Duke - Sep - Oct 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2004 en Presidential Precedent https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/presidential-precedent <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> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="11" style="width:17%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img alt="The graduating class of 1915 passes the old Trinity College Library en route to Craven Hall" src="/issues/091004/images/lg_inaug1949.jpg" style="height:370px; width:580px" /></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>On October 22, 1949, Duke held its first presidential inauguration ceremonies--even though the president inducted, A. Hollis Edens (above), was the university's third president and the institution's ninth leader.</p> <p>William Preston Few, Duke's first president, was inaugurated in 1910 during the Trinity College era before the school became Duke University in 1924. After Few died in 1940, Robert Lee Flowers was inducted during the 1941 commencement exercises, rather than in a separate inaugural event.</p> <p>The ceremony held to install President Edens became the model for future inaugurations of Duke presidents. The academic procession filed past the statue of James B. Duke to reach the dais set up on the plaza in front of Duke Chapel, which provided a dramatic backdrop as President Edens delivered his inaugural address. Delegates from academic institutions around the world joined the local community in celebrating its new leader.</p> <p>The same protocol will be followed when Duke's ninth president, Richard H. Brodhead, is inaugurated on September 18.</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" 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/tim-pyatt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tim Pyatt &#039;81</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Selections from University Archives</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500494 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/presidential-precedent#comments Endowing Endeavors--Forever https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/endowing-endeavors-forever <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> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Locke: saying yes to the worthy projects" src="/issues/091004/images/lg_betsy5x7.jpg" style="height:324px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Locke: saying yes to the worthy projects.</p> <p>Photo: Nancy Pierce</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>The Duke Endowment contributed more than $300 million to the Campaign for Duke, far exceeding its obligations to the university year in and year out. Elizabeth Hughes Locke '64, Ph.D. '72, who retires as president of the endowment after twenty-two years with the foundation, talks about giving on a grand scale and the nature of a "special relationship."</strong></p> <p><strong>Is The Duke Endowment in any way affiliated with the university? </strong></p> <p>No, that's something a lot of people don't realize. People tend to think The Duke Endowment is somehow part of Duke University, and it isn't. It's a completely separate, private foundation, just like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation. We always have Duke people on our board, but we don't have any seats on our board designated for Duke alumni, and our trustees are separate. In fact, when our last trustee was elected, he had to resign from the Duke board of trustees before coming to ours. So, while we share a history, a founder, we're separate entities.</p> <p>That confusion has been problematic in the past. As recently as the late 1950s, The Duke Endowment's contributions to the university accounted for about 50 percent of its operating costs. And that really hurt the university's fund raising because the normal response from any would-be donor was, "Well, you don't need my twenty-five dollars, you've got The Duke Endowment." People thought the endowment was going to provide everything the university needed forever. The endowment doesn't account for nearly as much of the university's budget now, but that doesn't mean it's cut back its support. In fact, it's greatly increased its support over the years. It's just that the university has increased its costs by so much more.</p> <p><strong>How does it feel to give away so much money?</strong></p> <p>It feels great, of course, to be able to say, "Yes, that's a wonderful idea, here's the money, go and do it." But for every time we're able to say yes, there are ten times that we say, "I'm sorry, we can't do that," or, "Your project isn't right for us." So really we're saying no a whole lot more than we're saying yes. And that's not as much fun.</p> <p>We are somewhat insulated, though, thanks to Mr. Duke's wisdom in setting up the trust indenture. The primary reason we would turn people down is that they are not eligible. And that's easier, of course, than saying, "Your project isn't good," or, "We don't have faith in your organization," or any number of other things you can say that would be very hurtful. Mr. Duke narrowed the field geographically but also by institution.</p> <p><strong>What was the most difficult "No"?</strong></p> <p>One situation that's very hard and that happens frequently is when a group of funders, usually local funders, gets together to do something--something good and worthwhile. Somebody will call up and say, "All of us are getting together, and we are pledging to try to help the Special Olympics. And we've got all these pledges. Can we count you in?" And the answer is "No." And that feels bad. It feels like you're not being a team player with your fellow donors, and you're refusing to help something like the Special Olympics or another very worthy cause. That's always hard.</p> <p><strong>What, in your mind, has been the most meaningful program or project you've been able to fund?