Johns Hopkins Magazine by The Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins S u m m e r

MA GA Z I N E

2010

Young and Vulnerable Tracking down the rare, sometimes deadly diseases that stalk Pennsylvania Dutch children

Johns Hopkins S u m m e r

2010

MAGAZINE

v o l. 62 n o. 2

Features 28

The Disease Chaser By Michael Anft Johns Hopkins pediatrics professor Richard Kelley searches for clues to rare genetic disorders that, still too often, afflict Amish and Mennonite children.

Healing Art By Mat Edelson In Addiction and Art, Hopkins researchers Pat Santora and Jack Henningfield collect artistic interpretations of substance abuse to humanize addiction’s victims.

The Keys to Success By Nick Romeo A young Peabody student journeys from post-Soviet Odessa to Baltimore, from a cardboard piano to a Steinway Grand.

Immortal Cells, Enduring Issues By Dale Keiger Nearly 60 years after Hopkins surgeons removed cells from Henrietta Lacks’ body, those cells still live—as do ethical issues raised by a best-selling book about her.

The Buzz By Sharon Tregaskis Master beekeeper and NASA scientist Wayne Esaias, A&S ’67, turns to his hives for clues about global climate change.

Above: Ask Again Tomorrow …, by Lindsey Mears, from Addiction and Art, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cover photo by Steve Spartana

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 1

Departments 3

Contributors: Tracking Bees and Disease

The Big Question: Will the Gulf Recover?

The Big Picture: In the Eye of the Blogger

Editor’s Note: Ethics and Genetics

Letters: This from That

Essay: The Opposite of Sex

Golomb’s Gambits: The Mnemonic Plague

Wholly Hopkins: Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins 16 In Memoriam: M. Gordon Wolman, 1924–2010 17 University: Plans to cut CO2 in half 19 APL: Practicing for a trip to the inner edge of space 20 Books: Halsted’s encumbered genius

22 Peabody: $2M scholarship supports gay students

23 Nanobiotechnology: Are nanoparticles safe?

24 Anthropology: Reviving the “lost crops” of Africa

26 Arts and Sciences: New dean, multidisciplinary approach

27 Students: Pumping up

Alumni News & Notes

Golomb’s Solutions

How To: Graduate from Johns Hopkins

57 2 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

C o n t r i b u to r s Vol. 62 No. 2 Summer 2010

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

Johns Hopkins Magazine (publication number 276-260; ISSN 0021-7255) is published four times a year (Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer) by The Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Produced in cooperation with University Magazine Group. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland, and additional entry offices. Address correspondence to Johns Hopkins Magazine, Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Via e-mail: jhmagazine@jhu.edu. Web site: magazine.jhu.edu Telephone: 443-287-9900 Subscriptions: $20 yearly, $25 foreign Diverse views are presented and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or official policies of the university. Advertisers: Representative for local advertising: The Gazelle Group, 410-343-3362, gazellegrp@comcast.net POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Johns Hopkins Magazine, 201 N. Charles St., Suite 2500, Baltimore, MD 21201. Copyright ©2009, The Johns Hopkins University.

Tracking Bees and Disease Capturing a world gone by “It was hard to find and shoot horse-drawn buggies,” Stephen Spartana says of his attempt to photograph Amish people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The results of his search accompany the story of Richard Kelley, a Johns Hopkins pediatrics professor and Kennedy Krieger Institute researcher whose work focuses on diagnosing and treating rare genetic diseases among Amish and Mennonite children (“The Disease Chaser”). “Dr. Kelley struck me as a very dedicated and gentle man, who seems to fit in nicely with his patients,” Spartana, a Baltimore-based photographer, says. “His ways serve him well, but as I watched him work I wondered, When he’s retired, who is going to follow up his work?” Busy with bees Sharon Tregaskis, a freelance writer and small farmer in the Finger Lakes region of New York, planted 500 trees this April, “including black locust, chokecherry, and serviceberry, all favorites with the local pollinators,” she says. Such apian knowledge informed her story about NASA scientist Wayne Esaias, A&S ’67 (“The Buzz”). “Wayne’s work has begun to reveal the profound role of insects in preserving both natural landscapes and our food supply,” says Tregaskis, whose work has appeared in Atlanta, Organic Gardening, and a handful of university magazines. “That work is vital for a busy public assaulted by the often abstract debate over climate change, which often sounds like so much hot air.” —MA

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Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 3

The Big Question

Will the Gulf of Mexico recover from this spring’s massive oil spill?

“We learn from failures, so we should take the opportunity this disaster has provided to improve the way we extract oil via offshore drilling. With such a massive release, there will be substantial harm to the ecosystem.The acute effects are terrible and very visual. But once the source has been stopped, most of the acute damage will no longer be present within six months to a year. Oil has been on the earth since geological time, and microorganisms exist that are able to rapidly biodegrade a good fraction of the oil, particularly when it has been diluted. First, the oil will get dispersed through precipitation, water flow, evaporation, and weathering. These will help promote biodegradation. Natural purification will continue, and within a few years there should be near full recovery of the ecosystem. The addition of fertilizer can stimulate microbial activity and enhance the oil biodegradation. The earth is very good at assimilating small releases of petroleum. The climate in the Gulf will also help speed biodegradation because microbes are more active in a warm environment, breaking down the oil faster.”

Stev e Spartana

Edward Bouwer (to the right of Brian Shell, Eng ’12), the Abel Wolman Professor of Environmental Engineering, also serves as the chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. His areas of research include how microbes transform contaminants in soil and water. —Interview by Michael Anft 4 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 5

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

Richard anderson

In the Eye of the Blogger When Forbes published a list of “the world’s most beautiful campuses,” it spotlighted some of the usual suspects: the spired Gothic buildings of Oxford, the ivy-covered stone of Princeton, the stately columned porticoes at the University of Virginia. But one scribe averred that other college grounds—including Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus—shouldn’t be overlooked. Scott Carlson, author of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Buildings & Grounds” blog, praised Hopkins for putting up paradise and unpaving parking lots. “I just like what the university has done at Homewood over the last several years in terms of beautification—specifically, getting rid of blacktop and replacing it with green space or brick,” he says. “Areas of the campus were unified in the process.” —Michael Anft

6 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 7

E d i to r ’s N o te

Ethics and Genetics

hen associate editor Dale Keiger set out to write about Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times best seller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, he got a few quizzical looks. After all, the book—which tells the story of Lacks’ treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital and how the so-called HeLa cells taken from her then continue to support medical research, advancing science and, in some cases, reaping huge profits for the companies that have used them—paints a rather unflattering portrait of the institution. How could we write about that? I figured, how could we not? After all, the story is out there—often in headlines like “Health-Care Injustice” (Newsweek) and “Henrietta Lacks’ Cells Were Priceless, But Her Family Can’t Afford a Hospital” (The Observer). Our readers would likely appreciate an honest and deep discussion of some of the issues involved in Lacks’ experience and the aftermath. Dale’s story (“Immortal Cells, Enduring Issues,” page 44) picks up where Skloot’s leaves off: Situations like Lacks’ prompted a hard look at issues such as privacy and informed consent, and hospitals have since adopted policies and procedures to protect patients. But the more medical technology advances, the more vexing such issues become.

Interestingly, the late Johns Hopkins physician and researcher Victor McKusick, Med ’46, who worked with Lacks’ descendants in his search for DNA markers that could identify HeLa cells in lab samples, appears not just in this story but in senior writer Michael Anft’s cover story about Hopkins pediatrician Richard Kelley, who specializes in treating rare genetic diseases that occur in Amish and Mennonite children (“The Disease Chaser,” page 28). McKusick worked with these populations in the 1960s, studying the effects of their genes and identifying a number of conditions specific to them. Decades later, Kelley diagnoses and treats those and other genetic diseases. But his research has raised its own controversy. Because his group of patients is so specific and small, clinical trials aren’t feasible. He treats his patients based on observation and instinct—and he’s been criticized for that. It seems genetic research will never be without its complexities, both scientific and ethical. But it’s crucial that the Kelleys and the McKusicks of the world continue to ask scientific questions—and raise ethical ones while they’re at it. It’s also crucial that the rest of us—university magazines included—ask questions of our own and contribute to that discussion.

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L e t te r s This from That Bucks from pollution Some public health dollars [“The Buck Goes Here,” Spring 2010] should go to making bucks out of our massive, ever-expanding mess of organic wastes and sewage solids, rather than letting those messes get out of hand, polluting our biosphere and being allowed to re-emit the carbon dioxide that nature has so kindly trapped for us. Late last year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it is going to limit several drugs now showing up in drinking water, indicating that we are losing control in confining the escape of germs, drugs, and toxins. These messes can become a resource in battling the climate crisis as well as controlling pollution if we use pyrolysis. Pyrolysis [decomposition by heat in the absence of oxygen] will destroy the germs, toxins, and drugs with about 50 percent of

the biocarbon present in those wastes converted to inert charcoal that can be used to supply minor nutrients for plants. The hot charcoal can be passed through a heat exchanger to get some steam for power. In the essentially closed pyrolysis chamber, the other 50 percent of the biocarbon gets converted to various low molecular–weight organic chemicals expelled as a gaseous mix. This mix can be passed through a turbocharger, then collected to be refined for renewable fuel and/or selected chemicals to make drugs, etc. Maybe people at Johns Hopkins can realize that money put into applying pyrolysis to those messes can lead to financial benefits from sale of the energy and chemicals obtained, as well as major health benefits from destroying those hazards. James Singmaster, A&S ’59 (MA) Fremont, California

Out of sire, by dam If Guido Veloce (“What’s in a Name?” Spring 2010) had spent as much time at Pimlico as I did as a News-Letter sports editor, he would realize that the naming of thoroughbred race horses is the ultimate exercise in creativity. In most cases, a horse is named in allusion to its sire and dam. From his own examples: • Mine That Bird—out of Mining My Own by Birdstone; • Birdstone—out of Dear Birdie by Grindstone; • Deputed Testamony (sic—the magazine’s spell-checker changed that one)— out of Proof Requested by Traffic Cop. Just surfing www.pedigreequery .com would make a Writing Seminars prof swoon. Unfortunately, they don’t list my father’s favorite unnamed racehorse—out of Texas by Truck. Dave Einolf, A&S ’81 Portland, Oregon

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Still waiting for an apology I would like to “second” the opinions expressed in Henry Kerfoot’s letter in the Spring 2010 issue. I have yet to see any apology for, or any recognition of, the failed policies that the neo-cons, warmongers, and promoters of American militarism (in Iraq and Afghanistan most recently) at SAIS have been responsible for in the last couple of decades. And I agree with him that it would be nice to see Johns Hopkins Magazine publish a critique of, or acknowledge, their failures and ideological rigidity, and give voice to some of their critics. In case you’re interested, I stopped contributing to Johns Hopkins as a small voice of protest against the ideological extremism of SAIS’ faculty and their contributions to several failures of American foreign policy. I am appalled at SAIS’ willingness to always provide a “home” to those whose policies have proved disastrous; it ranks right up there with the American Enterprise Institute as a bastion of the Right. M. W. Wenner, SAIS ’65 (PhD) Prescott, Arizona Needed: objective analysis The letters on Israel and Iran by Chaim Forer and Michelle Kravitz [“Israel’s ‘balance’ of terror” and “Hopelessly naïve about Iran,” Spring 2010] and Ray Gordon [“Terrorist nation,” Winter 2009] open an interesting debate on the Middle East. Unfortunately, all three have allowed preconceptions and sloganeering to cloud and prevent real solutions. Gordon’s one-dimensional view of Iran begs for criticism but does not warrant equally naïve solutions—like Forer’s assertion that Israel “has refused to destroy its enemies.” Israel’s battlefield success led Egypt and Jordan to drop their futile aggressive policies, and even Syria no longer confronts Israel militarily. But for Israel to destroy its enemies, in Gaza, Lebanon, or Palestine, as Forer seems to advocate, would entail massive civilian casualties and worldwide protest. That is hardly “appeasement”— Israel has simply recognized “its objectives” cannot include wholesale destruction of populations.

Total victory over one’s enemies is not a sinecure. After WWI, the Allies tried to prevent Germany from ever again challenging Europe; the Versailles Treaty however became the tool to unite Germans behind those who (like the Nazis) would redress this “intolerable injustice.” Within 21 years, Europe was again at war—and much more destructively. This attempt seemed reasonable, but unintended consequences can undo desired goals. America’s post-WWII rebuilding of former enemies, and giving them a stake in democracy, was the far more effective strategy for long-term peace. Ms. Kravitz’s valid points about Iran lose credibility by painting all Muslims as terrorists. She may not intend that, but saying “these people do not believe in tolerance” is reminiscent of past charges leveled against African-Americans, Jews, etc. Such assertions against Israelis would immediately be labeled anti-Semitic. And while “doing something to avert Iran’s

and the other must lose. Every negative action has an opposite reaction: Bomb a school and Israel will retaliate; bulldoze homes and Palestinians will have grievances for another century. Both sides must eschew violent response and find real long-term solutions—even if they require tough compromises. We must bring humanism and enlightened reasoning to such conflicts, and reflect how our JHU education can help achieve positive results—and not just point fingers of blame. Robert Marro, A&S ’70 Great Falls, Virginia

nuclear ambition” is commendable, America has been trying that for years. But the critical support of other countries is stymied by inherent conflict with their own national interests. JHU taught us never to see issues as black and white—we must always consider gray areas, too. As a former U.S. senior Foreign Service officer, I know international politics is not a simple equation: There are many conflicting viewpoints that cannot be ignored. A key problem for Israel, Palestine, and Iran is the refusal of each to consider the viewpoint of the other, and actions the other side will accept. All want to make the world see “we are right, and our opponents are wrong,” and each feels that with sufficient force they can impose their will. The Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted 60 years. The use of force, appeals to God and religion (on both sides), attempts to win world opinion, are all a zero-sum game: One side will win

Correction: Paul Didisheim, Med ’54, noted an error in last issue’s “Golomb’s Gambits.” The five-letter anagram requested by item G6 should have been “type of beer,” not “type of beef.” Didisheim gracefully blamed the typesetter, but the mistake was in our proofreading.

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What Makes YOU Happy? In six to 60 words (haikus welcome), tell us what makes you happy. We’ll print selected responses in the “What Makes You Happy?” feature in our HAPPINESS issue this fall. Send your thoughts by July 15 to happiness@jhu.edu or Johns Hopkins Magazine, 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 13

Essay

The Opposite of Sex

am writing at a time when “sex addiction” is much in the news. With any luck, it won’t be when you read this, although sex addiction is unlikely to vanish from headlines as long as there are people with lots of money, free time, hubris, and divorce attorneys. Caught cheating? Check into a clinic. What bothers me about this is a recent proliferation of addictions—an addictions arms race with shopping and video games among the other newcomers. Why not just treat people in trouble without creating a new category for behaviors that may stem from very different roots? This rising tide of addictions, moreover, occurred when there was a perfectly good, traditional vocabulary for describing the same behavior, much of it not printable here. Admittedly, those words don’t have addiction’s implication of medical authority, special clinics, and billable hours. Sex addiction hasn’t yet entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) but may be on the fast track to the popular culture equivalent of disorder canonization. Good academic that I am, I decided to check out sex addiction—not by field work but by engaging in safe research on the Internet, in the privacy of my own, newly passwordprotected home network. It was revealing. Sex addiction merits two national organizations. In common with similar organizations for other addictions, each follows the 12-step and 12-tradition program of the granddaddy of them all, Alcoholics Anonymous, almost word for word. These words, however, sound different when substituting sex for alcohol. Sex addicts might think twice before asking God “to remove our shortcomings.” And if a requirement is always to “maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, and TV,” some sex addicts fail miserably. I am also not sure all the language of other addictions transfers to sex addiction. Try to convince a longsuffering mate that you need a “maintenance dose.” Similarly, some of the paraphernalia might not work

14 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

for sex addiction. I found, for example, a line of greeting cards that make sense when sent by the target audience, recovering alcoholics. From a recovering sex addict, however, they’re creepy. How would you feel receiving from such a person whimsical cards bearing messages such as “Let’s Get Together SOON!” and “Just for TODAY”? For greater depth of research, I also checked out Gamblers Anonymous for another possible model for understanding and treating sex addiction. I will substitute “sex” for gambling and you can judge. Quotation #1: “After abstaining a few months some of our members have tried some small sex experimentation, always with disastrous results.” Quotation #2: “The intervals between sexual binges were not periods of constructive thinking. Symptomatic of these periods were nervousness, irritability, frustration, indecision, and a continued breakdown in personal relations.” Quotation #3: “The newcomer to abstinence will soon find a keen appreciation of the many pleasant and stimulating activities available—far removed from anything that is remotely associated with sex.” I am not sure there is a one-sizefits-all model for addictions, although Quotation #2 might indicate otherwise. As for the actual treatment for sexual addiction, I found little specific information. One center offers “Equine Therapy,” among other options. And I appreciated the candor of a therapist who said, “We may not stop the behavior, but we’re going to ruin it for you.” Some of us had mothers and religious instructors who were ahead of the therapeutic curve. Sex addiction may eventually enter the DSM, but it won’t truly have won the war for public acceptance until a betrayed spouse, golf club in hand, yells at the betrayer, “You sex addict!” At such moments, the language is likely to remain plainer and less therapeutic for a long time to come. 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

Johns Hopkins

The Mnemonic Plague

Magazine

By Solomon Golomb ’51

Mnemonics are aids to memory and take many forms. Some are used by students cramming for exams. The more outrageous—or outright indecent—the easier they are to remember. (If you can’t even recall the mnemonic, you’re in deep trouble.) For this column, I’ve selected (or crafted) relatively inoffensive versions.

8. Big boys regard our young girls behind verdant garden walls. 9. On old Olympus’ towering top a Finn and German viewed a hop. 10. How I want a drink—alcoholic, of course—after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.

A. Try to identify what, and how, each of these mnemonics is intended to help you remember. (For extra credit, list other mnemonics for the same or related items.)

B. What familiar mnemonics are intended to help you remember each of these?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

HOMES ROY G. BIV J. JASON, D.J., FM, AM One egg is enough. Every good boy does fine. Oh, be a fine girl—kiss me. King Philip called out family guards suddenly.

We couldn’t have done it without your help! Our readers’ contributions make it possible for us to rank among the nation’s very best alumni magazines year after year. Your generous support is crucial to maintaining the editorial excellence that has become a hallmark

1. How to reset your clock when daylight savings time begins or ends. 2. How to tighten or loosen screws, valves, etc. 3. The number of days in each of the 12 months. 4. Whether i precedes or follows e in the spellings of most words. (Solutions on page 71)

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Matters of note from around Johns Hopkins

Royce Faddis

Wholly Hopkins

In Memoriam

M. Gordon Wolman 1924–2010

eds,” I said, “do you know that meander of Stony Run, the one off Linkwood Road, that’s eroding back toward that ugly apartment building?” Reds smiled at me like I was his best friend because he smiled that way at everybody, especially if they wanted to discuss meandering rivers. Yes, of course, he knew this meander. “Do you know how long before it cuts right under the apartment,” I said, “and the apartment falls into Stony Run?” Reds looked serious, calculated some rates— water flow, sedimentation, erosion—to himself, and said, “Maybe 50 years.” “I’m sorry we won’t be around to see it go,” I said.

16 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Reds was Markley Gordon Wolman; he had flame-colored hair that made “Reds” inevitable. He was chair of his department, twice interim provost, co-authored his field’s standard textbook, and was a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering (one of the 7 percent of their members who are). He was Hopkins family: He knew everyone; his undergraduate degree and most of his professional career happened here; his son, Abel, a conservation mathematician, got his degrees here and so did his father, Abel, a sanitary engineer who established the standard practice of chlorinating water. Reds himself was a fluvial geomorphologist, a student of rivers and how they change the earth. Reds finished his doctorate at Harvard in 1953, back when ideas about how rivers behaved were mostly theory. Theory, Reds thought, would benefit from actual measurements: “You need to know something about something,” he would say. One feature of rivers needing measure-

ment is the size of the sediment—sand, rocks, boulders—in their beds, so to measure size, Reds suggested what became known as the Wolman Pebble Count: Take a step into the river, reach down to your toe, look away, pick up the rock nearest your toe, and measure its width. Repeat until you’ve measured 100 rocks. The pebble count paper became the third most highly cited in geomorphology. In fact, of the 10 most highly cited papers, Reds ended up with four of them. Another of that four, written a few years later, was about which floods set a river’s size. Floods erode a river’s banks on one side and deposit sediment on the other, so that over time the river moves like a snake over its flood plain. But even as it moves, its shape and size remain surprisingly the same. Reds found that the floods that control that shape and size are not the big historic ones but the modest ones every year or two that exactly fill the riverbanks. That rivers of all sizes in all landscapes follow this same rule is remarkable, says Reds’ fellow geomorphologist Peter Wilcock, “and we still can’t explain why that happens.” A few years after that, Reds moved his science into the untidy world of policy, arguing with the newly forming environmental movement that identifying the sources of pollution wasn’t enough. You also need to understand the operation of the whole system—what’s being added, what’s taken away, how the river responds—and how that system changes with time and urbanization. Reds kept the state of Maryland apprised of the overloading of its rivers, and the state drew up some of the first regulations, which the rest of the country adopted. Now storm water control is the law everywhere, and no one builds a house without planning for ponds to catch water and black fabric fences to trap the sediment washing off treeless construction sites. Over the years, Reds was a member of innumerable national and international boards and panels, all advising on various environmental policies, even policies on oysters. When Reds came to Hopkins in 1958, he turned the Department of Geography into the interdisciplinary Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering—DOGEE, pronounced “doggie”—to include geoscientists, engineers, and social scientists. His idea was that specialists in the earth’s processes and in construction could affect policy only with help from other specialists who knew how people behave and why. The other idea was to train students who knew the substance and languages of all disciplines needed to create good policy.

