheduled to be broadcast on PBS affiliates in the spring. Boritt and Szlasa are already talking about making another film together, perhaps a feature on the Peace Corps. “It’s an extraordinary program that is underreported, like the Scouts,” says Szlasa. Or they may return to the subject of the Boy Scouts, this time focusing on Philmont Scout Ranch, a camp in New Mexico. This first experience left them wanting more. “I still want to go back to Camp Keowa and climb the wall and swim across the lake,” says Boritt. “It was like being a boy again.” —Andrea Appleton

Rajesh Panjabi, SPH ’06

The Long Journey Home The stars of 759: Boy Scouts of Harlem

immigrant with a master’s degree from Columbia University. And a couple of the boys come from longtime Scouting families. “Hopefully it will change some people’s minds about both of the words in the title of our film: both about Harlem and about Scouts,” says Szlasa.

56 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

ajesh Panjabi has told the story of his 1990 escape from Liberia countless times, but it hasn’t made it any less powerful. Raj was only 12; he and his family (his parents were immigrants from India) had lined up to board a plane, part of a hastily organized evacuation of the capital, Monrovia, as rebel troops commanded by warlord Charles Taylor descended on the city. The international airport was closed; the Panjabis were waiting to board a privately chartered cargo

Shelf Life Abel Kiviat National Champion: TwentiethCentury Track & Field and the Melting Pot, by Alan S. Katchen, A&S (PhD) (Syracuse University Press) This reviewer can speak for one of two readerships targeted by Katchen—those perhaps slow on track yet amenable to learning of it when in a wider social setting. On this basis, he breaks the tape by 30 strides.The other audience, already immersed in the sport, surely will savor start to finish the career of Kiviat—a long-distance “Hebrew runner,” son of Polish immigrants, who earned fame with the Irish-American Athletic Club in a time when the sport was akin to baseball in popularity. (Indeed, he also played center field.) His roommate on a team cruise to the 1912 Stockholm Olympics was Jim Thorpe. One of his races inaugurated Homewood Field in 1915. He knew little of long-distance loneliness: Outlasting the prejudices of his early times, he became the George Burns of track, meeting presidents, before he died in 1991 at age 99.

Rajesh Panjabi (left) and one of his favorite patients, Emmanuel Yonly. plane at a small local airport. But the plane was not for everyone. “The only way to get on that plane was to have the right color passport, skin, or money,” Panjabi says. There were two lines: the one the Panjabis and others of means stood in, and another line farther from the plane. Panjabi will never forget the people in that other line. “There were children and women in torn lappa [traditional] cloth, being systematically restrained by soldiers,” he says. “When the plane took off, the back hatch was still open. You could see those whom you had left behind. “That was the moment Liberia gave birth to my conscience,” says Panjabi. Panjabi’s devotion to his homeland never faded in the years following his departure. If anything, it strengthened as he and his family started from scratch in a strange new country. Panjabi’s father — who had stayed behind — eventually fled on what would be the final evacuation flight and rejoined the family, which settled in North Carolina. Panjabi, who received his MD from the University of North Carolina, says that he wanted to go back to Liberia in 2003, but the country once again “was in hell — going up in flames,” he says. Taylor was attempting to hold on as two other rebel groups tried to remove him from power. In the meantime, Panjabi traveled to Afghanistan to learn about health care in post-conflict societies. Finally, in 2005, he was able to fly back to Monrovia; at that point Liberia was a nation of more than 3 million people and only 51 doctors. “I had mixed feelings,” Panjabi admits. “I was so thrilled to reconnect with that part of my life, recol-

Exiles, by Elliot Krieger, A&S ’70 (Soho) If this novel were made into a movie, the star should be a young Alec Guinness. He would play the paired protagonists— look-alikes caught up in the 1970s smorgasbord of GI deserters, anti-war activists, and sympathetic Swedes in frumpy Uppsala—as well as a triangulating Portuguese. Exiles come to an edgy welcoming committee, even as Sweden willingly provides board and language classes. The Americans mostly cut those classes, saying they offer only how to ask for a cheese sandwich. The communication barrier compounds the exile—from the very hosts. Perhaps the Portuguese is a much-feared plant. He is forever asking, “How do you say it?” yet coming up with the apt Americanism. The women in the cause give their all. Passports wander. But this account of mistaken identities is no comedy of errors—rather a stark account of life abroad in troubled times. —Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63

lecting old memories I had lost — but there was a deep feeling of sadness. I remembered Monrovia as a thriving city, a place where other West Africans came to vacation. When we entered Monrovia, there was no electricity, no water, and one traffic light. My old school had been used as a hideout by militias. The walls were broken down.” It was almost as if the country itself was trying to make it difficult for Panjabi to return. But his sense of possibility is unflappable. “We could start to see the potential for pragmatic change.” A new president — Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman president in Africa — had won the 2005 democratic election. Some services were being restored. Some health clinics reopened. In 2006, along with Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 57

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Keith Weller

Liberian native Weafus Quitoe and others, Panjabi started Tiyatien Health (the word means “truth and justice” in a Liberian dialect). The group currently operates out of the 75-bed Martha Tubman Hospital in Zwedru, a 10-hour drive southwest of Monrovia. Tubman Hospital is effectively the only hospital for a region of about 300,000 people. (Baltimore City, with a population of 650,000, has 11 major hospitals.) Tiyatien Health works with AIDS-affected women, community health workers, and other medical and public health personnel to design and enable the delivery of comprehensive HIV and primary health care. Panjabi has a particularly magnetic personality—a very handy gift for one involved in something as relentless as providing health care in a country without basic infrastructure—and he’s put it to good use by recruiting other Johns Hopkins alumni to work for Tiyatien Health. These include Tiyatien’s medical director, Kerry Dierberg, SPH ’05, Med ’06, whom Panjabi met at Massachusetts General Hospital when both were doing their residencies. Panjabi’s story and Tiyatien’s goal of providing comprehensive health care to southeastern Liberia also brought Mark Siedner, SPH ’06, Med ’07, and John Kraemer, SPH ’08, to the group as research directors. Twelve hours after getting a call from Panjabi in the spring of 2007, Kraemer traveled to Liberia for a two-week research mission. The long road trip—and the isolation of Zwedru—were new experiences for

