John Harvard's Journal

ship, winning in Cologne, Germany, on two months. But his older brother, Wael, a all-Ivy, Farag is a mechanical engineering her seventeenth birthday, June 29, by tak- strong player himself, took over as his coach concentrator who wants to bring solar-en- ing down Egypt’s Nour El Tayeb in a de- and a few months later Farag reached the fi- ergy technology to Egypt. “There’s a mas- manding final—“at the end of the match nals of a national tournament. He captained sive resource of sunlight there,” he says. my lungs were about to explode.” Even his Egyptian team to the world junior title “An average of 9.5 hours per day.” before college, Sobhy was ranked first in in Quito in 2010 and was ranked the num- Though the two champions have had the United States and as high as seven- ber-one junior player in the world after win- similar Harvard careers, their teams’ suc- teenth in the world; she had won four U.S. ning the British Junior Open in 2011. cess has diverged slightly. Last year, the junior national titles and five tournaments At Harvard, he went 16-0 (he did lose women’s team went 17-0, winning the in the professional Women’s International six games over the course of the season) Howe Cup, symbolic of the CSA national Squash Players Association. and swept all opponents en route to his team championship. The men’s squad (16- It is hard to overstate Sobhy’s dominance CSA national championship, triumphing 4), finished third in the country, up from last year: she tore through women’s squash over Columbia’s Ramit Tandon in the final. fifth the year before, losing to Princeton, like a tornado. College matches use a best During the regular season, he unhorsed Yale, and Trinity in the regular season and three-of-five game format; Sobhy not only Princeton’s defending national champion, to Trinity at the CSA national tournament. won all her matches (15-0), but won all her Todd Harrity, settling a score for his fam- (Princeton won the 2012 Potter Cup and games, recording five consecutive sweeps ily, as Harrity had handed Wael Farag a national title, besting Trinity in the final.) at the CSA individual tourney, capped by tough defeat years earlier. Naturally, Farag, This year, the Harvard men return all a shutout of defending champion Millie too, was Ivy Rookie and Player of the Year. their starters from the young squad that Tomlinson of Yale in the final. Sobhy was, He nearly didn’t come to Harvard. Ini- played last year—the season in which inevitably, both Ivy League Rookie of the tially he was adamant about staying in Yale finally ended Trinity’s unearthly Year and Player of the Year. To get chal- Egypt, but he played a tournament in St. 252-match winning streak that dated to lenging competition, she often practices Louis and, with parental encouragement, 1998. “Trinity’s players have the eyes of the against Harvard’s male players or with the made a visit to Cambridge and had an in- tiger,” Farag says. “They are strong men- plethora of pros and coaches who visit the terview. He returned to Egypt two days tally and have the most intense fighting Murr Center courts. (And bear in mind before the revolution there, and his father spirit. This year, we’ll be the most intense. that Harvard’s number-two player, Laura urged him to earn a Harvard degree and That’s all it takes—we have the will, so Gemmell ’13, was herself an undefeated na- use it to help his homeland. An academic we will find a way.” vcraig lambert tional champion as a freshman.) Sobhy typically sets a blazing pace in her matches, which frequently are decided in 15 to 25 minutes. She has both foot speed and alumni enough power (“I’ve got a lot of muscle”) to hit rockets off both the forehand and back- hand sides. She speeds up play by volleying as many balls as possible; professional play- Paradise Found ers can handle the dizzying pace, but many collegians cannot. Sobhy also loves drop The dazzling beauty and strangely human behavior shots; she now seeks to cultivate a more of one of the world’s most diverse bird families. varied pace in her game, to “throw in some lobs.” An anthropology concentrator, she hopes to play professionally after college and some day open her own club. n 2010 biologist create a campsite. It Farag hails from Cairo and completed a and National Geo- was their fifteenth year at American University there before graphic photogra- expedition on an Harvard. Egyptian players have the advan- pher Tim Laman, eight-year mission tage of being largely concentrated in Cairo; IPh.D. ’94, again found to document all 39 at Farag’s Heliopolis Sporting Club, he often himself more than 80 species of the birds- plays with many of the world’s best, includ- feet off the ground, of-paradise in the ing Ramy Ashour, frequently the world’s hidden in a rainforest wild—something top-ranked player in recent years. Farag blind made of skinny palm trees and leaves Blue Bird-of- never done before. aims high: his sporting idols, he says, are woven together with vines. At 4:30 a.m. it Paradise, Tigibi, The palm-tree Tari area Roger Federer (yes, he plays tennis, too) and was still dark. blind faced a lek, a retired French soccer star Zinedine Zidane. He and his research partner, ornitholo- spot where male birds assemble for com- In 2009, Farag was ready to quit the game gist Edwin Scholes, had taken 10 different petitive mating displays. The blind held not and sell his racquet after a pair of devastat- planes and two boats to get to the Aru Is- only Laman’s muscular six-foot-four-inch ing losses—a player he feels he should have lands, between New Guinea and Australia, frame, but also his tripod and digital SLR beaten bested him instead, 3-0, twice in then hiked a few hours into the forest to cameras (for close-up stills and video), an