In the whole country, the department remains nearly unique. Reds would take his students on weekly field trips, park them in a likely spot, and ask, “What’s that?” He’d lean against a tree and Reds thought his students were smoke a cigar until exceptional, and so were his they told him what colleagues and friends. Even it might be, then he’d say, “How’d it the people who cut down trees get there?” thereby were undoubtedly good and teaching them to delightful people. He had a high read in a landopinion of the human race. scape its history, its story. Reds thought his students were exceptional, and so were his colleagues and friends. Even the people who cut down trees were undoubtedly good and delightful people. He had a high opinion of the human race. —Ann Finkbeiner U n i ve r s i t y

Plans to cut CO2 by half

hen Davis Bookhart and Lawrence Kilduff needed to figure out how to reduce Johns Hopkins’ carbon footprint, they went looking for heavy breathers. Bookhart is Hopkins’ environmental stewardship manager, and Kilduff is executive director of the Office of Facilities Management. A “heavy breather” is a building that takes in, conditions, and puts out large volumes of air—a form of respiration that consumes a lot of power and creates a disproportionate amount of carbon dioxide emissions. Bookhart and Kilduff identified 45 of them on the various Hopkins campuses, and they will be prime targets for improvement as part of an ambitious sustainability plan Hopkins announced last March. The university estimates that in 2008, its many buildings pumped 259,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It projects that without action, that figure will rise to more than 273,000 metric tons per year over the next 15 years. The goal of the new plan is to cut annual emissions to 134,700 metric tons by 2025, a reduction of more than 50 percent. The plan requires an initial investment of $73.8 million but projects cost savings through greater efficiency and resource conservation of $10.3 million per year. Two years ago, the university convened a sustainability task force consisting of trustees, faculty, staff, and students, as well as members of the BaltiJohns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Jesse Kuhn

Wholly Hopkins

more business community. That task force directed energy audits of 276 buildings on every Hopkins campus in the Baltimore-Washington area. Among the heavy breathers were the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy building and many of the large basic science buildings. Problems were not confined to older buildings. Kilduff points out that after only about 10 years, controls on things like heating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems begin to “drift,” resulting in growing imprecision and inefficiency. He and Bookhart plan to reduce carbon emissions by applying a variety of technologies. A clean, efficient cogeneration power plant, fueled by natural gas, will begin producing electricity at Homewood later this year. Two more cogeneration plants are slated to come online in East Baltimore late next year for the medical campus. Measures to reduce power consumption in all facilities will include upgraded HVAC and lighting systems; new, tighter windows; more efficient laboratory equipment; and greater use of solar power. Other critical elements of the master plan include a sustained campaign to encourage faculty, staff, and students to reduce 18 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

energy consumption; an effort to reduce power consumption by the university’s energy-intensive information technology infrastructure; programs to apply Hopkins knowledge and research to Baltimore’s and Maryland’s sustainability efforts; and creation of a new interdisciplinary Johns Hopkins Environment, Sustainability, and Health Institute to conduct climate change research and teach students, including those participating in the university’s new undergraduate major in global environmental change. In a prepared statement released by the university, President Ron Daniels said, “Global climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges. The earth’s rising temperatures will, over decades to come, affect where and how we live, the ecosystems we inhabit, our quality of life, and even our health. Facing this challenge head on is our shared responsibility, especially as residents of the developed world. But universities have a special role in our society and a special responsibility. We are institutions that discover, that educate, and that, often, set an example. When it comes to global climate change, Johns Hopkins will be a leader in all three.” —Dale Keiger

A p p l i e d P hy s i c s L a b o ra to r y

Practicing for a trip to the inner edge of space

arl Hibbitts’ pre-adventure adventure made him dizzy and nauseous, forced him to try and move the blood in his legs and torso up toward his woozy head, and spun him around like a top. And, he claims, he loved every minute of it. During a two-day simulation experience earlier this year, Hibbitts, a senior staff scientist and geophysicist at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), learned how to physically deal with the next wave in extraterrestrial travel: suborbital space flights. While literally shaking through a regimen at the privately owned National AeroSpace Training and Research Center (NASTAR) in Philadelphia this winter, Hibbitts and 11 other scientists were forcibly exposed to both low and high levels of gravity, the airlessness of space, and a centrifuge that spun them around to give them an idea of what it feels like when a space ship descends and accelerates back toward Earth. “I got nauseous because I turned my head when I was spinning in the centrifuge—even though they told me not to move it,” Hibbitts says of being temporarily turned into a human martini. “But it’s the most amazing effect. It’s really hard not to look around and check out what’s happening.” Hibbitts, dressed in an aviator’s helmet and flight suit, took part in the simulation in preparation for trips he plans to make to the edge of space—above the atmosphere but below the level of orbiting satellites. Along with tens of thousands of tourists, experimental space scientists are lining up to be among the first to take short suborbital flights once they become commercially available within the next year or two. Private companies—including one owned by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, the British airline, music, and telecommunications mogul—have indulged in a space race of sorts to see who can develop the technology to regularly send a hybrid of a plane and a rocket into the ether and then bring it safely back to Earth. (Suborbital space is between six and 60 miles above our planet.) Initially encouraged by the Ansari X Prize, a foundation-led contest that offered $10 million to the first company to launch the same manned spacecraft twice within two weeks

(it was awarded in 2004 to Mojave Aerospace Ventures’ SpaceShipOne project), the so-called spaceplane industry has invested more than $100 million into figuring out a way to make space nearly as reachable a destination as, say, Spain. When that happens, the payoff will be found in the pent-up demand among rich nonscientists who will spend $100,000 or more for a brief flight—with only two to five minutes of real “space time.” Scientists like Hibbitts hope they’ll get some preference to tag along on the tourist jaunts, and eventually make less expensive trips on their own. Such excursions would greatly aid Hibbitts in his quest to find evidence of water on asteroids, the moon, and perhaps Mercury. To see signs of water and carbon dioxide on those celestial bodies in useful infrared wavelengths, Hibbitts must travel above the water in Earth’s atmosphere. “These suborbital flights open up the possibility of routine space trips,” says Hibbitts. “What

S p or t s Johns Hopkins spring sports teams reeled in one Centennial Conference championship after another in May, continuing an excellent run by Hopkins athletics during the 2009–2010 season. Women’s track won the first conference championship in school history by upsetting Haverford College, which was favored to win its fifth straight crown. Senior Laura Paulsen ran off with individual championships at 10,000 meters, 5,000 meters, and 1,500 meters to finish as the most decorated runner in Hopkins history. Women’s tennis claimed the Centennial Conference for the fourth straight year, winning the championship match by shutting out Swarthmore, 5–0. The team qualified for the NCAA championships, which were to be held later in May after Johns Hopkins Magazine went to press. Not to be outdone, men’s tennis claimed a fourth straight conference championship of its own and its fifth in the last six years. The Jays finished with a 20–5 record and, like the women’s team, qualified for the NCAA championships. Finally, Hopkins baseball rolled to its eighth Centennial crown in nine years, and at press time was ranked first in the nation in Division III with a stunning 39–4 record, including 32 straight victories. The Jays began NCAA tournament play after this issue went to press, hoping to return to the College World Series for the first time since narrowly missing a national championship in 2008. One curious detail about Hopkins’ 2010 spring championships: All four came on the same day, May 2. —DK Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Wholly Hopkins

Books Halsted’s encumbered genius It’s no surprise to learn that a Johns Hopkins physician developed the very concept of safe and modern surgery—and, on top of that, implemented revolutionary sterilization techniques and created the residency training concept for medical school. Yet somehow, despite these and other advances that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, William Stewart Halsted remains a virtual unknown outside the medical community. That may have been how Halsted (born in 1852 in New York City) wanted it—though not for the best of reasons. A new book by Manhattan plastic surgeon Gerald Imber, Genius on the Edge (Kaplan, 2010), examines both the panoply of medical improvements Halsted made throughout his career, and a side of Halsted’s life he kept far from the public eye: a 35-year-long addiction to cocaine and then morphine, the latter prescribed to help cure his dependence on the former. Imber first learned about Halsted during his residency in California, where he studied under Roscoe Wilcox, who had learned from George Heuer, a protégé of Halsted’s. Much like classical musicians trace their instructors’ lineage back to the great conductors and ar tists, so do physicians—par ticularly surgeons. And Halsted was a fearless surgeon, made bold by his innate understanding of physiology and his rigorous studies of the human body. That strength allowed him, in 1882, to diagnose and perform the first successful gallstone removal surgery on his own dying mother, on a kitchen table, according to Imber’s book. What made Halsted such a special physician? “He was exposed to essentially the same elements as all the other physicians of the time,” says Imber, referring to the great strides being made by German and British medical researchers. “But Halsted seemed able to synthesize a whole out of each of these little things in a way no one else could. He saw a step beyond everyone else. He saw the big picture.” Halsted arrived in Baltimore in 1886, three years before the official opening of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He served as the first chief 20 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

of surgery at a time when that field was about to evolve—thanks, in large par t, to Halsted— from a nearly guaranteed death sentence into a legitimate and beneficial medical course of action. While at Hopkins, he pioneered countless improvements to surgical procedure (like wearing rubber gloves and using antiseptics) and theory—including the development of a successful radical mastectomy, a hernia repair, and thyroid and digestive surgery advances. Still, “he’s known for the residency training system or the Halsted method of safe surgery,” Imber says. “The things he did changed the environment in the way we do medicine.” Halsted’s success can be attributed to fortuitous circumstances. A brilliant, revolutionary research physician (Halsted) was able to start from a clean research slate at a brand new, forward-thinking institution (Johns Hopkins Hospital), with the support of a leader who believed in him and helped him work through his substance abuse issues (the first dean of the School of Medicine, William Welch). It was Welch whom Halsted entrusted with his secrets, and it was Welch who first helped Halsted seek treatment—and then tacitly aided Halsted as he covered for the surgeon’s months-long sabbaticals away from Baltimore, which almost always included indulgence in his chemicals. The number of aggregate years of research and work he lost to his addictions is an unfortunately large number, and his debilitating condition makes Halsted’s achievements even more impressive. Some of his Hopkins students who went on to greatness of their own argued that his addictions somehow assisted his discovery process; legendary surgeon Alfred Blalock said, “I think it is probably very fortunate for American surgery that he acquired [his addiction].” But Imber strongly disagrees with that contention. “He did this in spite of his drug addiction,” says Imber. “Can you imagine if he wasn’t encumbered?” books by Johns Hopkins leadership and faculty deal with economics and politics, and the intersection between the two disciplines. First is Innovation: The Key to Prosperity (Montagu House, 2009), penned by Aris Melissaratos, A&S ’66, special adviser for technology enterprise development to Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels, and co-author N.J. Slabbert. Melissaratos—a longtime technology entrepreneur and former chief technology officer for Westinghouse Electric Corporation—and Slabbert put forth two other recent

the case that without massive and immediate U.S. government investment in technology, global prosperity is at serious risk. To make their case, they offer a sweeping variety of science and history lessons in innovation and boldness (the earliest Greek philosopher-scientists, Aaron Burr, modern physics, the Chicago World’s Fair, DNA’s discovery, Cecil Rhodes, etc.). These pivotal moments and people are cast alongside a scathing analysis of what the authors identify as anti-technology sentiment, policy, and beliefs in the United States that are jeopardizing the nation’s role as the world’s leader not just in technology but in hope, creativity, and aspiration. The DeMarco Factor is a book about a lobbyist, but not of the “Washington, D.C., fat cat expense account, K Street” sor t. The book—written by Michael Per tschuk, a longtime health care advocate, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, and an associate in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Depar tment of Health, Behavior, and Society—is about that rarity known as the public advocacy lobbyist. The titular DeMarco is Bloomberg School assistant professor Vinny DeMarco, A&S ’79, ’81 (MA). DeMarco, president of the nonprofit Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative, lobbies for causes such as increased tobacco taxes, health care reform, and gun control. The book chronicles DeMarco’s philosophies, strategies, tactics, and teachings as he’s challenged some of the nation’s most powerful special interest groups in the Maryland Legislature. It’s a great read for hardcore political junkies who want an insider’s look at how legislation is created, tweaked, and ultimately (or not) passed. And it reveals how the legislative sausage is made, a process that isn’t always encouraging to believers in democracy. But as the book tracks DeMarco’s planning and brainstorming (and his use of his mother’s marinara sauce as a political tool), it’s an intriguing look at Maryland’s legislative process. —Geoff Brown, A&S ’91

NASA does is very expensive one-offs. They might be perfectly done, but very few scientists get to do work in space.” Suborbital travel will aid scientists by repeatedly taking them to places they hadn’t been to before—so they can perform repeat experiments—and by costing one-tenth of the price of a trip on a NASA vehicle. “We can send an experiment in a shoebox up into space on one of these vehicles for about $1,000,” says Alan Stern, chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s Suborbital Applications Researchers Group, which is working to make sure science has a place on such trips. “Suborbital flights have the added advantage that they’re developed by private industry, so governments won’t have to underwrite them. Tourists will help pay the freight.” Hibbitts’ simulation “These suborbital flights open up exercise, which cost APL $3,000, involved the possibility of routine space being hooked up to trips,” says Karl Hibbitts. “What oxygen in a hypobaric NASA does is very expensive chamber to simulate one-offs.They might be perfectly the effects of high altitude on the human done, but very few scientists get body, including low to work in space.” levels of oxygen and pressure. He lost some level of consciousness before being pulled out of the chamber. NASTAR facilitators taught him “the grunt maneuver,” in which space travelers constrict their legs and stomach muscles to keep blood flowing to the brain so they don’t pass out. Hibbitts was also exposed to the increasing forces of gravity that attend coming back to Earth. (“It felt like an elephant sat on my chest,” he says.) And he got an idea of how to work in a tight, confined space, perform an experiment during a small window of time while there, and stow his equipment away again. Noam Izenberg, another APL senior professional science staffer, was slated to take part in a similar exercise in June. Like Hibbitts, he’s excited about the simulation and what it represents. He wants to use suborbital travel to test how a sandbox filled with sand and pebbles reacts when struck by a hammer in low gravity, so he can make estimates of how seismic waves in space affect asteroids. But he admits there is a wide range of possibilities that he and other scientists have yet to imagine. “This is a whole new box,” Izenberg says. “We haven’t even begun to think inside it yet.” —Michael Anft Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Wholly Hopkins Pe a b o d y

$2 million scholarship supports gay students

Jim Dandy

he hardships of a longtime friend have stayed with Tristan Rhodes for decades. The friend is a woman whose life took a dramatic turn after she came out as a lesbian to her family. “She is a great thinker and an extremely talented writer who would have been a great literary talent,” Rhodes says. “She came out to her parents when she was 17 and they kicked her out. She was disowned. She dropped out of college and was on the streets of New York living as best she could. Sadly, her story is not unique.” This spring, Rhodes, a piano and conducting student at the Peabody Conservatory in the late 1960s, returned to campus to sign papers formalizing a new need-based scholarship. The Tristan W. Rhodes Scholarship Fund will support gay and lesbian musicians who lose financial support after coming out to their families or guardians. The $2 million bequest is one of the largest future commitments to the conservatory. Around the country, the number of need-based scholarships for LGBT students remains few, but their number is increasing. Duke University established the Carolinas Gay and Lesbian Scholarship in 2000 to “encourage and reward involvement in the LGBT community and activism by members of the community at Duke,” while universities from the University of California, Berkeley to Ohio State now offer some form of scholarship aid to LGBT students. Many of the scholarship funds specify support to students who are active in the LGBT community. In 2003, Hopkins alumnus Michael 22 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Heinl, A&S ’73, created a scholarship for an undergraduate student of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences who supports the school’s Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance group, the LGBT student organization on the Homewood Campus. The Rhodes scholarship is unique in that it does not award the funds based on activism but rather on circumstance. The fund is for “the benefit of students who are gay or lesbian and have been disenfranchised by their families and therefore have lost support for education expenses,” according to the language of the scholarship agreement. Peabody Institute Director Jeffrey Sharkey says the scholarship fits with the open nature of the school. “Diverse people gather here because of their shared love for music and high level of ability,” he says. “Already, comments have reached me from students and faculty indicating their excitement about both the size of the commitment and its intended purpose.” “I would love to see this scholarship not be necessary, but, sadly, I have seen that discrimination continues,” says Rhodes, 62 and now living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hannah Pressley agrees. A cello performance major at Peabody, Pressley heads the school’s GayStraight Alliance, a student group meant to foster a supportive environment for the LGBT community. “I don’t know of any students at Peabody in this particular position, but I have known people who have been disowned by their families because they are gay,” Pressley says. “I feel like homophobia is really deep-seated and I don’t think people realize how long it’s going to take for that to change completely. [This scholarship] is a step in the right direction. It will change what people view as their options if they are in this situation and it’s a huge morale boost just in the fact that it exists,” she says. When the Tristan W. Rhodes Scholarship takes effect in the future, it will supply an annual fund to qualified students who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender and who no longer receive tuition support from those who originally agreed to provide it. Should no student fit the above specifications, the scholarship may be awarded to any LGBT student in need of financial support for reasons other than disenfranchisement. “I wanted there to be a safety net,” says Rhodes. “I wanted any talented kid who was disenfranchised to know there were funds available for an education.” —Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

N a n o b i o te ch n o l o g y

Nanoparticles are here, but are they safe?

he shelves at your store are filled with items that have been enhanced by things too small to see. They are so small, in fact, that each speck would make up the same portion of a regulation soccer ball as a soccer ball would of the entire earth. Tiny particles added to sunscreen transform it from smeary white to invisible, making it more attractive (marketers hope) to sunbathers. Minute bits of silver are added to toothpaste and shampoo to kill bacteria. All sorts of things, from air fresheners to clothes to tennis rackets, feature minuscule pieces, each made up of only a few atoms or molecules, engineered for a specific purpose. As nanoparticles are added to more goods we use daily—up to 800 consumer products and counting—our bodies often absorb them, and the planet deals with what ends up in the dump or washed down the drain. But are we sure they’re safe? At the annual symposium of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT), held in late April, speakers from several Hopkins divisions urged toxicologists, environmental scientists, and governments to focus more on the question of safety of nanotechnology so they can begin to catch up with the burgeoning field, which now creates more than $3 billion in revenue annually for private companies. “It’s too late for precaution,” said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Six years ago, we were in a position where we could look before we would leap. Now I wonder whether the cat is out of the bag. We have to move twice as fast now.” The problem, Silbergeld added, is that there are few hard and fast rules for research into nanoparticles’ possible toxic effects, and that so many types of them are now being made. “We haven’t prioritized our research so we can evaluate the risk of all of them,” she said. Although scientists and engineers generally view nano-applications as safe, they worry that investigations into their long-term effects haven’t kept pace with the technology. They also aren’t sure how certain chemicals that behave differently when reduced to mere atoms might react in the body, or if they might have previously unseen effects once let loose in the environment. A handful of recent studies involving mice have found that nanoparticles could cause genetic

Now we k n ow …For a decade, birds have been prime suspects in the spread of avian flu across the United States. But expansion of the disease did not match their migration patterns. New research led by Jason L. Rasgon, associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, points to Culex tarsalis mosquitoes as the more likely culprits. Birds pass the virus to C. tarsalis, whose movement pattern more closely matches its spread. The research appeared in the March 2 issue of Molecular Ecology. …In 2008, almost 9 million children under age 5 died around the world, two-thirds of them from preventable infectious disease, according to a study published May 12 online by The Lancet. A team led by Robert Black, professor of international health at the Bloomberg School, found that malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia persist as the most common killers of children, and pre-term birth complications and birth asphyxia were the leading causes of death among newborns. …A School of Medicine team has found that the protein TRPA1 enables fruit flies to taste and thus avoid eating noxious substances. Writing in the May 4 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers noted that the protein could be targeted by chemicals that would make plants taste bad to destructive pests. Authors included William B. Guggino, professor of physiology, and Craig Montell, professor of biological chemistry. …Elderly Americans are dying at a faster rate from falls, unintentional poisonings, accidents with machinery, drowning, even motorcycle crashes. Research appearing in the February issue of Injury Prevention found that from 2002 to 2006, there was only a 3 percent increase in overall injury mortality among adults 65 or older, but deaths from falls, for example, increased 42 percent and from machinery 46 percent. Susan Baker, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy, was a co-author on the study. …Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center say that sexually active teenage boys do not get enough counseling about sexually transmitted infections (STI) when they visit doctors. A study published online in February by Journal of Adolescent Health found that only 26 percent of boys who admitted engaging in high-risk sex received advice from doctors about prevention of HIV/STI. Arik V. Marcell, a pediatrician at the Children’s Center, was lead investigator. —DK damage. Some types of nonengineered particles that exist at the nanoscale, such as those present in welding fumes and diesel exhaust, have been shown to create health problems for humans. The issue is further complicated by a lack of knowledge about the materials themselves. Howard Fairbrother, a professor of chemistry at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, said research would be better served if the field of nanotechnology kept better tabs on what exactly it produces. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Wholly Hopkins

Quot e , unquote We give up. We’re fighting a losing battle here. And we strongly suspect the extra “s” was a typo in the first place. —University President Ron Daniel [sic], quoted in a press release announcing the changing of the university’s name to John Hopkins, and dated 4.1.10. (That would be April Fools’ Day.) Parents and grandparents are like the National Guard—they’re called up to active duty when there’s a crisis. But while families may be moving in together to save money, they’re discovering the advantages of shared child and elder care and an enriched family life. —Andrew Cherlin, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, quoted in Parade, 5.2.10. With just one geriatrician for every 10,000 adults over 75, primary care physicians are being called on to provide geriatric care for our rapidly aging population. In fewer than 20 years, one of every five Americans will be over 65, amounting to more than 70 million people. We need to act now, and act aggressively, to improve the geriatric education of all physicians. —Chad Boult, professor and director of the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, quoted in the May 2010 issue of Health Affairs. Nobody is doing more to address the tragedy of sexual abuse of minors than the Catholic Church. —Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, quoted in the National Catholic Register, 4.20.10. Tenure prohibits mandatory retirement by federal law. It’s the only job where you can’t force turnover. That has a deadening effect on innovation. —Francis Fukuyama, professor of international development at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, quoted on academic tenure in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 05.03.10. For example, carbon nanotubes, which make up a high percentage of all engineered nanoparticles, often contain metal particles that can cause toxicity. “Often, it’s not the carbon that causes the problem, but the contaminating metals,” Fairbrother said. The size of the particles also represents some new angles for toxicological research, said Patrick Breysse, director of the Division of Environmental Health Engineering at the Bloomberg School. For example, particles of silica don’t invade the lungs of lifeguards because those emanating from grains of sand are too large. But much smaller particles that are created during welding and in lab experiments can lead to silicosis, a debilitating disease, because they are tiny enough to embed in lungs. EPA studies often don’t adequately measure the tiniest of particles. Breysse advocates more use of existing technologies that measure particles at the nanoscale, and the development of new ones. Last year, the Canadian government enacted a law requiring manufacturers of nanomaterials to 24 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

register their work and disclose potential toxins. In the United States, only Berkeley, California, has passed similar legislation, and federal oversight is split up between several agencies that haven’t coordinated their efforts. As bioengineers develop more and more nanomaterials, the need for oversight will be even more intense, concluded Ronald White, an associate scientist in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “If you think things are scary now, as we deal with passive nanostructures, take a look down the pike when active nanostructures that are designed to do specific things in the body come to be,” said White. “There’s definitely a need for regulation of nanoparticles. The question is: How do we get there?” —MA

A n t h ro p o l o g y

Reviving the “lost crops” of Africa

he light green melon called egusi is known for the richness found in its seeds. In the savannas of southwestern Nigeria, the seeds are prized for their flavor—they taste a bit like pumpkin seeds—and for the powder they produce when dried and ground up. The pungent powder spices up soups. Egusi seeds are also rich in vitamins and minerals—a bonus in a region where getting enough nutrition is a daily travail. But because egusi isn’t easy to process, it’s not eaten as widely as it could be. Traditionally, women working in tandem take several hours harvesting the melons, separating the seeds from the flesh, drying them, grinding them, and allowing them to steep in salt to extract the oil, another important food product. Complicating the issue is a short dry season that leaves only a small window for drying the seeds in the sun. What’s more, because of a dearth of technology, it’s difficult to make more than one gallon of oil at a time. As a result, production remains a local, farm-byfarm phenomenon, and not a success story in the ongoing war against malnutrition in Africa. That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum that some who battle hunger in Africa face: Though native foodstuffs that provide a wide range of nutrients have been available ever since the first humans walked in Africa’s Rift Valley several million years ago, many remain relatively untapped—or are disappearing—because science hasn’t focused on improving them.

