Johns Hopkins Magazine by The Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins S P R I N G

2011

African Studies • Johns Hopkins researchers, in their own words • Explaining the resource curse • 20Qs with faculty, alumni, and students

M A GA Z I N E

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Johns Hopkins S p r i n g

2011

MAGAZINE

v o l. 63 n o. 1

Features

African Studies Into Africa Interviews by Michael Anft

In their own words, Johns Hopkins researchers and health professionals tell how “the dark continent” has illuminated their work and their lives.

The Curse of the Golden Egg By Dale Keiger SAIS’s Peter M. Lewis explores why resource-rich African countries have been plagued by economic disparity, corrupt governments, and civil strife.

20 Questions: Africa Edition

My Mom, My Avatar

By Brennen Jensen Everything you ever wanted to know about Africa. Johns Hopkins faculty, alumni, and students field questions—big, small, and out of the blue.

By Piper Weiss, A&S ’00 Through her blog, My Mom the Style Icon, Piper Weiss shows that pictures of your mother taken B.C. (before children) can inspire fascination—and fashion.

Redefining Webster’s By Joshua Kendall, A&S ’91 (MA)

David Colwell

Johns Hopkins’ first president was a man of science, but he was also a lover of words who helped turn Webster’s into the evidence-based dictionary we know today.

Cover illustration by Lasse Skarbovik Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 3

Departments 5

Contributors: Artists, Bakers, and Dictionary Makers

The Big Question: Is America Capable of Controlling Its Guns?

Editor’s Note: African Tales

Letters: Back to Basics

Essay: Lost in Translation

Golomb’s Gambits: Biblical J-Names

Wholly Hopkins: Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

16 Students: Got 10 minutes? Micro-volunteer 17 History: Studying what could not be thrown away 19 Psychiatry: Bringing science back to hallucinogens 20 Education: Number of “dropout factories” declines

22 Astrophysics: The astronaut who fell to Hopkins

23 Public Health: Running on empty?

24 Books: Many lives indeed

26 Engineering: Record gift will fund new research building

Alumni News & Notes

Golomb’s Solutions

How To: Learn a Language

4 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

C o n t r i b u to r s Vol. 63 No. 1 Spring 2011

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

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

Artists, Bakers, and Dictionary Makers Illustrating Africa Inspired by an old African pattern, illustrator Lasse Skarbovik created the artwork for this issue’s cover and for Dale Keiger’s “The Curse of the Golden Egg.” “I feel that the African style is related to my own style,” he says. “The way they simplify figures, form, and colors.” As a child, Skarbovik says, he wanted to be a baker. “I was born in Norway where they eat bread for breakfast, lunch, and supper. So it was natural to be a baker. But it was before I understood that a baker must start so early in the morning.” The son of an art director and a clothing designer, Skarbovik gravitated toward art. He now lives in Stockholm, where he is a founding member of the Stockholm Illustration collective, the largest such group in Scandinavia. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Economist, and Computer Arts, among other publications.

Working with words Joshua Kendall, A&S ’91 (MA), who in this issue profiles Daniel Coit Gilman, co-editor of the 1864 Webster’s Dictionary and first president of Johns Hopkins University, is a true logophile. “Like Gilman himself, I fell in love with Latin and Greek as an adolescent,” Kendall says. “At Yale, I even took Latin prose composition. But that was my last course in the classics because I felt this flirtation was getting a little too serious!” Kendall knows a thing or two about working with words. His soon-to-be-published book, The Forgotten Founding Father, chronicles the life of Noah Webster, the creator of the American English dictionary. Kendall lives in Boston, where he works as a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, BusinessWeek, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. —KI

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 5

The Big Question

Mi ke Ciesi elski

Is America Culturally Capable of Controlling Its Guns?

6 Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Spring 2011

“The deep cultural chasm in America about guns mirrors broader political divisions that have hampered our nation’s ability to tackle other social problems. One side distrusts government and values self-reliance, including arming oneself for protection. The other believes that certain social problems are best addressed through government safeguards such as gun regulations. When mass shootings like the one we just experienced in Tucson occur, the media turn their attention to ‘the gun debate,’ dramatizing this cultural divide by giving voice to those with the most extreme views. Nothing much changes. “Breaking this cycle of futility requires that we set aside the cultural debate on guns and focus on a policy debate about public safety. There is broad agreement among gun owners and non-gun-owners about gun policy. Survey data indicate that, when asked about specific proposals geared toward keeping guns from dangerous people, large majorities of gun owners support much-needed reforms. More than 75 percent of gun owners support requiring background checks for guns sold by private gun owners and fixing gaps in databases used to identify individuals prohibited from possessing guns. “Mayor Michael Bloomberg is leading a bipartisan coalition of over 500 mayors across the United States, joined by clergy, crime victims, and police, that has begun to break the logjam on U.S. gun policy.Their mission is not to rid the United States of guns or to disarm individuals who own guns legally, but to advance policies to keep guns from dangerous people. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research is conducting and synthesizing research that has shown that well-enforced gun laws can, indeed, achieve this objective. “We will know that we have turned the corner when—after their photo op in hunting gear—politicians vow to enact gun laws that the vast majority of gun owners and non-gun-owners favor and that research suggests will reduce the toll of gun violence.” Daniel W. Webster, a professor of health and public policy and co-director of the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, is a leading national authority on firearms laws.

—Interview by Michael Anft

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 7

E d i to r ’s N o te

African Tales

ews out of Africa these days seems at best a mixed bag, at worst horrific. As this issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine was headed to press, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had stepped down and military rulers had instituted martial law; the potential of a new democracy is promising, but stories along the way of protesters and journalists being detained, beaten, or killed have been scary. Southern Sudan had just voted to secede from the North, but only after years of civil war and genocide. Charles Taylor was boycotting the war crimes trial against him; the former president of Liberia is accused of commanding rebels in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and witness testimony has involved stories of slave labor, cannibalism, rape, and other acts of brutality. Tales of poverty, disease, corrupt leadership, and civil unrest seem unending. Around Johns Hopkins, however, we often hear different kinds of stories about Africa—from researchers who’ve worked there, from students who were born there, and from alumni who’ve turned their attention there since graduating. Those stories can be full of good people and meaningful interactions, of progress, and of hope for the future. In “African Studies” (page 28), this issue’s three-part special section focusing on the continent, we wanted to share some of those stories with readers.

With that in mind, senior writer Michael Anft conducted interviews with a handful of researchers based in various African countries (“Into Africa,” page 30). Their subjects of study are along the lines you’d expect—HIV/ AIDS, for example, or saving the lives of pregnant women and newborns—and those issues continue to present huge challenges. However, Mike found that these researchers were not just dedicated to a cause; they were inspired and changed by the Africans with whom they lived and worked. In writing about Africa’s seeming “paradox of plenty,” associate editor Dale Keiger writes that Nitze School of Advanced International Studies’ Peter M. Lewis, an expert on Nigeria, is optimistic about that country’s future despite its continued inability to parlay oil revenues into a healthy economic system (“The Curse of the Golden Egg,” page 38). Finally, freelancer Brennen Jensen found all kinds of interesting facts and perspectives from all around Johns Hopkins (“20 Questions: Africa Edition,” page 42). Taken together, our stories don’t prove the daily news accounts wrong. But they do fill in the picture a little better. They also show just how far-reaching and varied the Johns Hopkins community’s collective efforts are when it comes to helping Africans solve all those problems you read about in the papers.

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L e t te r s Back to Basics One step forward, two steps back? In “Back to Basics for the ‘Division Clueless,’” Lisa Watts reports on Krieger School mathematics professor W. Stephen Wilson’s lament about how the “new-old-new” math has ruined elementary students’ grasp of numeracy [Wholly Hopkins, Winter 2010]. The substitution of technology for memory and understanding eventually affects SAT scores and undergraduate performance, according to Wilson’s analysis. Several recent news articles attest to related phenomena. For example, a December Baltimore Sun article called “Study: One-quarter Fail Army’s Entrance Exam” described a study of high school graduates applying for the military. According to the study, many graduates lack the reading, math, science, and problem-solving skills needed to pass the enlistment exam. Are we being led down the path to utter destruction by a “Sputnik re-

vival”? Are we putting too much faith in a regeneration of computer-based instruction? Do we really believe that a test teaches content? Have we substituted digital glitz for basic skills mastery? Have we once again created an eitheror situation when what we need is both technology and old-fashioned learning? I have a copy of the 1923 Maryland State Department of Education Annual Report. Though the graphs are only pen and ink, they communicate information as well as the modern computer-generated, colorful, pictorial, animated, 3-D charts. Though the prose appears in primitive font, it is written with a clarity, precision, and syntax that I wish we emulated in our current documents. The more we progress, the less we move forward? I hope not! Gary Brager Former Adjunct Professor, School of Education; Supervisor of Research, Baltimore County Public Schools

Number sense I suspect that most readers of this magazine may be initially inclined to agree with W. Stephen Wilson about continuing to include long division in the school curriculum. After all, isn’t long division a part of “basic math,” something that you learned in third grade and can still do, if given pencil and paper and enough time? No, I say it is not. As a professor who has taught all levels of mathematics, I share some—but not all—of Wilson’s concerns about students’ overdependence on calculators. I wince when I see my students reach for their calculators to do computations that can be performed mentally, such as 10 percent of 35,000 or 27 – 22. This is a problem for two reasons. First, mental arithmetic is a very useful skill. In some situations, it is the most efficient means of computation; in other situations, it is critical for checking the reasonableness of machine-generated

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answers. Second, doing mental arithmetic helps develop “number sense.” Number sense is about making sense of numbers and understanding why and how they behave the way they do. For example, using number sense I know that a 0.75-liter bottle of wine priced at $7.18 is a better deal than a 1.5-liter bottle of the same wine priced at $14.50. However, my mental arithmetic goes only so far. For instance, I cannot do 2,375 ÷ 67 mentally. I can estimate that the answer is above 30 and I can— but do not want to—use long division to compute the exact answer. This leads to my disagreement with Wilson. These days, there are essentially three ways to do computations: mentally, with paper and pencil, or by machine. I suggest that paper-and-pencil work is important primarily for the purpose of developing number sense and mental arithmetic. In contrast, Wilson argues in favor of long division, presumably

for such paper-and-pencil problems as 2,375 ÷ 67. Why? He argues that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between knowing how to do long division and learning Calculus III. I doubt it. I think there are more plausible explanations, such as students’ levels of self-discipline, or their tolerance for authority, or an underlying correlation with number sense. Long division provides students with experience in doing multi-step problems, which is a good thing. However, I would argue that students’ time would be better spent learning mental arithmetic, grasping key number principles, and doing multi-step applications. Based on over 30 years of teaching experience, I am convinced that the average college student is deficient in all of these areas. For all of these reasons, I think that long division is in the same category as the slide rule and will disap-

pear from the curriculum eventually— unless those who wish to keep it come up with good research and powerful reasons to do otherwise. Betsy Darken Professor of Mathematics, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga The “division clueless” Regarding “Back to Basics for the ‘Division Clueless,’” if one looks at the math competency in this country nicely illustrated by the collapse of the financial industry and the low ratings of our country compared to others, one could deduce that we have little understanding of math and little ability to teach it. With the education system crushing the morale and creative spirit of our teachers, we have little hope of making a turnaround in the next five or 10 years. Math is a way of thinking, a way of solving problems, and a way of or-

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ganizing that is applicable to any field of study. In my own case, I was able to grow in this infertile soil because of a nurtured curiosity, intelligent and caring parents, and inspiration from a teacher here and there. When one looks at how children are being taught today, one can only cry out how intellectually undernourished they are. I gave my fifth-grade grandson a division problem of six digits divided by three, which I could do in less than a minute. Ten minutes later, he was incorrectly one-third of the way through the problem, with lattice multiplication scratch work all over the paper and multiple cumulative guesses honing in on the correct digit with absolutely no understanding of what he was doing. What was missing? He did not know how to do mental arithmetic! In our great educational wisdom, we are removing the teaching of basic computational skills. I grew up and was part of the technology revolution and understood the intellectual and financial limits of it. We have used that technology to undermine good teaching and learning. Education has become enormously expensive and ineffective. Good education exercises the mind and helps you develop insight and techniques to study and is very inexpensive. Irvin M. Miller, Engr ’59, A&S ’64 (PhD) President and Director, Math and Physics Exploration Poughkeepsie, New York

Preserving history in the digital age I am writing this short missive concerning two articles that appeared in your Winter 2010 edition. One of the articles was titled “The Welch Goes Digital” [Wholly Hopkins]. In it, the quote that caught my eye and made my heart sink was, “The library’s future will have arrived when its shelves are empty, its books are gone, and its librarians have become ‘embedded informationists.’”

It’s the The second article highlights Elliott Hinkes’ success in preserving “rare books, pamphlets, and articles of science” [“Atoms, Genes, and Everything In Between”]. I am not sure if it was a stroke of genius or serendipity, but the inclusion of these two articles in the same edition of the magazine provided a glimpse of the future if the Welch does go all digital. If the goal of all digital had been achieved in the 1950s, instead of a photograph of the original Nature journals incorporating Watson and Crick’s writings and drawings, a photograph of a CD or hard drive would have had to suffice in the Hinkes article. I do not agree with the all-digital plan for the Welch and tossing the books and print journals into “bright yellow fabric bins . . . to be recycled.” One of the most exciting times of my studies at Hopkins was walking into the Welch, feeling the books and bound journals, and communing with the spirits of all those who had come before me. I do hope a compromise can be reached that accommodates both the computer age and the thread of history. Curtis Chubb, SPH ’78 (PhD) Milano, Texas Promoting global health Dale Keiger’s piece [“The Buck Goes Here,” Spring 2010] listing eight places to put global health money clearly expresses a problem: Doing things to people is what we do and then justify, as Randall Packard does with his concluding remark, “You do something because you can do it. People are dying and you can’t allow that to happen.” But I suspect Packard was being ironic because Keiger also quotes him as saying, “You only really solve these problems when people are able to protect themselves and governments are able to provide their own support and not depend on international aid.” Packard also points out that the list of eight priorities discussed in the Continued on page 71

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Essay

Lost in Translation

ccording to Lord Tennyson, “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Much is wrong with that: Only in the spring? Just young men? Why “lightly”? Another problem? Germans. In the spring, it turns out, many of their fancies turn to Karl May, an author who inspires at least three annual festivals in Germany and German tourist excursions to the American Southwest, the setting for his most beloved work. Why does May warrant festivals and tour groups? Little known in the United States, he may be the best-selling German-language author of all time, outpacing flashes-inthe-pan like Goethe. His success raises interesting questions about popular culture and perhaps about Germans. Born in 1842, he became an accomplished con man, liar, and ex-convict. True to form, as an author, he wrote detailed accounts about places he’d never seen, including the Middle East and the American frontier. He was already famous as an author of Western novels when he first visited the United States in 1908, four years before his death. He ventured no deeper into cowboy country than Buffalo, New York. May’s copious oeuvre includes fictitious travel accounts, mystical writings, and one of his lesser works of fiction, an autobiography (now available on Kindle). His reputation, however, rests on his novels, still in print, including a growing number in English. Although May’s Middle Eastern adventures have their fans, his two most memorable creations lived in the American Wild West. One is Winnetou, a member of the pueblodwelling Apaches—a previously unknown group—who is spiritual, noble, brave, and therefore doomed. The other is his friend, a German immigrant turned Übermensch on horseback. His nickname is Old Shatterhand, “given to me because of the reputation my strong hands had earned in knocking down anyone who attacked me.” He avenges wrongs with the social skills of a Clint Eastwood character. It is Winnetou, Shatterhand, and Karl May’s version of the West that inspires festivals. The one in Radebuel in June 2011 will feature a number of supposedly Wild West

14 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

attractions: a re-enactment of Virginia Confederate volunteers, a bluegrass and country music festival featuring Jimmy Bozeman and the Lazy Pigs, contemporary Native American musicians, and the toe-tapping tunes of Zydeco Annie and the Swamp Cats. Cajuns and Indians? Perhaps this weird sense of the American West is the appropriate tribute to May. For him, accuracy was one option among many. There are disquieting things about Karl May’s popularity, even if it is largely quarantined to continental Europe. One is parochial. Isn’t the Western as a genre ours—allAmerican, something about us that we own? Of course, there are Italian “spaghetti Western” movies, but cut the Italians some slack. It’s understandable why they might like big, overblown epics in which lots of people die, plots don’t make sense, and women are madonnas, whores, or schoolmarms who could go either way. Epic Westerns are just operas without dying sopranos. But what’s in it for Germans? Or for people in other cultures? How to explain something like the 2007 Japanese movie Sukiyaki Western Django, a stylish remake of an Italian Western? Perhaps the most thought-provoking thing about May’s popularity is his list of admirers. Albert Einstein: “My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today, he has been dear to me in many a desperate hour.” The humanitarian Albert Schweitzer: “What I liked most in his writings was the courageous stand for peace and mutual understanding, which inspires nearly all his books.” May was indeed a pacifist, unlike Old Shatterhand—and unlike another admirer, Adolf Hitler, who apparently turned to May for relaxation and even tactical advice during World War II. It’s hard to know what to make of that list. Maybe popular culture works best when it is many things to many people. Perhaps another admirer, and somewhat better writer, got it right. Hermann Hesse called May “the most brilliant representative of a truly original type of fiction—i.e., fiction as wish fulfillment.” If so, perhaps not all wishes should be fulfilled.

Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins University professor.

Gilbert Ford

B y “ G u i d o Ve l o c e ”

Golomb’s Gambits TM

Biblical J-Names By Solomon Golomb ’51

The letter yod begins many names in the Hebrew Bible, and most of these start with the letter J in English translations of the Old Testament. (A few begin with I, e.g., Isaac, Isaiah, Ishmael, and Israel; and at least one, Ezekiel, begins with E.) Here are the names, as usually spelled in English with J, of 18 biblical men, divided into three groups based on level of difficulty. See how many you can match up with the correct descriptions.

A. Easy

B. Medium

1. Jacob 2. Job 3. Jonah 4. Joseph 5. Joshua 6. Judah

a. b. c. d. e. f.

7. Jeroboam 8. Jeremiah 9. Jesse 10. Jethro 11. Joab 12. Joel

g. h. i. j.

13. Jabin 14. Jehoiada 15. Jehu C. 16. Jephthah Difficult 17. Josiah 18. Jotham

(Solutions on page 70)

He was ultimately rewarded after years of terrible suffering. He led the children of Israel after the death of Moses. Sold by his brothers, he rose to become viceroy of Egypt. Son of Isaac, he married both Leah and Rachel. Son of Jacob, his descendants included King David. Thrown overboard, he went on to prophesy the end of Nineveh.

He was the chief general under King David. He was Moses’ father-in-law. He was King David’s father. After the death of King Solomon, this man led the breakaway of Israel’s 10 northern tribes. k. He prophesied around the time Babylon conquered Jerusalem. l. He was the prophet who recommended beating plowshares into swords. m. After victory over the Ammonites, he had to sacrifice his daughter. n. He was a Canaanite king whose army was defeated by Deborah and Barak. o. He was the charioteer who ended the dynasty of Omri and Ahab. p. As a Judean king, he centralized all worship in Jerusalem. q. He was the priest who arranged the end of the wicked Judean queen Athaliah. r. Son of Gideon, he told a parable about trees choosing a king.

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www. www w. rolandparkplace.org rolandparkplace.org e oorg Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 15

Wholly Hopkins

Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

Students

Got 10 minutes? Micro-volunteer

Carl Wiens

s field director for Peter Franchot’s successful 2006 campaign for comptroller of Maryland, Jacob Colker learned some things about mobilizing volunteers through Internet social networking. He used Facebook to recruit campaign volunteers, the first such use of social media in a statewide election, he

that time from Twitter or Farmville toward helping good causes? He believes he has created one, a new online venture called Sparked.com. Through its website, Sparked enables people to “microvolunteer”—that is, apply small fragments of spare time, literally five or 10 minutes, to various projects that benefit nonprofits. People with language skills, for example, can spend a few minutes at a time translating documents. Graphic designers who can’t spare the hours it might take to create a logo for an environmental group can collaborate online and, a quarter of an hour at a time, complete the job. The website not only facilitates volunteers contributing to projects; it also provides a simple, efficient framework for nonprofits to coordinate the efforts of all those volunteers. In 2008, when Colker began developing what became Sparked, he was working on a master’s in communications from the Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs. But the project has grown so fast that he has taken a leave of absence from his graduate studies. To create the venture, Colker partnered with digital entrepreneur Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0 ( Jossey-Bass, 2008), to create a system that could match designers, programmers, writers, marketprofessionSparked enables people to ing als, and others “micro-volunteer”—that with projects is, apply small fragments of posted by non spare time, literally five or 10 profits. By 2009, minutes, to various projects they had won the support of that benefit nonprofits. heavy-hitting technology inbelieves. Along the way he learned that when vestors like Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson. people declined to volunteer, their most com- Last year, the new Rolex Young Laureates Promon explanation was a lack of free time, despite gramme awarded Colker $50,000 to help develop data that revealed Internet users spend more than his company. 270 million hours on Facebook and watch some Sparked has attracted more than 1,000 non1 billion YouTube videos every day. Was there profits (65 percent are repeat users), Colker says, some way, Colker wondered, to redirect some of and more than 200,000 volunteers; lately, non-

16 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

profits have been signing up at a rate of 20 per day. Funding comes from corporations such as Kraft, Google, and SAP, which encourage their workers to volunteer on the site as part of corporate social responsibility efforts. Sparked is organized as a for-profit Certified B Corporation, meaning it pledges to adhere to higher standards for transparency, environmental and social performance, and legal accountability. Colker, 27, likes to illustrate the power of the Sparked network with the story of Jackson, a Masai tribesman who, with the help of an aid agency, signed on to the website and requested advice on how his Kenyan village could drill a well for water. Within a week, an expert on Third World water issues living in San Francisco connected the Masai to a well-drilling company that was run by a nonprofit agency and, better yet, located in Kenya near Jackson’s village. As a result, says Colker, the Masai community will soon have fresh water. —Katherine Gustafson

H i s to r y

Studying what could not be thrown away

and European libraries. The collection includes literature, letters, government decrees, petitions, marriage contracts, receipts, even children’s primers. Central to her study is the idea that a community as a whole cannot be understood without paying attention to its margins. Her current manuscript-in-progress, Patronage and Politics: Islamic Empire and the Medieval Jewish Community, attempts to learn how the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) functioned by studying its Jews, the empire’s smallest religious minority. The sheer task of governance in the premodern era, when communications were poor and populations sparse, is key, and the administrative texts found in the Geniza give clues to the Fatimids’ methods. One important tactic was “government from below,” in which the people themselves were responsible for petitioning the caliphate. In an article for the University of Cambridge’s Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Rustow translated and examined such a petition from the khatib (preacher) of a mosque whose tenants—on which he depended for income and the mosque’s upkeep—were in arrears. She explains that the Fatimid caliphate issued decrees in response to petitions from anyone in the realm, in principle, though in practice from anyone with connections. “Petitions served as an administrative device and a check on abusive officials,” she says. Although Rustow’s general area of Geniza research is Jews in the medieval Islamic world, other questions come into play. For example, some documents feature no Hebrew text at all. How did they find their way to the Geniza?

