JOHNS HOPKINS MAGAZINE Have Your Cake

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Sherlock Holmes, Hopkins Man p.14 The Butterfly’s Effects p.48 The 5/2 Diet p.21 The professor is already inspiring undergraduates in his acting and directing classes. JOHN ASTIN’S NEXT ACT But his true quest is to bring the theater major back to Johns Hopkins. p.28 VOLUME 64 NO. 2 SUMMER 2012 Once Quiet on the Western Front p.60 Idea The End Plan p.10 Der Blaue Jay p.73 JOHNS HOPKINS MAGAZINE Have your cake...

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34 Computing Texas Hold ’em 12 The Cosmic Web

FRONT DEPARTMENTS

05 Contributors 10 Idea Happier Endings 07 Note 12 Artifact The Cosmic Web 08 Dialogue 14 Forefront The Case of the Bivalve Epicure 26 Evidence Sequencing Not a Crystal Ball 56 Text Hospital Props ALUMNI 58 Who Is . . . Sheri Lewis 60 Campus One Opera, One Pulitzer 67 Golomb’s Gambits Word Changes 68 Giving Making Waves to Fight Cancer 70 Colleagues The Read on Culture 72 Alumni Association Hopkins True Blue 73 Notebook A Vienna Lexicon 74 Friends for Life Lacrosse Brothers 75 Class Notes 79 In Memoriam 80 Afterwords My Life as an Egyptologist

2 | johns hopkins magazine 68 Making Waves to Fight Cancer

FEATURES

28 Staging a Revival 40 Parental Guidance Michael Anft Bret McCabe In a career that has included Broadway, film, For parents of kids with special needs, navigating and television, John Astin, A&S ’52, has also been the education system can be a daunting successful in his most recent role—bringing process. Johns Hopkins student Liza Brecher spotlights back to his alma mater. wants to help.

34 Computing Texas Hold ’em 48 Aping Nature Dale Keiger Michael Anft Computer security expert Avi Rubin approaches We can’t talk with the animals. But by poker as he approaches his other “casual” observing their most awe-inspiring traits, pursuits—obsessively. we can learn enough from them to create new medicines and robots.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 3 24/7 SERVICE SECURITY PROTECTION ONLINE ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT 24/7 SERVICE SECURITY PROTECTIONad here ONLINE ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT From breakfast on the run to a night at the movies, use your Johns Hopkins Alumni ® ® From breakfast on the ®run to a night at the Association Platinum Plus MasterCard creditmovies, card with use WorldPoints your Johns rewards. Hopkins Alumni You’ll earn points on purchases to redeem® for cash,® travel, merchandise, even ® AssociationN Platinum Plus MasterCard credit card with WorldPoints rewards. unique adventures.You’ll earn Rewards points on for purchases the things youto redeem buy anyway. for cash, travel, merchandise, even unique adventures.N Rewards for the things you buy anyway. The Johns Hopkins Alumni Association receives financial support for allowing Bank of America to offer this credit card program. To apply, call toll-free 1.866.438.6262 Mention Priority Code VABENU.To apply, You can call also visittoll-free www.newcardonline.com 1.866.438.6262 and enter Priority Code VABEN U. Mention Priority Code VABENU. You can also visit www.newcardonline.com and enter Priority Code VABEN U.

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JOHNS HOPKINS MAGAZINE Contributors

Editor Cathy Shufro (“Renewing Ties appeared in the New York Times, Catherine Pierre to Myanmar,” p. 16) is a the Telegraph, Wired, and New Associate Editor freelance journalist who has Scientist, among other publica- Dale Keiger, A&S ’11 (MLA) reported on global health from tions. Originally from Istanbul, Senior Writers Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Haiti, she lives and works in London. Michael Anft and Thailand. This spring, she Bret McCabe, A&S ’94 reported from Myanmar on a Marshall Clarke (“Making Assistant Editor fellowship from the Interna- Waves to Fight Cancer,” Kristen Intlekofer tional Reporting Project, a photograph, p. 68) is an Art Director program at the Nitze School of independent photographer Shaul Tsemach Advanced International Studies based in the Baltimore and Designer that allows U.S. journalists to do Washington, D.C., areas. His Pamela Li in-depth reporting overseas. work has appeared in exhibi- Alumni News & Notes tions at the Fraser Gallery in Lisa Belman David Driver (“Applying a Slide Washington and at the Balti- Mike Field, A&S ’97 (MA) Rule to Baseball,” p. 20) is a more Museum of Art, and his Business Manager freelance writer whose work has clients include magazines, Dianne MacLeod appeared in the Washington universities, multinational Post, the Washington Times, the corporations, and nonprofits. Johns Hopkins Magazine (publication number 276-260; ISSN 0021-7255) is Sacramento Bee, the Cleveland published four times a year (Fall, Winter, Plain Dealer, and the Seattle Jennifer Walker (“The Read on Spring, and Summer) by The Johns Hopkins University, 901 S. Bond Street, Post-Intelligencer. A former Culture,” p. 70) is a freelance Suite 540, Baltimore, MD 21231. college baseball player, he now writer based in Baltimore, Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, covers sports in and around where she writes about health, Maryland, and additional entry offices. Diverse views are presented and do not Washington, D.C., where he has food, business, and arts and necessarily reflect the opinions of the lived for 20 years. culture. Her work has appeared editors or official policies of the university. in Urbanite, Johns Hopkins Correspond with Johns Hopkins Magazine Eda Akaltun (“Computing Texas Nursing, Healthcare Traveler, Johns Hopkins Magazine Johns Hopkins University Hold ’em,” illustrations, p. 34) and SmartCEO, among other 901 S. Bond Street, Suite 540 employs traditional printmaking publications. She blogs about Baltimore, MD 21231 and digital collage to create her food and cooking at [email protected] Telephone: 443-287-9900 illustrations, which have mymorningchocolate.com. magazine.jhu.edu

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Advertise with Johns Hopkins Magazine Alter Communications Kristen Cooper, Sales and Marketing Director; On the cover Sherlock Holmes, Hopkins Man p.14 The Butterfly’s Effects p.48 The 5/2 Diet p.21 The professor is already inspiring undergraduates in his acting and directing classes. 410-468-2700; JOHN ASTIN’S NEXT ACT But his true quest is to bring the theater major back to Johns Hopkins. p.28 Actor and theater professor John VOLUME 64 NO. 2 SUMMER 2012 Once Quiet on the Western Front p.60 Idea The End Plan p.10 Der Blaue Jay p.73 [email protected] Astin was photographed for our JOHNS HOPKINS MAGAZINE cover by Christian Witkin, a New POSTMASTER York–based fashion and portrait Please send address changes to photographer. This cover photo of Johns Hopkins Magazine Astin was taken outside the Mer- 201 N. Charles St., Suite 2500 Baltimore, MD 21201 rick Barn, recently renovated and renamed the John Astin Theatre. Copyright ©2012, The Johns Hopkins University Witkin’s work has appeared in a number of publications, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine, and in advertising campaigns for (RED), Nike, Micro- soft, and Calvin Klein.

| 5 [ AD ] ad[ here AD ]

6 | johns hopkins magazine NOTE | P H OTOG RA P H by Christian Witkin

[ AD ] [ AD ] Vol. / Just another day in the Land of Pleasant Living. It was ambitious to schedule a double photo shoot—one of them outside—for mid-April. We had a terrific photographer named Christian Witkin coming down from New York for back-to-back sessions with 64 theater professor John Astin, A&S ’52 (“Staging a Revival”), and undergrad Liza Brecher, A&S ’13 (“Parental Guidance”). The timing had to be nearly perfect, so I attended the shoot to make sure things went smoothly. We got started a little late when Astin turned out to be charming and loquacious and full of wonderful stories. And when we P H

OTOG went outside to photograph Brecher, the day clouded over and a small sprinkling of rain was followed by a full-on hailstorm. Not exactly RA P

H perfect, but it’s springtime in Baltimore—what can you do? by

M My favorite part of the day was when, between shoots, Astin intro- ax

H duced himself to Brecher. She mentioned that her dad, Gerald Brecher, irshfeld A&S ’67, participated in theater when he was a student. Astin graduated too early for them to have crossed paths, but he thought for a minute and said, “Any relation to Irving Brecher?” Irving Brecher was a screen- writer who, among other things, wrote for the Marx brothers. Turns out he was a first cousin of her grandfather, Walter Brecher, A&S ’34. Irving Editor Catherine Pierre himself was not a Johns Hopkins graduate, but the moment still felt very Smalltimore. It’s just kind of nice that at a university that gathers people from all over the country and around the world, you can still have small-town moments like that.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 7 DIALOGUE |

Connections lacrosse games before the days of ingly difficult environment. Those who I just received your new and splashy Ernie Larossa and emails. Nobody did build and fund technology must get magazine and I am compelled to write, it better. physicians to the requirements table not just because of the suave appear- William J. Fenza, A&S ’51 and learn from industries that have ance but also because so many items in Macungie, Pennsylvania already crossed the technology chasm. that issue have a personal connection Obviously, a lot has been learned for me. already. Why repeat the process? Dale Keiger writes about Sidney When it comes to helping John May, Engr ’86 (MS) Offit, A&S ’50, and Kurt Vonnegut CEO, TrustNetMD physicians deal with Trustee, Sibley Memorial Hospital [Forefront, “Pals with Pens,” Spring]. Potomac, Maryland Sidney and I were both in Bob Jacobs’ increased workload and writing class and I still remember with overbearing bureaucracy, Food for thought fondness Sidney’s enthusiasm and wit, we are missing the boat. especially when reading one of his own While the efforts of David Love to stories. John Barth was also in that extend urban farming to the fisheries class. I also recall that when I did not sector are admirable, it is also a dead have the nerve to make the call, Sidney Healthy tech end and a waste of his time and our telephoned Ogden Nash at his home to I read with interest Mary Garland’s JHU money [Wholly Hopkins, “Farm- invite him to our Pi Delta Epsilon comments on “Paying Attention to ing for Urban Tilapia,” Winter 2011]. honorary fraternity dinner. I stood to Distraction” in the Spring issue Believe me, it is almost as useless to one side and listened, amazed at [Dialogue, “The Perils of Distraction”]. try and raise commercial quantities of Sidney’s charm and persuasion. Of Clearly, when it comes to helping fish in a living room aquarium as it is course Nash attended, even got there physicians deal with increased to attempt what he is doing in the early to schmooze with us at the bar. workload and overbearing bureaucracy, backyard. To paint this doomed effort There was also a photograph of we are missing the boat. as properly scientific research with a John Astin, A&S ’52 [Campus, “Astin’s Technology, when used thought- real potential for game-changing House,” Spring]. I had the privilege of fully, can be a godsend. It has results is a failure to discriminate fact sharing the stage with John during my revolutionized many industries, from fantasy. Your story did note the Hopkins days, once in Macbeth and particularly banking, communications, risks of high antibiotics, steroids, most memorably in Our Town. and retail. No one today wonders if hormones, and pesticides in fish Finally, I was delighted to read “A their mobile phone will work as they tissues absorbed in ponds and tanks Hopkins Guy” [Alumni, Spring] by travel between cities. (and these things are needed to ensure Tristan Davies, A&S ’87 (MA). He is the We are entering a period in health that the fish grow as fast as possible, author of an unusual and entertaining care where our technologists in general consume as little food as possible— volume of short stories, Cake. He and I and health care IT specifically must called “feed conversion ratio” in the corresponded frequently years ago come to the rescue. There will be too fishery business—and avoid diseases when he did write-ups about Hopkins many people to care for in an increas- that can and do often wipe out the

Undergraduate degrees awarded to our newest readers (aka the class of 2012)

Engineering Business Peabody Arts & Sciences Education Nursing 340 47 72 909 23 273

8 | johns hopkins magazine Connect with us Johns Hopkins Magazine 901 S. Bond St., Suite 540 Baltimore, MD 21231 MAGAZINE.JHU.EDU

entire crop in a matter of days). As we already import such tainted You wrote in response to our redesign. We made a word cloud. and contaminated fish from Vietnam, China, and Chile, what is the advantage of repeating these cost inefficiencies and poisonous additives in a Baltimore backyard? want contemporary lookgraduated Tilapia is also widely regarded excellent in the food industry as garbage fish, with among the lowest omega-3 fat feels Hopkinsmailbox professional content of any fish we eat. If the intent

is to provide a more valuable, healthy clean really food (protein) supply, tilapia is among recognition substantially terriﬁc designfantastic the last fish anyone would recommend. I would challenge David Love to time academics read Johns university address these very real concerns, message Columbia impressed contents

creativity cover which were only alluded to in passing Congratulations in the article. identity Charles Kestenbaum format Director, KZO Sea Farms Vienna, Virginia new incredible team wonderful

great black blue love athletics

print beautiful JHU connection redesign It is almost as useless to try improvementissue and raise commercial quantities of fish in a living room aquarium as it is to attempt what [Love] is doing in the backyard. better; in fact, it is getting worse. It is prophecy, “Those who can, do. Those one of only two rivers that the USGS who can’t, teach.” And I did, through has sampled over the years that shows teaching, come to understand more still increasing levels of nitrogen, fully the value of basic science. Saving the Chesapeake largely from agriculture. Other Eastern What a pleasure now, past my I always enjoy reading the quarterly Shore rivers face the same problem. mid-80s, reading of Michela Gallagher magazine, and I noticed your note on Here on the Eastern Shore, we are not and her associates [“Forgetting of Chesapeake Bay improvement in “Now yet able to celebrate improving water Things Past,” Winter 2011], We Know” [Winter 2011]. While I was quality because politicians refuse to particularly in a discipline—then happy to read that, on average, our bay adequately address nutrient and psychology or behavioral science—that is getting healthier, one should always sediment pollution from agriculture. 60 years ago was almost entirely keep in mind those averages of bay Jane Bollman, A&S ’92 (MLA) closed, at a doctoral level, to women. data do not hold true for every subwa- Easton, Maryland Lewis B. Frank, A&S ’50 (MA) tershed. The U.S. Geological Survey has Georgetown, Maine been gathering data in the entire multistate bay watershed for many Those who can, do Correction years. That data reveals that the More than 60 years ago I “ran rats” in a In “Telling Baltimore’s Stories” [Alumni, Spring], Choptank River bordering Talbot and simple maze in Gilman Hall. A bit we incorrectly stated Gil Sandler’s degree informa- Dorchester counties is not getting later, I spent 35 years fulfilling the glib tion. His correct affiliation is A&S ’67 (MLA).

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 9 IDEA |

Context Morhaim also serves in the Maryland General Assembly, where for 18 years he has dealt with health policies surrounding end-of-life issues. He has attempted to liberalize medical marijuana laws so more people can legally smoke pot to relieve cancer symptoms and chemotherapy side effects. He has also noted the rigors that colleagues, friends, and relatives have undergone as they have passed on; Morhaim was particularly inspired by his stepfather, who refused life-

prolonging treatment for a terminal illustration by kidney ailment. Along with assistant professor Keshia Pollack and others at the Bloomberg School, Morhaim A conducted a study to gauge how aron Thomas Marylanders view advance medical directives—living wills, medical power R

of attorney papers, and other legal o t documents that entrust someone with h carrying out one’s wishes shortly before death.

Americans are in denial about death, Data Happier says Dan Morhaim, and that takes a toll The researchers found that even both on their ability to make decisions though 80 percent of Marylanders 18 Endings about how they want to die and on and older say they want their final public health budgets. Morhaim is an wishes to be honored, only one in three adjunct professor of health policy and has created an advance directive. That Interview by Michael Anft management at the Bloomberg School number jibes with national figures on of Public Health and author of The the subject. When Morhaim teaches Better End: Surviving (and Dying) on classes to health professionals, the Your Own Terms in Today’s Modern figures dwindle: Only about 20 percent Medical World (Johns Hopkins raise their hands when asked if they University Press, 2011). The book is the have made legally binding arrange- result of research into how people view ments. Morhaim believes that many death and prepare for it, as well as people would not opt for expensive Morhaim’s 30 years of experience as an treatments that only prolong their lives emergency physician. “I’ve spent a by days or weeks, especially if they are career seeing people whose lives were mentally compromised or in pain. If hanging in the balance,” he says. “Many people are incapacitated, their loved of them hadn’t thought about how they ones must decide whether they will wanted to die. I’m hoping to inspire receive drugs or therapies that keep people to take action before a health them barely alive. Such decisions affect crisis occurs and it is too late to plan.” not only the lives of individuals and their families but taxpayers as well.

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Conclusion Society needs to change its views on death to reflect its natural place at the end of our lives, Morhaim says. “We’ve seen a change over the last few decades in how births are viewed. They used to be mostly medical experiences, but Quality living assistance in the comfort of your home people demanded that there be more Initial In-Home Assessments and Home Safety Assessments by Registered Nurse humanity to it all—and that brought Emergency and Same Day Coverage 24/7 Skilled and Non-Skilled Nursing Services—RNs, LPNs, GNAs, CNAs PRIVATE DUTY SERVICES, INC. about change. As baby boomers watch their parents die and envision their own deaths, they are starting to look at the end very differently. Americans are WeCare Private Duty Services people who like to have control over Award Winning Service Excellence since 1995 things, but somehow we haven’t License number R921. Licensed as a Residential      gained control over our own deaths. Service Agency by The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Ofﬁce of Healthcare Quality. www..com This is something people need to be Bonded and Insured.         more comfortable talking about.”   

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 11 ARTIFACT |

12 | johns hopkins magazine THE COSMIC WEB Reminiscent of the brilliant orange rock excerpted from an informational poster created by Miguel formations of Antelope Canyon in Arizona, the orange Aragon-Calvo of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. See bubble-like structures below depict something far less the full image—which won the National Science Foundation’s tangible—the flow of matter. The illustration, which offers 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization a glimpse of the invisible forces that form galaxies, is Challenge—at magazine.jhu.edu/artifact. Kristen Intlekofer

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 13 FOREFRONT

Welcome to “The Great Game,” in which Sherlockians imagine the life of Holmes. That impulse can produce At a Glance 1 spinoff tales like Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell mystery novels or the recent A 1 Chemistry Study in Sherlock collection, wherein CHEMISTRY contemporary authors such as Lee The Case of the Bivalve Epicure The Case of the Child and Neil Gaiman invent new cases for Holmes or reconsider old 2 Bivalve Epicure INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ones. But The Great Game also involves Bret McCabe speculative consideration of Holmes as Renewing Ties to Myanmar Just to placate his parents, Ira Remsen an actual historical figure, chronicled 3 earned a medical degree from Colum- in stories like “The Adventure of the PEABODY bia University’s College of Physicians Gloria Scott”—which ostensibly takes and Surgeons in 1867. But it was Rockin’ the Viol place in 1874—and “The Adventure of organic chemistry that really proton- the Musgrave Ritual,” set by Doyle 4 ated his hydrocarbon. The New Yorker around 1879. Players of the game NURSING earned his chemistry doctorate in 1870 adhere to the “facts” laid out in the 56 Spit, Please in Germany, and stayed to assist a men- Holmes stories and four novels. The tor. He returned to the States in 1875, time between the two stories occupies 5 took a position at Williams College, roughly five years in which Holmes’ ENGINEERING and published Theoretical Chemistry, a whereabouts are unknown—and Johns Applying a Slide Rule text that caught the eye of an educator Hopkins’ founding falls squarely within to Baseball setting up America’s first research those years. “There’s a dropout period university. Daniel Coit Gilman in there that Doyle never accounted for, 6 recruited Remsen to be the inaugural which is kind of like those missing NEUROSCIENCE chemistry chair of the start-up Johns years with Jesus,” Renkwitz jokes. Don’t Feed Your Head Hopkins University. Renkwitz isn’t alone in thinking Chemists revered Remsen, and Johns Hopkins University might’ve 7 his reputation spread hither and yon. tempted Holmes to cross the pond. COSMOLOGY It may, in fact, have reached a preco- Philip Wilson considered the idea in a Big Bang of Citations ciously logical young Englishman 1986 article titled “Holmes at Hop- who would’ve been interested in kins? Elementary, Writer Says” in 8 Markovnikov’s rule during those Baltimore’s Evening Sun. The piece MEDICINE gap years after college and before builds on a rumination made by Aching for a Role starting a career. “Sherlock Holmes Christopher Morley in his 1934 essay is an organic chemist—he had to “Was Sherlock Holmes an American?” have heard of Remsen,” says Art Morley knew what Johns Hopkins Renkwitz, an integrated technology could offer the intellectually curious. resources teacher on Maryland’s His father, Frank Morley, chaired Eastern Shore. And, yes, he is talking Hopkins’ mathematics department in about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s the early part of the 20th century. “My fictional character. “And to know own thought is that the opening of the that a university was opening its Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore doors in America with one of the best in 1876, and the extraordinary and organic chemists of the times, that informal opportunities offered there would have been a lure. It would just for graduate study, tempted [Holmes] be a question of getting on a boat and across the water,” Morley wrote. “He coming over here.” was certainly familiar with papers in

14 | johns hopkins magazine the chemical journals written by Ira invited Holmes collector William “Two of my favorite avocations are Remsen, the brilliant young professor Bennett Shaw to present a slideshow Sherlock Holmes and Hopkins,” offers who took charge of the new laborato- over a Sherlockian Weekend at Home- Andrew Solberg, SPH ’77, a former Six ries in Baltimore. Probably in Balti- wood in June 1978. British writer John Napoleons of Baltimore member and more he acquired his taste for oysters Hopkins wrote the screenplay for the current member of Watson’s Tin Box, and on a hot summer day noted the 1979 Holmes-Watson movie mystery based in Columbia, Maryland. He’s depth to which the parsley had sunk Murder by Decree. A July 1981 Newsday also a Baker Street Irregular, where he into the butter.” letter to the editor from Robert S. Katz serves on the board of trustees and Morley founded the granddaddy of of Johns Hopkins defended Watson’s directs the organization’s oral history all Sherlockian scion societies, the modest detective skills since he was, of project. He was kind enough to forward Baker Street Irregulars, in 1934. The course, trained as a medical practition- one more Morley passage, which Baltimore sister organization, the Six er and was serving as Holmes’ informal speculates that Holmes remained Napoleons of Baltimore, was started in biographer. Television’s most recent attuned to Johns Hopkins in his later 1949, and over the years a fair share of Holmesian character, Gregory House, years: “No one read with more interest Johns Hopkins alumni have filled its of the popular eponymous television the reports of Dr. Osler’s famous ranks. From there, playing The Great series, spent his undergrad years at farewell address at Johns Hopkins Game gets out of hand pretty quickly. Homewood and was kicked out of the [February 22, 1905], quoting Trollope For example, the office of the late Johns Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. on the chloroforming of men at the age Hopkins chaplain Chester Wickwire And so on. of 60. It is more than coincidence that the last testimony we have [‘His Last Bow’] showed him at that age.” Watson’s Tin Box also puts on an annual Scintillation of Scions event over the summer, where Sherlockians come to talk Holmes. At the 2008 event Renkwitz presented his “Holmes on the Shore” argument that the budding detective visited the Eastern Shore during his time at Johns Hopkins, merely to taste oysters—a delicacy he’s quite fond of in the canon. A running thread in The Great Game is where Holmes went to college—Cambridge or Oxford? Doyle seemingly toyed with that debate in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” which has Holmes and Watson traveling to Camford Univer- sity, a clever portmanteau of Holmes’ disputed alma maters. But could it also be a wry nod to those Eastern Shore towns of the same names, formidable oyster seaports in the late 19th century? “You have to go back to the canon, find something that lends itself to innuendo if nothing else, but then you have to historically support it,” Renkwitz says. “And so sometimes we have to be a little bit tongue-in-cheek— well, most of the time, actually.”

