Duke - Summer 2013 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/summer-2013 en Shaping a Campus Hub https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/shaping-campus-hub <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>The Bryan University Center is full of campus activity, and it will be even more so once the West Campus Union closes for renovation this summer. With performance spaces, meeting rooms, student activities, the University Stores, and dining, it is an essential part of student life today. It might be surprising that the long saga of its construction makes it one of the campus’ most-debated and most-anticipated buildings.</p> <p>The story starts in 1949, when William J. Griffith ’50, then a student (later vice president for student affairs), looked at the site of today’s Allen Building with some friends. As he told The Chronicle in 1982, “We paced off the site where Allen Building sits today and decided it would make a great location for a Union Center.” They even talked to President Edens about their idea, but the need for an administrative building prevailed, and the Allen Building went up in 1954. In 1959, a Long Range Planning Committee called a union a top priority and estimated the cost at $4 million. It wasn’t until 1970, when Terry Sanford became president, that momentum began to build.</p> <p>In the fall of 1970, Sanford commissioned a committee, including students, to determine the philosophy and purpose of a union. In 1971, another committee made further recommendations. It proposed that the union should contain lounges, an arts-and-crafts center, a forum, a gallery, a multipurpose room to be subdivided, a theater, dining options, services such as a bookstore and post office, guest rooms, and “special interest shops for the sale of ice cream and leathers, candles, and other craft items.” At this date, the expected cost was $8 million.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/retro-320x200_1.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>On again, off again</strong>: Years before construction began on the Bryan Center, the university's attempts to build a student center were continually delayed by rising cost estimates.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>The planning committee—again, with students—visited numerous student unions around the country to continue to refine ideas, and an architect was selected. A pamphlet from 1972 stated that initial drawings would begin that year, with groundbreaking expected in the fall of 1973. However, the need to raise more funds delayed groundbreaking for more than three years. Finally, on December 10, 1976, a number of guests joined President Sanford in the ceremonial groundbreaking on the site. Barbara Hall ’76 (and later M.D. ’80), immediate past chair of the building committee and past president of the union, commented, “Some students became so dedicated to the project that they seemed to be majoring in university center planning.” Indeed, the classes of 1975, 1976, and 1977 together pledged more than $175,000 in gifts toward the building, and the Student Project for University Development (SPUD) was active in fundraising.</p> <p>Although half of the expected $8 million had been raised by 1977, inflation had driven the cost to $11.5 million. The trustees authorized the construction to start, but university architect James Ward told The Chronicle in February 1978 he was “reluctant to close down Union Drive” until he was “sure that a building is going to come out of the ground.”</p> <p>In May 1978, Joseph and Kathleen Bryan pledged $3 million toward the project. The Greensboro couple, neither of whom were alumni, remarked, “We are doing this because we feel it is the duty of private citizens, whenever they are able to do so, to contribute to the private sector of higher education.” With this generous gift, the building had its name, but there was still a shortfall; the cost was now $12.5 million.</p> <p>On September 5, 1978, President Sanford wrote an extraordinary letter to 55,000 alumni. “This is the first time I have ever written a letter like this, as you know, but this is a special occasion, a special opportunity, a special need…. We are awarding the construction contract on August 12, and we will start construction immediately; if we are not successful in raising these additional pledges, we could find it necessary to suspend construction.” His plea yielded $1.3 million.</p> <p>After nine years of planning, pledging, and pleading, students had become disenchanted with the project. An editorial in the February 23, 1979, Chronicle noted, “When the ‘Site of the New University Center’ remains only a site for over two years, many of us begin to wonder if we’re not meant to eat, receive mail, and attend experimental theater productions among the trees out there.”</p> <p>To the relief of all on campus, construction began in May of 1979, and the Bryan Center was officially opened in February 1981—some thirty years after the idea had been proposed. The Durham Morning Herald wrote that “you have to get past the skin” to take in the building in all of its impressiveness. Offering a flattering assessment not always echoed by later users of the building, it said the Bryan Center “sort of cascades down a natural hill, takes root among the pines and hardwoods, and looks far less pretentious than it is. Inside, however, its 144,000 square feet are composed in flamboyance…. [T]he center is like a great mall, with activities scattered about.”</p> <p>The opening weekend took advantage of the Bryan Center’s scattered-about spaces, with musical and theatrical performances, a champagne toast, film screenings, and even a gathering to watch the Duke-UNC basketball game on television.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Gillispie is the university archivist.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-24T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, May 24, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/retro-620x265.jpg" width="620" height="265" alt="(Credit: Duke University Archives)" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The long quest to build the Bryan Center</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Fri, 24 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498716 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/shaping-campus-hub#comments Devil's Own: Marriage of Jupiter and Juno https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/devils-own-marriage-jupiter-and-juno <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><em>Marriage of Jupiter and Juno</em> (c. 1720-30), by Nicola Maria Rossi, is in the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection. Floating in the clouds at the center of a swirling entourage of winged attendants, the Roman gods Jupiter and Juno are joined in marriage by the young torch-carrying Hymenaus, god of weddings.</p> <p>Jupiter swoops in from the right, while his bride seems rooted to her seat in the clouds, pressing herself away from him with an outstretched hand. This gesture, along with her fully clothed body and downcast eyes, signals her maidenly modesty.</p> <p>Venus, goddess of love, triumphs over all and is crowned in the upper right.</p> <p>Nicola Maria Rossi was a celebrated Neapolitan artist whose portraits, religious works, and mythological paintings were popular with nobility throughout Europe. While Rossi’s artistic style significantly changed throughout his career, his works from the 1720s are distinctive for their clarity, pastel colors, and light brushstrokes.</p> <p>This work is included in “The Human Position: Old Master Works from the Collection,” an exhibition at the museum on view from June 20 through August 18.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-24T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, May 24, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/devils-own-620x265.jpg" width="620" height="265" alt="(Courtesy: Nasher Museum of Art)" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/art-art-history-and-visual-studies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Art, Art History and Visual Studies</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/arts-and-culture" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arts and Culture</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Fri, 24 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498715 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/devils-own-marriage-jupiter-and-juno#comments The Missing Movement https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/missing-movement <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>If Phil Cook backed his way into the study of gun violence in the U.S.—arriving at the topic via a broader study of criminal justice—Kristin A.&nbsp;Goss found herself thrown in headfirst. On the afternoon of April 20, 1999, Goss M.P.P. ’96, then a graduate student at Harvard, was standing in her Somerville apartment when she saw the face of a Denver anchorman on the television set. Goss had grown up in Colorado, and she recognized the anchorman. “I remember thinking, wondering why there was no real movement for gun control in this country. And I realized I was staring at my dissertation topic.” That dissertation, titled “Disarmed: The Real American Gun Control Paradox,” won the Harold D. Lasswell prize—awarded nationally for the best dissertation in the field of public policy— and helped secure Goss a position at Duke, where she was hired in 2005 as an assistant professor of public policy studies and political science.</p> <p>The “paradox” in “Disarmed” is a political one: Even as incidents of gun violence become more numerous and widespread, Goss argues, gun-control activists have not been able to achieve serious firearms-policy reform. For Goss, this is partly a matter of divergent strategies. While the gun lobby successfully focused much of its energy on state and local laws, gun-control activists were intent on getting national legislation passed—the theory being that only big and bold legislation could solve the gun-violence epidemic.</p> <p>“The difficulty was that gun-control advocates overreached in the early days,” Goss says. “By pushing for handgun bans, they didn’t build up a momentum from lower-level, more incremental victories. These handgun-ban strategies helped energize and politicize the NRA and make it into the no-compromises ‘gun lobby’ that it is today.”</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>“I found myself wondering why there was no real movement for gun control in this country. And I realized I was staring at my dissertation topic.”</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>In 2006, Goss incorporated much of the material from her dissertation into&nbsp;<em>Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America</em>, which was published&nbsp;by Princeton University Press, and endorsed by many prominent gun-control campaigners—from Sarah Brady to U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy—as both an important political history of firearms policy and a playbook for activists.