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Cambridge University Library T-S NS 246.26.2

ewish tradition teaches that the Hebrew script, as the word of God, cannot be simply thrown away. Documents must be collected in repositories called genizah (sometimes transliterated geniza) for ceremonial burial. But whereas most genizot are cleared regularly, that of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (now old Cairo) piled up for centuries, perhaps because the attic storeroom was so large. This has made the trove of documents, which date primarily from 900 to 1250, an invaluable historical resource. Johns Hopkins associate professor of history Marina Rustow has spent years studying the Cairo Geniza, a daunting accumulation of almost 280,000 folio This bit of vellum from the Cairo Geniza was written in Iran early in the 10th century and pages that are now dispersed among several U.S. contains the end of the biblical book of Nehemiah, vocalized with Babylonian vowel signs. 17

Wholly Hopkins

Vignette As the year 1814 entered its last months, the owner of a Baltimore music store sought to profit from the sudden popularity of a new song titled “Defence [sic] of Ft. McHenry.” Thomas Carr, proprietor of Carr’s Music Store on Baltimore Street, apparently didn’t like the song’s name because when he published the tune in October 1814, he changed it to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Perhaps in his haste to capitalize on what a 21st-century publisher would call the buzz about the song, he left off the name of author Francis Scott Key and misspelled an added subhead. Only 11 copies of Carr’s first edition, thought to be the second-ever printing of the song’s lyrics and melody (an anonymously printed broadside had appeared a few weeks before), are known to exist, marked by that subhead, “A Pariotic Song.” The White House has one, as do the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Indiana University, the Moravian Music Foundation—and Johns Hopkins. A well-preserved copy resides in the Eisenhower Library, part of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music. In 1940, Levy bought the copy for $170, about $2,700 in current dollars. Quite the bargain, considering that someone bought another of the Carr editions at a Christie’s auction last December for $506,500. Carr may not have credited Key (or even heard of him), but on the sheet music he credited himself with the adaptation and arrangement, which he said should be sung con spirito (with spirit). His edition includes a seven-bar introduction and acknowledgment that the octave-and-a-half melody, notoriously tough for bad pop singers at sporting events, was originally “To Anacreon in Heaven,” the official ditty of an 18th-century club for English amateur musicians. Carr published all four verses— sing with me: “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore . . .”—plus a 16-bar addendum “For the Flute.” —Dale Keiger Perhaps through a paper sale; after regime paper as more than a container for text, findchanges, the new rulers often sold off all the ing the material aspect of a manuscript likeprevious government’s archives as scrap. Rustow wise important; for example, a manuscript that’s suspects, though, that the Fustat Jews kept cer- never been folded is perhaps a draft, whereas tain texts around as templates—communication one folded and refolded many times was likely with the bureaucracy was highly stylized, and copied and passed along, possibly over miles copying out or paraphrasing another’s rhetoric and years. was good practice. The collection contains a wealth of informaOne challenge to Geniza study is the wide tion about social and economic history—from dispersion of the material. The majority is now detailed financial records to the power of women housed at Cambridge. in Fatimid society. But the A nonprofit called the texts demand an uncomFriedberg Genizah Proj- Central to her study is the idea mon linguistic skill set: ect has been tracking that a community as a whole Many of them are written down and digitizing the cannot be understood without in Judeo-Arabic, which is documents and archiving paying attention to its margins. Arabic written in Hebrew them on one website. script. “People wrote the Rustow, with her curioslanguage they spoke in the ity about the afterlives of the texts, has mixed alphabet of their scripture,” Rustow explains. The feelings: “If all I was interested in were the ability to work in both languages is uncommon, words on the pages, the digital reproductions Rustow says. She has it, which has heightened would be fine, sometimes even better, because her sense of professional obligation to bring the you can zoom in”—an advantage for decipher- material to light. ing centuries-old handwriting. But she sees the —Anna Perleberg 18 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

P s y ch i a t r y

Bringing science back to hallucinogens

he research subject, a woman in her 60s, reported a blinding light that flooded her consciousness, a luminosity she interpreted as an emanation from God, an invitation to the heavens. “I felt a sense of joyous expansion as it opened fully to me, like entering a splendid palace, yet the feeling was completely natural and gentle,” she wrote. Months later, others who took part in the research study ranked it as one of the five most important experiences of their lives. The visual clarity and well-being they felt, mixed with a sense of the mystical feeling that all things are interconnected, came from a high dose of psilocybin, known on the street as magic mushrooms. When Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine, unveiled results of that study in 2006, his team was investigating whether the ostensibly spiritual experiences that psilocybin users report could provide clues to how the brain works. But in doing so, the researchers ripped the lid off an area of inquiry that had been in place for more than 30 years, and reintroduced an illicit drug to the rigors of medical research. Griffiths’ research into the pharmacological value of psilocybin continues. He has also turned his sights to another recreational drug that may have medicinal properties. Intrigued by a darkly understood set of receptors in the brain, Griffiths and Matthew Johnson, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, decided to study Salvia divinorum, a smoked drug that is legally sold for $20 to $40 in head shops. Known on the street as salvia, the drug has garnered headlines because of a YouTube video of one of its addled users, teen star Miley Cyrus, and news accounts reporting that Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman who in January killed six people and wounded 13, including a congresswoman, had regularly used it. Griffiths doesn’t condone its use, or argue whether it should be made illegal or not (it currently isn’t in most places). But he says salvia’s ability to activate kappa opioid receptors in the brain makes it worthy of study. The results, published in the online journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, found that whereas salvinorin A, salvia’s active ingredient, can be intensely disorienting shortly after it is smoked,

it has no other adverse side effects in the short term, meaning that it might prove useful for scientific inquiry. “It gives us another window to look through,” he says. “It doesn’t appear to be addictive, which is a real advantage if you’re trying to find drugs that work in the brain to cure disease, or designing studies that involve human subjects.” The substance targets regions in the brain that are believed to trigger depression when activated. Understanding how this happens can lead to drugs to control the manic phase of manic depression, Griffiths says. Setting the kappa receptors in motion may also eliminate pain, which could lead to development of a new class of analgesics and possibly to advances in treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Griffiths is interested in mindaltering drugs for what they can teach about the brain. “We want to find out what triggers addiction and which substances are most likely to be abused,” he says. “Those are important con siderations in drug development.” But it was more than science that moved Griffiths to test the psychotropic properties of a humble mushroom more than a decade ago. His metamorphosis began when a friend joined a meditation group 15 years ago. “I was intrigued by the idea of turning the mind toward the deeper self,” says Griffiths. “That thought was quite a departure for me. I was a radical behaviorist at the time. I had been trained not to take what people were feeling seriously.” He went along for the ride, in search of “the nature of spiritual, mystical experience,” and began a regimen of mantra-based Indian meditation. Since then, he’s explored several other types of so-called mindfulness, and spent a week in retreat with others as recently as December. Early on in the course of his meditation journey, he says, “I was introduced to literature on psilocybin and psychedelic substances.” But those studies weren’t exactly current. During the 1960s, when Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychology professor, had exhorted young Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Wholly Hopkins

Now we know …Violent assaults in health care facilities occur four times as often as assaults in other U.S. workplaces. School of Medicine research by Gabor D. Kelen and Christina L. Catlett, professor and assistant professor, respectively, of emergency medicine, found a rate of eight assaults per 10,000 workers in health care settings, versus two per 10,000 in all other private-sector workplaces. The authors found that shootings, though heavily publicized, were rare. The findings appeared last December in the Journal of the American Medical Association. …Charles Meneveau, professor of mechanical engineering in the Whiting School, and colleagues in Belgium have determined a new formula for the optimal layout of turbines in wind farms. At a recent meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, Meneveau reported that spacing turbines at twice the distance called for by the standard layout results in more costefficient power generation. …Children’s exposure to alcoholic beverage advertising on U.S. television increased 71 percent from 2001 to 2009, according to a recent report from the Bloomberg School’s Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. The study also found that young people were 22 times more likely to see an ad for an alcohol product than a public service “responsibility” ad warning against underage drinking. …A report in the January 4 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine found that researchers routinely ignore already published clinical trials of drugs, devices, and procedures, citing only 21 percent of relevant earlier studies. In a press release, co-author Karen Robinson, assistant professor of medicine in the School of Medicine, said, “We may be wasting resources when we fund trials for which we already know the answer. And we may be coming to incorrect conclusions about what works in medicine.” —DK people to “turn on, tune in, drop out” with the help of hallucinogenic substances, he played a role in turning off studies of those substances. Highly publicized deaths from all types of drugs made lab work that utilized hallucinogens appear chancy or unethical. Among the drug casualties were LSD, DPT, and psilocybin, all banned by the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970. “A whole generation of researchers was effectively marginalized,” says Griffiths. “There were many who had been discovering that people who were undergoing some kind of mystical experience on these hallucinogens had the potential to have profound and positive mood and behavior changes.” Now, in part because of Griffiths’ use of hallucination-inducing substances as subjects of inquiry, researchers at New York University, at 20 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

UCLA, in Great Britain, and elsewhere have reintroduced illicit drugs to their laboratories. He’d like to add more to his roster of ongoing studies, but he and other researchers are hamstrung by a lack of funding. Despite the much-lauded findings on psilocybin, getting government approval for studies is still difficult. Griffiths argues that there is too much value in those studies for governments and, possibly, drug manufacturers to ignore. “Scientifically, there’s a lot to get at. We’ve known that primary mystical experiences from hallucinogenic substances have been around for thousands of years. But it’s never really been studied. Now, we can unpack those experiences using functional magnetic resonance imaging and genetics to see how some people are predisposed to such experiences and what that may mean for developing new treatments.” What’s more, people who suffer from mental illnesses and others that affect the nervous system shouldn’t have to wait longer than they have to for answers, which may come from investigations of substances that have been pariahs for decades, he believes: “It’s far too important not to do this.” —Michael Anft

Education

Number of “dropout factories” declines

ducation researcher Robert Balfanz quietly coined the term “dropout factory” in 2001 to describe schools in which less than 60 percent of the freshman class remained enrolled four years later. But in 2007, when he labeled more than 2,000 U.S. high schools as dropout factories, the term went viral as the study received widespread attention from news media. However harsh, the label seems to have pushed more communities, government agencies, and corporations to address the problem of failing schools. In a November 2010 progress report, Balfanz offers cautious good news. From 2002 to 2008, the number of dropout factories fell from 2,007 to 1,746. During the same period, the nation’s high school graduation rate rose from 72 percent to 75 percent. Balfanz, a principal research scientist with Johns Hopkins’ Center for Social Organization of Schools, has focused for more than two decades on how to translate research findings

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Bob Soulé/SIS

into real improvements. Reform requires a com- the problems. The group won federal and state plex weave of efforts tailored to each school, he funding to increase the Communities in Schools says, with a few common elements. For example, presence, putting more volunteers in all of the he advocates programs such as City Year and district’s schools. They began a ninth-grade acadCommunities in Schools, emy to help students which put volunteers in adjust to high school classrooms to work with From 2002 to 2008, the number of in that critical first year. students who don’t catch dropout factories fell from 2,007 And they created dualon quickly. Teachers to 1,746. During the same period, enrollment partnerships and administrators need the nation’s high school graduation with area colleges to more training and planoverage students— rate rose from 72 percent to allow ning time, he says. And those older than 18 who schools should follow 75 percent. left high school without what he calls the “ABCs” graduating—to complete of early warning indicators—attendance, behav- high school requirements in a different setting ior, and course performance—to intervene at the while earning college credit. first sign of students faltering. Balfanz’s data show that schools in the South The curriculum, meanwhile, should be rel- made the greatest improvements, led by Texas evant and engaging, and teachers and adminis- and Georgia. “In the South, schools are orgatrators should set high expectations. “In some nized typically in larger countywide districts, low-performing schools with high numbers and state departments of education have typiof high-needs kids, implicit and explicit assump- cally assumed stronger organizing roles,” he says. tions develop that only some students can and “Many parts of the Midwest and Northeast have will make it,” Balfanz says. “This creates a down- strong traditions of local control and small school ward spiral in which students are not challenged, districts, so it’s harder to have effective collective become bored, and act out, further frustrating action over a large number of schools.” At the the adults in the building.” Over time, students same time, governors in the South have recogmay internalize these low expectations and stop nized that their states’ economic futures rest in trying, he says. improving what have been far lower levels of In his recent report, “Building a Grad Nation: educational attainment. Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic,” funded by America’s Promise Alliance, an education advocacy organization started by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma, Balfanz offers Richmond High School in Wayne County, Indiana, as an example of successful multilayered efforts. Richmond High’s graduation rate jumped from a dismal 53 percent to 80 percent in three years. At the same time, the rate of graduates entering college rose from 66 percent to 77 percent. What worked? Wayne County leaders built a partnership of 30 community agencies, businesses, and volunteer organizations focused on

Wholly Hopkins

A s t ro p hy s i c s

The astronaut who fell to Hopkins

sibility of life elsewhere—or at least pinpoint and study a planet like ours. “One of the things I learned as a young astrophysics student was that planets aren’t common in our galaxy,” Grunsfeld says. “Well, now we know that’s wrong. We can see that when a planet travels between our vantage point and a star, the star’s light is dimmed. We can use that change in light to measure the size of the planet. This new knowledge can help us answer some deep, fundamental science questions. If we get answers, we could start a scientific revolution that rivals the one Copernicus started.” In January, NASA scientists discovered the first rocky planet outside our solar system—Kepler-10b—560 light-years away, where it orbits a sun-like star in the constellation Cygnus. Unlike other exoplanets previously uncovered by telescopes, Kepler-10b is solid, not the usual ball of gas. Rocky planets are more apt to contain liquid water—a necessity for life as we understand it. Kepler-10b, nearly half again as large as Earth, was the first of 1,235 possible planets NASA now has isolated by using a telescope mounted on a satellite. “When the Hubble was launched 20 years ago, we knew of nine planets in the universe—all of which were in our solar system,”

uring John Grunsfeld’s 800 hours in space, much of it spent floating in the ether with a tool in his hand, he tweaked mirrors, fixed wrecked cameras, and dodged shards of space junk as NASA’s longtime “repairman” of the Hubble Space Telescope. Nowadays, Grunsfeld is in a safer place. He’ll keep his head in the stars but his feet on the ground (to paraphrase telescope buff Theodore Roosevelt) as a research professor in Physics and Astronomy at the Krieger School. Most of his work will still involve telescopes. But it will hardly be as prosaic as that sounds. Grunsfeld is one of many astrophysicists around the world who will attempt to lay the groundwork for the Great Escape—the time, ostensibly, when humanity is able to travel to strange new worlds, not just to explore but to inhabit them. The recent discovery of rocky exoplanets—orbs in our galaxy that circle distant stars—heralds the beginning of a fascinating era, Grunsfeld believes: “Not only might we answer the age-old are-we-alone question, but also another one: Is there another place for earthlings to go? Will we find planets that are habitable? Astronomy can answer those questions.” Recent improvements in telescope technology have afforded scientists the chance to search for the pos- Astrophysicist John Grunsfeld, in his former work clothes 22 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

NASA

To meet the Obama administration’s goal of a 90 percent high school graduation rate by 2020, the nation’s schools will have to pick up the pace. In 2008, close to 2.2 million students still attended high schools where graduation is not the norm. At least 25 percent of all students, and nearly 40 percent of all minority students, fail to graduate with their class. “Progress is being made, but it’s uneven,” Balfanz concludes. “In some places the progress has been substantial, which shatters the myth that this is largely an intractable problem. So I am optimistic. But everyone needs to do their part.” —Lisa Watts

Brian Hubble

says Grunsfeld, adding that the number reverted to eight a few years ago when Pluto was reclassified downward to a “dwarf planet.” “In the mid1990s, astronomers began seeing what looked like planets circling stars. Soon we’ll know of possibly thousands of solar systems, and many will have planets,” he says. Grunsfeld brings an astronaut’s perspective to the exoplanet search, a perspective he hopes will help inform a new generation of scientists. “Right now, humanity is making the conditions ripe for a mass extinction,” he says. “Looking down upon the earth from space, you see how we need to protect it. The earth is a system. I want to help train people to see that.” He’ll have the tools to work with. The James R. Webb Telescope, scheduled to be up and running in 2015, will be housed at the Hopkins-affiliated Space Telescope Science Institute, where Grunsfeld also holds a position. He and other Hopkins astronomers, who are searching for clues to the force behind dark energy and signs of life elsewhere, will have ready access to it. “I left the astronaut corps to find a voice to talk about the future of humans in the cosmos,” says Grunsfeld, 52. “And the campus here seems like a good place to do that.” —MA

Public Health

Running on empty?

f you believe academics who practice the science of public health, the work of people like them is responsible for increasing the world’s population from around 500 million, where it had been stuck for centuries following the plagues of the Middle Ages, to 7 billion today. Proponents of this thinking, including Alfred Sommer, a storied professor and senior associate dean at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, point to the field’s many breakthroughs in containing diseases and providing food, clean water, antibiotics, and vitamin regimens to even the poorest people around the world. Emphasis on improving health care access, hygiene, and prevention, so the thinking goes, explains modern humanity’s dominion over the planet. There’s one crucial element missing from this scenario: cheap energy, mostly in the form of oil. From around the U.S. Civil War onward, humanity’s fortunes have risen on a tide of crude oil. In addition to literally fueling much of the world’s economic growth, oil and things made from it have done more than allow public health pros to travel to trouble spots around the world. Fossil fuels Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Wholly Hopkins

Books Many lives indeed In the fifth paragraph of his recently published memoir, pianist Leon Fleisher writes, “If my story is about anything, it’s about being very careful when your dreams come true.” Fleisher, who has been a revered teacher at Peabody Conservatory since 1959, began studying the piano at age 4; by 16 he had performed with the New York Philharmonic. During the next 20 years he achieved international renown as a concert and recording artist. But in 1963 the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand began to curl into the palm; within a few years the hand was rendered unusable by focal dystonia, a neuromuscular disorder. It would take Fleisher 30 years of extraordinary work and determination before he could perform with both hands again, his right restored by a combination of Rolfing and Botox injections. He continues to teach at Peabody and make concert appearances in his 83rd year. Fleisher recounts his remarkable story in My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music (Doubleday, 2010), co-written with Anne Midgette, music critic for The Washington Post. Readers who already know the arc of Fleisher’s life story will savor details. As a boy, he could memorize a Beethoven sonata in one night. He began his teaching career when he was 15, giving lessons to a youngster named Pat in exchange for baklava baked by her mother. He accepted the faculty appointment at Peabody in part so he could qualify for a mortgage. He tends to tilt his head back to gaze at his Peabody students through his bifocals, causing some of them to refer to a particularly intense lesson as “going up Fleisher’s nose.” My Nine Lives is a triumphal life story, but such a life comes at substantial cost, often to the other people who are part of it. Fleisher is a sublime musician, an exemplary teacher, and an intelligent, charming, generous man, but he was a lousy husband to his first two wives, a serial philanderer, and not much of a father when his five children were young. That’s all in the book, too. Fleisher does not gloss over his failings any more