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audio recorder, and a laptop computer. The last was connected, by a cable he had run across the canopy, to a camouflaged camera that took wide shots by remote control. At sunrise, two male Greater Birds-of- Paradise arrived. With billowing gold- en plumage rising above their rust-red wings, they spread their feathers wide and hopped about madly, singing a one-note tune, their yellow-and-iridescent-green heads bobbing for attention. Then each froze, like a runway model jutting out a chiseled jaw, as their less dazzling fe- male counterpart nosed around critically, checking them out. A choice was made and the pair did what they were born to do, then flew away. As the one lone male lingered on the branch, Laman saw his “dream shot” emerge. “He was hanging out with all his Laman, whose doctoral research focused One of the 146 trees Tim Laman plumes spread and the sun came up and il- on rainforest ecology. “I’m also excited climbed to capture images of the rain forests’ avian dwellers. luminated these pale clouds over the mist about the contribution we’ve made to sci- of the rainforest, casting a yellow light,” he entific understanding.” Their project offers rituals, and 2,256 video and audio record- says. “And I got the shot!” the most comprehensive look so far at this ings, are now archived at the Cornell Lab’s That became the opening spread of La- dynamic avian family. Detailed accounts of Macaulay Library, where Scholes is the bio- man and Scholes’s Birds of Paradise, Revealing habits, habitat, calls, evolutionary history, diversity video curator. At least six scien- the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds, published and singular features are paired with maps tific papers outlining their findings are also by National Geographic and the Cornell Lab of and notes on migration and terrain. slated for publication. of Ornithology, which together funded The birds’ unique anatomical features Further enlivening the book are histo- most of the pair’s 51 field-research sites and comparative sexual selection practices ries of earlier explorers—such as Laman’s in New Guinea and parts of northeastern are highlighted. The Twelve-Wired Bird- hero, the nineteenth-century natural- Australia. The new, coffee-table book fea- of-Paradise male, for example, uses elon- ist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer tures ethereal and intimate images of the gated central shafts of plumage to “tickle” of natural selection—interspersed with birds in all their glory, culled from 39,568 the female; the Superb male transforms tales of the pair’s own adventures. On one that Laman brought back—from 2,006 into a ghoulish turquoise smiley face by trip, Scholes’s appendix burst at a remote hours spent in rainforest blinds—and dramatically repositioning his plumage; campsite and they spent five days getting painstakingly catalogued. the Western Parotia male engages in a him to a hospital. Twice they found them- “The book celebrates the beauty and di- whirling dance during which its side feath- selves adrift at sea in broken-down boats. versity of these birds and the importance ers flare out like a tutu. “The diversity of Not to mention all the other discomforts of conservation in protecting them,” says the forms were extraordinary: the variety field biologists endure. “It’s not cool to of shape, size, whine about the bugs,” Laman maintains. feathers, col- “Although the leeches in Borneo are bad.” ors, the long tail feathers, and the All told, Laman has spent five years in wires coming out Bornean rainforests, on projects including of their heads,” his dissertation on the interactions between Laman notes. strangler fig trees and the wildlife that help The researchers’ disperse their seeds. He often shared the extensive new same field station in the Gunung Palung Na- material, such as tional Park with orangutan expert Cheryl documentation Knott, Ph.D. ’99—now his wife, and an as- of two species’ sociate professor at Boston University. (The previously un- couple and their two children, Russell, 12— seen courtship named for Wallace—and Jessica, 8, live in Lexington, Massachusetts.) The whole fam- Twelve-Wired Bird-of-Paradise, ily has traveled many times to Borneo, and Nimbokrang, will journey to the Galápagos Islands in Feb- Jayapura area ruary. In 2011, Laman took his son to Antarc-