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/goss-250x375.jpg" style="height:375px; width:250px" /> <p>Credit: Patrice Gilbert</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>In that way, Goss’ work has come to complement that of her mentor Phil Cook. Where Cook looks at gun control from an economics angle, Goss studies the policy and political context.</p> <p>Goss has turned her attention to the public reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings—and particularly how that reaction compares to the public outcry after the Columbine massacre. She says she has identified four main areas of contrast. First, there is the question of Internet activism, which was relatively rudimentary in 1999 and is extremely dynamic today. Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and Facebook “greatly magnify the ability of leaders to reach sympathizers and mobilize them in an old-fashioned civic fashion.”</p> <p>Second, the networks of survivors of&nbsp;mass shootings have assumed a national profile in a way they never did&nbsp;before. Of course, Goss points out, this kind of activism is not new—Tom Mauser, for instance, a father of one of the Columbine victims, was an extremely outspoken gun-control proponent. But now, Goss says, “there’s a whole new cadre of leaders, operating at a much higher level.” Among those leaders are the Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard and former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who—along&nbsp;with her husband, Mark Kelly—recently founded Americans for Responsible Solutions, a PAC dedicated to reducing gun violence.</p> <p>A third factor, according to Goss, is the willingness of deep-pocketed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to throw his money and power into a range of gun-control measures. Bloomberg’s PAC, Independence USA, has invested millions in candidates sympathetic to gun-control measures. In February, Independence USA spent $2.3 million attacking Debbie Halvorson, an NRA-endorsed Illinois Democrat campaigning to replace former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Halvorson eventually conceded in the primary.</p> <p>“Bloomberg is the tenth-richest person in America,” Goss says, “and he’s willing to do the hard politics in a way I haven’t seen from a lot of other donors. He’s sending a message that if you associate yourself with the NRA, it’s a losing strategy.”</p> <p>And there’s the timing with respect to the political season. The Columbine shootings took place in 1999, in the run-up to the hotly contested 2000 presidential election. Sandy Hook, on the other hand, occurred&nbsp;<em>after&nbsp;</em>Barack Obama had been elected to a second term, meaning that Obama has been able to speak out against gun violence in a way he never would have in September or October of 2012. Meanwhile, Republicans, having lost not just the presidential election but plenty of Senate races as well, face the challenge of devising a gun-policy platform that appeals to an increasingly diverse electorate. Goss, like her colleague Phil Cook, has been much in demand in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings—by her count, since December, she has written four newspaper op-ed columns, appeared on radio or television nine times, and been quoted on the topic of gun control thirty-four times. In April, Goss, who spends half the academic year in Washington, leading the Sanford School’s new Duke in D.C.-Public Policy program, was on hand as the Senate weighed a series of gun-control proposals. None of those proposals, even a compromise measure on background checks, gained enough votes to&nbsp;proceed in the Senate.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong><em>Cautiously optimistic</em>: Goss says the Sandy Hook mass shooting could provide the&nbsp; political opening for stricter regulation.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>“I watched the debate and a few of the&nbsp;votes, and I can say that it was very jarring to see the pro-gun rights senators giving each other backslaps,” Goss says, “directly below all these victims and survivors of gun violence, with their faces drawn. It was moving and stirring and really quite stunning.”</p> <p>Goss says she’s kept tabs on the unpredictable gun-control debate for too long to hazard any predictions on how the next year will play out. Despite the failure of the most recent gun-control measures, she says gun-control activists still have a modicum of momentum on their side. “I think you’ll find that the activists are now really looking at the 2014 midterms for an opportunity to persuade lawmakers.”</p> <p>Consider Americans for Responsible Solutions and Independence USA, two PACs that will be active in the run-up to the midterms, she adds. “Election results can be extremely persuasive.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-21T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, May 21, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/shooting-1200x700.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/matthew-shaer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Matthew Shaer</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Have gun control advocates adopted the wrong strategy?</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498721 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/missing-movement#comments Theater: Hoi Polloi https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/theater-hoi-polloi <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/theater2-250x375.jpg" style="border-style:solid; border-width:0px; float:left; height:375px; margin-left:20px; margin-right:20px; width:250px" />How do Americans come together - and fall apart?</strong> That question fuels the works produced by Hoi Polloi, an Obie-winning New York-based theater collaborative. Foudner and artistic director Alec Duffy '98 (left, pictured with Ritza Calixte '13) brought the group to Duke in February for a two-week residency using Plato's<em> Republic</em> as a starting point for exploring the Occupy Wall Street movement. This spring the group presents a stage adaptation of John Cassavetes' film <em>Shadows</em> at Jack Theater in Brooklyn.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-21T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, May 21, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/theater1-620x265.jpg" width="620" height="265" alt="Photos by Alex Maness." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/art-art-history-and-visual-studies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Art, Art History and Visual Studies</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/arts-and-culture" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arts and Culture</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/performing-arts" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Performing Arts</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498719 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/theater-hoi-polloi#comments False Memoirs https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/false-memoirs <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>In 1997, a woman named Misha Defonseca wrote a book about the four years she spent as a child searching war-torn Europe for her Jewish parents, who’d been deported by the Nazis from Belgium. She’d been sheltered by a pack of wolves and she’d killed a German soldier, a story all the more remarkable and harrowing because she’d been only seven years old when her search began.&nbsp;<em>Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years&nbsp;</em>was an international bestseller, translated into eighteen languages.</p> <p>A decade later, Herman Rosenblat wrote another wonderfully improbable memoir,&nbsp;<em>Angel at the Fence</em>, in which he recounted how a young girl passed him food through the electrified fence of a concentration camp—a girl he married years later after he met her on a blind date in New York. On her program, Oprah Winfrey called Rosenblat’s romance “the single greatest love story” she’d ever heard, and the film rights to the book sold for $25 million.</p> <p>Unfortunately, neither story was true. Defonseca admitted as much in 2008, and Rosenblat’s publisher canceled&nbsp;<em>Angel at the Fence&nbsp;</em>two months before its scheduled release in February 2009.</p> <p>Colleen Fitzpatrick, recruited by a friend, was part of a team that helped expose both frauds. They found a record of Defonseca registering for the first grade in Belgium at a time she’d claimed to be running with wolves. And while Rosenblat had indeed been imprisoned in Schlieben, the team traced his story through his wife’s family—and discovered she was hundreds of miles from that concentration camp at the time. An examination of the camp’s layout and interviews with other survivors, meanwhile, suggested it would have been unlikely—or impossible—for a prisoner and an outsider to get close enough to the guarded, electrified perimeter fence to exchange food.</p> <p>Fitzpatrick worked pro bono on both cases. Why?</p> <p>“I don’t want people saying I’m biased,” she says. “I get nothing for this, nothing.” Yet she researched both cases—and is involved in a third possible hoax—because she finds such grievous frauds offensive.</p> <p>“There are still some of us who care about the truth, and the truth of the Holocaust,” she says. “And I believe that should be kept as true and pristine as possible for future generations.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-21T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, May 21, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/false_memoirs_banner_1200x700.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/sean-flynn" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sean Flynn</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498720 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/false-memoirs#comments Duke Ticker: Basketball, Men's Track and Field https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/duke-ticker-basketball-mens-track-and-field <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>BASKETBALL:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Senior forward&nbsp;<strong>Mason Plumlee</strong>, left, and women’s basketball&nbsp;junior forward&nbsp;<strong>Haley Peters</strong>, right, were named to the Capital One Academic All-District III team. The award recognizes the nation’s top student-athletes for their performances on the court and in the classroom</li> <li>With 18 points on February 10&nbsp;against Boston College, guard&nbsp;<strong>Seth Curry&nbsp;</strong>’13, right, and his brother&nbsp;<strong>Stephen</strong>&nbsp;became the all-time highest-scoring brother duo in NCAA history. In their combined NCAA career, the two have accumulated 4,736 total points, putting them ahead of Tyler and Ben Hansbrough, who finished with 4,485 career points.</li> <li>Former Duke basketball players&nbsp;<strong>Kyrie Irving ’14</strong>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<strong>Luol Deng ’07</strong>&nbsp;have been named NBA All-Stars. During All-Star weekend in Houston, Irving won the 3-Point Contest.