24 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

than he effects false modesty about his accomplishments. Near the end of the book, he reproduces a letter he wrote in 2008 in which he wryly noted, “Some seven decades separate the time when older people would tell me that I played very well for my age from the occasions nowadays when younger people say the same thing.” Richard A. Goldthwaite, Johns Hopkins emeritus professor of history, has devoted decades of scholarship to teasing out the complexities of the Renaissance Florentine economy. The crowning achievement of that life’s work is The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), a 672-page history of Florentine economic development from the late Middle Ages to 1600, just issued in softcover. The hardcover edition was named 2009 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, which reviews scholarly titles for academic libraries, and won the 2010 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. Check. When Peter Pronovost found that use of simple checklists by nurses and physicians produced stunning reductions in hospitalacquired infections, he became a national figure. The medical director of the School of Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care, Pronovost has teamed with freelance writer Eric Vohr to write a manifesto for better hospital practices titled Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals (Plume, 2011), newly issued in softcover. The youthful-looking Pronovost, who became a MacArthur Fellow in 2008, recalls traveling to Michigan for a meeting and introducing himself to the driver who’d been sent to the airport to pick him up. Said the driver, “No, sonny, I am waiting for an important doctor from Johns Hopkins.” —DK

have also provided the chemical basis for fertiliz- aid organizations and universities should factor ers and pesticides that have helped poor countries in dwindling amounts of fuel when planning grow enough food. Medical supplies essential to public health interventions and reduce their relitreatment, such as affordable latex gloves and IV ance on air travel. He says that some programs, tubing, are made from petroleum. Energy-gulping such as ones that work to minimize threats to a air conditioning and ventilation systems in tropi- birthing mother’s health, should more often be cal developing nations make patient comfort and constructed so that local people can run and important research possible. And many lifesaving maintain them using less energy. For his study, Winch explored the connecdrugs essential to the health of millions of poor people are made from chemicals wrought from tion between a population that author and Oxford economics professor Peter Collier calls “the botthe molecules of petroleum. But now that the oil industry is approaching, tom billion”—the poorest seventh of humanity, or has already reached, a time when its ability to who live in 58 countries—and the effects of the extract available petroleum has maxed out, will phenomenon known as peak oil, after which the public health standard set in recent decades the supply of oil will forever trend downward. continue? What happens when the earth cannot Much of the bottom billion lives in underdeveloped, landlocked countries yield enough inexpensive oil already pay much more to take care of the health of The gains made by public that for oil because neighborits poorest nations? In an article to be pub- health in the past century or ing coastal nations charge lished later this year in the so may slowly be rolled back them oversize fees to deliver American Journal of Public as oil becomes progressively it. Reaching those countries rural ones with the tools Health, Peter Winch, SPH more scarce and expensive. and of the public health trade— ’88, a professor of social and medical professionals, transbehavioral sciences at the Bloomberg School, warns that the gains made by portation, portable supplies, and oil for hospital public health in the past century may slowly be generators—will cost much more in the coming rolled back as oil becomes progressively more years, he says. Food will be harder to grow withscarce and expensive. What’s more, as the nations out inexpensive fertilizers, pesticides, and gasoof the world increasingly scrape for petroleum, line-fueled irrigation systems, raising the price of scientists who believe that saving lives is worth food and increasing hunger. Scientists are hazy about precisely when the any amount of available grant money may have world’s oil production will reach its apex. But they to change their thinking. “A lot of people believe that our basic M.O. agree that the supply will diminish as the years will stay the same,” says Winch. “But there’s no pass, as the energy needs of the Western world way it will. We have to recalibrate what we’re continue, and countries in the East, particularly doing in the field. Just getting people thinking China and India, experience explosive growth. about what will happen when oil is scarce is The concept, first formulated by geophysicist M. a challenge.” He sees the energy issue as one King Hubbert in 1949 (it is also known as Hubthat decision makers in public health should take bert’s Peak), has been honed to the point that more seriously, as they already do in regard to researchers believe that the zenith of the oil age climate change and degradation of the environ- has either already happened or is imminent. Although Winch doesn’t foresee mass diement. “The way public health uses liquid energy is part of a problem that threatens to increase offs from a shortage of fossil fuel, he says the mortality,” Winch says, arguing that using energy results will be devastating over the longer term. as in the past will contribute to future shortages “What we might experience is analogous to what that may affect the nutritional health of people we’ve seen from HIV/AIDS in Africa,” He says. in poor countries. “We should be working to “We’re more likely to see life expectancies diminprevent such a sudden threat, which means we ish. People will start dying younger.” Winch’s paper will be published in a special should stop relying so heavily on a resource that peak oil supplement of the American Journal of is becoming rapidly depleted,” he says. Winch recommends that public health hos- Public Health, to be edited by another Bloomberg pitals and research stations in poor countries professor, Brian Schwartz, and assistant profesreinstitute low-energy natural ventilation sys- sor Cindy Parker. Schwartz says the fallout from tems and reintroduce surgical supplies that can the emergence of peak oil won’t be limited to be easily sterilized and reused. He says foreign the bottom billion. “We’ll see recessions that Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

come from oil price shocks, to be followed by growth. Then, the price of oil will go up because of increased demand, and the process will repeat itself. What happens during recessions? Politicians cut budgets, which would lead to fewer clinics and vaccinations. Public health will suffer even in wealthier nations.” —MA

Engineering

Record gift will fund new research building

Will Kirk / Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

wo new transdisciplinary research initiatives are getting a home of their own. Johns Hopkins recently announced that John C. Malone, Engr ’64 (MS), ’69 (PhD), chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, has pledged $30 million to the Whiting School of Engineering for a new research building that will rise four stories above Decker Quad and encompass 56,000 square feet. Construction of Malone Hall will begin in 2012.

Malone’s gift is the largest in the history of the Whiting School. In a statement released by the university, Malone said, “I am pleased to be able to support the Whiting School and its leader, [Dean] Nick Jones, in this exciting expansion of interdisciplinary research between the School of Engineering and so many of the other divisions of the university.” One of the new initiatives, the Johns Hopkins Systems Institute, will involve eight of Hopkins’ 10 divisions in the research of complex systems, to engineer improved systems approaches to public health, neuroengineering, health care, civil infrastructure, information security, education, and other areas of national importance. Individualized medicine will be the second research initiative housed in Malone Hall. As the name implies, researchers from Engineering, Medicine, and life sciences will collaborate on applying information science to the development of individual treatments for patients. The initial focus will be on cancer, a disease with complex genetic and epigenetic factors that make individualized treatment protocols desirable. —DK

Malone Hall will rise—as soon as these happy, waving people move—on the southeast corner of Decker Quad, between Hackerman and Mason halls. 26 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

*OHNS (OPKINS !LUMNI *OURNEYS Nile River ° Mozambique mbique & Madagascar ° Tanzania ° Australia & New Zealand ° Antarctica ° Lesser Antilles ° Vietnam & Cambodia ° Elbe River ° Holland d and Belgium ° Mediterranean Cruises ° Rhône River ° Turkey ° Amalfi ° Rhine River ° Switzerland Family ° Danube River ° Scandinavia & Russia ussia ° Canadian Maritimes ° Chicago ° Normandy & Paris ° Andalucía ° St. Petersburg ° China & Tibet ° Tahiti ° Rome

ttravel tr a el@jh av jjhu.edu hu. u ed du ° 800. 800.548.5481 8 80 00 548 548.54 54 481 8 ° 41 410.516.0363 4 10. 0..51 0 5 6. 6.03 0363 0363 63 ° al alumni.jhu.edu/travel alum um mni ni.jhu .jjhu.e hu u.edu edu u/t /trave /tra vell IIllustration Ill lust u rat ust ration ioon co courtesy ourt ur esyy © Roy Royal a Geo al Geogra Geographical ggra rapphi hical c Society Socie So cie ietyy

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African Studies

David Colwell

Zambia’s Kafue Flats

28 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

y many measures, Africa is a mess: strifetorn, poverty-ridden, plagued by disease and bad governance and lagging development. Home to a billion people and an abundance of natural resources, the continent is nevertheless the poorest on the planet, accounting for less than 2 percent of world trade, according to the U.S. State Department. But the story of Africa is more complex, and perhaps more hopeful, than those facts suggest. Johns Hopkins faculty, students, and alumni have lived there, worked there, or based their research there, and they report reasons for guarded optimism. In the following pages, we talk to researchers who’ve worked in the field—fighting disease, teaching midwifery skills, or studying the social and economic effects of a recently installed oil pipeline. We explore the origins of the so-called resource curse that seems to prevent so many African countries from taking advantage of the oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, and other minerals below their surfaces. And we play “20 Questions” with Johns Hopkins’ Africa experts, who enlighten us about ancient Egyptian drinking games, China’s increasing influence on the continent, how Facebook is being used to fight HIV, and much, much more. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 29

A f r i ca n S t u d i e s Photo Courtesy of Jhpiego

IntoAfrica Interviews

Michael Anft

hey travel in search of answers, and adventure often finds them. Hundreds of Johns Hopkins academics, clinical workers, employees, and researchers work in Africa, seeking knowledge about cultures, disease, and the past. They do so at some peril. Before they board a plane, they are vaccinated against yellow fever, hepatitis A, rabies, typhoid, and meningitis. They are prescribed drugs to ward off the continental scourge— malaria—and unrelenting diarrhea caused by local food

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and water. They often come face to face with political violence, as the case of Stephen Okiria—a Bloomberg School of Public Health employee killed by a terrorist’s bomb earlier this year in Uganda—chillingly proves. Yet, few have misgivings. The chance to aid a largely impoverished population—the United Nations’ list of the 10 poorest countries worldwide is entirely African—and to fully explore the realm of disease on the continent offers researchers a living laboratory. It’s an opportunity too meaningful to pass up.

Johns Hopkins researchers and health professionals tell how “the dark continent” has illuminated their work and their lives. Beyond medicine—and the anthropology, Egyptology, and paleontology university researchers investigate there—are the people and places of Africa. Many Westerners who make the trip say that Africa changes them. Much of what they learn has little to do with their discipline, and everything to do with perspective. “I have learned patience, how dependent the world is on the Internet, how to slow down and appreciate people, and how not to get too frustrated,” says Sara Groves, an assistant professor at the School of Nursing. She has spent

the past two years in Kampala, Uganda, as part of a cadre of Johns Hopkins clinicians and researchers from various schools who work to increase the numbers of Ugandan health workers and medical scientists. “I’ve learned just how hard African lives are outside the workplace.” Inside are five edited interviews with Johns Hopkins people who have either uprooted their comfortable American lives or left middle-class African neighborhoods to work amid the poor, sick, and needy on their native continent. Each tale is a measure of science and soul. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 31

Chad has been the backbone of my career. It’s why I chose to study public health at Harvard, completing my dissertation in the southern part of the country during the 1990s. And oil has always been the backdrop for any conversation on the future of Chad, which ranks 170th out of 177 countries measured by the U.N. Human Development Index. International oil companies began exploring the possibilities for petroleum there in 1969. By the 1990s, they had worked out plans with the Chadian government, which had gotten loans from the World Bank to help finance a pipeline that would stretch from southwestern Chad to Cameroon’s Atlantic coast. I wondered what this huge potential change in the country’s fortunes would mean for people, especially those who live in the oil field region, and who grow millet, sorghum, sesame, and peanuts on the lands around them. When I came to Hopkins in 2000, I already had in mind exploring oil as a substance that was supposed to improve people’s lives. I’ve spent three to four months each year in Chad since. My plan was to really make this a longitudinal study—about 25 years, what was planned as the life of the oil fields. But the project as “an experiment in development” ended in 2008, when the World Bank pulled out, arguing that the Chadian government had not kept its part of the deal to spend 80 percent of its oil sale proceeds on health, education, and rural development—a “future generations fund.” While I am still doing research in Chad, at this point I’m mostly focused on writing. The study involves 160 households. I’ve followed the lives of the people in 80 of them, spread across three villages, especially closely. I’ve seen attitudes toward oil and the project change. When the first oil well was capped in the middle of the three villages, people who live there took pride in it—they’d clean around it, cut the grass, and clear the overgrowth. They had been told for years that this was their future. Now, there are security guards all over the place and the wells are off-limits. It’s a completely different relationship. Oil companies have taken land, offering some cash in return, but they initially underestimated how much the project would need. In one village, 90 percent of people have lost land. Many families have had to learn to make vegetable oil, repair motorcycles, do carpentry 32 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

work, or vaccinate chickens to try to make up for the loss of land. Most of them haven’t been successful because those jobs they’ve been retrained to do don’t get them enough work. Relocation isn’t an option. People are disappointed and frustrated. It’s been hard for them to keep up with the changes demanded of them. And the state once had a lot of interest but now limits much of what it does to policing and security. The very general question I asked when I started this was: How does this kind of “development” work? The bevy of environmental and social regulations and the policies governing the way land was acquired were supposed to serve as a model for other projects of this kind—at least that’s how the government and the World Bank saw it. I investigated how those concepts worked out at the micro level. One of the things I learned was that while it is important for this consortium of oil interests to show that they were adhering to global standards and policy prescriptions, they knew little about the day-to-day lives of people those standards aim to protect and even to help. It was interesting to explore the mundane ways in which people got along in the wake of the project. I have a lot of friends in Chad—my days there are filled with friends. Here in the States, there’s a lot of time spent alone. There, the norms of sociality are completely different. I’ll spend days talking with people while they work in the fields or make a chair or cook a meal. That kind of closeness, developed over many years, greatly aids the research. But it means so much more than that.

Nicole E. Warren, Nurs ’98, SPH ’99 Position: Assistant professor of community public health, School of Nursing Place: Koutiala, Mali Age: 39 Mission: Teaching midwifery skills to women who work in remote areas When I first traveled to Mali as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1990s, I spent one of my first nights in a hut during a rainstorm. I was forced to move closer and closer to the center as the mud walls slid in around me during the deluge. Early in the morning, I emerged expecting sympathy and shock from my hosts. All I saw were women busy repairing their homes. They laughed when they saw how distraught I was. It was one of my first lessons in the resiliency and strength of Malian women. When you understand how much they do in terms of raising children, farming, carrying water and

Photo Courtesy of Nicole E. Warren

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Lori Leonard Position: Associate professor of health, behavior, and society, Bloomberg School of Public Health Place: Miandoum, Chad Age: 47 Mission: Investigating the effects of a new oil pipeline on three rural villages

Nicole Warren (far left) started the a bottle of water, some bleach, wood from long distances—basinonprofit Mali Midwives to help matrones some cotton, and a bucket. cally moving nonstop from 4 in improve their midwifery skills. “They have More importantly, for all the the morning to past midnight— grown tired of watching mothers and great work they do, they aren’t you forget about whatever combabies die,” she says. as well trained as they need to plaints you had about your combe. They are acutely aware of fortable Western life. this. They have grown tired of watching mothers and For pregnant women, the work is even more difbabies die. ficult. In Mali, they say a woman has one foot on the I started a charity, Mali Midwives, to understand the earth and the other in the grave. In poor rural areas, challenges matrones face and to help them improve where most Malians live, and where hospitals are hours their midwifery skills. Our work has supported the Mali away and transportation is chancy, a woman suffering Ministry of Health’s plans to get more priority care trainfrom a postpartum hemorrhage can bleed to death in ing to every level of the health system. The matrones a matter of hours. Mali has one of the highest rates of and their supervisors got together and decided what maternal death in the world—nearly one in 200 births— the agenda for their education should be. In the first and there are a lot of near misses. Women who survive year, 2008, we updated their skills in essential newborn life-threatening complications often have trouble breastcare. Since then, we’ve concentrated on the third stage feeding or helping with the harvest. Their family’s ecoof birthing, when the placenta is delivered following nomic future, already fragile, can be devastated. a birth. Bleeding during this time is the No. 1 reason Midwives are often present during childbirth, but women die during childbirth. Mali Midwives coordithere are too few of them. Fortunately, there are auxnated training in which local experts showed matrones iliary midwives called matrones, about 140 of them a set of simple skills to prevent the uterus from bleeding in Koutiala, a region in Mali’s southeast where about too much during the third stage. 400,000 people live. For most women, a matrone is the But there are a lot of things—cultural things—that most highly trained provider they’ll ever see. Unfortutraining can’t really get at. Matrones struggle for respect. nately, most matrones are poorly equipped, working Most have low social standing because they are young and by a lantern’s light with nothing more than a black female. In the health care system, they can be regarded plastic tarp to offer the birthing woman to lie on. They as country bumpkins because of their links to rural life. might work with little more than a clamp, old scissors, Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 33

Jane Otai Position: Senior program officer, Jhpiego Place: Nairobi, Kenya Age: 49 Mission: Educating some of the 1.5 million people crowded into the city’s slums about health care I was born in a Nairobi neighborhood, but the church and school I went to were in the makeshift places built on the edges of our society, the slums. I’ve experienced a lot there, and some members of my family have suffered poor health in part because of the slum environment they lived in. It’s intensely crowded in Korogocho and Viwandani—the slums where I now work. Many families live in houses that are no more than 10 feet by 10 feet, with mud-plastered walls and a corrugated metal roof. Houses aren’t ventilated properly, so you see a lot of tuberculosis. There might be a communal toilet. Many have to pay to use it but can’t afford it, so you’ll see people do their business in a plastic bag instead, and then throw it out into the fields. Having all that around leads to high rates of diarrhea, skin disorders, and cholera. There’s a good bit of crime and much unemployment and underemployment, which is a bit 34 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

ironic given that so many people come to Nairobi from rural areas or Somalia in hope of finding work. Many people make no more than $2 per day. Some women turn to prostitution—one of the reasons why nearly one in seven people here has HIV or AIDS. I started working with children in the slums more than two decades ago to get more of them into schools. I ran a soup kitchen and founded a training program for youths and parents who needed jobs. I also started a health clinic. When I was at a conference in Italy in 2005, Pamela Lyman, the director of the Kenyan programs at Jhpiego, Johns Hopkins’ international affiliate that focuses on ways to improve health, heard me speak and hired me to run a program centered on the slums. Since then, we’ve tried to empower people. We teach HIV-infected persons how to handle aspects of their own care by showing them how to regularly use their medicines and get to health facilities in Nairobi. We created a map that shows people where an array of services—clinics, nutrition, schools—is situated. We also train providers of health services, link them to the national health ministry, and make sure they get antiretroviral drugs. We try to help people, especially women, deal with some cultural things. In some communities, it is difficult for women to have the power to tell their men to use condoms, particularly if they’re married. In the slums, it’s no different from anywhere else—people want to live a good life. When you arm them with education, they have more power to create that life. It once was a challenge to get men involved in issues of health, particularly if they involved women and children. But we’ve managed to get men to rally around health issues, like HIV, reproductive health, water, and sanitation. In Korogocho, we’ve helped support Men’s Movement Against AIDS. Members meet as men and discuss men’s issues, including condom use, how AIDS is transmitted to an unborn child, and family planning. And we’ve provided wheelbarPhoto Courtesy of Jhpiego

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When a woman is having problems during childbirth, the matrones face harrowing choices: Should they stay to support the woman? Or do they use precious time to find the village authorities or the woman’s family to arrange transportation—a truck, a donkey cart—to get her to a distant hospital? They often have to navigate the realm of men, where they have no real power. Yet, these women persist in providing reproductive health care along with the usual obligations of farming and family life. They’ve certainly earned my respect. I’ve remained friends with several during the past 15 years. When my daughter, Felix, was spending the first year of her life in Mali, matrones and other women there began treating me as a woman, and not as an outsider. They critiqued my breast-feeding technique and taught me how to properly tie my child to my back. When you’re a wife and mother, they understand you. They’re more likely to laugh with you. The grace they show while leading often-difficult lives is inspiring. One of the reasons I keep these pictures of Mali hanging in my office in Baltimore is that it’s so easy to get caught up in the fast-paced Hopkins environment, to get consumed by the work here. The photos remind me of what real work is.

Jane Otai (left) runs a program that works to improve health care in the slums of Nairobi. “In the slums,” she says, “it’s no different from anywhere else—people want to live a good life.”

rows, rakes, and the like to young men who decided to gather together and clean up their villages. They don’t want their children to suffer from the usual slum diseases. Before I joined Jhpiego, I would go into the communities and say things like, “Here’s your problem: Your children don’t get enough nutrition. Here’s how you can solve that.” But working with Jhpiego has taught me that we shouldn’t be dictating to people. Instead we give them training and equipment and get them thinking about how to improve their lives. Right now, about 40 percent of Nairobi’s population of around 4 million lives in places like Korogocho and Viwandani. By 2030, urban slum dwellers will make up 72 percent of the population in African cities, the United Nations tells us. What I see here is the future, one we need to understand so we don’t have to deal with catastrophes in public health.

Taha Taha, SPH ’92 (PhD) Position: Professor of epidemiology, Bloomberg School of Public Health Place: Blantyre, Malawi Age: 62 Mission: Conducting research into mother-to-child transmission of HIV and training new Malawian researchers I grew up in Sudan, in a bustling place along the Nile. Our great fathers, the Nubians, thought they owned the river. Historically, the Nile Valley has been very active—people coming in and going out—but has offered little in the way of health or educational opportunities. Nonetheless, I was trained to be a physician and practiced for several years in Sudan, working on cases of tropical diseases, such as malaria and schistosomiasis. Epidemics such as meningitis and cholera were very common in many African countries, with

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people traveling from West Africa to East Africa along the famous “meningitis belt.” After spending some time in clinical practice in Africa, you realize you have to do more than treat one patient at a time. I became involved in public health because of my interest in doing research that would get at these big African health problems. I got my PhD in public health from Johns Hopkins and traveled to Malawi to begin investigating HIV. In 1992, when I was asked by my superiors at Hopkins to go there, I responded that I would rather go to East Africa, West Africa—anywhere else other than the south of Africa. I knew nothing about the southern part of the continent. What I learned when I got to Malawi was that the cultures in Africa are actually very similar. They have common customs, common diseases, and back then they had little research capabilities to deal with them. Most of our activity has been built around AIDS in pregnant women and their children. We started looking at what the risk factors were. We learned that having multiple sexual partners and not using condoms were spreading disease. But we also learned that many mothers were infecting their babies during breast-feeding. Currently, about 20 percent of pregnant women are HIVinfected. We developed prevention programs, encouraging people to change their sexual practices. Most recently, we’ve done several studies and clinical trials to see what we can do to stop HIV transmission via breast milk. We did one trial involving more than 3,000 Malawian babies and found that by giving infants a certain drug regimen, we can protect them from HIV in their mother’s breast milk for up to 14 weeks. We didn’t go further than that at the time because of safety concerns about the effects of the drugs. But now we know that they are safe and we’re looking to give them the regimen for the entire time they are breast-feeding. We’re also looking at ways to give the mother antiretroviral drugs while she’s breast-feeding. These two methods of prevention may be equivalent. You don’t want to give some women these drugs until their immune systems are in dire need of them, so there are some extra considerations there. My wife and three sons lived with me in Blantyre for five years and they really enjoyed it. We returned to the United States for my sons to continue their education after high school. Otherwise, I’m not too sure that we would have come back. I make several trips back to Malawi each year. The people are warm, friendly, and happy to deal with you. When you do this kind of work, you really feel like you are doing what you need to do. You’re living among the people and doing what you can to help them and their community. You talk to people and help educate them, too. In turn, they honor you by giving you a place there. 36 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Yukari Manabe Positions: Head of research, Infectious Disease Institute, Makerere University (Uganda), and associate professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine Place: Kampala, Uganda Age: 45 Mission: Researching the transmission of HIV and HIVrelated infectious diseases and training a new generation of Ugandan scientists When I was told three years ago that there was a chance to study the intersection of tuberculosis and HIV in Africa, I jumped at it. Uganda is really the epicenter of HIV in Africa—the first African case of the disease was diagnosed along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1982. It’s an infectious-disease scientist’s dream to be where the action is, and HIV is the infection of my lifetime. Ever since I completed my residency at Johns Hopkins in 1994, it has molded my life as a researcher. It has driven me to investigate the possibilities for diagnostic tests and a vaccine for tuberculosis, one of the diseases HIV-positive people are most likely to acquire. So I brought my four boys—now ages 8 through 16—to Uganda, as well as my husband, who now works here as a medical epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When we got here, I was overwhelmed by how green the country is despite being overcrowded, especially in Kampala, the capital. People are warm and speak English here, too, so I began to understand why there were so many retirees from international nonprofits who choose to settle here. Beyond the beauty and friendliness is a lot of suffering, however. Rates of HIV and its related infections have come down since their peak prevalence in the 1990s, but along with malaria, they still dominate the medical landscape here. It’s hard not to see how difficult the lives of so many Ugandans are. The need is intense. When I worked in the TB clinic in East Baltimore, there might have been 44 total cases we tracked. Here, we’ll see 350 to 400 people in just one clinic. It’s staggering. I’ve continued my research into TB and have participated in several studies on HIV-associated complications and cryptococcal meningitis, a fungal disease that causes inflammation in the space between the brain and skull; it’s another often-fatal infection that people with HIV contract. At the Infectious Disease Institute, our goal is to increase the numbers of native Ugandans who study medicine and research and then go on to independently conduct research on questions that will change the lives of Ugandans. We rely on local and international faculty to train them. There are five of us from Hopkins living here.