Harvard Magazine 63 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

images (http://timlaman.com). He’s also a frequent lecturer on environmental edu- cation trips. In fact, his first glimpse of a bird-of-paradise came while accompany- ing a Harvard Museum of Natural History trip to Indonesia in 1990. It “was just enough to make me eager to go back,” he says. He had read Wallace’s tales of exploration, The Malay Archipelago, before his first trip to Borneo in 1987; one section chronicles the naturalist’s own trip to the Aru Islands more than 150 years ago, where he was the first Westerner to see these “most beautiful and most won- derful” creatures alive in their homeland. In Papua New Guinea, Tim Laman takes advantage of a rare hotel stop to dry out his Related to crows in structure and habit, 20 lenses, 4 camera bodies, audio and lighting gear, computers, and tree-climbing and these enchanters, Wallace wrote, “are camping equipment—not to mention his clothes and boots. characterised by extraordinary develop- tica for three weeks, prompting Russell to demic articles that “only reach a handful of ments of plumage...unequalled in any oth- note not long ago that he’d already set foot scientists,” and wanted a wider audience. er family of birds. In several species large on every continent except Africa. Yet they He chose to return to Borneo for post- tufts of delicate bright-coloured feath- are just as thrilled to observe the life of local doctoral research and to focus on his ers spring from each side of the body be- species. A phoebe nest sits above their front photography, a longtime hobby. His first neath the wings, forming trains, or fans, door: the brown-and-white birds migrate National Geographic article, published in or shields; and the middle feathers of the from South America and, atypically, have 1997, covered strangler figs; it was quickly tail are often elongated into wires, twisted used the same nest for three years. Laman followed by another article, written by into fantastic shapes, or adorned with the rigged a video camera so that he and his kids Knott, that used his images of orangutans. most brilliant metallic tints.” Today, the “could sit inside and watch the babies being “I soon became their rainforest guy,” La- rural parts of the Aru Islands are largely fed and raised,” he explains. Not as excit- man says; by 1999, wildlife photography unchanged since Wallace’s visit, but there ing as fording rivers and climbing trees in (supplemented by some science journal- are far fewer birds, due to their only con- the rainforest, but wondrous just the same. ism) was his full-time job. sistent enemy: humans. Laman has always been riveted by the Since then he’s produced 20 feature sto- Laman’s birds-of-paradise odyssey be- natural world, with all its complex and ries for National Geographic; has worked for gan in 2003, when National Geographic ac- beautiful forms. Born and raised in Japan, other publications, such as his kids’ favor- cepted his pitch to do a photo spread on “never far from lakes, mountains, or the ite, Ranger Rick; and has won awards for his the subject; the birds had not been covered ocean,” where his parents were American missionaries, he believes his international upbringing “has probably led me to being comfortable working all over the world. I had no clear career plan: ‘I’m going to get a Ph.D. and then become a professional pho- tographer,’” he adds. “I kind of made it up as I went along.” Two years of a doctoral program in neuroscience and animal be- havior at Harvard left him unhappy about spending the rest of his career indoors, so in 1987 he took a year off as a field assis- tant in Borneo with biologist and ecologist Mark Leighton (then an assistant professor in biological anthropology and now an in- structor at the Harvard Extension School). There, Laman fell in love with the terrain and wildlife. He transferred to the depart- ment of organismic and evolutionary biol- ogy on his return and completed his doc- torate. But along Raggiana Bird-of- the way, he became Paradise, Kiburu, frustrated by aca- Mendi area

