Sep - Oct 2010 Issue

A fine example of late medieval sculpture from the Brummer Collection of Medieval Art, this figure was once part of a large altar piece that was likely in a liturgical space. The sculptor has created a figure who looks attentive and content; he bears a slight smile and rests his hands in the crook of a tree. It is the presence of the tree—actually a sapling—that helps to identify the figure as Saint Sebastian and, among other features, to indicate the date of the sculpture.

During the summer session, undergraduates were offered two courses online, a first for Duke. The courses were aimed at students who left campus for the summer but sought alternative ways to earn academic credit during those months.

When students returned to campus this fall, they found it easier to get from campus to downtown shops, dining, and entertainment, thanks to a new free bus service run by the city in partnership with Duke.

Environmental and energy studies at Duke have a new home on campus, thanks to renovations on the first floor of Gross Chemical Laboratory, or Gross Chem, that took place this summer. Dubbed the Energy Hub, the space, once furnished this fall, will contain a new multidisciplinary center that will be headed by Lincoln Pratson, professor of energy and environment at the Nicholas School of the Environment.

Two new members joined the board of trustees in July: Laurene M. Sperling ’78, president of the Sperling Family Charitable Foundation, and Hope Morgan Ward ’73, M.Div. ’78, a United Methodist bishop.Sperling, of Wayland, Massachusetts, serves on many nonprofit boards and, from 1997 to 2010, was a member of the Duke libraries’ advisory board, serving as chair from 2006 to 2010.

This summer, allegations surfaced that Duke cancer researcher Anil Potti had misrepresented his academic credentials on research grant applications.

Over the summer, Robert Calderbank, a professor of electrical engineering and mathematics and the former director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, became dean of natural sciences at Duke.

While French artists were creating Cubist works and Italian artists were combining politics and color into Futurist paintings, a small but powerful movement known as Vorticism was taking hold in British art circles. Traditionally treated as an insular movement in standard art history, Vorticism is anything but, according to a new Nasher exhibition.

Twenty years ago, artist Wendy Ewald began exploring how children view themselves. She gave them cameras and asked them to take self-portraits and use them as catalysts for verbal and written expression. Literacy Through Photography, or LTP, was launched in the Durham public schools and then expanded to other parts of the world.

Alice Bacharach Sherr was a young girl in Egelsbach, Germany, when Nazi sympathizers broke the windows of her family home and wrote on the fence outside: Hier wohnt ein Jude (A Jew Lives Here). Alice was sent to Switzerland as part of a kindertransport program and came to the U.S. after the war. But her family fled to France, where they were captured. Her father died after being detained, and her mother and sister, Edith, died in Auschwitz in 1943.

In 1890, James B. Duke organized the American Tobacco Company out of the family business—W. Duke, Sons, and Company—and other tobacco interests they had acquired. This new conglomerate expanded to become the largest of its kind, adding nearly 250 companies over the next twenty years. The “Tobacco Trust,” as it became known, controlled so much of the cigarette and plug-tobacco market that, in 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court found the company in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and ordered its dissolution. Out of the breakup, four firms were created: American Tobacco, R.J. Reynolds, P.

Free For All: Fixing School Food in AmericaBy Janet Poppendieck ’67. University of California Press, 2010. 368 pages. $27.50Greasy pizza. Soggy french fries. Flaccid fruit drowning in sugar syrup. Is it any wonder that school lunches have a bad rap?

DukeReads, an interactive, online book discussion group led by a university faculty member or administrator, returns for its fourth year with a list of selections that ranges from The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt to Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane. Frank Stasio, host of North Carolina Public Radio’s popular talk show The State of Things, will return as moderator.

Project Search, Duke’s newest preorientation program, aims to have Duke’s newest students respond— early and often—to the opportunities of a research university. Duke is home to researchers who “can read primates’ minds, create artificial chromosomes, and engineer artificial blood vessels,” the program says on its website. “And these labs all have undergraduates.”

Eason Abbott grew up loving Duke and cheering for the Blue Devils with his father, Michael Abbott M.B.A. ’83. When it came time to consider colleges, Duke was at the top of a short list that also included Georgetown University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But the Raleigh resident knew that even though he had the academic and extracurricular achievements to do well at Duke, he would most likely end up following his older sister to UNC.