</li> <li><strong>Adam Silver '84</strong>&nbsp;will become the NBA commissioner after David Stern retires next year. After having worked as the league’s chief operating officer for the past six years, Silver will start&nbsp;as commissioner in February.</li> </ul> <div class="column"><strong>MEN'S TRACK AND FIELD:</strong></div> <ul> <li>The men’s 4 × 800 relay team set a school record of 7 minutes, 26.88 seconds in the event at the Millrose Games in mid-February. The relay team consisted of&nbsp;<strong>Tommy Meister&nbsp;</strong>’16,&nbsp;<strong>Kyle Moran&nbsp;</strong>’15,&nbsp;<strong>Nate McClafferty&nbsp;</strong>’16, and&nbsp;<strong>Michal Filipczak&nbsp;</strong>’16, in that order.</li> <li><strong>The score: 8,011 </strong>points won by&nbsp;<strong>Curtis Beach&nbsp;</strong>’13 to win the Texas Relays decathlon, the second time he’s passed the 8,000-point mark and a new personal record. Beach won the pole vault at 16 feet, 8 3⁄4 inches—a new personal record. He also finished first in the 1,500-meter in 4 minutes, 17.94 seconds, more than 12 seconds ahead of everyone else.</li> </ul> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-16T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 16, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/ticker-620x265.jpg" width="620" height="265" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/athletics" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Athletics</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498722 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/duke-ticker-basketball-mens-track-and-field#comments Next Steps: Continuing the Conversation https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/next-steps-continuing-conversation <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>As part of the university’s 50th anniversary of black students at Duke, a number of regional events are setting the stage for alumni to explore the past and future of Duke’s commitment to issues of race relations and diversity.</p> <p>Participants at the first two events, held this past April in New York and Atlanta, included: James Braxton Peterson ’93, MSNBC contributor and director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University; Nana Asante ’12, former president of the Black Student Alliance; Shavar Jefferies ’96, an associate professor at Seton Hall Law School; Janet Hill, a member of Duke’s board of trustees, principal with Hill Family Advisors, and parent of NBA player Grant Hill ’94; Maurice Wallace Ph.D. ’95, associate professor of English and African &amp; African American Studies at Duke; <a href="https://www.lisaborders.us/&nbsp;">Lisa Borders ’79</a>, president of Grady Health Foundation.</p> <p>Additional events are scheduled for Boston (May 29), Los Angeles (June 28), and Washington (July 20); Dallas and Chicago will host events in late summer or early fall. <a href="http://www.dukealumni.com" target="_blank">The Duke Alumni Association website</a> will update the calendar of events, including speaker and participant information, as it becomes available.</p> <p>Event organizers are also encouraging all alumni to mark their calendars for the culminating 50th Commemoration events on campus this fall as part of Founders' Day weekend activities, October 3-6.</p> <p>“We want to be sure everyone understands that this anniversary isn’t just about one particular group—it’s about all of us,” says D. Michael Bennett ’77, who leads an alumni advisory committee for the commemoration. “What happened fifty years ago changed Duke for everyone. And we want everyone to be part of recognizing the significance of those events.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-15T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, May 15, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/50th.jpg" width="568" height="370" alt="50th logo" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/diversity-equity-inclusion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Diversity, Equity &amp; Inclusion</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/duke-black-alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Black Alumni</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Regional programs explore 50th commemoration of integration</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498725 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/next-steps-continuing-conversation#comments An Interview With The Zebrafish https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/interview-zebrafish <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><blockquote> <p><em><strong>Hello, I'm Danio.</strong> I know it’s crowded, but come in. I started showing up in places like this in the 1980s, and now I come here by the tens of thousands. You may say it feels like a meat market, but I prefer to think of it as just a nice place to swim, eat, and mate. Mating, after all, is a significant part of my job, and I excel at it. I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable. I do have some outstanding characteristics, and there’s nothing like ultraviolet lights to show them off—my circulatory system, perhaps, or my neurological network. I glow in the dark; we can discuss that further when we’re more familiar.</em></p> <p><em>Danio rerio is my full name, but you can just call me Danio. I’m a zebrafish. And I may be saving your life. In fact, I may be helping you figure out how your life develops in the first place. But that’s you. First, a little more about me. Yes, since you ask, I do always dress this way; I’m only an inch long, so I think the stripes make me look sleeker. And black and white together is, of course, a classic.</em></p> <p><em>Compare me to him over there, in the shabby white fur, muttering to himself. That’s Ratty—Rattus norvegicus. His eyes are red because he’s albino, but also because he’s been drinking himself to sleep since the 1980s, when scientists began doing their first research with zebrafish. Since then I’ve made serious inroads into his territory in the lab. And don’t even ask about that dude asleep with his face on the table in the corner. That’s Cavy—Cavia porcellus. Guinea pig. He’s felt forgotten for decades.</em></p> <p><em>But if you really want to understand what makes me so satisfying as a research subject—a “model system,” as scientists like to call me—visit the labs of some of the Duke scientists doing groundbreaking research using—no, I’m embarrassed. Okay—using me.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>Start with cell biology professor Nicholas Katsanis, a geneticist whose research lab uses zebrafish to study genetic diseases in humans. He’s addressing not only which genes cause which diseases in a long-term research-based approach, but also trying to figure out, with the clock ticking, how to address specific genetic abnormalities in newborn babies.</p> <p>Katsanis says studying genetic disease once it’s either killed a patient or been fully expressed is like archaeology: “We go in after the massacre has occurred, we dust off relics, we can figure out how many soldiers were there,” what weapons they used, and so forth. Which is great—in past tense. “But you cannot use this information in a reliable fashion to predict where the next battle is going to happen or try to prevent it.”</p> <p>“And I think that’s what it’s all about,” adds Katsanis—actually preventing or curing disease. In the archaeological model, if a child is born with a genetic disease, by the time it’s understood, it’s too late to do much.</p> <p>“As a community, we are engaged in employing genomics as a brute-force tool,” Katsanis says. “There are three things. Diagnosis? We’re doing okay. But prognosis? And proactive treatment? We really suck at it. I’d like to begin thinking about genetics not in an absolute deterministic terminal disease, but as a manageable set of diseases. How can we use genomics in a cost-efficient manner to improve predictive power? And help inform the decisions made by physicians and their patients?”</p> <blockquote> <p><strong><em>This is where I come in.</em> </strong><em>Read this part. It’s about me: Danio.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>Most genetic modeling using mammals takes an enormous amount of time to introduce genetic changes and allow them to grow embryonically. A rat or mouse, for example, takes three weeks to gestate maybe a dozen babies, called pups. Plus, of course, you can’t see what’s happening until the pups are born, unless you kill the mother to remove and examine the pups.</p> <p>Too long for Katsanis, who focuses on babies. “Can we improve the guesses we take as to what’s wrong with these babies, these young kids?” he asks. Can we shorten the diagnostic time and maybe get a chance for treatment?</p> <p>“If your nervous system is already saturated with some toxin, I can’t fix it anymore. But if we can understand early enough what the toxin is in the first three months, how it gets into your cells, maybe—just maybe—we can do something.”</p> <p>So enter the zebrafish. The zebrafish allows Katsanis to rapidly address the cause and the treatment of that disease. It shares 70 percent of its genome and its anatomy with humans. It has bones, neurons, eyes, muscle fibers, organs. It shares our fundamental biochemical mechanisms of development from zygote to fully grown animal.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Zebrafish are more than just cheap and easy to manage in large numbers. They're also, at least early in their development, transparent.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>“So if I have a child who has loss of light-sensitive cells at the back of her eye,” says Katsanis, “I can actually copy that defect in the developing light-sensitive cells of a zebrafish.” And he can do that cheaply, quickly, and in an adequate number of trials to demonstrate that whatever conclusion the various trials suggest is correct. “Or imagine we have a child who has deteriorating muscles. You sequence the genome, and you end up with twenty-seven candidate genes. Your next question is, which of these genes contribute to that child’s phenotype? Which mutations? And how?” If you used rats or guinea pigs for each of those genes, the experiment would take several years— far too long to help that child—and cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.</p> <p>But using zebrafish, “we can actually model all these genes in four to six weeks,” says Katsanis. And for a fraction of the cost. Each of these gene candidates can be turned off through the injection of small molecules, known as morpholinos, into an egg. The short embryonic time—two to three days—allows him to examine the effect of inactive genes egg by egg within just a few days. And he can, very directly, watch it develop. Zebrafish are more than just cheap (it costs about 20 cents per day to maintain a mouse; you can maintain about a hundred zebrafish for the same cost) and easy to manage in large numbers. They’re also, at least early in their development, transparent. You can put embryos under the microscopes that feed the big screens in Katsanis’ laboratory, and each looks like exactly what it is—a big egg, with no shell to impede your vision.