Kraemer, who had never traveled outside the United States. (“I grew up in Kansas, and it’s a long way from Kansas,” he says.) But Panjabi says that his friend jumped in with both feet. “It’s an area where a few resources can do so much good,” says Kraemer. “[This is] a pretty optimistic group. It’s a group that has [Panjabi’s] personality. The team was united by passion.” Tiyatien has already had a few successes in Liberia, particularly in getting antiretroviral HIV drugs to rural hospitals like Tubman through a model program called the HIV Equity Initiative. For Panjabi and Tiyatien, it’s a broad-based effort to improve health across a swath of areas, including a few areas in desperate need of improvement. “We’re trying to bring about the freedom of opportunity,” Panjabi says. “We’re trying to build a movement. That’s what it’s going to take.” —Geoff Brown, A&S ’91

Pamela Paulk, Bus ’04 (MBA), ’05 (Cert)

Giving a Piece of Herself

alking down the hall at work one day, Pamela Paulk, vice president of human resources for the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, ran into her colleague Robert Imes. Imes, a painter/mechanic in Facilities at Johns Hopkins and a photographer for Johns Hopkins events, is also a union delegate. He and Paulk knew each other from years of working on union issues. Imes had just returned from a 10-month sick leave for kidney disease, and on this, his first day back, Paulk asked if there was anything she could do. “Well, I could use a kidney,” Imes joked. Then Paulk did something shocking: She offered him one of her own. Organ donation had been on Paulk’s mind for nearly a decade, ever since she observed a kidney transplant. She recalls the moment the surgeon attached the gray, seemingly lifeless donor kidney—which had been flushed of blood—to the Transplant patient Robert Imes and organ donor Pamela Paulk recipient’s receiving artery. “It turned from no color to

58 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

the color of that lampshade,” says Paulk, pointing to the deep magenta shade. “And tears started going down my face. It was just amazing.” When Paulk walked out of the operating room, she was shocked to see the donor already sitting up and talking. “I thought then this is something I might want to do.” But, Paulk says, she couldn’t be an “altruistic donor,” someone willing to donate a kidney to any needy recipient. “I needed to have a connection to the person,” she says. So she waited, while she earned an MBA at night from Johns Hopkins and began teaching at both the Carey Business School and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. And then came Robert Imes. “My mom always said, ‘If you have it to give, you give it,’” Paulk says. “To her, keeping something that you didn’t need when somebody else needed it would have been wrong.” Paulk turned out not to be a compatible donor, but Johns Hopkins surgeons had a solution. The pair ended up as part of a 16-patient, multicenter operation, known as a “domino donor” transplant. The procedure involved a complicated mix and match between pairs of donors and recipients around the country. On June 22, at the age of 55, Paulk donated her kidney, which was flown to a recipient in St. Louis, while Imes received a kidney from a donor in Oklahoma City. These days, both patients are back at work and feeling fine. Imes was out for three months, but Paulk only missed a month. She hopes telling her story will help raise awareness about organ donation. She wears a “Donate Life” pin on her lapel and encourages everyone she meets to sign their donor cards and talk to their families about it. “If you lose a family member to a tragedy,” she says, “your tragedy can become someone else’s miracle.” —AA

Felix Hell, Peab ’07 (AD), ’08 (MM)

On Organ, the Wunderkind

our days, 10 full-length recitals, more than 19 hours of playing. Only a handful of musicians have done it, and Felix Hell was one of the youngest. In 2006, at age 21, the German-born organist executed a marvel of musicianship at the Peabody Institute when he performed the complete works for organ of Johann Sebastian Bach. For Hell, it was just another in a long line of early and significant successes. At the tender age of 8, Hell memorized a Bach prelude in three days without ever having played piano. Several months later, his father took him to an organ concert and Hell was rapt. Before he turned 9, he was playing organ at a liturgical service. At 18, Hell became the youngest organ major to graduate from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, an impressive feat at a school that seems to specialize in child prodigies. He

Organist Felix Hell then came south to study at Peabody Institute under Donald Sutherland, earning an artist diploma in 2007 and a master of music degree just one year later. All the while, he produced eight CDs and played more than 650 concerts around the world, helping to earn him one of the first Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Outstanding Recent Graduate Awards. “Felix has the ability to be one of the leading organists of his generation,” says Sutherland. He remembers helping the wunderkind learn the full range of Bach’s repertoire for that marathon concert: “It’s an athletic event in a sense, and you prepare and pace yourself in the same way. He is an exceptional talent.” This fall, Hell returned to Peabody to work on a doctorate. “At this point, I’ve gotten more out of my life than I ever expected. I’m going to keep doing my best, be grateful, and let the rest fall into place,” he says. He hopes to teach at a major conservatory one day. Then, he jokes, his students can say they got their degree “from Hell.” —Robert White Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 59

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

pitals. “These are very warm, loving cultures,” she says, “but you walk into a hospital, and it’s not a cozy environment. We’ve made progress—expecting mothers are now allowed to have a family member with them—and we’re trying to get doctors to decrease Caesarian sections. There’s a 50 percent C-section rate at some rural hospitals, which is an inappropriately high number.” Breman, a native of Sharon, Massachusetts, headed to Costa Rica as a 16-year-old exchange student. Now she is the program technical adviser for Infante Sano, a nonprofit that works with mothers and infants in Latin America and the Caribbean. She studied in Spain, speaks five languages, and has worked on women’s health issues in Angola, Cape Verde, Ghana, and Niger. “When you travel outside the U.S., especially to poorer countries, you realize how horrendous the health care is,” she says. She considered medical school but wanted to get back out into the field faster than that path would allow. So she came to the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, thanks to scholarship support. “Most of the principal health care provided overseas comes from nurses, not doctors,” she explains. “In Cape Verde, nurses trained me to be a midwife. Physicians there don’t do deliveries except for Caesareans.” She describes her work in Bani these days very simply: “We’re focusing on humanizing the birth process. We’re making this a mother- and baby-friendly hospital.”

Jesse Kuhn/rawtoastdesign.com (ALL)

hen Johns Hopkins University welcomed its first class in 1876, student aid scholarships—a condition of the university’s founding bequest—helped support exceptional students who otherwise might not have had the means to attend. In addition, the most promising graduate students were given cash stipends as well as free tuition. It was an innovation that eventually became standard practice at American universities. Generations of graduates from all nine university schools have benefited from the more than 1,000 named scholarship and fellowship funds. That assistance has resonated far beyond the education of individuals, with alumni going on to serve humanity in a multitude of ways. This issue, we look at the work of three alumni who were supported by student aid scholarships at Johns Hopkins: A public health nurse working to improve birthing experiences in Latin American and Caribbean hospitals; a patriot scholar whose drive and discipline are an inspiration; and a globe-trotter helping people of developing nations to help themselves.