David Colwell

Besides overseeing the work Many Johns Hopkins researchers, including without water or power for long done at the institute, I’ll also travel Taha Taha and Yukari Manabe, are working stretches of time. They deal with with some students two and a half to stop the transmission of HIV in Africa. this despite the basic unfairness hours outside Kampala to overof life, and somehow maintain see clinical trials in a district hospital in Kiboga. People the energy to both see patients and conduct research. with HIV are much more likely to die from opportunistic I’ve learned how deeply people can care for each infections like TB here than patients in the United States, other here. When I returned from a recent trip to do clinieven if they take antiretroviral drugs. We’re trying to find cal research in Mozambique, people said, “Dr. Yuka, you out why. I’m also running trials to see if we can develop were lost.” What that means is, “We missed you. You were a diagnostic tool for TB that doctors don’t have to adminlost, but now we’ve found you. It’s nice to see you.” When ister. One of the methods we’re looking at involves a I heard sentiments like that when I first got here, I thought dipstick that would test urine for the presence of cell wall it was out of politeness. But now I know that it comes components that signal the presence of TB. from the uncertainty of life in settings with few resources, My level of admiration for people here who live with and from not knowing what tomorrow will bring. It’s a and treat disease is boundless. The doctors seem to have way of showing people how much you care every day. tireless energy, even though one-third of the people they see in the hospital will die. Many of them have to work Michael Anft is Johns Hopkins Magazine’s senior writer. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 37

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The Curse Golden Egg Why have resource-rich African countries been plagued by slow growth, economic disparity, corrupt and repressive governments, and civil strife? By Dale Keiger I llustration

L asse S karbovik

ore than 25 years have elapsed, but Peter M. Lewis vividly remembers an early morning telephone call and subsequent walk through a city market. He was a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the 1980s when he applied to the U.S. State Department for a summer internship. “In those days they had a good program that would place you in overseas embassies with a small stipend,” he says. “You had no choice as to your placement—if you were accepted, you were just told where you were going. So I got a phone call at 6 in the morning saying, ‘You’ve been accepted and you’re going to Lagos.’” Lewis, now director of African Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, had been to Africa before but not to Nigeria. He recalls, “I went for a walk through downtown Lagos. It’s a very dense, very busy city of several million people, and the downtown area has a lot of market activity. I was looking for things to buy, souvenirs, and there were a lot of goods in the market, but it was quickly apparent that very little of it was made in Nigeria. There were textiles and padlocks and mosquito coils and machetes, and they were made in Europe, they were made in China, they were made in India, in the United States and elsewhere, but very little manufactured locally.” This struck Lewis as odd. Nigeria’s population then probably was approaching 100 million (it’s now estimated at 152 million) and it had considerable oil wealth. Together, those should have been the foundation of a robust economy. But that day in the market, there was little evidence of a Nigerian economy beyond petroleum exports. And there was substantial evidence that despite the money pouring in from its state-owned oil fields, the government could not provide basic public services. “Electricity might be out for a week at a time. Trash was piled two stories high in block-long accumulations. It really looked like things were coming unraveled, which they were—there was a coup shortly after I was there.” What Lewis encountered on the streets of Lagos was just beginning to be a subject of serious study and debate in the 1980s. Economists had begun to note that

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of the

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a striking number of African countries (and developing nations in other parts of the world) rich in oil, natural gas, diamonds, gold, copper, and other valuable minerals also were plagued by lagging economic development, ineffective and often corrupt governments, widespread poverty, severe economic disparities, and violence, sometimes open warfare. Rich in resources, yet poor by most measures. Consider some numbers. Nigeria has more known oil than all but a dozen of the world’s nations, yet its estimated per capita gross domestic product ranks 183rd in the world; the life expectancy of a Nigerian at birth in 2008 was 48 years, and the country has endured a succession of corrupt and repressive governments, plus ethnic strife and a violent insurgency in its oil-producing region. Angola also has oil beneath its surface, but a per capita GDP ranking of 120 after 27 years of civil war. The Democratic Republic of Congo has abundant oil, copper, and other resources, yet 80 percent of its population lives on the equivalent of 20 cents per day. Meanwhile, look at Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Meager reserves of the natural resources in demand by a growing world, but per capita GDPs of 39th, 49th, and 7th, respectively (all GDP figures are 2009), strong public sectors, and robust civil societies. Some economists have called what has befallen so many resource-rich countries the “paradox of plenty.” Others prefer the more vivid and arresting “resource curse,” and that’s the label that has caught on. What Lewis first glimpsed in Nigerian street markets has stayed with him. In 2007, he published the book Growing Apart: Oil, Politics, and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria (University of Michigan Press). He organized an April 2009 SAIS conference on “The Politics of Development and Security in Africa’s Oil States,” and hopes to shepherd into print a collection of the conference papers by the end of this year. “On the face of it, having abundant natural resources would give you a tremendous advantage in development,” he says. “You’d be able to pay your civil servants, build up your public sector, deliver universal health care and education at some decent level, provide economic opportunities, and invest in infrastructure. That would presumably make you popular so you could win elections, and dampen incentives for conflict. Yet it hasn’t worked out that way.” The notion of abundant resources as a drawback is not new. Developmental economists love to quote Six Books of the Commonwealth by 16th-century French political philosopher Jean Bodin (for some reason frequently leaving out Bodin’s attribution of the observation to the ancient Roman historian Livy): “Livy remarks that the inhabitants of rich and fertile country are normally mean and cowardly, whereas a barren soil makes men sober of necessity, and in consequence careful, vigilant, and 40 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

industrious.” Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill also noted that resource wealth seemed to correlate with problems that it should solve. Modern economists took up the question in earnest about the time Lewis was traipsing about Lagos. In 1980, Gobind T. Nankani, former vice president for Africa at the World Bank, found that over a 16-year period the developing world’s leading exporters of minerals had half the per capita GDP growth of a control group of so-called nonmineral states. A similar study four years later by Boston University’s David Wheeler of 30 sub-Saharan countries found much the same. The first heavyweight modern study came in 1997, when Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew W. Warner of Harvard applied regression analysis to 19 years of economic data from 97 countries. They controlled for a host of factors that might have influenced growth in those countries, such as trade policy, investment rates, bureaucratic efficiency, and income distribution. What they found was abnormally slow growth rates in countries that had high ratios of natural resource exports to GDP. What’s more, they demonstrated that those same countries had higher rates of civil war. A few years later, economist Michael Ross of UCLA analyzed 16 years of data from 113 countries and found an additional effect: a wealth of petroleum and mineral resources increases the prospect of authoritarian rule. Resource curse, indeed. There are economists who argue that the curse is an illusion, but if you believe, as Lewis does, that it is genuine, the next question is, What goes wrong? Why aren’t oil-rich Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, and Equatorial Guinea thriving democracies with burgeoning economies? Those questions still await definitive answers, but Lewis offers a few potential explanations. The first is often called “the Dutch disease”—a label applied by The Economist to describe what happened to Dutch manufacturing and exports in the 1960s after Holland discovered natural gas deposits in the North Sea—and mostly has to do with inflated currency. Say that a nation discovers a huge new oil field and begins exporting crude to petroleum importers like the United States and Japan. That sudden export boom creates a surge in demand for the nation’s currency on foreign exchanges as customers buy, say, Nigerian naira to pay for Nigerian oil. Increased demand creates higher prices, inflating the currency’s value. That in turn depresses other economic sectors, such as manufacturing and agriculture—remember Lewis’ inability to find Nigerian-made goods in the Lagos markets?—because widgets or walnuts now cost more in the inflated currency and importers of those goods shop elsewhere to buy them more cheaply. Plus the booming oil export business draws labor and investment away from the depressed sectors. So now the widget makers and walnut growers not only have trouble selling their

goods abroad, they have to pay more for workers and capital, further inhibiting growth. As if that isn’t enough trouble, governments become imprudent or careless in their economic planning. Says Lewis, “When you get this sudden flood of revenues, they’re hard to monitor and an inducement to fiscal myopia. It’s like winning the lottery. People get a windfall and think the windfall is going to be permanent and they won’t have to worry about budgeting anymore.” But oil or mineral revenue is revenue all the same. Why does it matter if the income is generated by petroleum or copper instead of cocoa, printed cloth, computer circuit boards, or cars? Why have so many resource countries been plagued by governments inept at best, corrupt and authoritarian at worst? Lewis’ answer is that if much of a country’s wealth (in Nigeria’s case, virtually all) comes from exporting natural resources, it becomes what’s known as a rentier state—dependent on income derived from rents, which is what economists call “income derived from the gift of nature.” Because the money that sustains a rentier state is external, the government doesn’t have the same stake in building other parts of the economy and widening prosperity because it doesn’t have to generate tax revenue.

“They know that the wealth is coming from beneath their soil, but they’re not seeing any benefits.” Nor does it have to respond to a constituency of taxpayers. As New York Times international affairs analyst Thomas Friedman wrote in Foreign Policy in 2006, “Oil-backed regimes that do not have to tax their people in order to survive, because they can simply drill an oil well, also do not have to listen to their people or represent their wishes.” Politicians or generals, whoever is in charge, can buy off potential opposition through patronage funded by resource rents, and they can afford repressive security measures for those who won’t be bought. Says Lewis, “You get no accountability, a high level of inefficiency, and no investment in roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, effective regulatory institutions, or a legal system.” Studies have also found a correlation between resource wealth and armed conflict. A number of African states—Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria—have endured civil wars and insurgencies engendered in part by economic inequality and disenfranchisement. The same oil fields, diamond mines, and

mineral deposits that sustain a regime also can sustain insurgencies that seize control of them. Factions in the Congolese civil war, which has killed an estimated 5 million people since 1996, have battled for control of mines that produce cassiterite, wolframite, and coltan, which you may have never heard of but are essential for manufacture of computers and other technology. Lewis cites the situation in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. That’s where the oil is, but the people of the delta have derived little benefit from the oil wells they can see and smell. “They know that the wealth is coming from beneath their soil, but they’re not seeing any benefits. Their soil and water are degraded, they don’t get schools or electricity, they don’t even get jobs. There are 30,000 jobs in the oil industry, in a country of 150 million.” The result has been armed violence as insurgents have disrupted oil production. Though the situation in much of Africa can seem dismal, several countries have made progress, Lewis says. In 2007, Nigeria signed on to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which requires it to make public all payments to the state and state revenues accruing from oil, gas, and mining. The goal of EITI is to strengthen accountability and good governance in resource states through transparency, create more stable investment climates, and help prevent conflict. Other African countries that have joined the initiative include Sierra Leone, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, and Niger. Lewis notes that Angola has ended its civil war and begun managing its oil revenues better. His colleague, Bo Kong, director of SAIS’ Global Energy and Environment Initiative and a professorial lecturer in African Studies, cites Botswana, which has substantial deposits of diamonds, and South Africa, which produces a lot of metals including gold, for their stability and better use of revenues from natural resources. For 11 years now, Nigeria has conducted democratic elections that have had serious flaws but, nevertheless, have resulted in the first civilian-to-civilian transfers of power in the nation’s history. “I am an optimist in Nigeria,” Lewis says. “They’re not where they need to be and not even close to where they want to be. Yet there’s both a new generation of emerging elites and a very substantial cohort of businesspeople, public officials, some politicians, commentators, analysts, and so forth who understand the sources of their problems over the last 40 years, and who have a clear vision for where the country could go. These people are trying to get a handhold in the policy domain, and I think they will.” Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 41

Africa Edition Can Facebook stop the spread of HIV in Uganda? Has Bono been any help at all? What’s China up to anyway? And do you know my friend in Zimbabwe? Johns Hopkins faculty, alumni, and students field questions—big, small, and out of the blue— about Africa. By Brennen Jensen

1. How firmly has democracy taken root in Africa? The United Nations reports that Africa currently has the greatest number of countries with democratic governments since the 1960s, though it’s far from accurate to call the continent a bastion of free and fair elections. “Democracy has a foothold; it’s more than just a toehold,” says William Zartman, professor emeritus at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and former director of the school’s African Studies program. “In 50 years of independence, the idea of democracy as the legitimizer of African regimes has pretty well penetrated, though this doesn’t mean that the idea of democracy is well practiced.” Indeed, over the last couple of years, elections in Ivory Coast, Guinea, 42 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Zimbabwe, and Mauritania, among others, have been disputed, disrupted, or mired in fraud charges. Still, Zartman says, the idea of democratic participation in elections has stuck, and men and women vote with some enthusiasm across the continent. “Regimes now feel they have to claim they are democratic in order to be legitimate,” Zartman says. “The idea of democracy is there, and once the principles are there, then you can nail people to them. Then the question becomes not, are there democratic practices, but is democracy being implemented and enforced. That’s progress.” 2. What should we make of China’s surging interest in Africa? Although the roots of a Sino-African relationship can be traced back to

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the 15th century, it’s only recently that China—with its booming economy, brimming coffers, and hunger for oil and other resources—has seen its relationship with the continent bloom into a multi-billion-dollar proposition. Last year China replaced the United States as Africa’s second-largest trading partner after Europe. Chinese investment in Africa tops $9 billion. Carla Freeman, interim American co-director of the SAIS Hopkins-Nanjing Center, led a group of students to Ethiopia and Ghana last August to discuss the issue with experts and policymakers in those countries’ capitals. She found that many Africans admire China’s ability to quickly lift so many of its own people out of poverty. China’s deep pockets are appreciated, too. In Ethiopia, the Chinese have

invested heavily in roads, cell towers, and other infrastructure improvements that have helped the poor country’s economy experience double-digit growth. “China has drawn attention to Africa’s economic potential, and that’s a really good thing for Africa,” Freeman says. However, one concern is whether African admiration for China’s economic approach will lead to a similar appreciation of its hard-line political system. With the United States and Europe mired in a protracted economic downturn, Freeman says, “many of the Western political and economic models are being called into question.” And then there’s China’s less-thanstellar environmental record. “China’s reform has come at a tremendous cost

to the environment, and from that perspective it’s a terrible model,” Freeman says. But one African the student group met said that Africans were still looking for their own way forward—not interested in copying the economic “tiger” so much as learning how to become “new lions.” 3. What are some of the misconceptions American college students have about Africa? Patrick Bassey, a senior from Lagos, Nigeria, studying economics and psychology at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, has received some curious questions from fellow students once they learn he’s African. “The most ridiculous thing anyone asked me,” Bassey recalls, “was when I said I was

from Nigeria and someone said, ‘Oh, do you know my friend in Zimbabwe?’” Bassey has learned to consider such ill-informed queries as teaching moments. And he is president of the Johns Hopkins African Students Association, which also aims to educate people about Africa. The group, with some 40 members representing more than half a dozen African nations, holds monthly public meetings to discuss African customs and culture with occasional dances and field trips to local African restaurants or stores. “There are some people who still have the misconception that all of Africa is like a safari,” Bassey says. “We do have houses, not huts. I talk about my life. How I went to a Jesuit high school and did some of the same things as a teenager that they Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 43

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African Picture / The Image Works

4. What was the ancient Egyptian “festival of drunkenness”? In short, a bibulous religious event dating to 1500 B.C. or earlier where participants pounded beer and tried to score face time with a goddess. Since 2001, Betsy Bryan, a professor in the Krieger School’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, has led excavations at Temple Mut, an ancient Egyptian site that is part of the sprawling Karnak Temple complex near the modern-day city of Luxor. Uncovered was an area where this annual festival is thought to have taken place, as well as new clues to its age and activities. The festival recalls several myths, including one in which an angry, lionshaped goddess is killing her way across Egypt. To save mankind, the gods send down a flood of red-tinted beer, which the bloodthirsty deity consumes until passing out. “Kiosks were set up with large vats of this alcohol,” Bryan says of the boozy, myth-inspired ritual. “There was very little eating, just more or less inebriation and passing out from lots of alcohol.” Then, in the wee hours of the morning, drummers would besiege the out-cold celebrants, making a huge racket to wake them. In the resulting hazy moments of hung-over consciousness, statues of the lion goddess would be brought forth. “There would be this moment of connection, this epiphany when the celebrants could speak directly to her and ask for something,” Bryan says. Perhaps they’d request an aspirin or an Alka-Seltzer? “I know,” says Bryan. “Can you imagine being woken up by drums at 3 o’clock in the morning with that kind of headache?” courtesy of Betsy Bryan

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do over here.” Bassey likes to talk about Africa’s cultural festivals, cinema, music, and close-knit families. “I’m not trying to tell people there isn’t poverty,” he says. “But in Africa, the story is more complex.”

5. Are Western celebrities such as Bono really doing much good when they support African causes? “When you are using terms like ‘genocide,’ my experience is you need all the help you can get to try and get the point across,” says Michael Evans, SAIS ’90. “I say, more power to them.” Last October, Evans was named the national director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, a charity focused on the humanitarian needs of displaced people. He spent the previous 20 years living in Africa as the organization’s director for Eastern Africa. He’s experienced mortar attack, gunpoint imprisonment in a mud hut, and other hardships and violence. Nevertheless, Irish rocker Bono, who is outspoken on a range of African topics including the need for debt relief, has earned Evans’ respect. “He’s been consistent,” he says. “Africa has not just been a drop-in, fly-by-night cause for him.” Hollywood’s George Clooney, too, earns accolades, both for his visits to Darfur refugee camps and trips to Washington asking legislators for additional support for the war-torn Sudanese. “I think there is a value for someone like a George Clooney raising the issue of Darfur, especially when no one else was doing it,” Evans says.