</strong></p> <p>That's hard to say, but, unquestionably, building and establishing and nurturing Duke University from a fledgling school into one of the best universities in the country has been something we are very proud of. We didn't do it alone, but, on the other hand, for a time, I'd say, we did do it alone. Duke would have closed during the Depression if it hadn't been for The Duke Endowment, and it certainly would not have the stature that it has now if it hadn't been for the endowment's consistent and persistent infusions of money. And advice. In addition to supporting the school financially, we have, for many years, advised the university on the development and direction of different programs.</p> <p><strong>Do you think the image of the Carolinas has changed during your involvement with the endowment? </strong></p> <p>I think the image of North Carolina as a progressive and economically sound kind of state really started with [former Duke President and U.S. Senator] Terry Sanford, and [former Governor of North Carolina] Jim Hunt. There have been leaders in North Carolina who positioned this state rather favorably. I don't think South Carolina has had the benefit of that kind of leadership, although I certainly have to mention Governor Richard Riley, who was a great leader, a former U.S. secretary of education, and a member of our board for some time. And, accordingly, South Carolina has not prospered.</p> <p>Now, the popular thing to say, and it's the truth, is that there are really two North Carolinas. You have the urban, middleclass Piedmont in the center of the state--Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro--and then, East of I-95 and West of I-85, you have abject poverty. And those were the places that were dependent upon agriculture and manufacturing--both fading industries, which have yet to be replaced. And so The Duke Endowment is trying to help people in these areas. We've recently started a program called "The Rural Program," whereby we try to rebuild the economies of twenty communities in North and South Carolina. It's very exciting for us. We've never tried to do economic development before. It's not in our charter. But the grants are going to our eligible beneficiaries. And I think it's looking good.</p> <p><strong>How does the endowment identify which organizations it will support and how it will support them?</strong></p> <p>In the Indenture of Trust that created The Duke Endowment, James B. Duke specified the types of institutions he wanted to support. So the endowment supports Duke every year, and quite generously, but it also has commitments to three other schools--Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University--and to nonprofit hospitals and children's homes and rural Methodist churches throughout North and South Carolina. That's where Mr. Duke made his money on tobacco and hydroelectric power, and he felt that the money should go back to those places.</p> <p>And in terms of how it gives that support, the endowment is unique. Unlike most foundations, which designate donations for specific projects, roughly half of our grants are general operating support, meaning they can be used at the recipient's discretion. We do that for all four of the schools, and that's probably among the most treasured money that we give.</p> <p>So Duke automatically receives a certain amount every year in general operating support without putting in a request for it--and will continue to. But then there's a whole lot on top of that, which the endowment specifies for a particular building or program. That's money that's negotiated, that could go to other causes, to another college or hospital. Duke doesn't want to assume an entitlement that it doesn't have, but at the same time we're not just like any other foundation. We're closer to Duke than that. We have historical ties and a very special relationship.</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" 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/patrick-adams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Patrick Adams</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500477 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/endowing-endeavors-forever#comments The Skinny on the Low-Carb Craze https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/skinny-low-carb-craze <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">The bagel section at Elisabetta Politi's neighborhood supermarket says it all. Six months ago, shelf space devoted to the onetime low-fat staple of health fanatics took up three long yards. Today, it's less than half that."People are not buying rice, bread, pasta, and bagels as much as before," observes Politi, the nutrition manager of the Duke Diet & Fitness Center. "And for the first time, they're eating more eggs. This low-carb trend has touched everybody. Even people who are not overweight have begun thinking that it's probably not a good idea to eat too many carbs."</p><p>Most of these new products are being marketed to the 24 million Americans now on low-carb diets and the estimated 44 million others thinking about trying one in the next year. But they're also satisfying the hunger pangs of millions of other Americans who, overweight or not, have begun cutting back their carbohydrate intake as a result of news reports and advertising blaming carbs, rather than fat, as the culprit behind our nation's steadily expanding waistlines.Walk into any supermarket these days, and it's clear we've become a low-carb nation. Products once touted as low fat have been reformulated and remarketed to appeal to our new low-carb sensibilities. Dwindling sales of bread, rice, and pasta at checkout lines are being replaced, to the glee of many food manufacturers, by sharply rising sales of much more expensive dairy products, meat snacks, and nuts. And the trend shows no signs of slowing. This year, U.S. consumers are expected to spend an estimated $30 billion on low-carb products, up from $15 billion in 2003.</p><p>Critics of the Atkins, South Beach, Zone, and other low-carb diets-- including most of the medical establishment--have long contended that most of the weight shed from these high-protein regimens is due to water loss and that the diets are medically dangerous, unsustainable, and nutritionally unsound. While they concede that a small percentage of low-carb dieters do lose weight, they argue that the vast majority end up regaining the weight they lost and more.