Benjamin Krause, SAIS ’09 Bernard Schwartz Fellow for International Development

Developing Real-World Help

B Rachel Breman, Nurs ’02, Nurs/SPH ’04 (MSN/MPH) Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship Isabel Davidson Gamble Scholarship

Nurturing Better Care for Mothers

rom a small hospital in Bani, in the southern region of the Dominican Republic, Rachel Breman explains the surprising cultural shift that happens at the doors of many Latin American and Caribbean hos60 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

en Krause grew up in Nebraska and intended to become a Jesuit priest. But after years of social work in the United States and Latin America, he realized his true calling was to empower people in developing nations to create their own solutions. After leaving the Jesuits, he joined the Uganda Village Project, which links small local organizations with international resources to improve the lives of rural villagers. “It’s about working with communities to help them identify their needs and obstacles,” he says, “and the practical steps we can take to solve them together.” Krause’s hope of attending the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies was hampered by his lack of funding. When it looked like things were not going to work out financially, and he began making other plans, “I got an email that completely changed my life.” He had been named a Bernard Schwartz Fel-

low for International Development. At SAIS, he mixed academic practice with real-world practicality. In one economics class, “most of the student groups did theoretical projects,” says Krause. “My group developed an impact evaluation for new health interventions for the Uganda Village Project, which we rolled out that year. I used four different classes to develop ideas now used in the field.” He’s currently an international development fellow at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Ethiopia, working to safeguard and effectively deliver the more than 100,000 metric tons of food that CRS is bringing into the nation this year. “We’re two years into a water shortage and drought here,” Krause says by phone from Addis Ababa. “We’re working on food security issues, helping farmers to diversify, and to make sure we don’t have a repeat of the famines of the 1980s.”

a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, Moore returned to Baltimore to complete his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, with student aid scholarships, and turned his vision upward. “Hopkins was where that vision got a dose of clarity. I knew if I could compete there, I could compete anywhere. I knew I could make a contribution.” Moore became a student intern for Baltimore’s then mayor, Kurt Schmoke, who saw the young man’s potential and encouraged him to apply to be a Rhodes Scholar. In 2001, Moore got that Rhodes Scholarship and, while at Oxford University, studied radical Islamists and non-conventional warfare. That work got him hired by U.S. Homeland Security officials, and after a brief stint in Washington, Moore realized that to understand how global politics worked, he needed to understand the global economic system. He returned to London to get that financial education as a banker, but his training was cut short in 2005 when he left the world of finance to serve on active duty in Afghanistan as a member of the 82nd Airborne division. During his deployment, he

Westley Moore, A&S ’01 A.Z. Hartman Memorial Scholarship Class of 1979 Memorial Scholarship

Charging Upward

n a path that has taken him from Baltimore to the Bronx to London to Afghanistan to Washington, D.C. (and, now, Wall Street), Wes Moore has learned how to see—and seize—the opportunities before him. A Baltimorean who moved to New York City as a young child, he was a restless teen who bristled against authority. A change of scenery and vision (read: military school) was what it took to start him moving forward. “[Military school] was the first place I actually dared to think bigger,” he says today. After graduating with an associate degree and

spearheaded a successful program to rehabilitate Taliban, al-Qaida, and HIG fighters and earned a field promotion to captain. A White House Fellowship followed (he was the youngest member of the class), and in 2007, he returned to a career in finance by joining Citigroup’s Investment Bank. He’s also awaiting publication of his first book, a nonfiction work that juxtaposes the parallel lives of two Baltimore men named Wes Moore; the other Wes Moore (discovered by Moore in a newspaper article) was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Moore has a talent for turning potentially hazardous situations into opportunity. “It sounds trite, but the answer to that old problem of ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ It’s one bite at a time.” —GB Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 61

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Alumni Journeys Spotlight: China the Qin Terra Cotta Army Museum at the site of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum, travelers converged again with local alumni, this time in Shanghai to meet club president Tommy Li, SAIS Nanj ’01, and hear from Ken Jarrett, SAIS Nanj ’89. A career foreign service officer and current vice chairman of APCO Worldwide, Jarrett discussed trade relations between the United States and China. Said traveler Frank Grant, A&S ’64: “We saw every highlight we would have wanted to see; the lecturers were very knowledgeable and eager to share their information. It was all effortless.” —Nora Koch

Learning by the Bay

he Alumni Association kicked off the new semester in the historic Chesapeake retreat town of St. Michaels. The school year’s first Alumni College was led by Grace Brush and William Ball, both professors in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering. A weekend high point was the waterfront luncheon hosted by Mike, A&S ’62, and Nancy Lytell. Here’s a look at the weekend, by the numbers:

29 alumni/students for the weekend on topics from the bay’s 4 lectures, environment to its economy 3 Chesapeake cruises crabs 168 steamed oysters tonged from the bay 6 (plus 50 empty shells!) 62 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Jay VanRensselaer

Eighteen Johns Hopkins travelers spent two weeks this fall touring China, with stops for special events with local Alumni Association clubs featuring prominent alumni speakers. In Beijing, after touring Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and China’s Great Wall, travelers joined local club president Boyong Wang, SAIS Bol ’01, SAIS DC ’02, and other alumni to hear Zhu Min, A&S ’91 (MA), ’96 (PhD), a recently appointed vice governor of the People’s Bank of China, speak about the interconnectedness of the global financial system. Following a cruise along the Yangtze River and a visit to

The St. Michaels Alumni College was the brainchild of Chesapeake enthusiast Bill Day, Engr ’66.

1945

Charles Edwards, A&S ’45, ’48 (MA), ’53 (PhD), who retired in 1991, now divides his time between Sarasota, Florida, and New York City and assists in science teaching in a Sarasota elementary school.

1952

George Manos, Peab ’52, has written a book, The President’s Pianist: My Term with Truman and My Life in Music, that recounts his time spent with President Truman and follows his career in music from early childhood to his performances as a classical pianist, symphony conductor, composer, and teacher.