64 January - February 2013 www.alumni.harvard.edu Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

since the 1950s because they are so difficult sion of Wallace’s essential work. “If I had collectors,” Laman adds, “and we were to find and record. Laman then contacted lived in his lifetime,” he says, “I might have shooting video and audio of them so that Scholes, the only active researcher in the ended up in a similar line of work—as a people 100 years from now can still see field he could find, and thus began a five- roving naturalist.” Wallace was fascinated how extraordinary these birds were in life. trip project from 2004 to 2006 that led to by exploring foreign lands, “but he also For me, that’s the most exciting thing.” a 2007 article. The subsequent “mission,” had a high-level scientific inquisitiveness vnell porter brown Laman recalls, came out of a fateful “semi- with which he pursued the species ques- delirious camp fire talk in which Ed and I tion—how many are there and how did National Geographic features the work of La- said, ‘Hey, we ought to get all 39 species. they get that way?—that led him to natu- man and Scholes in its December 2012 issue (http:// It can’t be that hard, we’re already halfway ral selection. ngm.nationalgeographic.com); the pair travel on a there!’” “He was shooting birds and bring- U.S. and Canadian National Geographic lec- Laman sees his project as a modern ver- ing them back for scientists and private ture tour through April.

Essay A Pediatrician Takes the Long View

I am a converted pediatrician. A product had been afflicted with severe anemia of Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, since birth and required regular red trained almost entirely in adult medicine, I blood cell transfusions. It was readily began my career as a hematologist focused apparent that his own erythrocytes on disorders of the blood in adults. For- were being rapidly destroyed, and his tunately my base was the then Peter Bent spleen, an abdominal organ that re- Brigham Hospital, an excellent but entirely moves old or damaged red cells, was outmoded facility in close proximity to the greatly enlarged. It therefore stood then equally Dickensian Children’s Hospi- to reason that removal of the spleen tal. Though its facilities were pathetic, Chil- might alleviate the anemia. David Nathan dren’s had a brilliant faculty, among them The operation was performed niversity with his patient Mark, now an son U son Louis K. Diamond, one of the fathers of pedi- skillfully, but with mixed results. k r adult, in May 2012 a l

atric hematology. Diamond showed me the The need for transfusions was greatly C way. He invited me to see his most complex reduced, but the red cells were still rap- reactivate their genetically defective en- patients, and I became utterly fascinated by idly destroyed, and the boy remained ane- zyme and cure their anemia? I was to gain them. When I was invited to join his divi- mic. As my colleagues and I pondered the a possible answer to that question almost sion, become a pediatrician, and ultimately case, Michael’s mother bore a second boy, a half-century later. direct it, I jumped at the chance. Joseph, with the same problem. Before my trip to Potsdam, I e-mailed Mi- I had come to realize that treatment of After a great deal of laboratory work, chael and Joseph and asked them to meet ill children may allow a physician to have a survey of all members of the family, and me in Saranac Lake. Michael was there decades of experience with individual searches of the literature, we determined with his 90-year-old father, whom I had not patients throughout their growth and de- that both boys had inherited a copy of an seen since 1963. Michael had established a velopment, and to take advantage of new altered gene from each parent. The tiny career as a technician in medical, food ser- therapies as they slowly emerge from re- defect or mutation, present in both copies vice, and computer laboratories; he has the search laboratories and pharmaceutical of the gene in these boys, seriously dam- background to understand the research companies. Though the care of very ill aged the function of an enzyme protein, related to his disease. We had a spectacu- children, particularly children with seri- pyruvate kinase, in their red blood cells. lar reunion during which I told them that a ous blood diseases, can be very challeng- That enzyme protein, we soon learned, is biotech company has just developed a drug ing, when new therapeutic approaches essential to maintain the life span of all hu- that can reactivate the defective protein. enable former patients to enjoy productive man red cells. The boys were only the sec- That firm is now testing Michael’s and Jo- lives, the reward is huge, as I was remind- ond set of such patients to be so identified seph’s cells to see if the drug will reactivate ed this past May. worldwide. their weakened enzyme. If that happens, my A trip to Clarkson University, in Pots- Michael and Joseph returned intermit- two former patients and others like them dam, New York, offered an opportunity to tently to Boston for follow-up studies un- around the world may recover from their reconnect with two brothers whom I had til their early teens, when their care was chronic anemia. seen with Dr. Diamond in the mid 1960s, transferred permanently to local physi- I continued on to Potsdam, where ser- and who still lived in nearby Saranac Lake. cians. But the challenge of their rare in- endipity brought me together with Mark, Michael, now in his fifties, was three herited anemia always preoccupied me. a 52-year-old whom I had last seen at years old when I first examined him. He How, I wondered, could we find a way to Children’s in 1966, when he was only a

Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746