</p><p>That mainstream view, however, is now under fire from recent clinical trials at Duke, Harvard, and other respected medical institutions, which discovered that weight losses among obese patients on Atkins and other low-carb diets are not only real, they exceed the losses on low-fat diets. While many of these studies also show no ill effects and even some improvement to cholesterol levels from Atkins-style diets, physicians wary of potential long-term effects continue to recommend that their patients go low fat or avoid staying on low-carb diets for longer than six months.</p><p>So what's the average American seeking good health--and maybe ten fewer pounds--supposed to do in light of this conflicting advice? Do we drop our low-fat diets and put the kibosh on fruit and grains? Start loading up on low-carb (hold the bun) double cheeseburgers? Politi and other health experts at Duke see a number of potential risks for consumers getting caught up in the current low-carb mania.</p><p>"We do know that if you eat fewer carbohydrates, you're going to replace them with protein and fat," she says. "And eating a high-protein diet can raise your risk of cancer. There are already some studies that have suggested that. It's definitely not good for your kidneys, because your kidneys are the only organs in your body that can break down and dispose of extra nitrogen from the protein you're eating. If you're also not eating the same amount of carbohydrate as before, you're also probably eating more fat. And we know that a diet high in saturated fats is linked with an increase in heart disease."</p><p>"There's also the concern that if you have a diet that's relatively low in fruits and vegetables and whole grains, you might be missing out on some nutritional elements that are important in reducing cancer risk," warns Howard Eisenson, a professor of medicine at Duke who directs the Duke Diet & Fitness Center. Eisenson has a long list of people he wouldn't recommend going low carb, because there are no studies on the diets' long-term health effects: pregnant women, children, the elderly, and those at risk for impaired kidney function, osteoporosis, or kidney stones.</p><p>"The decent studies on low-carb diets are in their infancy," he says, adding that he recommends the traditional low-fat diet for most patients at his center looking to lose weight. "Our low-fat diet has the greatest weight of scientific work behind it. We've been doing it for a long time. We feel most confident in this as a way of life. If you haven't tried a traditional low-fat diet in a very serious way in a well-supported setting such as this, that's our leaning."</p><p>Low fat, however, has been the mantra for the past three decades and, in case you haven't noticed, it hasn't done much to halt the supersizing of America. Nearly two in three adults across the nation are now defined as overweight, compared with less than half two decades ago, and half of those are classified as obese, with a body mass index, or BMI, of 30 or more. Among Americans, residents of North Carolina weigh in among the heaviest, with more than 21 percent of the state's adults defined as obese, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Experts cite a number of reasons to explain how we've grown so fat, so fast: declining physical activity, less cooking at home, more eating at restaurants and fast-food outlets, and increased portion sizes.</p><p>"Our society makes it really easy for us to consume more calories than we can expend," says Politi. "We're surrounded by a lot of calorically dense foods. We don't have as many opportunities to move as before. And the food industry makes it difficult for even the well-informed consumer to make healthy choices."</p><p>"You've got to eat less; you've got to exercise in moderation," says Eisenson. "That's a simple message, but apparently it's very complicated for people to apply." Another basic lesson we forgot during our past obsession with low-fat foods is that calories are calories, whether they're from carbs or fat. Many of us got caught up in what nutritionists call the "Snackwells phenomenon"--the mistaken belief that you can eat as much as you want as long as it's low in fat. "There's no doubt that low-fat diets were depriving too many dieters," says Politi. "They didn't feel satisfied. One of the big arguments against them is that when you eat more carbohydrates they enhance your appetite, because they raise your blood sugar. Then, when your blood sugar crashes, you feel like you're starving."</p><p>While we may feel starved, we're anything but. A quick glance around the mall these days underlines the fact that Americans have become the fattest people on the planet, having munched and slurped our way to a national health crisis that threatens our future economy. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that obesity, which killed 400,000 Americans in 2000, may soon overtake smoking, which killed 435,000 during the same year, as the leading preventable cause of disease in the United States. Obesity and its health consequences--such as type 2 diabetes--now cost the nation $117 billion a year. And many experts fear the doubling and tripling of obesity rates for children and teens, respectively, over the past twenty years have created a health-care time bomb that will have an even more dramatic economic impact. The sad fact that some 20 to 30 percent of teens are now considered obese, compared with just 5 percent in the 1960s, suggests that the growing girth of American adults is likely to continue for many years, if not generations, unless we find ways to halt this destructive trend.