the study’s director. The project helped boost the production of sorghum throughout Africa, he says. On the southern part of the continent, local women collect marula, and then sell it to a company that makes Amarula, a liqueur popular in Africa and the West. “It’s a good source of cash for them,” Dafforn says. Previous efforts Dafforn was involved with, including discovering the “lost crops of the Incas,” taught him that until native foods gain wide acceptance they are often looked down upon by various populations, native and otherwise. “It’s kind of like the peanut was here for a good while,” says Dafforn. “It helps when foods catch on elsewhere so that there’s a market for them. One of our leaders on the Inca project said that for a food in Lima to become popular in Cuzco, it has to travel through New York. We’ve seen that kind of success with quinoa, which you can buy at Whole Foods now.” Guyer says the next step for achieving that kind of success with African crops is to link people with technical know-how to others who understand specific food plants. For example, a company in Austria has developed an efficient method for extracting oil from a rare type of pumpkin seed. That technology may be adaptable in the case of the egusi seed. Getting the Austrians to work with Nigerians would be a small but important step toward increasing consumption of the wholesome egusi melon. Multiply that by several other projects and you begin to have an overall effect on hunger. “We’re not talking about heirloom tomatoes here,” says Guyer. “These are crops that are really fundamental to the well-being of millions of people.” She adds that poor countries may soon face new agricultural challenges—ones that may be met with the help of native food plants: “With climate change worries staring right at us, these crops are on the doorstep of science, just waiting to be worked with.” —MA Istockphoto.com

“It’s somewhat disconcerting that, at a time when the nutritional science of the moment in the West has to do with local, fresh, and a large variety of foods, we’re not seeing it in places like Africa that could really use that kind of thinking,” says Jane Guyer, an economic anthropologist at Johns Hopkins. Guyer, who studies the life cycle and money streams of African farms, served for several years on a National Academy of Sciences panel that oversaw the production of three large volumes that described what were termed “the lost crops of Africa.” Such food plants, the series contended, are often present in the landscape— not truly “lost”—but aren’t being used sufficiently to make a dent in Africa’s food problem. Of the 1 billion people worldwide classified as “undernourished” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 300 million live in Africa. Too much of the effort to feed Africans has been based on large-scale farming of staple crops, such as maize and rice, the panel contended. Aid agencies and national governments haven’t focused enough on developing a variety of food plants, often overlooking valuable crops in their midst. “Part of the problem is the perception that people need calories and protein,” says Guyer. “In actuality, many people need the nutrition of a wide variety of foods.” Many local people cultivate native food plants in their gardens and farms, she says. Children often eat wild fruits, like those of the marula tree, the juice of which contains four times the vitamin C of an orange. “The know-how of the local people of the world is huge,” Guyer says, “and it’s underutilized.” The National Academy’s panel hoped that scientists could tap local people for expertise on growing the crops, and then inform local leaders and others to encourage the planting of them, she adds. Even though the panel ended its work two years ago, one of its leaders says that its work is still bearing fruit. The books—one on grains, a second on vegetables, a third on fruits—“provided an incentive and a legitimization for researchers to work with these plants,” says Mark Dafforn,

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Arts and Sciences

New dean specializes in multidisciplinary approach

W Will Kirk / Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

hen President Ron Daniels took office last year, he expressed an intent to bring the university’s various divisions together in entrepreneurial and academic collaboration. “There’s more that we can do to knit the various parts of the university,” he told Johns Hopkins Magazine last winter. Daniels took a step

Katherine Newman: “I look forward to making Arts and Sciences an ever-stronger partner.” toward realizing that goal when he announced Katherine S. Newman as the next James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. In an international search yielding hundreds of applications and 80 serious candidates, Newman was selected to be the next dean for her adroit research capabilities, her academic leadership, and her multidisciplinary approach. “She has been really committed to working across multiple parts of a university,” Daniels said at Newman’s formal introduction in April. That bridge-building is evident in Newman’s career at Princeton University, where she has been a professor in the Woodrow Wilson 26 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Sociology since 2004. In 2007, she became director of Princeton’s university-wide Institute for International and Regional Studies and founded a joint doctoral program in social policy, sociology, politics, and psychology. “I am a firm believer in what I call the discipline-plus model. Once you have a strong grounding in the central discipline you can build a very effective platform for interdisciplinary study,” she says. “I believe students at all levels can prosper by understanding how adjacent disciplines have attacked the problem they are studying.” Before joining Princeton, Newman spent eight years at Harvard as the first dean of social science in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. There she developed a university-wide research program in the social sciences, fostering collaboration among faculty from arts and sciences, public health, medicine, law, and education. Her own research into the lives of the working poor and global economic mobility has yielded multiple books, including 2007’s The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America, co-authored with Victor Tan Chen. She is known for broaching her topics with a combination of rigorous research, personal inquisitiveness, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Newman will join Hopkins in the fall after wrapping up research, including work on a new book about how sales tax policies in the United States can detrimentally impact the working poor. She gave up a sabbatical year to come to Baltimore and plans to resolve a year’s worth of work over the summer. “At one point I was asked by the search committee how I felt about working with high-energy people like our president and provost,” she said, referring to Daniels and Lloyd Minor. “And I asked them whether or not I appeared to be like a wallflower. And fortunately they found that there is not a petal of wallflower in me,” Newman told colleagues at the April event. Newman says her top priorities include personal sit-downs with the 275 faculty in the Krieger School to begin the work of developing strategic plans that increase undergraduate enrollment, raise graduate stipends, and grow advanced academic programs. “Hopkins is a tremendously exciting landscape to me,” she says. “This is a unique university in the way that it integrates across the schools, across the disciplines, and I look forward to making Arts and Sciences an ever-stronger partner.” —EED

Students

Bot t om L in e

Pumping up

15: Rank of Johns Hopkins University among “The 50 Most Stressful

Miguel davilla

ast fall, Rajiv Mallipudi, Eng ’09, took a latenight and somewhat fateful stroll to the apartment of Roosevelt Offoha, whom he had recently met through a mutual acquaintance. Mallipudi wanted to recruit Offoha, a first-year medical student at the School of Medicine and an ex-football player with a superhero physique, to his new passion—powerlifting. An archetypal Type A personality, Mallipudi wouldn’t take no for an answer. And, like any good Hopkins student, he came packing research. “I just showed up at his door with a list of national [powerlifting] records,” says Mallipudi, a biomedical engineering graduate who is currently working toward his master’s degree in reproductive and cancer biology from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I sat down and told him, ‘You will break these. You can, you will.’” It took awhile, but eventually Offoha gave in. The two trained together the following day in a marathon session. Four months later, in back-to-back statewide competitions, Offoha broke 10 national powerlifting records. No slouch himself, Mallipudi set eight state records at the USAPL Maryland State Powerlifting and Bench Press Championships, held in February in Annapolis. Each won gold medals in their respective weight divisions. The numbers themselves could cause back strain. Mallipudi, 23, a 5-foot-2 bundle of power who weighed in at 146 pounds, lifted 253 pounds in the bench press, 358 pounds in the squat, and 446 in the dead lift. Offoha, a soft-spoken 24-year-old who stands 5-foot-10 and competed at 215 pounds, benched 430, squatted 606, and for the dead lift hoisted a bar weighing 672 pounds—a grand total of 1,708 pounds. He topped state records in his age group, weight, and in several “open” categories. The Baltimore native would go on to break 10 national records in the 220-pound class at the Pennsylvania State Powerlifting Championships a few weeks later. For his off-the-charts

Colleges” as determined by The Daily Beast. After cheerily noting that Cornell University endured six student suicides in this academic year alone, the website applied some dubious methodology to the top 50 universities as listed by the annual U.S. News & World Report survey—that makes it dubious on top of dubious in the methodology department—creating a ranking out of an amalgam of total cost per annum, academic rigor, admissions acceptance rate, national rank of engineering program (!), and level of campus crime. Topping the list was Stanford, which shared the podium with #2 Columbia and #3 MIT. Hopkins bested such rivals as Duke (#16), Georgetown (#19), and Cal Berkeley (#23), and positively smoked Virginia (pfffttt . . . #36). We’re not claiming that Hopkins is competitive or anything, but we expect to move up next year. We’re looking at you, Dartmouth. (For what it’s worth, The Daily Beast followed up with “The 100 Happiest Colleges,” which placed Hopkins at 71st. Hrrmmmphhh.) —DK performance, Offoha qualified for the Arnold Sports Festival, the largest multi-sport event in the nation. The sport of powerlifting centers on brute strength—how much weight you can lift—in the three events. It differs from weightlifting, which requires a high degree of technical proficiency. (As an example, you’ve probably seen the “clean and jerk” event, in which the athlete brings the bar to his shoulders, then lifts it above his head.) In these competitions, judges are looking for perfect position and form. Both Mallipudi and Offoha were weightlifters in high school. Offoha did it for football. Mallipudi wanted the extra strength to play ice hockey, and later for bodybuilding. Mallipudi says he progressed to powerlifting during his sophomore year of college when he met someone in a local gym who pushed him toward the sport, not unlike what he did to Offoha. “He told me, ‘Wow, you’re really strong. You’d be great for powerlifting,’” he says. Despite his initial reluctance, Offoha is now glad Mallipudi twisted his arm back in October, he says. “When I won that competition and broke those records, I had never felt like that before. It was a complete adrenaline surge that day.” —Greg Rienzi

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Disease Chaser The

By Michael Anft Photos

Steve Spartana

Richard Kelley travels through the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania in search of clues to rare genetic disorders that, still too often, afflict the Amish and Mennonite children he treats.

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

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

Kelley interacts with Amish children in Lancaster County. Strasburg, Pennsylvania.

s he parks next to a large white farmhouse that would fit comfortably into a 19thcentury still life, Richard Kelley smiles at a rust-colored retriever, an old friend that stirs from an early spring sunbath to greet him. Kelley knows this old place well. He’s been dropping by regularly to check on Joshua since the boy was little more than a month old, when his grandmother noticed that his body quavered slightly but uncontrollably. The grandmother had heard tales of similar symptoms in Amish toddlers who had died. Kelley has been visiting Joshua, an attentive boy with an impressive hank of blond hair swept across a head that lists to the left because of his condition, for 18 months now. This is one of his many house calls to Amish families who refuse to use modern devices, such as telephones, and who have very young, very sick children at home. After examining Joshua for the first time, and later performing a DNA test, Kelley was forced to conclude that the grandmother’s disturbing hunch was right. The boy suffered from a rare and deadly form of nemaline myopathy, an inherited muscular disorder. The variant of the disease that afflicts the Amish, who have named it chicken breast disease, raises the sternum straight up from the chest symmetrically, making the breastbone much more prominent. It also stalls the growth of muscles in infants. Because they lack a structural protein that builds certain muscle fibers, chicken breast disease children eventually become too weak to breathe. In most cases, a cold or other illness will be too much for them. All of them die, most by the age of 2. As Joshua nears that grim milestone, Kelley, having been warmly received inside, checks for signs of the disease’s progress. He reaches into his bag for the pediatrician’s simplest tools. “When Josh heard you were coming, he started playing with his hammer,” says Joshua’s mother, a cheery young woman dressed in a traditional dark blue frock and bonnet. Kelley tests Joshua’s reflexes with taps of his hammer, then examines his torso. He finds it noteworthy that, instead of the usual rise of the chest, Joshua sports only one small bump near his sternum where a rib seems to be poking up. Years of doing highly specialized clinical work have enabled Kelley to see such differences. Of the 70 children

diagnosed with chicken breast disease over the past generation, Kelley has personally treated about half, including a family in which four siblings have died from the disease over the past 11 years. The form of nemaline myopathy Joshua suffers from is one of about 100 disorders that are either uniquely found in small numbers among the Amish and Mennonite children of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or which affect only them and other tiny populations around the world. All of the disorders are rare and based in the genetics of people who have essentially inbred, as is the case with several orders of Pennsylvania’s Amish and Mennonites who have maintained insular, self-reliant communities here for the past 13 generations. Kelley, a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a researcher and physician at the Hopkins-affiliated Kennedy Krieger Institute, has made a career out of tracking those diseases down. Trained in pathology and genetics in addition to pediatrics, Kelley runs the Mass Spectrometry Lab at Kennedy Krieger, where he searches for the biomedical basis of genetic disorders, like the one that threatens Joshua’s life. Because funding for clinical researchers of rare diseases is a rarity in itself, he uses income from the lab—which provides testing for patients of dozens of Johns Hopkins physicians, as well as services for doctors seeking information on patients with rare diseases around the world—to bankroll his work in the field. Several days per month, Kelley performs research by seeing patients of the Clinic for Special Children, which he helped found 20 years ago in an Amish-raised, postand-beam structure. During his visits to homes and his examinations of children brought into the clinic with unusual health problems, Kelley tracks down clues to oddball diseases that linger in the twists and turns of a genetic matrix. At the same time, he provides a bridge between the anti-modern and the modern, the archaic and the cutting-edge. In Lancaster County, Kelley navigates along two-lane roads—black ribbons that lace through endless undulating acres of well-tended spring green, and which regularly include horse-drawn buggies—to undertake medical detective work that few clinicians or academic researchers from beyond Pennsylvania Dutch country have cared to understand. The children he checks on come from communities that want to shield their young from the outside world—

Richard Kelley tracks down clues to the

oddball diseases that linger in

the twists and

turns of a genetic matrix.

30 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

from people whom the misnamed “Dutch” have, in turn, wrongly called “the English.” “I got into investigating and treating these rare diseases because I saw there was a need for it,” says Kelley. A vigorous man at 61 who maintains a neatly trimmed white beard and parts his dark hair well over to one side, Kelley calls himself a “dysmorphologist”—one who studies how the body’s functions can go wrong and lead to deformities, injuries, and death. “It’s kind of a fun discipline,” he says. “If you know what you’re doing, you can walk into a room and say, ‘Johnny has this.’” Starting nearly 30 years ago at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Kelley began to see Amish and Mennonite children who suffered from rare diseases. Most involved their bodies’ inability to break down certain substances. Listed as metabolic disorders, several variants of the diseases that affect Amish and Mennonite children have evocative, sometimes innocuous-sounding names—but potentially deadly consequences. Among the Old Order Mennonite, a particular type of maple syrup urine disease—called that because the urine and earwax of its sufferers smells like maple syrup—had ravaged children for generations, killing them or leaving them paralyzed. Because those who suffer from the disease cannot metabolize protein, their brains become damaged. A type of glutaric aciduria, a genetically based disease that afflicts some Amish children, did similar, irrevocable damage.

Until Kelley and D. Holmes Morton, a former researcher at Kennedy Krieger and Kelley’s protégé, opened the clinic, parents would often wait until a child’s disease was in the late stage before taking him or her to a hospital. “There were all kinds of wrong diagnoses that people were given,” Kelley recalls. “No one saw those diseases as metabolic or biochemical. Doctors treated them as if they were the result of an acute insult,” such as a fall. Many children ended up in wheelchairs or died. Not long after the clinic opened, Kelley and Morton discovered the biochemical cause of those types of maple syrup urine disease and glutaric aciduria. What’s more, Kelley began to realize that by putting sick children on a regimen that limits their intake of protein to almost nothing and gives them the essential amino acids they initially lacked, he could help them through periods of crisis, allowing them to lead mostly normal lives. The physicians’ work—which led to treatments for diseases that were once labeled as progressive and fatal, and introduced a method for screening newborns for them—contributed to a decrease in the injury rate among glutaric aciduria patients from 95 percent in the 1980s to about 15 percent today. “I like working with metabolic diseases because, chances are, you can find something to help,” says Kelley. “It’s gratifying to find that you can give them something simple to counteract a disorder.” Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 31

Kelley’s work has led to regimens or therapies for about a dozen different genetic maladies. But he, Holmes, and others at the clinic aren’t saviors. They admit to being vexed by several disorders that give up their secrets slowly, if at all. Particularly difficult are certain diseases that don’t have anything to do with metabolism. Joshua’s illness, for example, has long defied a cure. Chicken breast disease is not a metabolic disorder but one of a trickier group of genetic illnesses marked by a deficiency of the structural proteins that build muscles. To fix it, a doctor would need to use specific gene therapies to get the protein into each muscle, but those haven’t been developed yet. And no regimen of amino acids or protein restriction will help Joshua. But is there something else that might?

he disorder that threatens Joshua’s life came to America with about 200 people during one of several waves of immigration from Germany and Switzerland in the early decades of the 18th century. A subgroup of the Anabaptist communities that were heretical in the eyes of the Catholic Church, the Amish fled persecution and answered the call of William Penn, who had traveled along the Rhine River encouraging farmers to come to the New World. The Anabaptist movement was formed in the early 16th century by Menno Simons, a lapsed Catholic priest whose followers—Mennonites—were named after him. The Amish splintered off a century later during a dispute over foot washing and “shunning,” the hard-andfast excommunication of sinful members that the Amish still practice. Farmers who came to the colonies were drawn to Lancaster County by Penn and by soils suffused with limestone. Centuries of farming under harsh conditions—they had been granted the least desirable lands in Europe by noblemen—had taught them the value of “good earth.” Farming is still the centerpiece of life for the 25,000 Amish in Lancaster County and a similar number of Mennonites, even if land pressures have forced many of the men into trades, such as carpentry. One can see tradition in action as men wearing black, wide-brimmed hats and sporting mustache-less beards drive five-horse teams and plows across meticulous fields. Other traditions endure. Hymns that were composed by Anabaptists who were persecuted and imprisoned in a Bavarian 32 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

castle nearly 500 years ago are still sung during services held in Amish homes. The hymns commemorate the suffering of those who stood fast for their beliefs. Suffering lives on through the genes as well. The “founder effect”—the name for a lack of genetic variation within a group— has been reinforced by the insular nature of the so-called Plain People of Lancaster County, who don’t proselytize to bring in new members who would deepen the gene pool. The founder effect has left their children vulnerable to dozens of inherited disorders, mostly due to recessive traits in genes. Twenty-five percent of children born to parents who both carry recessive genes for a disease are likely to manifest it, making the young of inbred groups particularly at risk for strange disorders. Family names show how rarely the gene pool in Lancaster County has been jumbled. Nearly one in four Amish people carry the surname Stoltzfus. Other surnames—Beiler, King, Lapp— predominate. Of the 200,000 Amish in the United States today, there are only 125 or so family names. Today, physicians who treat Amish and Mennonite infants perform specific genetic tests to determine susceptibility to disease. Scientists have discovered, for example, that males with Joshua’s surname have very short Y chromosomes, and that cases of Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, an Amish-specific form of dwarfism, can be traced back to one couple that emigrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania in 1767. On Tuesdays, when Kelley works in Lancaster County, he’ll search for signs of Amish-specific disorders as he sees patients in their homes and at the clinic, a sturdy edifice raised in a single spring day in 1990. It sits on three non-arable acres in the middle of the region’s farm belt, and is accessible to horse-drawn buggies that can travel only 25 miles in a day from around various parts of Amish country. More than 1,700 children make their way there for treatment each year, whether by archaic means or by renting a taxi or driver. While most Amish sects and some Mennonite ones don’t permit car ownership, it’s OK for them to be driven somewhere by someone else. That’s not the only wrinkle in Amish lives that an outsider might interpret as a contradiction. Their reliance on the “English” for modern medical care, despite their disdain for newfangled contrivances, is another. The Amish don’t train their own physicians. As a rule, children of the Plain People are schooled only

until the eighth grade and are taught vocations—such as farming and homemaking—that keep them grounded and away from “prideful” accomplishments, including college degrees. To remain separate from the world outside their communities, the Amish (and many Mennonites) believe in renouncing what they see as pride and undue power that emanate from modern knowledge. “To the Amishman, the grossest distortions of education are perpetuated by the scientists, who have invented the theory of evolution and who have made bombs to destroy the world,” wrote John Hostetler, a sociologist who was raised Amish before leaving the community and eventually authoring Amish Society (published by Johns Hopkins University Press and now in its fourth edition). Yet, there are no proscriptions in the Bible against seeking medical care. Hence, when they need it, the Amish seek it from those outside the community. Kelley and the clinic’s other physicians are hardly pioneers among researchers in Lancaster County. Victor McKusick, Med ’46, a Hopkins researcher and physician who is widely known as the father of modern genetics, became entranced with the Amish in the 1960s after reading Hostetler’s work. Drawn by the closed nature of the Amish community and its well-kept records, McKusick began making regular trips to Lancaster County, examining people and investigating the effects of genes on them. In 1978, he published Medical Genetic Studies of the Amish (also published by JHU Press), still an important tome in its field, and identified dozens of genetic conditions including brain swelling, cataracts, and macular degeneration. “I’ve always felt that McKusick’s work here contributed greatly to his reputation as a geneticist and to Hopkins’ role as a center for the study of it,” says Morton, the Clinic for Special Children’s chief founder, director, and driving force. By opening themselves up to an outsider decades ago, the Amish have helped science unravel facets of other diseases in the general population, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. “They do this even when they know that we can’t treat them, as is the case with dwarfism and Amish microcephaly,” a metabolic disorder that invariably ends in an infant’s death, says Kelley. “They know they can do someone else some good.” Although many of the genetic diseases the Amish suffer from are unique to them, there are several that pop up in areas where other remote or closed societies

fall under the founder effect, including some in Chile, Indonesia, Ireland, and the Philippines. The clinic’s scientists, including Kelley, have published their findings in top journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, to get the word out to physicians serving those populations and to increase the overall understanding of disease. They say they have broken new ground. For example, Morton points to a gene that controls expression of Casper II, a protein in the nervous system linked to seizures that begin in Amish children at around 18 months. That gene has also been connected to similar defects among a group of non-Amish children in California and may have something to do with autism and schizophrenia. “There’s a whole area of biological research started by the study of this gene in the Amish,” says Morton. Some aren’t sold on the scientific value of the clinic or Kelley’s hands-on research model—including some leading researchers at Johns Hopkins who believe that, absent the rigor and objectivity of academic science, such work has diminished value. “While there is no doubt that Morton and his colleagues have made a contribution to the health of the Amish, they have chosen to work in a location where they are essentially free of the normal, critical scrutiny characteristic of academic medicine,” says David Valle, director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “This choice may, in part, result from their unwillingness and/ or inability to defend their practices and ideas in the normal marketplace of ideas.” But the clinic also has its defenders. Ann Moser, a research associate at the Kennedy Krieger Institute who helped Kelley get started there in 1987, says Valle is off-base. “That’s absolutely not true. There’s some politics involved, and Richard doesn’t like to get involved with that,” she says. “If you ask people who are experts worldwide in metabolic disorders, they’ll tell you that he and his work are highly regarded. There might be some prejudice here at Hopkins, but not elsewhere.” Kelley brushes off the matter. People need him, so he makes himself personally available. Modern medicine that demands that academic researchers compete for grant dollars designed to go to the most prevalent, most deadly diseases—and often discourages personal connections between researcher and patient—doesn’t apply to his situation, he says. (Funding for clinical research

Suffering lives on through genes as

well. The “founder effect” has left their children vulnerable

to dozens of

inherited diseases.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 33

into rare diseases “is the ivory-billed woodpecker of genetic research,” he says.) Drug companies won’t invest in research into remedies for these odd diseases, but he and the clinic will do what they can. Instead of worrying about his standing in academia, Kelley carries on in the field, visiting families, like the one with four children who suffered from Amish nemaline myopathy. All four died while in Kelley’s care. But he thought he saw some hope as the third of the four, a little girl named Lorraine, fought the disease five years ago. He had prescribed steroids in hopes of controlling her asthma and coaxing some muscle growth. He had also given her mother an inhaler filled with albuterol, an asthma-fighting drug, to use when Lorraine struggled for air. Kelley noticed something in the months before she died that he hadn’t seen in the other chicken breast disease cases he’d handled: Lorraine’s chest cavity wasn’t massively restricted at age 1, as had been the case with her two older siblings and many others. What’s more, while children with chicken breast disease tend to go downhill very quickly when faced with an additional illness, such as asthma, Lorraine’s disease moved along more slowly, even though she later died. “It puzzled me,” he says. “How were we to explain this abnormality in how her disease progressed? Normally, you’d say the difference was in the genetics. But in this case, we had seen how the two siblings before her had done, and they did not fit this pattern.” Something in the steroids or the albuterol must have made the difference, he thought, after scanning medical literature. When a younger brother was diagnosed with the disease, Kelley decided to put him on steroids. The dosage, administered orally, was more consistent than the inhaled albuterol, he reasoned, and might be more responsible for the different track that Lorraine’s illness took. “When you’re trying out drugs on these things, it really is serendipity,” Kelley adds. But the brother died a textbook chicken breast disease death at 18 months old. Steroids weren’t the answer. Could it be the albuterol? When he visited tremulous Joshua at age 6 weeks, Kelley knew which drug he’d try next.

elley’s life at Hopkins involves three days each week spent on the phone with concerned parents, returning hundreds of emails from them and physicians who want to tap his far-flung expertise on odd disorders, and doing and overseeing research at the Mass Spectrometry Lab. He skips lunch and runs on a scant few hours of shuteye, sometimes pulling a bedroll out of a drawer in his closet-sized office before stretching out his long frame along almost the entire length of the floor to spend the night.