6. How has Western literature presented an incomplete image of Africa? Africa is an incredibly vast and varied continent teeming with cultures, languages, and lifestyles. Except, that is, in the pages of Western fiction, poetry, and drama up through the early 20th century, says Hollis Robbins, professor of humanities at the Peabody Institute. “For a long time the Western literary tradition didn’t take Africa seriously,” Robbins says. “Africa only existed as a kind of trope, a literary metaphor— you can think of Heart of Darkness. It wasn’t a place with distinct geo-political divisions and cultures.” Whereas writers easily and readily differentiated between England, Scotland, and Ireland—indeed all of Europe— Africa was just Africa, the cultures of Kenya indistinguishable from those of Senegal or Egypt. Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexandre Dumas, and even Shakespeare employed the now-

7. How is Facebook being used to slow the spread of HIV in Uganda? The HIV infection rate is on the rise in Uganda—not so much among traditional at-risk groups, such as sex workers or migrants, but for people who are married or cohabiting. When individuals in such long-term relationships seek what are colloquially called “side dish” sexual partners, they place themselves and their domestic partner at risk for HIV. In 2009, the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs launched the “Get Off the Sexual Network” campaign to promote mutual monogamy, using TV, radio, and billboards. And starting in June of last year, Facebook became part of the effort. The campaign targets Uganda’s urban, educated, and better-off population— just the folks most likely to have access to the social networking site. Nearly 11,000 people have become members of the campaign’s Facebook group, where they can participate in discussions about at-risk behavior and the benefits of mutual monogamy. “Facebook allows dialogue to hap-

pen outside of the technical experts,” says Leanne Wolff, program officer at the Center for Communication Programs. “Peers talk to peers, which is helping to move the process.” 8. What is a “ram pump” and how has it helped South African grandparents and orphans? When you need to get water up a hill, one of the most straightforward mechanical devices you can employ is a “ram pump,” which harnesses the power of water flowing downhill to pump some water back up. Since 2006, the Johns Hopkins branch of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a nonprofit that sends volunteer engineers around the world to tackle community-based engineering projects, has installed eight such pumps in rural South Africa. The pumps are used to bring water to community gardens, improving yields while lessening the work required of their tenders. “We got to see people trying to get water to their gardens before a pump was installed,” says Imbi Salasoo, a junior mechanical engineering major in the Whiting School of Engineering who visited South Africa last August as part of the Johns Hopkins EWB team. “They used plastic petrol tanks and a wheelbarrow, and it was quite the physical burden going up and down a hill.” Making matters worse, in some of the communities where student engineers have worked, many of the able-bodied adults have died of AIDS, leaving the elderly and children to raise the crops. Although the pumps are built in South Africa, the students have to figure out how best to install them and then lay the necessary pipe. Eight Hopkins students David Colwell

archaic terms “Nubian” or “Ethiop” as literary shorthand for African, residents of a place, Robbins says, depicted largely as “uncivilized” and “scary.” Robbins likes to expose her students to Victorian writer H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure, which involves—however improbably—an Englishman’s search for a white queen in central Africa. “Africans become the constitutive ‘other’ of heroic white Western heroes,” Robbins says. Things had improved by the 20th century. Isak Dinesen’s 1937 Out of Africa, though dealing primarily with white colonials in Kenya, does refer to native Kikuyu culture. However, Robbins credits Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart for ushering in the modern and more realistic era of African literature.

went on last summer’s three-week trip, visiting the countryside northwest of the city of Durban. They installed one pump and checked on several others installed earlier. “It’s a great way to apply what you’ve learned in books and see the benefits of how it helps people,” Salasoo says. 9. What can the scratches on million-year-old African teeth tell us about human evolution? Mark Teaford examines teeth, but he is not a dentist. Indeed, his “patients” have been dead for more than 2 million years. Teaford is a professor of functional anatomy at the School of Medicine; he studies the dental abrasions of our primitive ancestors to gain new insight into their diets and evolution. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 45

10. What is life in Rwanda like 16 years after the genocide there? In 1994, 800,000 people were murdered in this landlocked nation when the majority ethnic group, the Hutus, waged bloody attacks on the rival minority group, the Tutsis. The brutal genocide shocked the world. And today? “Rwanda is actually one of the safest countries in Africa,” says Jon Rosen, SAIS ’09, a freelance journalist based in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, whose writings have appeared in Global Post, USA Today, and World Politics Review. “You can walk around the streets of Kigali at night and not really worry about getting mugged.” The nation now has great economic ambition, aiming to become the “Singapore of east-central Africa,” Rosen says. Whereas some 90 percent of the population is involved in smallscale agriculture, government plans call for transforming the country into “a regional hub of information technology 46 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

and education.” The fact that stability and promise have come to the country is due in large part to President Paul Kagame. The lanky, bespectacled leader has done much over the past 10 years to root out corruption, and he counts Tony Blair and Pastor Rick Warren among his Western admirers. Still, though Kagame was re-elected last year with more than 90 percent of the vote, questions remain about the openness of his Tutsi-led regime and the degree to which credible opposition candidates had access to the ballot. “He’s a dictator— there’s no question about that,” Rosen says. “The debate is more on whether he’s a benign dictator who’s good for the country, as many say, or whether ultimately he’s dangerous.” And although Rosen is optimistic about Rwanda’s economic future, he says deep divisions remain between Hutu and Tutsi that “people are not allowed to talk about.” Foreigners who make brief visits to the scrubbed capital might not discern these tensions. “If you are here long enough,” he says, “you begin to feel like there are still a lot of fundamental problems that really haven’t been addressed.”

“I had read and had been briefed on a number of different dimensions of Johns Hopkins’ work in Africa,” Daniels says. “But you really need to be there on the ground to understand how genuine and enduring the ties are between Hopkins and the continent.” Even before his trip, last spring Daniels sought to increase the number of students traveling to Africa for research and fieldwork opportunities and launched the Johns Hopkins global health awards program—85 new grants

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Natural History Museum / The Image Works

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Teaford has visited museums in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa to bring back detailed dental molds of early human teeth in their collections. He then examines their surfaces using a computer analysis system he helped develop employing advanced microscopy and detailed 3-D modeling. The degree of dental abrasion is related to the hardness of foods routinely eaten, and Teaford’s studies have shaken up some conventional evolutionary thinking. Take Paranthropus boisei (aka “Nutcracker Man”), an early human species from East Africa thought to have evolved a prominent jaw in response to the significant presence of hard foods in his diet. Teaford found very little abrasion when he examined the creature’s teeth. “So he wasn’t just going around eating nuts,” Teaford says. “Our ideas about his anatomy are either way off base, or more likely, he occasionally ate something hard and that was what was driving the evolutionary changes in his anatomy.”

11. What is your vision for the future of Johns Hopkins’ relationship with Africa? Last June university President Ron Daniels made a two-week, three-country trip to Africa for a firsthand look at some of the in-country health programs affiliated with the Bloomberg School, including the Rakai Health Sciences program in Uganda and Zambia’s Malaria Institute at Macha. The experience left a deep impression on the university’s new leader, then barely a year on the job.

of as much as $3,500 each for students in all divisions to pursue international public health experiences. The idea is to enable students to see firsthand the challenges Africa faces and how research can help resolve them. “A lot of institutions can talk about sending more students abroad to Africa on exchange programs or internships but don’t have the capacity to draw on the deep research networks and faculty commitments that Hopkins has made over the decades,” Daniels says. “What we’d like to see is a very dramatic enhancement of the level of interaction and collaboration with Africa across our triplicate mission of research, teaching, and service.” Adds Daniels, “Hopkins—not just in words but also in deed—has long had an institutional commitment to the development of the continent. I’m anxious for us to build on that, and on the strong moral imperative that we continue to be part of the solution for Africa’s many challenges.”

12. How did an American born of Swiss parents come to write a novel about Africa and Africans? Susi Wyss, A&S ’04 (MA), an editor with Jhpiego, a global health nonprofit affiliated with Johns Hopkins, released her debut novel, The Civilized World, in March. Billed as a “novel set in stories,” its nine interconnecting tales ramble across Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, Malawi, Ghana, Ethiopia, and the United States. At the book’s core are two characters, a Ghanaian and an American expatriot living in Africa, and their reactions to a shared tragedy. The author says she “caught the African bug” at age 7, when her family moved from Washington, D.C., for a three-year stay in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. A career in public health followed, with opportunities to visit and live in a dozen African countries, first with the Peace Corps and then for 11 years as a program manager with Jhpiego (a position she left to work on her novel). “There is such a large population here that doesn’t have any concept about what Africa is like, and I wanted to give them a window,” Wyss says of her move into fiction. “My agenda was to establish a human connection and show day-to-day life, not the things you usually read about Africa—the headlines of civil war and despots.” 13. What’s the most promising new strategy to curb the spread of HIV in Africa? Four years ago a team of Bloomberg School researchers completed clinical trials in Uganda showing that circumcision can prevent the male-to-female spread of HIV by as much as 60 percent. It was Time magazine’s No. 1 medical breakthrough of 2007. Ron Gray, a professor of epidemiology and one of the leaders of the circumcision study, says he and his col-

leagues are now hopeful about a trial completed last summer at South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal involving a microbicide vaginal gel. When applied before or soon after sex, it was shown to reduce a woman’s chances of contracting HIV by nearly 40 percent. The gel contains the antiretroviral drug tenofovir, widely used as an HIV treatment but here being applied as a preventive. Trials involving oral doses of the drug taken to prevent male-to-male HIV transmission are also under way, though Gray sees the gel as having special appeal. “We’ve been very desperate to develop female control methods,” Gray says. “This gives women something that they can use to protect themselves.” Generic forms of the drug reduce costs, which is crucial in Africa, where high drug costs can be an obstacle in the war on HIV/AIDS. Gray says plans are already in the works to bring the gel to Uganda, pending the outcome of several ongoing trials. “We already use these drugs for treatment anyway, so it’s just a matter of getting them formulated for a microbicide.” 14. How do you get 25,000 used books to Gambia? The short answer: in a shipping container, which holds about that many titles. Amassing such libraries and sending them off to West Africa is the work of the Wings of the Dawn International Institute for Children, a Fort Worth–based charity where Jaracus Copes, Ed ’10 (MS), has served as an adviser and volunteer since 2007. “Having access to books can make a real difference in someone’s life,” Copes says. “In Africa, we’re talking about off-thebeaten-path villages that don’t have the infrastructure for the Internet.” To date, Copes has had a hand in shipping five bookfilled containers across the Atlantic to Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries

where English is a principal language. Copes, who runs after-school programs for middle- and high-school-age kids in Montgomery County, Maryland, solicits his charges to help with book drives. He also seeks donations from school systems and libraries, which sometimes decommission books. Another challenge is raising the $6,500 it takes to ship the containers. What kind of books does he seek? All types—from Dr. Seuss titles to textbooks to Tom Clancy thrillers— providing they are in decent shape. “I think just the power of reading—to be able to escape where you are and go to an imaginary world—is the greatest thing,” Copes says. “We try to help bring literacy to where it might not have a chance.” 15. What’s being done to ensure that human medical research projects in Africa are conducted ethically? Africa is awash in human medical research, as scientists and doctors from around the world strive to confront the continent’s daunting health challenges. In the United States and other developed nations, laws codify the ethical oversight of human research, with independent review boards looking at, among other aspects, each study’s fairness, validity, and the informed consent of participants. Across much of Africa, however, a framework for bioethical oversight is less established. Since 2000, the Johns Hopkins–Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program, a joint project of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Bloomberg School, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, has trained more than two dozen African scientists, scholars, and government officials in the principles of bioethics. “We had one trainee from the Democratic Republic of Congo who created an ethics committee in the Congo, a place where Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 47

16. Is it true that many Africans have poor diets because their farms are stagnant and inefficient? Agricultural practices and challenges vary when talking about an entire continent, and although hunger is a problem in parts of Africa (often as a result of drought or civil unrest), many Africans enjoy a bounty of fresh, varied, and healthful foods. And they do so mostly without relying on the heavily industrialized mega-farms that exist in the West. “People think of Africans as being malnourished, but when you visit West Africa, you encounter people who are muscular and strong looking with beautiful teeth,” says Jane Guyer, a Krieger School anthropology professor who has been doing research in rural farming areas in Nigeria and Cameroon intermittently for 40 years. Whereas the “foodie” fad in the United States touts seasonal produce grown locally, that kind of eating has long been the norm in places like Nigeria. And it seems to be working well: Food David Colwell

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markets in Lagos brim with goods that are largely the product of a network of small farms in the hinterlands, Guyer says. It’s an agricultural system that not only feeds the cities but also provides employment opportunities. Over the years, Guyer has seen the range of farm size in western Nigeria grow wider, from about four or five acres to 12 acres and beyond. That growth has not been the result of an aid scheme or government program. Rather, commercially minded Africans developed tractor rental programs to provide smaller farms with affordable access to mechanization. “This notion that African agriculture is stagnant creates an invitation for someone else to come in with a different idea altogether,” Guyer says. “My work on agriculture suggests that Africans themselves have developed the resources to grow their economies and generate a varied diet.” 17. What surprised you the most about America? Anita Okoh was born and raised in Accra, Ghana, and is a member of the first class in the Carey Business School’s new Global MBA program, which launched last fall. She first arrived in

the United States in 2001 to attend Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and health sciences. Moving from a bustling West African city of nearly 2 million people to a small Pennsylvania town certainly provided opportunities for culture shock, but one thing that struck her was how little her fellow students knew about her homeland and the degree to which they took their ready access to information and education for granted. “People in my classes in college probably grew up with computers in their rooms and could surf the Net 24/7, and they didn’t think they could type in ‘Ghana’ and learn something?” Okoh says. “That was a shock.” Things were different for Okoh growing up in Accra. Although she attended one of the country’s premier high schools, her access to the Internet was sporadic at best. Students would huddle over computers for the one or two hours a day they might be online and connected with the wider world. “As school-age children we had a thirst for knowledge,” Okoh says. “You learned beyond the classroom, took any opportunity to read books or talk to people who may be from a different country or culture.” 18. What is Johns Hopkins doing to address the nursing shortage in South Africa? Nurses are in short supply in much of Africa, and the shortage is acute in South Africa. School of Nursing professor Phyllis Sharps recently read a report indicating that Western Cape alone, just one of the nation’s nine provinces, needs another 1,000 nurses to address its health care needs. South Africa, with its epidemic levels of HIV infection and vast rural areas, can be a challenging place for nurses to

David Colwell

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there had never been one of these committees before,” says Nancy Kass, a professor of bioethics and public health in the Bloomberg School and director of the African bioethics program. More recently the program has begun forming yearlong partnerships with African universities to help them develop localized bioethical training programs. In 2010, the University of Botswana participated; this year it’s Uganda’s Makere University. “It’s not really for me, a Johns Hopkins professor, to figure out the best way to resolve ethical research issues in Africa,” Kass says. “What we want to do is equip Africans to be able to make their own decisions.”

19. Are there really more doctors of Ethiopian descent in Chicago than in the entire nation of Ethiopia? Yes, according to estimates made by the International Organization for Migration, a Swiss group that examines migration issues. This is just one of the eye-opening statistics Richard Cambridge, SAIS ’79 (PhD), likes to employ to highlight the urgency of his work as director of the World Bank’s African Diaspora Program.

Science Department and coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies in the Center for Africana Studies. “I’m just not quite sure yet what significance his administration will have on economic and political relations with Africa. America is still in an economic crisis, and it would be difficult to justify a lot of new aid to anyone these days.” Certainly nowhere in Africa has Obama’s rise been as closely watched as in the East African nation of Kenya, where Obama’s father was born. This is a change of sorts. “More East Africans are paying attention to what’s going on with the United States and with the presidency,” Hayes says. “This area has generally been more distant from the United

Bob Daemmrich / The Image Works

work, prompting some to leave their homeland for better pay and opportunities in Europe or the United States. Still, Sharps has seen some heroic nurses during her numerous trips to the country. “They will fill a small SUV with all the supplies they need to provide hospice care in rural settings and drive as far as the road will go and then walk the rest,” she says. One key to dealing with the shortage is to increase nursing programs and the number of instructors at South African universities. For several years, the School of Nursing has run a program in which doctoral nursing students at South African universities spend a semester or more studying at Johns Hopkins. Ten nurses have participated to date. “These nurses are going to become faculty members [in South Africa] and they’re going to become leaders in health departments and be able to influence health policy and the delivery of care,” Sharps says. “People are realizing that nurses prepared at the graduate and the doctoral level are going to be critical to meet the challenges of increased health care demands.”

Launched in 2007, the program aims to harness the skills and resources of the millions of people of African descent living around the world. “It’s not that Africa doesn’t have the talent; it’s just that a lot of it isn’t resident in the continent,” Cambridge says. Beyond expat talent, there are also finances that could be tapped. Cambridge estimates that the diaspora from sub-Saharan Africa sends as much as $40 billion a year back to the continent in the form of “remittances,” or cash transfers to relatives. The World Bank recently helped the African Union, a collaborative organization of 53 African nations, form the Africa Institute of Remittances to examine ways in which the diaspora can be encouraged to channel at least a portion of these billions into development projects. Cambridge’s program has also helped 25 African nations develop a Ministry of the Diaspora to create policies and mechanisms to help their far-flung citizens give time and/or money back to the homeland. “Bottom line: The bank decided that the diaspora is an important part of any strategy to deal with development on the continent,” Cambridge says. “Every discussion and analysis about challenges to development in Africa starts with this notion of a ‘lack of capacity’—the countries don’t have the people, they don’t have the institutions they need. But then here’s this cadre of well-educated people with resources that can be brought into the mix.” 20. How has the election of Barack Obama affected U.S.-Africa relations? The election of the first U.S. president of African descent was a milestone event, but its impact on the nation’s relationship with Africa is hard to determine, says Floyd Hayes, senior lecturer in the Krieger School’s Political

States because most black Americans are descendants of West Africa.” If an Obama-led United States enjoys a stronger connection to Africa, it’s certainly not showing in Ivory Coast, where efforts to resolve a deeply conflicted presidential election have so far been fruitless. Hayes, however, is hopeful that “a more serious relationship” will develop. But as Obama is mired in a pressing domestic agenda, says Hayes, his presidency has so far been more symbolic than substantive when it comes to deepening connections. Baltimore-based freelancer Brennen Jensen is a former senior reporter for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 49

Mom, My

Avatar

By Piper Weiss, A&S ’00

f you Google search “Piper Weiss”—and I shamefully do, often—a photo of my mother comes up. She’s got blunt black bangs and a mustard-colored wool frock. Her smoky eyes look just past the camera. Taken on the balcony of a Portuguese hotel, the city square and the roofs of buildings in the background, the photo has that sepia overlay like it was put through that Hipstamatic iPhone app that turns everyday photos into instant nostalgia. It is my hope that anyone who stumbles across the photo online alongside my name assumes the snapshot is ironically vintage, technically modern, and actually me. I want to be mistaken for my mother, at least on the Internet. On my online account profiles, from Twitter to gChat, I’ve replaced my own portrait with one of my mother at 24. If you were to explain that to my mom, she’d be flattered but also have no idea what you were talking about. Her interest in technology stopped at recording TV movies on VHS tapes. All she knows is that several photos of her in her 20s are all over cyberspace. Fortunately, she’s OK with it. Last year, I found two old photo albums in a cabinet at my parents’ house. My mother has always been our family’s archivist, maintaining bookcases full of vacation and birthday party pictures from the past 35 years. I know all of those photos by heart. But these two albums were new to me. They are a chronicle of her life between the ages of 21 and 24, after she’d graduated from college and before she married my dad, and there isn’t a single shot of me in either book. That may have been what made them so fascinating, at first. Then I noticed her style. She wore stovepipe pants, minidresses frothing over with lace bibs. In one photo she’s wrapped a tribal headband around her bangs. In another, she’s posing in a fez. “I got that hat in Morocco,” she explained as I turned the page to find her riding a camel in a yellow bell-bottom jumpsuit. I have not known my mother to take a plane ride longer than six hours, much less swim in a pool, so this development was a shock. The alarm bells continued at the sight of countless shaggy “beatniks” at her side who were not my dad. Not to

50 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

mention the black “I Dream of Jeannie” wig, a pair of nonprescription glasses, a pet parakeet balancing on her head. She curated each photo with facts that spoke not only to a time in her life but also a time in history. “In 1968, a week in Europe was affordable for a single woman with a day job in Manhattan,” she explained as I ogled a picture of her on the balcony of a hotel in Cannes. I also learned her version of a knockoff was having a tailor hand-make a design based on a picture she had ripped from a magazine during a trip to Italy. Wigs were commonplace; so were friends who were travel agents. Compelled to share the photos with my friends, I scanned a few and posted them on a blog I created called My Mom the Style Icon. A few months later, the site caught on, and I began receiving submissions from adult children around the world. Photos of mothers from the 1930s through the 1980s told the story of their lives in the B.C. era (before children). Their styles ran the gamut, from the handmade to the haberdashercrafted. One mom straddled a motorcycle in a halter top and headscarf in the California desert. Another wore shiny pink pants to the disco every Friday night as a young woman in the Philippines. Some rebelled by dressing in menswear for their prom. Others sported trademark beehives that took an hour to construct every day before school. While the looks, eras, and locations varied, the reactions from spawn submitting the photos were fairly unified. They were proud. After years of being embarrassed by our parents as teenagers, it’s a revelation to want to show them off as adults. It’s also a way of saying thanks for raising us: We get you now. But it’s not entirely selfless. There’s a level of projection, at least for me, that goes into sharing mom’s old photos. It’s a lot easier to see beauty in others than in yourself. Seeing it in your mom is a nice sturdy negotiation of the two. It takes crossing a generation gap to appreciate those pictures. Looking at a photo of your mom taken before you

Pictures of your mother taken before you were born inspire fascination—and appreciation—for the person she was. were born is momentarily orphaning. It’s a record of a time when she didn’t even know you’d exist. An isolating notion as a child, it’s a revelation as an adult. Seeing my mom free of worry, at least when it comes to my well-being, allowed me to see her as a person I might have been friends with. She liked to wear costumes, she traveled on a whim, she met random guys with hearty beards, and even once, a monkey (which she apparently took in as a pet for six months). Instead of offering the standard pert and practiced family portrait smile, she barely noticed the flash go off. There’s no gathering of family members awkwardly waiting for the snap of a shutter. In old photos, she hardly seems to have the patience to stand in one place. Her eagerness to know what will happen next is broadcast through every trip, every hairstyle, every tailor-made frock. Not only can I relate to her, I want to be her. It’s a similar feeling I get trolling Tumblr blogs of slightly younger strangers (yeah, I’ll admit) whose lives seem fuller and more thor-

oughly lived than my own. Only this is my mom—that is, before she was my mom. All told, her vintage photos possess every ingredient for the perfect Facebook photo: well traveled, exotically dressed, and casually uninterested. It’s something I’ve never been able to pull off and never will. Despite the befuddlement of many moms when it comes to the fine art of social network profiles, they seemed to know inherently how to do it better. Maybe it’s because they didn’t care about self-projection then, the way we do now. They dressed for the moment, not the moments after when they’d story-produce their adventure for online followers. Certainly, my mom never expected thousands of strangers to see her photo more than 50 years after it was taken. But she did always say, “When you have kids, your life is no longer your own.” Wise lady. Piper Weiss, A&S ’00, is author of the book My Mom, Style Icon, to be published by Chronicle Books in May. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 51