</p><p>"If kids make it into their teen years obese, they've got an 80 percent likelihood of being obese as adults," says Eisenson. "And most people gain weight through adulthood, especially overweight people. So someone who starts adulthood already obese is likely to have very severe weight problems as they go through life. And we know that obesity correlates very strongly with premature death. People lose years from their life. That's the biggest thing. And even if you don't die, having high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, all those things, predispose you to having heart disease."</p><em><u><br /></u></em><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table width="49%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_poli.jpg" alt="Politi: "food industry makes it difficult for even the well-informed consumer to make healthy choices" " width="350" height="523" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Politi: "food industry makes it difficult for even the well-informed consumer to make healthy choices" <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Les Todd</span></p></p></div></div></div><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>"It's going to be a tremendous expense for us as a society," he adds. "It will affect us in terms of productivity. People who are sick and unhappy don't function as well. And as these children become obese, their own children are set up. The likelihood that a child will have weight problems is 80 percent if both parents are obese."</p><p>How to stop or, better yet, reverse America's obesity epidemic? For nutritionists and obesity experts, that's the $64,000 question. The late Robert Atkins, who dedicated his life to creating a dieting empire, blamed carbohydrates. Deprive the body of carbs, he preached, and your body will enter a fat-burning state called ketosis that will shed pounds.</p><p>Eric Westman, an associate professor of medicine at Duke, didn't buy Atkins' weight-loss sermon and, after reading his best-selling book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, was convinced the Atkins plan had little scientific merit. "It's a very slick book, written to sell books," he says. Westman even advised his overweight patients against trying Atkins, warning them that the added fat that accompanied their high-protein regime would raise their cholesterol and triglyceride readings. But when three former patients disregarded his advice and returned to his office in 1997 trimmer and with improved triglyceride and cholesterol readings, Westman figured he had to learn more.</p><p>"So I wrote Atkins a letter and basically told him, 'Your ideas are intriguing, but where are your data?' " Not long after that, Westman received a surprise telephone call from the diet guru himself. After listening to Westman's complaint about the lack of medical data on low-carb diets, Atkins agreed to finance a study at Duke to determine whether the changes Westman had seen in his former patients would also show up in a randomized clinical trial.</p><p>Westman and his colleague, William Yancy, an assistant professor of medicine at Duke, published the results of their first low-carb study in the July 2002 issue of the American Journal of Medicine. They put fifty obese patients on a very low carbohydrate diet--amounting to some 25 grams per day, or about two cups of salad and one cup of a low-carbohydrate vegetable such as broccoli or cauliflower--for six months. The result: Some 80 percent of the patients lost an average of 10 percent of their body weight, or about 20 pounds.</p><p>"The most counterintuitive thing was that their cholesterol levels did not get worse, even though they could eat an unlimited amount of meat and eggs," says Westman. "Their LDL, or bad cholesterol, on average, did not get worse, and their triglycerides went down a lot. Their HDL, the good cholesterol, went up. This was interesting. So we went back to the Atkins Center and said, 'You need to fund a randomized clinical trial, because some of these people had been on the Atkins diet before and knew it would work.' "</p><p>That follow-up study, involving 120 obese patients randomly assigned for six months to either the traditional low-fat diet recommended by the American Heart Association or the Atkins plan, produced a few other surprises. The study, published in the May 18, 2004 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that low-carb dieters not only lost more weight than the low-fat dieters--an average of twenty-six pounds compared with fourteen pounds--they also lost more body fat, lowered their triglyceride levels, and raised their HDL more than the low-fat group. "The mechanism for the weight loss seems to be a reduction in calories," says Yancy. "There might be some other things that are contributing slightly, such as the thermic effect of food; that is, the body actually wastes energy when it eats, and a high- protein diet might increase that effect. But I think it's really that people are reducing their caloric intake. And the interesting thing is that people seemed to do that on their own. They said it was different from other diets because they weren't hungry all the time. We had a lot of people who said they didn't eat as many meals because they just weren't hungry for lunch or breakfast."</p><p>"The current paradigm explaining why this diet works is: It's higher protein, and protein is satisfying," adds Westman. "What most people who haven't studied this diet don't understand is that there is also an appetite suppression. It can't be the protein if you haven't eaten anything and you're not hungry. So the unknown question is, What causes the appetite suppression with people on this diet?"</p><p>Westman and Yancy's results parallel two other studies published in the past year that found low-carb diets to be at least as effective in losing weight as low-fat diets, for at least the first six months. But whether low-carb dieters regain their weight and whether these individuals suffer any medical problems when they continue their diets beyond six months remain open questions. "No one really knows," says Westman. "There are people who have done the diet for years, but not in a large enough number and not with monitoring to know that they're healthy by all of the parameters that we can measure. In both of these studies, I closed up shop after six months and told the patients, 'I'm not even sure you should be on this diet.'"