Spring 2013 Issue

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FEATURES

  • (All photos: Les Todd)
    Ingrid Daubechies’ eyes dart down at her plate of mixed salad greens. She stabs a hefty chunk of endive hiding beneath an arugula leaf and chews it quickly. The words are coming fast now. “We don’t get a three-dimensional map,” she says. “We have a much higherdimensional map. More like eighty. But I can only explain it in three dimensions.”
  • Walking meditation: Stone labyrinth at Duke Integrative Medicine (Credit: Jon Gardiner)
    On Good Friday in 2009, Mary Ann Harrison made a phone call that changed her life. Harrison was suffering from fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, and an assortment of gastrointestinal issues. She was used to living with chronic pain—pain so constant and systemic that restful sleep was impossible and any physical exertion was exhausting. But on this particular afternoon, her abdominal discomfort was so severe that she called her primary-care physician in her hometown of New Bern, North Carolina, only to discover that his office had closed for the Easter weekend.
  • Illustrations by Arlen Schumer
    One morning last semester, a Duke undergrad peeled off from a busy day on campus to hustle to a basement office in the Sociology- Psychology Building, where scientists were waiting to peer into her brain. Within minutes the slim first-year student, chic in a black-and-white shorts set, was sitting before a computer screen in a narrow, beige room. For more than an hour, her fingers clicked answers to hundreds of questions about her tastes, behaviors, quirks, and feelings.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • As winter recedes, millions of Americans renew their pledges to eat better and exercise more. And hundreds of scientists work to discover the keys to make those efforts more successful. Here’s the latest on what Duke researchers are learning about maintaining a healthy body:
  • A $50 million gift from Anne and Robert Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, will launch an initiative to encourage students and faculty members to collaborate across academic boundaries—and to give them the tools to tackle some of the most vexing society-wide issues.
  • Mayer retraced his grandfather's life, including his escape from a Nazi labor camp during World War II
    David Mayer never knew much about his grandfather, Paul. He knew his grandfather had escaped a Nazi labor camp in eastern Germany during World War II and emigrated to the U.S. in 1949. But Paul Mayer died in 1985, before David was born. The reality of that experience remained distant for David—until he found a translation of his grandfather’s journal. “The thing that interests me most is that [my grandfather] never once talks badly about an individual Nazi,” says Mayer. “He never points a finger at a human being and says, ‘That’s their fault.’ ”
  • What are the most significant years in Duke history? By my count, there are three. The first is 1892, when Trinity College moved from Randolph County to Durham, leaving its rural birthplace to seek a new urban setting and a new connection to the world. The second is 1924, when James B. Duke’s gift transformed a fine liberal-arts college into a comprehensive university.
  • Circle of concern: gathering to proclaim "Race Is Not a Party" (Credit: Megan Morr)
    About 200 people participated in an early-February protest sparked by a fraternity party that they said denigrated Asians. The protest sought to hold Kappa Sigma responsible for its “Asia Prime” party; the invitation to the party included stereotypical representations of Asian people and language.
  • From late November to early December, a bit of United Nations alphabet soup hit the sweltering heat of Doha, Qatar. As part of the course “U.N. Climate Change Negotiations Practicum,” ten select master of environmental management candidates from the Nicholas School of the Environment attended the eighteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
  • The catalyst: Economics professor Neil De Marchi began to teach the course in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of his fascination with the art market and the ways in which it fits and breaks traditional economic theory. “It’s a beautiful context to inject a bit of critical thinking and skepticism into students’ previous economics coursework,” he says.
  • Duke Law School’s Guantanamo Defense Clinic has been granted observer status by the Defense Department. Some clinic students are getting the chance to see military commissions in action. Law students Jesse Kobernick and Julie Coleman spent this past fall’s study break observing hearings at Guantanamo Naval Base. Other students traveled there early this semester.
  • For the discerning Duke student who wanted to jumpstart his or her international exposure and couldn’t get enough of the freshman Focus experience, last year’s Duke INtense Global (DIG) fit the bill. The three-semesterlong interdisciplinary program had its test run in India and Russia and featured culture-and language-immersion components. For Edna Andrews, professor of linguistics and cultural anthropology and the initiator of the DIG proposal, the program was an opportunity to change the meaning of the word “classroom.”