34 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Endless days are a regular part of the gig for doctors who specialize in strange disorders. Because very few physicians focus on the 7,000 diseases categorized as “rare”— each afflicts 200,000 or fewer people in the United States— those who become experts on one or more of them often drive research for the disease, as well as provide firsthand clinical treatment and consultations. Although 25 million people suffer from rare ailments, money for research into causes and treatments is scarce. Parents of children who suffer from odd syndromes search extensively, and often futilely, for cash that could lead to a cure. Many have formed networks and foundations, such as the Barth Syndrome Foundation, of which Kelley is a scientific adviser, to garner attention from funding agencies and deep-pocketed philanthropists. (Barth syndrome, a metabolic condition that affects the heart muscles of young children, afflicts hundreds of people worldwide, and often leads to death.) Kelley, who maintains a list of about 300 patients who suffer from several dozen different disorders, has seen the phenomenon repeat itself year after year. When he and Morton worked together at Kennedy Krieger, Morton wrote a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health to investigate glutaric aciduria in Lancaster County. He lost out to Hugo Moser, who won an award to look into the efficacy of a homespun treatment to slow the progression of adrenoleukodystrophy, another rare and deadly genetically based metabolic disorder that doesn’t afflict the Amish. (Moser’s research was later dramatized in the 1992 movie Lorenzo’s Oil.) Sensing that academic research for Amish diseases was likely to plod along, if it moved at all, Morton decided to forgo a career as an academic researcher and open the Clinic for Special Children in 1989. He asked Kelley to help him start it. Once the clinic opened on land donated by an Amish farmer, Kelley got to work uncovering the metabolic malfunctions that herald genetic disorders. Kelley’s personalized clinical research method was partly what inspired Morton to work with the Amish and open the clinic, he says. “What he does is a unique form of learning that very few physicians can do. He takes a personal responsibility when it comes to dealing with patients and working through the ins and outs of these rare diseases. The clinic is modeled on that idea.” Kelley rarely charges anyone—Amish or not—for his services. Much of his simple approach to life, based on family and work, mirrors that of the Plain People he serves, say those who deal with him. “He is a man who has few needs,” says Rebecca Kern, a genetic counselor who works for Kelley. And the modesty and drive that mark Kelley’s lack of careerism at least faintly reflect the steadfast Amish avoidance of pride. After returning from visiting Joshua one afternoon, he mused on the value the Amish life has for him. “I’m

not a religious person, but there are some admirable things about the Amish,” he says. “The self-reliance, the way they help each other. The Amish believe deeply in friendship, and friendship is about hope. You could make an argument that friendship is part of what medicine is about. I can offer people whose children I treat some hope—not false hope, but some idea that we can to do something for them. They appreciate that.”

nside the old farmhouse, a fire burns in a wood stove as Joshua and his brother play with a train set on the floor. Their mother, speaking with a slight accent that hints at a dialect of German, tells Kelley about monitoring Joshua’s heart rate. She’s upbeat about Joshua’s health and his prognosis, an optimism that started to take root about a year ago when Kelley noted that his condition differed from that of other chicken breast disease children. Typically, the tremor that announces the disease disappears when they are 3 or 4 months old. Stretch receptors in tendons weaken and die because of a lack of muscle development, so the tremor never comes back. But in Joshua, the tremor returned, as did some reflexes. Although it might not seem like it, these are positive signs; his muscles were working and growing a bit. By age 1, he looked like a normal kid, and not like one who was wasting away. “It was clear that his musculature was working better than we had seen in the children before,” says Kelley. Instead of the telltale mound on the chest—“It usually looks like a growing volcano,” says Kelley—Joshua has only one bump, the result of a curvature in his spine. His development has been relatively normal. “There’s no sign that his chicken breast disease will get worse,” Kelley says. The albuterol, in his estimation, is working. When asked if he has sought evidence in the lab of albuterol’s ability to help infants with chicken breast disease, Kelley says there’s little reason to bother. He’s aware that academic investigators maintain that the rigors and objective criteria of the research study are the

lingua franca of the field—standards and protocols that he can’t always follow. He knows that funding for such an enterprise would be hard to find, that there aren’t enough people who suffer from a rare disease to take part in clinical trials to make them scientifically viable, and that his patients need his help now. “It’s a question of who you want to impress,” Kelley says. “Holmes and I are confident enough that we’re giving albuterol to Elam, the latest child we’ve seen with this disease.” In previous studies, Kelley adds, the drug has shown the ability to modulate the expression of genes. That may be what’s going on with Joshua and the genes that control muscle development. That’s enough evidence, along with Kelley’s own observations, to justify his thinking, he says. Doctors could perform a muscle biopsy on Joshua to see what effect albuterol is having on his tissue, but that would involve poking him with a needle to excise part of a muscle. “I’m very averse to using invasive procedures,” Kelley says. “It’s a hard sell to the scientific community, who want to see some evidence from the lab. If there were other populations who suffered from these particular diseases, then we’d have reason to do that. But in this case, we don’t.” As he folds his lanky frame into his Prius, Kelley pauses to note that Joshua’s life won’t be normal, but it’s likely he’ll at least be able to lead it— unlike every sufferer of the disease before him. He may have to undergo several surgeries to place rods in his spine to correct the scoliosis, or spinal curvature, that he is developing. “He could develop scoliosis to the point where his lungs don’t expand properly, which means we’re replacing one problem with another,” Kelley speculates. “We discussed this at length with his family. It’s possible that we’ve saved him from chicken breast disease, but he may be in a wheelchair his whole life.” Then it’s down the road to the home of another patient. And the next medical mystery. Michael Anft is Johns Hopkins Magazine’s senior writer. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 35

Autopsy, by Julia Carpenter. The artist created a series of 10 portraits, two of which are included in Addiction and Art, about her sister, Amy Johnson, who died of heroin overdose. “The creation of this body of work allowed me to explore her loss as I tried to reconcile my memories about her with the harsh realities of her life lost to addiction.”

36 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Healing Art

In a new book, Johns Hopkins researchers gather art that makes visceral the suffering of addiction.

Hands of Recovery, by Sam T. Barnes. “Practicing orthopedic surgery supports my sculpting materially; whereas sculpting is one of the mainstays of my spiritual life. The power of a spiritual life began to dawn on me nine years ago when I began working the 12 steps of recovery. ... I find that the hard work and sometimes the mystery of the foundry—a process I refer to as ‘art-reco’ (short for art recovery)— supplies me with the balance my life needs.”

All artwork is from Addiction and Art, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press; all captions are quoted from the book’s artist statements.

B y Mat E d e l s o n

lifetime of work in the field of substance abuse has left Pat Santora, a veteran Johns Hopkins researcher, in the grip of her own emotional turmoil— frustrated that her patients are stigmatized, angered that the public still sees addiction as a moral failing rather than a treatable disease, and irritated that, despite her vociferous protests, “in a wonderful acute-care hospital like Johns Hopkins, we have thousands of people who are diagnosed with addictions to alcohol, tobacco, and illegal and/or prescription drugs,” she says. “And like so many acute-care hospitals, we focus primarily on treating the adverse medical consequences of the addiction— heart disease, cancer, cirrhosis—rather than treating the addiction itself.” Santora’s solution would be familiar to any addict who has ever entered a 12-step program: Instead of trying to beat the problem herself, she’s reached out to a higher power, in this case the

power of gifted artists to state her case that addicts are all too human, and that the cost of not properly treating addiction is far too high for society to bear. As she flips through the pages of Addiction and Art ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)—the book she co-edited with Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Jack Henningfield, who was instrumental in uncovering the addictive nature of nicotine, and Margaret Dowell, a professor of art at Carroll Community College—the 61 works of art leave little doubt as to the devastation wrought by addiction. From the high-wire act of recovery depicted on the cover—a tightrope walker balancing on one leg over a pit of half-filled hypodermic needles—to the book’s last piece called Restoration of the Spirit, a close-up of the wary eye of a reformed smoker who knows she’s just one screaming toddler away from a relapse, Addiction and Art represents the complexity of the disease JohnsHHopkins opkinsMM agazine •• SS pring 2010 Johns agazine ummer 2010 37

Driving Under the Influence, by Linda Ruiz. “Driving under the influence is no laughing matter and should not be taken lightly. Driving Under the Influence is a caricature of someone who has taken one too many.”

Flower Child, by Charlotte Huntley. “This painting is named for the ‘flower children’ of the 1960s in San Francisco. This emaciated young man lives in a village in Thailand. Judging from the skeletal condition of his body, I presume he lives on opium. He made this trashy hat and decorated it with flowers. He evidently made the opium pipe too. ”

in its rawest terms. Angst, Heartache, Drowning, River of Tears, Living Hell— the titles alone leave little to the imagination, the art even less. No doubt that’s because the pieces come from all along the addiction continuum, from former and current addicts, to those who work with them, to even those who bury them. When Baltimore funeral director Erich March was asked why he created The Addiction Savior—an oil painting of Jesus clutching two addicts, his thorny crown replaced by a ring of cigarette butts, and a heroin needle and beer bottle substituting for crucifixion nails— 38 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

March’s reply was both chilling and deadly accurate. “These,” he says of the people in the painting, “are my clients.” Henningfield, too, knows both the pain of addiction and the power of art to communicate. The former director, along with Santora, of the Johns Hopkins–headquartered program Innovators Combating Substance Abuse, Henningfield had a younger brother land in jail as a result of addiction and selling crystal meth. That wasn’t a surprise, given the grip of the drug. What was a shock for Henningfield was the ability of art, in essence, to have the opposite

effect of drugs, to re-sensitize people, particularly Henningfield’s colleagues, to the population they serve. His own “aha” moment came in 2002, when the American Visionary Art Museum held one of the first exhibitions of art done by addicts. Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM’s founder, asked him to speak at the opening. “I remember thinking, ‘What do I know about art?’” says Henningfield, who nonetheless was impressed by the exhibition, called High on Life. “The art was amazing. It was so powerful. It hit me that what motivates us as scientists is

Split, by Stephanie Funk. “Having suffered the loss of friends and estrangement from family members due to alcoholism, I understand that one does not have to use substances to suffer from abuse and addiction.”

the human condition. We do the science to help understand it, but there’s nothing you can do in the laboratory, in my opinion, that replicates the human experience of addiction. But art reveals it.” Henningfield’s colleagues were equally moved when he and Santora started displaying similar art at conferences. Researchers, educators, clinicians, therapists—all found their way to their ersatz gallery. Again. And again. And again. “People would stay for hours. They’d meet friends there. Pull up chairs. Start talking about the concepts exemplified in the art,” says Santora. “We had

people crying, coming up to us, saying, ‘This is what it’s all about for me.’” The art even stood out in academic texts. In their 2007 book, Addiction Treatment: Science and Policy for the Twenty-first Century, the duo prevailed upon an initially reluctant Johns Hopkins University Press to include eight color pages of artwork among the more than two dozen articles. “They weren’t really crazy about [including the art] because it didn’t really fit,” says Henningfield. “They said it was expensive to do.” But guess what people remembered

about the book? The art—so much so that the press asked Henningfield and Santora to create Addiction and Art, with the assistance of Dowell, herself a talented artist. The real question is whether a soft subject such as art can have a hard impact on both public policy and public opinion regarding treatment of a disease. Henningfield says there’s already precedent for such a mind shift: the world’s largest community art project in history, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, first unveiled on the National Mall in 1987. “When AIDS first happened, there were people in the Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 39

Untitled 101, by Bricelyn H. Strauch. “This piece is meant to evoke emotions associated with isolation and introspection in the viewer, because addiction is an internal struggle, regardless of the addict’s desire to quit.”

administration saying those people did it to themselves, they deserved to go to hell in a handbasket,” recalls Henningfield. It took art—in this case nearly 2,000 stitched eulogies, each one representing someone’s son, or daughter, or lover, or friend—to put a human face on an illness and finally elicit compassion for their suffering. “These ‘artists’ galvanized people, humanizing this horrible disease,” says Santora. “It brought together a leadership coalition—the people at the CDC, the NIH, the pharmaceutical companies, philanthropies. Where we are today with AIDS started because of the quilt.” Billions of research dollars later, 40 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

HIV infection has moved from a precursor to a fatal disease to a chronic, treatable illness. The road for treating people with addictions is not as easy. Santora, who recently joined the Center for Substance Treatment as a public health analyst, claims that addiction is treatable. (She cites the extensive research of A. Thomas McLellan, deputy director for demand reduction for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who notes in some of his more than 400 articles on the subject that addicts are no more likely to relapse than those with other chronic diseases such as hypertension and asthma.) But skeptics still abound.

To some, addiction treatment is just throwing good money after bad, trying to apply medical models to what they consider mental weakness, watching as patients, seemingly of their own volition, implode again and again. Can art reach into those hearts and minds and change all of that? Perhaps that’s unrealistic. But with the universal acknowledgment of the physical and fiscal toll of addiction on America— the authors write in their introduction that addiction accounts for one in five deaths annually and costs more than a half trillion dollars—what’s really needed is a dialogue. From that vantage point, art rendering the addiction

I’m Dying for a Smoke, by Marie Balla. “The one addiction society is numb to is tobacco smoking. ‘Death sticks,’ ‘cancer sticks,’ ‘tar fix’ are all slang terms I’ve learned from cigaratte smokers. Maybe it’s the very slow, internal, unnoticeable effects of nicotine addiction that seem angelic in comparison to meth or coke addiction?”

0 Refills Left, by Derek S. Cumings. “Some will not see the juxtaposition if they only see medication as a tool of help. I hope most see medication as the double-edged sword it has become. Why don’t we secure medicine cabinets half as well as gun cabinets?”

experience may be a very good conversation starter. This idea was driven home to Henningfield by his friend, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. A lifelong migraine sufferer, Koop—who was on the panel that chose the art for the book—told Henningfield that he’d never been able to explain to others what the pain was like until the day he saw an art exhibit portraying migraine victims. “He told me he walked through and said, ‘That’s it! That’s how I feel.’” The isolation of addiction, the sense of having pain no one can understand or relate to—art can address

these things, perhaps most importantly to an audience that’s still malleable. As part of their work, Santora and Henningfield created downloadable guidelines for creating exhibitions of art by those whose lives have been touched by addiction, similar to the shows they held at academic conferences. Dowell, their artistic collaborator on the book and the guidelines, held one such exhibit at Carroll Community College. It was the most-attended function in the school’s history. Dowell thinks the key was including submissions from area high school and college students as well as local artists, which, as with the AIDS quilt, framed a disease as not

being the affliction of strangers but of one’s neighbors, friends, and family. “I walked past one night at 8 p.m., and the gallery was full of people,” Dowell says. One attendee was a young incarcerated woman. “She said, ‘I came over with the juvenile detention people. They said we could have an outing, go anywhere we wanted. And I picked here.’” There’s a case for art as preventive medicine. Mat Edelson is a Baltimore-based health, science, and sports journalist and former director of the Johns Hopkins Health Newsfeed. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 41

The

Keys to By Nick Romeo Photo

Will Kirk

Success

he first piano Dasha Bukhartseva ever played was an old, poorly tuned upright that sat in her aunt’s living room in Vishniaki, a small village in Ukraine. Barely a toddler, she’d waddle over to it, open the lid, and bang away at the keys for hours. At age 8, having moved with her mother, Natasha, to Odessa, she started formal lessons. Though Natasha didn’t imagine her daughter would ever devote her life to the piano, she thought playing an instrument would be enriching for her, and it might provide some needed distraction from the crime and poverty of post-Soviet Union Odessa. But music was much more than a distraction for Bukhartseva. Her interest was instant and powerful—“I felt it was the thing I’d do all my life,” she says—and her talent quickly became obvious. Just three months after Bukhartseva began taking lessons, she won her first competition. Without a piano of her own, however, her progress was limited. Bukhartseva could only practice when her mother left her job early and drove her to the music school. As she began tackling more difficult pieces, such intermittent practice was not enough. So her mother devised a solution—she took a long piece of cardboard and drew a piano keyboard on it. Bukhartseva practiced on it for hours on the days she couldn’t make it to the music school. “I loved that paper keyboard,” says Bukhartseva. For a brief time, Bukhartseva had a piano of her own, an ancient upright donated by an equally ancient man Natasha met on a bus. But that was short-lived. Bukhartseva and her mother were abruptly evicted when their landlord rented their room, right out from under them, for a higher price. “They’d thrown away all our food, and our stuff was in boxes,” says Bukhartseva. “We slept on chairs in the lobby for that night.” Mother and daughter ended up staying at the music school. The director gave them a key, and for almost six months they slept in a classroom. The living quarters were cramped and uncomfortable, but for Bukhartseva, there was one tremendous benefit: “When I woke up,” she says, “it was pianos everywhere.” In September 2006, Bukhartseva participated in an outdoor concert in Odessa. Dan and Lynne Levinson, an American couple whose cruise happened to dock nearby, were in the audience. They couldn’t believe what they heard—such a waiflike creature producing such a powerful sound. “She was this tiny thing, only 14,” recalls Dan Levinson. “And she

42 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

blew everyone’s socks off.” When the couple went to congratulate Bukhartseva after the concert, they told her about a famous music festival in their hometown of Aspen, Colorado. Half-joking, they asked her if she’d like to play there. Bukhartseva’s eyes brightened. “When do we go and what do I play?” she asked in English, a language she’d studied since grade school. The couple hadn’t meant the question as a serious invitation, but they found themselves not wanting to disappoint the young pianist. They were charmed by her manners, impressed by her playing, and moved by the difficulties she had faced. With the help of scholarships from the Aspen Music Festival, the Levinsons were able to bring her and her mother to Aspen for a summer. Bukhartseva took lessons from Ann Schein, a renowned pianist and former Peabody Institute professor, and practiced on the best pianos she had ever played. She also discovered certain basic problems with her technique. Specifically, she hadn’t developed the wrist and finger strength necessary to play high-quality pianos with weighted keys. There was much work to be done. The Levinsons invited Bukhartseva, along with her mother, back to Aspen for a second summer, then set them up in New York City so Bukhartseva could study in Juilliard’s precollege program and prepare for conservatory auditions. Fundraising among their friends, the Levinsons were able to pay for an apartment and Bukhartseva’s musical training. Bukhartseva prepared meticulously for her Peabody audition. For a Mozart sonata, she practiced the opening gesture hundreds of times a day, trying to find the perfect dynamic, tone, and articulation. “I highlighted every voice of the fugue in a different color—four colors for four voices,” she says. “Then on YouTube I watched performances by Richter, Horowitz, and other pianists I like.” She nailed the audition. Now a sophomore at Peabody, Bukhartseva is still working to overcome some of her bad musical habits. “One of her challenges is correcting some basic technical issues that result from her somewhat unusual background,” says her teacher, Peabody faculty member Yong Hi Moon. “But she plays with great spontaneity and expressive power.” And she does so on a Steinway Grand. New York–based freelancer Nick Romeo writes about classical music for Carnegie Hall and is working on a book about young musicians.

Tracing a Peabody studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s musical journey, piano by piano.