</p><p>As a practical matter, both Westman and Yancy counsel their overweight patients not to go low-carb for longer than six months. And when restricting carbs, the researchers insist that dieters be monitored by a physician, particularly if they have diabetes or high blood pressure. "This really shouldn't be your first method of losing weight," advises Westman. "But over the last six months, I've come to the conclusion that if you've tried other ways of losing weight unsuccessfully and if obesity is your main problem, then this is a viable option with monitoring. The times are changing quickly, and a lot of it has to do with ongoing research."</p><p>That revisionist view on low-carb diets, combined with heightened public interest in Atkins, South Beach, and other low-carb regimes, prompted Eisenson and Politi to begin last fall what they call a "moderate low-carb diet" at the Duke Diet & Fitness Center. About 30 percent of the center's overweight patients now choose this diet, in which 35 percent of their calories come from carbs, 30 percent from protein, and 35 percent from fat.</p><p>"We've found that a lot of our clients who pick that option do extremely well," says Politi. "It's a diet that includes whole foods. They can eat fruit, which is very nutritious and shouldn't be eliminated from the diet as some low-carb diets recommend, and good grains--those high in fiber and not processed, such as oatmeal, sweet potato, corn, and peas. It's a good ratio of nutrients for people who are not very physically active. And, as they lose weight and become more active, I think it would be okay for them to eat 55 to 60 percent of their calories from carbohydrates, as the major health organizations recommend."</p><p>Politi and Eisenson, however, don't think people should adopt low-carb as a lifestyle, especially if they are active and are simply looking to lose five or ten extra pounds. "Low fat is an all-inclusion diet," Politi says. "Low carb is a diet in which a lot of important foods are not allowed. The restrictive diets are not the ones that are normally successful for the long haul. So I'm skeptical that low-carb diets are going to solve the obesity problem. That said, I strongly believe that there is no diet that fits everyone. And I think our major health organizations need to come up with different diet recommendations, depending on whether we're young and more active or older and more sedentary."</p><p>One useful outcome of the current low-carb craze is that people are now paying more attention to limiting their refined carbs, eating more vegetables and other complex carbohydrates, and avoiding overindulging in foods just because they're low in fat.</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_60409.jpg" alt="Medical professors Westman, left, and Yancy: their studies showed low-carb dieters lost more than low-fat dieters" width="580" height="315" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Medical professors Westman, left, and Yancy: their studies showed low-carb dieters lost more than low-fat dieters. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo:Les Todd</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>"We had people in our studies tell us that they are eating more vegetables on the Atkins diet," says Yancy. "It's because people have concentrated so much on starches and carbohydrates. When those are taken out of the picture, they have only meat, eggs, and vegetables as an option, and so they end up eating more vegetables."</p><p>"The USDA food pyramid emphasized eating too many carbohydrates," Politi says, noting that a revised food pyramid due out in 2005 is expected to change that. "People who are obese and not very active don't need to eat a lot of carbohydrates. It wasn't helpful to recommend that everyone indiscriminately eat six to eleven servings of grains and starches every day. For someone who is very active, it's fine. But for an obese individual, it's just too many every day."</p><p>But Politi is also concerned about the other end of the spectrum: those thin, healthy individuals in the grocery line with baskets of low-carb snacks and foods, cutting back on their carb intake in the mistaken belief that it will improve their health. "If you're not overweight, it's not a good idea to cut down on carbohydrates, because carbohydrates are the best fuel that your body can use to generate the energy you need on a daily basis for metabolic function and physical activity. Carbohydrate foods are also high in fiber, vitamins, and minerals, which are important essential nutrients, so they have to be part of a well-balanced diet. Limiting carbohydrates should only be an option for people who are obese and having difficulty moving."</p><p>If you're not overweight, but insist on going low carb, the Duke experts have strict guidelines for their patients, to avoid the dehydration and nutrient deficiencies that come with a diet high in protein. "If a person approaches me with a low-carbohydrate diet and says they've tried the other diets and it wasn't effective for them for some reason, then I would be agreeable to them trying a low-carbohydrate diet," says Yancy. "But I would monitor them closely, check their cholesterol, counsel them to drink plenty of water and take a multivitamin every day, and teach them how to systematically add back vegetables and other carbohydrates to their diet."</p><p>Yancy and Westman also warn dieters not to go overboard on low-carb, high-protein bars and snacks. Yancy thinks the explosion of low-carb convenience foods on supermarket shelves may prove detrimental to low-carb dieters, just as the no-fat Snackwells snacks were to low-fat adherents. "I really see them as a double-edged sword," he says. "They could make it easier for people to stick with the diet. But, now that people have more options, it might turn out that they just eat more calories, and the diet might be less effective. Low-carb manufacturers are learning how to make their snacks taste better. And when they taste better, people tend to eat more."