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 15 FOREFRONT |

how the university might help Myan- reforms by sending Secretary of State mar emerge from isolation and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar in modernize. “The most striking thing,” late November 2011. 2 Daniels says, “is just the magnitude of Weeks after Clinton met with the cost that the country has faced as a President Thein Sein and opposition International RElations consequence of the decisions that it leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Daniels and has made over the last several decades, his group met with them, too. They also Renewing Ties just the unimaginable cost, the met government ministers, military poverty, the sense of isolation, the low officials, academics, and activists. to Myanmar health outcomes.” “Probably the most poignant moment Cathy Shufro Despite the country’s isolation, ties came when we walked on the campus Burma was an up-and-coming democ- between Johns Hopkins and Burma at Rangoon University, now Yangon racy in 1954 when Johns Hopkins were never fully ruptured. During the University,” Daniels recalls. “It’s a established its Rangoon-Hopkins 1970s and 1980s, the Burmese govern- campus that is overgrown. Several of Center for Southeast Asian Studies at ment sent students destined for the the buildings are crumbling. There’s a Rangoon University. Burma had been diplomatic corps to study at SAIS. fraction of the students that were once independent from Britain for only six Johns Hopkins scholars traveled to there. You can see what was once the years, but it had already emerged as a Burma when they could get visas. And glory of Southeast Asia in terms of leader in the Non-Aligned Movement, in the 1990s, faculty from the Bloom- higher education.” and Rangoon University’s medical berg School gave advice to various According to Daniels, the decision school was perhaps the best in South- groups inside Myanmar, a country the to re-engage with Myanmar grew out of east Asia. World Health Organization in 2000 disparate discussions among faculty. Founded by the newly established ranked as 190th of 191 nations for the When the Johns Hopkins contingent Nitze School of Advanced Interna- quality of its health system. visited Myanmar, Burmese government tional Studies, the Rangoon-Hopkins In 2003, however, Myanmar stopped officials named two priorities: health Center was staffed by a professor granting visas to some Bloomberg reform and institutional capacity and a handful of Johns Hopkins grad School faculty. Researchers moved to building in government. “It turns out,” uate students who taught English, countries bordering Myanmar and Daniels says, “these are areas where we ran a library, and did research. But began to provide cross-border medical have lots of expertise.” the center only survived eight years. care to ethnic minority groups that, On April 8, an 11-member delega- It closed in March 1962 when Gen. embroiled in 50 years of conflict with tion from Myanmar arrived at Johns Ne Win seized power. That July, after the junta, had been cut off from even Hopkins. Myanmar’s minister of Rangoon University students pro- minimal health services. The research- health, Pe Thet Khin, headed the tested against the coup, the military ers trained backpack medics not only group, which met with professors dynamited the student union, killing to provide medical care but also to and students, aid groups, and officials as many as 100 students inside. Those collect data inside the conflict zones; a from the State Department, USAID, explosions became the overture to five 2006 survey by the medics found that and other agencies. In a talk delivered decades of violent military repression one in five children died before age 5. at the Bloomberg School, Pe Thet Khin, and isolation. As the years passed, military a British-trained pediatrician, And so the arrival of Johns Hopkins oppression in Myanmar persisted. But described the quality of health care University President Ron Daniels in then, beginning in the summer of professionals in his country as “com- Rangoon (now Yangon) in January 2011, something remarkable began to promised” and said that his ministry’s constituted a reconciliation of sorts take place: top-down reform. The crucial task is improving maternal between Johns Hopkins and Myanmar nominally civilian government that had and child health. “To tackle all these (Burma’s official name since 1989). taken power in March loosened press problems, we have to have a strong, Daniels and colleagues from the censorship, released some political well-trained, and well-motivated health provost’s office, SAIS, the School of prisoners, and sent peace envoys to workforce,” he said. But that requires Medicine, and the Bloomberg School meet with armed resistance groups. money. “The economy, as you know, of Public Health had come to explore The United States acknowledged these is not very good over the past 20 or 30

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Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 17 FOREFRONT |

years, partly because of sanctions but partly because of some mismanage- ment, shall I say.” He also said that reform required that people think for themselves, particularly government officials, who PHOTOGRAPH by Britt are “so much used to asking for permission or orders from the ministers,” he said. “The most difficult thing is to change our mindsets, but it’s

most important.” O lsen- Daniels says that he sensed opti E

mism in Myanmar. “You felt that cker despite what the country has suffered in terms of decades of authoritarian government, at the same time, there was this sense of hopefulness that they were turning the corner.” To support Johns Hopkins’ role in that renewal, SAIS and the Bloomberg School have landed nearly $1.3 million in pledges from foundations and other donors, all for projects in Myanmar. term for pre-baroque, pre-1600s Still, the future remains uncertain. Western music—appeals to her desire Human rights abuses and sporadic for an authorial voice. “It’s different fighting persist in some ethnic areas. 3 from mainstream classical music in Pe Thet Khin obliquely addressed this that there is room for improvisation, PEABODY in an interview when he said, “I’d like because we don’t know exactly how to improve the health of the entire people played this music,” she says. nation, all the ethnic tribes, all our Rockin’ the Viol Domingues says the viol was most brothers and sisters in the whole Bret McCabe popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, country. Delivering good health care is Spotting Amy Domingues, Peab ’12 particularly in England, France, and not just a humanitarian [project]. (MM), in a coffee shop isn’t difficult. Germany. As the cello became favored Equitable health care to all people She’s the stylish, auburn-haired woman over the viol in orchestral music, helps our national unity and reconcili- lugging around an instrument case the people stopped playing and writing for ation, and it will contribute to the size of a small refrigerator. It contains it, which makes preparing an early stability of our country. Without her viola da gamba, a fretted, seven- music piece an interpretive process. stability, we can never prosper.” stringed instrument that looks a bit “It’s like a musical history detective One member of the delegation to like the cello but has a much richer, game,” Domingues says. “You have to Johns Hopkins, Burmese President velvety resonance. She was exposed to it constantly be researching how people Thein Sein’s chief political adviser, has in the 1990s through the recordings of would have played it. It’s less cut and called Myanmar’s political reform famed viol player Jordi Savall and Alain dried, in terms of what the musician’s “irreversible.” Aung San Suu Kyi was Corneau’s 1991 movie, Tous les Matins role is. A lot of it is not specifically more guarded on May 2 as she took the du Monde, starring Gérard Depardieu as notated on the page.” oath to join Parliament. When a composer and viol player Marin Marais. Domingues mentions that her reporter asked her about the day’s It wasn’t only the instrument that husband, Stefan Bauschmid, a rock significance, she replied, “Only time attracted her but the creative space drummer who is not classically will tell.” Johns Hopkins has a stake in afforded by the viol’s early music trained, has been enjoying early music whatever happens next. repertoire. Early music—the umbrella more than baroque pieces. “The

18 | johns hopkins magazine rhythms are a little more analogous dynamic tempos to create an engaging terrified of tuberculosis, and with good to rhythms that we come across now hybrid, equal parts chamber music reason: At the time, TB was the leading in pop and rock music. Some have spaciousness and catchy pop. She cause of death in the United States, really complex stuff that’s almost like put out Lucidia, her third album, killing 150,000 people and infecting math rock.” She laughs over compar- earlier this year, and it includes a more than 1.5 million every year. ing early music with a genre of rhyth- 16th-century viol piece. Originally thought to be a hereditary mically complex guitar rock. But she “When I initially came to Peabody disease, tuberculosis was revealed to has experience in both worlds. She I was really trying not to tell anyone be spread by bacteria in 1882, when grew up in an all–classical music about my secret rock-and-roll past,” bacteriologist Robert Koch discovered household, taking up the piano at age 5 she says. “I wanted to be taken seri- the tubercle bacillus. As this new germ and the cello at 9, before earning a ously. And I didn’t want people to be, theory of TB became well known, degree in cello performance from like, ‘Oh, she’s this rock musician.’ I doctors and city dwellers became James Madison University. Though she wanted these things to be separate. But concerned about the “promiscuous hadn’t encountered popular music in some ways it’s becoming obvious spitting” problem—on sidewalks, in until she was 11, once she became an that each can inform the other.” train stations, and in other public undergraduate in Harrisonburg, Last year she joined Sonnambula, a places. “In neither [Denver nor Virginia, in the early 1990s she caught New York–based early music consort Colorado Springs] can a woman walk the rock bug hard. She was exposed to that is, like a number of contemporary down the street without gathering on the underground music streaming out classical ensembles, taking the music her skirts a sickening mass of bacilli- of nearby Washington, D.C., and out of the symphony hall and bringing laden sputa of all ages and stages quite started playing cello and bass in it to churches and art spaces. It’s hard sufficient . . . to sow a family harvest of punk-inspired bands. work—she typically heads up to New death,” ran an 1896 editorial in the Then Jenny Toomey tapped her to York before a concert for a string of Denver Medical Times. join indie rock darling Tsunami for a four or five 12-hour rehearsal days— A century later, medical researchers national tour. “Cello is a really excel- but the music more than rewards the are looking more kindly at spit. In lent instrument to incorporate into the effort. “It’s really tremendously fact, the Johns Hopkins School of rock mix because of the contrast of the complex music, but it’s so rewarding to Nursing has an entire lab devoted to sort of aggressive and the melodic play,” she says. “It’s fun to get to that the stuff. The Center for Interdisci components,” says Toomey, who is point where you’re working on music plinary Salivary Bioscience Research now the Ford Foundation’s program and you know it well enough that you is directed by Doug Granger, a profes- officer for media rights and access. can take some risks.” sor of acute and chronic care who “Amy seemed really balanced and holds joint appointments in the School smart and a great player. She plays with of Nursing, the Bloomberg School of a lot of emotion, she doesn’t phone it Public Health, and the School of Med- in, and it’s clever.” Domingues soon icine. Granger has been at the fore- started plying her cello’s melodic front of salivary research for the past nuance off rock’s jagged edges for a 4 20 years, founding two companies to number of bands, becoming Washing- support salivary researchers—Salimet- Nursing ton’s go-to cellist for hire and appear- rics in 1998 and, more recently, ing on more than 50 recordings, from SalivaBio, a one-product company post-punk legend Fugazi to former Spit, Please that launched earlier this year with Hüsker Dü leader Bob Mould. With Kristen Intlekofer help from the Johns Hopkins Technol- Toomey’s encouragement she started “Don’t Spit! It is indecent. It is danger- ogy Transfer Office. Sometimes writing for herself, first on Wurlitzer ous. It is against the law. It Spreads referred to as the “Spit King” by and then on cello, forming the band Disease.” In the late 19th and early 20th colleagues, Granger has fun with it. Garland of Hours as the vehicle for her centuries, public admonishments like “People say, ‘You’ve got to be own songs in 2000. this one from the Anti-Tuberculosis kidding me. You guys need saliva? I’ve Her music often combines a lyrical, League in New York City started to crop got tons of saliva, I’ll give you all you layered melodic sense with rock’s up in urban areas. Americans were want,’” Granger says with a laugh.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 19 FOREFRONT |

Granger first became interested in groups. For example, a lot of early salivary research in the early 1990s saliva research focused on the stress while working as a postdoc at the hormone cortisol. A recent study found University of California, Los Angeles, that cortisol levels are correlated 5 where he was doing a behavioral study between mothers and their babies, and Engineering with children. Finding it difficult to get researchers saw similar correlations children involved in a study that between college students who were required multiple blood draws, seriously dating. “This raised some Applying a Slide Granger and his colleagues started really fascinating questions for the Rule to Baseball looking into saliva collection, which researchers about the shared experi- was emerging as a less invasive ence and the notion of contagion,” David Driver alternative to blood tests. The problem, Granger says. “My level of stress The book and subsequent film Granger says, was that in the early ’90s, hormone is not just driven by what I’m Moneyball tell the story of Billy Beane, saliva bioscience was still a fledgling experiencing, but it’s also driven by the general manager of Major League field. He and his colleagues found that what the people around me are Baseball’s Oakland Athletics. To the assays being run weren’t really experiencing. There’s some really cool compete against richer teams such as designed for saliva; they were modifica- stuff about social networks. It connects the New York Yankees and Boston Red tions of blood tests. And research working groups and families and Sox, Beane began to look closer at the protocols were crude and not uniform sports teams and special forces teams.” statistics of undervalued players who between labs. Realizing that there was Researchers working at Granger’s could help his team score runs without enormous room for improvement, center are exploring other applica- inflating the payroll. Beane’s approach Granger and his colleagues dived right tions, such as a recent study that tested was grounded in a form of baseball in. He says, “We spent the next 20 years the use of spit screening to detect heart data analysis that has come to be working on the details of how do you disease risk. The study, published in known as sabermetrics, defined by one collect saliva from an insect, how do the May issue of Brain, Behavior, and of its foremost practitioners, Bill you collect saliva from a walrus, how do Immunity, found saliva to be a reliable James, as “the search for objective you collect saliva from a horse, from an measure of CRP (C-reactive protein), a knowledge about baseball.” adult, from somebody who’s sleeping? risk factor for heart disease. The James brought sabermetrics to Does it change the way the measure- possibility of one day using a saliva test popular attention in the 1980s, but one ment is done when you have a material instead of a blood test, Granger says, of the seminal works on objective that absorbs the sample, or are there could increase the number of patients analysis of baseball data was written other ways to get the sample out of who get tested regularly, leading to by a Johns Hopkins professor of their mouths that would be minimally more early detection. chemical engineering named Earn- invasive, that would preserve the Granger teaches “spit camps” all shaw Cook. The MIT Press published integrity of the specimen?” over the United States to help research- Cook’s Percentage Baseball in 1964, Along the way, salivary bioscience ers in the social sciences and other dis- and in the foreword he wrote, “This researchers have made some big ciplines incorporate salivary bioscience book has been written for those strides. The leading edge of this into their research. “Saliva is a great tool aficionados of percentage baseball research, says Granger, is detecting HIV because they can do it really simply,” who have managed to retain vestigial in saliva. In fact, OraSure Technologies, says Granger. “They don’t have to have a recollections of freshman mathemat- a company that has been producing phlebotomist, they don’t have to have ics. In a small concession to sanity, oral fluid HIV tests for years, is cur- their own laboratory. They can come to many derivations and calculations rently developing an over-the-counter spit camp for two days and learn the have been relegated to separate tables version that, if approved, will allow basics of what they need to know.” as less to interfere with continuity of consumers to test themselves at home. Spit has come a long way in 100 discussion. The argument is not Granger says that more recent work years. Far from being the problem, spit difficult but it is complicated because has come out of behavioral studies, could hold answers. So, please spit (at baseball is an exceedingly intricate with researchers looking not only at least for research purposes). It is safe. game.” Cook’s publisher noted, individuals but at correlations among It is painless. It helps detect disease. “Among other theories that Cook

20 | johns hopkins magazine James wrote, “Cook knew everything about statistics and nothing at all about baseball—and for that reason, K all of his answers are wrong, all of his methods useless.” Wrong or not, K Cook—or at least a copy of Percentage Baseball and the slide rule that he used while working on it—is part of the permanent collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

K K 6 Neuroscience Don’t Feed Your Head K Michael Anft

K Fish, we’re told, is brain food. So are blueberries, as they contain nutrients K K that help us remember things. But could it be that the brain, the hoggish human command center that makes up only 2 percent of our total body weight but requires 20 percent of the calories we consume, is actually attacks with irrefutable mathematical Baseball was published, and recalls, “I better off when we deprive ourselves findings are the benefits of the remember him as quite the gentleman, of food altogether? Scientists at the sacrifice bunt, the use of relief pitch- extraordinarily helpful to someone like National Institute on Aging, led by ers, the traditional batting order, the me who was so ignorant of math. He Mark Mattson, a professor of neuro hit-and-run play, and the standardiza- had a nice little sense of humor. He science at the School of Medicine, tion of baseball itself.” loved baseball and was amused that it think so. In several papers Mattson In Percentage Baseball, Cook, who was still played more traditionally than discussed during a meeting was born in 1900 and died in 1987, realistically. As such, he was well ahead of the American Association for the notes that his father played shortstop of Bill James and all the latter-day Advancement of Science in February, for Gettysburg College, one of his statistical savants. Earnshaw wasn’t he and other researchers say that uncles played for Lehigh University, smug about his statistics. He just was depriving ourselves via fasting twice and a distant cousin, George Earn- astonished that nobody had figured it a week could significantly lower the shaw, won a league-high 24 games as a out before him.” risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease pitcher with the Philadelphia Athletics The sabermatrician James does not or Parkinson’s. in 1929. Sportswriter Frank Deford concur with MIT Press’ assessment of The findings resonate with interviewed Cook for an article in Cook’s work as “irrefutable.” In his decades-old studies that show a link Sports Illustrated when Percentage 1981 self-published Baseball Abstract, between caloric intake and oxidative

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 21 FOREFRONT |

“rusting”—the stress on cells that measures against damage from stroke of protein plaques that underlie cases comes when people get older and take and other mechanisms that cause of Alzheimer’s, or the damage inflicted in food. “One of the only ways to slow degeneration in the brain. “What we’ve by Parkinson’s. down the progression of aging that discovered in both animal and human “Fasting imposes more stress on involves disease or organ malfunctions studies is that it’s good to submit your the cells, but in a good way,” he adds. is to reduce energy intake,” says brain to challenges, especially in the “There’s an increase in adaptive stress Mattson, who has been studying short term,” Mattson says, citing responses when people intermittently Alzheimer’s and the brain for 20 years research done by several groups in fast that is good for maintaining and, according to Thomson Reuters’ recent years. the brain.” database, is the most cited neuroscien- But why fasting? Wouldn’t reduc- Dietary changes have long been tist in scholarly journals worldwide. ing calorie intake overall also help the known to have an effect on the brain. “As is similar to what happens when brain? Apparently not, or at least not Children who suffer from epileptic muscles are exercised, the neurons in as much. Sticking to an intermittent seizures have fewer of them when the brain benefit from being mildly crash diet, with no more than 500 placed on caloric restriction or fasts. It stressed. To achieve the right kind of calories two days per week, primes the is believed that fasting helps kick-start stress, people might benefit from brain for protection, he says. Studies protective measures that help counter- severely minimizing their food intake.” show that keeping calories at around act the overexcited signals that Mattson and others have tested that level stimulates two messaging epileptic brains often exhibit. (Some their theories on animal models and chemicals that operate at the cellular children with epilepsy have also small groups of human subjects. In level and are key to the growth of brain benefited from a specific high-fat, studies involving experimental mice, cells in animals and humans, Mattson low-carbohydrate diet.) Normal brains, neurons in the brain become more explains. The shock of fasting leads when overfed, can experience another active when the rodents are hungrily the brain to create new cells. As kind of uncontrolled excitation, searching for food. What’s more, neurons are coaxed to grow, the brain impairing the brain’s function, fasting animals develop protective becomes more resistant to the effects Mattson and another researcher reported in January in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The intermittent fasting advocated by Mattson and others for overall brain health may be linked to how human- kind has evolved. There are reasons why the intermittent shocks of hunger do a brain good. “Our ancestors undoubtedly had to go without food for stretches of time,” Mattson explains. “It hasn’t been that long since humanity lacked regular supplies of food. When you search for food when you’re hungry, the brain is really engaged. The individuals who survive the best—the ones whose brains are more attuned to predators and who can remember where food sources are—are the ones who’ve survived.” Partly because he is worried people might not be able to stick to it, Mattson isn’t promoting a strict, water-only fast. He advises people to drink plenty of water or unsweetened tea and to eat no

22 | johns hopkins magazine more than 500 calories per fasting day Sciences. Now winding down as its universal geometry and the expansion via fiber-rich vegetables. He warns, team finishes a final data analysis, the of the universe. however, that fasting is not recom- project’s publications also topped the When the craft carrying the WMAP mended for the very young, who need ScienceWatch most-cited list in 2003, telescope was launched, Bennett and many more calories to keep them 2007, and 2009. “But we nabbed the his crew wanted to measure the growing, or people over 70, whose first three spots this time around, fluctuations and polarization of cosmic brains seem to derive little benefit from which is amazing given the size of the microwave radiation. But Bennett is intermittent food deprivation. field we work in,” says Bennett. “Most astounded by how much more knowl- research journals are in the biosci- edge WMAP accumulated. For exam- ences. The medical research commu- ple, the project’s team calculated nity is enormous in comparison with within a 1 percent margin of error that astrophysics and cosmology. We have the universe is 13.75 billion years old. reasons to be proud.” It also quantified observations of other 7 Simon Mitton, a Thomson Reuters scientists that the universe is mostly consultant, concurs. “The WMAP composed of an antigravity called dark Cosmology papers are far and away the most energy, while only 4.6 percent of it is successful series that we have ever composed of atoms that make up Big Bang of Citations featured in ScienceWatch,” he says. Earth’s living things, as well as other Michael Anft “Nothing else comes close.” Mitton planets and stars. “We have a strong Researchers flourish by placing their adds that sky surveys such as WMAP standard of cosmology now,” Bennett scientific writing in journals. When maintain their high profiles by says. “It’s not at all obvious that we can they publish, they often build their annually releasing new data that prove understand the entire universe, but we investigations on the backs of other useful to astrophysicists. “WMAP is do understand an enormous amount useful studies, citing them as refer- one of a small number of programs because of the cosmic microwave ences or footnotes. In some ways, that are dedicated to finding the background. We’re very lucky.” having one’s research mentioned often fundamental cosmological param- Bennett now has turned his atten- in others’ published work is the eters. Everyone working in observation to CLASS, or the Cosmology Large highest form of professional flattery. tional cosmology quotes the WMAP Angular Scale Surveyor, another So, when a far-reaching, decade-long papers,” Mitton says. telescope-based project. This time, study of the essential stuff of the WMAP’s investigations of cosmic Bennett—who is building much of the universe took the top three spots on a microwave radiation, a lingering apparatus along with Johns Hopkins list of the most frequently cited science remnant of the universe’s period of undergraduate and graduate students articles of 2011—the first time in rapid expansion followed by cooling, —and Tobias Marriage, an assistant history that one research program has popularly known as the Big Bang, professor of physics and astronomy, will dominated such listings—the scientific have reaped more and more interest try to gather evidence of gravitational world took notice. as new findings have been published. waves and their effect on inflation, the The list of citations, gathered by Since WMAP citations first were working theory of how the universe ScienceWatch, a website run by the charted in 2003, they have grown expanded immediately after it began. British media firm Thomson Reuters, sixfold, from around 1,100 at the start Despite the success associated with centered on scores of papers created by to 6,500 in 2011. “These are annual WMAP, Bennett isn’t exactly sentimen- the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy numbers, not cumulative ones,” tal about its end. “Some people have Probe. Better known by its acronym, Bennett points out. “The level come up and said, ‘Isn’t this a sad WMAP is a telescope mounted on a of interest goes up every year. Anyone time?’ Well no, actually. I’ll miss NASA spacecraft launched in 2001, and who does research on the universe working with this team. But we set out it is designed to answer questions needs context, and WMAP provides to get some information and ended up about the universe’s beginnings. that.” And, he adds, interest likely with much, much more. It’s like we’ve WMAP is headed by Charles L. Bennett, will continue to climb as more won the lacrosse game and someone a professor of physics and astronomy researchers use WMAP’s findings comes over and says, ‘You just won the at the Krieger School of Arts and to investigate topics that include game. Aren’t you sad it’s over?’”