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 43

Immortal Cells, Enduring Issues

Nearly 60 years after cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks’ body, those cells still live. So do the ethical issues raised by a best-selling book about her. B y D ale Keiger

I llustration

HELA ETHICS—Final young lab assistant attended an autopsy at the Johns Hopkins Hospital morgue on October 4, 1951. The assistant was Mary Kubicek. The autopsy was of a woman who had died at 31 from the metastasized cervical cancer that had so ravaged her there was scarcely an organ in her body not riddled with malignancies. Kubicek had never seen a corpse before and tried to avert her gaze from the face to the hands and feet. That’s when she was startled by the deceased woman’s chipped red toenail polish. Kubicek later told writer Rebecca Skloot, “When I saw those toenails, I nearly fainted. I thought, ‘Oh jeez, she’s a real person.’” The real person was Henrietta Lacks. Much of the American public knows at least the outline of her story since publication of Skloot’s best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. When Lacks came to Hopkins for treatment of her cancer, a surgeon sliced away small samples of the malignancy and Lacks’ healthy cervical tissue for George Gey, the director of tissue culture research at Hopkins. By 1951, Gey was nearly 30 years into a quest to culture “immortal” cell lines: human cells that would reproduce endlessly in test tubes to provide a steady supply of cells for medical research. Gey had experienced little but failure when a Hopkins resident dropped off the pieces of Henrietta’s tissue. Soon after the malignant cells, labeled “HeLa,” were placed in culture medium by Kubicek, who was Gey’s lab assistant, they began to reproduce, doubling within 24 hours. They have never stopped. They now live by the uncountable 44 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

D avid P lunkert trillions in laboratories and the inventories of biologics companies throughout the world, still robust after 60 years and perfect for all sorts of research. The HeLa cell line has been the foundation of a remarkable number of medical advances, including the polio vaccine, the cancer drug tamoxifen, chemotherapy, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and treatments for influenza, leukemia, and Parkinson’s disease. Though the science and history in Skloot’s book are fascinating, they are not what has made it a national best seller. What has resonated with readers are the interwoven narratives of Henrietta Lacks’ sad life and her daughter Deborah’s pursuit of knowledge about the mother she never knew. And there is one more thing. Text on the front cover of Skloot’s book reads, “Doctors took her cells without asking.” The inside flap continues, “Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits.” A significant segment of the public harbors a deeply rooted mistrust of medical research. They do not trust physicians and scientists to be open and honest with them. They fear that the privacy of their medical records will not be respected. They believe that someone somewhere is making a lot of money off of drugs and biological products that were developed using pieces of tissue from people who now are entitled to a

Johns Hopkins Magazine â&#x20AC;˘ Summer 2010 45

piece of the profits. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks speaks to that skepticism, and above all is the vivid testament of how the Lackses feel they’ve been treated by physicians, researchers, journalists, and corporations. The book will not reassure those already suspicious that they are being used. Skloot says, “The thing that I hear more than anything [from readers] is, ‘We want to know what’s going on. We don’t want to feel like someone is doing something behind our backs.’” People want their individual humanity acknowledged and respected. Physicians and scientists and ethicists know this. They also know that doing the right thing, which can seem so straightforward to the public, gets more complicated all the time. hen Lacks came to Johns Hopkins complaining that she had “a knot” on her womb, she entered the “colored ward” in the only major hospital in Baltimore that would treat an African American. She received treatment that did not succeed but was state of the art in 1951. Simultaneous with her care, researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere were searching for better ways to diagnose cervical cancer, which was killing 15,000 women per year. They wanted a method of growing cervical cancer cells in the lab. That dovetailed with George Gey’s quest to create an immortal cell line. He received tissue samples from every cervical cancer patient who came through Hopkins’ door, including Lacks. Skloot states in her book that no one asked Lacks for permission to take some of her tissue for Gey’s research. Documentary evidence of what was said at her bedside is scant and can be taken either as supporting Skloot’s assertion or arguing against any retrospective moral judgment. Joann Rodgers, senior adviser for science, crisis, and executive communications at the School of Medicine, says, “People I’ve talked to here have told me that physicians and scientists did talk to their patients if they wanted to take tissue, if they wanted to have them participate in research.” But Skloot has seen the consent form for Lacks’ treatment, and it does not include any mention of taking tissue for research. Howard Jones, who was Lacks’ gynecologist at the hospital, told Skloot that he never sought consent for tissue samples. Present-day researchers at Hopkins acknowledge that in the 1950s, the very concept of informed consent as it’s now known was not on researchers’ minds. Daniel Ford, vice dean for clinical investigation at the School of Medicine, observes,

“In that era, researchers got a little carried away with science and sometimes forgot the patient, and physicians treated patients the same way clinically—it wasn’t shared decision making.” David Nichols, vice dean for education at the school, adds, “It was a relationship that was utterly imbalanced with respect to power and privilege. There’s a lingering sense, even today, of this imbalance, which has deep historical roots.” Before a procedure at Hopkins, patients now sign a consent form that includes this clause: “Johns Hopkins may dispose of any tissues or parts that are removed during the procedure. Johns Hopkins may retain, preserve, or use these tissues or parts for internal teaching or other educational purposes without my permission, even if these tissues or parts identify me. However, Johns Hopkins may only use or disclose tissues or parts that identify me for research with my permission or with approval of a review board governed by federal laws protecting these activities. If the tissues or parts do not identify me, Johns Hopkins may use them for scientific (research) purposes without my permission or action by a review board.” Three things make consent a more complicated matter than simply reading a clause like that and initialing the form. First, in some cases a patient may be asked to provide a biospecimen— tissue, a DNA swab, a blood sample— for a specific research project that has been approved by an institutional review board (IRB) and that requires specific consent. More often, though, researchers accumulate biospecimens for future use in research that cannot be specified at the time of collection. In 1951, someone could have told Henrietta Lacks or her husband that they wanted cells from Henrietta’s cervix to research a better means of diagnosing her cancer. They could not have told her that someday science would want her cells for research on the effects of zero gravity in outer space, or for the study of leukemia or lactose intolerance or longevity or the mating of mosquitoes, all of which has happened. Chi Van Dang, the School of Medicine’s vice dean for research, points out that scientists can’t possibly anticipate many types of future research. He says, “Do we have the trust of the public to say, ‘Look, we have your cells. What we’ll do with these cells, I can tell you to some extent now, but five or 10 years from now they could be used in a completely different way. With your permission, we need to have that flexibility.’” Scientists worry that stringent

“People see bits and parts of themselves as bits and parts of themselves, you know?”

46 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

regulations requiring specific consent for any future uses of biospecimens could hamstring research. But a recent court case demonstrates that Dang’s hoped-for flexibility on the part of the public cannot be assumed. Arizona State University recently settled, for $700,000, a lawsuit brought by Havasupai Indians after they learned that blood samples donated for a study on diabetes among tribe members were also used for research on schizophrenia and inbreeding. The Havasupai hold sacred ancestral stories about their origins in the valley they still inhabit, and they were particularly offended to learn that their samples were used in research about the migration of ancient peoples from Asia. They had not been asked if their blood could be used for those additional purposes, and they sued. Joan Scott, director of Hopkins’ Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a research scientist at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, says, “People see bits and parts of themselves as bits and parts of themselves, you know? We find that in the research we’ve done there really is a strong altruistic vein in the American public, in particular individuals who have diseases. That’s their way of helping someone not go through the same things they did. [But] what they do expect is transparency and full disclosure about what’s going to be done with the sample.” Skloot has interviewed plaintiffs in lawsuits over tissue research: “Over and over again they say, ‘If they had just asked us, we’d have said yes.’” The second thing that makes informed consent complicated is the “informed” part. Scientists making a conscientious effort to secure informed consent must wrestle with translating complex issues for a lay audience. A section of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes Hopkins researchers, including renowned geneticist Victor McKusick, Med ’46, taking blood samples from members of the Lacks family in 1976. McKusick and his assistant at the time, Susan Hsu, were searching for DNA markers that could identify HeLa cells in any lab sample. They could not recall for Skloot how well they had informed Deborah Lacks about why they wanted some of her blood. But years later Lacks told Skloot that she believed she had submitted to a test for cancer. Hsu recalled for Skloot giving David Lacks, Henrietta’s husband, a technical explanation of why she wanted to draw blood, using terms like “HLA androgen [sic],” “genetic marker profile,” and “genotype.” David had a fourth-grade education. Did Hsu inform him, or baffle him? Says Skloot, “People get this stuff if you can explain it to them clearly. There is a science literacy problem, but there’s a bigger problem

with a lack of communication from the scientists. If you go to a hospital and you don’t speak English, you’re going to get a translator—French, Spanish, whatever. If you walk in and you don’t speak science, they’re not going to call in the science translator who says, ‘Let me help explain this to you.’” Finally, current consent regulations cover only studies done by researchers who have firsthand contact with tissue donors. If you are a scientist working with anonymized tissue samples taken from a repository, that is not considered research on a human subject and no informed consent is required. Ruth Faden, director of the Berman Institute, raises one more ethical issue: when to ask for informed consent. Is it proper, when patients are about to undergo surgery and have to deal with consent for the operations, to present them with another set of decisions regarding what might be done with their tissues? Faden recently had surgery to repair her shoulder’s rotator cuff; she notes that like anyone, she has a finite amount of emotional energy, and in this case wanted to apply it to thinking clearly about her impending procedure, not what might be done with some of “the gunk,” as she puts it, that was cleaned out of her shoulder. Says Scott, “How much are people going to be paying attention? They’re under stress from their condition, then you’ve got this other thing that you shove underneath their noses.”

n the January 30, 1976, issue of Science, McKusick co-authored a paper, “Genetic Characteristics of the HeLa Cell.” That paper published the analysis of the blood drawn from Deborah Lacks and others in her family and listed 43 genetic markers found in the Lackses’ DNA. The paper identified Henrietta and listed family members as “Husband,” “Child 1,” and “Child 2.” Your DNA reveals who you are in the most fundamental sense—your genetic abnormalities if you have any, your predisposition to certain diseases such as breast cancer, whether your parents are really your parents or your sister is really your sister. Today no ethical researcher would publish the sort of genetic information complete with identifiers that McKusick published in 1976. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reports other examples of violations of the Lackses’ privacy. For example, someone, presumably at Hopkins, gave Henrietta’s medical records to journalist Michael Gold, who quoted from them in his 1985 book A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman’s Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. According to Skloot, no one in the Lacks famJohns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 47

ily had ever seen those records or given permission for their release. Gold included a stomach-churning description of Henrietta’s autopsy. He later told Skloot that he recalled unsuccessful attempts to contact the family; she quotes him as telling her, “And to be honest, the family wasn’t really my focus. . . . I just thought they might make some interesting color for the scientific story.” The privacy of medical information remains an evergrowing concern as biomedical research, both academic and commercial, has burgeoned. In 1999, RAND Corporation estimated, in a monograph titled Handbook of Human Tissue Sources, that 307.1 million human tissue samples were stored in various repositories throughout the United States. No doubt that number is significantly larger today. The term “biobank” has entered the lexicon. A biobank is a collection of human tissue, like a living database of human cells. National biobanks now exist in Estonia, Canada, Japan, Latvia, Singapore, Sweden, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Biobanks have been created by disease advocacy groups, commercial research companies, and academic centers such as Howard University, which founded the National Human Genome Center to foster genomic research on African Americans and African diaspora populations. “Recently, there’s a biobank on every corner,” says Scott. “That may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much.” Geneticists are excited by the prospect of new research made possible by linking genetic samples in these biobanks to clinical information contained in digitized medical records. This raises new privacy concerns. Some laboratories and biobanks have procedures that strip the identifiers from specimens, so that no one knows from whom they came. But linking those samples to the information contained in medical records databases, while scientifically useful, may erode some of the privacy safeguards that depend on biospecimens being truly anonymized. Ford recalls a researcher in Arizona who did an experiment on a 1,000-person public biodatabase that included genetic and clinical data on each person. “It was said to be de-identified,” Ford says—all identifiers stripped out. “That means it did not have to be approved by a review board and anybody could access it— detective, lawyer, whatever, OK?” The researcher took 50 entries selected at random and by cross-referencing the data with other public information was able to match a person’s name to 47 out of 50. Medical and genetic records have long lives. Henrietta Lacks’ medical records were made public again as recently as September 2009 by the authors of an article that appeared in Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. One of those authors was Grover Hutchins, a professor of pathology at the School of Medicine. 48 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

s genetic medicine, genomic science, and bioengineering become bigger fields, they generate more opportunities for profit by commercial enterprises. The public understands that human biospecimens may be used by scientists purely for the advancement of knowledge and the development of new medical therapies, but they’re also used by business to generate profits; through technology transfer, they have the potential to generate profits for universities as well. Few reviews of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or stories about its author have failed to mention that while Johns Hopkins has never sold, licensed, or patented HeLa cells, a number of commercial firms have sold them and continue to do so, and none of the proceeds have ever gone to Henrietta’s descendants. There seems to be no precise accounting of how much money has been made from HeLa; the near-meaningless figure of “multi-millions” has been in circulation since publication of Skloot’s book. But the amount is assumed to be substantial. In the afterword, Skloot writes, “Today, tissue-supply companies range from small private businesses to huge corporations, like Ardais, which pays the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Duke University Medical Center, and many others an undisclosed amount of money for exclusive access to tissues collected from their patients.” Meanwhile, the public asks: If a corporation used my tissue sample—a piece of my body—to develop a product that now generates profits, why am I not entitled to a share of those profits? Ethicists speak of a “common good model” in which tissue donors are not compensated because they donated pieces of themselves not in the hope of a future payday but to further science that contributes to the common good. In this model, the payoff is not in dollars but in better medicine that someday might cure your disease or repair your injury. All well and good, but two factors complicate the situation. The first is articulated by Faden: “The hitch with this vision, which ethically has so much to commend it, is the suppressed moral premise that everyone will benefit from the advances that will result from this shared agreement to let our biospecimens be used for science,” says Faden. “This vision of the shared public good presupposes that all of us really benefit, with the emphasis on all of us. So in the absence of guaranteed access to a decent level of medical care, the moral justification for that structure breaks down.” She adds, “One of the really tragic dimensions of the Lacks story is the fact that her children still experience enormous difficulty getting access to decent medical care.” Says Skloot, “The truth is, not everyone does benefit. The people who benefit are people with money. The people it doesn’t help are people like the Lackses, people who

do not have money, minorities. People who historically have been hurt most by research done without their consent tend to be the ones who do not benefit.” Second, a biotechnology company or pharmaceutical company does not operate for the common good; it operates to enrich its investors. That suggests a different equation. If your labor as an employee contributes to the company’s success, that company owes you a salary. Why doesn’t the company owe you if it developed a lucrative product from a piece of your body? And regardless of its contributions to the common good, were a nonprofit medical center to generate revenue from selling your cells to a corporation like Ardais, wouldn’t you be entitled to a share? Researchers and ethicists understand the sentiment behind these questions, but they point out several complications. Ethicists warn of the commodification of human tissue and the dangers of creating a market for body parts, even the tiniest of body parts. Researchers note that Henrietta Lacks’ story—a scientific breakthrough of immense importance that derived from the cells of a single person— is extraordinarily rare. Most often, advances in biomedical research involve hundreds if not tens of thousands of biospecimens, many of which may have been collected five, seven, 10 years ago. (Almost 60 years ago if they’re HeLa.) How does a research center or a for-profit company track down all of those donors to pay a royalty or fee? Says Nichols, the Hopkins vice dean for education, “You can imagine a world in which the retrospective reporting and notification requirements become so onerous that one is not able to do science at all, and the potential benefits from discovery are withheld from future patients because science is forced to grind to a halt. On the other hand, patients have rights that have to be respected, particularly if there’s commercial value.” If the alternative is to pay for tissue samples at the time they are taken, in case someone might gain commercially from them in the future, will nonprofit research centers be able to afford large-scale studies? The public wants its privacy guaranteed. How do researchers or companies know whom to pay retroactively if identifiers have been stripped from every specimen used in their research? As yet no one knows the answers to these questions. One solution, says Dang, is for consent forms to include a waiver of rights to any financial benefits.

ohns Hopkins Magazine wanted to include the Lacks family in this discussion, but Sonny Lacks, Henrietta’s son, indicated by way of Skloot that they had spoken to enough journalists and were disinclined to speak to one more. Over the years some of the Lackses have complained about a lack of compensation, especially in light of their difficulties paying for health care. But various family members also have stated they have no desire to impede research, and they’re proud of the contribution Henrietta has made to science. Much of their annoyance comes down to a lack of communication. They resent that for years no one told them about HeLa cells. They believe that they themselves were used in research without adequate informed consent. They are angry that no one asked before releasing Henrietta’s medical records or the genetic markers that are as much theirs as Henrietta’s. They would like to have been acknowledged decades ago by researchers as they have now been acknowledged by Skloot’s book. Acknowledgment is not just a courtesy, it’s a basic human need and important in addressing the power imbalance that people still feel when illness or injury forces them to deal with medicine, science, and large institutions like hospitals, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. The needs of science or institutions can become decoupled from the needs of individuals. That’s why the public still worries about informed consent, privacy, and who profits from their participation in research. Dang says, “We need to remind scientists, physicians, and businesspeople that we have a common goal and that the patient is waiting—for treatment, for a cure, for humanity, and particularly for hope. We often get lost in our own world when there is a disjunction of science and humanity—the self-interested drive for recognition and glory can lead us down the wrong path that crosses ethical boundaries.” Says Joann Rodgers, “When people come to a [medical] institution, they are vulnerable. If you’re sick and you come here for care, we need to be sure there’s always recognition of that vulnerability.” The vulnerable want medicine and science to acknowledge and respect that they are people, and not need to be reminded of that, too late, by chipped red nail polish.

Why doesn’t the company owe you if it developed a lucrative product from a piece of your body?

Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 49

zz Buzz The

What Bees Tell Us about Global Climate Change

B y S haron Tregaskis I llustration

B ill C igliano

tanding in the apiary on the grounds of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, Wayne Esaias, A&S ’67, digs through the canvas shoulder bag leaning against his leg in search of the cable he uses to download data. It’s dusk as he runs the cord from his laptop—precariously perched on the beam of a cast-iron platform scale—to a small, batteryoperated data logger attached to the spring inside the scale’s steel column. In the 1800s, a scale like this would have weighed sacks of grain or crates of apples, peaches, and melons. Since arriving at the USDA’s bee lab in January 2007, this scale has been loaded with a single item: a colony of Apis mellifera, the fuzzy, black-and-yellow honey bee. An attached, 12-bit recorder captures the hive’s weight to within a 10th of a pound, along with a daily register of relative ambient humidity and temperature. On this late January afternoon, during a comparatively balmy respite between the blizzards that dumped several feet of snow on the Middle Atlantic states, the bees, their honey, and the wooden boxes in which they live weigh 94.5 pounds. In mid-July, as last year’s unusually long nectar flow finally ebbed, the whole contraption topped out at 275 pounds, including nearly 150 pounds of honey. “Right now, the colony is in a cluster about the size of a soccer ball,” says Esaias, who’s kept bees for nearly two decades and knows without lifting the lid what’s going on inside this hive. “The center of the cluster is where the queen is, and they’re keeping her at 93 degrees—the rest are just hanging there, tensing their flight muscles to generate heat.” Provided that they have enough calories to fuel their winter workout, a healthy colony can survive as far north as Anchorage, Alaska. “They slowly eat their way up through the winter,” he says. “It’s a race: Will they eat all their honey before the nectar flows, or not?” To make sure their charges win that race, apiarists have long relied on scale hives for vital management clues. By tracking daily weight variations, a beekeeper can discern when the colony needs a nutritional boost to carry it through lean times, whether to add extra combs for honey storage, even detect incursions by marauding robber bees—all without disturb50 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

ing the colony. A graph of the hive’s weight—which can increase by as much as 35 pounds a day in some parts of the United States during peak nectar flow—reveals the date on which the bees’ foraging was most productive and provides a direct record of successful pollination. “Around here, the bees make their living in the month of May,” says Esaias, noting that his bees often achieve daily spikes of 25 pounds, the maximum in Maryland. “There’s almost no nectar coming in for the rest of the year.” A scientist by training and career oceanographer at NASA, Esaias established the Mink Hollow Apiary in his Highland, Maryland, backyard in 1992 with a trio of handme-down hives and an antique platform scale much like the one at the Beltsville bee lab. Ever since, he’s maintained a meticulous record of the bees’ daily weight, as well as weather patterns and such details as his efforts to keep them healthy. In late 2006, honey bees nationwide began disappearing in an ongoing syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD). Entire hives went empty as bees inexplicably abandoned their young and their honey. Commercial beekeepers reported losses up to 90 percent, and the large-scale farmers who rely on honey bees to ensure rich harvests of almonds, apples, and sunflowers became very, very nervous. Looking for clues, Esaias turned to his own records. While the resulting graphs threw no light on the cause of CCD, a staggering trend emerged: In the span of just 15 seasons, the date on which his Mink Hollow bees brought home the most nectar had shifted by two weeks— from late May to the middle of the month. “I was shocked when I plotted this up,” he says. “It was right under my nose, going on the whole time.” The epiphany would lead Esaias to launch a series of research collaborations, featuring honey bees and other pollinators, to investigate the relationships among plants, pollinators, and weather patterns. Already, the work has begun to reveal insights into the often unintended consequences of human interventions in natural and agricultural ecosystems, and exposed significant gaps in how we understand the effect climate change will have on everything from food production to terrestrial ecology.

of insects seduced by color and scent transfer pollen as they brush up against stamens and pistils in the quest for a good meal. It’s an intricate dance cued by rainfall, daylight, and soil and air temperature throughout the year, contingent on the syncopated life cycles of plants and pollinators. The resulting seed bodies—everything from apples to zucchini— account for one-third of the modern American diet. North America boasts 20,000 species of native insect pollinators, maybe more; nobody knows the precise figure. Maryland has more than 400 species of native bees—and while their ground-dwelling, solitary habits, often cranky disposition, and narrowly tailored symbiosis with individual plant species are perfectly attuned to a diverse native ecosystem, they’re a poor fit in an intensively managed, large-scale agricultural system. Enter Apis mellifera, transported to this continent in the mid-1600s by European colonists who relied on the docile, collaborative insects for the array of crops they pollinate, the relative ease of domestication, and the volume of sweet syrup they produce. As the 20th century hit its midpoint, the honey bee hit the fast track. National farm policies driven by an emerging industrial food system promoted a “get big or get out” mindset. Farms consolidated, and to increase the efficiency of the massive machines required to work hundreds of acres, farmers eradicated hedgerows where native pollinators once thrived. Diversified family farms producing blooms—and food for pollinators—all season morphed into square miles planted with a single crop, blossoming en masse in a bloom-and-bust cycle ill-suited to the survival of pollinators. “It’s not that honey bees are necessarily better pollinators than other bees or insects,” says University of California, Riverside, entomologist P. Kirk Visscher. “It’s just that if you want a million of them to show up this week and be taken out two weeks later before you put on insecticide treatment that would kill them, it has to be honey bees because they’re portable and managed in large numbers.” Today, hives loaded on tractor-trailers commute from California almond plantations to Florida orange groves and Maine blueberry barrens and everywhere in between, credited with a $14 billion contribution to the nation’s food production. The system hinges on a new syncopation: enough honey bees in the right place, at the right time to pollinate crops nationwide. This spring, as colony collapse was again credited with national honey bee losses of 30 percent and the inventory of robust hives dipped dangerously low, brokers flew in honey bees from overseas to stay ahead of demand.

“I was shocked when I plotted this up,” Esaias says. “It was right under my nose, going on the whole time.”

nchored to the soil by their roots, plants can’t go out in search of the ideal mate—or any mate at all. To ensure that their gametes mix and match with others of their kind to perpetuate the species, they release pollen on the wind or, using a strategy that emerged more than 65 million years ago, deploy showy blooms and sweet nectar to recruit mobile helpmates. Bats, birds, and a wide range 52 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Esaias downloads data from bee hives at Mink Hollow Apiary, which he maintains in his backyard in Highland, Maryland.