1955

John Defandorf, Engr ’55, is enjoying low-key retirement and keeping in touch with Johns Hopkins Phi Psi friends. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, especially about history, particle physics, and astrophysics. Of course, he is always still rooting for the Red Sox. Eugene Galen, A&S ’55, retired after practicing medicine from 1963 to 1996 in a private practice in Beverly Hills, California, and enjoys sailing. Warren Grupe, A&S ’55, was honored at Harvard University with the establishment of the Warren E. Grupe/John P. Merrill Professorship in Transplantation Medicine. He continues to teach nephrology as a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia, and serves as visiting faculty at the Lee Iacocca Institute. He is a board member for Charlottesville Health Access and medical adviser to the Charlottesville Westhaven Coalition. He is also studying nonmedical factors that impede health access in underserved populations. Richard Howell, Engr ’55, ’60 (MS), is president of Maitland Civic Center and enjoys hunting, fishing, golf, and travel. Pierce Linaweaver, Engr ’55, ’65 (PhD), is a trustee emeritus of Johns Hopkins University and makes frequent visits with his wife, Kelly, to see his children and two grandsons, ages 6 and 4, in Jackson, Wyoming. Victor J. Marder, A&S ’55, ’55 (MA), Med ’59, clinical professor of medicine, pediatrics, and neurology in UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars.

1959

Arnold Silverman, A&S ’59, an attorney with Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott in Pittsburgh, has been named a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer for 2009. He specializes in intellectual property law and is the firm’s former chair of the intellectual property department.

1960

William F. DeVoe, A&S ’60, has retired as head of pediatrics at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. He is still practicing. Jerome Reichmister, A&S ’60, has been in orthopedic surgery practice with classmate Larry Becker, A&S ’60, for 40 years. He serves as the chairman of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, and served as the chairman of Sinai’s board of directors from 2005 to 2008. Bernhard Saxe, A&S ’60, and his wife are enjoying spending time with their 14 grandchildren, ranging in age from 3 to 18 years. James Henry Wheatcroft, A&S ’60, is busy enjoying his four grandchildren, ranging in age from 4 months to 4 years.

1961

Josh Grossman, A&S ’61, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, now teaches advanced cardiac life support, mentors and tutors international medical graduates for the United States Medical Licensure Examination, and reviews books for Tennessee Medicine.

1963

Thomas E. Spath, Engr ’63, recently welcomed his second granddaughter. She will be living around the corner in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, with his son, Ted, and daughter-in-law, Corinthia, who were married last summer in Manila, Philippines. Thomas and his wife, Lyn, have been getting in shape to hike into the Grand Canyon for a week’s rafting on the Colorado River.

1964

Jerry A. “Dutch” Van Voorhis, A&S ’64 (MAT), was honored in April by Chatham Hall, an independent secondary boarding school, for his 16 years of service as head of school. The Jerry Van Voorhis Lecture

Hall for “world leaders, thinkers, and artists” and the endowed Jerry Van Voorhis Leadership Scholars program were built and named, respectively, in his honor.

1965

Harvey Berger, A&S ’65, retired from an accounting practice in 2006 and continues to work part time as a sole practitioner. Edward Homan, A&S ’65, was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2002 and was re-elected in 2004, 2006, and 2008. He now chairs the Health and Family Services Policy Council. Charles King, A&S ’65, is still enjoying practicing gastroenterology. He writes, “I started playing golf five years ago and am still happy when I break 100.” After spending time in the Air Force and doing academic medicine in Florida, “it’s great to be in Maryland and seeing us always beating Navy in lacrosse!” Newsmakers Clarence Long, A&S ’65, retired in 2006 due to kidney failure and Michael R. Bloomberg, Engr ’64, received received a new kidney in 2007 at The the 2009 Mary Woodard Lasker Public SerJohns Hopkins Hospital. Stephan Mintz, A&S ’65, ’72 vice Award for “employing sound science (PhD), retired June 30 after 35 years of in political decision making; setting a world service at Florida International University, where he was a professor of physstandard for the public’s health as an impeics and served as department chair for tus for government action; leading the way 12 years and as associate dean of the Graduate School for the last five years. to reduce the scourge of tobacco use; and

1967

Henry D. Kahn, Engr ’67, was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2008. He is a senior statistician with the National Center for Environmental Assessment in the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. Donald L. Trump, A&S ’67, Med ’70, president and CEO of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars.

1969

advancing public health through enlightened philanthropy.” Charles Sawyers, Med ’85, is one of three recipients of the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, which honors investigators whose contributions have improved the clinical treatment of patients. The trio received the Lasker, known as the “American Nobel,” for groundbreaking work in the development of novel treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia.

Merrill J. Egorin, A&S ’69, Med ’73, codirector of the Molecular Therapeutics/ Drug Discovery Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars.

1970

Elliot Krieger, A&S ’70, won an O. Henry Award for his first published short story, “Cantor Pepper,” and has published a novel, Exiles. Read a review on page 57. Joseph Lipinski, Engr ’70, is a construction engineer currently working on the Freedom Tower in New York City. Brian Mohler, A&S ’70, SAIS ’72, retired from the U.S. State Department in September after 35 years as a career diplomat. David Moore, A&S ’70, retired in 2006 after a long career as a gastroenterologist. He is now working on his farm in rural Pennsylvania. Bennie I. Osburn, Med ’70 (PGF), dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, has been named to the board of directors of Banfield, The Pet Hospital. He has been involved in key discoveries about food animal viruses — including the bluetongue virus — developmental immunology, congenital infections, and food safety, and has produced more than 280 peerreview publications. Thomas A. Pearson, A&S ’70, Med ’76, SPH ’76, ’83 (PhD), the Albert D. Kaiser Professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine and senior associate dean for clinical research at the University of Rochester, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars. David Ruchman, A&S ’70, retired as an administrative law judge for Colorado and completed eight years as an elected official with Denver’s Regional Transportation District. In that capacity, he says, he “worked to successfully bring light rail passenger service to west suburban Denver.”

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 63

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

1972

Ellis Wasson, A&S ’72, ’72 (MA), has published a book, Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present, with publisher Wiley Blackwell.

1973

Herbert C. Smith, A&S ’73 (MA), ’77 (PhD), professor of political science at McDaniel College, received a Distinguished Teaching Award at the school’s honors convocation. John Stobo, Med ’73 (HS), senior vice president for health sciences and services at the University of California, has been named to the board of directors of CHI-California Healthcare Institute. Alison Zahniser, A&S ’73 (PhD), has published a book with Orbis Books (2008) titled The Mission and Death of Jesus in Islam and Christianity. It was selected as “a best book” for fall and winter 2008 by the Association of Theological Booksellers and selected as one of the 15 best books of 2008 by the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, a leading journal in the field of mission studies.