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24 | johns hopkins magazine | FOREFRONT

families for making them. The Simu doing the end-of-life scenarios in the lation Center, a bustling place with morning, I’ll have to go home, take various medical classes receiving some Tylenol, and get a nap in before 8 instruction—often with the help of returning in the afternoon.” Wyatt “Sim Man,” a manikin that mimics a adds that portraying someone in Medicine batch of medical conditions and is intense physical pain is even harder most often used in cases where than playing another who is emotion- Aching for a Role resuscitation is called for—provides ally devastated. “Not only do I have to Michael Anft the setting. Members of the medical constantly grimace and groan, but I On a given day, Tom Wyatt might be school faculty watch the student-SP have to remember what the med told that he’s abusing alcohol and encounters through one-way glass. student is saying so I can grade how tobacco. Or that he has cancer. Or, Almost all of the simulated meetings they do,” he says. several times over the course of a shift, are videotaped and discussed with Otherwise, Wyatt finds the job that he just became a widower. On the students later. more taxing on his brain than his Johns Hopkins medical campus, it’s During one simulated case, six heart. Because SPs must learn and Wyatt’s part to suffer the slings and senior med students are asked to understand a wide range of scenarios, arrows of outrageous medical fortune diagnose the breathing problems of a memorize the facts of cases that often over and over again. He is a “standard- patient (Sim Man, portraying someone involve complex medical and social ized patient” (SP), engaged to portray called “Mr. Hill”) and deal with his problems, and get a grasp of the family sick or injured people or their con- worsening symptoms, which, they dynamics in many of them, they are cerned family members in order to help eventually figure out, are caused by challenged to juggle several shards of medical students develop people skills. giving him an antibiotic he is allergic information at the same time—and A middle-aged Baltimore actor, to. But the students botch the resusci- sometimes several roles per day. choreographer, and director, Wyatt is tation effort before saving Mr. Hill— Not surprisingly, the annals of SP one of 150 SPs at the School of Medi- something each must then explain to life are filled with eye-rolling anecdotes cine’s Simulation Center. It is the SP’s SPs who portray Mrs. Hill. The actors’ about callow med students—such as role to present burgeoning physicians emotional responses vary, with some one who summarily blurts out that a with the charged human interactions appreciating the honesty of students loved one has suddenly died, and they’ll face once they take their MDs, who tell them of the mistake. Others another who habitually ends her and it’s hardly a star turn. “We’re not let them have it. (“This is Johns sentences with “. . . OK?,” telling a here to put on a show,” Wyatt says. Hopkins! Y’all are supposed to be mother, “Your son has just died, OK?” “It’s all about helping students, getting better than that,” bellows one.) (The SP responded with, “No, it’s not them to identify things in the ways they Often, SPs in similar situations are OK!”) Sometimes, SPs angered by the deal with people that they might not be called upon to cry—with real tears. insensitivity of a student have flipped aware of.” Neva Krauss, an SP since 1999 and a them the bird—all of which is recorded SPs do more than create conversa- trainer of them for the past three years, on videotape. “We tell them that’s a big tional characters. They serve as guinea calls on her knowledge of Constantin no-no,” Krauss says. pigs for aspiring physicians, acting as Stanislavski’s century-old method- Still, perhaps because of the work of patients. They perform cameos as acting techniques to get the water- SPs, students are getting better at homeless patients and battered works going. To open the faucet handling simulated situations, says women. Specially trained actors make further, she’ll picture the scene in Wyatt. “There’s been dramatic improve- presentations and instruct students Titanic right before the big boat sinks. ment. We try to be open to what the how to sensitively conduct examina- “There are days when you have to cry student brings to the situation, and tions of the genitourinary tract and on cue over and over again—stopping then add reactions and observations. abdomen. They help train physicians it on a dime, and then getting the tears A lot of times, we’ll be there afterwards on how to bring up the idea of organ flowing again,” she says. “That’s a to discuss how an encounter went. Our donation to devastated loved ones, and draining day.” Wyatt, who has been an instinct is to be judgmental—‘Oh! I how best to disclose medical errors SP since 1996, seconds that post-death hated how he handled that!’—but we’re and apologize to patients and their scenes take their toll: “When we’re here to be constructive.”

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 25 EVIDENCE |

Genome sequencing data: not a good predictor of common disease. left: Photo by Mind your doctor’s weight: It may affect how he treats you. right: Photo by M Veer.com auro Fermariello / P hoto R esearchers, I nc.

Sequencing Not a Crystal Ball MORE DISEASES AND GENES Referring to a study involving thousands of identical AIDS experts at Johns Hopkins have twins, Johns Hopkins researchers say that the calculated precisely how effective certain sequencing of an individual’s genome isn’t the anti-HIV drugs are. Used alone or in more By Michael Anft diagnostic tool many scientists had hoped it would than 850 combinations, the drugs For more information on be. “Sequencing isn’t a crystal ball,” says Bert suppress the virus that can cause AIDS. these discoveries, go to Vogelstein, a professor of oncology at the School of The findings could more easily point magazine.jhu.edu/evidence. Medicine and one of the study’s lead researchers. physicians toward the best individualized “Just because people may receive a negative test for treatment for their patients. having a genetic predisposition to a certain disease In a separate study, researchers used doesn’t mean they won’t develop it. There are all human immune system cells to devise a kinds of nonhereditary factors that can cause new vaccination strategy that prepares disease.” Vogelstein and other investigators the immune system to attack HIV. examined health records of twins—each pair shares the same genome—from Scandinavian countries and the United States. They collected information RACE, CLASS, AND HEALTH on the incidence of 24 diseases, including cancer, Bloomberg School of Public Health and then used a mathematical model to see if one researchers have discovered that female twin’s experience could help predict whether the sex workers in developing countries other twin would develop a similar illness. The are 14 times more likely to become investigators found that sequencing is of some value infected with HIV than the rest of their in the case of inherited diseases, but it is a poor country’s population. predictor of common disease. “We looked at the maximum theoretical potential of genomic mapping The number of black women in six U.S. and concluded that no amount of knowledge of your urban areas who contract HIV each year genetics will prevent you from getting disease.”

26 | johns hopkins magazine Fouled fowl: Farmed chickens harbor weird chemicals.

The nerve: Brain cells grow in mice plied with fat. left: courtesy right: p hoto by N istockphoto.com ature P ublishing G roup

is five times higher than was previously Latina mothers with young children prefer Overweight people who shed pounds, thought. Sixty percent of newly infected non-Spanish-speaking pediatricians with particularly from the belly, have better women each year are black, though empathy and warmth far more than blood vessel function than people who African-American women represent only pediatricians who are merely fluent in don’t lose the weight—no matter the type 14 percent of the U.S. female population. Spanish, according to research done of diet they employ, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. from the School of Medicine. Scientists at Johns Hopkins and else- where have identified five previously Large, regular doses of vitamin C may unknown gene mutations linked to DOCTORS AND DIETS moderately reduce blood pressure. elevated blood-platelet counts in Doctors who are obese or overweight are Mice who eat a high-fat diet grow a African-Americans. The finding could lead less likely than physicians of normal disproportionately high number of new to drugs that lower risk for heart disease body weight to discuss weight issues with nerves in their brains. The neurons and stroke in African-Americans, who patients, or to diagnose their patients appear to be clustered in a part of the generally have higher counts of blood- as obese, according to a joint study by brain that regulates eating. clotting platelets than whites. the Bloomberg School and the School Chickens are still ingesting antibiotics Primary care doctors with unconscious of Medicine. that have long been banned by the U.S. racial biases engender less trust from Parents generally understand the risks of government, a study by scientists at the their African-American patients, a poor diet in children but aren’t always Bloomberg School and Arizona State researchers at the School of Medicine and aware that children can become over- University found. An analysis of farmed the Bloomberg School have found. weight or obese as young as 2 years old, chickens’ feathers also found traces of Doctors with biases tend to dominate or that they require more physical activity arsenic, caffeine, home care products, conversations, pay less attention to social to counteract weight problems, according and Prozac. and emotional needs, and make patients to the Children’s Center and All Children’s feel less involved in making decisions Hospital in Florida. about their health.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 27 Staging a Revival After bringing spotlights back to Johns Hopkins, John Astin plans one final act.

Michael Anft | Photography Christian Witkin

28 | johns hopkins magazine Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 29 ownstairs from the stage at the for drama, a Waiting for Godot of uncertainty (to Merrick Barn, the most prominent name-drop one of Astin’s favorite plays). Theater actor on the Johns Hopkins Home- at Johns Hopkins, part of a department called wood campus tries to impart a Writing, Speech, and Drama during Astin’s hard-learned lesson, one he has undergrad years, had petered out by the late Dabsorbed over six decades in the limelight: Actors 1970s. For a few decades following, undergrads don’t control the characters they portray. For all would still put on shows, but they were do-it- their preparation and the thespian bravado it yourself productions. “They might have learned allegedly inspires, there’s a seat-of-the-pants ele- about running an organization, but there were a ment to treading the boards that keeps the vital lot of limitations otherwise,” Astin says—such as player on edge, uncertain but electric. That com- a lack of courses, one-on-one coaching, and a posed, confident stage face? It’s all an act. guiding hand. To drive home the point, the professor leads Since his arrival, Astin has gone from lead- his students, 11 undergrads who revel in theater ing a class during one semester each year to but major in something else, in a game in which teaching as many as eight classes annually each adds one word to a story that emerges across the entire academic calendar. He has quickly around the circle they sit in. They are not moved to Baltimore year-round, raised money allowed to ruminate. The tale of the moment, one for the once-moribund department, reestab- that involves a girl going to a mall, temporarily lished a theater minor, hired faculty, and comes to a halt when a student doesn’t blurt out grown the program from an initial batch of 54 the next word fast enough. Where is the zap of curious students to 140. voltage the actor is looking for? But there’s one bit of transcendence, one “Do not plan!” the professor good-naturedly implicit—as he sees it—plot point that has yet tells the student. “That took too long, Ellie. You’ll to play out: the return of the theater major. destroy yourself by planning. Just listen—and “About a quarter of our students are theater answer quickly.” He aims to hone their budding minors, but most of the people who study the- “He is tempering actors’ instincts, to have them add something ater here say they want the major,” says Astin, the harshness of daring and extemporaneous only when they really who now serves as a visiting professor in the the sciences feel it, to have new lines emerge organically. “You Writing Seminars, which houses the drama and with the have to learn to forget”—he tells them as their production courses. “It’s a question they ask narrative slowly unspools around the room, not- frequently. Some students already treat it like a humanity of the ing the paradox of memorizing for the stage—“so major, and then build another major around dramatic arts.” that a role or a line is fresh every time.” their theater studies.” Edward Asner John Astin—that professor—has spent a life- Many of Astin’s students have followed in his time striving for those transcendent moments. In footsteps, becoming regularly paid actors in New a career that has included Broadway, film, and York (as Astin did right after graduating), Los television—most famously, his three-year turn in Angeles, and even Bollywood. So, why worry the 1960s as Gomez, the not-quite-unhinged about whether students graduate with a degree patriarch of The Addams Family—the actor has in theater or not? “It has more to do with attract- portrayed characters high and low, broadly come- ing a broader cross section of students to Hop- dic and darkly tragic, bringing a brash energy and kins and offering them an aspect of culture they courageous intensity to each of them. couldn’t otherwise find here,” he says. “In those He’s embraced the same shoot-for-the-moon regards, a theater major will have a great benefit approach for his latest role: reviver of the theater for the university.” program at Johns Hopkins, his alma mater. When His cultural rescue effort has been the subject Astin, A&S ’52, returned to campus in 2001 (“It of plaudits on campus, including from university was the day the Ravens won the Super Bowl,” he President Ron Daniels and Katherine Newman, marvels) at the tender age of 70, the campus’s dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. stage-scape was ripe for the taking—if only When the university renamed the stage in the because Johns Hopkins had become a wasteland Merrick Barn the John Astin Theatre last Decem-

30 | johns hopkins magazine ber, Astin’s old friend, Edward Asner, came for able. A teenage math whiz whose father, Allen the ceremony. He heard noises-off echoes of his Varley Astin, was a postdoctoral physics fellow at old friend. “I talked with people who told me they Johns Hopkins during the Great Depression were at Johns Hopkins because of John, that he’d before eventually becoming chief at what was given Hopkins something it hasn’t had and that then called the National Bureau of Standards it desperately needs,” says Asner, who met Astin (now the National Institute of Standards and a half-century ago when the two were playing off- Technology), John Astin planned to follow in his Broadway in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny dad’s footsteps. It was at Washington & Jefferson Opera. “He’s tempering the harshness of the sci- College, in western Pennsylvania, where the foot- ences with the humanity of the dramatic arts.” lights first intervened. Astin had received a scholarship to study hat’s not exactly what Astin had in mathematics, and he wasn’t about to dally in the mind as a youngster in Baltimore, arts and letters. Once humiliated by a high school where he was born, or in and around English teacher, who responded to his misread- Washington, D.C., where he grew ing of Moby-Dick by calling him a cretin—“I had up. Just as performing a role well characterized it as a fine adventure but thought Tallows for a surprise or two, Astin’s path to Johns at times it was like one long plug for the whaling Hopkins, then back to it, was sinuous, unpredict- industry,” he says with a shake of the head—Astin

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 31 was hardly game for studying humanities: “I was detail earned him a carpet call from G. Wilson devastated by this. I had so much rage. I vowed Shaffer, then dean of the university. To Astin’s never to take English again.” surprise, the dean suggested he apply for a schol- He met the teacher of freshman English “and arship, even though Astin, saddled at the time told him I was only interested in the hard sci- with incomplete assignments, didn’t think he ences,” Astin says. “He said he’d let me off the qualified. Shaffer encouraged him anyway. hook but asked me if he could give me something “The generosity of that man—I’m eternally to look at.” He gave Astin a copy of Joseph Con- grateful for what he did for me,” Astin says, citing rad’s Heart of Darkness, which reminded Astin of that experience as a factor in his loyalty to the the timeless value of fiction. Eventually, the same school. “I was so moved by that that I poured professor and some students pulled Astin toward myself into my studies. My attitude became, ‘Give the stage. He had already been wowed by a pro- it to me and I’ll learn it.’ At one point, I was taking duction of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (one that 27 credits.” included Wilder himself in the role of stage man- He would also soon make a fateful choice, ager) he had seen as a freshman. “It reminded me swapping his natural love for math for his bur- of the magic of day-to-day life,” he says. geoning appreciation of theater, becoming a Astin and another student put on an on-campus regular at Merrick and the stage, then called the production of Noël Coward’s Ways and Means, Johns Hopkins Play Shop, that would one day with the professor’s blessing. It was nerve-rack- bear his name. ing. But he got used to it. “At first, I was just terrified,” he recalls. “But it seemed to get more ne warm late-winter morning, comfortable as things went on. I didn’t plan on Astin teaches an elective course making a living out of it, but I became fasci- he created, called Contemporary nated by the process. There was an aspect of Theatre and Film: An Insider’s enrichment, a feeling of intensified living to it.” View, in the hall named after G. After the show’s two scheduled performances, OWilson Shaffer. Now 82, with a fringe of white Astin returned to the darkened makeshift the- hair below and around his pate and the ever- ater, walking through the whole play by himself, present (though now ash-colored) mustache, in an attempt to “recapture that feeling of won- Astin maintains an easy rapport with students, der,” he recalls. particularly those who place the stage at the cen- As he continued to study math intently, the ter of their academics. At Shaffer Hall, the 35 tenor of things at Washington & Jefferson began kids in attendance—some rocking back in to change. It was the early 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was question- ing the loyalty of academics and government officials in an attempt to root out alleged commu- nists. The college followed suit, grilling its educators and chasing many away. His professor friend left the school. Devastated, Astin soon did the same. He opted to transfer to Johns Hopkins because it was close enough to the family’s Bethesda home “and they had this killer math department,” he says. That’s when the biggest plot twist crept up on him. The acting bug bit. Hard. Despite a determination to study math, Astin, to the consternation of his father, found himself taking acting parts around Baltimore. Many of them. He ignored his physics labs and ditched his French classes. His lack of attention to academic

32 | johns hopkins magazine chairs, others texting or checking their mes- and danced, and punctuated it all by an ‘aha!’” he sages, all from a variety of majors and schools— says, gliding seamlessly into character, to the provide more of a challenge. He keeps things delight of the students. moving, tossing out some deep background on Those who have witnessed Astin at work at theatrical conventions. Johns Hopkins, or who have heard him speak Astin starts class with some references to the about it, can’t miss how he has embraced the idea bare-bones staging and gestures in Waiting for of theater at the university. “He is as devoted to Godot, and then lurches backward into the tale of the mission of rebuilding the program as is how Thespis and the ancient Greeks created first- humanly possible, probably because he loves it so “I think what person acting. (Prior to that, plays were written much,” says his son, the actor Sean Astin. “In my Addams was and acted in third person.) “Solon and other mind I have this image of my father, almost a trying to do was prominent Athenians thought that playing a spectral figure whose true age is a mystery, shake us out character or singing a song that had ‘I’ in it was a swooping around the [Merrick] Barn locking up form of lying,” he says. “It was too close to Narcis- late at night as he surveys the domain of his cre- of our boredom sus. Actors were thought to be unbalanced in ative life. He considers restoring the drama pro- and routines so we those days. And that’s an idea that has continued gram to a full major as the crowning achievement could get in touch to the modern era. That’s why in Hollywood— of his life.” with this thrill which was created not to make art but to make But it’s an act that has yet to play itself out. of living.” money, and it has needed to protect its image to Bringing the major back depends upon the uni- John Astin do that—they included clauses in actors’ con- versity’s doing more to embrace the arts, includ- tracts that rewarded them if they behaved and ing funding them. The Krieger School is ponder- punished them if they didn’t.” ing ways to ramp up its performing arts From there, Astin discusses the “humors” offerings—and not just theater. An arts task force that the Greeks believed controlled emotions. created in 2010 recommended that the school Actors of the time used those humors as guides make the arts a new point of emphasis. for the gestures they created onstage. In the 19th As for theater, Krieger dean Katherine New- century, American and European thespians tied man and Astin agree that there should be enough emotions to the gestures instituted by François money to hire someone to eventually replace him. Delsarte, Astin notes, just as those in the last cen- “We have to plan for a post-Astin world, though tury were inspired by the “psychological gestures” we really don’t want to think that way,” Newman created by vaunted stage teacher Michael Chek- says. “He’s a walking miracle. We owe a huge debt hov. “If the emotion one is portraying isn’t genu- to him. Whatever we end up doing regarding the- inely felt, then the gesture won’t be honest—it ater, he’ll be recognized as the founder of it.” won’t work,” he tells the students. For Astin, who says he wants to “make it to the As he wraps things up, Astin ties the concept century mark,” the quest for the legitimacy and of the psychological gesture to his most famous commitment that attend a full-fledged theater role, as Gomez. The cartoons of Charles Addams, major means more than having his name whose characterizations led to The Addams Fam- attached to another physical feature of the uni- ily, gave him his cues, as did his acquaintance versity. He’s waiting for that surprise, that crystal- with Chas Addams himself. “His cartoons always lizing moment that shatters expectations. Treat- had these tales of implied violence behind them, ing theater with the respect he believes time has like when the family is on the roof getting ready earned it would be that moment—both for him to pour hot, molten metal on Christmas carol- and for Johns Hopkins. ers,” he says. “But there was never any violence “The university is so good at so many things it actually carried out, so we laughed. I think what does,” he says. “We generate all this knowledge, Addams was trying to do was shake us out of our and it’s not just about the medical school. What boredom and routines so we could get in touch we need more of is wisdom, humanity. Hopkins with this thrill of living.” Astin applied that idea is missing that chunk of humanity that it used to To view a video about to Gomez, whose eyes and smile were as wide as have. But we can bring it back.” John Astin and the craft of acting, visit his thrown-open arms. “He waved a cigar around Michael Anft is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine. magazine.jhu.edu/astin.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 33 34 | johns hopkins magazine A computer scientist goes all in for poker. COMPUTING TEXAS HOLD ’EM

vi Rubin looks at his cards. Looks at his chips. Pon- ders his options. He has made it to the last table of a poker tournament at Delaware Park Casino, near Wilmington, Delaware, but he is perilously close to elimination. Stacked before him now is $8,000 worth of chips—the chips are merely to keep score; he bought into the tournament for only $65—and his eight remaining adversaries have among them $298,500. To win the event he must win all of their Achips, too, and he is tired, worn down by the struggle this tournament has been. The game is Texas Hold ’em, the most popular poker variant, and the two cards in Rubin’s hand are the ace and 4 of spades. Not the stron- gest hand, but he has $13,000 already invested in this pot. He thinks some more. Then he shoves his remaining chips into the center of the table. He is all in. If he wins the hand, he keeps going. If he loses, he goes home. Rubin does not play poker for a living. He is a 44-year-old professor of computer science in the Whiting School of Engineering, plus technical director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, plus director of the Health and Medical Security Lab at the same institution, plus a well-paid computer security consultant. If his name seems familiar, it is probably because in July 2003, he gave a technical paper he had co-written to a New York Times reporter. The paper proved that a

Dale Keiger | Illustrations Eda Akaltun

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 35 Diebold Election Systems touchscreen voting His plan was to play a cash game in the morn- machine that had been adopted by 38 states in ing, then enter the casino’s noon tournament. In time for the 2004 U.S. presidential election was so a tournament, the entrants vie for prizes awarded insecure a clever teenager could hack it and sub- to the top finishers. Prize money in most daily vert its vote tally. Much to Diebold’s annoyance, tournaments is modest and the players risk no Rubin soon was in major newspapers and on more than the entrance fee, so tournaments tend CNN explaining why a supposedly tamper-proof to attract more casual participants and poker voting machine was anything but. tourists. But in a cash game, the players vie for About five years ago, Rubin’s father men- each other’s money, and because there is no limit tioned that Avi’s younger brother, Yaacov, had to how much can be won (or lost), cash games been winning money playing poker online. Soon attract professionals for whom a casino is the after, Avi suggested to Yaacov that they play office. Soon after Rubin sat down at one of the sometime. “He kind of laughed at me and cash games in progress at 9:30 a.m., a pro in a started asking a few questions about hands and black T-shirt quit, holding more than $4,000 in situations,” Rubin recalls. “He said, ‘You know chips. Rubin was happy to see him go. You don’t so little about poker, you don’t realize that you win that much money at a small-stakes table After his don’t know anything about poker.’” Rubin unless you really know what you’re doing. family and his thought his little brother was just being arro- Texas Hold ’em is the game you see on cable work, poker gant, but when Yaacov recommended a poker television poker shows. In Hold ’em, each player became Rubin’s book called Harrington on Cash Games: Volume I, tries to make the best five-card hand out of two Rubin read it at a few sittings, highlighting the cards dealt facedown and a set of five communal main interest, text, making notes, utterly engrossed. “It was cards faceup in the center of the table. The cards displacing pocket probably the most fascinating experience I’ve are dealt in four rounds—first each player’s face- billiards, his ever had, to read that book and understand the down cards, then three communal cards (called previous obsession. science and the math behind poker and to real- “the flop”), followed by a fourth (“the turn”), and ize that a game I’d considered fun my whole life finally a fifth (“the river”)—with betting after actually had more depth than I’d ever consid- each round. Texas Hold ’em rewards a good head ered,” he says. After his family and his work, for odds and a good memory for what everyone poker became Rubin’s main interest, displacing else does in the course of the game. Cautious at pocket billiards, his previous obsession. He is a first, Rubin spent several hands sizing up the man of strong enthusiasms, serially all in, you other players. He guessed that at least three were might say, and now he bought every poker book professionals. They had substantial chip stacks he could find and studied them for hours, and cool, appraising faces, and they were not rereading the best ones. He started seeking out making mistakes. Still, after about 45 minutes he games with better players, learning by losing began winning some pots and seemed to be hold- until he began to win. And he set a goal—to play ing his own. He played well for another 45 min- his way into the World Series of Poker in Las utes, until he tried to bluff with a weaker hand, Vegas, the biggest poker tournament in the failed to fold when he should have, and lost $240 world, by the time he was 50. to one of the pros. On a break soon after, he said of the player who’d just beaten him, “I should ubin is so young in appearance, he have realized he was strong. But every time I bet, once had a Las Vegas casino ques- the pros on the other side of the table were raising tion the validity of his photo ID, and me and I was folding, and I was getting a little fed there is something childlike in his up. So they got in my head a little.” He checked enthusiasm for poker. On the day we his iPhone. Years ago, he had made a substantial wentR to Delaware Park, when I arrived at his house investment in Apple stock at a great price. Now he I found him already in his car, sitting impatiently at noted that the company was up $5 per share in the end of the driveway. Once we were at the casino, morning trading. He chuckled. “The good news the closer he got to the poker room the faster he is I’ve made more on Apple this morning than I’ve walked. I half expected him to break into a trot. lost here.”