Elaine Esaias

aised on a family farm at the northern edge of the Baltimore City limits, Esaias had a lifelong fascination with honey bees. But it took a bit of serendipity—and the fall of the Berlin Wall—to turn him into a beekeeper. Esaias was 43 when East and West Germans clambered atop the Wall in November 1989. Son Colin, then 11, was a Boy Scout. As diplomatic ties between the United States and Eastern Europe thawed, defense contractors living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., started losing their jobs—among them, the assistant scoutmaster of Colin’s troop. At a troop meeting father and son attended just days before the leader’s departure, the man offered up his honey bees and the equipment to tend them. “We’ll take them,” piped up Colin, with a glance to his father. “Won’t we, Dad?” Esaias kept mum about the allergic reaction to hornet stings that had twice landed him in the hospital (honey bees don’t pose the same hazard for him, experience has revealed) and the pair promptly retrieved their new charges. “We jumped right in and figured it out from there,” says Colin, now a business student in Austin, Texas. Over the course of that first year, Wayne Esaias would read some 3,000 pages of beekeeping literature. Together, father and son attended beekeeping meetings, soaking up all they could from those with more experience. The effort would— in their best year—yield 1,500 pounds of honey harvested from 15 hives. As Colin and his younger sister, Caroline, proceeded through high school, they earned as much as $2,000 in annual profits from the operation, says their father. The colonies at Mink Hollow Apiary lead a more pastoral existence than their commercially managed counterparts. The hives remain in place year-round and the fairweather fliers rarely forage more than one and a half miles from home. Instead of the high-tech, corn syrup–based diet fed to bees when they are on the road, the Mink Hollow gang dines on stores of honey they produce from the spring nectar flow of trees near the apiary. To protect his charges from the ravages of tracheal mites and the aptly named,

blood-sucking Varroa destructor—a disease-spreading mite introduced from the United Kingdom and the Pacific Rim only a few years before the Mink Hollow Apiary was established—Esaias relies on a combination of intensive management and, as a last resort, chemical miticides. When Colin left for college, Caroline picked up the slack, and even after she started her undergraduate studies, returned on spring and summer breaks to help with the honey harvest. For a hand during the semester, Wayne Esaias tapped their younger cousin. He also reinvigorated the local Howard County Beekeepers Association and ascended, for a time, to its presidency. “It’s in my dad’s nature to recruit people and grow awareness,” says Colin. “I don’t think he means to do it, but it always ends up happening.” In 1995, he passed the written, oral, laboratory, and practical exams to become an Eastern Apiculture Society–credentialed master beekeeper, one of just 130 from Maine to Florida. He coached newcomers, organized the honey competition at the county fair, appeared before local planning boards drafting beekeeping regulations, and gave talks throughout the region. “Bees,” says Esaias, “can take over your life.” Because nectar flow varies by plant species, as well as such climatic and meteorological conditions as rainfall, temperature, and daylight hours, each apiary produces a unique record of local flora and weather patterns in the hue and flavor of its honey. In the Northeast, autumnal Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 53

stands of goldenrod yield a rich, amber product late in the season. In the Southeast, the midsummer blossoms of the sourwood tree produce a light, aromatic syrup with a deep, spicy flavor. As Esaias plumbed his data in the wake of CCD, he started wondering if his bees might offer clues to a puzzle he and the kids had observed in the backyard. Old-timers in the Baltimore area consider amber tulip poplar honey a staple, and the clear, mild product of black locust nectar an “unreliable” and rare treat. But since 1992, the Mink Hollow bees had produced almost exclusively black locust honey. The family has extracted tulip poplar honey just three times in 17 years.

t the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he works, Esaias has spent the last 30 years developing and refining a satellite instrument known as MODIS, which collects data on temperature, humidity, and biological productivity both on land and at sea. Scientists and policy-makers use the data to predict commodity harvests, assess the algal blooms that lead to fish kills, and monitor the expansion of deserts, the unfolding of spring greenery, and the contraction of glacial ice sheets. Each pixel in the daily images captured by MODIS corresponds to one square kilometer. Apis mellifera forages in a range of about 11 square kilometers. As he analyzed his own records during the winter of 2006, Esaias realized that integrating the two information streams could allow scientists to reveal how shifting weather patterns and land use practices affect the relationships among plants and pollinators—and perhaps even explain what happened to the tulip poplar honey. When it comes to monitoring how ecosystems respond to meteorological and climatic conditions, the time series Esaias has captured at Mink Hollow is barely a blink of the eye. So he canvassed fellow beekeepers whose records stretched back to the 1970s and incorporated data on local weather patterns from the National Weather Service. The new data only extended the trend Esaias had found in his own backyard. Over the course of four decades, Maryland’s peak blossom time has shifted by 28 days. The single meteorological factor most strongly correlated with the shift was average winter temperature, which has crept up by four degrees during the same period. Esaias now thinks of climate change as a contributing factor to colony collapse, compromising colony nutrition and making the bees more susceptible to stress and disease. “For something as crucial to the ecosystem as pollination, I think it’s pretty important to have a basis on which to make judgments.” So he took what he had to his boss, David Adamec, and proposed that NASA give him the latitude to expand his data set by establishing a volunteer network of backyard beekeepers around the nation, all using the same protocol to monitor the same variables. Esaias would manage the volunteers and integrate their observations with data from 54 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

MODIS. “Wayne has an incredibly strong background in the workings of these satellites,” says Adamec, now acting chief of hydrospheric and biospheric sciences at Goddard. “We’re very good at honing the satellite to see when things turn green—but that doesn’t tell you when things are in bloom, and the satellite was never built with that in mind.” The scale hive records at Mink Hollow Apiary detail exactly when pollination starts and stops; beekeepers across the country have kept similar logs spanning decades. If Esaias can find those records and use them to reveal the corresponding data in the deluge of information MODIS beams back to Earth every day, he should be able to uncover a rich ecological data set stretching back to 1982—when MODIS and its predecessors began monitoring planetary patterns— and continuing for as long as it remains in space. “If anyone is going to pull this information out it’s going to be someone of the caliber of Wayne with the background that he has,” says Adamec. “This problem will provide feedback so we can get more information from the satellite than we ever could before.” With the go-ahead from Adamec and seed funds from NASA, Esaias launched HoneyBeeNet as a collaboration of citizen scientists in 2007. Now in its third year, it has grown to include nearly 100 backyard beekeepers in 27 states and three Canadian provinces, including 37 in Maryland (among them the scale hive at the Beltsville bee lab). The volunteers follow a strict protocol designed by Esaias to record hive weight and account for manipulations related to honey harvest, the addition of equipment, and other management variables. “The creatures out there outnumber us a billion to one,” says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research ecologist Tom Stohlgren. “Observation is the first rule of science and we need point distribution. Professional scientists can’t be everywhere to collect that data.” Esaias has already tracked down historical records from six sites including a former USDA bee lab in what is now downtown Chevy Chase, Maryland, and another in Louisiana that incorporates a daily record of plants in bloom. Because changing forage species—due to disruptions in land use patterns, displacement by invasive flora, and changing meteorological conditions—potentially have as significant an effect on the nectar flow trends captured by scale hives as winter temperature, Esaias invited Stohlgren to collaborate on the project. “Wayne thinks about interrelationships, rather than just relationships,” says the expert on early detection of invasive species. “Ecologists have to be smarter and faster than ever before and we have to work together more than ever before,” he says. “We need the big thinkers. That’s what Wayne brings to the table.” There’s not much money in plain old environmental monitoring; but given their profound ecological and economic implications, invasive species—from pythons in the Everglades to the inexorable northward march of the fire ant and the scourge of kudzu encroaching on

southern farm fields—have commanded substantial attention from government agencies. Esaias has funded much of his recent work through a grant from NASA for collaboration with USGS and USDA to model the spread of the Africanized honey bee—the “killer” bee— which arrived from Africa in the late 1950s and has since established feral populations in eastern Texas and parts of Florida. Scientists have long expected that as winter temperatures warm due to climate change, the ornery bees will spread north, breeding with their more docile counterparts, disrupting backyard and already compromised commercial beekeeping operations, and attacking humans, livestock, and pets unfortunate enough to get in the way of a swarm. In the meantime, beekeepers have inadvertently given the invaders a boost. Over the last 100 years, northern beekeepers expanding their apiaries or replacing winter-killed colonies have come to rely on large southern operations for mail-order queens delivered in time to establish a robust colony before the spring nectar flow in the North. After each southern-hatched queen takes nuptial flights from her natal hive—mating with wild drones on the wing to ensure that she will lay the fertilized eggs to produce a new colony—the queens are shipped north. In each of the last four years, winter die-offs attributed to the stress of travel, pesticides, tracheal and Varroa mites, and colony collapse have amounted to as much as 30 percent of the nation’s colonies, making the queen-rearing trade increasingly vital. Yet, buying mated queens from areas where Africanized honey bees are established has turned into a Russian roulette of hybridized genetics. “At first it’s fine,” says Esaias, who notes that there’s no way to control the mates a queen encounters on her flights. “But then in August when the population gets up, their true African nature comes out.” In the best-case scenario, the apiarist destroys an aggressive colony and starts over the next spring. In the worst-case scenario, the bees swarm and establish feral populations throughout the country. Rumors of the bees’ presence can be enough to torpedo even a well-established queen-rearing business and induce panic among community residents. But until now, scientists have had few tools to guide their search for the bees. And while they’ve known that there’s more to the story than temperature, scientists have struggled to anticipate where feral populations would thrive or collapse. Esaias found clues in his scale-hive data. Unlike their European counterparts, Africanized honey bees co-evolved with plants and weather patterns that produce twice-yearly nectar flows. In places with a single nectar flow like Mary-

land, the Africanized bees reproduce, swarm, and then starve waiting for another nectar flow to sustain them. Not so in places like Arizona, southwest Arkansas, and south Florida, where Esaias and his collaborators have demonstrated that nectar flow spikes twice. If the scientists can deduce the parameters that determine nectar flow and map the pattern for the rest of the country, they’ll have a powerful tool to inform both detection and management. “We need to better understand this insect-climate interaction and what it can tell us about our planet,” says Dewey Caron, a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Delaware. “This is a great test case of a potentially damaging invader we can use to build better models for better predictions.” In a nascent collaboration with Sam Droege, a USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center scientist, Esaias has also begun investigating the relationship of native pollinators to local plant populations in a study of Osmia lignaria, the orchard mason bee. “Most of our terrestrial ecosystem has its own set of bees and we don’t even know all of their names and what they eat,” says Esaias. “For something as important as pollination for our terrestrial ecosystems, we need more people working on it—and here I am, just about retirement age.” In the meantime, says Caroline Esaias, HoneyBeeNet seems to have forestalled her father’s departure from NASA by reigniting his passion for investigation. Caroline was in elementary school when the bees came home with her father and Colin, and although the kids helped, they always knew whose hobby the bees really were. Now 28 and living in the farmhouse where her father was raised, Caroline tends the hive he placed in a back pasture a few years ago. This spring she added three more colonies and put a platform scale, equipped with an electronic monitor like the one her father installed on the Beltsville colony, beneath one of them. In May, she joined HoneyBeeNet herself. Unlike most of her father’s volunteers, committed to a daily check of their hives either at dawn or dusk as the study protocol dictates, Caroline can download data anytime. At Mink Hollow, Wayne Esaias maintains the daily habit that inspired the protocol: “He goes down to the bees in the morning with a cup of coffee, checks the scales, watches the bees,” she says. “There’s always something he’s pondering—it’s part of who he is.”

Over the course of four decades, Maryland’s peak blossom time has shifted by 28 days.

Freelancer Sharon Tregaskis writes from the Finger Lakes region of New York. This is her first story for Johns Hopkins Magazine. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 55

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Alumni

News & Notes from our graduates and friends

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Homewood undergraduates stepped up to celebrate the Johns Hopkins legacy—and the big shoes left for them by generations of alumni—during the first-ever Student Philanthropy Education Week. As the campus prepared for

alumni to return for Reunion 2010, the Student Alumni Society sponsored a week of daily events aimed at building awareness of alumni giving, including a wacky obstacle course students attempted in a symbolic pair of oversized shoes.

58 59 60

Trash, Trash Everywhere

61 62 65

The North and the South

It’s Just a Flute From the Boardroom to the Coffeehouse

Forever Blue Jays Alumni Notes

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 57

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Doug Woodring is researching ways to clean up thousands of acres of floating refuse: “How could we have made such a massive impact in the farthest, most remote area of the planet?”

Doug Woodring, SAIS ’96

Trash, Trash Everywhere

ar, far away from any major landmass, the deep waters of the remote North Pacific are expansive and blue, and full of trash. Plastic bottles, abandoned fishing nets, unmoored buoys, the occasional stuffed toy—a so-called “plastic vortex” of floating debris scattered over thousands of square miles. Much of the plastic has been broken down by the sun and waves into confetti-sized pieces that get snapped up by fish and other marine life and make their way into the food chain. Some experts have speculated that the refuse covers an area larger than Texas, but Doug Woodring, an environmentalist and entrepreneur who founded Project Kaisei, a nonprofit aimed at finding solutions to the problem, says the exact size is not yet known. That’s just one of the mysteries Woodring and his colleagues hope to solve. Project Kaisei visited the plastic vortex in 2009 and hopes to do so a second time this summer. The team is also organizing a global ocean cleanup weekend on June 6 and 7, just prior to World Oceans Day on June 8. Woodring first heard about the vortex a couple of years ago at a tech conference in Hong Kong. At that time, he was working as an environmental and media consultant in Japan. An avid outdoorsman from California who grew up swimming and surfing, Woodring 58 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

considered himself “pretty environmentally aware” but had never heard of the plastic vortex. He figured other people hadn’t either. In 2008, he joined forces with two other ocean lovers from California—surfboard design guru George Orbelian and Mary Crowley, former executive director of the Oceanic Society—to launch Project Kaisei. (Kaisei means “Ocean Planet” in Japanese). As director, Woodring spends most of his time fundraising, orchestrating alliances, and performing public outreach. Woodring is well equipped to tackle this kind of international environmental problem. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University, where his focus was environmental economics. Finding solutions will require international cooperation, financial incentives, and new policies, he says. “A lot of that is what I was studying at Johns Hopkins.” Last summer, the Kaisei team partnered with scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to explore the vortex. The goals were to determine how much debris had accumulated, to assess removal techniques, and with a National Geographic documentary film crew on board, to bring attention to the problem. The team spent a month at sea trawling the water for plastic. “Between our two research boats, we sampled 3,500 miles of water,” Woodring says. “We got plastic in every single sample.” The scientists have yet to quantify the total amount of plastic collected, but Woodring was surprised not to find a

single sample without trash. “It definitely got us thinking: How could we have made such a massive impact in the farthest, most remote area of the planet?” he says. Scientists have identified five places worldwide where ocean currents drag and dump trash. Cleaning up every last scrap of that plastic isn’t feasible, Wood ring says, but at least some of it can be removed and may someday be converted into diesel fuel to power cars, trucks, or boats. “This is something that’s solvable,” Woodring says. Project Kaisei is raising money to continue exploring the toxicity and distribution of the debris and to test different ways of collecting the garbage. The real challenge, Woodring says, will be preventing plastics from entering oceans in the first place. Each year the world produces more than 260 million tons of plastic. Only 10 percent gets recycled. “You think you throw something away,” Woodring says. “Well, there is no ‘away.’” —Cassandra Willyard, A&S ’07 (MA)

Shelf Life The Power to Prosper: 21 Days to Financial Freedom, by Michelle Singletary, Bus ’93 (MS) (Zondevervan) Singletary’s 21 steps require a determination to “fast” from unessential spending for three weeks—tactically, by swearing off credit cards, and philosophically, by conforming one’s character to biblical teachings. Singletary is a personal finance columnist for The Washington Post (her column is “The Color of Money”) and a recent recipient of Johns Hopkins University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. She developed the program while helping fellow congregants in need, and the importance of tithing figures large in the book. Day 16 is titled Financial Fornication; its message is that Corinthians’ approach to marriage makes cents, and its admonition is “Don’t play banker to your baby.”

Karen Evans Moratz, Peab ’84

It’s Just a Flute

Darlene Delbecq

ven before Karen Evans Moratz had finished writing the book Flute For Dummies, critics were scoffing at the idea of a simplified flute manual for such a demanding instrument. They called it the literary equivalent of fast food. Moratz, who’s been the principal flutist with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO) for 21 years, says she was surprised by the vitriol, but it only strengthened her resolve to write a comprehensive book for the beginning flute player that would be straightforward without being, well, dumb. “The term ‘dummies’ is really more one of endearment than an insult,” says Moratz, unabashed to have a shelf at home full of other “Dummies” titles, includ-

Karen Evans Moratz, author of the smartly written Flute For Dummies

The Last Leaf: Voices of History’s Last-Known Survivors, by Stuart Lutz, A&S ’92 (Prometheus) Some of newspapers’ more engrossing stories result when obituary writers prepare ahead for the eventual deaths of their famous subjects. The premise of this book is akin, resulting in 39 interviews, mostly with those who outlived all other witnesses of an event. The first section is about three widows of Civil War veterans, all child brides who married aged warriors for their pensions. All three died after their interviews, in their 90s. And so it is with survivors of forgotten shipwrecks, a pitcher who fed Babe Ruth a grand slam in a record season, a colleague of FM radio’s inventor—all recently departed in their 10th decade. Lutz concludes that “a commonality to nearly all the Last Leaves is they remain active and have something to look forward to every day.” —Lew Diuguid, SAIS ’63

ing books on yoga, football, and personal finance. She met an editor for the series—an amateur flute player—at a flute club gathering, and learned that Flute For Dummies was in the planning stage. It just needed a writer. Moratz submitted a proposal and was thrilled to get the job. “It was just very me,” she explains of the book’s down-to-earth approach to teaching. “My attitude has always been that it’s just a flute. People shouldn’t be intimidated by it.” She wrote the manuscript over four Red Bull–fueled months. She was on break from teaching at Butler University’s Jordan College of Fine Arts but still performing with the symphony. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 59

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Originally from Pasadena, California, Moratz joined the ISO in 1989, following her training at Peabody (where she studied with renowned flutists Britton Johnson and Timothy Day), study in Germany, and training with the New World Symphony in Miami. When her book was released in December, colleagues’ skepticism generally turned to admiration. Positive reviews included one on FluteFocus.com, which concluded, “After checking out this book, one would no longer be a ‘Dummy.’” Then world-famous Irish flutist Sir James Galway— “the man with the golden flute”—posted a review that delighted (and vindicated) her. “I am very impressed,” he wrote. “This is a book everyone should own who plays the flute.” —Christina Ianzito

Paula E. Boggs, A&S ’81

From the Boardroom to the Coffeehouse

he next time you’re in line at a coffeehouse, take a good look at the woman in front of you, the one carrying her guitar. It could be Paula Boggs, a top Starbucks executive who’s not afraid to step away from the boardroom and perform her own music with nothing but a microphone standing between her and a live, heavily caffeinated audience. Sound intimidating? Since her days at Homewood as an ROTC cadet-scholar, Boggs hasn’t backed down from a challenge. As a freshman, she led the charge to establish the Blue Jays’ women’s cross country and track teams, then went on to build a distinguished law career that has taken her from the Pentagon to the White House to Starbucks, where she is now executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary. Today, she’s also following another dream as she puts the finishing touches on a debut collection of 12 original songs she honed while playing the Northwest music circuit. Boggs, who was honored with the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2009 and has been a university trustee since 1998, recently spoke with the magazine from Starbucks’ corporate headquarters. With your first CD set for release this summer, you’re on a rather unusual parallel track to an impressive legal career. How did you become a serious musician? I’ve been writing music since I was about 10, and performed occasionally on stage in

60 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Paula Boggs performing at an open-mic night: “It’s a highly vulnerable format, with instant feedback.” my 20s. But as I climbed in my career, a lot was going on and the music just stopped. With encouragement from family, I picked it up again in my mid-40s after facing a tragedy that became a trigger: My sister-in-law died suddenly in an auto accident at age 36, and it made me think, “I’ve got something here and I need to do something with it.” How did you make your return to music? I auditioned and was accepted into the graduate songwriters program at the University of Washington. It was the one evening every week when I wasn’t general counsel of a Fortune 500 company, I was just another songwriter. At the end of the year, when it came time to perform for my peer group there, I was terrified. But at the end of the recital, my instructor said, “You have a gift, and it would be a shame if you don’t continue.” I made a New Year’s resolution to play once a month at coffeehouses or clubs, and later open mics. Why open mics? In that format, there is no space between the musician and audience. It’s a highly vulnerable format for performing, with instant feedback. Learning to connect with an audience turned out to have a direct application for connecting with my team at Starbucks. A leader’s job is to enable a team to be the best it can be, and the process of music discovery taught me how to better empathize with others. You are able to better know, “How can I give them what they need in a way that enables them to achieve their potential?” You’re still doing that with student-athletes—helping them fulfill their potential. Ever since you started the women’s cross country and track teams, you’ve been contributing to their success. When I arrived at Johns Hopkins University in 1977, the school was still learning how to serve a female student population—there were

istockphoto.com

Alumni

When you graduated, did you think you would someday be recording your own music while serving as the top lawyer for a Fortune 500 company? I don’t think I was preordained to be a lawyer; it is a profession I stumbled into. In me there’s a CEO who flourishes as a leader, an anthropologist who is interested in people and their cultures, and a social worker who likes to help others—and working in law has allowed me to satisfy these aspects of my personality. The lesson for students is that at the end of the day, labels only take you so far. Understanding and being true to what I really needed to be fulfilled has been the key for me. —Interview by Bill U’Ren, A&S ’94 (MA)

Joseph McGowan, Ed ’04 (MS)

The North and the South

ood leadership can be learned in countless ways—while fighting a war, rising through the corporate ranks, working to improve a public school system. So says Joseph McGowan, the director of federal programs for the School of Education’s Division of Public Safety Leadership (DPSL). For the past 12 years, McGowan, who will turn 84 this summer, has organized the Gettysburg Staff Ride, a three-day onsite study of the leadership choices made by the North and South throughout the 1863 fight. About 10 times a year, McGowan and his team of management experts bring to the Pennsylvania battlefield groups of 25 to 30 employees from federal agencies, including the Secret Service and the DEA. A few years ago, McGowan personally demonstrated one important leadership lesson: The boss sometimes needs to get down in the trenches. He became a DPSL graduate student, one of the oldest in Johns Hopkins University’s 134-year history. (He’d already earned a BS in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1952 and an MS in general administration from the University of Maryland in 1988.) To better evaluate and improve the program he helps oversee, he says, “I thought I should go through it, not to audit it, not to sit in the back, but as a member of the class. Feel the pain, if you will.”

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

still buildings on campus without women’s bathrooms! The women had no track team of their own. A female fencer, Wendy Galfand, A&S ’87, and I began recruiting for a club, and the women’s fencing coach offered to coach us. A Johns Hopkins supporter named Larry Goldfarb volunteered to underwrite our trip to a major club meet. Only after winning did we finally secure official status as a team from the school. Today, I follow the team and still contribute financially to the program. It’s pretty rewarding to know these young women are following the same path that Wendy and I and the others started all those years ago.