</p> <p>Postdoctorate fellow Christelle Golzio gives a tour of the fish rooms. Each shoebox-sized tank can hold twenty fish or more, stacked six-high on long rows of racks. Labels show subjects’ genetic strains and particular experiments. Golzio estimates 10,000 tanks or so, easily a couple hundred thousand zebrafish in this facility—on one floor of one building, and it’s only one of several zebrafish facilities, large and small, at Duke. And if you need more zebrafish? Easy. “We mate them and harvest the eggs,” Golzio says. Which means you put some male and female zebrafish in a tank, leave them overnight, and gather the hundred or more eggs in the morning.</p> <p>Golzio puts a petri dish with a few eggs on the platform of a fluorescence dissection microscope. The screen shows lovely bluish spheres floating peacefully, with easily identifiable yolks in the middle. A dish from the previous day shows eggs already twitching with life, embryos folded around yolks. They’re still perfectly clear: You can see every aspect of development by doing nothing more complex than looking at a screen. “At two days you can see the blood flowing through the vessels,” she says.</p> <p>The zebrafish lab population explosion began in the 1970s, when University of Oregon molecular biologist George Streisinger, looking for an inexpensive and effective model for his research, glanced at the fish tank he kept as a hobby. Zebrafish were cheap. They were easy to breed. They lived in murky water in the wild—they were originally isolated from the extremely polluted Ganges River—so they were hardy. They laid and fertilized their eggs wantonly, and the developing embryos were transparent.</p> <p>He began using the fish in his research and spreading the news of the effective new model. ZFIN (the Zebrafish Information Network), based at the University of Oregon, helped spread word of the model. And as genetic sequencing progressed, the entire zebrafish genome was sequenced. Meaning scientists can, as Katsanis does, choose specific genes, cause specific mutations, and watch the results develop in real time. Katsanis has done this and made a difference in the lives of children. He has letters from grateful families to prove it.</p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>You see? </strong>I’m not just a fish; I’m a hero. By 1993 scientists had already held a Zebrafish Meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor lab and decided to rename me: I was called </em>Brachydanio rerio <em>before that; you can read about that in </em>The Zebrafish Book, <em>and yes, you may say it: Book ’em, Danio. Everyone likes to say that.</em></p> <p><em>Back to me. By 1996, the journal </em>Development <em>dedicated an entire issue to me, and in 1998 scientists already had 1,913 publications of research using me as a subject. Last year? Try 17,396, according to ZFIN.</em>&nbsp;</p> </blockquote> <p>David Tobin, an assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke, uses zebrafish to study tuberculosis. Zebrafish obviously lack lungs, so <em>Mycobacterium tuberculosis, </em>the bad guy that makes humans sick, doesn’t trouble zebrafish. But, “they do get infected by a natural pathogen that’s its closest relative, called <em>Mycobacterium marinum,” </em>Tobin says. “There are a lot of conservations” between both the two bacteria and the zebrafish and human response to them—places, that is, where the organisms function in the same way. The same kind of immune system cells respond by making the same kind of granuloma to isolate the pathogens. “And the great thing about the zebrafish,” Tobin says, “is, because the larvae are optically transparent, you can visualize the whole process of infection in real time under a microscope, and do long time lapses and look at interactions of specific immune cells with the invading bacteria.</p> <p>“So that’s really fun.”</p> <p>The other good thing about zebrafish is what Katsanis especially likes about them: “They’re genetically tractable.” Scientists can go in and affect one or another specific gene, but more important, they can use the fish as a sort of cannon fodder. “About a third of the world has been exposed to tuberculosis,” Tobin says. Yet only 10 percent of that population develops active disease. Environmental and nutritional issues certainly affect susceptibility, “but it’s clear there’s a strong genetic component” to who does and doesn’t get TB. To check that out, you just get tons of zebrafish and tons of <em>Mycobacterium marinum. </em>The zebrafish model allows Tobin to do “forward genetic screens, in which you make no assumptions about what you will find, and you randomly mutagenize the zebrafish.” That is, his lab randomly introduces mutations and other effects and sees what makes fish more or less susceptible to disease—doing so by using fluorescently labeled bacteria and seeing what they see.</p> <p>Yep—fluorescently labeled. They make bacteria that fluoresce one color and infect embryos that fluoresce in a different color, and then where the bacteria flourish, that part of the fish identifies the site—and allows one to watch the infection. Under the microscope. While it’s alive. And transparent. Katsanis’ lab does the same—introducing fluorescent labeling to elements of the zebrafish, which then makes certain parts of the fish glow.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>The heart—at least in zebrafish— can repair itself. This is changing the way medical scientists pursue heart regeneration.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>(This glowing, by the way, got started in 1999, when scientists injected eggs with green fluorescent proteins from jellyfish. The Glofish you can buy for your home aquarium are just zebrafish bred to have a lot of that stuff.) Differently prepared markers can illuminate neurons, the circulatory system, bones. Even heart tissue. Heart tissue? According to Ken Poss, professor of cell biology at Duke and Early Career Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, zebrafish have yet another capacity that renders them amazingly useful as experimental models. “They do something better than we can: They regenerate tissue.” Poss’ lab studies heart regeneration. Around a million Americans per year have heart attacks, each attack causing the death of up to a billion heart cells. The body responds by quick scarring but cannot generate more heart tissue, and for decades people have believed that heart tissue is a one-shot deal: You get what you were born with, and every time you lose some, it never comes back.</p> <p>“Zebrafish are the best laboratory system we know so far for regenerating tissue,” Poss says. “If you remove a quarter of a zebrafish heart, or genetically kill two-thirds of their heart cells, they’re lethargic. They don’t perform well on a swim test,” at first. But, in non-human fashion, their heart cells come back?</p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>Seriously. </strong>It turns out I can regenerate heart tissue, and instead of a Nobel Prize they give me—I’m a fish!—swim tests. I try to be a good sport.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>“Zebrafish can recover, and reverse all these symptoms,” says Poss. “We want to know how they do that.” So amid all the excitement about stem cells and how to teach them to grow into whatever we want them to, his lab has been seeking the source of this new zebrafish heart tissue. Poss’ lab uses the same combination of see-through embryos and fluorescent tagging the other labs use. “We permanently tag certain cell types and follow their progeny,” he says, which led to an astonishing conclusion.</p> <p>“We thought stem cells would be involved,” he says. “But [zebrafish] have cardiac muscle cells that can be stimulated to divide.” The heart—at least in zebrafish—can repair itself. This is changing the way medical scientists pursue heart regeneration. “Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t the idea or optimism that this could even happen,” he says. “Most thought the heart was an organ that was static.”</p> <p>Now, he says, human heart regeneration is "something we can almost grasp."</p> <p>And the introduction of more and more of those fluorescent proteins make the fish more and more useful. “You can get virtually any tissue you want to glow: blood vessels, the heart, the brain, skeletal muscle. We can get maybe fifty different colors in one animal.” You can even tag particular compounds.</p> <p>“You can, with zebrafish, visualize brain activity. You introduce a tag that will activate when a neuron fires, and you can visualize learning paradigms.” Then you put the zebrafish in a petri dish on a microscope, and you watch it think.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>The zebrafish shares 70 percent of its genome and its anatomy with humans. It has bones, neurons, eyes, muscle fibers, organs.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>In another Duke lab works Elwood Linney, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology who pioneered zebrafish research at Duke a decade or so ago. Linney, whose undergraduate degree was in engineering, likes to figure out how things work, and he worked with stem cells in mouse embryos.</p> <p>“I wanted to work with an embryonic system, where we could watch embryos develop in real time,” he recalls. “I keep on remembering: I’m a <em>visual </em>person.” He switched to zebrafish and hasn’t looked back. “Let’s say you have a gene expressed only in the heart. You identify its DNA elements, clone that, and you couple that to a gene that connects to a fluorescent protein. In the next generation, you get embryos that are expressing that fluorescence in the heart.”</p> <p>He marvels at Tobin’s research on tuberculosis, where Tobin uses fluorescence to follow infection: “You watch the macrophages come along. You <em>see it happen</em>. Some clever people are making fluorescent probes that are sensitive to calcium,” which is transmitted during the electrical signals causing heartbeats. “You can look at the heart, and the heart is flashing." And the zebrafish heart turns out to beat a lot more like a human's than a mouse's does, so we can learn not just about regeneration, but also about our own heart function through zebrafish hearts.</p> <p>For his own research, Linney takes Poss’ work even a step closer to the beginning. Every organism, from a single-celled bacterium to a human being starts out as one cell. “You get <em>us </em>from a single cell,” he says. Linney studies how cells know which developmental route to take and when to do so. He’s spent his career studying how the nutrient called retinoic acid, related to Vitamin A, affects the process. Scientists have long known that it plays a role in turning genes on, controlling development, and that its presence at the wrong time can cause catastrophe: Years ago pregnant women using acne creams containing related chemicals saw terrible birth defects.