1975

Bruce Parker, A&S ’75, has been inducted as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He also recently completed his term as president of the International Association of Defense Counsel. Melvin Morse, A&S ’75, has started a privately funded think tank, spiritualscientific.com, dedicated to consciousness research. Mary Warner, A&S ’75, is currently an attending physician and instructor at Harvard Medical School, specializing in obstetric and Newsmakers gynecologic ultrasound. She commutes to Boston from her 80-acre farm in Maine. Bruce Oreck, A&S ’76, was sworn in as

U.S. ambassador to Finland on August 12.

1977

Kenneth C. Anderson, Med ’77, the Kraft Family Professor of Medicine Jeffrey Blitz, A&S ’90, ’91 (MA), won a at Harvard Medical School, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars. 2008–2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Robert F. Buchanan, A&S ’77, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series recently joined the Finance Departfor an episode of the NBC sitcom The Office. ment faculty at the John Cook School of Business at Saint Louis University in Blitz, who wrote and directed the films SpellSt. Louis, Missouri. He is a chartered bound and Rocket Science, received the award financial analyst and a full-time nontenure-track instructor. for the hourlong episode “Stress Relief,” Martha S. Linet, SPH ’77, chief of which aired after the 2009 Super Bowl. the Radiation Epidemiology Branch in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars. John Perrotta, A&S ’77, is in his second year as chair of the World Languages Department at High Point High School in Beltsville, Maryland. In his free time he and his wife, Sara, are busy raising a ninthgrade daughter, Flavia, and a sixth-grade son, John-Paul.

1978

Thomas J. Walsh, Med ’78, chief of the immunocompromised host section of the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and adjunct professor of pathology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was named as the 2009 recipient of the Lucille K. Georg Medal of the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology for distinguished contributions to the field of medical mycology.

1979

Carl Hull, A&S ’79, president and chief executive officer of Gen-Probe Incorporated, has been named to the board of directors of CHI-California Healthcare Institute.

1980

Steven Beal, A&S ’80, retired from the U.S. Army in 2008 after 28 years of service. He is now settled in Virginia where he works as a government contractor for the National Intelligence Council. John Culleton, A&S ’80, returned this year to a solo endocrinology practice after many years in a large multispecialty group. He has also enjoyed reconnecting with Johns Hopkins along with his son John, a member of the class of 2010. Leslie Ganley, A&S ’80, who is enjoying a new phase of his career as a high school teacher, writes, “I utilize both my clinical social 64 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

work background and my new special education degree to support students with a variety of learning disabilities and emotional/ social issues.” Scott Paul, Engr ’80, has been participating in clinical research at the NIH since 2001 and writes, “I’ve been enjoying the intellectual challenge including developing my own protocol on the use of digital stereophotogrammetry as an outcome measure for conditions such as scoliosis.”

1982

Arnold-Peter C. Weiss, A&S ’82, Med ’85, associate dean of medicine and dean of admissions at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars.

1985

Donn Colby, A&S ’85, is currently living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, with his partner and their two adopted sons. He is medical director of the Harvard Medical School AIDS Initiative in Vietnam, which provides training and technical assistance to expand treatment for HIV disease throughout the country. Laurence Huang, A&S ’85, is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. This position involves research in HIV-associated pulmonary diseases in San Francisco and Kampala, Uganda. Lisa Pollack, A&S ’85, is now semiretired after 15 years as a real estate broker and owner of The Pollack Realty Group. She moved to North Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 2008 for her husband’s new job running a patient-centered medical home in Foxboro.

1986

Ralph E. Pudritz, A&S ’86 (PGF), director of the Origins Institute at McMaster University, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars.

1987

Thomas Hecht, Peab ’87 (DMA), has become Singapore’s first professor of music at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music.

1988

Steve Cina, A&S ’88, was just elected president of the Florida Association of Medical Examiners and chair of the Anatomic Pathology Cluster of the College of American Pathologists (CAP). He also serves as chair of the CAP’s Forensic Pathology Committee and is the deputy chief medical examiner in Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), Florida.

1990

Jane R. Maytin A&S ’90 (MLA), is now semiretired, working part time as a sales associate at a clothing store in Hunt Valley, Maryland. She has two sons, David and Michael Antwerpen. Her husband, Richard, is retired from Alcatel-Lucent. Peter Zage, A&S ’90, was awarded the 2009 Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology for work on developing new therapies for children born with neuroblastoma.

1991

Karen D. Davis, SPH ’91, head of the Division of the Brain, Imaging and Behavior-Systems Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, has been elected to the JHU Society of Scholars. Jason McNamara, A&S ’91, is chief of staff for FEMA. He was most recently an associate vice president and the director of emergency management/homeland security for Dewberry Davis LLC, a consulting firm headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia.

1994

Linda Whipple, A&S ’94 (MA), has been named director of corporate and foundation development in the Harrisburg Area Community College Foundation. She will be responsible for increasing the visibility of the college in its eight-county service region, and will represent the college and foundation in the community to build relationships and encourage new support for the college.

1995

James Eldridge, A&S ’95, was recently sworn in as a Massachusetts state senator. Eric Halsey, Engr ’95, will soon be leaving Ohio and moving to Lima, Peru, with his family. While there he will participate in and

develop research projects. He expects to be there for three years and visitors are welcome. Geoffrey Ling, Med ’95 (PGF), received the 2009 Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences Distinguished Alumnus Award and spoke at the June commencement in Carnegie Hall. He is acclaimed for his work in developing advanced prosthetic limbs for soldiers. An active duty U.S. Army colonel, he is the only board-certified neurocritical care specialist in the Department of Defense. Jon Strasser, Engr ’95, is a radiation oncologist at the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center in Delaware and has an academic appointment through Thomas Jefferson University. He and wife Ilicia just welcomed their second daughter, Zoey, who joins big sister Sydney.

1996

Celestina L. Owusu-Sanders, SPH ’96, has been named an “up-andcoming attorney” by the Wisconsin Law Journal. An attorney at Quarles & Brady, she represents health care providers including health systems, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, nursing homes, hospices, and physician group practices.

