Jul - Aug 2012 Issue

In the summer of 2010, Nyuol Tong ’14 returned to his home village of Ayeit in what is now South Sudan for the first time since he was five years old. He saw the remnants of war. Destroyed houses. Scorched land. Scarred people. Scarce jobs. A young population. And no schools. “Not even a single school,” Tong says. “That was a horrifying fact.”

Failure is a successful theme for Henry Petroski. As Duke’s resident expert on design and structure, he has spent almost three decades teaching and writing about everything from bridges to toothpicks to pencils to space shuttles—including what underlies design mishaps.

 Perhaps one of the only things we remember from eighth-grade biology is that DNA doesn’t change. The 3 billion letters that make up your personal genome are with you for life, a master blueprint handed down from your parents. But not everything about how your genes operate is programmed at birth. Simon Gregory, an associate professor of medical genetics and codirector of the Duke Epigenetics and Epigenomics Program, explains:

Labels may not be helping us watch our diets much. A study led by the Fuqua School of Business found that in the two decades since foods were required to carry “Nutrition Facts” labels, the actual nutritional quality of food products in supermarkets has decreased. Researchers say food companies are responding more to consumers’ demand for bettertasting foods, which seems to trump whatever is on the label.

How do you mend a broken heart? Duke medical researchers think they have a new way, using the very scar tissue that forms after a heart attack.Scientists at Duke University Medical Center used molecules called microRNAs to trigger scar tissue to convert itself into healthy heart muscle. They completed the conversion in a lab dish and, for the first time, in a mouse, potentially creating a way to regenerate heart tissue without the need for stem-cell transplantation.

 Carla Antonaccio may not seem like a bullwhip-brandishing, Indiana Jones-type adventurer, but the classical studies professor nonetheless wound up in the middle of an international detective story.

Like most start-up ventures, Duke’s two-year-old Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative has grand ambitions, which fall nothing short of remaking the university’s entrepreneurial culture. In May, the initiative received another critical piece to realizing those ambitions: a significant investment of capital.

 On the first day of her “Women in the Public Sphere” course this past spring, Rachel Seidman told her students they would be responsible for a single class project, one they would be inspired to continue even after the course finished. But no one imagined just how far that project would go.

 When Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke ’67, Gene Kendall ’67, and Nathaniel White ’67 arrived at Page Auditorium on Reunions Weekend in April, they assumed they would be watching the usual presentation of class gifts. But the three surviving members of Duke’s first cohort of African-American undergraduate students were in for a surprise.

 The catalyst: Law and political science professor Donald Horowitz is an expert on constitutional design for severely divided countries. He recently worked on the transitional constitution of South Sudan and has published a book on Indonesia’s transition from an autocracy to constitutional democracy. “The best courses are usually the ones that mesh with the instructor’s own interests,” he says. “[This course] is the subject matter of my research…. It’s something I have been working on for decades, really.”

When Jeff Howard ’76 first stepped onto Duke’s campus as a teenager from Minnesota, the beauty of the campus “took my breath away,” he says. “It was my vision of what a university was supposed to look like.”

Growing up in Canton, Georgia, Ken Hoehn wasn’t exactly encouraged to study the science of evolution. “The community I grew up in was very Christian-conservative, so evolutionary theory was one of those forbidden fruits,” says Hoehn, who first was drawn to science by collecting insects as a boy. “But I was always curious about it.” 

Daniele Armaleo Ph.D. ’84 has been teaching molecular biology at Duke since 1975. Students now are not just exploring the microscopic components of life, but engaging with advancements in genetic engineering and genomics. Although the research frontiers of his field accelerate ever faster, the basics of teaching undergraduates have remained constant.

During the dog days of summer, millions of us migrate to the nearest watering hole or beachfront property to have our fun in the sun. We may not realize it when we are lounging by the pool or bouncing a beach ball around, but those seemingly mindless activities actually fulfill a primeval pattern connecting all living things to the sun. The pull of this celestial orb is emotional, spiritual, and physical—commanding the reverence of ancient Greeks and modern-day students alike. So why are we so drawn to light?

Proof of prognostication: Detail from 1870 Koskoo Almanac!

FILMDerrick Heggans '92: Beyond the Game As a former NFL executive and current managing director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Sports Business Initiative, Derrick Heggans knows the inner workings of professional sports.

[Les Todd]

As the son of contemporary art collectors, Jason Rubell spent a fair amount of his childhood at gallery openings and museum exhibitions. By the time he was a teenager, Rubell started buying artwork that caught his eye, using money he’d made stringing tennis rackets. But he never thought of himself as a collector until his senior year at Duke.

We were still about forty miles away from Memphis when a window blew out on the bus. Ever since we’d crossed into Mississippi, headed northwest from Birmingham, Alabama, a quiet unease had settled over our Carolina Livery minibus. Our trip, the inaugural Roots to Rights alternative spring-break venture between Jewish Life at Duke and the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, was at one point scheduled to stop in Jackson for a night. But even just the simple fact of being in transit in Mississippi lent a sense of foreboding.

 At first, the work didn’t sound too difficult, particularly not for someone like Takoby Cofield. Here’s a young mountain of a man—six feet, four inches tall and 310 pounds of brute force—who plays offensive tackle for the Blue Devils football team. He’s accustomed to tossing around 300-pound defensive linemen every Saturday. How hard would it be to spend a few days in May digging a hole, especially when he had the help of nine of his fellow linemen?When that hole is in rural Ethiopia—and when that hole is dug with a manual percussion drill—the answer is, pretty tough.

Remember those not-too-distant days when people got excited about a camera with a couple of measly megapixels of resolution? Make way for the gigaage. Duke engineers have now developed a camera capable of capturing up to 50,000 megapixels—or fifty gigapixels—of data, five times better than perfect human sight.

Dan Rittschof sweeps his scuba light across a sliver of the Neuse River. It’s 11:30 p.m., and he and his students are taking one last look across the water to see if any interesting creatures appear.

 Following passage of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in North Carolina, Duke administrators were unequivocal about how the amendment will affect Duke’s benefits and employee relations. Bottom line: It won’t.

After twelve years of teaching introductory and organic chemistry at Duke, Stephen Craig ’91 knows many of the most important moments in his students’ learning don’t happen in the classroom.“They occur at 2:30 in the morning, in the commons room of their dormitory, probably the night before an exam,” laughs Craig, a professor and chair of chemistry. “It’s when students are trying to work through the material together.”