</p><p>"The main difference between protein bars and real food is that there are sugar alcohols in these products, and it might be a more concentrated source of protein than you get from a chicken breast," says Westman. "If people just eat those foods and they don't reduce their calorie intake--which is how low-carb diets work--then they won't lose weight."</p><p>Eisenson doesn't believe low-carb snacking or dieting will be medically detrimental for the typical healthy consumer, just expensive--foods high in protein and fat are higher in price. (They're also less environmentally friendly, points out Politi, because a given serving of meat and dairy exacts a higher toll on our environment than, say, fruits, breads, and vegetables.)</p><p>"I may sound a little cynical," adds Eisenson, "but I don't think most [consumers] are going to do low-carb for very long. In our society, we like quick solutions and, in my experience, a lot of people play with low-carb, but they don't really understand it. They go out and buy low-carb products, but they don't adhere diligently to it. A fairly significant percentage of them tire of it. They get to the point where they feel too deprived, and they give up. So I don't know how much medical harm we're really going to see. We're probably going to see more harm to their pocketbooks."</p><p>It's no surprise, then, that food manufacturers see big bucks in the low-carb trend and are spending millions in infomercials and low-carb advertising supplements to pump up sales of low-carb fare. Some of these products, such as low-carb colas, with half as much sugar as regular sodas, have nutritionists shaking their heads.</p><p>"I really think it's a shame our food industry is so aggressive," adds Politi. "It has manipulated the low-carb idea by saying, Don't eat rice, potatoes, pasta, and bread, but eat the low-carb pasta and low-carb bread. It's unfortunate for the health-conscious consumer, because we're getting away from eating more wholesome foods, which I think would help our health in the long run."</p><p>"I'm hoping that people will see that low-carb diets are not the magic bullet. The epidemic of obesity that we're seeing in this country is going to be really difficult to tackle. We need to have more time to cook for our children," she says. "If children are raised on healthy food, they are naturally going to choose that food. But if children are always brought to McDonald's and Burger King because their parents don't have time to cook, it's really going to be hard for them to be healthy consumers later in life. If schools keep providing Pizza Hut and sodas, it's going to be really hard for our children to make good choices. The food industry is just so powerful, but I'm hoping that education and awareness will counterbalance this difficult environment that all of us live in."</p><p>McDonald, a former science writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, is director of science communications for the University of California, San Diego. He is certified by the American Council on Exercise as a personal trainer and teaches wellness classes.</p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/lg_838800111.jpg" width="689" height="265" 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/kim-mcdonald" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kim McDonald</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Diet and Fatness in America</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500515 at https://alumni.duke.edu Son of Einstein https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/son-einstein <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 class="articletitle">Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur know your dirty little secret: You know that you don't know as much as you think other people think you should know.</p><p>Don't worry; they're not going to expose your intellectual shortcomings to public ridicule. To the contrary, these 2001 Duke graduates and co-founders of mental_floss magazine want to help.</p><p>First, a few cerebral calisthenics:</p><ol class="text"><li>Why did a 1937 children's play about water-loving rodents provoke members of Congress to kill a Depression-era work program for unemployed theater professionals?</li><li>What element was isolated for the first time during a 1669 experiment to make gold from putrefied urine?</li><li>Who did so poorly in boarding school that his father accused him of caring about "nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching" and fretted that the boy would disgrace the family name?</li></ol><p>Stumped? Maybe it's time you joined the nearly 60,000 readers who turn to mental_floss magazine every other month for a treasure trove of brainy facts, academic minutiae, and conversation toppers they never learned in high school or college (but maybe would have if they'd been paying more attention in class).</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 316px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_dscn8938.jpg" alt="Pearson, left, and Hattikudur, co-founders: "Everybody wants to be smart. But nobody wants to work at it." " /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: #eeeeee;">Pearson, left, and Hattikudur, co-founders: "Everybody wants to be smart. But nobody wants to work at it." </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Beau Gustafson</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center" height="30"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">If you'd thumbed through a recent copy of the magazine, you would have learned that:</p><ol class="text"><li>Members of Congress responded to the thinly veiled Communist ideals espoused in The Revolt of the Beavers in 1939 by killing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Theatre Project (and set a sixty-five-year precedent for anemic government funding of the American theater).</li><li>German alchemist Hennig Brand boiled the urine to a paste, heated the paste to draw out the vapors into water, and found a waxy, glow-in-the-dark substance now called phosphorus--and commonly added to multivitamins.