1998

Richard N. Jones, SPH ’98 (ScD), of Needham, Massachusetts, is a senior scientist at the Institute for Aging Research of Hebrew SeniorLife. He received an Academy Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence in Tutoring Award from Harvard Medical School, and the journal Medical Care named Jones an “exceptional reviewer” for 2007–2008, placing him in the top 5 percent of the journal’s peer reviewers. Emily Schuster, A&S ’98, and her husband, David Bauckham, welcomed their first child, Liana Beatrice Bauckham, on June 18.

2000

M. Beth McFadden, A&S ’00, is still working with Giorgio Armani Corp., where she is senior director of marketing and events for North America. Miranda Nurse, A&S ’00, is in her fourth year as a Spanish teacher. She was recently named director of Tutoring of Future Scholars, Inc., in Wilmington, Delaware. Jennifer Washburn Richcreek, A&S ’00, is enjoying life on Kodiak Island. She writes, “The salmon are running, berries are popping, and days are long. At work, we just built the first industrial-scale wind farm in Alaska and are powering our community with abundant wind and water.” Jodi Rosensaft, A&S ’00, welcomed the birth of twins, Hallie and Jacob, on November 21, 2008.

Obituaries

1926: Fred B. Slagle, A&S ’26, ’33 (PhD), a retired Exxon executive, died August 7 in Lakewood, New Jersey. 1936: Hans Lineweaver, A&S ’36 (PhD), developer of the LineweaverBurk plot, published in 1934 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, died at the age of 101. He was internationally prominent throughout his career in food technology and the poultry and egg science industries. He served as president of the Institute of Food Technologists in 1971, was a holder of six patents, and was the author or co-author of more than 100 technical publications. 1937: William Diamond, A&S ’37, ’42 (PhD), a World Bank economist who retired in 1978, died May 16 at his home in Washington, D.C. Newsmakers He published two books, Development Banks (1957) and Aspects of DevelopJonathan Groce, A&S ’04, won his second ment Bank Management (1982), the second of which he co-edited. Daytime Entertainment Emmy Award for 1942: Charles Armstrong Forbes Jr., Engr ’42, a Reisterstown lumber company executive and outdoorsman, died from complications of a stroke at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He purchased the Reisterstown Lumber Co. in 1933 with his father and brother. He had not retired at the time of his death. 1943: Donald N. Rothman, A&S ’43, a founder of Center Stage in Baltimore in 1963, has died of respiratory failure. A retired trial attorney, he was also a founding partner of Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger & Hollander.

Outstanding Game/Audience Participation Show for the Discovery Channel’s Cash Cab. He has been a producer on the show for four seasons. Steve Oppenheimer, A&S ’69 (PhD), a professor at California State University Northridge, received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.

1946: John L. “Jack” Butler, Med ’46, a psychiatrist in private practice residing in Butler, Maryland, died July 6 of pulmonary disease. He was an advocate for the rights of homosexuals, and his work in Boise, Idaho, was documented in John Gerassi’s book The Boys of Boise. 1947: George Moore Brady Jr., A&S ’47, a founding director of the James W. Rouse & Co. Inc. and a national leader in low-income housing, has died. Brady joined the company in 1950, where he was in charge of developing the mortgage business in Baltimore and Annapolis.

2001

1947: Lee M. Howard, Med ’47, SPH ’58, ’60 (PhD), died April 28 at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville, Maryland. He was chief of the USAID worldwide malaria program and director of the Office of Health. Before retiring from USAID in 1987, he served the Pan American Health Organization as a specialist in financial resource mobilization for disease eradication.

2005

1947: Edward N. McLean, Med ’47, died July 4 after sustaining injuries related to a fall. He founded the first ophthalmology clinic in his county in Oregon, which has become Eye Health Northwest.

Kelly Young, SPH ’01 (PhD), was one of five faculty members at California State University, Long Beach, to be honored with the 2009 Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award, which is given to selected faculty in recognition of their sustained excellence in teaching. She is an associate professor of biological sciences.

Vicki J. Coombs, Nurs ’05 (PhD), has joined the firm of Spectrum Clinical Research Inc. as senior vice president. Peter Dixon, A&S ’05, SPH ’06, conducted research at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City this summer. Elissa Roch, A&S ’05, published her first two novels for pre-teens this year. Standing for Socks was released in March by Simon & Schuster, and The Trouble with Mark Hopper followed in July from Penguin.

2006

Cory D. Snyder, A&S ’06, is an environmental consultant with Malcolm Pirnie, Inc., in Long Island City, New York.

2007

Richard Pardoe, Bus ’07 (MS), is now assistant vice president with M & T Realty Capital Corporation in Baltimore.

2008

Tom Falvo, Bus ’08, reports that his capstone project, “The Business of Emergency Medicine: A Non-Clinical Curriculum Proposal for Emergency Medicine Residency Programs,” has been accepted for publication in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. Paul Rabil, A&S ’08, has become the national spokesman for the National Cued Speech Association.

1947: Katherine C. Turner, Nurs ’47, an active participant in many community organizations in Towson, Maryland, and a registered nurse, died of heart failure at Oak Lodge Senior Home in Pasadena, Maryland. 1949: Bruce Carlton Barger, Engr’49, of Salem, Virginia, died July 24. He was employed by Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Johnstown, Pa., until he retired in 1981 to Largo, Florida. 1949: John Strider Glass, Engr ’49, died on May 30, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was vice president at Presbyterian Medical Services until his retirement in 1990. 1949: Robert A. Pearce, Engr ’49, retiree from E.I. DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, died August 10 in Princeton, New Jersey. 1950: Rudolph Charles “Rudy” Dangelmajer, A&S ’50, a resident of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, died June 26 after a battle with prostate cancer. He specialized in total joint replacements at Overlook Hospital and the Summit Medical Group in New Jersey. 1950: W. Scott Ditch, A&S ’50, died of head injuries suffered after a fall at his Royal Oak home. He oversaw the naming of streets in Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 65

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Columbia, Maryland, and helped persuade Baltimore’s voters to approve Harborplace. 1950: Charles Burton Levitin, A&S ’50, died July 21, surrounded by his family. He made his acting debut with the JHU Barnstormers and appeared on stage at the Little Theater of Norfolk, where he served on the board of directors. He was president of the family furniture business, D. Levitin & Son Inc., in Norfolk, and opened Simply Southern, a furniture store in Virginia Beach. He retired in 1994. 1951: Victoria Smith-Friedman, SPH ’51, of Chestertown, Maryland, died June 25. She was a New York State epidemiologist and served as director of Mental Health Services for Greene County, New York. She also ran a private psychiatric practice. In 1976, she received the Redway Award from Newsmaker the New York State Medical Society for her work on Reyes syndrome. She was a Sisters Louise Erdrich, A&S ’79 (MA), and life member of the American Psychiatric Heid E. Erdrich, A&S ’89 (MA), ’90 (MA), Association.

are both winners of 2009 Minnesota Book Awards. Louise won for her novel The Plague of Doves, and Heid for a book of poetry, National Monuments.