</p> <p>Current hypotheses suggest that the molecules that allow retinoic acid to turn genes on can, in the absence of retinoic acid, keep genes off at times when they should be off. “There are mechanisms in the fertilized egg that are restricting certain genes and allowing other genes,” says Linney. “We think one of the restrictive mechanisms involves the receptor that retinoic acid binds to.” Linney’s environmental work involves a class of chemicals called triazoles, found in pesticides, body-building compounds, and acne pharmaceuticals. “We think all of these can affect the set of genes that control the distribution of retinoic acid in the embryo, can inhibit the genes that metabolize retinoic acid in the embryo. If the enzymes are inhibited, it’s almost like pouring on extra retinoic acid at the wrong time and mucking things up. We’re using zebrafish as a model for that trying to see which set of these chemicals might be more dangerous for humans to use than others.” He’s also experimenting on human stem cells to examine whether the manner in which retinoic acid receptors restrict gene expression in embryos may also hold in human stem cells.</p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>And who’s helping him do it?&nbsp;</strong>Me, that’s who. Danio Rerio. The humble zebrafish, taking over the lab once I got my chance.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>All the scientists are careful to note that the zebrafish is hardly a panacea, and that though it’s making a great contribution, mice, rats, nematodes, and other experimental systems are in no danger of being shoved aside. “No one in the zebrafish field would want to give the impression that it’s taking over,” says Poss. “Any model system works: Mice are well established; the tools are there.” Zebrafish are not even particularly personable. “I like my work,” Katsanis says. “I also like sushi. What can I tell you?”</p> <blockquote> <p><em><strong>Okay hold on</strong>. After all I've done for these scientists...</em></p> </blockquote> <p>But it’s a fish that makes science move faster and better, and Duke has jumped on the opportunity, Poss says. “Our hope is to use the system in a way that provides the advantages that are lacking in mice: speed, throughput [high-volume, rapid experimentation], and visualizing animals early in development.” He’s enjoyed watching the zebrafish community spread over the past ten years, since Elwood Linney was at Duke essentially on his own. “The school has been especially supportive. It’s inexpensive to work with zebrafish compared to mice, but to build the facility? The equipment? That’s a big investment, and not every place will make that investment.”</p> <p>It’s a big investment in a small fish—a small fish that deserves credit for helping to unlock some very big secrets.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong><em>Okay,</em> </strong><em>I can work with that. But I’ve actually got to leave you now. Both Ratty and Cavy are awake, and neither of them looks cheerful. I wonder if you can tag your genes for invisibility?</em></p> </blockquote> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-15T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, May 15, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/zebrafish-1200x700.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/graduate" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Graduate</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/research" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Research</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/scott-huler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott Huler</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Forget rats, mice, and guinea pigs. Here&#039;s the ultimate research subject, and it&#039;s prepared to reveal everything about itself.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498731 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/interview-zebrafish#comments Straight Shooting https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/straight-shooting <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>On a Friday in December, Philip J. Cook received an email message alerting him to a mass shooting at a small school in Newtown, Connecticut. The details were startling: The perpetrator, a twenty-year-old later identified as Adam Lanza, had murdered his mother with one of her own handguns, before making his way to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed twenty children and six staff members, including the principal and the school psychologist. Just before 10 a.m., with police closing in, Lanza shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead on the scene.</p> <p>Two things quickly occurred to Cook, a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy. The first was that the magnitude and specifics of the crime, even in the era of mass shootings like Columbine (fifteen dead, twenty-one injured) and Virginia Tech (thirty-three dead, seventeen wounded), were unprecedented. “I think I’m pretty human when it comes to this kind of thing,” Cook says. “It was completely devastating. And the more we learned about it, the more horrific it became.”</p> <p>The second was that his phone would be ringing off the hook soon. Cook, who is lanky and tall, with a head of formidable silver hair, has been researching U.S. firearms policy for almost forty years. He has racked up a reputation—to quote one of his colleagues—as the single “most important person working on the problem of gun violence in the U.S.” When a mass shooting happens, Cook is frequently the first person reporters call.</p> <p>Sure enough, by the next day, the queries had begun to pour in. <em>The New York Times </em>got in touch, as did National Public Radio, and Al Jazeera. There was even an e-mail request from a producer for a television network in Turkey, which was interested in creating an hour-long special on Newtown. Most reporters offered variants of the same question: How can we stop this from happening again?</p> <blockquote><strong>The NRA has disseminated a series of arguments that Cook and many of his colleagues believe are contradicted by the best science on the subject.</strong></blockquote> <p>Cook answered as best he could. Targeted law-enforcement tactics—like the “stop and frisk” approach—have been proven to work, he explained, and a more comprehensive registration system for guns could help, too. Above all, he suggested a common-sense, middle-ground approach. “If you want legislation that doesn’t impair legitimate uses but has the potential for reducing the body count, limiting the size of magazines is the way to go,” he told a reporter for an NBC affiliate in California.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/cook-320x200.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>Professional reckoning</strong>: Cook now questions the effectiveness of policymakers - including himself - who have spent decades trying to reduce gun violence. Credit: Chris Hildreth.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>But truth be told, he had reason to believe no one would heed his recommendations. He’d fielded plenty of these kinds of requests before—after Virginia Tech; after the Fort Hood attacks of 2009, when an Army major gunned down nineteen at a base in Texas; after the 2012 murder of twelve people during a midnight screening of <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>, in Aurora, Colorado. In each case, there was a media furor, some thundering pronouncements from politicians— followed quickly by counterattacks from the National Rifle Association—and resounding calls for a “national conversation.” And in each case, the issue eventually disappeared from the front pages and the TV screens.</p> <p>All academics, of course, occasionally experience a similar frustration—the inability to directly influence the course of contemporary events, no matter how nonsensical or even backward the decisions of professional policymakers might appear. For Cook, this frustration is particularly acute. He prides himself on being a true economist, a numbers man, a man who trusts in the power of empirical evidence and hard facts. And the hard facts collected by Cook over the course of his career yield an irrefutable conclusion: More guns equals more dead people.</p> <p>Yet public-opinion polls consistently show that even as the number of gun deaths in the country soars—the number hovers around 30,000 a year, and could reach 35,000 annually by 2015—Americans have comparably little interest in gun-law reform. A recent and much-discussed Pew study, for instance, found that on the list of the American public’s priorities for 2013, “strengthening the economy” was number one, “dealing with moral breakdown” was number sixteen, and “strengthening gun laws” was near the very bottom of the list, at number eighteen, just above “dealing with global trade.” That study was conducted in January—a month after the Newtown shootings.</p> <p>More distressingly for Cook, the NRA, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue from members, has succeeded in disseminating a series of arguments that Cook and many of his colleagues believe are contradicted by the best science on the subject. The most prominent of those arguments, put forward by economist John R. Lott Jr. in <em>More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws</em>, is that one of the only things that halts gun violence is a heavily armed public.</p> <p>This is a dismaying inverse of what Cook has found. As a result, he says, “Much of the effort by people I respect has been spent playing defense against big flashy claims that are being made on the other side.” He props one long leg on a nearby chair and stares into the middle distance. “It’s been hard to kind of take charge of the agenda because the stuff that’s getting the headlines is coming from people that I don’t respect but who have access to the media,” he continues. “They have a big machine behind them. So it seems like it’s important to have somebody take them to account, and there’s a group of us who try to do that. It isn’t as uplifting as it might be.”</p> <p>Which means Cook isn’t done fighting yet. Far from it.</p> <p>Read enough online critiques of Phil Cook’s work, or Twitter messages about him, or the comments under online articles in which he has been featured, and you might reasonably conclude that he is a French-born Communo-Fascist, dispatched to the U.S., like some gun-stealing Terminator, with the express purpose of ripping up the Second Amendment and making a ten-acre wide bonfire of semiautomatic assault rifles. In fact, Cook grew up with guns, and still owns one today. He was raised in Clarence, New York, not far from Buffalo, on a large tract of land that his family rented out to local farmers. Cook’s parents tried out a few agricultural “experiments” themselves—three pigs and then some goats—before finally settling on dairy cows. Growing up, Cook saw guns as a part of life. Cook’s father kept a .22 rifle, mostly to help clear out animal intruders, and Cook and his three older brothers learned how to use it. There was no fetishism associated with the gun, no speeches on the importance of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” It was just a tool, one of many on the farm.</p> <p>Cook was a skilled high-school athlete—he continued to run marathons until 2008, when worries about his heart made it impossible—but from an early age, he sensed his future was in academia, and he went from an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan straight on to graduate work at Berkley, where he earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1973. Notably, for a man whose name eventually would become so deeply associated with firearms policy, Cook did not immediately gravitate toward the topic. There was no “Road to Damascus moment,” he likes to say.