Redefining Webster’s B

“

By Joshua Kendall, A&S ’91 (MA)

urglaries are very common here of late,” wrote 19-year-old Daniel Coit Gilman to his sister, Emily, in the spring of 1851. “Several houses and stores have been entered and robbed in the most scientific manner.” The Yale junior could not help but admire the ingenuity of the thieves, who studied the accounts of their exploits as reported by the New Haven papers. On one occasion, Gilman observed, after the robbers learned they had missed a plate that had been stashed in a cupboard, “the next night . . . very thankful no doubt for the information, [they] made a second descent upon the premises with . . . a more thorough investigation.” A reverence for the scientific method—wherever it might be found—would fuel the signature achievement of this budding polymath with the distinctive wit. As the first president of Johns Hopkins University, Gilman created the first American research university. And in turn, the university helped escort American scholarship to the international stage. As an educator, Gilman exerted his greatest impact upon the hard sciences; Gilman’s first five hires—Hopkins’ original faculty—featured just one man of letters, a classicist, who was surrounded by experts in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. And midway through his quarter-century tenure in Baltimore, he also helped found both the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the School of Medicine. But this “captain of education,” as The New York Times described Gilman shortly after his death in 1908, still cared deeply about the humanities. “All sciences are worthy of promotion,” the Johns Hopkins president declared in his inaugural address on February 22, 1876. “Or in other words, it is useless to dispute whether literature or science should receive most attention.” Gilman had a particular fondness for the emerging discipline of philology—the branch of literary studies that addresses the origin and use of words as well as affinities between languages. Right from the start, Johns Hopkins University harbored a Philological Association, where 52 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

faculty discussed linguistic matters at monthly meetings open to the public. In 1880, the university began publishing The American Journal of Philology. “If I should name the languages taught here,” Gilman noted in a report to the trustees in 1888, “it would be obvious that language and literature hold their time-honored place.” This word-lover, who had been steeped in Latin and Greek at Yale, did more than just pave the way for a new generation of literary scholarship while at Hopkins. Gilman’s hefty resume also includes a stint as a pioneering lexicographer. A decade before coming to Baltimore, this man of science brought the scientific method to America’s preeminent dictionary. As the co-editor of the 1864 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language—the first major revision of Noah Webster’s 1828 masterpiece—Gilman was partly responsible for turning what had been a literary endeavor into the evidence-based dictionary as we know it. While this feat has often been obscured by Gilman’s numerous accomplishments in the academy, it is no less impressive.

ilman’s interest in dictionaries dated back to his arrival in New Haven in the fall of 1848. Despite its heady science courses, Yale was at that time “a veritable storm-center” of lexicography, he would later recall, as about half of the university’s 20 faculty members moonlighted as editors on Webster’s Dictionary. After taking a course on eloquence taught by Chauncey Goodrich, the classicist who had replaced Webster as the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Gilman was smitten. By the time he reached Harvard as a graduate student, he toyed with the idea of writing a dictionary of his own. In Cambridge, Gilman took up the study of geography. Afterward, he headed to St. Petersburg to join the staff of the new U.S. minister to Russia, Thomas Seymour. During his two years in Europe, Gilman toured scientific schools in several countries, reporting on his travels for various American periodicals. After a few months of graduate study in Berlin, Gilman accepted a position as a

Johns Hopkins’ first president was renowned as a man of science and an educator. But Daniel Coit Gilman was also a lover of words and language—and responsible for turning what had been a literary endeavor into the evidence-based dictionary we know today.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 53

librarian at Yale. Not long after that return to New Haven in 1855, Goodrich, his former professor, invited him to get into the dictionary business. At that time, Goodrich and his publisher, the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, were facing a crisis: Though universally admired and wildly successful, Webster’s was in urgent need of a makeover. The definitions for its nearly 100,000 entries were not systematically organized. They lacked literary quotations to illustrate word usage. Even more significant, the 1847 edition, which Goodrich had edited, failed to incorporate the work of German philologists who had been making systematic discoveries about the roots of words since the early 19th century. “[Webster] has literally been undermined by the new researches,” asserted Noah Porter, a consulting editor and a member of the Yale faculty, in 1857. “In regard to many words and in respect to whole classes of important roots, he is in error and of no authority to modern scholars.” In short, it was high time for English lexicography to be transformed from an art into a science. Since its birth in the early 18th century, the English dictionary had been primarily a literary endeavor governed by the idiosyncrasies of its creators. The great solo efforts by both Webster and his British predecessor, Samuel Johnson, author of the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, were as much personal statements as repositories of objective truth. For example, Johnson expressed his pique with patrons by defining “patron” as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” Webster sneaked in his own predilections. The fervent Congregationalist defined marriage, for example, as a custom “instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes.” While Goodrich had already removed Webster’s religious beliefs from the definitions, he hadn’t tinkered with his fanciful etymologies. As a born-again Christian, Webster had been convinced of the literal truth of the book of Genesis, which asserted that all human beings once spoke the same language. He had spent a decade relating all languages back to the ur-language, which he called Chaldee, of his biblical namesake. Unfortunately, this assumption had led to wild speculations. For example, Webster had concluded that the verb “heat” was related to the Welsh word “cas,” meaning hatred, and that the adjective “loud” was derived from the Arabic verb “walada,” which means to bring forth. Such derivations ignored the major breakthrough in linguistics that Sir William Jones had made at the end of the 18th century. This Welsh Orientalist was the first to formulate the IndoEuropean hypothesis, which maintained that a common ancestor language lay behind Latin, Greek, Persian, German, the Romance languages, and Celtic. 54 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

In early 1859, Goodrich was ready to get cracking on the revision. To fix the etymologies, he hired the German scholar Carl August Friedrich Mahn. But the frail Goodrich, then nearing 70, could devote no more than two or three hours a day to the project, so he also needed help with the line editing. He would end up leaning heavily on his colleagues on the Yale faculty in general, and on Gilman in particular. “I understand that the letter A,” Goodrich wrote to publishers George and Charles Merriam, on May 26, 1859, “is to be taken up for a commencement by such of these gentlemen (especially Mr. Gilman) as are now ready to commence. This will be done upon a plan marked out by me in conversation with Mr. Gilman.” Gilman’s wage for that work was initially a mere 60 cents an hour. But the financially strapped librarian, who had to pay for his assistant out of his own pocket and was struggling to support himself on his library salary of $2,000 a year, was happy to have the additional income. Once Gilman demonstrated his literary prowess, his compensation would rise to the top rate of $1.50 an hour, given to another one of the editors, William Whitney, Yale’s professor of Sanskrit and one of America’s most distinguished philologists. Soon Goodrich formalized a chain of command whereby Whitney and Gilman were installed as principal co-editors, responsible for rewriting all the nontechnical definitions. Specialists would handle the scientific terms. The Yale physics professor Chester Lyman was assigned mathematics, physics, and technology, and Yale’s internationally renowned zoologist, James Dana, natural history and geology. (Due to a flare-up in his nervous condition, Dana was soon replaced by a young medical student named William Chester Minor. As readers familiar with Simon Winchester’s best-seller, The Professor and the Madman, may recall, this is the same lexicographer who, two decades later, would pass on tens of thousands of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary’s editor—from his cell in England’s Broadmoor Asylum.) After Goodrich’s sudden death in February of 1860, Noah Porter reluctantly took over as editor in chief. Conceding that lexicography was “foreign to his special studies,” Porter was happy to hand off the bulk of the editing. “Professors William Whitney and Daniel C. Gilman,” Porter acknowledged in the preface to the book, published in September 1864, “have labored at the definitions of the principal words, recasting, rearranging, and condensing them, introducing citations, etc.” Thanks to Porter’s conscientious co-editors, for the first time, the definitions in Webster’s were based on sound philological principles. Whitney and Gilman reorganized the entries from the previous edition to reveal the historical development of a word’s significations. And based

Photo courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, The Milton S. Eisenhower Library

on a thorough review of eminent English and American authors, they both added new senses and cited thousands of quotations to demonstrate particular usages. As Porter also noted, no previous dictionary contained “so many apt illustrations from so large a variety of writers.” For these citations, added Porter, the editors were indebted to a large group of devoted volunteers, “not a few of the most faithful and judicious of whom were ladies.” While it is widely believed that the OED was the first dictionary to employ an army of volunteer readers to supply illustrative quotations, that practice actually began with Webster’s. The editors turned to everyone they knew—including friends and family—to comb through the canon of English and American literature. Gilman reached out to his sisters, Emily and Maria. “I have read over your citations from [Oliver] Goldsmith and those from [William] Hazlitt which Maria sent,” Gilman wrote to Emily on November 10, 1860. “I think it is on the whole the most valuable series we have received from volunteer assistants except perhaps Mrs. [Noah] Porter’s [Thomas] De Quincey which was extraordinarily rich.” After thanking Emily for fishing out several idiomatic expressions during the course of her voracious reading program, the perspicacious wordsmith urged her to keep going: “You must not let the work bore you. It is a great service to us, and I am afraid a great labor to Maria and yourself.” One of the citations from Oliver Goldsmith mentioned in Gilman’s letter featured the verb “nail.” To illustrate how the 1864 Webster’s improved upon the previous edition, consider the updated entry for that word:

Below these three definitions, the editors added an explanatory paragraph about a colloquial usage, “to expose the falsehood [of a lie],” which, as they noted, was derived from the practice of shopkeepers who nailed counterfeit money to countertops. While the first and third definitions rework the first three definitions listed in the earlier version, the second definition, the Goldsmith reference, and the supplemental paragraph are entirely new. Upon its release at the end of the “public disturbances,” as the Merriam brothers referred to the Civil War, the monumental 1864 Webster’s, which contained definitions for a staggering 114,000 words, elicited raves from nearly every major American literary journal. “Viewed as a whole,” Harper’s declared, “we are confident that no other living language has a dictionary which so fully and faithfully sets forth its present condition as this last edition of Webster does that of our spoken and written English tongue.” The Atlantic Monthly noted, “Briefly, in its general accuracy, completeness, and practical utility, the work is one none who read or write can henceforward afford to dispense with” (italics in original). Even Scientific American was impressed, calling it “a vast treasury of knowledge . . . an encyclopedia in itself.” And the makers of that other dictionary across the pond—then still in the planning stages—took careful note. On account of its innovations, Webster’s was the gold standard, which the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first fascicle appeared in 1882, aimed to replace. As he made his way through the alphabet, OED editor James Murray would keep close tabs on the “Webster-ratio”— the size difference between the two books. The New English Dictionary, as Murray’s project was originally called, was supposed to be exactly six times as large as the 1864 Webster’s. While the OED, the final volume of which wasn’t published until 1928, would eventually encompass 10 times as many words, it wouldn’t alter the template Webster’s had established. Along with his co-editor Whitney, Gilman had succeeded in creating the evidence-based dictionary.

By the time he reached Harvard as a graduate student, Gilman toyed with the idea of writing a dictionary of his own.

1. To fasten with a nail or nails; to unite, close or stud with nails. The rivets of your arms were nailed with gold. Dryden

2. To fasten, as with a nail, to bind or hold, as to a bargain or acceptance in an argument or assertion; to fix; to catch; to trap. When they came to talk of places in town, you saw at once how I nailed them. Goldsmith 3. To stop the vent of, as a cannon, with a nail; to spike. Obs.

Joshua Kendall, A&S ’91 (MA), is author of The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture (Putnam, 2011). Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 55

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News & Notes from our graduates and friends

This January marked the 10th year of the beloved winterbreak course Intersession in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, led by Eric Fortune, an associate professor in the Krieger School’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. To celebrate the milestone, a handful of alumni joined undergraduate students for the trip to Ecuador’s

rain forest, highlands, and Galapagos Islands to study the habitats’ flora and fauna, as well as the history, art, and culture of the South American country. They also made time for fun, including spending time on the beach at Florena, where the group saw sea lions and mockingbirds in between snorkeling excursions.

Calling Out Cairo’s Catcallers Other Duties as Assigned Flash Nonfiction Moth Fancy At Home in the City Alumni Notes

Photo courtesy of Michael Tucci, A&S Class of 2013

58 59 60 61 62 65

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 57

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

from an “epidemic” of routine stalking, grabbing, and molestation of women on public streets. “We want to change the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt,” she says. HarassMap uses the Ushahidi technology platform, developed in Kenya, that employed crowd-sourcing technology to document eyewitness accounts of election violence after the 2007 elections. A 2008 Harvard University study credited the Ushahidi campaign with “sparking increased global media attention” to Kenya’s post-election crisis. HarassMap has similar goals, says Chiao. The hope is to empower Egyptian women to speak publicly about harassment, and to encourage business owners and police in high-harassment areas to take positive action to confront the problem. Chiao, who grew up on a 300-acre family farm in north-central Pennsylvania, came to Egypt by way of a SAIS course on the microeconomics of development. Associate professor Karen Macours asked students to profile a non-governmental organization. Chiao, who had spent four years working for Americans for Peace Now, says she “randomly” selected the only Middle Eastern NGO on the list: the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights. The group brought her to Cairo after graduation to work as director of international relations, but she also ended up starting a volunteer program and the first sexual harassment project in Egypt. “The sexual harassment program started with those volunteers,” Chiao says. “They were getting attacked and would come to work crying.” She led a public awareness campaign between 2005 and 2007, conducting public opinion surveys on harassment that for the first time drew widespread Egyptian media and government attention to the problem. Building on that experience, Chiao teamed up with three Egyptian women and Arizona-based NiJeL Inc., a developer of mapping technologies, to develop HarassMap. The all-volunteer startup has no office or paid workers, but its ambitions are far from modest. “We have a global rollout plan,” says Chiao, who is Sandy Young

Alumni

Rebecca Chiao, SAIS ’04

Calling Out the Catcallers

eeks before its formal December launch, the Cairo-based website HarassMap was already buzzing with dozens of contributions. “Car full of pervs in Zamalek,” read one anonymous report of sexual harassment in the Egyptian capital. “Nearly every male passing me slowed to ogle and smirk, making me less confident and more angry with every minute.” An interactive project that turns women’s text messages, web postings, Chiao says Cairo and other emails, and Twitter feeds into points on a Google cities suffer from an “epidemic” map, HarassMap is the of routine stalking, grabbing, brainchild of Rebecca and molestation of women on Chiao, a 2004 graduate of the Nitze School of public streets. Advanced International Studies. The reports are color-coded by categories, including “touching,” “catcalls,” and “indecent exposure.” Chiao has lived in Cairo for six and a half years and says the country’s capital and other cities suffer 58 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

now a freelance consultant to NGOs. Working with New York–based Hollaback, another anti-street-harassment group, Chiao hopes to launch HarassMap sites in several countries next year, including the United States, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Brazil. —Gadi Dechter, A&S ’03 (MA)

Michael D. White, SAIS ’76

Other Duties as Assigned

CBS

ike White had a rough workweek last summer as a rookie employee with DirecTV, the satellite television provider. He was clumsy wielding a power drill during a rooftop dish installation. Clueless in the warehouse, he was instead dispatched outside to jump up and down in a dumpster to flatten a heap of cardboard. And while manning a tech-support phone at the company call center he mistakenly called a female customer “sir.” So, did he get fired? In a manner of speaking, yes. When the week was up, White left the rooftops and trash bins to return to his real place within DirecTV’s operations: the corner office. White is the company’s president and CEO. He was participating in an episode of Undercover Boss, the CBS reality series that clandestinely places senior corporate executives in entry-level jobs within their own firms. “It was a humbling experience,” White says. “I came away with a better appreciation and understanding of the challenges the frontline work force faces every day.” For the program, which aired in October, White assumed the name Tom Peters and disguised himself with chin stubble and eyeglasses. What didn’t need to be staged was his newness to DirecTV, as he had only assumed the company’s top spot the previous January, following 20 years in various senior management posts at PepsiCo. He had spent the last seven years leading the food and beverage firm’s international operations, a period when overseas sales more than doubled. White’s interest in global affairs dates back to his years as an undergraduate at Boston College and a semester abroad in then Soviet Russia. That experience led him to the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he pursued Soviet studies and international economics. He eventually parlayed that expertise into a career devoted to furthering companies’ economic interests

overseas. “We developed a fascinating business model, a balance that reflected both globalism and localism,” White says of his days selling American snack foods around the world. For example, under his leadership, Frito-Lay, the convenience foods business unit of PepsiCo, added new flavors to its Lay’s potato chips to match cultural tastes: Peking duck–flavored chips in China, white mushroom in Russia. DirecTV, which wants to grow its presence in Latin America, is tapping White’s international business savvy as well. Satellite television and foodstuffs may seem like very different kinds of products, but White says the companies have more in common than you might think. “DirecTV is not as much a media company as Disney or CBS,” he says. “We are really a distribution company, and Frito-Lay is a distribution company.” As such, both rely heavily on a clock-punching work force who drive trucks, stock shelves, and answer phones. Undercover Boss, he says, enabled him to get to know those workers a little better. “It was really about celebrating the sometimes unsung and underappreciated workers,” he says. “I met some amazing individuals.” And, he adds, executives don’t need reality TV cameras rolling in order to leave the corporate offices for the loading dock. “In this tough economy I think it’s very important for CEOs to walk a mile in the shoes of the frontline work force,” he says. “It really sharpens your perception of how the business works from the bottom to the top.” —Brennen Jensen

Mike White left the corner office to go undercover as a satellite TV guy last summer. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 59

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

hadn’t known existed or hadn’t paid much thought to, and then discovering this whole other realm.” Whereas Lynn’s other books involved years or months of immersion in those different worlds, the 240-page Whistleblower came together fast—and over Skype. The screenplay had been circulating for several years when the film’s producers encouraged Bolkovac to write a book that would explore her story in greater detail. The producers put her in touch with Lynn, and the two began writing. When, shortly thereafter, the film began shooting in Romania, the book’s publishers, who wanted to coordinate the book release with the film, gave the pair six weeks to finish the project. “I just holed myself up and wrote until it felt like my fingers were going to fall off,” she says. “Then I would get up and do it again the next morning. It was really intense. I even finished with a couple of days to spare.” Lynn’s primary source material was a journal Bolkovac wrote during her Bosnian ordeal. The challenge was extracting a human narrative out of a text that, Lynn says, “read like a police report.” She wrote the book in first person, so she had to embody Bolkovac’s no-nonsense cop personality. “I was always asking her how she felt about certain situations, and feelings weren’t necessarily an angle that seemed relevant to her,” Lynn says. “Likewise, when I would attempt to put in ‘cop-talk,’ like when Kathy is radioing a colleague, my dialogue would sound really corny to her. We had to find a happy medium between descriptive narrative and ‘just the facts.’” These days, Lynn is focused on writing her own stories. When her 2004 undercover memoir, Leg the Spread: A Woman’s Adventures Inside the Trillion-Dollar Boys’ Club of Commodities Trading, was optioned by a major studio, Lynn began to explore screenwriting. That story, which describes Lynn’s immersion in the male-dominated trading pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is still awaiting its Hollywood treatment. Meanwhile, the Windy City native is happily transplanted to the warmer climes of Los Angeles, developing television and film projects with her writing partner, Kellie Martin, the former ER and Life Goes On actress. She’s now working on her next project, another memoir, the coming-of-age story of a celebrity makeup artist. “I’m looking forward to doing something lighter,” Lynn says. “My research will shift from poring over State Department reports to refreshing my memory of late1970s pop culture.” —GD Iris Schneider

Alumni

Cari Lynn, A&S ’97 (MA)

Flash Nonfiction

t took human trafficking watchdog Kathy Bolkovac eight years to transform her 2002 courtroom victory against a U.S. military contractor into a major motion picture starring Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave. It took Cari Lynn only six weeks to turn Bolkovac’s tale into a book. The Whistleblower tells the story of a Nebraska cop, Bolkovac, who traveled to war-torn Bosnia to work as a peacekeeper only to discover that some of her colleagues were involved in the sex trade of young women. She complained, was fired, and then sued the firm, DynCorp International, for violating a U.K. whistle-blowing law. The book was released by Palgrave Macmillan in January; the film will follow this summer. For Lynn—a Writing Seminars graduate who has penned books about an orphan-rescuing doctor, an animal massage therapist, and female commodities traders—the Bolkovac assignment was the latest in a line of deep dives into extraordinary human narratives that have kept her busy since graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1997. “I’m drawn to stories about worlds I know nothing about,” Lynn says, speaking by phone from Los Angeles on the day the Hollywood trade papers announced that movie distributors around the world had bought rights to screen the film. “What’s thrilling to me is getting entrenched in a topic, in a world that you either 60 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

John Cody, Med ’49 (Cert)

Moth Fancy

ohn Cody was 5 years old when he first encountered a large, ornate saturniid moth—a moment he calls his “introduction to beauty.” While his mother battled to keep the pests out of the family’s closets, Cody found his artistic calling. Cody, a retired psychiatrist, has spent a lifetime painting Saturniidae, the family of moths that includes some of the largest and most beautiful species. His renderings have been published in books and exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution and at the American Museum of Natural History. The legendary former editor of Audubon magazine, Les Line, dubbed him the “Audubon of moths.” In 1947, Cody’s combined interest in painting and medicine drew him to the School of Medicine’s Art as Applied to Medicine program. His detailed depictions of moths helped get him in. (The highly competitive program, which celebrates its 100th year in July, graduates no more than six students each year.) After leaving Baltimore, he spent time in the Caribbean as staff artist for noted explorer-scientist William Beebe and worked as a medical illustrator in Arkansas before attending medical school at the University of Arkansas. “I never stopped painting and drawing moths,” says Cody, “even in medical school.” Cody likes to paint from actual specimens he catches or hatches from cocoons—a preference that has led to more than a few adventures. As a newlywed, he shared a small apartment with his bride, Dorothy, and 70 luna moth caterpillars he fed with heaps of sweet gum branches. “The landlord couldn’t figure out how all the leaves got in the hall,” Cody says. Cody practiced medicine for 25 years. He also

MacPhail’s Silkmoth, Automeris macphaili, by John Cody (1995) authored several biographies, including one of Max Brödel, who founded the Art as Applied to Medicine program. But his consistent devotion has been to celebrating the saturniids. In 1996, he was celebrated in turn. A newly discovered moth—a chocolate-brown specimen found only in northern Pakistan—was formally named Saturnia codyi in his honor. —BJ

Shelf Life Short, by Cortright McMeel, A&S ’94 (St. Martin’s) This short title riffs on several levels. The novel is about an energy trader’s scheme to rig a massive short trade and blow away others in the pit. The plot turns on an immense short circuit caused by a lightplane pilot dropping a chain across the cables of a major power line. The text is choppy, 295 brief pages, including notes on how energy trading works and a glossary of its jargon. Chapters average maybe three pages. All that helped this novice make his way, but the overwhelming image of these traders made the book depressing—shallow, scatological men and mostly floozy women, all rank with chicanery, binge drinkers on the make. Coming in the wake of the Great Recession, Short poses a question of whether energy is too crucial to put in the shaky hands of traders.

