Fall 2017 Issue

In the examining room at the Duke Neurological Disorders Clinic, Richard Bedlack looks more like the eccentric rock star he wanted to be growing up than the physician he became.

As a former governor, Terry Sanford often used his political skills during his tenure as Duke president, from 1970 to 1985. One of his best-known missives, the “Avuncular Letter,” was sent to the undergraduate students in 1984. At once humorous and chiding, effective but gentle, the letter, signed “Uncle Terry,” is a triumph of Sanford’s acumen. The story behind the letter, however, tells the tale of the long-standing problem facing Sanford, as well as the path it set toward the creation of what we now know as “Cameron Crazies.”

Go to Norway, and then head further north, three hours by plane. You’ll end up in Longyearbyen, the main settlement of the not-quite-sovereign archipelago of Svalbard. Formerly a mining town, Longyearbyen focuses now on tourism and climate research, an area of obvious interest, given its position in the Arctic. If you leave the settlement on foot, you’ll have to carry a rifle to protect against polar bears.

Postdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has helped solve a mystery about the physical nature of glass. But as interesting as the breakthrough is, perhaps equally interesting is Yaida’s choice of tools—the same ones used by Newton and Darwin. For research recently published in Physical Review Letters, Yaida spent a month at his desk calculating, using nothing more technological than printer paper and free pens from the supply cabinet.

Duke Gardens executive director Bill LeFevre seems at home in a golf cart. He zips along the gardens’ crushed gravel pathways, up and down hills, through gates and over bridges, many of which were built during his tenure. Horticulturists, curators, and volunteers seem to have an ear for the cart’s humming and step aside, smiling as LeFevre rolls by.

Inside one of Durham’s brick-faced, vestigial tobacco buildings, Nick Troester Ph.D. ’10 speaks quietly. “I don’t know that anyone at any point in time says, ‘You’re a failure if you don’t find a tenure- track job somewhere,’ but it’s an expectation that I think I had,” he says.