Joseph McGowan adapts Battle of Gettysburg lessons to 21st-century circumstances. He studied along with the others, even learning to write papers on a computer. The last time he was at school everyone had typewriters. At Wharton, he’d used pen and ink. Before he went to college, McGowan went to war: He enlisted in the Navy at age 17 and shipped out to the South Pacific for almost two years. He later spent 31 years as a senior executive at Bethlehem Steel, specializing in helping labor and management work toward, as he puts it, “col- The last time he was at laborative problem solving, try- school everyone had ing to find the middle-ground.” typewriters. At Wharton, He also was a member of the he’d used pen and ink. board of education of Baltimore County for nine years, five of them as board president, then joined the board of the Baltimore County Police Foundation. When McGowan retired from the corporate world, Baltimore’s chief of police invited him to coordinate leadership education programs for the force, which led to a job as director of the Baltimore County Police Department’s training academy—a good fit for someone who’d become well-versed in both education and public safety. McGowan was among the group to help Sheldon Greenberg found the DPSL 15 years ago, and since then the Gettysburg Staff Ride has grown extremely popular among federal law enforcement officials. It keeps evolving as McGowan finds ways to enhance the experience. “You’re always looking for areas of improvement,” he says, citing yet another leadership lesson: “Never go with the status quo.” —CI Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 61

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

Forever blue Jays

Photos: Stuart Watson and Will Kirk

Over Alumni Weekend 2010, Homewood was practically bursting with programs, events, student volunteers, and—of course—alumni. With help from the new Student Alumni Society (an organization formed last year to improve undergraduate life and appreciation of campus traditions like Reunion), 4,704 alumni were welcomed back to campus for crab cakes, lacrosse, a wine tasting, and Reunion’s first-ever family tent with free kid-friendly activities (including a fire-eating sword swallower). True to the spirit of President Ron Daniels’ commitment to “one university,” graduates not just from Homewood but from all nine academic divisions were invited to participate in a university-wide career networking panel, plus division-specific programming from the Carey Business School, the Peabody Institute, and the School of Education.Visit alumni.jhu.edu/reunion to view a film recap of the weekend and a class-by-class photo gallery. We hope to see you for Alumni Weekend 2011.

Left to right: In the days leading up to Alumni Weekend, thousands of Homewood undergraduates signed a giant thankyou card that was presented to alumni at a luncheon honoring scholarship supporters. A member of the class of 1960 celebrated a half-century of Blue Jay pride. Creativity flowed in the Family Tent, where parents and children made signs to cheer on the men’s lacrosse team.

62 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Clockwise from top left: Alumni reconnected with an old friend who has weathered the years with grace. Always a favorite, the traditional crab cake luncheon packed the Robert H. Scott Gymnasium. The Fiji “Islander” party drew a crowd on the lawn at Nichols House. With the baseball team at the top of its game this season, the sport was on everyone’s mind. Celebrating its 50th reunion, the class of 1960 led the class parade. Members of the class of 1985 mingled on the terrace of Charles Commons.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 63

A Johns Hopkins Road Trip Ron Daniels hit the road this spring to meet alumni and friends and share his vision for the university. At events in eight cities, he spoke about the themes of his early presidency: promoting individual excellence among faculty and scholars, including an initiative to admit the brightest students, regardless of their ability to pay; strengthening the notion of “one Johns Hopkins” by fostering more interdisciplinary work; and bolstering the university’s civic engagement. His journey will continue in November with Rising to the Challenge events in Boston and San Francisco, and plans are in the works for another visit to Chicago. Find out when he’ll be in a city near you and join the conversation at rising.jhu.edu/facebook. San Francisco, February 18

Discussing his vision of nourishing individual accomplishment, Daniels said that stretching to make admissions decisions based solely on merit is “the only way we can continue to compete for the brightest minds and ensure the promise of equal opportunity for students of equal merit.” Learn more about how Johns Hopkins University is working to attract the best students at opportunity.jhu.edu.

Chicago, March 15

Boston, March 16

“I see my role as a convener of the conversations that will shape our destiny,” Daniels said. “One of the most important things I have been able to do over the past year is simply listen.” Share your thoughts with him via email at president@jhu.edu.

Local chapter president De McKeown, Engr ’94, introduced Daniels as a “staunch advocate of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. … [He is] deeply committed to universities encouraging global understanding and has promoted their engagement with local, national, and international issues.”

Washington, D.C., March 3 Los Angeles, March 9

Daniels joined faculty experts for the first Rising to the Challenge event, which featured two panel discussions covering advances in medicine and science and tackling the university’s role in today’s global challenges. Listen to the discussions at rising.jhu.edu. “We had panelists representing the entire spectrum of biology,” said David G. Nichols, Bus ’00 (MBA), a leader at the School of Medicine and panel moderator. “The fact that this interdisciplinary work is going on right here at Johns Hopkins is just tremendous.”

Philadelphia, May 8

Delving into the idea of one university, Daniels said, “Truly great universities foster the capacity of faculty and students to dream broadly and to transcend academic silos, bridging disciplinary boundaries in the service of understanding the social and scientific challenges of the day.”

64 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

New York, April 17

Daniels worked a crowd of nearly 700 spanning generations, from CTY students to the venerable Walter Sonneborn, A&S ’33. “When I entered the university, we were given a lecture that I remember very well—they told us that we should say ‘hello’ to everyone on the campus, we should not pass someone without acknowledging them, whether they were a student or professor or a visitor,” Sonneborn said. “I felt that same friendliness at the gathering in New York.”

Daniels took a moment at this event, in an auditorium at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, to celebrate the announcement of another collaboration between the university and local communities: The National Cancer Institute will soon call the Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus home.

Baltimore, March 1

No jet lag on this stop. Daniels crossed the Homewood campus to greet local alumni at a Meet the President event in Mason Hall. Watch his speech at alumni.jhu .edu/meetthepresident.

Alumni

News & Notes

1940

Milton Rudo, A&S ’40, splits his time between Delray Beach, Florida, and Highland Beach, Illinois, and enjoys playing golf and bridge.

1944

Benjamin K. Silverman, A&S ’44, retired in July 2009 and moved to Bay Head, New Jersey.

1949

William F. Rienhoff III, Med ’49, a retired surgeon, is living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Graycie M. Cameron, Nurs ’49, is living in St. Petersburg, Florida, and spends time traveling to visit family and friends.

1953

Nicholas G. Byron, A&S ’53, retired after 27 years as a circuit court judge in Madison County, Illinois. Byron was honored in 2007 at the Senator Paul Simon and Senator Paul Wellstone Awards program for his work to ensure justice in cases involving injury from asbestos and tobacco.

1954

John Fenzel Jr., A&S ’54, now has two sons who are colonels in the U.S. Army. In December 2009, Col. John Fenzel III proudly pinned on the insignia officially making his brother, Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel, A&S ’89, also a colonel.

1959

Irvin M. Miller, Engr ’59, A&S ’64 (PhD), a programmer at IBM for 28 years, founded the Math & Physics Exploration, a hands-on learning museum in LaGrange, Georgia. Miller’s goal is to teach critical thinking, creativity, and other lessons that he feels have long been left out of education.

1960

John “Jack” Gegner, Engr ’60, has been volunteering in a few church activities and is involved with environmental and wildlife issues. Niels Sundermeyer, A&S ’60, ’61 (MA), who worked actively for the Obama presidential campaign, has been retired since 2003. He is enjoying many hobbies, including photography, computers, travel, movies, music, and playing with his grandchildren.

1961

Joshua B. Grossman, A&S ’61, was a part of the group that wrote The Johns Hopkins Internal Medicine Board Review: 2008 – 2009, 2nd Edition.

1963

Felix A. Hughes III, A&S ’63, a retired radiologist, is enjoying winters in Arizona and summers in Virginia Beach with his children and grandchildren. Fred Kahn, SAIS ’63, was featured in an article in the Huffington Post on Aug. 25, 2009, titled “American Spirit Personified.” The article credited Kahn for originally suggesting the tradition of presidential debates in 1956. After Kahn got the idea rolling, the League of Women Voters stepped forward to sponsor the first scheduled presidential debates in 1960 between Nixon and Kennedy. Edward R. Laws Jr., Med ’63, an expert in the treatment of neuroendocrine disorders, was named director of the Neuro-Endocrine/Pituitary Program at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital in June 2008. Frank R. Olenchak, Ed ’63, emeritus professor since 1984 at Western Michigan University, retired in 2005 after 55 years of teaching. Ann Judith Saltzman, Nurs ’63, Bus ’81 (MBA), retired as a vascular access nurse from Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, Maryland, in 2006. She is currently working as a home and hospital private duty nurse.

1964

Jonathan Fine, SPH ’64, continues to write a blog about poverty and rural health in India. He has recently completed “The Story of Dasrath,” based on his trip to Chhattisgarh and his association with clinical and public health organizations serving the most destitute of rural poor in India.

from our graduates and friends

Samuel H. Greenblatt, Med ’64 (MA), was appointed historian of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in May 2009. Michael Ratner, A&S ’64, has been named the Dr. Michael H. and Rissa Ranter Professor in Pediatric Surgery at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

1965

Herbert H. Blumberg, A&S ’65 (MA), ’67 (PhD), co-authored a new book, Small Group Research: Basic Issues. Previously he co-authored Peace Psychology: A Comprehensive Introduction, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. Joan Ellen Corbett, SAIS ’65 (Dipl), ’66, retired from active duty with the U.S. diplomatic service in 2005 and is currently working part time as a senior adviser with the U.S. Department of State.

1966

Donald A. Mankin, A&S ’66 (MA), ’68 (PhD), has written an article, “Dental Tourism: Getting Drilled in Bangkok,” which discussed the phenomenon of people traveling to Bangkok for dental procedures.

1967

Jonathan A. Lowe, A&S ’67, retired from a 31-year career at JPMorgan Chase in May 2009. He is planning to do parttime financial advising. Roland A. Pattillo, Med ’67 (PGF), received the 2010 St. Louis University Merit Award. He is also completing his third book, to be published next year, From Within: Democratization N60s in South Africa, Tajikistan and Argentina.

1968

Andres Rigo-Sureda, SAIS ’68 (Dipl), reports that he has been appointed to the IMF Administrative Tribunal, which serves as an independent judicial forum for the resolution of employment disputes arising between the International Monetary Fund and its staff members. Rigo-Sureda served with the World Bank in several capacities from 1973 to 2000.

1969

Newsmakers

Howard B. Dickler, A&S ’64, has been appointed the first chief operating officer of the new National Institutes of Health Center for Human Immunology, Autoimmunity, and Inflammation in Bethesda, Maryland.The trans-NIH CHI has been created to probe the human immune system in great depth using multiple high-throughput multiplex platforms both in normal individuals and disease states. Robert Ford, A&S ’80, SAIS ’83, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, has been nominated by President Obama as the U.S. ambassador to Syria. If confirmed by the Senate, Ford will be the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since February 2005. Ford’s appointment is expected to advance U.S. interests by improving communication with Syria.

A. Everette James Jr., Med ’69 (PGF), SPH ’71 (MS), served as professor and chair of the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center from 1975 to 1991 and is currently a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. James has been recognized with the establishment of the A. Everette James Jr. Lectureship in Radiology and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Eitan D. Schwarz, Med ’69, a distinguished child and family psychologist, has written a book called Kids, Parents and Technology, An Instruction Guide for Young Families, which discusses the challenges faced by parents raising children in the digital age.

1970

William H. Beardsley, Engr ’70 (PhD), who has served as president of Husson University in Bangor, Maine, for 22 years, is running for governor of Maine. Beardsley successfully oversaw the transformation of a struggling business and nursing college into a vibrant and dynamic university with three times the enrollment, more than 50 degree offerings, and schools of pharmacy and law.

1971

Ronald Rowes, A&S ’71, has been named chief medical officer of Queens-Long Island Medical Group. He is also chair of the board and medical director of Lypris Medical, a company based on his patented medical device for pressure ulcers. Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 65

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

1972

Romesh C. Batra, Engr ’72 (PhD), a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Virginia Tech, is a 2010 recipient of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award sponsored by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and Dominion, an energy company based in Richmond, Virginia. R. Rodney Howell, Med ’72 (HS), a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Miami, is chair of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns and Children, part of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services.

Wolf-Ruthart Born, SAIS ’73 (Dipl), was appointed secretary of state for the German Foreign Office in 2009. Born served as Germany’s ambassador to Spain from 2006 to 2009.

1974

Cui Tiankai, SAIS ’87, was appointed vice minister of foreign affairs in January by China’s State Council.

Gregg Semenza, Med ’90 (PGF), a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is one of seven recipients of the 2010 Canada Gairdner Awards, which honor groundbreaking medical research behind cancer, epilepsy, heart disease, and malaria treatments. Semenza is being honored for a discovery that led to therapies to block or stimulate responses to low oxygen levels. Tumors seeking oxygen to grow stimulate production of new blood vessels to access more oxygen, but by blocking this response, tumor growth is decreased.

1980

Charles Faddis, A&S ’80, retired from the CIA in 2008 and is currently dividing his time between running his consulting business and writing. He has published three books and is working on a fourth.

1982

1973

Newsmakers

Nancy W. Cushman, Ed ’78 (MEd), owns Meadow Mill Athletic Club in Baltimore and is working to get the Johns Hopkins University squash team back.

David G. Burke, A&S ’74 (PhD), is the editor of the recently published book Translation That Openeth the Window: Reflections on the History and Legacy of the King James Bible. Raymond D. Burke, A&S ’74, a real estate development lawyer with the Baltimore office of Ober/Kaler, was named one of Maryland’s “Super Lawyers 2010” for the fourth consecutive year. Charles T. Dubin Jr., A&S ’74, is a veteran and does pro bono legal consulting work in government. A. Roger Ekirch, A&S ’74 (MA),’78 (PhD), is the author of a new book, Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped (W.W. Norton, 2010). In a starred pre-publication review, Booklist declared,“Ekirch out-kidnaps Stevenson in this thrilling, thoroughly documented story. A perfect mix of true crime and real-life adventure.” Ron C. Estler, A&S ’74 (MA), ’76 (PhD), a chemistry professor at Fort Lewis College, was named Colorado’s U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He received the award in Washington, D.C., along with 49 other educators in November 2009.

Devra Lee Davis, SPH ’82, is the recipient of the 2010 Carnegie Science Award: Environmental, which recognizes outstanding achievements in the fields of environmental protection and restoration that benefit the economy, health and quality of life. Davis is founder of Environmental Health Trust, and also founded the world’s first Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Richard Mathis, A&S ’82 (MA), ’87 (PhD), accepted the position of senior research director at the Center for Medical Technology Policy in Baltimore. CMTP is a private nonprofit organization that provides a neutral forum in which patients, clinicians, payers, manufacturers, and researchers can work together to design and implement prospective, real world studies to inform health care decisions.

1983

Judith S. Britz, Med ’83 (PGF), a veteran scientist, academician and entrepreneur, was named executive director of the Maryland Biotechnology Center on January 15. In her new role, Britz will lead Maryland’s bioscience efforts, reaching out to the state’s 400-plus bio and life sciences companies to help them grow and create new jobs.

1985

Vivek Samnotra, A&S ’85, is an assistant professor at Dartmouth Medical School and the medical director of a small community cancer clinic run by Dartmouth Medical Center. He lives in the southern part of New Hampshire with his wife and two daughters.

1987

James T. Moore, A&S ’87, is vice chief judge at the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

1988

Sherry R. Myers, Peab ’75, joined the law firm of Neuberger, Quinn, Gielen, Rubin and Gibber in Baltimore as a legal assistant.

Bruce Henoch, A&S ’88, was named vice president and general counsel of Stratos Global Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland. He had previously served as the company’s vice president for legal and regulatory affairs. Kenneth Harvey Homer Jr., Bus ’88 (MBA), joined BRTRC in Fairfax, Virginia, as a senior analyst in November 2009. BRTRC provides management and technical services to federal government agencies. Deanne Meek, Peab ’88, continues to perform in operas, concerts, and recitals in the United States and overseas. Some of her highlights during 2009 include performing title roles for Utah Opera, Toledo Opera, and her debut at Milan’s renowned La Scala Opera as Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

1976

1989

1975

Cecilia Lenk, Engr ’76, was elected town councilor of Watertown, Massachusetts. Lenk’s two-year term began January 4. Freda Lewis-Hall, A&S ’76, was named one of the “Top 15 Women in Pharma” by FiercePharma, the pharma industry’s daily online monitor, in October 2009. Lewis-Hall has been chief medical officer and senior vice president for Pfizer Inc. since May 2009. Prior to her career at Pfizer, Lewis-Hall was at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, BMS, Pharmacia Corporation, Eli Lilly, the National Institute of Mental Health, and at the Howard University College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry.

1977

John F. Finston, Engr ’77, a partner in the San Francisco office of the law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, LLP, has been named the chair of the firm’s Insurance Regulatory & Transactional Practice Group.

1978

Herbert M. Baum, SPH ’78 (PhD), married Kathleen Whitmine on May 24, 2009. They are living in Rockville, Maryland. 66 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Evan Chuck, A&S ’89, who works for Bryan Cave LLP, an international law firm, was appointed as leader of the firm’s global International Trade Client Service Group in February. In addition to international trade matters, his practice includes international transactions, with significant emphasis on cross-border acquisitions, project development, and government regulatory compliance matters. Kevin Kelly, Med ’89 (PDF), was the president of the American Society of Maxio-Facial Surgeons for 2008–2009.

1991

Judy Bruns, Engr ’91 (MS), was recently hired as a senior database engineer for ADG Creative, a marketing agency in Columbia, Maryland. Bruns previously worked at BSC Consulting.

1992

Evelyn Jerome Alexander, A&S ’92, along with two other Johns Hopkins graduates, completed the Rock-n-Roll Las Vegas half marathon on December 6, 2009. The three showed their alma mater

pride by wearing matching JHU T-shirts for the duration of the race, in 40-degree temperatures.

1993

Margaret “Mimi” Azoubel Daniel, Bus ’93, president and founder of XY Outlook, Inc., was elected in December 2009 to the board of directors of the Metro DC Chapter of the International Coach Federation, the governing body of certified coaches. David Louis Edelman, A&S ’93, has concluded his science fiction trilogy with the February release of Geosynchron. The saga began with Infoquake in 2006, followed by MultiReal in 2008. Edward S. Tuvin, Bus ’93 (MBA), vice president of Capital Bank, N.A, was personally thanked by President Obama in February for his efforts and Capital Bank’s participation in assisting the nation’s small businesses. Capital Bank led the Washington, D.C.–metro area with more ARC lending than any other bank.

1994

James R. Anderson, Engr ’94, and his wife, Heather Baston, enjoyed their first Christmas with daughter Samantha. Gabriel J. Kaufman, A&S ’94, was appointed to the East Chester Center for Cancer Care in New York City as an oncoplastic breast surgeon. William A. Zellmer, SPH ’94, a longtime staff member of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and an influential thought-leader in the profession, received the Donald E. Francke Medal in December 2009 at the opening session of the society’s 44th Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas.

1996

Victor B. Ibabao, SPH ’96, traveled to the Philippines last summer on a mission for the Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation, a Philippine-based poverty reduction and nation-building movement launched by Couples for Christ, a Catholic lay community, to care for worse-off Filipinos and survivors of natural disasters. Jin-Suk Park, A&S ’96, became a partner of the international law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in January. Park is a member of the firm’s intellectual property practice in Washington, D.C., where he focuses on patent litigation and intellectual property transactions.

1997

James “Jim” Applebaum, A&S ’97 (MA), received Mercersburg Academy’s 2009–2010 Distinguished Teaching Award, endowed by the Ammerman Family Trust. Applebaum is a member of the English faculty, a dormitory dean, and adviser to the weekly student newspaper and annual literary-arts journal at the Pennsylvania boarding school.

Mathy Milling Downing, Ed ’02 (MS), received a second international advocacy award for outstanding achievement in children’s rights. She continues to advocate for safer medical practices in regards to the overmedication of children. Rebekah (Itzkowitz) Lipstein, A&S ’02, and Steven A. Lipstein, A&S ’02, welcomed their second child, Jacob Arthur Lipstein, on December 19, 2009. Meredith (Make) Patterson, A&S ’02, gave birth to her second child, Makenna Kate Patterson, on November 19, 2009. Patterson and her family reside in Howell, New Jersey, where she has been working for the National Captioning Institute since 2003.

2003

Azim Chowdhury, Engr ’03, an associate in the Baltimore office of interNewsmakers national law firm Duane Morris, was the keynote speaker at the annual Spring Banquet of the Asian/Pacific American Francesco Clark, A&S ’00, Law Student Association at the Univeran entrepreneur who sur sity of Maryland in February. Chowdhury discussed what young lawyers can vived a tragic pool diving do to bring about a positive change in accident more than seven their communities by volunteering and providing pro bono legal services. years ago, was featured in

2004

Teresa Matejovsky Ross, A&S ’04, was married to John Kenneth Ross in Baltimore in October 2009. Ross received her MD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in May 2009 and is currently in residency for Emergency Medicine at the Georgetown-Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. The newlyweds reside in Arlington, Virginia.

2005

Alissa (Burkholder) Murphy, Engr ’05, who is now married to Todd Murphy, Engr ’04, has moved to Myanmar to work for Proximity Designs. Megan Moore Riley, Ed ’05 (MA), and her husband, James, welcomed their first child, Colin Gavagham Riley, on January 18. Riley works as a freelance editor for a scientific publisher.

2006

a January episode of the PBS documentary This Emotional Life. Clark, who was paralyzed by the accident, suffered through a deep depression, but eventually his resilience and optimistic attitude led him to an opportunity to help himself and others with his natural skin care line, Clark’s Botanicals. Wes Moore, A&S ’01, shared his remarkable twist-of-fate story in his newly released book, The Other Wes Moore, with an April 27 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. His is the tale of two kids with the same name, living in the same city. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar and decorated combat veteran, while the other is serving a life sentence in prison for felony murder.

Andrew Brent, A&S ’99, and his wife, Erin Massey Brent, welcomed a son, Noah Greene Brent, on June 12, 2009.

Bradley Peganoff, A&S ’06, joined RTI International, one of the world’s leading research institutes, as vice president of government and corporate relations in January. Peganoff joins RTI from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore, where he was director of government and corporate affairs. Tina Stump, Ed ’06,’07 (MS), was promoted to acting director of security operations for the Maryland Division of Correction in February 2009.

2000

2007

1998

Carolyn Eastman, A&S ’98 (MA), ’01 (PhD), an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had a book published in December, titled A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (University of Chicago Press).

1999

Roxane Born, SAIS ’00, head of the therapeutic area for Bayer Mexico, in Mexico City, completed the executive program at Harvard Business School in January. Michael D. Hoke, A&S ’00 (MA), has joined the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck as an associate in its litigation group in Denver. Hoke’s practice focuses on general litigation, including commercial, securities, and antitrust litigation.

2002

Sean C. Carroll, SAIS ’02, director of programs at the Club of Madrid, has been named chief of staff at USAID and is relocating from Madrid to Washington, D.C. His wife, Anna Cabanes, SPH ’08, coordinator of the annual Cancer Report at Spain’s National Center of Epidemiology at Carlos III University in Madrid, will join him in Washington with their children.