</li><li>Charles Darwin was a bit of a late bloomer.</li></ol><p>As the tag line on every mental_floss cover says: Feel smart again.</p><p>"People like to be well informed," says Pearson. "People like to know a little about almost anything. At the same time, there's so much out there, there's no way to learn everything."</p><p>Hattikudur puts a slightly different spin on it. "Everybody wants to be smart," he says. "But nobody wants to work at it."</p><p>That's where mental_floss comes in--offering chunks of predigested information about myriad topics in a cheeky style that deliberately mixes education and fun. The publication may lack the name recognition, ad pages, and circulation figures of Newsweek, People, or Vanity Fair, but it shares the same magazine racks in Barnes & Noble, Borders, Wal-Mart, and Books-A-Million.</p><p>Pearson fondly describes his publication as "Mad magazine meets Smithsonian." The magazine's third annual "10 Issue," published last spring, hopscotched from snippets about rebellious teens getting voluntary amputations and Ben Franklin's predilection for nude "air baths" to articles about the "10 Movies That Changed the World," "10 Things That Aren't Boring About Chemistry," and "The Not-So-American History of Our National Anthem."</p><p>"You skim it," Hattikudur explains. "If you have five minutes, you can pick up something to use at a cocktail party."</p><p>The magazine even takes a crack at answering some of the truly big mysteries of life. For example, "Are green M&Ms really an aphrodisiac?" That's an urban legend, according to mental_floss writer Kelly Ferguson. But two chemicals in chocolate--and thus, every color of M&Ms--do cause symptoms that correspond to feeling "in love," she says. Phenylethylamine elevates heart rates, increases energy, and creates a sense of euphoria; anandamide is a neurotransmitter that works on the brain in essentially the same way as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a chemical found in marijuana.</p><p>The eclectic mixture of oddball items has attracted a surprisingly large amount of media buzz. Write-ups and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times ("like Reader's Digest as penned by Jeopardy! writers"), The Chicago Tribune ("For the discerning intellect, mental_floss cleans out the cobwebs"), Reader's Digest ("Read once a day for a minty-fresh mind"), National Public Radio, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and Newsweek magazine (twice).</p><p>And in two episodes of the NBC comedy hit Friends, Monica, the character played by actress Courtney Cox, was spotted thumbing through mental_floss while she sat in a doctor's waiting room.</p><p>Mental_floss offers "to the contemporary mind, adrift in the sea of random data unleashed by the Internet ... the kind of fact you want from a magazine--the kind that snaps you awake in the middle of a plane ride with its staggering insignificance, the kind that by its total absence of context is guaranteed to stay lodged forever in your brain, impressing future dates," wrote Newsweek senior editor Jerry Adler in a recent article that carried the headline "The Titans of Trivia" and featured a photo of Pearson.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_dscn8957.jpg" alt="First in a series: Condensed Knowledge, a less-than-trivial pursuit" width="580" height="338" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center">First in a series: Condensed Knowledge, a less-than-trivial pursuit. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Beau Gustafson</span></td></tr></tbody></table></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>But the big story behind mental_floss is the marketing savvy that focuses this kind of media attention on a magazine chock full of item upon item of "staggering insignificance." Getting a newspaper, magazine, or TV news show to cover almost any topic, especially a near-niche publication, can be a frustrating endeavor, which may explain why mental_floss posts its successes on its website, like notches on a gunslinger's Colt 45. (The website, www.mentalfloss.com, enjoys its own popularity, generating approximately 250,000 hits a month.) "We never want anyone to come to our website and see that nobody's written about mental_floss in five or six months," Pearson says. "But, at some point, we have to prepare for the fact that we will not be the new magazine on the block forever."</p><p>Concerned about the ever-present risk of becoming yesterday's news, mental_floss is constantly seeking new outlets that keep its brand fresh, front, and center. Pearson agreed to appear weekly on CNN Headline News a year ago, hosting a short trivia segment. Just in time for grads and dads, in May, HarperCollins published the first in a planned series of mental_floss books, Condensed Knowledge. A regular column in Reader's Digest made its debut in June. A mental_floss board game is slated to hit stores in 2005.</p><p>Pearson and company leave little to chance, even going so far as to make certain that the publication of the book and the release of the board game would be far enough apart to generate their own publicity--and reflect positively on the magazine.</p><p>Deals to provide content to Salon.com and Discovery Channel websites are in the works. A syndicated radio show, a nonprofit educational magazine aimed at children (named elemental_floss), and a TV game show are on the drawing board.</p><p>"Everything is aimed at driving people to our website and toward signing up for subscriptions," Pearson stresses. "So it all points back to the backbone of our business, which is the magazine."</p><p>Mental_floss has turned down a number of potential suitors, including several television producers. "It's tempting to do a mental_floss TV show, but the timing isn't right," Pearson says. "We're about gradual growth and creating a brand that has substance."