36 | johns hopkins magazine etween the cash game and the tour- not bother with all the math. They feel that they nament, Rubin wolfs down a sand- have enough intuition for the game.” Rubin is wich at the casino’s On a Roll Deli. pleased to point out that they’re frequently wrong. While he eats, he enters the morn- “The fundamental math is much more important. ing’s results on his phone, using an If you’re a solid mathematical player, in the long appB that lets him record and chart his earnings and run you’re going to kill the intuitive player. losses. He says that over the long haul he is ahead, “I think what really helps me is being a com- this morning’s $240 blunder notwithstanding. puter security guy. In security, we think of every- When he began studying poker, Rubin fre- thing in terms of adversaries and action-and- quently thought in terms of how a computer response. You’re worried about hackers and might model the game. Several disciplines were always trying to stay one step ahead, trying to pre- applicable—game theory, expert systems, dict what they will do if you take this defense mea- machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a sure, and in poker, you always have to stay a few branch of mathematics concerned with finite steps ahead. It’s almost exactly the same threat countable structures. The various combinations model that you have in network security.” of cards in a poker hand are finite countable structures. As he trained himself to be a better player, t noon, the Delaware Park tourna- Rubin would make up combinatorics poker prob- ment begins with 43 entrants dis- lems, then solve them on a computer. He has con- persed to four tables. Everyone sidered studying the game by creating decision starts with $7,500 in chips. Lose all trees, branching diagrams that plot a chain of of your chips and you are out of the if-then options and are routine for a computer sci- tourney,A which goes on until there’s one man stand- entist. For example, he could start with a single ing. (And it will be one man. The only women hand, then chart all the variables—his position in involved on this day are dealers.) The top five finish- a round of betting, the texture of the flop (that is, ers will win cash prizes, with $723 for first. (Prizes at does it have potential to create strong hands like the daily casino tournaments are calculated by a straights or flushes), whether he is playing against formula and tied to the number of entries.) three others or heads-up against a single remain- Soon it becomes apparent that Rubin’s initial ing opponent—to see what might happen. “For table will be an action table, with people playing any given spot in the decision tree,” he says, “I a lot of hands instead of cautiously folding. Early could come up with a probability distribution of on, he gets ace-king, a strong hand that he bets. different plays. Then I could write a learning pro- But he does not get the cards he needs on the flop gram that I could use as a simulator on the com- and loses. Not much later, he’s dealt a pair of puter and play a thousand times with particular jacks. This is also a good hand, so when someone settings, then tweak the settings and run it again raises him, Rubin raises back. The flop comes up to see if I do better, and work backward from it to king-7-4. Rubin now has to worry that the one infer why that was a better play in that situation. player still in is holding a king. When that player The thing is, there are so many variables and so bets, Rubin is forced to fold. No more than 20 many factors you rarely find yourself in a precise minutes into the tournament, he has lost half his situation that you’ve studied. What you have to do chips. He’s not playing badly, but he’s not getting is abstract out the reasoning used to get to that the cards he needs to win. decision, then apply that logic and process to Some of the casino’s video monitors show whatever situation you’re in.” data from the tournament: how many players In his regular Monday night games with started, how many are still playing, and the aver- friends—his wife, Ann, got him to agree to limit age number of chips held by each. Rubin’s chip poker to one night a week—Rubin plays against stack quickly falls below the average and he will lawyers and doctors. “The lawyers tend to be bet- spend the day clawing back from the edge of ter,” he says. “The math in poker is basic arithme- oblivion. At 12:54 p.m., he’s dealt a pair of kings tic, it’s not that hard. But you still have people, like and bets the hand. One of his opponents refuses a lot of the doctors that I play with, who’d rather to fold, and Rubin goes all in. If he loses the hand,

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 37 for a house in Baltimore, he rejected a few because they didn’t have any rooms big enough to accommodate the tournament-size pool table he wanted. Once they had the house and he had the table, he practiced in the evenings and on weekends. He converted a competitive friend to the game, and they would play until 1 or 2 in the morning. “That was before either of us had kids.” Ann says that early in their relationship, Avi’s capacity for obsession was not so apparent, perhaps because they had little money and he was busy finishing his doctorate. Ann is a lawyer, smart, patient, and bemused by life with a husband who does not seem to grasp the everyday meaning of “casual pursuit.” She can tick off other examples of his tendency to go all in. When the two of them decided that sailing might be fun, she had in mind occasionally going out in a rented boat. But it wasn’t long before they were he’s out of the tournament in less than an hour. taking lessons and the owners of their own sail- The players turn over their cards and the oppo- ing vessel. The Rubins have three children, and nent has only king-jack. Rubin survives. when the oldest brought home her annual school photos one day, Avi was unhappy with the quality wenty-seven years ago, Rubin and decided he could do better. There ensued the entered the University of Michigan purchase of cameras, lenses, lights, backgrounds, with no intent to become a com- and books; a period of study and practice; the set- puter scientist and security expert. ting up of a home studio; and the establishment As a freshman he was premed. But of an annual photo shoot in which the kids dress The harbored a strong interest in applying comput- up and Rubin takes hundreds of pictures to get ers to medicine, so he listed computer science as portraits that satisfy him. his major while he embarked on the premed cur- “He’s fortunate that his interests coincide riculum. Starting at a sprint, he enrolled in six with mine,” Ann says. “Except for the poker one.” classes for his first college semester, and got five Rubin calls poker the biggest source of friction in As and a B+. The B+ was in chemistry, a class he his marriage. Ann seems more good-humored hated so much it drove him out of medicine. “I told about it than her husband would suggest but my parents that if I had to take another chemistry admits, “Poker became an annoyance, really, course, it wouldn’t be worth it to be a doctor.” He because it was much more of an obsession than would concentrate on computers. anything else. Part of this obsessiveness is he He stayed in Ann Arbor for his graduate wants to talk about it.” She does not share his degrees, and one year the university offered an enthusiasm for analyzing poker situations. Nor is intersession course on pool, taught by a pro who she comfortable with the amount of money that was ranked 17th in the United States at the time. can change hands. “I don’t like gambling,” she Most of the students were merely amusing them- says. “Mah-jongg I play for quarters. To go to a selves between semesters. Not Rubin. Taken with game and potentially lose hundreds of dollars in the complexities of what seemed like a simple an evening? I don’t know. It bothers me. He’s game, he practiced diligently, studied books and ahead, but still.” videos, watched every Hollywood film that Nevertheless, for one birthday she took him to involved pool players, and found himself improv- Atlantic City and turned him loose to play while ing quickly, which fueled his desire to get even she shopped, and for another birthday took him better. Years later, when he and Ann were looking out to dinner while friends slipped into the house

38 | johns hopkins magazine and set up a surprise tournament for her to bring what cold logic says. But he looks at his chips, him home to. The Rubins are building a new ponders his options, and convinces himself that house, and the basement, with her blessing, will on the previous hand his adversary displayed a include a poker room with three tables. Avi has tendency to back down against a show of strength urged Ann to play more, and says he thinks she and might do that now. Or he might be upset could be the better player if she worked at it. She’s enough to play a losing hand out of frustration. not much drawn to that idea but has suggested Either way, Rubin wins. He pushes forward that he take cooking lessons. Her calculation is $10,000 in chips, adding to the $3,000 he already that if he dives into that like he dives into every- has at stake. thing else, by the time the house is done he’ll be The other man raises and goes all in—the one able to cook some very good food whenever he possibility Rubin hadn’t considered. Now he is hosts a Monday night game. She might not play, backed into a corner. He is “pot committed,” but she’ll be happy to eat. meaning it no longer makes mathematical sense to fold. So he, too, must go all in, hoping he hasn’t little more than an hour after the blundered. Maybe he’ll get an ace on the flop. Or start of the tournament, five play- three spades, which would give him a flush. But ers have gone broke and are out. sensing imminent demise, he looks back at me At 1:45 p.m., Rubin, down to less and says, “Let’s go home,” as he pushes his remain- than half of his initial stake, goes ing $8,000 in chips into the center of the table. He Aall in again, and his two opponents fold. He starts does not get the ace. Nor does he get the spades. to rebound, winning a couple of hands. He His opponent beats him with a pair of 9s and doesn’t say much, and his right foot jiggles con- Rubin is out. He finishes the tournament eighth. stantly. Half an hour later, with only 29 players Only the top five finishers earn prize money. left in the tournament, he’s all in yet again. His In a conversation two weeks earlier, he had two pair, aces and queens, beats a pair of 7s. Each said, “Sometimes when I leave a poker game I’m hour, the tourney breaks for 10 minutes, and on lost. I have this really terrible feeling inside. I one of these breaks Rubin says, “This is what you can’t stand it if I leave a tournament because I did Three hours into call grinding it out.” By 2:30, the field is down to something really foolish.” On the drive home the tournament, 20 players and Rubin folds a pair of 3s. It’s the now, he has 90 minutes to brood over that last he’s forced to right play for such a weak hand, but he then has to hand. “That was a bad play. I should have given go all in yet again, watch as the pot grows large and the other two 3s more thought to the position pre-flop. Maybe it turn up in the flop. Had he stayed in the hand, was the strain of playing that long.” Twenty min- but wins when he’d have won big with four of a kind. All he can utes later: “Oh, I’m kicking myself for that play. everyone do is shake his head. Kicking and kicking.” Half an hour after that: else folds. Three hours into the tournament, he’s forced to “Definitely misplayed that hand. But in my go all in yet again, but wins when everyone else defense, I was exhausted.” He does note one ben- folds. By 3:30, for the first time all day he has clawed efit. Because of his early exit from the tourna- back to holding what the video monitor says is the ment, he will be home in time to take his son to average number of chips. Ten minutes later, he’s soccer practice. That will make Ann happy. all in for the fifth time today, and again he wins. He could buy his way into the World Series of He makes it to the final table. When another Poker simply by showing up and handing over player crashes out, Rubin is only four places out of $10,000. But he doesn’t want to do that. He wants the money. At 4 p.m., he peeks at his cards and sees to bring his skill up to where he can qualify by ace-4 of spades. Not a great hand. Still, all but one playing his way in. Ann believes he could do it. other player has folded, and that one just lost She says, “When Avi sets his mind on something, $6,000 when confronted by an all-in raise. Rubin there’s no stopping him.” Right now, though, he knows that the by-the-book play with ace-4 is to just keeps replaying that last hand. Turning onto fold. That’s what a computer scientist’s grasp of his street, he sighs loudly. the probabilities says, that’s what all the poker Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine. Thanks to manuals he has studied for months say, that’s Ann Rubin for relaxing her one-poker-game-a-week rule for this story.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 39 Michael Anft | Photograph Christian Witkin

40 | johns hopkins magazine Parental Guidance

Navigating the special oby’s mother knew her son was different from the education system can be beginning. She could pick out his high cry from daunting. Liza Brecher among other newborns’, and he was always restless in her arms. His fidgetiness continued through pre- wants to help. school, where his teachers started to complain that he disrupted the classroom, like the time he climbed a bookshelf to get an out-of-reach toy truck—and ended up sending everything and himself to the floor. He was moved to a different class. This pattern marked his early education: Hyperactivity led to behav- Tioral issues, the handling of which interrupted his schooling. He had dif- Bret McCabe ficulty learning the letters in his name. He could do puzzles but was com- Photography Christian Witkin pletely uninterested in reading. By the time Toby got to fifth grade, his reading comprehension problems were so pronounced his teacher paid closer attention. Over the course of a few months, Toby’s teacher tried several learning and behavioral interventions to document his performance before referring him to the school psychologist, who tested Toby on a series of reading and spelling tests: the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised, the Wide Range Achievement Test, the Broad Reading and Broad Written Language subtests of the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery. He performed above average on one, poorly on the other two. More testing ensued. The Hudson Education Skills Inventory–Reading showed Toby’s poor performance in phonic analysis, structural analysis, and comprehension; the Classroom Reading Inventory showed that his reading comprehension was at the second- or third-grade level while his listening comprehension was at the seventh-grade level. At this point the teacher contacted the school’s learning disability teacher and asked to have Toby removed from her classroom. She was through with him. “So, what would you talk to Toby’s mother about if this case was yours?” Liza Brecher asks one of the undergraduate volunteers taking part in her Homewood Educational Advocacy Resource (HEAR) program. Brecher, herself a Johns Hopkins undergraduate, organized HEAR to

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 41 train students to serve as pro bono advocates to without interruption or discussion, the parent Baltimore parents during Individualized Educa- endures a nearly hourlong monologue about test tion Plan (IEP) meetings, the annual sit-down results and standard scores that might not mean between the parent of a child in the special edu- anything to a noneducator. The IEP team goes cation system and representatives from the pub- through last year’s plan and makes recommenda- lic school system. tions for the coming year. Sometimes, an IEP Tonight is the second of five planned training meeting can feel like a lecture informing a parent sessions. The students have broken into two of all the things her child can’t do. small groups to discuss the case, sitting in desks “It’s a really intimidating process,” says Mau- in a Maryland Hall classroom on the Homewood reen van Stone, director of Project HEAL at the campus. A laptop is plugged into the overhead Kennedy Krieger Institute. Project HEAL is a med- digital projector to show a training website. ical-legal partnership between the Johns Hopkins Empty carryout salad boxes sit on the table at the Children’s Center and the Maryland Volunteer head of the class. Lawyers Service. “Most of my families are single- One of the young women brings up the teach- parent households, moms who are low-income, er’s efforts that did have a positive impact on who may be raising multiple kids, and so they’re Toby, such as the observation that practicing say- going to be doing it alone. This is not their area of ing words before reading a story decreased his expertise by any means. And they’re surrounded mistakes while reading. Brecher and the others by a team of professionals who have all of the data bat around ideas to build on these observations: available to them. They have all of the child’s setting goals to decrease the number of Toby’s reports. They have educational expertise. And errors per 500 words, providing him with fewer they have numbers. [Parents] should feel like options—such as practicing 15 words instead of they’re an equal partner at the table, but parents 20—and incorporating such practice into his les- never, ever feel that way.” son plans. They discuss ways to encourage a par- Liza Brecher started HEAR to let parents know ent to talk about setting specific, measurable they don’t have to go through this alone. She is goals with the IEP team during the meeting. After training HEAR advocates to be able to support a about 20 minutes, they finish with Toby’s sample parent hoping that a child isn’t segregated into case and move on to their next section of training. special ed–only classes, to recognize when an IEP In Maryland, a student’s Individualized Edu- meeting is venturing into territory that requires cation Plan is a 20-plus-page document, not legal representation, and how to refer parents to including addenda, that identifies his or her emo- appropriate service providers. “A big part of being tional, psychological, or cognitive challenges; an advocate is listening to the family and under- current performance levels; academic goals; and standing how they’re feeling and why they’re feel- strategies for achieving those goals, among other ing that way,” she says. “Because for so many issues. It’s the road map the school system uses families, they just don’t have any support. They to address a child’s special needs as mandated have nowhere they can go and say, ‘I’m worried by the Individuals with Disabilities Education about my kid,’ or ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ Act of 1990. or ‘No one is listening to me.’” For parents of kids with special needs, the annual IEP meeting can be daunting, and some- recher, a class of 2013 history of sci- times adversarial. The parent sits across a large ence major at Johns Hopkins, had table from the team of school system experts: the no idea what she was getting her- IEP chair, an IEP case manager, a school psychol- self into when she enrolled in Janu- ogist, a speech/language pathologist, a social ary’s Leading Social Change inter- worker, a general educator, a special educator, a Bsession course. She had just returned from a guidance counselor, and, if required, the school semester in Arica, Chile, where she was research- system’s attorney. If she can afford it, she can ing what resources exist for families of kids with bring along a representative, such as an attorney Down syndrome. Growing up with a trisomy older or professional advocate. If the meeting proceeds brother—Down syndrome is also known as tri-

42 | johns hopkins magazine somy 21 because it occurs when a child is born many of these families don’t have anyone help- with an extra 21st chromosome—Brecher has ing them,” she says. “So many parents say, ‘Oh, known since high school that she wanted to work the school knows best,’ because, obviously, with children with special needs. “My ultimate these are the teachers, these are the trained spe- goal is to create Down syndrome clinics like the cialists. You trust your teachers to do what’s best one we have in Boston,” she says. for your child. And that doesn’t always happen, That clinic is the Down Syndrome Program at especially in the special ed system, because it’s Children’s Hospital Boston, a comprehensive, expensive and hard and time-consuming, and multidisciplinary clinic where trisomy kids (and schools are strapped.” their families) see everyone from pediatricians Brecher looked into Baltimore’s special edu- and psychologists to dentists and nutritionists, cation situation and discovered that of the from birth through young adulthood. It’s where 84,000-plus students enrolled for the 2011–12 Louis Sciuto, Brecher’s brother, went and where year, about 16 percent were in the special educa- 14,000 Brecher volunteered and worked growing up. tion system—roughly 14,000 kids. She also found STUDENTS “The clinic is probably the first pediatrician out that there were only 20 volunteer advocates in [a] baby is going to see,” she says. “It’s a very the entire state of Maryland, and only two advo- ARE IN THE important thing for families, to have that support cacy agencies in Baltimore. (Private legal advo- BALTIMORE from the get-go. So, hopefully, I want to start clin- cacy is an option, but an expensive one—averag- ics like that all over. I mean, there’s still plenty of ing $75 an hour.) SPECIAL cities in the United States that don’t have them. Her project was one of three awarded a $5,000 And there’s actually legislation right now, if it ever grant at the end of January. Brecher immediately EDUCATION gets through Congress, that will allocate funding asked friend and classmate Rachel Muscat to SYSTEM specifically for Down syndrome clinics.” help coordinate the project, and the two recruited That goal is what attracted Brecher to Leading an inaugural class of student advocates. They Social Change, a class that asks students to come contacted local advocacy agencies and nonprofits up with socially conscious business plans. But the for training advice. They called special-needs class turned out to be aimed toward local projects organizations to reach out to families. They tried instead: Students research needs specific to Bal- to let schools know they existed. They wanted to timore and develop sustainable solutions to train five to seven student advocates and then address them. They present their ideas at the meet with families by the end of the spring Social Entrepreneurial Business Plan Competi- semester, so that come fall, when the IEP meet- tion, and winners receive grants for seed funding. ings start, they would have a plan. Baltimore already had a clinic—at Kennedy They quickly learned just how many chal- Krieger, where she did research—so Brecher lenges they faced. Kids in Baltimore’s special reconsidered her idea. “What other challenges do education system primarily deal with behavioral families face? A big one has always been educa- and emotional issues—which are sometimes tion,” she says. “I mean, nine out of 10 families subtle enough to go undiagnosed and can be who come into the Down syndrome clinic in Bos- more complex to address—rather than develop- ton are asking us how we can help them get mental ones. The school system and advocacy enough therapy in school or the right services.” groups have, on occasion, had a more adversarial Brecher recalled a Spanish-speaking mother than collaborative relationship. And in 2010, the who came into the Boston clinic; her son had a Baltimore City Public School System settled a spe- number of behavioral issues. “The doctors were cial education civil suit that directly informs the thinking he might have a dual diagnosis with school system’s attitude at the IEP meetings. The autism,” Brecher says. “So one of the things they suit was filed in 1984—seven years before Brecher were stressing was that he needed to get a func- was born. tional behavioral analysis.” Evaluation requests At their first meeting with the Maryland Special have to be made in writing, but the mother didn’t Needs Advocacy Project, its director Martha Good- write in English. Brecher drafted the letter for man “gave me this binder that was like this big,” her. “That opened my eyes to the fact that so Muscat says, her hands suggesting something

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 43 unabridged-dictionary thick. “That was just the seriousness when Andrés Alonso was appointed parent manual. That’s the minimum that a person superintendent in 2007. “Overall, are things bet- needs to know in order to engage with this issue.” ter than they were in 1984?” Margolis says. “I “It’s very, very stark,” Brecher says of special think, yeah—because in 1984, in 1990, in 1995, education in Baltimore. “I mean, I knew that it being able to talk about the quality of education was probably not going to be great and it’s always was a luxury. That’s now in the past. It looks like a challenge. But I didn’t realize quite how bad it is. they get IEPs implemented pretty quickly. So the So once I saw that, I was, like, I can’t not do this.” harder issues are the quality issues.” Those years of failed IEP compliance and n 1984, the Maryland Disability Law Cen- institutional apathy, however, can still linger. “In ter (MDLC) filed a class action suit in the this city, we started off extremely adversarial,” District Court of Maryland on behalf of says Project HEAL founding director Hope Tip- Baltimore City students with disabilities ton. She recalls going to an IEP meeting where, who were not receiving services to which when she requested a progress report, she was theyI were entitled by their IEPs. The suit— forwarded a previous progress report where the Vaughn G. et al. v. Mayor and City Council of Bal- date had been changed to make it look like a new timore, et al.—bounced through the Maryland one was performed. “And I was—pardon my lan- courts for 26 years. guage—pissed off, because that’s deceitful and Leslie Seid Margolis joined the MDLC in Sep- lazy. If you had just sent me the previous progress tember 1985 and worked on the Vaughn G. case report I would just have thought you were lazy. through its 2010 settlement. It started as a matter But when you specifically white out the date to of compliance and evolved into a reform effort. make it look current, that’s deceitful. “When the case was filed, it was filed on behalf of “Where we have come with this kid in the kids for whom the timelines were violated for last 18 months is miles and miles away with assessment and for implementation of IEPs,” this team,” she continues. “But where they Margolis says. “At that point the city had a back- started was absolutely horrible. And the log of many, many kids who were not getting school’s attorney has told me, ‘We see such a assessment on time and many kids whose IEPs minute number of kids in the special ed sys- were not being implemented in a timely fashion, tem, doesn’t it make you wonder about all the and the city was remarkably unconcerned.” kids we’re missing?’ Those are the kids I worry She recalls an early client, an elementary about—the kids who have no intervention, have school–age girl with cerebral palsy who had not no advocacy, who are just slipping through the received a physical therapy evaluation even cracks that way.” though the schools had the appropriate request It’s some of those families Brecher and HEAR for it. The evaluation was requested and it didn’t are trying to reach. They would like to pair each of happen. The next year the same evaluation the advocates with a family by the end of the request was made. Again, nothing. “Five years 2011–12 academic year. They also plan to target this kid waited for a physical therapy evaluation the incoming class to recruit new student-advo- that didn’t happen,” Margolis says. “We go to the cates, and to grow the program each year. due process—I mean, why should I have to The goal isn’t just to help a handful of fami- request a due process hearing for this? Go to the lies but to become part of a growing network of hearing. I say to the attorney, ‘Your own docu- special education support and advocacy. For ments reflect she didn’t have it. Can we just agree instance, the MDLC co-created the CityWide Spe- that she didn’t have it and resolve this?’ No. He cial Education Advocacy Project to build a grass- would not concede that. So we had to go through roots base and to educate and empower parents, a local-level hearing, [then] we go through state- who are always going to be their children’s best level hearing. And, of course, they find she didn’t advocates. Tipton says she worked with a mother have the assessment she was entitled to.” and her older son, and when the younger son The problem in the school system was sys- entered the special ed system, the mother was temic; issues started to be addressed with more able to navigate a great deal of it on her own. Now

