Duke University Alumni Magazine

     Shavar D. Jeffries '96 has been elected young trustee to represent the Duke Student Government on the board. He will spend the first year of his three-year term as a non-voting observer. As an undergraduate, Jeffries was president of the Black Student Alliance and received several leadership and academic scholarships and awards, including a William Griffith University Service Award. He is now attending law school at Columbia University.

     Susan A. Timberlake, nominated by the Graduate and Professional Student Council (GPSC), has been elected to a three-year term. She is also a young trustee, and will have full voting rights. She earned her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Princeton University and is completing the Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering at Duke.

EXCHANGING ART
SCHOLARS

     The idea for the program emerged when Jose Maria Luzon Nogue became the Prado's director in 1993. Nogue, who had spent a year at Duke as a visiting scholar in the early Seventies, said he had found the experience enriching and beneficial to his career, and wished the same opportunity were available for other Spanish students. Not long after he assumed the presidency of the Prado, he contacted DUMA director Michael Mezzatesta about the possibility of a joint project. Mezzatesta met with Annabel Wharton, chair of the art and art history department, who suggested an exchange of scholars.

     One scholar from each institution par- ticipates in the program annually. At Duke, Spanish scholars conduct research and teach classes in their field. At the Prado, the approach is slightly different; visiting scholars focus on research, exhibit preparation, and conservancy efforts. The Prado is government-owned and is not closely connected with any Spanish universities, so the emphasis for Duke scholars is more on the museum's inner workings than on teaching.

     Among the Prado's holdings is the world's largest collection of twelfth- to nineteenth-century Spanish paintings, with El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya strongly represented. Flemish masterpieces such as Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" and Rubens' "Three Graces," as well as many important examples by sixteenth-century Venetian master Titian, are also in the collections, reflecting the Spanish monarchies' taste. In all, the Prado owns 19,000 works.

MIDDLE-AGED AT
SIXTY-FIVE?

     "When you look at the trajectory of changes--mortality trends--in the population at very advanced ages, it looks like the lifespan's theoretical limits will be 130 or more," says Manton. "One could project a higher figure on other grounds--by medical research or things like genetic re-engineering or treatments of various diseases. But if you're talking about taking current population trends and extrapolating them on what is a reasonably conservative basis, you would say it probably has to be 130 or 135."

     The oldest living person whose age can be documented reliably is a 121-year-old woman in France. Other unsubstantiated claims have people living to as old as 126. The longer that reliable statistical systems such as Social Security and Medicare are in place, the easier it will be to verify such ages in the future. The number of centenarians in America has increased from between three to four thousand in 1960 to fifty- to fifty-five thousand in 1995, a growth rate of about 7 percent each year for the last thirty-five years. Likewise, the number of people 110 years or older has increased in that time frame, and today there are anywhere from several hundred to a thousand people who have passed their 110th birthday.

     There is no indication that there is a "biological brick wall," or specific age beyond which no human could live, says Manton. "Having a wall just means there would be some simple process where all of the cells and the organs in the body would just give up the ghost at once." Even people who believe that the lifespan is genetically determined would concur that multiple factors are involved in determining the maximum lifespan, he says.

     Researchers say that several factors have contributed to the expanding age limit, including positive changes in lifestyle and diet, better medical care, and advances in research and technology to treat diseases and conditions such as heart disease, strokes, and certain cancers.

WELCOME
RANKINGS

     To determine the rankings, the magazine tallied the results of 2,730 surveys of college presidents, deans, and admissions directors (with a response rate of 65 percent). The educators were asked to rank the reputation of schools in the same category as their own institution; those rankings were combined with data provided by the schools that covered student selectivity, faculty resources, financial resources, student-retention rate, and alumni giving. This year the survey included a new criterion--"value added" --meant to represent the value a school adds between freshman orientation and graduation.

     President Nan Keohane says the survey "confirms what we know about the quality of our faculty and students and the quality of the educational experience we offer undergraduates." While "having the Duke undergraduate experience ranked fourth in the country is welcome," such assessments "should be only one factor in a student's decision about where to attend college," she says.

     Earlier, U.S. News & World Report again ranked Duke Hospital fifth best in the nation in its "America's Best Hospitals" issue. The magazine's honor role placed Johns Hopkins first, the Mayo Clinic second, Massachusetts General third, and the UCLA Medical Center fourth.

     In the specialty listings, the hospital placed twelfth in AIDS research, eighth in cancer, fourth in cardiology, fourteenth in endocrinology, sixth in gynecology, eighth in neurology, fifth in orthopedics, sixteenth in otolaryngology, sixth in rheumatology, seventh in urology, ninth in ophthalmology, fifteenth in pediatrics, and twelfth in psychiatry. Duke was not listed in the top twenty in rehabilitation.

IN BRIEF