Amherst Today
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ALSO INSIDE FALL The 1896 alum 2017 who unearthed our mammoth skeleton is still frustrating and surprising scientists Amherst today. As the College’s first Army ROTC FUTURE student in two decades, Rebecca Segal ’18 is part of the long, rich, VETERAN complex story of Amherst and the military. XXIN THIS ISSUE: FALL 2017XX 20 28 36 Veterans’ Loomis “The Splendor of Days Illuminated Mere Being” FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO AN THE PROFESSOR WHO THE COLLEGE REMEMBERS “ACADEMIC BOOT CAMP” UNEARTHED AMHERST’S ACCLAIMED POET AND THIS SUMMER, AMHERST’S MAMMOTH SKELETON IN LECTURER RICHARD HISTORY OF TEACHING 1923 IS STILL FRUSTRATING WILBUR ’42, WHO DIED MEMBERS OF THE MILITARY AND SURPRISING THIS FALL. BY KATHARINE SCIENTISTS TODAY. BY KATHARINE WHITTEMORE BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 WHITTEMORE Inside the College’s Beneski Museum, a local scientist realized that this Tyrannosaurid jaw is different from any other he’s seen. (And he has seen quite a few.) Page 28 Photograph by GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 2 “We take pleasure in First Words A career in pediatric cardiology seeing the impossible inspires a young adult novel. appear possible, and the 4 invisible appear visible.” Voices Readers consider such far-reaching Historian Thomas W. Laqueur, invited to Amherst as issues as China’s one-child policy, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, during his October nuclear war and the search for lecture on how and why the living care for and extraterrestrial life. remember the dead. PAGE 12 6 College Row Support after Hurricane Maria, XX ONLINE: AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE XX researching bodily bacteria, Amherst’s “single finest graduate” News Video & Audio and more Jeffrey C. Hall ’67 was named What does a mammoth sound 14 a winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize like? In anticipation of the The Big Picture in Physiology or Medicine. He unveiling of the new mascot logo, and two fellow scientists were we filmed students doing their A drone’s-eye view of autumn recognized for their discoveries best (speculative) mammoth of the molecular mechanisms JEFFREY C. HALL ’67 impressions. The results were... 16 controlling circadian rhythms. interesting. Beyond Campus JOURNALISM: A small box turned out Actor, playwright and scholar Professor emeritus and Pulitzer Lisa Biggs ’93 William Taubman to contain huge news was part of the Prize winner PUBLIC HEALTH: Biologist Kathryn Five College Theater Alumnae discusses his new biography, Hanley ’89 keeps one step ahead of of Color Residency this fall. In Gorbachev: His Life and Times. the Zika virus preparation, she reflected on The book is the culmination of 11 her time at Amherst and the years of research and interviews. CANCER: Med student Jacob Reibel BENJAMIN GOLD ’11 ’10 helps patients tell their stories importance of making theater, then and now. “My job didn’t exist when I graduated,” says Catherine 42 As Benjamin Gold ’11 answered Brownstein ’97. “But I was able Amherst Creates questions from Amherst pre- to find it and succeed because CULTURE: Sex in the ’90s with David med students, the young doctor Amherst taught me how to adapt, Friend ’77 remembered what drew him to think critically and carve out a BIOGRAPHY: Professor William the College in the first place. place for myself.” LISA BIGGS ’93 Taubman on Mikhail Gorbachev OPERA: The Scarlet Professor TV SERIES: Cold War cop comedy POETRY: Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur EDITOR WE WANT TO HEAR Amherst (USPS 024-280) Emily Gold Boutilier FROM YOU is published quarterly (413) 542-8275 Amherst welcomes by Amherst College at 49 letters from its readers. Amherst, Massachusetts magazine@amherst. 01002-5000, and is Classes Please send them to edu sent free to all alumni. magazine@amherst. Periodicals postage paid at ALUMNI EDITOR edu or Amherst Amherst, Massachusetts 110 Betsy Cannon Magazine, PO Box 01002-5000 and additional In Memory Smith ’84 5000, Amherst, MA mailing offices. Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 (413) 542-2031 01002. to Amherst, AC # 2220, Letters must be PO Box 5000, Amherst DESIGN DIRECTOR 116 300 words or fewer College, Amherst, MA Creating Connections Ronn Campisi and should address 01002-5000. Cover photograph by ASSISTANT EDITOR the content in the Dana Smith, Oct. 23, magazine. 