1952: Lena B. Hobbs, A&S ’52 (MEd), died November 24, 2008, at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. She spent her life in education, teaching elementary school all the way up to college.

1953: Marie D. Eldridge, SPH ’53, a former U.S. Postal Service executive who became a realtor after her retirement in 1984, died June 13 at her home. 1953: Frederick Conrad Osing Jr., Ed ’53 (MEd), an English and social studies teacher and a World War II veteran, died July 4 at the Riderwood Village Retirement Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. 1954: Romeo M. Zarco, SPH ’54, a microbiologist specializing in blood coagulation and a division leader at the Miami-based heart pacemaker company Cordis Corp., has died. After settling in Miami, he co-founded the Filipino-American Association of Florida, a social/cultural organization based in Weston. 1956: Frank E. Mason Jr., A&S ’56 (MLA), died on June 27 at his home in Easton, Maryland. He was a supervisor for the Baltimore City Health Department in the 1960s. After graduation in 1973 from the University of Baltimore School of Law, he maintained a private practice in Easton until his retirement. He ran for Talbot County state’s attorney in 1974 on the Republican ticket, losing by a slim margin. His son is Frank E. Mason III, Bus ’95 (MBA). 1960: Prescott Harrison Williams Jr., A&S ’60 (PhD), taught Old Testament Languages and Archaeology at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, served as dean and acting president at the seminary, and became professor emeritus in 1984, continuing to teach until 1994. He died June 18 at St. David’s Hospital in Austin, Texas. 1962: Raymond H. Starr Jr., A&S ’62, a retired developmental psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and expert on child abuse, died of cancer at his Pikesville home. 1964: John I. Germershausen, Bus ’64, a veteran of the Korean War and resident of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, died on June 9 at Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. He worked as a biochemist for Merck & Co. Inc. until he retired in 1996 after 26 years of service. 1967: Ralph Criswell Benson, Med ’67, died on May 28 in New Orleans. He was chairman emeritus of the OB/GYN department at the University of Oregon Medical School and served as president of the Oregon Cancer Society. He also served as director of the American Board of Family Medicine and was the author and co-author of several seminal medical textbooks and articles. 1968: Betty Jane Grisinger, Ed ’68 (MEd), died June 21 at her home in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she has lived since her retirement. She was an educator in Baltimore County schools for 24 years. 1969: William Reed Fry III, A&S ’69 (MA), a member of the Lehigh Valley Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, died August 6. As a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he did his alternative service as a counselor at the Wiltwyck School for Boys. He was a selfpublished poet. 66 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

1969: William “Bill” Jasper Peters III, A&S ’69 (MS), a longtime employee and submarine specialist of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, died June 24 in Pulaski, Virginia. 1969: Tony Yen, Engr ’69 (PhD), who retired from the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2005, died June 17. 1970: James A. Rimbach, A&S ’70 (PhD), an affiliate of Grace Lutheran Church in Tacoma, Washington, died suddenly on July 3. He used his teaching skills for more than 15 years at two Lutheran seminaries in Hong Kong, from which he retired in 2006. 1971: Pearl N. Shiling, SPH ’71, a retired Maryland Health Department social worker who helped establish sexual assault care centers, died of cancer at the Gilchrist Hospice Center. 1972: Marjorie Gordon, Ed ’72 (MEd), a former president of a paper box manufacturing business who was active in numerous civic organizations, died of pancreatic cancer August 5 at her north Baltimore home. 1989: Karen Myres, Bus ’89 (MAS), died at Forbes Hospice in Oakland, California. She served as president of the Executive Women’s Council for two years before stepping down in February due to her health. During her tenure as president, she joined with other anti-domestic violence groups in urging Pittsburgh not to promote police officers accused of domestic violence. 1995: Paula Birdsong Emanuel, Engr ’95 (MS), who lived in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, died June 13 at Somerset Medical Center. She worked for Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill as an engineer. 1997: Daniel Lee Everman, A&S ’97 (MA), who lived in Pensacola, Florida, died June 6 after a long battle with liver disease. He was a drummer and a computer programmer/Web designer, software engineer, and a technical writer. 1998: Diane Elizabeth Campbell, SPH ’98 (PhD), died in Thetford, Vermont, on May 23. She did health outcomes research for several organizations including Dartmouth Medical School, was director of the New Hampshire Cancer Registry, and established Medical Outcomes Research and Evaluation Services, a consultancy which served, among others, The Rand Corporation. She was lead author or contributing author of papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Campbell’s academic career culminated in performing peer review for this and other journals. In recent years, she added realty to her experience. 2004: Kristen Cooper DeWeese, Engr ’04 (MSE), died July 27 in Baltimore after a two-year battle with cancer. Correction: In the September issue, Sapna Rohra’s alumni affiliation was listed incorrectly. She is a 2007 graduate of the Whiting School of Engineering.

Alumni News & Notes Alumni Association President: Gerry Peterson, Nurs ’64 Executive Director of Alumni Relations: Sandra Gray, A&S ’76 (alumni@jhu.edu) Editors: Nora Koch (koch@jhu.edu), Kirsten Lavin (klavin@jhu.edu) Class Notes Editor: Julie Blanker (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 Our phone, email, and Web site address have not changed: 410-516-0363/1-800-JHU-JHU1 (5481) alumni@jhu.edu alumni.jhu.edu We look forward to hearing from you soon. Please send class notes to magnotes@jhu.edu. By submitting a class note, you give Johns Hopkins University permission to 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 2005–2009. Lifetime membership dues are $1,000 or four annual installments of $250 each. For more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu/dues.

Statement of ownership, management and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685)

Golomb’s Answers

“Word Expansion” Solutions Puzzle on page 15.