Advice to the Young Physician: On the Art of Medicine, by Richard Colgan, SPH ’78 (Springer) The title is literal and so is the approach, so the general reader might well pass up this 145-page admonition—except that Colgan, perhaps inadvertently, illuminates a crucial, often neglected element of the current debate on national medical care: physicians’ obligation to serve patients’ urgent needs, irrespective of compensation. The University of Maryland Medical School associate professor recounts a history of this beneficence, predating the Hippocratic Oath and extending to heroes of the modern medical era. Several, including Sir William Osler, are associated with Johns Hopkins. Parsed out, the message is emphatic: The patient comes first. —Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 61

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Foresight 2020 They came from across the university—deans and directors, faculty and alumni, parents and friends—to help chart a vision of Johns Hopkins University in the coming decade. More than 350 university leaders convened in downtown Baltimore last October to discuss the opportunities, challenges, and priorities before the nation and the world, and how Johns Hopkins should try to respond. As part of this Volunteer Summit—which is planned to become a biennial event at the university—participants looked closely at four key issues that are expected to profoundly affect the future course of the university. In this and subsequent issues of Johns Hopkins Magazine, Alumni News and Notes will explore each of these areas in greater detail, starting with a topic in many ways nearest to our heart.

At Home in the City: Forging a New Partnership with Baltimore

n 2002 a report by a Harvard Business School professor to a new and little-known nonprofit organization revealed some startling information. It found that by the end of the 1990s more than half the nation’s colleges and universities were located in central cities and their immediate surroundings; that these institutions were spending more than $136 billion on salaries, goods, and services; and that they employed more than 3 million workers and held more than $100 billion in land and buildings. As it turns out, urban expenditures by higher education institutions were nine times the amount the federal government spends on business and job development in America’s cities. In city after city, colleges and universities were often one of the largest employers and a significant driver of the local economy. The report’s author, international competitiveness expert Michael Porter, pointed out that colleges’ and universities’ large payrolls and equally large landholdings made them far more significant than merely the nearby place to get a degree. They are in effect anchor institutions, opined Porter, who went on to suggest that they should recognize this new reality and begin acting accordingly. Specifically, he called on college and university leaders to create an explicit urban economic development strategy focused on their surrounding communities. Fast-forward eight years to the Johns Hopkins University Volunteer Summit held last October. There the university’s role in the social and economic life of Baltimore City was the focus of “At Home in the City: Forging a New Partnership with Baltimore,” one of the four discussion areas that occupied an afternoon of lively discussion and debate. By now the idea—if not the term—of Johns Hopkins as an anchor institution is 62 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

very much on people’s minds. “There is growing awareness around the country that the institutional health of universities and colleges is linked to the well-being of their neighborhoods and the cities and regions in which they are located,” notes participant Andy Frank, who was hired by university President Ron Daniels to act as a special adviser on precisely these issues. Currently, the list of Johns Hopkins–sponsored community outreach efforts fills a thick binder on Frank’s desk. But coordinating and focusing these efforts presents a challenge. Says Frank, “We have always been deeply engaged in the community. What is different is we are beginning to be more strategic; we are looking to engage communities in our own—and their own— enlightened self-interest.” Frank notes that there is a new appreciation of colleges and universities as economic drivers, particularly in Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins has for many years now been the city’s largest private employer. This presents the opportunity to serve the needs of both the university and the community by fostering urban economic development, just as recommended in the report published by CEOs for Cities, the nonprofit that first began promoting the concept of the university as an anchor institution. But steering and coordinating such efforts takes careful attention and focus. Recognizing this, the board of trustees recently established a Committee on External Affairs and Community Engagement—the first new committee to be created by the trustees in 20 years. “The fact that we’ve created this new committee reflects a new level of commitment and organizational focus on this issue,” says trustee Chris Hoehn-Saric, Engr ’84, who serves as the first chair of the new committee. “At the core is an examination of Johns Hopkins’ relationship to the community and vice versa. Baltimore is the bedrock of Johns Hopkins. It’s where our home is. We’ve made a long-term commitment and we recognize our long-term health is inexorably linked.” Although still in the very early stages of getting started, the committee already has a clear sense of

Wesley Bedrosian

both possibilities for and limitations on what it can do, Hoehn-Saric reports. The key, he believes, is for the university to find a way to identify opportunities that nicely coincide with its available capacity. “We have been looking at where we can be most effective. This is not about Johns Hopkins going out and solving other people’s problems; it’s about how we can use our core competencies to assist the community, to help business and political leaders lead effective change. I don’t see it as Hopkins going out there and taking charge. This is rather, how do we find the existing leadership and offer ourselves to support and help?” With notable achievements being recounted at other institutions—such as the successful West Philadelphia redevelopment effort at the University of Pennsylvania, or the ambitious Connective Corridor linking Syracuse University with the city’s downtown—this is a heady time to be reconsidering how Johns Hopkins University can best aid and support the communities in which it resides. And it starts, says Hoehn-Saric, with the

process of taking a fresh look at old challenges. “New ideas are critical. At the Volunteer Summit and on the committee I sensed a great willingness to put forth time and energy and resources. I saw people full of a real willingness to be involved and find solutions and put things forward—very much a renewal of excitement and energy. At the Volunteer Summit there were lots and lots of ideas put forth. Of course that is only the first stage. But it’s very energizing.” In the coming months discussions with university volunteers will help chart future priorities across every academic division. The course of the conversation to date—and the opportunity for all friends and alumni of the university to contribute to the ongoing discussion— can be found at volunteersummit.jhu.edu. —Mike Field, A&S ’97 (MA)

We invite you to join the conversation by visiting the website or emailing us at volunteersummit@jhu.edu. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 63

Johns Hopkins, Engaged Alumni, parents, friends, students, and faculty came together over a perfect fall weekend in October to get down to business (see previous page) and celebrate. There were intense discussions, busy meetings, and fireworks over Gilman Hall, but at the heart of it all were our people.

Photos by Homewood Photography

Carol and Manuel Dupkin, a university trustee emeritus,take in their first glance of Gilman Hall’s soaring new atrium during the rededication celebration.

Faculty—including Ben Vinson, a Krieger School history professor and former director of the Center for Africana Studies—led the Volunteer Summit conversations. Suzanne Jenniches, Engr ’79 (MS), a member of the Whiting School’s National Advisory Council, makes a point during one of the Summit’s conversation breakout sessions.

Ruben del Prado, SPH ’88, a new member of the Alumni Council, flew in from Guyana, where he is the country coordinator for the United Nations’ program to fight AIDS and HIV.

64 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Andrew Yip, a senior physics major at the Krieger School, reveals answers to the “Hopkins Aptitude Test,” 20 questions of Johns Hopkins trivia. Wolf Blitzer, SAIS ’72, assists.

Alumni

News & Notes

1951

John Collins, A&S ’51, has published Seeing the Unseen: Opening the Closed Circuit of Everyday Consciousness (Xulon Press, 2010). Donald H. Dembo, A&S ’51, a cardiologist, retired from his position as an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in June 2010. Solomon Golomb, A&S ’51, ’53 (MA), is a full-time faculty member at the University of Southern California, where he recently served on the presidential selection committee for the university’s new president. William “Bill” Hyde, Engr ’51, provides world travelogues to different organizations. Daniel McCarter, A&S ’51, is fully retired after 26 years of college teaching, four years of public administration, and 20 years as a small shop owner. John Messer, A&S ’51, writes that his son-in-law, Dave Baker, A&S ’84, is also a Johns Hopkins alum. Lars Molander, Engr ’51, who holds a patent, has served for 12 years on the NCEES Professional Engineering Exam Committee. NCEES is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing professional licensure for engineers and surveyors. William Sims, A&S ’51, has started a new business to assist senior citizens in Florida with food shopping, home repairs, banking, and bill paying. Eli Veazey, A&S ’51, retired as a colonel in the U.S. Army in 1979 and hopes to see some members of the class of ’51 at reunion weekend. Donald J. White, A&S ’51, retired in 1995 from investment positions with financial firms in New York City and New Jersey and now enjoys his five grandchildren and playing golf.

1955

Edward Glassman, A&S ’55 (PhD), is the author of several books, including Family Magic I and II (Create Space, 2010), Team Creativity at Work I and II (Create Space, 2010), and Weight Loss Simplified (Create Space, 2010).

1956

Robert Alderson, Engr ’56, and his wife founded in 1992 Aubrey’s Angels, a nonprofit organization that teaches music and crafting to elderly residents of small group residential homes. Frank N. Aronhalt, Engr ’56, is still enjoying getting together with his Johns Hopkins Delta Upsilon classmates two or three times a year. Sanford N. Cohen, A&S ’56, Med ’60, who retired several years ago, received an award from the Wayne State School of Medicine Alumni Association and was named a Distinguished Alumnus by Children’s Hospital of Michigan Alumni Association. He has served on the board of Temple Judea in Fort Myers, Florida, for eight years. Louis Dubilier, A&S ’56, has been actively involved with music since retirement, playing in five bands and practicing and improvising daily. Dubilier also has seven grandkids all within 70 miles of his home. Norio B. Endo, A&S ’56, creates websites for different organizations that he is involved with, and spends time editing photos, golfing, and studying with a master bird carver. Richard Fein, A&S ’56, Med ’60, is a proud new grandfather of Solei Mira Fein, who was born February 23, 2010, and joins her brothers Hudson and Nathan. Richard also has eight other grandchildren. Richard Gatchell, A&S ’56, has worked in residential real estate in Baltimore for 52 years. H. Thomas Hall, Engr ’56, retired in 1992 from his position as director of internal audit with Martin Marietta and now enjoys seven grandkids and many activities, including golf and community service. He started a tax practice in 1993 as a hobby, but now has his own practitioner business. James I. Pessin, A&S ’56, has three grandchildren and recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary. Raymond M. Schulmeyer, Engr ’56, Bus ’68, A&S ’70 (MS), has worked as an engineer for 40 years, including 35 years at Westinghouse, and has been on the faculty of the Whiting School of Engineering since 1988.

1961

Bruce S. Campbell, A&S ’61, served as centennial governor for Rotary International. He is currently serving as host area coordinator for the organization’s Center for International Studies in Peace and Conflict

from our graduates and friends

Resolution at the University of California, Berkeley. Campbell also owns and operates a computer training company and is a proud grandfather of six. Robert E. Daly, A&S ’61, Bus ’66, retired in 2001 as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, Baltimore. Howard Garfinkel, A&S ’61, is a part-time clinical nephrologist and teaches medical students, residents, and fellows. He is also enjoying spending time with his wonderful wife, family, and friends. Armand Girard II, A&S ’61, Ed ’73 (MEd), a retired high school math teacher, challenged the incumbent Republican candidate for Maryland state comptroller in the September 2010 primary election. Joshua Grossman, A&S ’61, published a review of the Johns Hopkins Internal Medicine Board Review 2008–2009 (Certification and Recertification), 2nd edition, in the August 2010 issue of Tennessee Medicine, the official medical professional journal of the Tennessee Medical Association. David Harris, A&S ’61, who is retired, maintains a small apartment in Greenwich Village and spends his winters in Sunny Isles, Florida. Newsmakers David W. Hunter, A&S ’61, is an Cameron Munter, A&S asthma and allergy specialist in Toledo, Ohio. Hunter enjoys trout fishing and ’78 (MA), ’84 (PhD), saltwater flats. began his tenure as the U.S. Charles “Chips” Lickson, A&S ’61, is the founder and CEO of Cotefco ambassador to Pakistan in Energy Group and the author of six January. Munter served prebooks, including Ironing It Out: Seven Simple Steps to Resolving Conflict; Negoviously in Iraq and Serbia. tiation Basics (Crisp Learning, 1996). He is also an adjunct faculty member at David Shear, SAIS ’83, Shenandoah University. Delvin Ryan Jr., Engr ’61, has SAIS Nanj ’87 (Cert), seven grandchildren and hopes one was nominated in Decemmay go to Johns Hopkins University. S. Donald Sherin, Engr ’61, ber 2010 to the post of U.S. retired in July 2004 after a 43-year ambassador to the Socialist career in architectural engineering procurement with the state of Maryland. Republic of Vietnam. Sherin received the 2008 President’s Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies. Richard Stewart, A&S ’61, retired in 2010.

1963

Roger Titus, A&S ’63, a Maryland District Court judge, has been appointed by the American Bar Association to be a member of its Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements.

1965

Michael Comenetz, A&S ’65, is the co-author of Valéry’s Graveyard (Peter Lang, 2010), which is a descriptive account of Paul Valéry’s famous poem, “Le Cimetière Marin.” Charles Wehrenberg, A&S ’65, is the founder of Solo Zone Publishing and Design, an e-book publisher.

1966

Renato Barahona, A&S ’66, retired as professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he has been teaching in the Latin American Studies Program as well as the History Department since 1975. James Beauchamp, Engr ’66, provides business advice and assistance to for-profit and nonprofit businesses. Henry Ditman, Engr ’66, has self-published 11 books of poetry and is working on the 12th. He also makes jelly and has won the Helen Burns Smythe Award for it at the Maryland State Fair. Frederick Fogelson, Engr ’66, is enjoying time with his 2-year-old grandson, Elijah. Stephen Greenberg, A&S ’66, is dean of medical education at Baylor College of Medicine and continues as chief of medicine at Ben Taub General Hospital. He spends time with his four grandchildren, and his youngest son recently got engaged. J. Michael Hemsley, Engr ’66, is writing a book on vehicles whose design was influenced by or reflects the art deco style. Frank Ierardi, A&S ’66, is the founder and president of Woodworkers for Children Charity Inc., as well as treasurer for Community Clinic Inc., located in Montgomery County, Maryland. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 65

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Martin Karel, A&S ’66, retired from his position as an associate math professor at Rutgers-Camden as of July 1, 2010, but is still doing research and is enjoying time with his new granddaughter. Adam Kline, A&S ’66, a retired litigator, ran for a fourth term in the Washington State Senate in 2010. Henry “Hank” Spalinger, A&S ’66, writes that he has sampled beer from more than 3,070 breweries worldwide. James Zevely, A&S ’66, works part time for Catholic Charities of San Diego.

1968

Bernard Grossfeld, A&S ’68 (PhD), an adjunct professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at Spertus College, Chicago, published The Pronominally Suffixed Verb in Biblical Hebrew: A Reference Guide (White Dove Group Publishers, 2010).

1969

Newsmaker

David F. Barbe, Engr ’69 (PhD), is executive director of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute of the University of Maryland at College Park. Brian Berke, Engr ’69, who ranks third in school history for career scoring average in men’s basketball, will be inducted into the Johns Hopkins Athletic Hall of Fame on May 1.

Kristina Schake, A&S ’92, began in December 2010 as special assistant to President Obama and communications director to first lady Michelle Obama, focusing on childhood obesity and support for military families.

1971

Stephen Bartlett, A&S ’71, who works in a private school in Tennessee, is planning to retire this summer. Peter Batts, A&S ’71, celebrated his 35th anniversary as a Dominican friar in August 2010. Frank L. Calkins, Bus ’71, published his sixth genealogical article in the September 2010 issue of The Connecticut Nutmegger, the quarterly journal of the Connecticut Society of Genealogists. James Cleary Jr., A&S ’71, is the appellate attorney at McDonnell and Adells PLLC, Garden City, New York. Robert R. Duncan, A&S ’71, writes that he is traveling, coaching lacrosse, enjoying life with his family, and still working. Steve Heller, Engr ’71, is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University and president-elect of the Metro DC Chapter of the International Coach Federation. Jed “Edward” Kirschbaum, A&S ’71, travels frequently as a staff photographer for The Baltimore Sun, and has covered assignments in more than 20 states. Thomas Lusby III, A&S ’71, has been in private practice as an oral surgeon since 1981. Kathleen Matthews, A&S ’71, is the author of 17 nonfiction books including four New York Times best-sellers. Brent Peterson, A&S ’71, co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in Berlin. Michael Stewart, A&S ’71, is doing part-time consulting work. George A. Taler, A&S ’71, is enjoying his new grandson, Jackson Chase Taler, a budding lacrosse player. R. Bruce Weisman, A&S ’71, a researcher and teacher at Rice University, started a small scientific instrument company in 2004.

1972

W. Stan Wilson, A&S ’72 (PhD), chief scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is one of four co-editors of Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

1974

Jeffrey Finkel, Ed ’74 (MEd), is the owner and CEO of Finkel and Associates Corporate Training Services in Atlanta, which develops training courses for corporate clients. In 2010, he lived half the year in Saudi Arabia developing courses for Saudi Aramco Oil Company.

1976

Michelle Longo Eder, A&S ’76, is vice chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and spoke recently at the World Ocean Council on the topic of Arctic fisheries in Belfast, U.K. Her book, Salt in Our Blood: 66 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

The Memoir of a Fisherman’s Wife, won the Willa Award in 2009 for best creative nonfiction. Alan Fink, A&S ’76, owner of ABC Box Company, got married in 2006 and lives in Baltimore. He spends time with his three children and travels as often as his schedule permits. Alexander I. Glogau, A&S ’76, is a senior partner at Associated Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Plano, Texas. Jay S. Goodgold, A&S ’76, who worked for Goldman Sachs from 1978 to 2003, is currently an independent investor serving as a trustee for Marsico Investment Funds, located in Denver. He is also on the board of the Organization of American Historians. Robert Schimmel, A&S ’76, SPH ’77, opened a law practice in Miami in 2010 and was selected as a member of Florida’s Legal Elite 2010 by Florida Trend Magazine. Robert Schwenkler, Engr ’76, is currently working with a couple of startup companies; one involves a breakthrough wellness product and the other involves concentrating solar energy with electrical or thermal output. Susan Terranova, A&S ’76, SAIS ’77, has been teaching Spanish since retiring from the U.S. Army in 1999. Linda Vane, A&S ’76, is in the real estate field, specializing in bank-owned properties and getting experience in short sales. She also spends time with her 3-year-old grandson, Richie, and vacations with her mom.

1977

Stephanie M. Cascio, A&S ’77, has returned to Baltimore as a master of public health student in the class of 2011 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also has plans to visit her daughter, Esther Bell, A&S ’09, in Ethiopia, where she is a foreign service officer at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa. Nancy Gardner Margolis, A&S ’77, has been named president and CEO of Energetics Incorporated, an energy and management consulting firm in Columbia, Maryland.

1979

Colin Chinn, A&S ’79, SPH ’82, a physician in the U.S. Navy, has been promoted to rear admiral (select) and is currently assigned as director of the TRICARE Regional Office–West, overseeing managed care support contracts and an integrated health care delivery system in 21 states. Richard Heuser, HS ’79, chief of cardiology at St. Luke’s Medical Center, was named a 2010 Health Care Hero by the Phoenix Business Journal in August 2010. The award recognized Heuser for his achievements in the health care industry in education. Daniel Thorp, A&S ’79 (MA), ’82 (PhD), associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, was named the university’s director of curriculum for liberal education in October 2010.

1980

Suber S. Huang, A&S ’80, an ophthalmologist at University Hospitals in Cleveland, was installed as president of the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) in December 2010. Huang will also serve as chairman of the American Retina Foundation, which is the charitable arm of ASRS.

1981

Joseph P. Acks, Engr ’81, has retired from the U.S. Navy. Todd Cohen, A&S ’81, Med ’85, a doctor and inventor of a number of medical devices, has published a book titled A Patient’s Guide to Heart Rhythm Problems ( JHU Press, 2010). Josiah N. Gluck, A&S ’81, recently wrapped up his 18th season as a music engineer for Saturday Night Live and is busy being a dad to twin toddlers. Sheila Hand, A&S ’81, is working for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance in Albany, New York. Her daughter, Alisa, is attending Cornell University. Gail Kaden, A&S ’81, is a pediatrician and adjunct professor at Hofstra University. Jeffrey Kaden, Engr ’81, is managing partner of Gottlieb, Nackman and Reisman, an intellectual property law firm in New York. They are the parents of two future Johns Hopkins graduates (classes of 2011 and 2016). Maynard Luterman, A&S ’81, writes that his daughter, Sara Luterman, will be graduating from Johns Hopkins in 2011 and that he helped set up the new Niagara medical school campus for McMaster University in Ontario.

Melanie Manary, A&S ’81, has been in private practice as an internist/geriatrician for 20 years and has two sons in college. Hugh K. McNeelege, A&S ’81, ’85 (MA), had two of his plays read at the 2008 and 2009 Classic Theater Guild New Play Festival and was re-elected as president of the Hudson Valley Community College Non-Teaching Professional Association in May 2010. Kevin Miller, Engr ’81, Med ’85, is professor of clinical ophthalmology and chief of the comprehensive ophthalmology division at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Linda J. Miller, A&S ’81, started her position as an associate dean for basic science at New York University School of Medicine in September 2010, after 22 years as a science editor. Patricia A. Pickup, A&S ’81, is a software developer who is also active in the arts and belongs to a fiction writing group. Theodore J. Robertson, A&S ’81, lives in Orange County, California. His daughter is a junior at San Diego State, and his son is a sophomore in high school.

1982

Katherine Towler, A&S ’82 (MA), has published her third novel, Island Light (MacAdam/Cage, 2010). This book, which is set in 1991 at the start of the first Gulf War, is the final volume of her Snow Island trilogy.

1985

Istvan Andras “Andy” Fehervary, SAIS Bol ’85 (Dipl), A&S ’86, has been actively involved in SAIS Bologna alumni activities and has served as president of the Belgian chapter of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association. Evan Krakovitz, A&S ’85, writes: “I live with my wife, two sons, and an English bulldog in Chappaqua, New York. I am a colorectal surgeon and was just named a ‘top doctor’ in Westchester Magazine for the second year in a row.” Jon Laria, A&S ’85, a partner in the real estate department of the Baltimore office of Ballard Spahr, was appointed chair of the Maryland Sustainable Growth Commission in September 2010.