44 | johns hopkins magazine “A big part of being an advocate is listening to the family and understanding how they’re feeling. Because for so many families, they just don’t have any support.” Liza Brecher

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 45 Tipton gives out this mother’s number when par- a research project about how people with disabil- ents contact her with similar problems. ities were treated in China. She met a young man Learning by doing is common in advocacy, there with Down syndrome, and the only word he and it’s also a reminder of what’s at stake in fight- could say was grandma. His parents had sent him ing for better integration of special ed into gen- to an expensive private school, where the only eral ed. Education isn’t merely pragmatic, where things he learned to read and write were one, two, we teach our children the intellectual and social and three—very basic Chinese characters. Brecher skills they need to become ostensibly functional says the young man’s father took pride in his son, members of society. It’s also aspirational. It’s talking about how he helped at the store they where we imagine how society could be: desegre- own, how he brought him his lunch every day. gated, inclusionary, tolerant. “His mother wouldn’t even talk to me,” Brecher says. “She was so ashamed of him.” hose are ideals that drive Brecher In the village of Lijiang she met a woman who because she’s witnessed them in had a 5-year-old son with Down syndrome who action. She knows her brother Louis paid the fee to have a second child. “She said, ‘I was fortunate to have grown up with had my daughter so there would be someone to supportive parents and family. He par- take care of my son when my husband and I die,’” ticipatedT in Special Olympics, but he also played Brecher says. “And that kills me.” typical sports with his peers. Louis and Liza had With HEAR, though, Brecher is entering new their bar and bat mitzvahs alongside each other. territory. “I’ve grown up in a very specific disability They grew up in a town—North Andover, Massachu- community. We’re learning that Baltimore tends setts—that incorporated special education into to have more strict behavioral disabilities and its school system early on. Today, Louis has a job. emotional disabilities, and that’s not something Brecher also knows that not all people with I’m really familiar with,” she says. “And those tend Down syndrome are so lucky. In 2009, she spent to have very different effects on families.” a semester in high school at a pair of Camphill A few weeks into training Brecher and Muscat communities—planned living situations for peo- were still a bit apprehensive. They had recruited 20 ple with special needs—in Ireland. “I was so used four other student advocates, and they had to how my brother and I were raised, it was very reached out to a number of local advocacy groups VOLUNTEER much in the community,” she says. “When I got who were helping them try to connect with fami- to Ireland and the villages, they were so isolated.” lies, but it was slow going. The schools had been ADVOCATES She was struck by how few typical children were completely nonresponsive; none of the special SERVE mixed with the trisomy kids at the children’s educators had returned any calls or emails. And community. “If there were any, they were the chil- the semester’s end was inching closer. THE ENTIRE dren of the director or the head farmer,” she says. There is a tinge of discouragement in her STATE OF “But [the trisomy children] didn’t have classes voice, but Brecher knew the project was going to together with the typical children.” be difficult. She realizes that raising a child with MARYLAND She witnessed a range of situations in Ireland. special needs is never a cakewalk, but she also At Trinity College Dublin she encountered a pro- knows that the first step in being a successful gram for adults who have special needs, where advocate is being there and ready when that first students get a peer buddy and the professors parent reaches out for help. “They need to see change their teaching styles to be more accessi- that we’re actually following through,” Brecher ble. “I saw schools in Ireland where they had says. “A lot of time what happens is people have totally normal integrated classes, and I saw an good ideas for this community and they think it’s institution where it was like going back to the going to be really great but then it doesn’t really 1950s,” she says. “There were kids in wheelchairs get off the ground. So I think we kind of need to sitting and watching a television screen for hours prove ourselves first. We need to show that we’re on end every day.” actually going to do this and we’re actually going The previous summer Brecher attended a lan- to help.” guage program in southern China and worked on Bret McCabe, A&S ’94, is a senior writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine.

46 | johns hopkins magazine SAME STORY. NEW STAGE. The Johns Hopkins Magazine iPad app is here. And it’s free. Download it now at magazine.jhu.edu/app.

Volume 64 No. 1 Spring 2012 | 47 48 | johns hopkins magazine Aping Nature

he hills of science are littered with wreckage, the remnants of failed attempts to touch the heavens of knowledge. The case of Otto Lilienthal explains this all too clearly. A late 19th-century German inventor, Lilienthal wowed his compatriots with newfangled flying machines. He buckled himself into a developing series of contraptions, jumped off hills outside We can’t talk Berlin, and soared around them. As he and his with the animals. brother, Gustav, honed their glider technology, Lilienthal climbed to But by observing nearly 1,200 feet. In the process, he converted himself from oddball to visionary,T drawing ever-larger crowds to his experiments. He made their most awe-inspiring human flight seem possible. traits, we can learn In his attempt to perfect his gliders, Lilienthal took clues from nature,

Photogra enough from them to especially the flight dynamics and wing conformations of the white stork. create new medicines In 1889, he published Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, in which he specu- lated that aircraft that imitated the flapping wings of birds could generate p h by and robots. enough power to stay aloft. He incorporated into his gliders some of his tore/ J oel theories on shifting one’s weight to maintain flight, but he wouldn’t have S ar time to work out all of his ideas. In August 1896, after one last successful voyage, Lilienthal’s glider lost contact with the drafts that had suspended N ational Michael Anft him in midair some 2,000 times before. Lilienthal plunged 56 feet back to earth, breaking his neck. He died a day later, using his last breath to tell

G eographic Gustav that in science, “sacrifices must be made.” S tock

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 49 If it could, Lilienthal’s legacy would comfort Some animals have such strange superpow- him—Berlin’s airport is named after him, and his ers that they invite investigation just to see how work inspired the Wright brothers in their much they do what they do. Take the hawk moth. It less tragic quest for sustained human flight. And, contains an unfolding proboscis that is one and despite Lilienthal’s sacrifice, scientists today hap- a half times its body length. It uses significant pily follow in his footsteps. They consider him the pumping power to pull nectar from plants into father of biomimetics, the study of the unique its belly. Could we make a moth-inspired characteristics of animals, undertaken to create mechanical pump that is as powerful? Other something of value from what we learn. examples abound. Might the planarian worm’s Part biology and part engineering, biomimet- endless ability to regenerate yield clues as to ics and its nature-inspired spinoffs (such as the how to slow cells’ aging? Is it possible that the engineering-centered field of biomorphics) bacteria-killing peptides secreted by the skin of mimic individual species’ evolutionary talents, certain Australian frogs could provide humans then use the underlying principles to devise new with hints about protection from antibiotic- medical treatments, craft more lifelike human resistant infections? replacement parts, and build cleverer robots. The “What’s exciting about this kind of research is fields regularly yield improvements in technol- that bio-inspiration is all around us,” says Rajat ogy. For example, scientists who observed the Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering at gecko’s ability to cling to walls have developed a the Whiting School of Engineering. “You never sticky substance similar to what the gecko uses to know where you’ll find a novel solution.” Mittal defy gravity. Others have investigated the self- became nature motivated 15 years ago while cleaning surface of sharks to develop boat hulls watching a NASA presentation at the University of that resist contamination or staining by oil and Florida, where he served as an assistant professor. other nuisances. A NASA scientist, echoing Lilienthal, was talking about creating an aircraft that could change the shape of its wings in midflight, as some birds and insects can. “I had never in my life thought we could learn anything from birds about aircraft design,” Mittal says. From that moment on, he began to search in earnest for nature-centric solutions to mechanical problems, making it one of the focal points of his career.

Mittal is hardly alone. Since the turn of the Photogra century, bio-inspired research has grown by leaps p

and bounds, he says, including at Johns Hopkins h by University. Scientists at the Applied Physics Labo- istockphoto.com ratory have studied hypersensitive dog noses to learn how they might develop a mechanical smell detector that could be used in airports or in contaminated regions too dangerous to risk search- and-rescue dogs. Engineers at the Whiting School who study neuromorphics—the science of creating networks of animal-like “nerves” in computer- ized robots and prostheses—researched lamprey eels to figure out how to electrically mimic the eel’s ability to regenerate a severed spinal cord. There are several ongoing experiments at Johns Hopkins that seek to unlock the secrets of animals. Here’s a handful of the critters researchers are finding useful.

50 | johns hopkins magazine squirrels entire body, including its organs and brain, goes Admit a very ill human being to a hospital, put through sweeping changes that likely begin even him in the intensive care unit, tend to him while before it tucks itself in for its winter sleep. He just he is comatose, and watch him (hopefully) doesn’t know how exactly it happens. “We haven’t recover. He still won’t be completely healthy. found patterns yet, or any answers as to why or Much of his muscle mass will have disappeared, how they go through these multiple changes,” so he’ll weigh a good bit less and have difficulty Cohn says. moving. Such wasting is a challenge for patients But that doesn’t mean the experiments have who may have already been too weak to move failed. As is the case with most basic science Some animals around, especially the elderly. Four in 10 people research, small discoveries add up. So far, Cohn have such over the age of 80 suffer from sarcopenia, an irre- has uncovered what he calls “a molecular signa- strange versible withering of the muscles. For younger ture of muscle endurance”—a number of pro- superpowers people who have degenerative muscle diseases, teins that signal how muscle mass is main- that they invite such as muscular dystrophy, the search for a med- tained. The way squirrels use those proteins is ical answer to wasting is a matter of life and death. unique. “In essence, they’re running a sprint investigation As part of that search, scientists have looked and a marathon at the same time,” Cohn says. just to see how to certain mammals that sleep for seasons at a “This is how they retain their muscle mass— they do what time but somehow manage to maintain their dex- even as they’re hibernating.” they do. terity, strength, and muscle mass. One researcher, Such clues may serve as the building blocks to Ronald Cohn, an associate professor of genetics, cures for degenerative muscle diseases, Cohn adds. neurology, and pediatrics in the School of Medi- “The squirrel has figured out what science hasn’t— cine, has spent much of the past five years exam- yet. We’ve tried to study wasting for decades. Now, ining squirrels for clues. we’ve developed a good model to help us catch up “When I was a boy of 10 or 11 years old, I was with what squirrels innately understand.” fascinated by bears and wondered how they could do what they do after hibernation,” says Cohn. alligator Gars “But working with bears would be too unwieldy, For every fluffy, adorable creature like the squir- so I landed on squirrels.” Bears also shiver as they rel that possesses an odd talent, there are several hibernate, perhaps enough to keep their muscles animals of seemingly less, er, aesthetic and toned while they sleep. On the other hand, hiber- anthropomorphic value that nonetheless prove nating ground squirrels, which are native to the useful to biomimetics and biomorphics. Con- American Midwest and the Arctic, don’t. They sider the elusive alligator gar, a fish that swims also don’t eat, drink, or move for four to six of the near the surface of the lower Mississippi River coldest months of the year. Yet when they wake and other freshwater rivers in the South and in up, they run around without so much as a simple Mexico. Capable of growing up to 10 feet long, the quad stretch. How? solitary gar is known for its jagged, alligator-like To find out, Cohn keeps squirrels in auto- teeth and ungainly snout. mated hibernation for months at a time in his lab, It may not make for a nice stuffed animal that during which, and afterward, lab workers perform ends up in a crib, but the alligator gar has several chemical analysis and genetic testing on them. things going for it. It can live as long as 70 years “We’re looking to see if there is a master regula- and its scales are extremely hard (something that tor, perhaps some kind of hormone or molecule, may factor into its longevity). That tough exterior that has a domino effect on the molecular path- has piqued the interest of the U.S. military, which ways in their muscles,” Cohn explains. Finding regularly enlists the help of Johns Hopkins engi- such a chemical or chemicals would give research- neers. For the past several years, Whiting School ers some idea of what’s keeping their muscles researchers have sought insight from other water- toned, and what kind of drugs could be developed borne creatures, including the abalone and its that could keep humans from wasting. durable shell, in a search for clues as to how to The problem is they haven’t found a regulator build better armor for military cars, tanks, and yet. Cohn has learned, however, that the squirrel’s infantry soldiers.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 51 “What we’re looking for are substances that and quantify it, and then see if they can develop are strong enough that they rarely break, are a similar material via research engineering— tough so that they maintain some integrity when the art of modeling something natural into they do break, and are of low weight,” says K.T. something that isn’t. The resulting product Ramesh, a professor of mechanical engineering could then be used to protect troops and equip- at the Whiting School. “The advantage in looking ment during battle. to nature for useful substances is that nature has Besides offering the benefit of having a model developed a very wide range of possible micro- to study, bio-inspired research contains another structures over time, and selected the very suc- advantage: It makes it easier to explain the work cessful few of them. Some have evolved interlock- at hand to others, Ramesh says. “People— ing hierarchical microstructures that make these funders, students—can connect to a biological surfaces tough.” Evolution provides a valuable analogue. Once the intuitive connection is made, lesson for nature’s mimics, he adds. “Nature does it’s much easier to engage people’s intellects.” the opposite of what engineers usually do. We Ramesh’s lab’s approach indeed has its look for ways to build things simple and fast.” appeal. In April, it won a $90 million grant from As an abalone shell develops, it grows different the U.S. Army to lead a consortium of private structures at the millimeter level than it does at the industries and universities that will investigate microscale and nanoscale. One level may be made the basic science behind materials, like a soldier’s up of a hardened material that makes the shell or armor, that are subjected to tremendous impacts. scale strong, while a softer layer (usually a polymer) interlocks with it to make it tougher. Those tiers songbirds link together with other layers of tough stuff. How do members of species cooperate? Are they The alligator gar scale is similar. Recently, programmed to dance or sing in tandem? Or do Ramesh and his lab mates began to look at the they learn how to work together? fish’s interlocking ganoid scales, which are To find answers, Eric Fortune, an associate made up of enamel over a base, covered by a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Fortune’s work has layer of ganoin, a shimmery hard material that the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, treks implications not makes up the scale’s surface. The scales, shaped regularly to Ecuador, where he studies how male just for birds but like diamonds, are prized for their durability— and female members of the species Pheugopedius euophrys—the plain-tailed wren—coordinate the other species, so much so that Native Americans used them to make arrowheads and jewelry. Gar scales and territorial duets they sing on the side of an including humans some seashell varieties, because they are com- Andean volcano. In a study published in Science who dance in plexly grown over time, are ripe for applications last December, Fortune reported that by analyz- pairs, reading cues made by engineers. “When biomaterials are hit ing the wrens’ shared song and measuring their and coordinating by something, the microstructure forces the brain activity, he and his team discovered that movements in time cracks to take these long, convoluted pathways. the birds hear acoustic cues as they trade notes. as they tango. Because damage to these pathways doesn’t com- They actually change sequences as they cooper- promise the system involved, they retain some ate. “The wrens segregate those cues in a very toughness,” says Ramesh. discrete way in time,” Fortune says. “Pairs of Over the coming years, Johns Hopkins engi- birds can sing the duets even when they can’t neers hope to investigate how individual scales see each other.” hold up during testing. (“We’re interested in Even though they sing alone as well, their the scale itself, not the gar scales’ interlocking brains act differently—cooperatively—when they features,” Ramesh explains.) They’ll subject croon in pairs, evidence that they learn exactly how scales to repeated hits from “microscale projec- to do it. “We had expected the brains of each wren tiles,” bits of material shot at high velocity. To to respond most strongly to its own part, but sur- document how the scales react to the barrage, prisingly we found that neurons respond most the results will be recorded by a high-speed strongly when the pair is singing the duet,” says camera system. Researchers will measure the Fortune. “Each bird has a memory of the complete material’s strength, create a theory to explain duet, which a single bird cannot produce alone.”

52 | johns hopkins magazine Fortune’s work has implications not just for result of a highly developed and calibrated sys- birds but other species, including humans who tem—one that could prove useful in making dance in pairs, reading cues and coordinating robots that travel blindly into dangerous areas movements in time as they tango. “When animals during military operations and search-and-res- interact, it’s incredibly complex,” he says. cue missions. The study’s first application may not be in the Robot eyes don’t navigate well without light, animal kingdom, however. Understanding how something that cockroaches, outfitted with a spe- brains work together is important for developing cialized antenna that measures how far they are machines that can mimic behavior in “animal from surfaces, excel at. The antenna does this using time,” as opposed to the regularity of the rhythms a sense of touch that complements its extraordinary robots are usually programmed with. Fortune’s design. The insect can run 20 body lengths per sec- findings allow scientists who work with robots to ond in complete darkness without mishap, thanks imbue them with the relatively imprecise time to the 200 hairy, sensitized segments packed into that people use when dealing with one another. the antenna’s 5 centimeters. “The hairs on the Fortune and colleagues are using wren data to antenna provide a steady flow of information on develop prostheses that respond more like how far a cockroach is from the wall,” says Noah human arms would, such as by recognizing when Cowan, an associate professor of mechanical engi- and how to shake hands, and how to work in tan- neering at the Whiting School. With the help of dem. “If you shake hands with a child, they don’t about $100,000 in grant money, he has been always get what it’s about—you have to instruct researching the insect along with colleagues at them what to do. It’s the same with robotics. A Johns Hopkins and the University of California, prosthetic arm would need to have a memory of Berkeley, for the past decade. “They allow the cock- shaking a hand in order to cooperate and shake roach to gather and process very detailed informa- your hand in real human time,” Fortune explains, tion incredibly rapidly. They also serve the mechan- adding that a “noisier, messier” timing mecha- ical purpose of orienting the antenna to points nism could now be developed, based in part on where it is most useful,” he adds. his research. As with many bio-inspired studies, Cowan’s As a biologist, Fortune finds the ever-present goal isn’t to imitate nature completely. The cock- similarities between species fascinating. But roach’s unique ability to situate its antenna in a because each has its own behaviors and physical- certain way may be of interest to science but may ity, science has a chance to learn something new or may not be relevant to engineering. “When and potentially valuable from every species. “Ani- mals and humans are exactly the same and completely different at the same time,” he says. “We may share 99 percent of our genetic material with

Photogra chimps, which means that we’re almost identical, but the devil is in the details—that 1 percent rep-

p resents a large number of differences, an amaz- h by ingly complex set of issues. We evolved from the istockphoto.com same point, but the differences are telling.”

cockroaches It might seem absurd that the vaunted National Science Foundation would grant millions of dollars to researchers investigating the utility of Peri- planeta americana, the humble American cockroach. But it has, and for several years now, and there’s a very good reason why: The cockroach’s ability to instantaneously make 25 turns per second while following along a darkened wall is the

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 53 cal models of the antenna and the insect’s behavior. That data has been used to build an antenna-like sensor that feeds navigational data to the robot’s controller. Cowan hopes the design will be useful in robots that will make their way Photogra through tight spaces, such as in buildings that p have collapsed during earthquakes, to find peo- h by

ple who are trapped. istockphoto.com Research on animals keeps him focused on his robotics problems, Cowan says. “I don’t think I even know how to do basic engineering science. It’s easier for me to sink my teeth into trying to understand how an animal works. That helps me generate hypotheses. Then, I get to work in the lab. We often end up discovering things we never expected.”

sunfish The U.S. military also has an interest in using robots underwater to identify mines, perform you’re translating biology into engineering, the search and rescue, and navigate safe routes first trick is to understand,” he says. “Once you through hostile bays, oceans, and rivers. Tradition- understand the principles behind a natural sys- ally, it has relied on trained dolphins to sniff out tem, you can copy the elements that are most danger. But the highly intelligent mammals cost a relevant—not necessarily the entire system lot to train, can become overstressed, and are mor- itself.” What’s more, it is not always obvious to tal. Submersible robots called autonomous under- engineers how to copy a design because, Cowan water vehicles (AUVs) promise to be cheaper and says, “we tend to think in a more modular way. more reliable. But they have their issues as well, But animals have evolved complex, integrated including not being able to move as smoothly and systems over time. Teasing out the function of a nimbly through water as a fish (or a dolphin) does. system can be challenging because it has had to The typical engineering solution for watercraft—a work on many levels at once, such as feeding, propeller—is great for moving a vehicle forward navigation, and reproduction. We must under- fast and straight. But it’s horrible for anything else, stand how nature’s design applies to the engi- especially evasive maneuvers. neering task at hand, and strip away features that The answer? To study fish and how they glide serve no engineering purpose.” and dart through water, and then create some- To get at the cockroach’s special sensory pow- thing mechanical that is very similar to it. “When ers—what engineering finds useful about the I look at a fish, I see a creature that has evolved insect—Cowan and his crew used a laser to burn over a very long time and developed a variety of off the antenna’s hairs to see what would happen sophisticated engineering systems,” says Mittal, without them. As an example of just how sensitive whose job it is to convert military grants into the cockroaches are, Cowan says they can sense, AUVs. He gets help from biologists who under- via pressure waves, when a human walks into a stand fish. “There’s an elegance to it—maybe too room. “That’s why you rarely know when you have much elegance for our purposes.” cockroaches in your house,” he says. “They’ve Mittal, his team, and outside collaborators already been traveling one and a half meters per have been entrusted to build a robotic pectoral fin second before you’ve even turned on the light.” for a small AUV. Studying the graceful movements After gathering information on the insect’s of the pliable fins of the bluegill sunfish proved sensitivity, the team did what bio-inspired engi- valuable to his research—and counterintuitive, he neers regularly do—they developed mathemati- says. Building something sturdy, even impregna-

54 | johns hopkins magazine ble, may seem like a worthy goal for an engineer, maneuvers worthy of some of nature’s most but that doesn’t apply in this instance. “What we accomplished fliers. It makes sense, then, for learn from fish, and even from butterflies, is that engineers to learn as much as they can from but- flexible structures are, in fact, good,” says Mittal. terflies, which are easier to manage during exper- “As engineers, we’ve been trained to make things iments than birds, and to see if the results can be as strong and invulnerable as we can. In nature, applied to the development of so-called micro maybe because there’s no steel around, or maybe aerial vehicles (MAVs). because it’s smarter than we are, we see all these For the past two years, Tiras Lin, a 21-year-old flexible systems that impart great advantages over junior mechanical engineering major from San rigid structures. All of this is opposite to how engi- Rafael, California, has investigated the motion of neers have been taught to think.” butterfly wings. The study was suggested to Lin by As with Cowan’s work, engineers have found Mittal, his adviser on the project. Lin concen- an easier way to achieve the same effects as trated on the painted lady butterfly, a globally nature. The fin of a bluegill sunfish has 14 finger- ubiquitous species that flaps its wings 25 times like rays that help it move smoothly and quickly per second. Central to his study was Mittal’s sug- through the drink. But Mittal found, with the gestion that engineers have too often underesti- usual aid of advanced math and computer mod- mated the role a concept called “moment of iner- eling, that he needed fewer fins to make the sub- tia” plays during flight, especially when the insect mersible robot travel in ways similar to it. “Our is maneuvering. computer models showed us that only five of the To describe the phenomenon, Lin draws a rays are needed to produce thrust and efficiency comparison to an ice skater performing a spin. similar to the fish fin,” he says. “The other rays “Just as the skater redistributes his mass by aren’t there to increase thrust but for other pur- drawing his arms inward or outward to rotate “When I look at poses, such as defense.” faster or slower, butterflies modify their moment a fish, I see a Mittal, who has also conducted research on of inertia by reconfiguring their wings in flight,” creature that has the systems of various insects, tends to see bio- he says. Using pictures taken by three high- evolved over a inspired solutions wherever he looks. Recently, speed cameras of painted ladies inside an aquar- while watching a BBC television program, he ium tank (at a rate up to 3,000 images per sec- very long time noticed that bubbles come off the bodies of pen- ond), Lin discovered that flapping wings have a and developed a guins as they shoot out of the water. “Those bub- significant effect on the insect’s moment of variety of bles could have some huge implications for drag inertia—even though the wings themselves sophisticated reduction,” he says excitedly, adding that he and make up only about 10 percent of the insect’s engineering another professor hope to study the birds. “Is the total mass. In other words, a low-weight part of systems. There’s down of penguins covered with air, which would the butterfly’s body can have a disproportion- an elegance to help them move faster through the water? It’s an ately large effect on how it keeps itself aloft and it—maybe too amazing opportunity to learn whether that’s true hyper-maneuverable. much elegance and what it might mean.” Understanding the role of the moment of inertia more clearly has major implications for for our purposes.” butterflies designers of flying robots, Mittal says. “It’s Rajat Mittal Whiting School researchers don’t limit their always been an idea that was swept under the designing skills to robots that roam the land and rug. Butterflies turn 90 degrees with two wing sea. Aided in part by more military grants, they flaps, which is incredible. Imagine an aircraft also investigate ways to fill the air with flying that could do that.” As always, he’s enthusiastic machines that can perform reconnaissance, res- about other avenues for study. “Flies get swat- cue, and other military operations, particularly in ted, yet can gather themselves and fly away, and dense, urban neighborhoods. In order to fly we see wind gusts that blow flying insects under the radar of various surveillance systems, around all the time, yet their flight is so robust the flying machines need to be small, very mobile, in the face of all these perturbations. How do and easily directed by human controllers. The they do it?” bug-sized robots also need to perform aerial Michael Anft is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 55 TEXT |