Harold L. “Spike” Yoh Jr. B.S.M.E. ’58 chose Duke for his undergraduate education because of its challenging engineering curriculum and because he wanted to head south for college. Little did he know that the university would profoundly shape the course of his life.

Nick McCrory is standing, arms at his sides, back facing the water, exactly ten meters from the pool. In a moment, he will launch himself backward and grab his lower legs, forcing his body into a jackknife position. He will then do threeand- a-half somersaults before entering the water headfirst, almost soundlessly. This is a dive called a back three-and-a-half somersault pike: back to the water, three-and-a-half somersaults, legs straight in the pike position. It will be the fifth time McCrory has ever attempted it.

A generation of young adults grew up listening to music on compact discs, and another is coming of age with digital music devices that are smaller than a deck of cards. But a new exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art seeks to bring vinyl records back into cultural consciousness—and in a big way.

Men who take statins to lower their cholesterol while undergoing treatment for prostate cancer are 30 percent less likely to see their cancer come back after surgery compared to men who do not use the drugs, according to a new Duke study. And those taking higher doses of the drugs were even less likely to see their cancer recur.

"When bankers get together, they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money,” says Hans Van Miegroet, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde.Van Miegroet’s course “Art and Markets” has broad appeal. Listed under both economics and art history, it unites students with different backgrounds for a semester-long collaborative project.

Stacks of broken projectors, four boxes of expired projector bulbs, a desktop, a laptop, VCRs, and hooks draped with VGA, RCA, Ethernet, and USB cables and extension cords are crowded into a ten-foot-by-ten-foot office in the basement of the Biological Sciences, or Bio Sci, building. Keikarion George sits in the center of this organized chaos and tries to stay calm. It’s 9 a.m., and soon his phone will be ringing, his email inbox will be filling, and his Skype voice-over-Internet window will be popping up.

As an avid fisherman and outdoors writer born long before the days of sunscreen awareness, it was probably inevitable that I would end up with skin cancer. What’s more fortunate is that I live within a few miles of West Campus and Jonathan Cook’s Mohs surgery unit. Having been under Dr. Cook’s expert knife twice, I was pleased to see him featured in your May-June [2010] issue. Bridget Booher does a good job describing how humanely the doctor treats his patients, and I’d like to add something from my own experience.

Athanasius Kircher was a true Renaissance man, a polymath. A biography of him, published in 2004, was subtitled The Last Man Who Knew Everything. Kircher, a Jesuit scholar who was born in Geisa in what is now Germany, lived from 1602 to 1680 and made important contributions to a wide range of fields.

Homecoming 1970 took place on a glorious fall afternoon with mild temperatures, light breezes, and high spirits. On October 31, in Wallace Wade Stadium, the Blue Devil football team was ahead 16-10 at the half, and head coach Tom Harp seemed well positioned to lead his 5-2 Blue Devils to a victory over Georgia Tech.

Project WILD, Duke’s oldest pre-orientation program, has a well-honed gear list. The list goes out to the not-quite-yet freshmen who sign on for two weeks of hiking in western North Carolina: broken-in hiking boots, waterproof rain jacket, flashlight, medical-insurance card, and so on.

Last fall, Durham County health director Gayle Harris faced a thorny question: How do you get a confused and suspicious public inoculated against H1N1 influenza? The much-feared flu strain had already arrived in Durham, forcing Duke to cancel several summer youth camps. Nationwide, H1N1 had infected 22 million people, killing 3,900, according to estimates by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, persuading Durhamites to get vaccinated was proving tough.

As Durham’s summer unmistakably asserts itself in late June, the books are finally packed, and L. Gregory Jones is moving out of the office he’s inhabited for thirteen years as dean of Duke Divinity School. After a few months of double duty, he’s ready to fully take on a newly created role at Duke, vice president and vice provost for global strategy and programs. He is just back from a trip to Kunshan, China—soon to be the site of a 200-acre campus with a strong Duke link—where the mayor congratulated him on Duke’s basketball fortunes.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos. Hyperion, 2010. 352 pages.$25.99.

Chicita Forman Culberson Ph.D. ’59 has devoted her career to the painstaking task of cataloguing the chemical diversity of lichens, those drab growths one sees clinging to life on rocks and tree trunks in the most unlikely places.