1. Add ART to get: HEART, IMPART, RAMPART, RESTART 2. Add NATION to get: CARNATION, DAMNATION, DONATION, STAGNATION 3. Add ATE to get: COOPERATE, DESIGNATE, LITERATE, PRIMATE 4. Add RATE to get: CASTRATE, GENERATE, MODERATE, PIRATE

1. FA(C)ULTY

7. F(L)OUNDERS

2. T(R)OPICAL

8. CORPOR(E)AL

3. STAR(L)ING

9. MEDI(T)ATION

4. STRANG(L)ER 10. INTE(R)STATE 5. PROST(R)ATE 11. UNDE(R)SERVED 6. ADDI(C)TIVE 12. S(T)IMULATION

Continued from page 13 buildings were designed for continuing clients and any failure was immediately transmitted to the architect. These buildings from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were designed to the South Florida Building Code, a relatively modest guide, as no code existed for many of the areas in Florida. But most importantly, they were designed to our standards. My experience is that no code, design, professional registration, or any authority can devise any damage resistant building that will stand if it is not built to do so. Codes are minimum requirements. Building officials will only check for code violations and have no responsibility for adherence to the construction documents, in fact, any implication to do so is carefully avoided for consequences of liability. Since Hurricane Andrew, millions and millions of dollars and countless hours of time given by every skill in the construction industry have attempted to compose the perfect building code, to the frustration of all, and the expense of everyone. The end result is the further derogation of the architect to sub-architect, expected to produce minimum documents at the lowest fee to obtain the necessary permit, and in many cases, to sub-contract to design-build firms, with construction checks performed by nonrelated personnel. Documentation does not change the result; only a whole architect can do that. Harold Seckinger Homosassa Springs, Florida

Not all opposition based on faith In “Letters to the Editor” [Fall 2009], R. Owen Sear mistakenly states that opposition to human embryonic stem cell research is only motivated by religious belief. On the contrary, one can even be an atheist and opposed to abortionon-demand and human embryonic stem cell research. How so? From political science we fathom that the first purpose of government is to protect the innocent from the guilty, the weak from the strong. When governments fail in this they tend toward the antipodes of anarchy or dictatorship. From biology we know that the fertilized egg of any bi-gender species has the full instructions to develop into a birthed one of that species. As Edgar Dacqué wrote in his classic Natur und Erlösung, the fertilized ovum has more than the mere potential to develop into a birthed one of that species—it has the full entelechy of that species. What is the difference between “potential” and “entelechy”? The former must be consciously developed to flower, while the latter will develop to maturity unless interrupted. In short, the “morula” of the human is that of a human, and not that of a pig or a goat. That is a scientific fact, independent of religious faith. Tom Kuna, SAIS ’71 (MA) Jerseyville, Illinois

1. Title of Publication: Johns Hopkins Magazine 2. Publication no.: 276-260 3. Date of filing: September 1, 2009. 4. Issue frequency: 4 times per year 5. Number of issues published annually: 4 6. Annual subscription price: $20.00 domestic, $25.00 foreign 7. Mailing address of publication: Johns Hopkins Magazine, 901 S. Bond St., Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. 8. Mailing address of headquarters or general business office of the publisher: Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21218. 9. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor–Publisher: Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21218. Editor: Catherine Pierre, Johns Hopkins Magazine, 901 S. Bond St., Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. 10. Owner (if owned by a corporation, its name and address be stated to be followed immediately thereafter the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual owner): Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: none. 12. The purpose, function, and nonproft status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months. 13. Publication name: Johns Hopkins Magazine 14. Issue date for circulation data below: Fall 2009. 15. Extent and nature of circulation:

a. Total no. copies printed b. Paid and/or Requested circulation (1) Paid/Requested Outside-County Mail subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541. (2) Paid In-County Subscriptions States on PS Form 3541 (3) Sales Through Dealers and Carriers,Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and or Other Non-USPS Paid Distribution (4) Other Classes Mailed Through the USPS c. Total Paid and/or Requested Circulation d. Free Distribution by Mail and outside mail (1) Outside-County as Stated on PS Form 3541 (2) In-County as Stated on PS Form 3541 (3) Other Classes Mailed Through the USPS (4) Free Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means) e. Total Free Distribution (Sum of 15d. (1)(2)(3)(4).) f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c. and 15e.)

Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months 132,365

Actual no. single issue nearest to filing date 122,093

119,428

107,719

5,826

5,401

7,244

5,865

132,499

118,985

1,451

1,308

1,451

1,308

133,449

120,293

g.Copies not Distributed

1,500

1,800

h.Total (Sum of 15f. and g.)

135,449

122,093

97.8%

97.5%

i. Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation (15c. divided by 15f. times 100)

I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. —Dianne MacLeod, Business Manager

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009 67

H o w To :

Create a Championship Cross Country Team

obby Van Allen is in his 11th year as track and cross country coach at Johns Hopkins University. This season, his women’s cross country team achieved something never done before by a women’s team at Johns Hopkins: a No. 1 national ranking. At

press time, the Jays had just won their second consecutive NCAA Mideast Regional Championship and were on their way to the NCAA Nationals, where they were one of the favorites. Here are Coach Van Allen’s instructions for assembling a championship team.

Find runners. Send letters to promising athletes at high schools in New England and the mid-Atlantic. Receive referrals from coaches. Field inquiries from runners as far away as California and Alaska.

Convince them to come to Hopkins. Bring them to campus. Talk about their educational opportunities and the program’s philosophy of developing the complete runner who will reach her fullest potential by her senior season.

Evaluate them as runners. Analyze how they have trained, the competitions they have entered, how they have been coached. Determine what they need to realize their full potential.

68 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Winter 2009

Make them fast. Target all of their energy systems through weight training and carefully tailored workouts. Stress injury prevention. Keep them confident. Convince them that they can contend for a national championship.

Wesley Bedrosian

IF IT’S POSSIBLE FOR A WEBSITE TO GRADUATE, YOURS JUST DID. WITH HONORS.

THE ALL-NEW ALUMNI SITE. LEARN, CONNECT, AND COMMUNICATE LIKE YOU NEVER HAVE BEFORE. As JHU alumni, you have always striven for excellence. You should expect no less from us. That’s why we’re proud to announce the launch of the new alumni website. Check it out. Visit often and feel free to let us know what you think. Because, like you, our desire to be better never stops.

ALUMNI.JHU.EDU