Leading the Way: A History of Darger’s Resources Johns Hopkins Medicine Michael Moon Neil Grauer

1940 to 1988. It’s more than a mere transitional anecdote, though, because author Neil A. Grauer, A&S ’69, under- stands that the story of Johns Hopkins Medicine is a combination of its own timeline and its social reputation. The book’s publication coincides with the opening of the $1.1 billion Sheikh Zayed Tower and the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center, the latest upgrades to Johns Hopkins Hospital’s East Baltimore footprint, and on the heels of the hospital’s 21st consecutive year atop the U.S. News & World Report’s best hospitals list. Johns Hopkins Medicine is well aware of its prominence, and Grauer is savvy enough to recognize that this expecta- tion of excellence is forged by the HISTORY personalities who have learned, HUMANITIES worked, succeeded, and tried, failed, Hospital Props and tried again at the hospital over the Fetishist or Before Elliott Coleman founded the past 123 years. Fantasist? Writing Seminars in 1947, a Johns Grauer, assistant director of When a Chicago janitor named Henry Hopkins–set novel had already cracked editorial services in the Johns Hopkins Darger died in 1973, he left behind a the best-seller list. Augusta Tucker Medicine Office of Marketing and mammoth, extravagantly illustrated Townsend’s Miss Susie Slagle’s spent Communications, has a sharp eye for text about enslaved children, particu- half of 1939 as a best-seller and was the illuminating story, and it’s the little larly girls, rebelling against their adult eventually turned into a movie starring details that make Leading the Way a overlords. Darger has long been Veronica Lake. Lillian Gish played the refreshingly engaging read. Whether regarded as a touchstone American titular Susie Slagle, who runs a board- it’s Victor McKusick, Med ’46, leaving outsider artist; in Darger’s Resources ing house where men stay while attend- cardiology in the 1950s to foolishly— (Duke University Press, 2012), Michael ing medical school at Johns Hopkins. according to colleagues—pursue an Moon, A&S ’89 (PhD), convincingly The book’s runaway success persuaded unimportant subject called genetics, or places the writer’s vivid, imaginary students to apply to the university, how the hospital learns from and worlds alongside those of other such prompting longtime Baltimore Sun responds to the tragic 2001 deaths of fantasists as L. Frank Baum and H.P. book columnist James Bready to deem pediatric patient Josie King and Lovecraft. In the process, Moon it “the best possible propaganda for asthma study volunteer Ellen Roche, upends conventional suspicions about this institution.” Grauer allows individual stories to add lifelong loner Darger that critics, when That quote comes from Leading the up to a bigger picture of just what sets considering the scenes of violence and Way: A History of Johns Hopkins Medi- Johns Hopkins Medicine apart from its at times oddly sexualized girls he cine (Johns Hopkins University Press, peers. Bret McCabe depicts, have read into his art. BM 2012), introducing the chapter covering the East Baltimore campus from

56 | johns hopkins magazine Empowerment on an Unstable Planet Daniel C. Taylor, Carl E. Taylor, and Jesse O. Taylor www.andyo.org Sponsored by: WETANKNYSTORE.COM

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ECOLOGY Learning to Adapt The late global health pioneer Carl E. — Taylor was the founding chair of the Broadmead Resident 76 years young Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, working on improving health care for people in more than 70 countries. His son, Daniel C. Taylor, A&S ’67, was knighted for his conservation work in Nepal. His son, Jesse O. Taylor, has examined the language and literary traditions of ecological activism. And all their various expertise informs EQUAL HOUSING Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: OPPORTUNITY From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale Larry has a passion for art and a passion for life. That’s why he chose Broadmead. of Global Change (Oxford University Press, 2012), a disarmingly potent Creative, intelligent, stimulating alternative paradigm for community- people like you. based cultural development, one rooted in human social adaptability more than economic investment, and inspired by generations of fieldwork in India, Nepal, and Afghanistan. BM 13801 York Rd. Cockeysville, MD 21030 | TTY/Voice: Maryland Relay Service 1.800.201.7165

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 57 WHO IS |

...Sheri Lewis

Travel schedule: In the last 24 months, Why is this sort of public health work she has traveled to Cambodia, Peru, being done at APL? Nicaragua, the Philippines, Singapore, APL has had a program known as Thailand, and Ecuador. ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Favorite TV show: House Hunters Hollis Interviews Community-based Epidemics) since International the late 1990s. SAGES leverages the Sheri Lewis success of the existing system and adds Your project at the Applied Physics Global Disease Surveillance components for analysis and visualiza- Laboratory is called SAGES. What program manager tion, communication, and modeling/ exactly is that?

simulation/evaluation. We’re working illustration by The Suite for Automated Global with the Global Emerging Infections Electronic bioSurveillance is an Surveillance and Response System, assortment of software tools that which is part of the Armed Forces ger A facilitate rapid collection and analysis Health Surveillance Center. nje

of health data. We use tools we J a develop and, when available, existing So all of your travel has to do with this

platforms to monitor the outbreak, global disease surveillance work? PH spread, and containment of emerging Yes. But we are not conducting OTO G infectious diseases. Electronic surveillance of other countries—we are RA PH by Ed W PH by disease surveillance (EDS) is relatively helping them learn to do that on new, even in the U.S. As recently as their own. Much of the work we do h 12 years ago data was not collected is teaching countries who ask for itman, electronically, but with pen and paper. help from the United States how to AP

The goal with EDS is to identify disease collect their own data. The term L outbreaks as early as possible, around surveillance is not as frightening a the world. word in countries that don’t have the same sense of personal privacy as here. What is new about the project? But at the same time, in countries with The benefit of our project is that we high HIV and AIDS numbers, privacy can help identify a local outbreak remains a priority. We focus on immediately. Many epidemics are collection of data and analytics to expected. Dengue fever is very predict—and contain—the spread of commonplace—countries know emerging disease. they’re going to have an outbreak every Hollis Robbins, A&S ’83, is chair of the year. We can train individuals to use I’m assuming they interpret data as Humanities Department at the Peabody their cell phones to collect data if well as collect it . . . Institute; she teaches courses in someone is seeing cases in an isolated Local governments interpret the literature, drama, film, and aesthetics. village, for example. Governments can data once they collect it. Interpretation She has a joint appointment in the set up a voice-response phone tree to has to be done carefully, though; for Center for Africana Studies at Home- enter data about the age, gender, and example, Twitter has to be monitored wood, where she teaches African- American poetry and civil rights. number of cases. We use text-messag- very carefully and specifically to ensure ing systems, too, in countries where that you get good data. In our own research is easier or less costly. on social media, for example, a

58 | johns hopkins magazine the index case for a deadly outbreak, and how the epi investigators work as disease detectives.

Are there countries that you won’t work with or that won’t work with you? We only deal with countries that ask for our assistance. We aren’t everywhere. We aren’t in the Middle East, for example. And we’re not in Europe. We’re mostly in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa. We don’t go to places that are too dangerous, though we’re working with the World Health Organization in the refugee camps in Somalia.

What’s the No. 1 thing people can do to keep from getting sick? Wash your hands with soap and water and stay home if you’re sick.

Traveling so much, do you ever get sick? Never! So far, I’ve never even gotten sick from eating local food. I love authentic cooking, which is strange because I was such a picky eater growing up. I love Peruvian dishes, Thai food, Cambodian and Vietnamese food . . . researcher who was reviewing tweets too—any novel respiratory pathogen What is your least favorite food? for the word fever was inundated with that could be on one side of the globe Lamb chops. the Twitter data for Bieber fever. today and on our doorstep tomorrow.

Ha! So what are you most Ah, like that film Contagion that came Sheri Lewis is the Global Disease frightened of? out last year. Did you see it? Surveillance program manager My biggest worry is influenza. It’s very I did! I watched all the way to the credits in the Applied Physics Laboratory’s Homeland Protection Business Area, easy to transmit. Every year there’s and saw that they had some of the best where she works with a team of genetic drift and the virus can change. people in the field as technical advisers. analysts, epidemiologists, physicians, H1N1 was scary—we were not nearly as It was good from an epidemiological and computer scientists who are prepared as we could have been. perspective—the film showed well how leaders in the field of electronic Diseases like SARS are a concern, the Gwyneth Paltrow character became disease surveillance.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 59 CAMPUS

One Opera, One Pulitzer We have it on good authority that when you win the Nobel Prize, you receive an early morning call from the Nobel committee. If you are awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, similar thing— you get a call from the MacArthur PHOTOGRAPH by people. But composer Kevin Puts did not learn he had won a 2012 Pulitzer

Prize until an Associated Press reporter M ichal Daniel called him in midafternoon, seeking comment on his new accolade. Puts recalls, “There was cheering in the background because the AP had won one, too.” The composer, who is also a Peabody Conservatory faculty member in the Composition Department, won for his first opera, Silent Night, which is set at the Western front of the First World War. The libretto, by Mark Campbell, is adapted from the screenplay of the 2005 film Joyeux Noel, directed by Christian Carion and based Composer and Peabody faculty member Kevin Puts won a Pulitzer Prize for his opera, Silent Night, which on an actual spontaneous 1914 premiered last year at the Minnesota Opera. Here, Lt. Audebert (Liam Bonner) and Lt. Gordon (Gabriel Christmas Eve cease-fire that occurred Preisser) lay down their arms in a Christmas Eve cease-fire. in the trenches when Scottish, Ger- man, and French soldiers decided to French, and German. The last two we finally couldn’t have them on the stop shooting at each other in obser- caused the most difficulty. He says, “I stage. We had one of the actors vance of the holiday. The work was had to say the German over and over miming the pipes and the actual commissioned by the Minnesota Opera again in my head before I felt comfort- bagpipe players were as far back in 2009 and premiered last November. able coming up with music to attach to offstage as we could put them.” Prior to Silent Night, Puts had the words. Rhythmically, German is Puts is still adjusting to his new composed four symphonies and pretty easy because it’s like English, it good fortune. He says, “I wake up in several concertos and chamber pieces, has clear stresses and weak beats and the morning and it’s just a jolt. It’s a but he had little experience composing strong beats. But French is very good thing, but it’s also a scary, for voice. This made for some chal- difficult because they almost don’t stressful thing.” He has heeded advice lenges. “I was sort of vague about stress syllables at all when they speak.” given to him by another Pulitzer where one voice type ends and another There was another tricky element. winner, composer Jennifer Higdon, begins, as far as range,” he says. “On a Central to the story were Scottish who told him to get right back to work. bassoon, for example, you know what troops playing Christmas music on “When I compose, that’s a world that the lowest note is, and you know the bagpipes. Puts had never written for makes complete sense, and I have quality of the upper register, too. But them. The instrument plays in only one control,” he says. “It’s where I feel with voice, every voice is different.” key, B-flat, so Puts had that imposed on most comfortable, dealing with notes Plus he had to write vocal parts in five him. He adds, “The other difficult and sounds and telling a story.” languages: English, Italian, Latin, thing is they are so incredibly loud that Dale Keiger

60 | johns hopkins magazine Inspiring Portraits By the time James West retired from about it like that. So we shared that with Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Lucent Technologies in 2001 at the age the president, and he said we could do Peabody Institute. of 70, his research had won a parcel of something about it.” Johns Hopkins is an institution that awards and a spot in the National In 2003, Morris put together an is proud of its history, but that history Inventors Hall of Fame. Most notably, undergraduate independent study can be diffuse; people can work hard at he co-invented the foil electret micro- project that produced an online the same place without knowing what’s

PHOTOGRAPH by phone, which now serves as the model exhibition titled The History of African going on across the hall. “When I first for microphones found in mobile and Americans @ Johns Hopkins University. It came here there were not very many standard telephones, hearing aids, and included a timeline of black history at blacks—as a matter of fact, the only video cameras. In 2002, he joined the Johns Hopkins and profiles of signifi- black people I saw were people who M ichal Daniel faculty of Johns Hopkins University as cant figures, such as Kelly Miller, the cleaned and served food,” Savage says. a research professor in the Whiting first black student to enroll in 1887. “It was an eye-opener. I’d walk through School of Engineering and was named Indispensable builds on that work, not this campus and never see anybody who the school’s first chair of the Divisional only noting the 1969 establishment of looked like me, but they were here.” Diversity Council. the Black Student Union by Bruce Baker, The ultimate goal is for black West is one of the 37 accomplished A&S ’71, SAIS ’74; John Guess, A&S ’71, achievement to become a more individuals included in The Indispens- SAIS Bol ’76 (Dipl); and Douglas Miles, permanent part of the university’s able Role of Blacks at Johns Hopkins A&S ’70, but also recognizing, among visual history. “We are hoping to see exhibition (with accompanying website others, author Wes Moore, A&S ’01, pictures on the walls,” Savage says. and booklet) that is traveling around epidemiologist Lisa Cooper, and “When students walk through Mason the university’s Baltimore campuses. Emmanuel Chambers, a waiter at the Hall, we want them to see somebody Co-sponsored by university President Baltimore and Maryland clubs who who looks like James West or Ben Ron Daniels, External Affairs and Devel- invested his tips to create a foundation Carson on the walls. Give them opment, and the Black Faculty and Staff that benefited institutions including something to aspire to.” Bret McCabe Association (BFSA), Indispensable takes a deep, institution-wide look at black experiences at the university. The exhibition was inspired in part by a lack of visual acknowledgment of that experience. While touring campus, prospective students and their parents see plenty of portraits of esteemed white alumni and faculty. “One of the parents was with her daughter, who was black, and asked, ‘Where are the blacks? You don’t have pictures of black people on the wall,’” says Deborah Savage, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’ IT manager for student technology services. A BFSA member, she served on the Indispens- able committee alongside Sharon Morris, a library services manager in the Sheridan Libraries, and Lisette Johnson-Hill, a senior research associate at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We never really thought The Indispensable Role of Blacks at Johns Hopkins, a traveling exhibition and accompanying website, takes an institution-wide look at black experiences at the university.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 61 CAMPUS |

New Dean for SAIS Opening Day Vali R. Nasr Johns Hopkins Hospital’s new patient towers r lef i ght t : PHOTOGRAPH by : PHOTOGRAPH : by K

aveh K eith Weller / jhmi S ar d ari

New Dean for SAIS Opening Day In March, the Nitze School of Advanced authored several books, including May 1 marked the beginning of a new International Studies announced that Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New era for Johns Hopkins Hospital when Vali R. Nasr had been selected as the Muslim Middle Class and What It Will it opened the doors to its new $1.1 eighth dean of the international affairs Mean for Our World (Free Press, 2009) . billion, 1.6 million-square-foot school in Washington, D.C. Most Nasr succeeds Jessica P. Einhorn, building. The facility features two recently a senior fellow at the Brook- who is retiring after a decade as dean. 12-story patient towers, 560 private ings Institution and a professor at He will assume his new post on July 1. patient rooms, 33 state-of-the-art Tufts University in Boston, Nasr is a Announcing the appointment, univer- operating rooms, and new adult and highly regarded scholar, foreign policy sity President Ron Daniels said, “I have pediatric emergency departments, as adviser, and commentator on interna- been as impressed with Vali’s warmth well as healing gardens, light-filled tional relations, especially in regard to and humility as with his intellect, lobbies and rooms, and an impressive the Middle East. From 2009 to 2011, he vision, and accomplishments. He has collection of 500 works of art. served as an adviser to the late Richard an excellent understanding of the The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Holbrooke when Holbrooke was challenges facing graduate schools of Children’s Center houses pediatrics, President Obama’s special representa- international studies, including SAIS, including neonatal and pediatric tive for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His and an appreciation for the opportuni- intensive care units, and has many most recent academic position has ties ahead.” amenities to make patients and their been associate director of the Fares In a statement released after the families more comfortable. The Sheikh Center for Eastern Mediterranean announcement of his appointment, Zayed Tower is home to the Johns Studies at Tufts. Nasr said, “The nature and focus of Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute, Born in Tehran, Iran, the 51-year-old education in international affairs are neurological and neurosurgical Nasr received a doctorate in political changing, as global challenges require services, trauma care, orthopedics, science in 1991 from the Massachusetts innovative approaches, greater general surgery, labor and delivery, and Institute of Technology. A prolific attention to technology, and address- a rooftop helistop for patients arriving writer, he is a columnist for Bloomberg ing new demands in the job market. by helicopter. Catherine Pierre View and has contributed to the New SAIS has a very important leadership York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign role to play in shaping the future of Affairs, and Foreign Policy. He has also education in international affairs.” DK

62 | johns hopkins magazine Burn App Outta Here Stephen Milner and Harry Goldberg Commencement Day lef r i ght t : PHOTOGRAPH by : PHOTOGRAPH : by K eith Weller H ome w oo d photo.jhu.e d u

Burn App Outta Here In treating burn victims, the first eight By the time you receive this magazine, long and successful career. He took hours are critical—every minute Johns Hopkins University will have over as CEO in 2002 and, over the past counts. After a medical mission to graduated the class of 2012 in its decade, has built a legacy that includes Kenya following two catastrophic fires annual universitywide commencement growing the company to over 433,000 in early 2009, Stephen Milner, director ceremony on Homewood Field. At employees worldwide, increasing of the Johns Hopkins Burn Center, set press time, there were 7,529 degrees, revenue to nearly $107 billion, and out to find a quick and effective way to diplomas, and certificates to be investing heavily in R&D. Palmisano teach people how to stabilize patients awarded on Commencement Day, with stepped down as CEO in January but in those first crucial hours after a burn. 1,664 bachelor’s degrees going to continues to serve as chairman of The result is the Burn Medical Educa- graduating seniors. Of the university’s IBM’s board. “Sam is a daring and tion app, or BurnMed, which Milner nine schools, the Krieger School of Arts visionary leader, whose dedication to created in collaboration with Harry and Sciences and the Whiting School discovery and refusal to accept the Goldberg, director of academic of Engineering are typically respon- status quo guided one of the great computing at the School of Medicine. sible for the largest number of gradu- transformations in business history,” The mobile app uses video, text, and ates, with an estimated 2,240 and 1,412 university President Ron Daniels said. 3-D images to explain proper care. degrees and certificates, respectively, Other speakers lined up for the “This app is designed so the user can awarded this year. week’s graduation events at individual understand the underlying procedures Samuel J. Palmisano, A&S ’73, schools included Jeffrey R. Immelt, used to treat a burn victim within a few chairman of the board at IBM and a chairman and CEO of General Electric, minutes,” Goldberg says. former Johns Hopkins University at the Carey Business School’s gradua- The free app, among others being trustee, was scheduled to be the tion ceremony; neurosurgeon and developed at Johns Hopkins Medicine, featured speaker at the May 24 event, CNN chief medical correspondent is part of the Johns Hopkins Global during which the university also Sanjay Gupta at the School of Medi- mHealth Initiative, which uses planned to award him an honorary cine’s convocation; and Treasury mobile technology to improve global doctorate of humane letters. After Secretary Timothy Geithner, SAIS ’85, health in areas of the world with earning his bachelor’s at Johns at the Nitze School of Advanced limited resources. Kristen Intlekofer Hopkins in 1973, Palmisano was hired International Studies’ graduation as a salesman at IBM, where he began a event in Washington, D.C. KI

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 63 CAMPUS |

Love, Sex, Good TV Intersexions, a steamy South African for Communication Programs (CCP), blamed for the terrible things you do to television drama, was recently awarded Intersexions explores through 26 each other.” a George Foster Peabody Award, which interlinked episodes how HIV moves The series is one aspect of JHHESA’s acknowledges outstanding interna- through society: A popular deejay nearly decade-long HIV prevention tional achievement in broadcast admits he is HIV-positive over the radio work in South Africa, which is funded by media. The program was recognized and scares a bride-to-be, his former the U.S. Agency for International alongside CNN’s and Al-Jazeera lover. A traveling husband cheats on Development and, more recently, the English’s coverage of the Arab Spring his wife and possibly exposes her. A United States President’s Emergency and Arab awakening uprisings, HBO’s trusted teacher preys on students. In Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). It’s one Treme, and Showtime’s Homeland the final episode, HIV gets personified of many entertainment-education drama series. and provides a voice-over narration to efforts, including a previous TV show Co-produced by Johns Hopkins the entire series, showing how the virus called Tsha Tsha, which, like Health and Education in South Africa spreads regardless of class, race, or Intersexions, was created in partnership (JHHESA), an affiliate of the Bloom- education. “Nature has given me a job with South African Broadcasting berg School of Public Health’s Center to do,” HIV says, “and I cannot be Corporation Education and Curious Pictures. Tsha Tsha focused on condom use and basic risk factors, but as the epidemic matured the messaging needed to evolve with it, says CCP director Susan Krenn. “There was a big push in many African countries, South Africa included, to look at multiple and concurrent partnerships and their impact on driving the epidemic. So the team came up with the idea of this intertwined series, with each episode being its own story and the link between P the stories being the sexual network hotograph that ties them all together.”

The show was immensely popular c o u

in South Africa, and earlier this year rt won 11 of the 12 categories it was esy C nominated for at the South African urious Film and Television Awards, including P best drama, actor, actress, director, ictures and writing. That popularity helps get the message across. “As we look at our research, we find that people talking about things is one of the predictors of actually practicing a behavior or having a positive attitude toward practicing a behavior,” Krenn says. “Entertainment education enables you to get a consis- tent message out to millions and millions of people in a way that a poster simply won’t do.” BM Award-winning South African TV drama Intersexions aims to get viewers talking about HIV transmission. The series is co-produced by the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs.

64 | johns hopkins magazine HIGH-QUALITY JOURNALISM IS COSTLY. YOUR GENEROSITY KEEPS IT POSSIBLE.

Johns Hopkins Magazine relies on reader support for a significant portion of our production costs. If staying informed about big ideas, fascinating people, and world-changing research is important to you, please consider making a gift. Questions or comments, please contact the editor, Catherine Pierre, at 443-287-9900 or [email protected]. Many thanks, and happy reading!