1986

Deane Brown, A&S ’86, an attorney for almost 20 years, is first vice president of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois. Michael A. DeRosa, A&S ’86, is engaged and loving life down in Florida. Brenda Greenberg, A&S ’86, is moving into a new home in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Marc F. Greenberg, A&S ’86, has been chief of ophthalmology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite for the last 10 years. He also started an additional practice in Bermuda in 2009. James G. Hoff, A&S ’86, writes that his daughter, Caitlin Hoff, is a member of the Johns Hopkins University Class of 2014. Jennifer Hosza-Dzielak, A&S ’86, teaches music to grades K-12, and is the piano accompanist for several ensembles. Marci Lecrone Howes, Engr ’86, and Kevin Howes, A&S ’84, Bus ’89 (MAS), have moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and are looking forward to their child’s Johns Hopkins University graduation in May. Regina Kelly, A&S ’86, is a part-time fundraiser for New Jersey Health Foundation/Foundation of UMDNJ and has two children. Richard S. Levin, Engr ’86, ’90 (MS), coaches girl’s IOU fast-pitch softball and writes that his team, the Vienna Stars, has won one national championship. Sujata Massey, A&S ’86, a fiction writer, is raising two children with her husband in Minneapolis. Michael Silverman, Engr ’86, is a partner in Cohen & Grigsby law firm in Pittsburgh. James Sullivan, A&S ’86, is director of emergency services at Harrington Memorial Hospital in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Robin Witkin, A&S ’86, is married with three children and has been practicing pediatrics for 17 years.

1988

Alexandra Marmion Roosa, A&S ’88, an attorney and museum professional, was named director of research and sponsored programs for Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California, effective July 2010. The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs assists faculty and staff in finding external funds for their creative and academic projects.

1989

Grace Kung, A&S ’89, Med ’93, and her husband welcomed their twins, Jake and Ella, on March 16, 2010. Kung was recently promoted to associate professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine where she is on faculty as a pediatric cardiologist.

1991

Erin Ganju, A&S ’91, SAIS ’92, left the corporate world in 2001 to become co-founder and CEO of Room to Read, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and enabling education through programs focused on literacy and gender equality in education.

1992

William Wallace, Engr ’92 (MS), has designed a website called easybyte .org, that offers free easy piano sheet music arrangements, including classical, folk, and hymn melodies in the public domain.

1994

Randy Becker, A&S ’94, and Kerry A. Becker, A&S ’95, are proud to announce the birth of their son Ethan Bryce, born on September 9, 2010. They live in Howard County, Maryland, and are both in private practice.

1995

Newsmakers

Jay Webber, A&S ’94, was named a rising star of American politics by TIME.com in a special “40 under 40” list. Webber is chair of the New Jersey GOP. Leslie Noyes Harrison, A&S ’00 (MA), was one of 42 poets awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in November 2010.

Evan Barrett, A&S ’95, is a life adviser who specializes in financial planning, retirement planning, and education funding. James “Jamie” B. Eldridge, A&S ’95, won re-election to the Massachusetts State Senate on November 2, 2010. Eldridge has served the Middlesex and Worcester District since January 2009. Thanos Kafopoulos, SAIS ’95, writes that he assumed the post of Consul General of Greece in Montreal on September 30, 2010. Zuwena “ZZ” Packer, A&S ’95 (MA), a writer, appeared for a talk and book signing at the Francis Marion University Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival, held on November 4, 2010, in Florence, South Carolina.

1996

Ashutosh Pradhan, A&S ’96, passed his neurosurgery boards in May 2010.

1997

Aaron Sherinian, SAIS Bol ’97 (Dipl), an executive for the United Nations Foundation, was selected for the Devex Washington, D.C. list of “40 under 40” international development leaders in September 2010. Devex is the world’s largest community of aid and development professionals.

1998

Caryn Dashukewich, Bus ’98 (MS), was promoted to corporate vice president, human resources, Olympus Corporation of the Americas in September 2010. Olympus Corporation, which is located in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, designs and delivers imaging products, including cameras, medical and surgical products, and life science imaging systems. Stephani E. Hosea, A&S ’98, a federal employment litigator, became an associate at the Washington law office of Tully Rinckey PLLC in October 2010. Yvette Saint-Andre, SAIS Bol ’98 (Dipl), SAIS ’99, and her husband, Neven Filip Stipanovic, welcomed their son, Charles André Stipanovic, on February 16, 2010. In 2009, Saint-Andre was promoted to unit chief in the U.S. State Department Office of Central Europe.

2000

Brian Carcaterra, A&S ’00, and his wife welcomed their firstborn, Emily Reese Carcaterra, in October 2010.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 67

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

2001

Shawn Nadelen, A&S ’01, a Major League Lacrosse defenseman, will continue to play for the Chesapeake Bayhawks as they enter their 2011 season. Nadelen, who is the longest-tenured Bayhawk, holds the franchise record for games played (94) and is a two-time All-Star and 2010 Team USA champion.

2003

Jeffrey Hausfeld, Bus ’03 (Cert), ’05 (MBA), a former ear, nose, and throat surgeon and current president of Memory Care Communities of Illinois, announces the November 2010 opening of Lincolnshire Place, which is the first dedicated Alzheimer’s and memory care assisted living community in DeKalb/Sycamore, Illinois. Newsmaker Melissa Prince Sigel, Nurs ’03, lives in Los Angeles and is a nurse Tomicah S. Tillemann, practitioner for UCLA doing forensic medicine at the rape treatment center. SAIS ’03, ’09 (PhD), a In 2010, she went on a five-week speechwriter for Secretary of medical mission in Kathmandu, Nepal, and spent a week trekking through the State Hillary Clinton, became Himalayas.

the secretary’s senior adviser for civil society and emerging democracies in October 2010. His role is to offer counsel on how the United States can best support the efforts of civil society activists around the world.

2004

Evan L. Balkan, A&S ’04 (MA), writes that his manuscript, The Wrath of God: Lope de Aguirre, American Revolutionary, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in fall 2011. The book is an examination of the life and legacy of the 16th-century Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre. Neil Bardhan, A&S ’04, writes: “On July 30, I successfully defended my PhD in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at the University of Rochester. In September, I started a post-doc position at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.” Susan McCallum-Smith, A&S ’04 (MA), received a Pushcart Prize for her essay “The Watermark,” which originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review and is now anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XXXV, Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2010). Rachel Bowen Pittman, Bus ’04 (MBA), is director of member services for the American Urological Association, located in Linthicum, Maryland. She was previously with the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society in Rockville, Maryland.

2005

Eric Hines, Bus ’05 (MBA), coach of the Capital Alumni Network Hopkins flag football team, led his team of 25 alumni to victory in the December 2010 championship against Michigan State. Susie Jang, A&S ’05 and Steven Chen, A&S ’05, Med ’09 (MD/ PhD), were married in April 2010 at Baltimore’s George Peabody Library. In attendance and performing at the reception were fellow alumni from the Octopodes, the JHU a cappella group through which they met. They now reside in Boston where they have begun residencies in anesthesiology and internal medicine/dermatology.

2009

Will Jawish, A&S ’09, works for Pfister Energy, one of the fastest-growing solar companies on the East Coast.

2010

Leyla Isik, Engr ’10, Salina Khushal, Engr ’10, Michael Shen, Engr ’10, and Emilie Yeh, Engr ’10, received third prize in the 2010 Collegiate Inventor Competition for an intelligent drill guidance device that would be used to train and guide orthopedic surgeons. The team developed the drill as biomedical engineering undergraduates. Correction: In the Winter 2010 issue, the class note for Evan Barrett, A&S ’95, was mistakenly attributed to Michael Scheib, Engr ’06. The correct submission from Barrett appears above. We regret the error.

In memoriam Carl A. Heinz, Engr ’28, who was 104, died August 19, 2010, in Towson, Maryland. Jane Adams Pollard Gould, Nurs ’30 (Cert), an active philanthropic volunteer who was 104, died November 7, 2010, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Malda Mabel Fink LaRochelle, Nurs ’38, a nurse who had 42 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, died October 24, 2010, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Linda E. Hartung, Nurs ’39, a retired public health nurse and World War II veteran, died May 9, 2010, in Bethesda, Maryland. Frances Daws Crocker, Nurs ’40, died on September 14, 2010, in Bakersfield, California. John P. Dodge, A&S ’40, a retired administrative law judge, died July 21, 2010, in Blue Hill, Maine. Ernest Kiehne, A&S ’40, who continued to work into his 90s, died in Baltimore on August 13, 2010. Gustav Kruger, HS ’40, an oral surgeon, educator, and textbook author, died July 5, 2010, in Bethesda, Maryland. Charles B. Thomas, A&S ’42, a career Army man and a three-time All-American lacrosse player, died September 12, 2010, in Melbourne Beach, Florida. Richard J. Bing, HS ’43, a pioneering cardiologist in the area of congenital heart disease, died at the age of 101 in La Canada, California, on November 8, 2010. Alvin Joseph Cummins, Med ’44, a retired professor and private practitioner, died September 27, 2010, in Carmel, Indiana. George E. Lang III, Engr ’47, a retired consultant and veteran, died October 18, 2010, in Wilmington, Delaware. Leon Marks, Med ’48, died August 10, 2010, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Robert H. Marshall, A&S ’48 (MA), an IBM executive, died in El Paso, Texas, on August 20, 2010. Robert W. McCollum Jr., Med ’48, an epidemiologist and former dean of Dartmouth Medical School, died September 13, 2010, in Etna, New Hampshire. Robert W. Miller Jr., A&S ’48, a retired businessman, died September 11, 2010, in Baltimore. Mary E. Sheriff, Nurs ’48 (Cert), a public health nurse, died on August 24, 2009, in Galesburg, Illinois. William M. Benesch, A&S ’49 (MA), A&S ’52 (PhD), a veteran, atmospheric physicist, and University of Maryland physics professor, died in Washington, D.C., on September 17, 2010. Robert B. Fortenbaugh, A&S ’50 (PhD), who worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, died on December 2, 2009, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Walter C. Pohlhaus Jr., A&S ’50, a member of the 1950 Johns Hopkins championship lacrosse team, died on August 16, 2010, in Baltimore. Donald H. Robinson, SPH ’51, a writer and columnist, died January 14, 2005, in Akron, Ohio. Charles M. Fornaci, A&S ’52, who worked for the New York State Department of Transportation and the International Right of Way Association in California, died October 18, 2010, in Valatie, New York. Janet Frye, Nurs ’52 (Cert), a veteran and an electrical engineer, died September 6, 2010, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Milton H. “Mickey” Miller Sr., A&S ’52, a civic leader and retired commercial real estate broker, died November 12, 2010, in Baltimore. David Gipe Jr., Engr ’53, who worked for Union Carbide Corporation, died August 16, 2010, in St. Albans, West Virginia. Sanford “Bud” S. Jenkins Jr., A&S ’53, died April 23, 2010, in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Robert M. Sutton Sr., Engr. ’53, a former electrical engineer, died November 10, 2010, in Baltimore.

68 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Sydney S. Netreba, A&S ’54 (MA), who worked in the financial field, died on August 14, 2010, in Millbrae, California. John E. Hardy, A&S ’56 (PhD), a literature professor, died August 13, 2010, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sherling Theresa Lauricella, HS ’56, a retired pediatrician, died on September 25, 2010, in Aspen, Colorado. Emilio del Rosario, Peab ’56 (AD), ’57 (MA), world-renowned pianist and piano professor who taught at the Music Institute of Chicago, died October 3, 2010, in Wisconsin. Edwin M. Henry Jr., Engr ’57, a former electrical engineer and attorney, died in Ellicott City, Maryland, on August 23, 2010. Malcolm M. Martin, HS ’57, Med ’57 (PDF), an endocrinologist, died October 8, 2010, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Philip M. Eisenberg, A&S ’58, a longtime prompter for the San Francisco Opera, died August 16, 2010, in San Francisco. Richard W. McClelland, Engr ’58, an engineer and commercial real estate developer, died on October 17, 2010, in Severna Park, Maryland. Jerome R. Pomeranz, HS ’58, Med ’65 (PGF), a physician and educator, died August 22, 2010, in Berea, Ohio.

Karen Nelson, A&S ’73 (MA), daughter of Patricia Ruppert Nelson, A&S ’65 (MA), ’71 (PhD), and Frank Mathild Nelson, Engr ’67 (PhD), and sister of Douglas Ruppert Nelson, Bus ’81 (MAS), died July 30, 2010, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Margaret O. Peeples, HS ’75, a pediatrician, died on December 9, 2010, in Fort Myers, Florida. John T. Cockerham, A&S ’76, a pediatric cardiologist and resident of Alexandria, Virginia, died August 17, 2010. John Desmond Corcoran, Ed ’76 (MA), a retired English teacher and well-versed traveler, died September 8, 2010, in Owings Mills, Maryland. Donald O. Fedder, SPH ’78, ’83 (DrPH), a veteran, pharmacy owner, and educator, died August 29, 2010, in Baltimore. Thomas Howard Artes, Bus ’79 (MAS), a 32-year employee of Baltimore’s McCormick & Company Inc., died November 19, 2010, in Baltimore. Charlie Yates, Engr ’79 (PhD), who worked for the Johns Hopkins UniNewsmaker versity Applied Physics Laboratory for almost 20 years, died August 11, 2010, in Norfolk, Virginia. John Benedetto, Engr

William A. McGovern, Med ’59, a neurosurgeon and U.S. Navy veteran, died September 15, 2010, in Great Kills, Staten Island.

Kenneth J. Blair, Med ’80, a family practitioner, died October 31, 2010, in Austin, Texas.

Rolf H. Bessin, A&S ’60, a vascular surgeon and past president of the medical staff at Morristown Memorial Hospital, died October 6, 2010, in Baltimore.

Kennedy Joseph O’Brien, SPH ’80, a physician and astronomer, died on August 12, 2010, in Ottawa, Canada.

Saverio M. “Sam” Quintiliani, Engr ’60, a retired electrical engineer, died September 2, 2010, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Frank C. Garland, SPH ’81 (PhD), a professor who connected vitamin D deficiency and various types of cancer, died August 17, 2010, in La Jolla, California.

Eugene G. McCarthy Jr., SPH ’62, of Boston, the former chief medical adviser for President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress Program for Paraguay, died November 16, 2010. Hannah F. Goldberg, A&S ’63 (MA), A&S ’64 (PhD), historian and provost emerita of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, died September 24, 2010, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Jerome P. Bukovsky Jr., Bus ’64, A&S ’69 (MA), Bus ’88 (MA), a retired Bethlehem Steel Corporation executive and member of the Hopkins Bayview Advisory Board, died October 16, 2010, in Baltimore.

’07, who was paralyzed in a July 2009 surfing accident, completed the 2010 New York City Marathon in 3 hours, 44 minutes.

Robert J. Stengel, A&S ’81, a family medicine practitioner, died November 4, 2010, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Arnold Bennett “Arnie” Cushing, Engr ’84 (MS), co-founder of SoftCafe LLC, a computer software company, died October 3, 2010, in Baltimore. Kathleen Slone Morgan, A&S ’85 (PhD), an educator and editor in Hillsborough, New Jersey, died November 2, 2010.

Sidney Carton, Ed ’64, A&S ’72 (MLA), a high school math teacher, died on August 11, 2010, in Baltimore.

Joseph “Jay” Jaso, Bus ’86 (MAS), a financial adviser, died in Massachusetts on August 17, 2010.

William J. Evitts, A&S ’64, ’71 (PhD), a writer, historian, college professor, and director of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Relations office from 1983 to 1989, died December 14, 2010, in Baltimore.

Karen A. Johnson, SPH ’95, a clinical research oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, died August 19, 2010, in Chestertown, Maryland.

David E. Ryer, Ed ’64 (MEd), A&S ’65 (MA), died September 3, 2010, in Baltimore. Oliver E. Owen, HS ’65, a physician and researcher, died September 6, 2010, in Philadelphia. Joseph S. Roeder, A&S ’68, who worked at the National Industries for the Blind, died on October 8, 2010, in Baltimore. Hayden G. Braine, Med ’69, HS ’73, emeritus professor of oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins and a blood cell transfusion pioneer, died November 2, 2010, in Baltimore. Ruby F. Shubkagle, A&S ’70 (MLA), an educator for more than 50 years, died November 3, 2010, in Lutherville, Maryland. Alexander B. Rakow, SPH ’71, of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, a doctor in the public health field, died November 19, 2010. John B. Curry III, A&S ’72, an attorney and military veteran, died November 16, 2010, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Margaret M. Dabney, A&S ’73, an accountant and mother of three, died December 13, 2010, in New York. Ella Edemy, Ed ’73 (MA), a retired educator with a focus on adult education, died September 17, 2010, in Baltimore. Kathleen Mary Klemmer, A&S ’73, a neighborhood activist and former manager in the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, died on September 30, 2010, in Baltimore.

Alumni News & Notes Alumni Association President: Ray Snow, A&S ’70 Executive Director of Alumni Relations: Mo Baldwin Editors: Nora Koch (koch@jhu.edu), Kirsten Lavin (klavin@jhu.edu) Class Notes Editor: Lisa Belman (magnotes@jhu.edu) Contributing Writer: Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63 Contact us at: The JHU Office of Alumni Relations San Martin Center, Second Floor 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2696 410-516-0363/1-800-JHU-JHU1 (5481) alumni@jhu.edu alumni.jhu.edu Please send class notes to magnotes@jhu.edu. By submitting a class note, you give Johns Hopkins University permission to edit and publish your information in Johns Hopkins Magazine and in online publications. The Alumni News & Notes section of Johns Hopkins Magazine is made possible by your annual Alumni Association membership dues. Annual dues are $50, $25 for classes 2006–2010. Lifetime membership dues are $1,000 or four annual installments of $250 each. For more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu/dues.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 69

Golomb’s Answers

“Biblical J-Names” Solutions 12. l; see minor prophets ( Joel).

Puzzle on page 15. 1. d; see Genesis.

13. n; see Judges. 14. q; see 2 Kings.

2. a; see Job. 3. f; see minor prophets ( Jonah). 4. c; see Genesis. 5. b; see Joshua. 6. e; see Genesis. 7. j; see 1 Kings. 8. k; see Jeremiah. 9. i; see 2 Samuel. 10. h; see Exodus. 11. g; see 1 Kings.

15. o; see 2 Kings. 16. m; see Judges. 17. p; see 2 Kings. 18. r; see Judges. Notes: i) Events in 1 and 2 Samuel, and in 1 and 2 Kings, are also found in 1 and 2 Chronicles. ii) Jeroboam in number 7 was called Jeroboam I because a later king of Israel was called Jeroboam II.

iii) Jotham in number 18 is in the book of Judges. A much later Jotham was king of Judah (see 2 Kings, Isaiah). iv) Jabin in number 13 is also mentioned in the book of Joshua. It was his general, Sisera, who was routed in the Song of Deborah (see Judges). v) Most of these Bible stories make fascinating reading and were part of the literary heritage of the English-speaking world. (When Hamlet talks of Jephthah’s daughter, Shakespeare’s audience needed no footnote to identify the reference.) When the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in public schools, an unfortunate (and I believe unintended) consequence was the gradual erasing of the Bible as literature from the public consciousness.

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70 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011

Continued from page 13 article addresses neither poverty nor war. Yet he says the list is a good place to start. I doubt it; this strategy is what we’ve been about for years. More likely it’s a good place to stop and think not about what we can do, but what might really help. I’m not suggesting that it’s our job to end poverty or war, but there are things we could be doing. Here are four: 1. Educating women is probably the single most powerful global health intervention. 2. Preventing protein-calorie undernutrition in 0- to 5-year-olds. Children don’t just die of measles or pertussis; it’s the malnutrition that kills them. Helping moms grow what they need to feed their families saves lives and builds self-sufficiency. 3. Birth spacing saves lives and improves the quality of lives of surviving children and their mothers. 4. Integrating prevention with cure strengthens both: Meeting universally felt needs for basic primary care builds the trust necessary for sustained prevention . . . including all the eight priorities discussed in Keiger’s article. Nicholas Cunningham, Med ’55, SPH ’77 (DrPH) Emeritus Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Clinical Public Health, Columbia University Corrections: In the Winter 2010 issue of the magazine, “Outbreak Agents,” about the federal Epidemic Intelligence Service, incorrectly stated when mass measles vaccinations began. The vaccine was first licensed and used in 1963. In our Winter 2010 “Shelf Life” review of Bruce Parker’s The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters, we misreported the number of casualties in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The correct number is nearly 300,000 people.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Spring 2011 71

H o w To :

Learn a Language R 1

and County public schools (where he created a course titled Introduction to Latin, Linguistics, and Etymology for the Bilingually Oriented) and now at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. If anyone is qualified to guide a would-be language learner, it’s Rivkin. And so we ask him: Comment apprendre une langue étrangère? —Catherine Pierre

Find a good reason to want to learn a language. Rivkin learned Spanish as a child because he wanted to be able to talk to his cousins, who were visiting from Peru. He learned Italian because he and some high school buddies wanted to understand opera.

Find a way to immerse yourself. Take classes. Buy some tapes. Listen to foreign broadcasts or watch foreign movies. And of course, travel if you can. But in any case, practice, practice, practice. “It’s not a spectator event,” Rivkin advises. “The more you use it, the more likely you are to keep it.”

Learn more languages. The second foreign language you learn, Rivkin says, will take about half as much time as the first did. Your third language will take about half as much time as the second.

72 Joh nsHopkinsMagazine • Spring 2011

Mission accomplished? Rivkin says you know you’re fluent in a language when it becomes the language you count in or the language you dream in.

Wesley Bedrosian

obert Rivkin, A&S ’61, is trying to learn his 10th language: Turkish. He already knows English (his native tongue), French, German, Latin, Italian, Greek, ancient Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese. Rivkin graduated from Johns Hopkins with a double degree in biological sciences and Romance languages. He then launched what would turn into a 49-year career (so far) as a language teacher, first in Baltimore City

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