Parents can’t help themselves. They want their children to succeed. But sometimes the best of intentions can thwart a student attempting to find his own way. In her new book, That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week: Helping Disorganized and Distracted Boys Succeed in School and Life, Ana Homayoun ’01 helps parents understand the importance of making students responsible for their own mistakes. In addition to a host of study and organization techniques, the book counsels parents to resist the urge to fall into the “competitive parenting” trap.

In a Chronicle essay he wrote his senior year, Hardy Vieux ’93 encouraged his peers to take personal responsibility for changing the status quo. The subject of the essay was campus race relations, but Vieux’s call to action was universal in scope. “We are not entitled to anything we don’t work for ourselves,” he wrote. “No one on this campus (or in this world) is entitled to leadership, power, title, clout, or money unless they work for it.”

President Richard H. Brodhead, former trustee Tom Clark ’69, and more than 150 others helped kick off the new Duke LGBT Network in early June at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York.

In Gazette, May-June 2010, a photograph accompanying an article about the regeneration of cardiac cells in zebrafish showed the wrong fish. An image of a lionfish (Pterois mombasae) was mistakenly substituted for one of the zebra danio (Danio rerio), shown here.

People are angry about BP’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the subsequent massive oil spill. Gavan Fitzsimons, R. David Thomas Professor of marketing and psychology at the Fuqua School of Business, who studies how individuals respond to marketing and brands and how they behave as consumers, examines why people have vented their anger at the company, and what, if anything BP can do to address the problem.

Heather Heenehan M.E.M. ’11 still remembers a certain trip to the beach quite vividly. She was only three at the time, and caught a glimpse of dolphin fins in the water. “My little legs kicked off, and I ran into the water,” she says, “and I stood there screaming, ‘I’m in the water with them!’”

Two new female-only residential communities opened this fall, marking an increase in student housing options for women at Duke.The Women’s Housing Option, or WHO, community, located in Few quadrangle above the Women’s Center, is open to all rising sophomore, junior, and senior women. And on Central Campus, the Panhellenic Association has made housing available for sorority members in two apartment buildings.

In the first half of the past decade, personal computers became commonplace in many American homes. They were supposed to bring benefits in education and close the achievement gap between students from different economic backgrounds, but according to a new study out of the Sanford School of Public Policy, that isn’t necessarily what’s happened.

For decades, oceanographers have embraced the idea that Earth’s ocean-overturning currents operate like a giant conveyor belt, continuously transporting deep, cold polar waters toward the equator and warm equatorial surface waters back toward the poles along narrow boundary currents. But Duke’s Susan Lozier, professor of physical oceanography and chair of the division of Earth and ocean sciences at the Nicholas School of the Environment, says it’s time to reconsider that hypothesis.

Your “Saving Face” article [May-June 2010] describes important work being done by Dr. Jonathan Cook and the Duke Mohs Surgery Unit, but two accompanying tables (“Are You at Risk?” and “What Cost Beauty?”) repeat popular misconceptions about tanning without any critical inquiry concerning their accuracy.

I suppose periodically you receive letters like the following; perhaps it is time for another.My time at Duke in the early ’50s is unabashedly dated: multiple big bands; bowl games (!); “preppy” dress; the nation’s unquestioned best athlete, Dick Groat [’53]; apprehension about the Korean War; etc.

Not to take anything away from the Snapshot article [May-June 2010] about Duke grad student Ken Ilgunas’ attempt to save money and live as simply as the legendary Henry David Thoreau, but I would like to note that in the 1948-50 period, there was a student who used the lounge areas in the West Campus dorms, particularly the one in what was known as “FF,” to sleep. He usually had only the clothes he wore and used the bathroom facilities of the dorm as necessary. He was known as “Roberto.”Now, this student was really down to the simple life! 



Joel McGinley’s broadside against the former Duke parapsychologist J.B. Rhine in the May-June [2010] issue is riddled with misstatements of fact.

I enjoyed your interview with professor Dubois about the World Cup [Q&A, May-June 2010], but he neglected the fact that South America is the other major force in each World Cup and in soccer generally. When Dubois says, “in the final rounds, where the European teams plus Brazil basically play against each other,” he is leaving out Argentina, which has two championships and two second-place finishes, and Uruguay, with two championships and a total of five semifinal appearances.