  • In the ongoing struggle to find a better way to treat cancer, the hopes of doctors and patients have been buoyed recently by the revival of an old idea—using the body’s immune responses to attack tumors. But while immunotherapies have shown tantalizing promise, they’ve presented frustrating problems. In some cases, the immune system waged attack on healthy tissues and organs, as well.
  • For millennia, African lions ruled a seemingly boundless kingdom, a sprawling, unbroken stretch of savannah onethird larger than the continental U.S. But today, 75 percent of that vast savannah is gone, and humans are fast chipping away at what remains. And Stuart Pimm is worried.
  • LACROSSE: Lacrosse players Casey Carroll ’07, Jake Tripucka ’13, and David Lawson ’13 were selected in the 2013 Major League Lacrosse Collegiate Draft. The 18th overall pick, Carroll is pursuing a master’s degree at the Fuqua Business School after serving multiple tours of duty as an Army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Newly arrived at Duke from King’s College in London, Luke Bretherton brings a fresh perspective on how Christian churches and faith-based causes intermesh with American political life. In a recent Office Hours interview, Bretherton, an associate professor of theological ethics and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, describes four key “temptations” that pose problems for the church as it carries out its public ministry.
  • So you’ve settled into the bathroom for a few minutes only to realize—too late!—you have nothing to read. Bryan Silverman ’15 and his brother Jordan share your frustration. It’s why they started Star Toilet Paper, toilet paper with advertisements printed on recycled paper in safety-tested, vegetable oil-based ink (like common printed napkins). Don’t turn your nose up, though. The idea was compelling enough for Silverman to be named Entrepreneur Magazine’s “College Entrepreneur of 2012.”
  • Birds do it. People do it. Now, Duke researchers are convinced that mice, too, can learn how to imitate songs to woo a mate. The surprising conclusion comes from a team of Duke neurobiologists who observed that male mice imitate the ultrasonic squeakings of other males. The researchers identified certain features in a mouse’s brain that are similar to the parts of the brain humans and birds use to learn vocalization, which suggests mice can pick up a tune.
  • Imagine, just for a second, the night before the first finals period of your freshman year. Your first semester of Duke has gone by in a flash; there are only seven more to go. Between trying to meet everyone in your class, joining new clubs, memorizing the C-1 bus schedule, and perhaps occasionally keeping in touch with friends and family back home, you might have forgotten that other thing—studying. Mild panic sets in, but then, that’s all right. Everyone else around you feels the same way. At least you can look forward to Midnight Breakfast.
  • When the Swiss-based group ensemBle baBel began planning its headline presentation for the 20 Heures de Musiques-Romont music festival this past fall, it first considered performing a work by avant-garde French composer Erik Satie, whose abstract, minimalist works have inspired artists ranging from John Cage and Philip Glass to Coldplay and Lana del Ray.
  • Steve Johnson M.H.S. ’02 is the new artist-relations’ manager for MerleFest, a four-day celebration of bluegrass, old-time music, Americana, country, blues, and rock. He’ll be in charge of selecting and scheduling the nearly 100 artists who perform on fourteen stages during the April event in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. MerleFest was founded in 1988 in memory of the late Eddy Merle Watson, son of Doc Watson, the American music legend who died this past May.
  • (Credit: Jon Gardiner)
    Here’s to you, Mrs. Merritt, onetime lunch lady at Banks High School, Birmingham, Alabama. It is the day before the 2012 Belk Bowl at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, and coach David Cutcliffe is discussing what he looks for in a potential recruit to his Duke University football program.
  • For Aisha Taylor ’05, Duke provided a clear life-changing experience: a “Women as Leaders” course. The course was taught by Betsy Alden ’64, who spearheaded service-learning at Duke and is now an adjunct lecturing fellow in the Program in Education. Alden also helped start Duke Alums Engage, which plans service experiences for alumni in dozens of cities each year.
  • One of the most notorious pieces of Duke’s theatrical history—an anonymously written play titled The Vision of King Paucus—never actually appeared on a campus stage. But when 300 copies of the three-page script showed up mysteriously in student and faculty mailboxes in late 1933, it caused a stir felt across the university.
  • 1891: Students of Trinity College in Randolph County put on The Womanless Wedding—an appropriate production for the all-male student body. 1922: Female students in the Dramatic Club played all the roles in a production of Monsieur Beaucaire in March 1922. The Dramatic Club was coached by Gladys Gross, wife of chemistry professor Paul Gross.

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