</p> <p>In 1973, a newly minted assistant professor at Duke, Cook was asked to teach a seminar on criminal-justice policy; at the same time, in his research, he was delving into the efficacy of the correctional system, from job opportunity rates for ex-cons to prosecutorial clearance rates. All of it provided a natural segue to gun policy. One of his first studies on the subject, published in 1976, was titled “The Effect of Gun Availability on Robbery and Robbery Murder: A Cross-Section Study of Fifty Cities.”</p> <p>In that paper, Cook concluded that although “an increase in the density of guns in a city has no effect on the overall robbery rate,” robberies involving guns were three times as likely to result in the death of the victim. Furthermore, the data indicated that the “per capita rate of robbery murders increases with the density of guns in a city.” His closing note was almost plaintive: “My results,” he wrote, “do suggest the prediction that, <em>if </em>a way could be found to reduce the density of handguns in a city, then this reduction would ameliorate the seriousness of the robbery problem.”</p> <p>Before tackling gun violence, Cook had never received much press for his work. But now the media were suddenly paying attention. It began with a commuter paper in Delaware that harped on Cook’s finding that gun robberies were less likely to injure the victims than knife robberies. “It was clearly cherry-picking,” says Cook, because it focused on injuries and not death. “And it was being presented as being an example of how ridiculous academic research is. So my introduction to this intellectual marketplace of ideas was a sneering response.”</p> <p>Rather than discouraging him, that sneer inspired Cook. In subsequent years, he approached the gun question from a kaleidoscopic variety of angles. He has explored the effects of gun violence on children (dire) and the effect of gun violence on society at large (the poor bear the brunt of the impact, but every part of the socioeconomic spectrum is affected adversely). He helped demonstrate that a net increase in household gun ownership leads to more homicides and, more generally, an increase in gun use in the course of a crime.</p> <p>And he worked to show that, contrary to the assertions of the NRA, guns actually are used rather infrequently for self-defense. To that end, mining data from a National Crime Victimization Survey published in the mid-1980s, Cook found that only 3 percent of all victims were able to use a gun against a potential burglar. “Since about 45 percent of all households possessed a gun during that period,” he later wrote, “I concluded that it is relatively unusual for victims to be able to deploy a gun against intruders when they have one nearby.”</p> <p>In fact, he discovered, residential burglary rates and home invasion rates are not reduced at all by a high prevalence of guns. “The reverse is true,” he says. “More guns results in more residential burglaries, presumably because guns are profitable loot.”</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>According to public-opinion polls, even as the number of gun deaths soars, Americans have comparably little interest in gun-law reform.</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>Perhaps most famously, in a 2000 book called <em>Gun Violence: The Real Costs</em>, Cook and Jens Ludwig A.M. ’92, Ph.D. ’94, a former graduate student of Cook’s, estimated that the annual cost of gun violence approaches $100 billion a year—a sum that includes medical and legal fees, lost earnings, and insurance expenditures. In straightforward prose, they laid out some possible solutions to the national gun-violence epidemic: harsher sentencing for using a gun in a crime; the closure of the loophole that allows consumers to purchase rifles and pistols at a gun show without a background check; more aggressive policing; and further research into “personalized guns”—weapons that recognize the grip or fingerprints of an authorized user.</p> <p>“There are a variety of programs to reduce gun violence that enjoy widespread popular support, have little effect on the ability of most private citizens to keep guns for personal use, and have benefits that exceed costs,” Cook and Ludwig wrote. <em>Gun Violence </em>ignited a robust debate in the mainstream media, which covered the book extensively—the conservative <em>National Review </em>chided Cook and Ludwig for disseminating a “sensational hundred-billion-dollar factoid,” while <em>The New York Times </em>praised the book, calling it “the first effort to make a comprehensive estimate of the price the nation pays for criminal shootings, gun accidents, and suicides committed with guns.”</p> <p>Ludwig, now a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says that some of Cook’s contributions “are so foundational that they have become deeply infused into the policy and research discussion in ways that make you forget that the ideas were ever not with us.” He offers a couple of examples: Cook coined the phrase “secondary market” to describe all of the unregulated gun transactions that occur in the U.S. every day. Cook also is responsible for the estimate that 40 percent of all gun transactions are conducted on that secondary market. As Ludwig points out, the figure is used frequently by politicians such as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden.</p> <p>Anthony Braga, another frequent co-collaborator, and a senior research fellow at Harvard, says one of Cook’s signal achievements was in his rigorous insistence on “scientific data collection,” rather than becoming tangled in the messy and subjective political web that surrounds the contemporary gun-control debate.</p> <p>Cook uses “analysis to reveal the underlying conditions that cause social problems to persist,” says Braga. “Other academics seem content with describing problems without offering any concrete policy recommendations based on their research. Phil wants to make a difference now.”&nbsp;</p> <p>Phil Cook is sixty-six. In four years, he says, he will resign his tenure and aim for emeritus status. As a kind of summing up of his career, he recently began working on a long document he fondly refers to as his “memoir.” (Working title: “The Great American Gun War: Notes From Four Decades in the Trenches.”) The essay is less academic paper—lay readers will find it blessedly free of dense jargon—than emotional self-reckoning.</p> <p>“Criminologists, economists, public-health scholars, and policy scientists have all made substantive contributions” to the field of gun research, Cook writes at one point in the essay. “Unfortunately, it is not clear that this research has improved the quality of the debate or the policymaking... In short, gun violence serves as a challenge to the very possibility of evidence-based policymaking in a contentious area.”</p> <p>It’s an extraordinary statement—one that gets at the deep frustrations and feelings of impotence that can plague academics who dare wade into contemporary politics.</p> <p>But Cook is not wholly nihilistic on the topic of his life’s research: He points out in “The Great American Gun War” that he has never second-guessed his “decision to spend so much of [his] career studying gun violence.” There remain flickers of hope and plenty of terrain left to cover. Beginning this year, Cook will work with a range of scholars, including Jens Ludwig and Columbia professor Sudhir Venkatesh, of <em>Gang Leader for a Day </em>fame, to establish something called the Multi-City Program, which will examine how gang members in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and Oakland obtain guns. “The hope is to find out the [business] activities of the gangs, and how the gang itself sources guns, and what do they do with them,” Cook says. “How do they distribute them within the gang?”</p> <p>Cook is also in discussions with Oxford University Press to write a new book on the topic of gun policy and research. The book, which would be coauthored by his protégé and Duke associate professor <a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/missing-movement" target="_blank">Kristin A. Goss</a> M.P.P. ’96, will be targeted at general audiences, with the purpose, Cook says, of “providing some antidote to the miseducation that’s going on all the time.”</p> <p>In late April, the focus wasn’t on general audiences but rather on the U.S. Senate. Senators were gathered to vote on a series of gun-control measures, including the so-called Manchin-Toomey amendment, which would have closed the gun-show loophole and made background checks mandatory for all gun buyers. Despite pressure from the White House, and the support of several Republican lawmakers, the amendment failed to gain the sixty votes necessary to proceed to full consideration. “The most ambitious gun-control push in two decades,” Reuters noted at the time, had gone down to conspicuous defeat.</p> <p>For Phil Cook, it was all depressingly familiar stuff. The stunning incident of gun violence, the promises from politicians to do more, the outcries from the public—and then nothing. “The proposal for universal background checks enjoyed support of nine out of ten Americans, and the president and vice president took leadership of the effort,” Cook says. “But now it appears that it has all come to nothing. As a citizen, I found it disheartening to have the cynics proven correct.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-15T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, May 15, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/shooting-1200x700_0.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/campus-news" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Campus News</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/matthew-shaer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Matthew Shaer</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The hard facts collected by “a numbers man” over the course of his career yield an irrefutable conclusion: More guns equals more dead people.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498732 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/straight-shooting#comments Super Sleuth https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/super-sleuth <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Maurice Conway does not recall being particularly polite when the phone rang that first evening, and he had every right not to be. He was fifty-seven years old and retired because of a bad heart that had required doctors to splice veins around the clogged spots in his arteries, and he’d given up cigarette only five months earlier, which will make any man irritable.</p> <p>On October 24, 2007, he was settled in a comfortable chair in his house near Askeaton, an Irish village from which he has never roamed far. His cell phone rang. The number is unlisted, and yet a stranger with an American accent was jabbering at him.