Visit us online at magazine.jhu.edu/giving. Or send a check to Johns Hopkins Magazine Gifts, P.O. Box 64759, Baltimore, MD 21264-4759.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 65 CAMPUS |

Abbreviated family, thanks in part to transplant WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING surgeon and associate professor Catherine Pierre Mounya Elhilali and Mark Foster, both Andrew M. Cameron. He and Facebook assistant professors in the Department COO Sheryl Sandberg came up with For the 32nd year, Johns Hopkins of Electrical and Computer Engineer- the idea at their Harvard class reunion University topped the National Science ing, were among 26 scholars nation- as a way to use social media to spark Foundation’s list for academic R&D wide selected by the Office of Naval dialogue and, they hope, encourage spending, performing $2 billion worth Research’s Young Investigator Pro- others to become donors. Carol Greider, of medical, science, and engineering gram to share $13.7 million in research Nobel laureate and director of research in fiscal year 2010. Of that, funding. Elhilali’s research looks into molecular biology and genetics in the $1.73 billion came from federal how our brains recognize sounds. Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic sources, including NSF, NASA, the Foster’s work focuses on developing Biomedical Sciences, was appointed to National Institutes of Health, and the photonic techniques for manipulating the President’s Committee on the Department of Defense. NIH has signals on the fastest of time scales. National Medal of Science. awarded the university $15 million over The Hopkins Baja Team placed ninth at five years to establish the Center for 2012 Baja SAE Auburn, an intercolle- AIDS Research. CFAR will support more giate design competition put on by the SCHOOL OF NURSING than 180 HIV investigators from Public Society of Automotive Engineers that The school is ranked No. 4 among Health, Medicine, Nursing, has student teams design, build, and nursing schools for total funding and other schools, a major priority race cars. This year’s event was hosted received from the National Institutes being to address Baltimore’s by Auburn University in Alabama and of Health. Professor Pamela R. Jeffries, HIV epidemic. In spring, as part of its included 102 teams. associate dean for academic affairs, Implementation Plan for Advancing was named a member of the Sustainability and Climate Institute of Medicine’s Global Stewardship, the university installed CAREY BUSINESS SCHOOL Forum on Innovation in Health more than 2,900 solar panels on The school announced in May that Professional Education. seven buildings on the Homewood it is reorganizing its degree programs to and East Baltimore campuses. The focus on the study of business panels should reduce the university’s issues related to health care and the PEABODY INSTITUTE output of greenhouse gases by 1.2 life sciences. Terry Dunkin, a David Smooke, chair of the Music Theory million pounds each year. member of Carey’s Real Estate Department, has been composing Advisory Board, was elected president works for toy pianos, including of the International Real Estate Nutshell Miniatures of Unexplained KRIEGER SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Federation World Council of Experts. Death, which he premiered in May at Film and Media Studies lecturer the Atlas Theater in Washington, D.C. Matthew Porterfield’s current project Voice major and master of music hit No. 27 on ioncinema.com’s SCHOOL OF EDUCATION candidate Sonya Knussen recently “Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of Assistant dean Mariale Hardiman has opened Mount Vernon Music Space, a 2012.” I Used to Be Darker—the title published The Brain-Targeted Teaching storefront performance and teaching of which was being tattooed on the Model for 21st-Century Schools space for emerging and established auteur’s arm during the film’s (Corwin Press, 2012), which offers professional musicians. Kickstarter pitch—follows Porterfield’s teachers practical ways to critically acclaimed sophomore effort, apply research to the teaching and Putty Hill. Jon Faust, an economics learning process. BLOOMBERG SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH professor and the director of In May, the school presented Emmy the Center for Financial Economics Award–winning actor Sam Waterston at Johns Hopkins, was named SCHOOL OF MEDICINE its Goodermote Humanitarian Award for special adviser to the Federal Facebook users can now share their his longtime support of refugees Reserve Board. organ donor status with friends and around the world. The school was one

66 | johns hopkins magazine of five partner organizations to receive part of $220 million from ™ Word Changes New York City Mayor Michael GOLOMB’S GAMBITS Solomon Golomb, A&S ’51 Bloomberg, Engr ’64, in support of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. The new funds will support Here are six words in each of eight groups. ings. See how many of these transformations tobacco-control efforts in low- and The words in each group can undergo a sys- you can discover. (Changes may involve re- middle-income countries. tematic change, unique to that group, that arranging and/or adding letters.) turns them into new words with new mean-

NITZE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5 Group 6 Group 7 Group 8 In April, SAIS celebrated the 25th Deliver Barker Earth Astern Bull Bet Broth Be anniversary of the Hopkins-Nanjing Emit Brad Easel Late Cigar Greed Mist Lout Center. Founded in 1986 in Nanjing, Lived Carve Leaf Mission Corn Isle Moth Lover China, the center is a postgraduate Parts Clam Reef Motion Intern Spire Numb Plunder joint venture between Johns Hopkins Repel Diary Ring Quality Skill Venue Should Trash and Nanjing universities, bringing American, Chinese, and international Warts Warp Trips Rode Toil Verse Wand Weight students together to live and study. Solutions on page 78 In May, SAIS received one of the largest gifts in its history, a residential property worth $5.9 million, from an anonymous donor. Proceeds from the sale of the property will establish the Betty Lou Hummel Endowed Fund, which will give a permanent base of support to the school’s Foreign Policy Institute.

APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY The Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated its 70th anniversary in March. APL scientists secretly came together in 1942 during the Second World War to develop the proximity fuze for the Allies. Seven decades later, a highly visible APL is working on more than 600 projects in the fields of air defense, undersea warfare, space systems, homeland protection, cyber operations, and others. The May issue of Popular Mechanics featured the APL-developed Modular Prosthetic Limb on its cover. The MPL is a neurally controlled artificial limb that has almost the same number of degrees of freedom as the human arm.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 67 ALUMNI | Giving

Making Waves to Fight CAncer

Written by | Leslie F. Miller PHOTOGRAPH by

During times of stress, Ted Smith, atic cancer is often deadly. Fortunately, A&S ’87, goes swimming. Smith was Jake’s doctors at Johns Hopkins caught

the assistant swim coach at Johns the tumor early, and he immediately M Hopkins for four years, and, before underwent surgery and had it success- arshall clarke Welcome that, he coached swimmers at the fully removed. Johns Hopkins alumni are University of Tennessee and Mercers- Following his son’s recovery, not content to sit on the burg Academy, among them four as Smith watched his wife endure sidelines. They’re doers. Olympic gold medalists. Although he chemotherapy, he became immersed Like Ted Smith, A&S ’87 (at never competed himself, he often in some of the issues surrounding right). After his son was swims for exercise at Meadowbrook cancer research—genetic testing and diagnosed with a rare form Aquatic and Fitness Center in northern tumor mapping, genetic flaws and of cancer, he set out to Baltimore. That’s exactly what he was drugs that respond to them. “I read raise $100,000 to help doing on May 14, 2010, when he got the about 800 pages on this stuff,” says others with the disease. devastating news that his wife, Julie, Smith. After hearing about gene had stage 3 ovarian cancer. studies going on at Johns Hopkins, And Cindy Parker, SPH ’00, Julie Smith had gone to Greater he learned that some cancers can be who was arrested while Baltimore Medical Center that morn- traced to a gene mutation, and map- protesting the Keystone XL ing for a preventive hysterectomy. She ping the mutation could lead to a cure pipeline in front of the had a family history of breast cancer, for other patients down the line. But, White House last year and both she and her sister, Kathleen Smith says, “Jake’s [form of cancer] (p. 76). And longtime Drake, had tested positive for BRCA1, is so rare, it was way down the list.” friends Jerry Schnydman, the genetic marker for hereditary Moved to help others with the disease, A&S ’67, and Stan Fine, breast and ovarian cancer. The sisters he asked how much it would cost to A&S ’65, who, in the had both gone in for the two-and-a- map Jake’s tumor: $100,000. Smith early 1970s, started a half-hour procedure that day. After decided to raise the money himself. tradition that continues spending the morning pacing in the That’s when he sat down with John to this day—an annual waiting room, Ted says, “I figured I’d Dierkes, A&S ’77. They had met years Homecoming reunion for go to Meadowbrook and swim, and I’d ago through their work at investment their fraternity brothers come back. No problem. I left the bank Alex. Brown & Sons and had (p. 74). Enjoy these stories, phone number of the pool, and I told recently become reacquainted through and more, in the pages [Meadowbrook] that my wife was in Johns Hopkins alumni swimming events. Knowing that Dierkes had that follow. surgery. I’m pulling up my pants in the locker room, and the surgeon is on the broad contacts in the cancer fundrais- phone. She has cancer.” ing community, Smith hoped to The news hit the parents of two identify potential donors and match especially hard. Their eldest, Jake, had them to his cause. been diagnosed with a rare form of It was through Dierkes that Smith pancreatic cancer just six months became involved in Swim Across earlier. Twelve-year-old Jake was the America, a national organization youngest person ever to have the donating to cancer research centers in disease. Because the vast majority of major cities. Dierkes, a melanoma cases are diagnosed too late, pancre- survivor and a former competitive

68 | johns hopkins magazine “Immediate funding to map a tumor like Jake’s wasn’t available,” says Ted Smith. “I wanted to speed up that process.” Above: Jake (15), Kathleen (12), Ted, and Julie Smith enjoy a warm spring day at Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center. swimmer (he was All-American captain In 2011, Swim Across America Jake, now 15, is already talking of the Blue Jays and led them to their Baltimore raised more than $500,000. about getting a team together to first NCAA championship in 1977), Smith raised $80,000 of that total. participate in this year’s swim, had been participating in Swim Across Within six weeks, the Swim Across and Smith says they plan to be America events for several years. In America lab at Kimmel had mapped there as a family. Smith’s wife and 2010, Dierkes brought Swim Across Jake’s tumor. “Full disclosure,” says their daughter, Kathleen, would have America to Baltimore, reaching out to Smith. “[Jake] did the swim. I did not.” been at last year’s event to cheer Baltimore native Michael Phelps, Originally planned as a one- or three- Jake on, but they were raising money Meadowbrook (the facility where mile swim near Gibson Island on the themselves at an ovarian cancer Phelps and several other Olympic Chesapeake Bay, the open-water swim walk in Annapolis, Maryland, which swimmers have trained), and most of had to be moved to Meadowbrook fell on the same day. Even though the Johns Hopkins swim team, who because of damage from Hurricane Jake and Julie are both recovered participated in the swim. That year, Irene. But so many people showed up from their illnesses, the Smiths the Baltimore event raised over to the pool, Smith says, he decided to are a family dedicated to finding a $465,000 for the Sidney Kimmel sit out and give others a chance to cure so that others can live. “I do Comprehensive Cancer Center at participate. Jake, who is not a swimmer have a fairly nice Rolodex of people Johns Hopkins, making it the most (he plays lacrosse), was a little daunted to call,” Smith says. “I am extraordi- successful inaugural event in the by the distance, but he completed the narily touched by what people organization’s 25-year history. one-mile swim. would do.”

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 69 ALUMNI | Colleagues

The Read on Culture

Interview by | Jennifer Walker

For Manuel Colás-Gil, A&S ’09 (PhD), paintings, architecture, sculptures, the possibility of working with profes- and urban history, including how the sor Richard Kagan, who has taught cities developed. early modern European history since R Right. We have history, we have

1972, was a bonus in his decision PHOTOGRAPH architectural history, we have religious to pursue his doctorate in Romance history and literature. These are languages at Johns Hopkins. Although different windows into that time. We Y

Colás-Gil gravitates toward literature by W have some great works of literature like

and Kagan is a historian, the two ILL Don Quixote. And then we have docu-

are fascinated by the same period: KIRK ments that are stored in archives and /

the Spanish Golden Age from the home libraries around Spain and other parts late 15th century to the mid-17th of the world. But they just provide us w century, when literature and the arts oodpho with glimpses. One of the tasks of the flourished across the country. By the historian, or the literary historian, is to to.jhu.edu time he graduated, Colás-Gil, who reconstruct this world, to get a better focused on 16th- and 17th-century sense of it, and to see how its people use Spanish literature, had completed history to define their own sense of self. several of Kagan’s Spanish history seminars on subjects ranging from M We are actually covering a period of religion and the Inquisition to architec- Spanish history in which, even though ture and cities. In January 2011, Kagan most of the population couldn’t read, and Colás-Gil co-taught a seminar on Spaniards were obsessed with the Spanish history and culture as part of a written word. . . . Not only literature, three-week study abroad intersession but other kinds of work and dis- Richard Kagan is a professor in the Department in Madrid. On a recent trip to Balti- courses. Still, there was a lot of fiction, of History and has a joint appointment in the more, Colás-Gil, now resident director and there was also a huge debate Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures in the Krieger School of Arts and of Johns Hopkins’ study abroad about the legitimacy of fiction. I just Sciences. He specializes in early modern program in Madrid, visited Kagan study how history is represented in European history, with an emphasis on Spain in his book-strewn office, where the prose. This is fiction. It’s false. It never and the Iberian expansion. two talked about the role literature existed. It never happened. But it’s plays in uncovering a culture’s past. very interesting how the culture of early modern Spain affected how the Richard The Golden Age of Spain and authors of that time represented the its society are what I find interesting. society in literature. The law, the history, the fiction and literature—they are all subsets. They’re R For example, isn’t there a book that a way to learn more about this particu- is a false second version of Don Quixote lar time and place and its culture. called Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Manuel Spain is well-known for parties Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda? and running the bulls, and sangria. But if you talk about all the early modern M Yes, it was published in 1614. But at history, you really have to talk about that time, there wasn’t copyright.

70 | johns hopkins magazine The Read on Culture

Interview by | Jennifer Walker

When a work of fiction became R From a historian’s point of view, extremely successful, other authors this is another way to understand just wrote a continuation or a second what a culture thinks about itself. part. Miguel de Cervantes published Spain is one of these early modern his Don Quixote in two books in 1605 medieval societies in which religion and 1615. In the second book, Cer- occupied the entire social sphere. vantes condemns the false continua- People defined themselves in religious tion and kills his hero. Don Quixote terms, which is so different from dies at the end so there can be no many Americans. Post-Enlightenment other continuation of his story. Americans mostly keep society and religion apart. But we don’t want to R But we can learn from that false judge an era by our own standards. version, too. In it, the town priest We want to judge it by the standards recommends that Don Quixote of that time. One of the most interest- read Lives of Saints because it was ing and perhaps most accessible full of stories about virtues and ways of understanding a time period exemplary deeds. is through literature. In fiction there M At that time, Lives of Saints was the are stock types, there are figures, kind of story people should be reading, there are stories. These books offer according to the church. Because it was a wider lens on society. If you don’t true. Don Quixote had read libros de know the literature of a particular romances, which are chivalric tales or era, I don’t think you can be a historian adventures, but he read them irrespon- of that era. sibly and thought that those stories M But historians have to be very were true. That’s when he decided to Manuel Colás-Gil teaches an introductory course on become a knight and imitate the lives careful when they read fiction. It’s not Spanish Golden Age literature at the Carlos III University of Madrid. This spring, he also taught a of those fictional heroes. His actions like reading a legal document. These books are a product of someone’s course on Don Quixote. Since 2005, he has worked show why these romances of chivalry for the Hopkins Madrid study abroad program and were condemned and prohibited by imagination. A fantasy. has served as its resident director since 2010. moralists and the church—they R That’s an important point. thought the books contained false Because 100 years ago, historians stories that could affect the reader’s would say that fiction is a faithful conduct. So, in Avellaneda’s book, the reflection of society. Now we know town priest recommends that Don that it’s a projection. Nevertheless, Quixote read Lives of Saints in order for it’s the way that some people want him to recover his sanity. Cervantes that society to be represented, said people could read whatever they and that can tell you a lot about want, though. They should just make the values of the time. You can’t sure that after they close the book, they do history without literature. go back to their social, professional, and family responsibilities. You did M And you cannot do literature not bring art into life. without history.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 71 ALUMNI | Alumni Association

Hopkins True Blue

Written by | Laura Dattaro

A Johns Hopkins education is not awards for alumni and faculty, and necessarily what you learn in the fund grants for student projects. classroom. It’s what you learn about Membership in the Cerulean Society yourself, and your capacity to achieve. is an investment that will support the Take Alexander Wolfson, A&S ’98. He work of the Alumni Association for majored simultaneously in biology; many lifetimes to come. The society Russian; and the history of science, helps fund programs that support the medicine, and technology—and later continuing success of Johns Hopkins became an anesthesiologist. “Hopkins graduates everywhere, even reaching turned me into who I am,” he says. out to them before they have received “So why not allow others to achieve their diplomas. their dreams?” For example, Charm City Clinic, a It’s this mindset that spurred volunteer effort coordinated by Johns the creation of Cerulean, the new Hopkins medical students, helps leadership giving society of the Johns residents from low-income Baltimore Hopkins Alumni Association. When neighborhoods connect with health the Alumni Council voted last October resources, such as state and federal to eliminate dues, it made all 172,000 programs that subsidize prescription Johns Hopkins graduates full members costs and doctor’s visits. And patients of the Alumni Association. The will soon have access to routine vision Cerulean Society was created at the and cholesterol screenings, thanks to same time to give alumni like Wolfson, an Alumni Association equipment who recently became a charter mem- grant partially made possible by ber, the means of getting more Cerulean support. Third-year medical involved. Membership in the society, student Claire Sampankanpanich, which is composed of those who have a Charm City Clinic board member given $1,000 or more to the Alumni and volunteer, says that Alumni Association, represents a commitment Association involvement helps create to enriching the alumni experience community among students and and fostering beneficial relationships alumni. “After graduation,” she says, across the Johns Hopkins community, “I would like to stay involved and help now and far into the future. “It enables with future projects. Who knows what those of us who feel strongly about the will get started?” vision of the Alumni Association to It all ties back to the Alumni have a little higher dedication to the Association’s fundamental mission, mission,” says Ray Snow, A&S ’70, according to Snow, which is “to engage president of the Alumni Council and as many current and future alumni on one of the creators of Cerulean. as many different levels as we can and Gifts to the Alumni Association in as many different ways as we can.” directly fund special events and To learn more, visit alumni.jhu.edu programs, finance alumni activity /cerulean, email [email protected], within the nine schools, sustain special or call 800-JHU-JHU1.

72 | johns hopkins magazine | Notebook

Ringstrasse, the boulevard that encircles the center of town. Guided illus by longtime Austria chapter leader trat Karl Krammer, SAIS Bol ’79 (Cert), ’80 i o n by (MA), these meetings have hosted a

ol stellar lineup of guest speakers iver jeffers including journalists, high-ranking civil servants, and academics. 2. heuriger One of these city wine taverns, such as Heuriger Werner Welser in the wine-growing hills, hosts an informal chapter get-together each summer. Vienna is the world’s only big city with a significant wine industry, with over 700 hectares (1,730 acres) of vineyards under cultivation, most of it on the city’s hilly northern and western edges. 3. Sachertorte This rich Viennese dessert concocted of chocolate sponge cake, apricot jam, and dark chocolate frosting can be found at the Hotel Sacher, which holds claim to the original 19th-century recipe. 4. haaße Derived from the word heiß (meaning “hot”), this Viennese expression refers to the hot sausages A Vienna Lexicon served at small sidewalk kiosks. As these places are open until 4 a.m., Written by | Mike Field, A&S ’97 (mA) you can enjoy a Burenwurst or a Käsekrainer with mustard, a slice of It’s an imperial city that never lost its the Viennese have plenty of words to dark bread, and a beer at almost any grandeur. A city of parks and woods cast by way of welcome to the 5 million time—day or night. that was “green” long before anyone or so tourists who visit each year. Here 5. Riesenrad The city’s famous used the term, Vienna is home to the are a few that intrepid Blue Jay travel- 212-foot Ferris wheel is in the Prater Austria chapter of the Johns Hopkins ers may find especially helpful should amusement park, which was a focal Alumni Association. It was Vienna’s they find themselves footloose in the point of the classic Orson Welles film own Sigmund Freud who once waltz capital of the world. The Third Man. observed that “civilization began the 1. jour fixe Meaning “fixed day,” To join or learn more about the first time an angry person cast a word these lively discussions are held the Austria Alumni Club, contact club instead of a rock.” As residents of what last Wednesday of every month chair Karl Krammer at international may be the world’s most civilized city, at Café Landtmann, located on [email protected].

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 73 ALUMNI | Friends for Life

Lacrosse Brothers, the Beach Boys

Written by | Greg Rienzi

Baltimore and kept in touch. Schnyd- man began an eight-year career in the insurance and pension business, returning to Johns Hopkins in 1975 to join the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Fine went to law school. Today, Fine specializes in real estate development law at the local firm of Rosenberg, Martin, Greenberg LLP. Both say their bond only grew following graduation. “If I ever needed anything, I would call Stanley like you call a brother or a father,” Schnydman says. “And I’m sure he would do the same thing for me.” The two say they rarely disagree and never argue. There are differences, however. “I got the big mouth,” Schnydman says. “Stanley is more laid back. I’m wilder. Stanley is the smarter one. But we’re both doers. After forging a bond on the lacrosse field, Stan Fine (left) and Jerry Schnydman remain close friends, 50 years on. We want it done five minutes ago.” In the early 1970s, the two organized a Homecoming reunion for their Jerome Schnydman, A&S ’67, and raising an octave. “The whole article fraternity brothers, an annual tradition Stanley Fine, A&S ’65, have a bro was about Jerome winning face-offs that continues to this day. They also spot—two chairs planted in the sand and running around and through co-championed many a project for on Bethany Beach, Delaware. Here people. I got one mention at the end of Johns Hopkins, several ideas born on these longtime friends watch the the story. It said something like, ‘and the beach in Delaware. waves crash and talk for hours, until Schnydman surrendered scoring And then there’s Blue Jays lacrosse. the sun goes down or their wives honors to Stan Fine,’” he says. For years, they attended home games pry them away. Fine gets to call Schnydman together, sitting in the row directly One favorite tale is the time the two “Jerome,” known as Jerry to most. He behind the band. That tradition ended played in the first game of Baltimore’s belongs to a core group who knew when Schnydman assumed his post as box lacrosse league, televised live in Schnydman before he started his secretary of the board of trustees and 1962. Fine, six months older than distinguished career at Johns Hopkins, executive assistant to the president in Schnydman and then a freshman at which officially ends on June 30, his 1998, and began entertaining visitors Johns Hopkins, scored a game-high retirement day. The two met at Balti- and guests in the president’s box. four goals in the winning effort for his more City College and forged a bond But all that will change next club team. He couldn’t wait to get a on the lacrosse field. At Johns Hopkins, lacrosse season, after Schnydman copy of the Baltimore Sun the next they pledged Phi Sigma Delta together retires. “Herb Better [A&S ’65] and I morning to relive his exploits. “The and formed the backbone of a tena- are saving Jerome a spot in the stands,” headline was ‘Schnydman Steals the cious midfield for the lacrosse team. Fine says. And, as always, they’ll both Show,’” says Fine, enthusiastically Following graduation, they stayed in save each other’s spot on the beach.