Grace Elizabeth “Beth” Gaither, Nurs ’07, is living in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she has been working as a pediatric oncology nurse at Levine Children’s Hospital. She and her husband welcomed their first child, Cash, on December 4, 2009. Peter McPhee, Engr ’07 (MS), is an energy systems engineer at EarthSpark International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates in Haiti, raising money to send solar lamps to the country to assist in disaster relief efforts. The organization is working with a coalition of fellow Clinton Global Initiative members to coordinate the supply and distribution of solar-powered products in Port-au-Prince.

2008

Gautam Gulati, Bus ’08 (MBA), an adjunct faculty member at the Carey Business School, was named vice president/group director in the Science

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 67

Alumni

News & Notes

from our graduates and friends

and Medicine department of Digitas Health. Gulati will be one of five physicians at the agency and will be based in its New York office. Adam Ruben, A&S ’08 (PhD), had a book published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, in April. Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School is a humorous guide to surviving and thriving as a graduate student.

In memoriam:

1932: Harris B. Shumacker Jr., Med ’32, a master teacher and visionary who was one of the pioneers of heart surgery, died November 14, 2009, in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, at the age of 101. He was a recent nominee for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 1933: Cathreen Carrico Samsel, Peab ’33, a gifted vocalist, pianist, and violinist died December 25, 2009, in Crofton, Maryland. Samsel was a recognized soloist in Washington, D.C., who performed for President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1936: Joseph L. Woods Jr., Engr ’36, an artist and former owner of a Baltimore toy company that manufactured toy watches, died January 11 in Easton, Maryland. 1937: Bertram H. Schaffner, Med ’37, a renowned psychiatrist who began his college education at Harvard at the age of 15, died January 29. Schaffner was one of the very first doctors to treat AIDS patients, writing articles seeking more humane attitudes and treatment for them. 1941: Francis W. Helfrick, Med ’41, who served as chief of pediatrics and president of staff at Manchester Memorial Hospital, died December 13, 2009, in Manchester, Connecticut. Early in his career, Helfrick developed a method for providing complete intravenous feeding for infants. 1941: John H. Lochhead, A&S ’41, who was a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, died in Waquoit, England, on March 6 at the age of 100. 1942: Barton Childs, Med ’42, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a legendary geneticist and teacher who influenced the practice of generations of physicians and shaped their understanding of inherited disease, died February 18. Childs spent nearly 70 years at Johns Hopkins University, coming to the Baltimore institution as a first-year medical student in 1938. 1942: Nelson E. Shawn, Engr ’42, who had worked for Bell Atlantic and Verizon Communications, passed away on March 6 in Bethesda, Maryland. 1943: John C. Burdette Jr., Engr ’43, a retired electrical engineer, Kohler, Murphy & Associates Inc., died on December 7, 2009, in Glen Arm, Maryland. Burdette served with the Army Signal Corps during World War II and later in the occupation of Japan. 1943: John W. Rach, Engr ’43, died December 9, 2009, in Towson, Maryland. 1944: Frank G. MacMurray, Med ’44 (HS) ’47 (PGF), founding partner of Foxhall Internists, died January 25 in McLean, Virginia. MacMurray was a clinical professor at the Georgetown University Medical School and the on-call doctor at Madeira School in McLean. 1945: Hazel Anita Kings Aaberg, Nurs ’45, died November 1, 2009, in Richland, Washington. She and her husband traveled the world together, visiting a different continent each year. 1948: John Charles Kramer, A&S ’48, a physician who dedicated his career to cystic fibrosis patients, died on January 31 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1949: William F. Greenwood Jr., A&S ’49, Bus ’52, Engr ’62 , a retired engineer, died on November 29, 2009, in Atlanta. During his retirement years, Greenwood pursued his passion for art. 1949: Edward A. Hamilton, A&S ’49 (PhD), who managed a family timber business in East Texas for over 50 years, passed away December 18, 2009, at his home in Marietta, Ohio. 1949: James Pollard Thompson, Engr, ’49, a former U.S. Navy commander, passed away on November 25, 2009, in Algiers, Los Angeles. 68 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

1950: George H. Bacot Jr., A&S ’50, a retired glass company vice president who was an avid ballroom dancer and golfer, died March 1 in Baltimore. 1950: Edward O’Neill Cole, Engr ’50, died January 3, in Saco, Maine. Cole, whose career began at the Bendix Corporation, later joined Squibb Pharmaceuticals, and then Marsh and McLennan Inc. 1950: William E. Dolan, A&S ’50, a retired English professor and published author, passed away December 12, 2009, in Elmira, New York. He worked for Corning Community College. 1951: Harry August Debelius, A&S ’51, a journalist who was active in the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, died February 18 in Vigo, Spain. Debelius had been living and working in Spain since 1955 and was a correspondent for the British daily The Times for 30 years. 1951: James Berryman Eisel, A&S ’51, died March 2 in Woodstock, Maryland. Eisel worked as an engineer at Westinghouse and also an attorney for Martin Marietta. 1951: Newton Margolis, A&S ’51, passed away on February 19. He was a 30-year partner of Embees Ladies Specialty Stores in West Virginia. 1952: Phoebe Bock, A&S ’52 (MA), a community activist and philanthropist, died November 6, 2009, in Seattle, Washington. Bock became the first Chinese American to teach in the Baltimore school district. 1952: Frank J. Eurs, Med ’52, passed away on March 20 in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. Eurs served in the U.S. Army during World War II and spent his career as a pathologist until his retirement in 1996. 1952: Donald Albert Ripke, A&S ’52, a retired advertising executive, died January 25 in Vero Beach, Florida. 1954: Henrietta Moritz, Med ’54, who was a cellist and worked for Social Security for 35 years, passed away on December 29, 2009, in Baltimore. 1955: Stanley Kelley Jr., A&S ’55 (PhD), a professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, died January 17 in Princeton, New Jersey. Kelley was known as an accomplished scholar and teacher on topics such as the American party system, elections and voting, and mass communications. 1956: John Randolph Batt, A&S ’56, who taught for 40 years at the University of Kentucky College of Law, died on November 17, 2009, in Lexington, Kentucky. Batt was very interested in criminal law and sports law. 1956: Beth K. Currie, A&S ’56 (MLA), a retired high school social studies teacher who spent her youth working in a family grocery business, died November 19, 2009, in Baltimore. 1956: Joseph Lintz, A&S ’56 (PhD), professor emeritus for the University of Nevada, Reno, passed away on December 18, 2009, in Reno. Lintz served as the acting dean of the Mackey School of Earth Sciences and Engineering and taught in Indonesia, India, and Pakistan. 1956: Robert L. Perkins, Med ’56, professor emeritus of internal medicine at The Ohio State University, died December 29, 2009, in Upper Arlington, Ohio. After serving as director of the division of infectious diseases at the College of Medicine, Perkins was director of medical education at Grant Medical Center until 1997. 1957: Daniel W. Dembrow, A&S ’57, a retired NASA scientist, died January 5 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Dembrow worked in rocket development and space technology at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory before joining NASA in 1960. He also served as head of Goddard Space Flight Center’s signal processing section. 1957: Barbara Dee Gatland, Bus ’57, died December 10, 2009, in Atlanta. After completing her education, Gatland worked as a nurse in Baltimore. She also spent many years volunteering in elementary schools teaching children to read. 1957: George Alexander Kay III, A&S ’57, a former executive with the Armco Steel Company of Ohio who started his own steel distributorship, died November 14, 2009, in Severna Park, Maryland. Kay was president of Bay State Steel until his death.

1959: Franklin M. Wright, A&S ’59 (PhD), a World War II veteran who served in the South Pacific, passed away January 30 in Memphis, Tennessee. Wright taught at Brown University and the University of Connecticut, Storrs, before joining the Rhodes College faculty. 1960: James Pearson Cairns, A&S ’60 (PhD), died on March 2. He joined the faculty of the Royal Military College in 1960, retiring as professor emeritus after 30 years of distinguished service. Cairns donated his time and resources to diverse community organizations and served as a Big Brother for many years. 1960: Ari Kiev, Med ’60 (HS), died on November 18, 2009. Kiev was the first psychiatrist to be appointed to the U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Committee and worked in peak performance coaching with Olympic and professional athletes. 1961: Jay Arnold Levine, A&S ’61 (PhD), a professor of English literature, taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago before serving for a decade as dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Levine died on February 25 in Chicago. 1962: Ramons Miezis, Bus ’62, who lived in Olney, Maryland, and was an antenna specialist for several defense contractors, died November 14, 2009. Miezis, who was born in Riga, Latvia, came to the United States as a young man and served in the U.S. Air Force in London during the Korean War. 1962: Douglas Warner Jr., A&S ’62 (PhD), a retired physics professor, died March 2 in Cockeysville, Maryland. Warner was the grandson of Howard A. Kelly, one of the four founding physicians of Johns Hopkins Hospital. He worked at the Johns Hopkins University’s Barton Laboratory and eventually joined the faculty of Essex Community College. He was one of the founders of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. 1967: John J. Marisic, A&S ’67, died January 5 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Marisic was the director of computing at Elizabethtown College and a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War. Marisic served on the boards of the Mt. Gretna Historical Society and The Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union. 1968: Adele Harvey, A&S ’68 (MLA), a longtime member of the Junior League of Washington, died February 23 in Bethesda, Maryland. Besides her work with the Junior League for nearly 60 years, Harvey was a board member of Washington’s HSC Pediatric Center. 1971: William J. Crawford, SPH ’71, passed away on December 17, 2009, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Crawford taught biological and environmental science at Howard University Medical College, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and other institutions. 1973: Melvin P. Trageser, Engr ’73, an engineer for Henry Adams Inc., in Baltimore, passed away on December 19, 2009. 1973: Edward Akira Sawada, SPH ’73, an obstetrician, gynecologist, and noted cervical cancer expert, passed away on November 28, 2009, in Towson, Maryland. Sawada established a statewide colonoscopy program and conducted clinics for underprivileged teenagers and women. 1973: John P. Berry, Engr ’73, passed away on February 13 in Annapolis, Maryland. 1974: Elizabeth Emerson MacQuarrie, Ed ’74 (MEd), a retired college professor, died January 28, in Barnegat, New Jersey. MacQuarrie taught at the School of Dental Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Community College of Baltimore. 1974: Walter John Ratterman, Engr ’74, passed away on January 12 at the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, during the devastating earthquake. Ratterman served in the U.S. Army Reserve. He traveled to more than 30 countries for aid, relief, and sustainable energy efforts. 1975: Elizabeth Otto, Ed ’75 (MS), who was a teacher for 25 years, died January 21 in Brooksville, Florida. 1976: W. Robert Higgins, A&S ’76 (PGF), a retired American history professor who headed Southeastern University in Washington, died in Baltimore on December 28, 2009. Higgins served in the U.S. Navy from 1959 to 1963 and later retired as a commander in the Naval Reserves.

1976: William N. Parrott Jr., Ed ’76 (Cert), a retired Baltimore County educator who earlier had been a city public school teacher and administrator, died January 6 in Annapolis, Maryland. 1977: Marion P. Szymanski, Ed ’77 (MEd), a retired Baltimore County public school educator, died February 12 in Edgemere, Maryland. She was a Title I teacher in the early 1970s, working with needy children and their families in southeastern Baltimore County. 1979: Robert Stanley Bridges, Peab ’79, who was a career violinist with the Houston Ballet, died December 16, 2009, in Houston, Texas. Bridges frequently performed with the Houston Symphony. 1984: Marvin R. Levy, SPH ’84, died on December 24, 2009, in West Amwell Township, New Jersey. He had written one of the first publications for the state of New Jersey on drug abuse and was the chairperson of the health department at Temple University in Philadelphia. 1986: Frederick A. Dittmer, SPH ’86, a former captain in the U.S Army and chief for the department of psychiatry at Peninsula Regional Medical Center, died December 13, 2009, in Salisbury, Maryland. 1990: Rachel Wetzsteon, A&S ’90 (MA), died on December 24, 2009, in Manhattan.Wetzsteon was the poetry editor of The New Republic and was also on the faculty of William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. 1991: Curt Harold Doerr, Ed ’91 (MS), A&S ’93 (MS), an adjunct professor at Montgomery College, died December 5, 2009. Doerr had previously taught at Georgetown Preparatory School in Maryland, Gonzaga High School in Washington, D.C., and Charleston Catholic High School in West Virginia. 1995: Myra Lynette Abaowa (Gary), Ed ’95 (MS), who taught special education in the Baltimore City Public Schools system for over 20 years, passed away on November 1, 2009. 1995: Catherine “Kitte” D. Sporn, A&S ’95 (MLA), who retired from Washington Hospital Center, died December 6, 2009, in Tunbridge, Vermont. Sporn held positions at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, the National Institutes of Health, and Washington Hospital Center. 2002: Lisa M. Shelton, Bus ’02 (MBA), founder and CEO of Sandi’s Learning Center, passed away April 24. The center, founded in 2002, was named after Shelton’s daughter. 2009: Joshua Alexander Kuhlman, A&S ’09, died on January 3 in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Department of Defense. Kuhlman was known for his academic achievements and community service. He played varsity soccer and was the president of the Fiji fraternity while he was a student at Johns Hopkins University.

Alumni News & Notes Alumni Association President: Gerry Peterson, Nurs ’64 Executive Director of Alumni Relations: Sandra Gray, A&S ’76 (alumni@jhu.edu) Editors: Nora Koch (koch@jhu.edu), Kirsten Lavin (klavin@jhu.edu) Class Notes Editor: 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 publish your information in Johns Hopkins Magazine and in online publications. The Alumni News & Notes section of Johns Hopkins Magazine is made possible by your annual Alumni Association Membership dues. Annual dues are $50, $25 for classes 2005–2009. Lifetime membership dues are $1,000 or four annual installments of $250 each. For more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu/dues.

Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 69

M a r k e t p l a c e Attire

Real Estate / For Sale

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Charming 2 1/2 Story on Blackburn Lane in Cedarcroft: 10 min. to JHU. 4 BR, 3 full/2 half bath, CAC, finished basement, 2 car det. garage, deck, fenced BY, beautiful landscaping. $489K, 410-982-7930, ML # BA7299642.

Dating Services

North Baltimore County: Custom-built, Cushwa brick home, 11 acres, pond and stream. French Provincial style. 6 BR, 5 full baths, 2 half baths, 4 fireplaces. 7,345 s.f. Main level features LR, DR, family and sun rooms, office, study, and gourmet kitchen. Lower level offers complete living quarters (possible in-law suite) plus family and sun rooms. Exercise room. Two decks. Extensive landscaping/private setting.Tree-lined driveway to three-car garage. $1,115,000. Stuart LeVene, associate broker, Long & Foster Real Estate, 410-274-9789.

Real Estate / Rentals Professional Services Baltimore Real Estate: Diligently serving the real estate needs of the Hopkins community since 1987—from the Inner Harbor to Monkton. Vicki Sindler, MS ’78, Realtor, EHO Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. 410-453-0500, cell: 410215-5234, email: vicki.sindler@LNF.com.

Downtown

Beach House–Lewes, Delaware: Walk to beach and town, sleeps 8, 2 baths, outdoor shower, hot tub, fireplace. 410-375-8661, dunk5106@aol.com. Bethany Beach-Sea Colony: 3 BD oceanfront condo available for weekly rentals; indoor/outdoor pools, tennis courts, fitness center & other amenities. Perfect for families! If interested, email Harbour411@aol.com. Deep Creek Lake, MD: Spacious 4BR/3.5BA, sleeps 12, FP, boat slip, Internet, cable. 410-3375119, rrkuser@comcast.net. Sanibel Island, FL: 2 BR/1BA piling beach house. Walk to beach, private deck. Trades considered. 410-692-0200, bdat08@gmail.com. Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay: Lovely 2BD cottage; sleeps 4; gorgeous sunsets, 410-905-6041, marciaupdike@yahoo .com.

Baltimore

Distinctive Living, Distinctive Experiences.

Vacation Rental / Foreign Italy, Tuscany-Umbria Border: Beautiful 5 bedroom countr y villa, designer interiors, stunning views, heated infinity pool, private grounds, available year-round! www.poderepalazzo.com.

Helping Families Reach Their Financial Goals: We provide completely objective financial advice, planning, and comprehensive wealth management. Barker Financial Management, Inc. www.GoDowntownBaltimore.com is an independent, fee-only, Registered Investment Advisor. Contact us for a free consulta10-878 DTP_Living_JHUmag.indd Tours1 / Travel 5/10/10 11:29:20 AM tion, MD & DC area, Barry Barker, MS '93, 410972-4550, barry@barkerfinancialmanagement Explore Newfoundland and Labra.com, www.barkerfinancialmanagement.com. dor: Whales, icebergs, lighthouses, puffins, Gros Morne, the Vikings’ New World In need of a mortgage? Purchase or home. Award-winning local hosts. Gentle refinance, please contact Bruce Kane, BA ’81, 7-day adventures. Wild days. Comfor table MBA ’95. 443-722-2845, mail to: bkane@ hotels. Wildland Tours, 888-615-8279, monarchmtg.com. www.wildlands.com. Timberly Masonry: Custom stone and brick work, including all types of masonr y repair. 40 years’ experience. MHIC 20032. Joe Warczynski, 410-960-4314. Tidewater Remodeling: Custom remodeling—full service to handyman. Prompt, professional, courteous. MHIC#12152, since 1980. 410-592-9993, tidewaterbob@comcast.net.

70 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Vacation Rental / Domestic Amelia Island: Northern Florida, Atlantic Coast. Walk to beach. 3BR/2BA or 2BR/2BA condos for year-round getaways, vacations or sabbaticals! Easy drive from JacksonvilleJAX. www.VRBO.com/67858 or www.VRBO .com/148124.

For Johns Hopkins Marketplace rates and information, contact Julie Wittelsberger, The Gazelle Group, Inc., 410-343-3362, or e-mail gazellegrp@ comcast.net.

Golomb’s Answers

“The Mnemonic Plague” Solutions

Puzzle on page 15. A. 1. The five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. 2. The colors of the rainbow, in order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. 3. This fictitious disk jockey’s business card gives you the months of the year, in sequential order: June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May. 4. For beginning French students, “one egg” is un oeuf. There are many mnemonics for words in almost every language. Other French ones: “Part II [partout] is everywhere,” and “Pluto [plutôt] is coming soon.” For Hebrew pronouns: “Me is who, who is he, and he is she” (that is, mi means “who,” hu means “he,” and hi means “she”). But in Japanese, mi = 3, hu = 2, hi = 1 and (in a different numeral sequence) shi = 4. 5. In music, the five lines on the treble clef are e, g, b, d, f, as in Every good boy does fine. The spaces are f, a, c, e, or face. For the lines on the bass clef, use “Good boys do fine always” (g, b, d, f, a), where the spaces are remembered by All cows eat grass (a, c, e, g). 6. The spectral types of “main sequence” stars, starting with the hottest and brightest: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. (Our own yellow sun is merely around G7.) 7. The hierarchy of biological classification levels: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. (Kingdoms are now grouped in larger units, the Eukaryotes, Prokaryotes, and Archaebacteria, which I have proposed should be called “Empires”; at the other end, Species are subdivided into “Varieties.” A nine-word mnemonic can be coined to include these extensions: “Every keen person can obtain fresh green salad veggies.” 8. The color code on the stripes circling electrical resisters, for the digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, are (in order): black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white. (Note the omission of “indigo” from A.2. above.)

9. The 12 pairs of cranial nerves, which every student of human anatomy must memorize, in order are: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, acoustic, glossopharangeal, vagus, (spinal) accessory, hypoglossal. A companion mnemonic, to remember which nerves are sensory nerves, or motor nerves, or both, in the same order is: Some say “marry money,” but my brother says, “Bad business marry money.” 10. The successive digits of “pi,” the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, are given by the number of letters in the words of this mnemonic: “3.14159265358979.” There are many other mnemonics for pi, both shorter and longer, and in many different languages. A short one, for 3.1416, is “Now I have a number.” B. 1. “Spring forward, fall back.” 2. “Lefty loosy, righty tighty,” or

simply “Clockwise to close.” This works for screws, garden hose taps, and most other valves, but natural gas valves operate in the reverse direction! 3. “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty-one Save February, all alone, Whose days are only eight and score, But leap year brings it one day more.” 4. “I before E except after C, Unless pronounced A, as in neighbor and weigh.” While this rule works for believe and receive, it has dozens of exceptions. (What general principle can explain siege vs. seize?) Today, instead of a mnemonic, one can use spellcheck! For bawdier mnemonics, e.g., for A.8 or A.9, ask someone who studied electrical engineering or pre-med anatomy, respectively.

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www.andyo.org Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010 71

H o w To :

...Graduate from Johns Hopkins

n May 27 at Homewood Field, Johns Hopkins University awarded diplomas to the Class of 2010. (New this year: one massive ceremony conferring degrees on undergraduates and graduates from all the university’s divisions and campuses, in keep-

ing with President Ron Daniels’ “one university” theme.) Hopkins is renowned for its heavy workload, high academic standards, and rigorous classes. Of course, sandwiched between final exams and The Rest of Your Life, Commencement has its own rigors. —Dale Keiger

One last party with classmates. Promise to be best friends forever by texting someone sitting 10 feet away. Remind yourself that this night is the pinnacle of your social “life” at Hopkins, most of which has been spent in MSE Library.

On the eve of the ceremony, have dinner with Mom and Dad. Make your escape toward Step Two as they giddily toast the end of tuition payments and celebrate the exotic cruise they'll be able to afford now.

The next morning, bring a cushion.You’ll be sitting through speeches (including one from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Engr ’64) and a couple thousand students ambling across stage to get their diplomas.

72 Johns Hopkins Magazine • Summer 2010

Fight off panicky feeling as you contemplate paying off student loans. Break out in broad smile when you realize there’s a way to defer all of that: grad school!

Wally Neibart

As a chemical engineer, Denis Wirtz may not have been the most obvious person to co-found our Institute for NanoBioTechnology. But at Johns Hopkins University, it’s not just how you were trained that matters; it’s what you can contribute to solving the problem. We know that interdisciplinary, collaborative efforts are the pathway to true discovery—that convergence can spark a moment of brilliance. That’s one reason we took Wirtz and other Johns Hopkins experts on the road this spring, generating thought-provoking discussion with alumni and the greater Johns Hopkins community.

Denis Wirtz, PhD, the Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor and director of the Engineering in Oncology Center, keeps the conversation going in Los Angeles with CTY parents Nora and Ariel Hazi.

And you can still join the conversation. Go to rising.jhu.edu to watch video highlights and download the Rising to the Challenge panel discussions. Learn about advances in the basic life sciences that affect us all and how we as a university are confronting tomorrow’s economic, geopolitical and ethical challenges. Keep the conversation going. Sign up for upcoming events and join the live discourse. rising.jhu.edu rising.jhu.edu/facebook

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