</p> <p>“There was this woman on the phone,” he says, “and she told me about this arm that was found in the snow, and she talked to me about this Kevin McGregor and the U.S. Army and this plane crash that I’d never heard of.”</p> <p>“There’s a phrase we use over here,” Conway says. “ ‘It’s all double-Dutch to us.’ And it was all double-Dutch to me. So, no, I wouldn’t have been very polite.”</p> <p>He told the woman on the phone, “It’s very difficult for me to understand what you’re on about. Could you call back in an hour?”</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Fitzpatrick was for many years a scientist, and for some of them an actual rocket scientist.</strong></p> </blockquote> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/alaska-250x375.jpg" style="height:375px; width:250px" /> <p><strong>Deadly discovery</strong>: A remote site in Mount Sanford, Alaska, above, brought challenges in identifying victims of the 1948 crash; right, the Northwest Airlines DC-4. Credit: Associated Press.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>So Colleen Fitzpatrick Ph.D. ’83, who used to be a rocket scientist but now practices a softer science called forensic genealogy, rang back. And she explained again. In 1948, a Northwest Airlines charter with a crew of six carrying twenty-four merchant seamen from Shanghai to New York crashed into the side of a remote Alaskan mountain. Forty-nine years later, two pilots and aviation-history buffs named Kevin McGregor and Marc Millican finally found the wreckage on the side of Mount Sanford and, poking up from the ice, a severed hand and forearm. The U.S. military, through its Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab (AFDIL), already had eliminated twenty-eight of the victims as the owner of the arm, which left two. One was Frank Van Zandt.</p> <p>Fitzpatrick’s job was to find a living relative of Van Zandt (the genealogy part) to compare a DNA sample (the forensics) from the severed hand. The difficulty, though, was two-fold. One, Van Zandt had no direct descendants. Two, Fitzpatrick was working with mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from generation to generation exclusively through females. That meant she had to trace Van Zandt’s family tree back through his mother and grandmother and so on until she found a kind of genetic matriarch, from whom she could then work forward through a separate, unbroken branch of daughters and granddaughters until she found one of Van Zandt’s distant, living relatives.</p> <p>This is not easy.</p> <p>And this is why Maurice Conway was befuddled. Conway, a retired machinist in an Irish village, had never heard of Van Zandt, the merchant seaman flying home from Shanghai sixty years earlier.</p> <p>But Fitzpatrick (who, by the way, remembers Conway being perfectly polite, all things considered) persuaded him to swab the insides of his cheeks with a DNA test kit and mail it back to AFDIL.</p> <p>A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, Conway got a message on his cell phone. “A very, very jubilant Colleen Fitzpatrick,” he says. “She was screaming, ‘It’s a match, it’s a match!’ ”</p> <p>And that is why it is now definitively known that a severed hand frozen in a glacier since 1948 belonged to Frank Van Zandt, second cousin twice removed of Maurice Conway, two men separated by 5,000 miles and sixty years.</p> <p>There are 6.3 billion people on the planet,” Fitzpatrick is saying one afternoon in January, “and I needed to find one.” She pauses for a beat. “And I <em>found him</em>.” She’s a petite woman of fifty-seven with a puff of auburn hair and a round face, which she arranges into a firm, proud smile when she says that. The Hand in the Snow, as the Van Zandt episode came to be called, was one of the first major media splashes for Identifinders International, the company she runs out of her Huntington Beach, California, home, with her partner (business and domestic), Andrew Yeiser. But it is not particularly surprising that she found Maurice Conway, either. Forensic genealogy is a niche profession, and a relatively new one at that—it apparently wasn’t even recognized as a distinct discipline when Fitzpatrick self-published her first book, <em>Forensic Genealogy</em>, in 2005—and it has some jingly definitions (“<em>CSI </em>meets <em>Roots</em>” being the most pop-culturally relevant if generationally mangled example). But Fitzpatrick, who has a gift for reducing complicated concepts to simple conversation, can dumb it down. “I find people for a living,” she says.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>“There are 6.3 billion people on the planet. I needed to find one.”</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>It’s more complicated than that, of course. She finds people, yes, and she’s very good at it. But she also solves historical mysteries, deciphering centuries-old records and spelunking through the past, near and distant, like a time-traveling gumshoe. She was part of a team that identified a Baby Doe who drowned when the <em>Titanic </em>sank, and she has twice helped expose popular Holocaust memoirs as frauds. Last year, she plugged a DNA sample from a crime scene twenty years old into databases to narrow the search for the killer of a teenaged girl in Seattle to a genetic line related to Pilgrims who came over on the <em>Mayflower</em>. Granted, that is a rather large pool so many generations later, but still a smaller one than detectives had generated in the previous two decades.</p> <p>More important, though, are the routine cases, the anonymous clients who are looking for someone and, through that someone, maybe something more. For them, she finds connections they’ve ached for, sometimes for decades.</p> <p>On the coffee table in her den, for instance, there is a framed certificate that says “For Colleen Fitzpatrick” across the top. “Guru, guide, diplomat, friend, and sleuth extraordinaire. With boundless admiration, affection, and appreciation.” It’s from a septuagenarian man, and his family, who’d been adopted as a child and had been searching for his birth parents for decades. They’re long dead, but now the old man knows where he came from. “She solved a 56-year-old riddle in only nine months,” it reads at the bottom, “January-September 2012.”</p> <p>“You need to know who you are, where you come from,” Fitzpatrick says. “There’s some kind of very strong biological connection to <em>know</em>: to know who you look like, if you look like your mother or your father, that they like hot food like you do, that they were gifted musically like you are. If you don’t know where you come from, there’s this big hole in your life.”</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/plane-320x200.jpg" style="height:200px; width:320px" /> <p>Courtesy of Colleen Fitzpatrick.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>And every now and then, there is a man like Maurice Conway. When you cold-call a person about a frozen, severed limb, when you reach across all those miles and all those years, the focus can change and the past can be brought into the present. “You begin to ponder the big picture of our nature,” she says. “You begin to realize there’s more to life than birth and marriage and death records, that there’s this big connectedness. There’s something really profound that we have, and sometimes you don’t know you’re missing it until you find it.”</p> <p>She was not formally trained for this business of finding people. Rather, Fitzpatrick was for many years scientist. She spent the early 1980s at Duke, smashing neutrons into calcium molecules as part of earning her doctorate in nuclear physics. She spent a couple of years after that lecturing in physics at Sam Houston State University, in Texas—“My two years as cannon fodder,” she says—but got distracted by the optics lab on campus.</p> <p>She happened to attend a seminar by T.H. Jeong, one of the foremost experts on holograms, and was rapt as Jeong reproduced a three-dimensional image of a little toy duck. Yes, it might seem silly—there’s not much practical application for a fancy representation of a child’s toy—but Fitzpatrick was fascinated by the process, by the precision of the technique and the materials and the interplay of light on solid matter. “There’s physics, there’s chemistry, there’s perception,” she says, “so many different areas that combine, literally, into what we define as the big picture.”</p> <p>She began spending Friday nights in the optics lab, when the building was still and quiet (slight vibrations and even the change in air pressure from a closing door can ruin a hologram), trying to reproduce that image of a toy duck. It took her five years, by which time she’d left academia for a job at an aerospace firm, where she worked on laser-radar amplification. Holograms weren’t part of her day job, so she built her own optics lab in her garage, weighting down a table with a half ton of sand to steady it. It was a hobby, really: Her first perfected hologram was of a small, pink angel her grandmother had given her, and she created others that a friend inlaid into a coffee table so that, from the proper angle, there appeared to be flames flickering in the wood.</p> <p>In 1989, though, after a second job at a different firm working with lasers, she opened her own shop, Rice Systems, Inc., and started hunting for government contracts. She won her first one in May 1990 from the U.S. Army’s Aviation Systems Command to develop, in the military’s highly hyphenated terms, “non-destructive testing of metal-matrix composite materials for high-performance aircraft engines.” In layman’s terms, she was going to use holograms to look for flaws in airplane parts. Her idea didn’t work, but she’d learned how to write grants and navigate the government bureaucracy. She landed a couple more small contracts, then some larger ones, and her business grew. Through the 1990s, she worked on an optical gyroscope for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a contraption for NASA to see how crystals grow in space, and an eye-pressure gauge that doesn’t use that annoying puff of air.</p> <p>By the early 2000s, Rice Systems had grown to a staff of ten. Fitzpatrick was contracted to develop the optical and environmental sensors for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), a nuclear-powered spacecraft that was going to explore Europa and, possibly, Ganymede and Callisto. It was a huge contract, both in terms of money and exposure. But NASA’s priorities shifted with the political winds of the Bush years, and JIMO was cancelled. For Fitzpatrick and Rice Systems, it was a final, crippling setback.</p> <p>“The building’s burning down around you, sixteen years of your life is going up in smoke, and I said, ‘Okay, it’s time to regroup,’” she says.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 280px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/nytimes_0.jpg" style="display:block; font-size:12px; height:375px; margin-bottom:10px; width:280px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mystery solve</strong><strong>r</strong><span style="background-color:#eeeeee; font-size:12px"><strong>:</strong> Fitzpatrick helped identify a baby boy, Sydney Leslie Goodwin, who drowned on the&nbsp;</span>Titanic<span style="background-color:#eeeeee; font-size:12px">. Credit: Bettman/CORBIS.