74 | johns hopkins magazine | Class Notes

1958 1971 Leslie Norins, A&S ’58, and his Raymond “Ray” Mabus Jr., A&S retired in February. He plans to research at Oregon State wife, Ann “Rainey” Norins, named ’71 (MA), secretary of the Navy, continue working part time as an University after working for four Johns Hopkins University as a discussed his military and political adviser for Stifel Nicholas. different federal agencies and beneficiary of a $10 million careers as a guest on C-SPAN’s Edward Prochownik, A&S ’72, one lobby in Washington, D.C., bequest to fund an endowed Q&A in February. director of oncology research at for 23 years. student and faculty exchange Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh program for the Krieger School of and professor of molecular Arts and Sciences. 1972 genetics and biochemistry at the 1976 Wolf Blitzer, SAIS ’72, lead University of Pittsburgh School of Donald E. Buchanan, A&S ’76, anchor for CNN news program The Medicine, was awarded a grant in Med ’80, HS ’81, ’83, a fellow of 1968 Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, January from the National Cancer the American Academy of Michael Merzenich, Med ’68 received a 2012 Common Wealth Coalition to purchase equipment Pediatrics, was named medical (PhD), professor emeritus at the Award of Distinguished Service for for his research. director and senior physician of the University of California, San mass communications on April 21 state of Nevada’s Early Intervention Francisco, is studying how video in Delaware. Services clinic in Las Vegas. and computer games can affect Jerry Doctrow, A&S ’72, a stock 1975 Jonathan Krant, A&S ’76, SPH brain plasticity, specifically in market analyst for Legg Mason Richard “Rick” Spinrad, A&S ’83, is enjoying his second career schizophrenic patients. and Stifel Nicholas for 15 years, ’75, is the vice president for as head of clinical research at Zalicus Inc., a biotechnology firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after spending 20 years in The Sound Guy academic rheumatology. “A really good audio system suspends disbelief,” says Sandy Gross, A&S ’72. “When you’re sitting in your living Freda Lewis-Hall, A&S ’76, chief room and you put on John Coltrane or Jimi Hendrix, it’s hard to believe that they aren’t there performing for you.” medical officer of Pfizer Inc., was Gross discovered the power of a superior audio system while a student at Johns Hopkins in 1971, listening to two elected to the Save the Children speakers the size of small refrigerators in his bedroom. A year later, eager to create similar high-quality sound at Board of Trustees and will serve a an affordable price, he joined fellow Johns Hopkins graduates Matt Polk, A&S ’71, and George Klopfer, A&S ’71, in one-year term. founding Polk Audio (named after Polk because his was the easiest name to pronounce). Initially operating out of a Civil War–era home off York Road in Govans, the company became successful for designing speakers that delivered lifelike sound comparable to other brands that cost thousands more. Gross would eventually found two more speaker companies: Definitive Technology and, most recently, GoldenEar Technology, whose speakers have 1977 been praised by critics for their audiophile-oriented design. “Speaker design is what we’ve done all our lives,” P. Rea Katz, Nurs ’77, is an Gross said of GoldenEar’s launch in 2010. “We love it.” Jennifer Walker assistant professor in the Physician Assistant Department at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago. 1978 Knut Danielsen, A&S ’78, has been director of finance for a PHOTOGRAPH by Manhattan-based pre-IPO company since 2009. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and recently married an old friend M

ike from high school, the former

C Laura ter Kuerst. iesielski James W. Wagner, Med ’78 (MS), Engr ’85 (PhD), president of Emory University in Atlanta, received President Obama’s intent to reappoint him as the vice chair for the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

| 75 ALUMNI | Class Notes PHOTOGRAPH by Will Marilyn Wyatt, A&S ’78 (MA), School of Medicine, was one ’82 (PhD), wife of the U.S. of the judges for the 2011 ambassador to Pakistan, spoke at International Science and the third Karachi Literature Engineering Visualization Festival, which was held in Challenge. The challenge, which K

Pakistan in February. turns scientific exploration into irk /home art, was presented by Science magazine and the National w

1979 Science Foundation. oodpho Judy L. Smith, Engr ’79, ’85

(MS), vice president of business to.jhu.edu development for ITT Exelis’ 1988 information systems division, was Jerilyn Allen, SPH ’88 (ScD), will appointed to the board of be one of 14 nurse researchers directors of Women in Aerospace. inducted into the 2012 Interna- The two-year appointment took tional Nurse Researcher Hall of effect in January. Fame later this year. The Hall of Fame recognizes Sigma Theta Tau International members whose 1980 research has impacted the nursing Robert S. Ford, A&S ’80, SAIS profession and patients, and who ’83, the United States ambassador have received significant national An Arresting Environmentalist to Syria, was interviewed by Wolf or international recognition for Cindy L. Parker, SPH ’00, has a level of expertise that would ordinarily be Blitzer, SAIS ’72, on February 10 their work. The award presenta- welcome at the White House. When the assistant professor of environmen- for CNN’s news program The tion will take place in Australia tal health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health went there Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. this August. last August, however, she ended up in jail. Parker and fellow activists Beatrice McKenzie, SAIS ’88, is a conducted a sit-in in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as part of an effort tenured professor in the to persuade the Obama administration to block the proposed Keystone XL 1985 Department of History at Beloit oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries near the Deborah Wetzel, SAIS Bol ’85 College in Wisconsin. Gulf of Mexico. National Park Service police quickly arrested them, but the (Dipl), SAIS ’86, who has more protesters’ concerns—about threats from the pipeline to aquifers and than 25 years of experience in environmentally sensitive areas in the Great Plains, and the imperative to development work around the 1992 find other ways to meet the world’s energy needs—received a wide airing. In January, President Obama rejected TransCanada’s initial construction world, was named World Bank Cherie Butts, A&S ’92, ’97 (MS), proposal for the pipeline, citing the need for a thorough environmental director for Brazil, effective April 2. is an associate director of review of the project. James Hunt immunology research at Biogen 1986 Idec in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stacy Feldman, SPH ’92, is a Amjad Ghori, SAIS ’86, is the technology teacher/coordinator at co-founder of the Aziza Ghori Theodore Schor Middle School in 1993 Charitable Foundation, which Piscataway, New Jersey. provides educational opportuni- Erdem Basci, A&S ’93 (MA), is Nancy Kete, Engr ’93 (PhD), ties and safe homes for under- Richard Norland, SAIS ’92 the governor of the Central Bank the newly appointed managing privileged children around the (MIPP), the international affairs of the Republic of Turkey. director of The Rockefeller adviser and deputy commandant Foundation, will concentrate world. Aziza’s Place, a home Brian Ganz, Peab ’93 (AD), at the National War College, on the foundation’s global work and learning center for impover- completed the second perfor- ished Cambodian children, is received President Obama’s on resilience. intent to appoint him as the mance of his decade-long quest to one of the most active projects perform all of Chopin’s approx of the foundation. U.S. ambas s ador to Georgia in February. imately 250 piano pieces in front 1994 Corinne Sandone, Med ’86 (MA), of a live audience. The perfor- an associate professor in the mance was held on February 11 at David Tuveson, Med ’94 (MD/ Department of Art as Applied to the Music Center at Strathmore in PhD), was appointed director of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins North Bethesda, Maryland. research for The Lustgarten

76 | johns hopkins magazine 1998 2005 Foundation, a private foundation Marie-Hélène Carleton, SAIS websites and associated mobile Catherine G. Sutcliffe, SPH ’05, that focuses on pancreatic cancer ’98, produced a documentary applications. Additionally, Callahan ’09 (PhD), an assistant scientist research, on February 7. about new archaeological was recently elected to the board with the Bloomberg School of excavations in southern Iraq, of directors of Running USA. Public Health’s Department of which aired on HDNet World Epidemiology, is researching 1995 Report in March. new ways to eliminate malaria Ron Capps, A&S ’95 (MLA), who Joshua M. Friedman, A&S ’98, 2003 worldwide. spent 25 years in the armed forces, formerly with NPR and the Johns Lavonzell Nicholson, Bus ’03 is founder of and an instructor Hopkins Berman Institute of (Cert), is the founder of with the Veterans Writing Project, Bioethics, joined the ASU Founda PlayNOLA, which organizes 2006 a nonprofit organization that helps tion for a New American University sports leagues and networking Benjamin Beirs, Peab ’06, ’07 people involved with the military as vice president for strategic events for young professionals (MM), ’09 (GPD), has just tell their stories in order to philanthropy on February 1. in New Orleans. released Widening Circles, a promote healing. Kyle Pickett, Peab ’98 (DMA), is new CD featuring his interpreta- Olivier Knox, SAIS Bol ’95 (Cert), conductor and music director for tions of contemporary classical SAIS ’96, is the White House the Juneau Symphony. The 2004 guitar music. correspondent for Yahoo News symphony, which is the largest Susan M. Anderson, A&S ’04 and the first ever White House in southeast Alaska, has grown (MLA), who has enjoyed a long correspondent for the website. significantly since Pickett career in orchestra management, 2007 Anita Tarar, A&S ’95, was assumed his position in 2000. was recently named director of Bharati Chaturvedi, SAIS ’07 promoted to partner at the Dallas operations and artistic adminis- (MIPP), founder of Chintan, an office of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP tration for the Santa Barbara Indian environmental research in January. 1999 Symphony. and action group, accepted the first ever Secretary’s Innovation Paul Wyse, Peab ’95 (MM), a Kevin Callahan, Engr ’99, and his Holly D. Elwood, A&S ’04 (MS), Award for Women’s and Girls’ concert pianist, had two of his wife, Maggie, live in Austin, Texas, nicknamed “the green electronics Empowerment from U.S. Secretary portrait paintings acquired by the and welcomed their first child last lady,” is a program manager of the of State Hillary Clinton in March. Smithsonian’s National Gallery in year. Callahan is co-founder of Environmentally Preferable There were two additional winners Washington, D.C., in 2011. One of MapMyFitness, which operates a Purchasing Program at the of this award. Wyse’s paintings, a portrait of Billy suite of social wellness–oriented Environmental Protection Agency. Joel, was unveiled at Steinway Hall in New York last December. 1997 Marie Nolan, Ed ’97 (MSEd), will SO MUCH Talent, SO LITTLE SPACE be one of 14 nurse researchers inducted into the 2012 Interna- POETRY NONFICTION tional Nurse Researcher Hall of Johns Hopkins alumni have The Lost Boys Heaven in the Fame later this year. The Hall of a way with words. And the Daniel Groves, A&S ’00 Fame recognizes Sigma Theta Tau talent to turn those words into American Imagination International members whose books—lots of them. We don’t Gary Scott Smith, A&S ’81 research has impacted the nursing have room in four magazine profession and patients, and who issues a year to feature them all, have received significant national which is why we’re now putting or international recognition for all alumni book publication their work. The award presenta- news online in our new Alumni tion will take place in Australia Authors Bookshelf. this August. Here are just a couple of the titles currently featured.

See more titles or find out how to submit your own book to the series at alumni.jhu.edu/bookshelf.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 77 ALUMNI | Class Notes

ALUMNI NEWS & NOTES Corinne Winters, Peab ’07 (MM), a soprano from Frederick, alumni association president Maryland, was one of six winners Ray Snow, A&S ’70 of the prestigious 41st George Executive Director London Foundation Voice photograph of Alumni Relations Mo Baldwin Competition. editors

Mike Field, A&S ’97 (MA) by

2008 J

Lisa Belman a Jennifer Carinci, Ed ’08 (MS), is ck A Contact us at: co-editor of New Horizons for lterman The JHU Office of Alumni Relations Learning, an online journal that San Martin Center, Second Floor publishes articles about teaching 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2696 strategies and education-based 410-516-0363 research questions. 1-800-JHU-JHU1 (5481) [email protected] Meghan K. Davis, Peab ’08, will alumni.jhu.edu represent Philadelphia in the “Mary from Dungloe” annual Please send class notes to magnotes musical contest to be held in @jhu.edu. By submitting a class note, Ireland this summer. you give Johns Hopkins University permission to edit and publish your Benjamin Peck, Peab ’08, ’09, a information in Johns Hopkins Magazine bassoonist, was the National Sym- and in online publications. phony Orchestra and Washington Leading the Southern Way The Alumni News & Notes section of National Opera development Johns Hopkins Magazine is made intern from January to May. As he approaches his 100th birthday, Theodore “Ted” Stern, A&S ’34, possible by your Alumni Association. For continues to serve and inspire his adopted hometown of Charleston, more information, visit alumni.jhu.edu. South Carolina. A native New Yorker born on Christmas Day 1912, 2009 he landed in the city in 1965 after being named commanding officer of the Charleston Naval Supply Center. Upon retiring three years later, Shalene Gupta, A&S ’09, GOLOMB’S ANSWERS Stern was asked to take on the presidency of the College of Charleston, received a 2011–12 Fulbright then struggling to survive with fewer than 500 students. He led the scholarship to teach English and integration and modernization of the school; its enrollment grew to Word Changes creative writing in Malaysia. more than 5,000 students by the time he stepped down in 1978. By Solutions (Puzzle on page 67) Melanie S. Hatter, A&S ’09 then, he had also lent his considerable energy to the effort to launch the 1 Read backward to get: reviled, time, (MFA), received the Washington noted arts festival Spoleto USA. Called “the most profound leader of his devil, strap, leper, straw. Writers’ Publishing House 2011 era” by 10-term mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., Stern continues to keep daily 2 Interchange second and third letters Fiction Prize for her novel, The office hours at the college, offering insight to all comers. James Hunt to get: braker, bard, crave, calm, Color of My Soul (Washington dairy, wrap. Writers’ Publishing House, 2011). 3 Bring last letter to the front to get: Courtney Silverthorn, Med ’09 heart, lease, flea, free, grin, strip. (PhD), A&S ’11 (Cert), an Lynn Molnar, Bus ’10, founded 4 Precede with e to get: eastern, elate, intellectual property specialist, is 2010 Thankful Paws, an organization emission, emotion, equality, erode. deputy regional coordinator of the Gordon Mack, Engr ’10, a video that helps people in financial 5 Adjoin et to get: bullet, cigaret, Federal Laboratory Consortium’s editor, is one of nine winners of need keep and feed their pets. cornet, Internet, skillet, toilet. mid-Atlantic region. the MLB Fan Cave contest. The They have partnered with Meals 6 Precede with a to get: abet, agreed, Michael A. Tanenbaum, winners are paid to dwell in the on Wheels to distribute pet food aisle, aspire, avenue, averse. A&S ’09, SAIS ’10, and Jillian “Fan Cave” on the corner of Fourth in Baltimore and surrounding 7 Adjoin er to get: brother, mister, MacNaughton, A&S ’10, and Broadway in Manhattan where areas. Visit their website at mother, number, shoulder, wander. launched a new online platform, they watch all regular season thankfulpaws.org. 8 Apply pig latin to get: eBay, outlay, ConnectCubed, that uses Major League Baseball games and Gabriel “Gabe” Plumer, A&S ’10, overlay, underplay, ashtray, eight- assessment games to connect chronicle their experiences only 23, is the newly appointed way. (This group uses pig latin by through social media. spelling. Using pig latin by pronun- aspiring traders and bankers mayor of Alexandria Township, ciation, we would lose lover/overlay, with Wall Street recruiters. New Jersey, and one of the state’s but could gain wonder/underway.) youngest municipal leaders.

78 | johns hopkins magazine | In Memoriam

in memoriam

Mary C. Walker, Peab ’34 (Cert), Walter F. Herman, A&S ’50, James A. Schoettler, Med ’57, Gilbert Scott-Heron, A&S ’72 December 22, 2011, Baltimore. March 2, Baltimore. March 6, Chevy Chase, Maryland. (MA), May 27, 2011, New York. George S. Eager Jr., Engr ’36, ’41 Albert C. Reymann, Engr ’50, Howard J. Waskow, A&S ’57, Theodore J. Booth, A&S ’73 (PhD), February 1, Montclair, January 2, Baltimore. January 13, Portland, Oregon. (MLA), ’76 (Cert), July 25, 2009, New Jersey. William M. Waters, Engr ’50, ’56 Allison F. Goddard, A&S ’58 Lewisburg, West Virginia. Edwin “Ed” S. Berngartt, Engr (MS), ’60 (PhD), December 17, (MAT), January 4, Rockford, Illinois. Candace D. Lang, A&S ’74 (MA), ’37, December 21, 2011, Raleigh, 2011, Parkville, Maryland. Francis “Frank” A. Zampiello, ’79 (PhD), October 31, 2011, North Carolina. Robert W. Watson, A&S ’50 A&S ’58, December 1, 2011, Atlanta. Charles T.J. Mewshaw Sr., Engr (MA), ’55 (PhD), February 27, Philadelphia. Eileen S. Tarcay, A&S ’74 (Cert), ’38, February 17, Catonsville, Greensboro, North Carolina. Edmund L. Auchter, SAIS ’59, February 18, Salt Lake City. Maryland. Martha R. Lumpkin, Med ’51, January 24, Sarasota, Florida. Richard L. Cooper, Engr ’75, David Seligson, SPH ’42 (ScD), October 18, 2011, Banner Elk, John “Jack” H. Mulholland, Med February 18, 2011, Baltimore. March 3, 2011, Chevy Chase, North Carolina. ’59, ’62 (PGF), HS ’66, December Maria E. Sliwinski, Nurs ’77, Maryland. Judah I. Rosenblatt, A&S ’51, 11, 2011, Fort Myers, Florida. January 2, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Curtis Prout, HS ’43, December 2, February 16, Tucson, Arizona. Robert Ruth, SAIS Bol ’60 Jane Anderson Flaherty, Bus ’78 2011, Manchester, Massachusetts. William G. Watson, A&S ’51, (Dipl), November 4, 2011, (MAS), August 12, 2011, Galena, Charles “Charlie” A. Wilson Jr., October 31, 2011, Camp Hill, Baltimore. Maryland. A&S ’43, January 3, Baltimore. Pennsylvania. William “Bill” H. Taylor II, Engr Grace Angelina Bruno, Bus ’83 Edward E. Bauman, HS ’44, Frederic Printz, A&S ’52, ’60, June 13, 2011, Lexington, (MAS), March 7, Avon-by-the-Sea, December 3, 2008, Verona, December 28, 2011, Allegany, Kentucky. New Jersey. Wisconsin. New York. Warren R. Leonard, SAIS ’61, Jeffrey “Jeff” A. Cynx, A&S ’83 Evelyn “Evie” Purdy, Nurs ’44 Robert “Bob” W. Summers, June 1, 2010, Wilmington, (MA), ’86 (PhD), December 24, (Cert), January 14, Elizabeth, Engr ’52, March 1, Baltimore. Delaware. 2011, Poughkeepsie, New York. New Jersey. Bruce G. Belt, Med ’53, HS ’54, Margot E. Louria, A&S ’61 (PhD), Siegfried B. Christensen IV, A&S Alejandro Rodriguez, HS ’44, ’58, January 9, Santa Ynez, November 28, 2011, San Ramon, ’84 (MA/PhD), December 28, ’62, January 20, Palm City, California. California. 2011, New Orleans. Florida. Basil Gordon, A&S ’53 (MA), Thomas E. Quade, Engr ’62, Constance A. Griffin, Med ’84 Karl E. Hofammann Jr., Med ’46, January 12, Los Angeles. December 19, 2011, Odenton, (PGF), January 8, Baltimore. HS ’53, January 15, Birmingham, Philip M. Hastings Jr., Engr ’53, Maryland. Dennis S. Barlow, Med ’85, Alabama. March 5, Bangor, Maine. John C. Fiege, Ed ’63 (MEd), January 20, Eastford, Connecticut. Sara S. Capps, Nurs ’47 (Cert), Dorothy L. King, Nurs ’53 March 2, Onancock, Virginia. Patrick T. Liu, A&S ’85, January December 30, 2011, Asheville, (Cert), August 2, 2011, Crossville, Malcolm Tenney Jr., SPH ’63, 25, Phoenix. North Carolina. Tennessee. February 10, Staunton, Virginia. Nancy Kaye Johnson, A&S ’87 William L. Stewart, A&S ’47, John M. Flexner, Med ’54, James W. Causey, Engr ’64, (MA), January 21, Oakland, Med ’51, November 18, 2011, December 27, 2011, Nashville, August 20, 2011, Columbia, California. Littleton, Colorado. Tennessee. Maryland. Randall William Welfley, Engr Doris Kaminsky Mela, Bus ’48, John B. MacGibbon, Med ’54 James “Jim” Skarda Jr., ’91 (MS), January 10, Alpharetta, February 2, Alexandria, Virginia. (PGF), December 24, 2011, Engr ’65, November 27, 2011, Georgia. John W. Bolton, Med ’49, Baltimore. Baltimore. Timothy D. Picciotti, Engr ’92 December 22, 2011, Edward S. Goldberg, Engr ’55, Jesse H. Hurst, Ed ’70 (MEd), (MS), December 27, 2011, Stuart, Florida. February 20, Reno, Nevada. May 13, 2011, Joppa, Maryland. Baltimore. George W. Heck Jr., A&S ’49, John T. Jenkins, Med ’55, August John F. Hoffman, Engr ’72 Donald “Don” A. Kreinbrink, June 12, 2011, Baltimore. 31, 2011, Spokane, Washington. (PhD), October 10, 2011, Engr ’94 (MS), January 31, Edward B. Lauer, A&S ’49, James J. McNamee III, A&S ’57, Annapolis, Maryland. Ellicott City, Maryland. January 2, Severna Park, ’60 (MA), March 9, Baltimore. Maryland.

Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 79 ALUMNI | Afterwords

my Life as an Egyptologist

Written by | Jacquelyn Williamson, A&S ’00 (MA), ’09 (PhD)

It is still dark outside my cramped, freezing, airless mud room, but the village rooster is crowing, so it must be time to rise. I sigh, pull myself out of bed, and dress quickly in the stifling cold. I check to be sure my clothes provide sufficiently modest cover to avoid offending our gracious Egyptian colleagues. Opening the door sucks a waft of fresher, warmer air into the room. As I brush my teeth over the sink in the shower house, my colleagues and I blearily but pleasantly greet each other. illus That is one of the great joys of working trat i o

with British archaeologists: They are n by laurie rosen always polite, even early in the morning after two months in the field. After gulping coffee down, we pile

into the bed of a battered pickup truck, w gripping the sides to steady ourselves as ald we lumber over the desert. When the truck stops, routine takes over. We check our squares first to be sure the strings demarcating the newly cut areas are still there. Mohammed, bless him, has started the fire for morning tea. My Egyptian team members, all my data, create tomorrow’s to-do list. Some of us return to the truck because speaking Arabic so rapidly my morning I look forward to “gin o’clock,” our we are traveling to the larger elite tombs brain can’t begin to understand them, cocktail hour before dinner on the to pursue a different avenue of research. lead the way to the tomb we are roof at sunset. I toast with the mem- I want to stay for the tea, but I also know photographing today. They open bers of the dig house to another day that we have not set up a field latrine the door and bring in lights and done, to one another, to our work. out there, so abstinence is probably wise. scaffolding. I dump my bag by the And I silently toast my Johns At our site, we trudge up steep hills, door as always and enter the tomb. Hopkins professors Betsy Bryan no longer really noticing the rolling Time passes, my mind clears, my and Richard Jasnow. Without their pebbles underfoot. I wave to other attention sharpens, and I miss second training and support, I would not team members who arrived earlier breakfast. A friend brings me a shot be here in this tortured, difficult, and are already mapping the cliff of tea and reminds me to eat some magnificent place working with face. Shouting up the cliff, I promise fruit. Five minutes later I have forgot- these brilliant people. to share “second breakfast” with them ten her advice. Jacquelyn Williamson is a postdoctoral fellow when we meet at the first tomb at 9:30, Before I know it, it’s time to reload and lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern halfway through our dig day. my bag, return to the house, process Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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HOW TOMORROW TAKES WING It starts with a shutterbug…

Specifically Tiras Lin, a rising senior and scholarship recipient, aiming his bank of high-speed cameras and snapping away at 3,000 frames a second. His subject: a tiny, frail butterfly that flits through tight spaces and around any obstacle, even against strong headwinds. Why? Lin’s observations and data will help engineer a new generation of robotic, bug-sized drones for search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring and recon missions. Today at Johns Hopkins, our student-researchers are tackling the hard questions and finding unimaginable answers. Your gift can make new opportunities take flight and, quite possibly, change the world. Give today. 800-548-5422 or giving.jhu.edu

Checks can be made payable and sent to: Johns Hopkins University Office of Annual Giving P.O. Box 17073 Baltimore, MD 21297-0509 Volume 64 No. 2 Summer 2012 | 81 Stuart/JohnsHopkinsMay-June12 4/24/12 2:21 PM Page 1 ©Morganhowarth.com

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