2017, at 2:30 p.m. 120 Katherine Duke ’05 Contest SENIOR WRITER An art history challenge Katharine Whittemore XXFIRST WORDSXX I walk in the room. The young woman on the exam table gives me a brief smile. The crisp, white sheet draped over the round of her belly flutters as I shut the door. I put down her chart and introduce myself. Ms. M is I ask Ms. M some questions about her health. The fleeting smile halfway through her pregnancy. Her anat- returns as she answers. Her fingers tighten. I slide into my seat and take omy scan two days ago was incomplete. The hold of the ultrasound probe. I want to reassure her. I can’t until I’ve fetal heart wasn’t seen well. So she’d been checked her fetus. At a large referral center, referred to me, the pediatric cardiologist. roughly a quarter to a third of fetal echocardiograms, ultrasounds of the fetal heart, will be abnormal. When I come across a fetus with a heart that has developed improperly, where parts are absent or in the wrong place—think of a toddler’s sketch of a person with only one eye and an arm coming out of the head—I put down the probe, flick on the lights and turn to face the parents. I take them into a room with a table and comfortable chairs so I can draw, with colored markers, the heart By Ismée (Bartels) Williams ’95 of their fetus. I explain what can be done. Their baby’s heart is sick. Their baby needs a surgery as soon as she’s born. Without it, she will die. Even with surgery, there is a chance their baby might not make it. But we will do everything to fight for her if that is what they choose. I hold their hands, pass tissues and wait for the question that every family, regardless of background, asks next: Is my child going to be normal? They want to know if their child will go to regular school, ride a bike, grow up and have a family. Every time my answer is the same: We don’t know. Advances in medical care allow most babies with severe heart defects a chance at survival. Yet more than half of these children will suffer neurodevelopmental setbacks. The spectrum ranges from minor learning disabilities and attention-deficitdisorder to autism and severe intellectual handicaps. We often don’t know why this happens. We don’t know who will be affected. The only option is to watch the baby closely over the first few years of life and intervene as delays are detected. It is an entirely unsatisfactory situation. Which is why, in addition to being a clinician, I am also a researcher. My probe sweeps from one side of Ms. M’s abdomen to the other. I see that her fetus is tucked in a ball, arms and legs in front of the chest, hiding the heart. I ask Ms. M to turn onto her side. This does not help. I explain the situation and ask if she’d like to go for a drink of water. Toward the end of my cardiology training, I went 2 AMHERST FALL 2017 back to school for a degree in biostatistics. I sought was a lesson from my grandparents who fled Cuba out mentors. I wrote grants. I ran a study investigating and had to start over, from my mother who applied early predictors of neurodevelopmental outcomes in three times to medical school and disregarded the children born with congenital heart disease. I wanted letters that suggested she try nursing. more information so I could tell parents something I realized I needed to tell a different story—one other than, We have to wait and see. reflective of my experience being raised bymis abuelos Then I read a novel. I was on bed rest, pregnant while my parents worked, and of being a physician WILLIAMS, a with my third child. I loved fiction, but hadn’t caring for Spanish-speaking families in Washington history major found time since Amherst to read beyond medical Heights. I put aside my first manuscript and wrote at Amherst, journals and statistics textbooks. Perhaps pregnancy about a young Dominican-American woman pregnant is a pediatric hormones and my anxiety over a threatened preterm with a baby with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in cardiologist and birth were partly to blame, but that novel opened a which the left side of the heart is missing. Within the the author of the young adult novel door to a room in my brain that had been forgotten. I year, I sold this novel. Water In May felt awakened—and I wanted to write something that My main character is based on many patients I’ve (Amulet Books, would make another person feel that way. treated: young women, some still in high school, 2017). Find her During the remainder of my pregnancy, I wrote a each pregnant with one of the 40,000 babies born at ismeewilliams. novel. Over the next few years, I crunched data from every year in the U.S. with heart defects—a number com. my research, scanned pregnant bellies and edited equivalent to roughly 1 in 100 births. Like my patients, my manuscript in odd, stolen moments. I attended this character has questions. Like her doctor, I don’t writers’ conferences. I wrote and rewrote.