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>She turned to genealogy. Actually, Fitzpatrick had been a genealogist, albeit an amateur one, long before she was a physicist.</p> <p>She grew up in New Orleans, the oldest of four children born to a florist and his wife, and surrounded by grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, an extended family of dozens. And they told stories, the older ones did, of the Fitzpatricks and Kellys (her mother’s side) that had come before, stories of yellow fever and tuberculosis and of the Kelly who was the first man with a bathtub in his neighborhood. “They were referring to people who died years before they were born; they’d never met them, yet somehow their oral history was spot-on,” she says. “When you have that kind of childhood, you don’t come to love history—you’re born living history.”</p> <p>One day in 1968, when Fitzpatrick was thirteen years old, her maternal grandmother found in a closet an iron box that had belonged to <em>her </em>grandmother. Inside was Fitzpatrick’s great-great-great grandmother’s marriage contract, the equivalent of a prenup, written in French and dated 1854. “This was wonderful,” she says now. “Everything about it was interesting, because it was a connection to her.”</p> <p>She took the document to her high-school French teacher (Fitzpatrick speaks five languages fluently, and can get by in a couple more), who helped her translate it. The contract also had a reference number on it, which she sent to the village in France where it originally had been filed, and the clerk there sent her back a copy of the marriage license, which included the names of the bride’s and groom’s parents. She used that information to request more records. “And I did that again and again and again,” she says, “until I got back to the beginning of the records in 1664.”</p> <p>She’d reached back thirteen generations to the Ulmer family in the Alsatian village of Sigolsheim, where they most likely had fled from Germany during the Thirty Years War. But then she noticed something odd in the birth records from that era: For ten years, there were no live births. That led her to research historic weather patterns and medical practices and anything else she could think of until she finally deduced that Sigolsheim had suffered a decade-long scourge of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and induces miscarriages. (It’s also where LSD comes from. “The village where my family came from had been on acid for ten years!” she says.)</p> <p>Solving that riddle took more than thirty years, another hobby Fitzpatrick worked on sporadically. Yet history—the common history of common people—remained a passion. For five years, for instance, beginning in 2000, she coordinated the compiling of an Internet database of 2.5 million birth, death, and marriage records from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Orleans, a task carried out by about 200 volunteers who transcribed records ten pages at a time.</p> <p>“When you’re a rocket scientist,” Fitzpatrick says, “you just can’t leave a hobby alone.” So when she regrouped, she turned to what she knew and loved best. She wrote <em>Forensic Genealogy</em>—“I didn’t even know forensic genealogy existed as a profession”—and she and Yeiser set up their own publishing house, Rice Book Press, to print it. She sold copies at genealogy conferences and seminars, and her name got around (though she already was fairly well-known in certain genealogy circles) as an expert in this new field. Then, one day in 2006, she got an e-mail message from a man she’d never met; she never spoke to him and never would. He was searching for a woman in a Taiwanese village who held the title to some unclaimed property. Could Fitzpatrick help?</p> <p>Why, yes, she could. She required skills in neither forensics nor genealogy: She used Google, and it took her less than ten minutes.</p> <p>She didn’t know what to do, whether she could charge for something so simple and, if so, how much. She asked Yeiser. “Charge him an arm and a leg,” he told her, “but get the arm up front with a four-day guarantee. After four-days, get the leg.”<br /> So Fitzpatrick e-mailed her offer, which was accepted, then four days later e-mailed the Taiwanese woman’s address in Tapei. The man, who she believes was a real-estate investor hunting owners of abandoned properties, was none the wiser and extremely grateful. “And that was the first of eighty arms and legs I got from him over the next two years,” she says.</p> <p>Hardly any of those other seventy-nine searches were as easy as the first. They didn’t involve forensics—no matching of DNA samples—but most required her skills in genealogy, tracing people through old records. Her business grew, and she took on more clients, finding lost relatives and birth parents, roaming across the planet by phone and Internet. It is not lucrative work, but it’s immensely rewarding. Because every now and then, there comes a Hand in the Snow and all that follows.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>She pauses for a beat. “And I <em>found him</em>.”</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>AFDIL wanted to figure out who that severed limb belonged to partly out of respect for the dead yet largely as a science experiment, developing techniques that might eventually help identify 809 Korean War casualties buried in a Hawaiian cemetery. Given the Hand in the Snow’s age and condition, it seemed a good test subject. Indeed, that it belonged to Van Zandt also was confirmed with fingerprints, no small feat considering those fingers had been desiccated by the elements for six decades and, after it had thawed, had been embalmed.</p> <p>Because she was trying to match mitochondrial DNA passed solely by mothers to their children, Fitzpatrick began her search for a match with Van Zandt’s mother. From Van Zandt’s birth certificate, she learned his mother’s maiden name was Margaret Conway and that she would have been born in 1876. Frank’s brother Orville’s marriage certificate, which she found in the archives in Bennington, Vermont, told her Margaret had emigrated from County Limerick, in Ireland.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 480px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/users/196305/how-it-works.jpg" style="height:342px; width:480px" /> <p><strong>How it works:</strong> The yellow circles represent people in a DNA project. The variable is the distance the circles are away from each other. The closer the circles are in the diargam, the more closely those people are related. If two people match on their DNA, they share the same spot in the diagram, and that circle gets larger. The red labels are the DNA markers, signaling where two people have a mismatch. If two people are separated by three mismatches - for example, on DNA markers 385, 290, and 455 - they are a genetic distance of three apart, explains Fitzpatrick. Image courtesy of Colleen Fitzpatrick.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>There were records of six Margaret Conways born in County Limerick between 1872 and 1877, but none of them on a date that would fit Van Zandt’s mother. The search appeared stalled. But what if, Fitzpatrick mused, Margaret Conway was as mildly vain as so many other people? What if she’d lied about her age when her son was born?</p> <p>Turns out she had. Fitzpatrick figured out the Margaret born to John and Ellen Conway was Frank Van Zandt’s mother. Ellen’s maiden name was Drum. So she began searching forward on the Drum line, starting with Ellen’s sister Elizabeth. And she found an unbroken line of females, the names changing with each generation of marriage, from Anne O’Shea to Bridget Sheehy to Cathleen McNamee, who married a man named (coincidentally) Conway and, in 1951 gave birth to a son she named Maurice.</p> <p>When Fitzpatrick called him that first night, when it was all double-Dutch to him, Maurice was skeptical but also curious enough to agree to the DNA test. “Colleen had such a convincing voice,” he says. “Somebody genuinely looking for help, that was the tone of her voice. Sincere. That’s the word.”</p> <p>But while the match in the lab showed that they were genetically related, Maurice still needed to prove their shared lineage— to demonstrate that the DNA link was <em>because </em>he and Van Zandt had descended along a related female line. So he combed through archives and wandered cemeteries, searching for people he never knew were his kin. “It was very exhausting,” he says. “I spent an awfully long time in graveyards. For those four months, I ate, I slept, and I spoke to the dead, looking for inspiration. And that bothered me as well. To me, Maurice, I was disturbing the dead, inquiring into the dead. I was actually disturbing their peace.” And he disturbed their secrets. Elizabeth Drum’s daughter Anne—Maurice’s great-grandmother—was born in 1856. “But the skeleton in the cupboard is October 1857,” he says. “That’s when Elizabeth got married.” This would have been a terrible scandal, a child out of wedlock, and no one in the family had known of it. “But that mixed emotion turned to admiration,” Maurice says. “Just nine years earlier, we’d had the famine, but she had the strength to keep her child. I fast-forward a hundred years, to 1956, and those women were sent to a home, and they never saw those babies again. And without Anne O’Shea, there would have been no Maurice Conway.”</p> <p>But that was the only skeleton rattling in the cupboards. And here’s what else Conway found: his family. He has dozens of cousins on his mother’s side in and around Askeaton, but they’d never been close, never more than nodded at each other on the street. Through his research, he leafed out the wide family tree, and on March 6, 2008, sixty of his relatives gathered to learn of their shared history. At least twenty of them Conway had never stood in the same room with before, and he believes that was the first gathering of his mother’s side of the family in which a Conway was present, let alone hosting.</p> <p>“Prior to this happening, I just had my own family, my father and my brothers,” he says. “But now I have a wider family to pray for and to remember at Mass.” He pauses. “It’s a beautiful story.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-05-15T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, May 15, 2013</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/sleuth-1200x700.jpg" width="1200" height="700" alt="Credit: Jessica Haye &amp; Clark Hsiao" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/sean-flynn" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sean Flynn</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/summer-2013" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Summer 2013</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Colleen Fitzpatrick solves historical mysteries, deciphering centuries-old records and spelunking through the past, near and distant, like a time-traveling gumshoe.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 15 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498733 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/super-sleuth#comments