</p><p>The task of maintaining mental_floss' distinctive voice--a fine line between smart and smart aleck--falls to Neely Harris '00, who joined the magazine in late 2001 and is now editor-in-chief. Finding writers who can discuss head-scratchingly obscure or complicated topics in a conversational style that mixes humor, sarcasm, and education--and do it all for limited pay--is not easy.</p><p>"The tone is light; it's humorous," Harris says. "We want to make jokes. But it has to be clear that the information we print is nonfiction." And, she adds, "It's all meant to be in laymen's terms, so it's easy to understand."</p><p>Today, mental_floss has a staff of nine scattered from Birmingham, Alabama, to Birmingham, Michigan, and Cleveland, New York, and Durham. "It's largely a virtual company," says Pearson. Pearson spent the past school year in Durham, where his wife, Georgia Liston Pearson, started as a graduate student at Duke's Nicholas School, before returning to his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, for the summer. He now holds the title of president and publisher, and Hattikudur is vice president for product development.</p><p>"We really have the perfect blend of personalities," Hattikudur says. "Will is really gifted in terms of promotion and directing the company. I handle the creative side."</p><p>The staff gets together as a group only three times a year. The majority of communication is handled through e-mail. "Everybody has their own branch of the company to run," Hattikudur explains. "It doesn't really matter where they do it. For creativity, I think it's best when people are where they're happiest."</p><p>This emerging multimedia mini-empire was hatched during late-night conversations freshman year between Pearson, Hattikudur, and other students living in Alspaugh dorm on East Campus. Pearson, an inveterate collector of trivia since sixth grade, was toying with the idea of publishing a book. Hattikudur suggested a magazine instead.</p><p>"We thought that if a magazine could bottle some of that enthusiasm and that love for education from those late-night conversations, it would be something that we would really want to read," says Hattikudur. A check of the shelves at Barnes & Noble failed to turn up such a publication, and so the pair decided to put one together themselves. They enlisted the help of three classmates: Milena Viljoen '01, John Cascarano '01, and Risako Koga '01, who remains the magazine's art director.</p><p>The lightness of the magazine's content is belied by the seriousness with which the aspiring publishers applied themselves to their task. After distributing a trial issue on campus their junior year--Hattikudur remembers it as "a complete embarrassment"--they turned to industry experts for feedback. Their goal was to build from the inside out, starting with a board of formal and informal advisers "because they are living in the publishing world on a daily basis," Pearson says. "We knew what we didn't know--which was anything about the publishing industry."</p><p>They approached Susan Tifft '73, Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the practice of journalism and public policy studies at Duke and a former associate editor at Time magazine. (Tifft is also a member of the Duke Magazine Editorial Advisory Board.) She put them in touch with George Hirsch, an old friend and publisher of Runner's World, who formerly published New York magazine and also launched Men's Health. They added Jackie Leo, editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest; Books-A-Million vice president Patsy Jones; Jerrold Footlick, a former senior editor at Newsweek (also on the advisory board for Duke Magazine); and others.</p><p>"First of all, I was just impressed with the concept. And Will struck me as a person with not only a good idea, but the ability to listen, work, and do something with that idea," says Tifft. "He's also got a pretty thick skin, in my opinion, and I think you have to."</p><p>The board members helped mental_floss avoid early missteps and continue today to provide important wisdom and contacts. Pearson illustrates the point by opening up his ever-present Palm Pilot. "If we've got a question about anything, we've got somebody in there we can go to."</p><p>Samir Husni, a magazine-industry analyst and professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, was an early believer. Pearson and Hattikudur had read his book on magazine publishing and hired him as a consultant as they prepared to put out their first issue. "They had a good plan of execution," recalls Husni, whose website refers to him as "Mr. Magazine." "Their feet were definitely on the ground, and their heads were definitely on their shoulders. It was a much easier job to work with them than with a gazillion other people."</p><p>They chose to call the magazine mental_floss after hearing about a comedy troupe with the same name. "It says everything you need to know about us. It's smart. It's educational. But it's also a joke, a pun. It doesn't take itself too seriously," Harris says.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="12" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="147"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_du2.jpg" alt="Mental Floss cover" width="183" height="238" /></td><td align="center" width="147"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_mentalflosswhyfpo.jpg" alt="Mental Floss cover" width="183" height="240" /></td><td align="center" width="300"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_mentalflossworstcover.jpg" alt="Mental Floss cover" width="183" height="244" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Hattikudur came up with the idea of putting the title in lower case and adding the underscore, as a way of getting people's attention and reminding them of the Internet. "Our entire mission statement is in those two words," Harris says.</p><p>On the eve of their graduation in 2001, the five friends published the first, full-fledged mental_floss, using $20,000 from savings and summer jobs. Besides topics ranging from Alexander the Great to sumo wrestling, the first issue featured a cover photograph of Albert Einstein. "He was being a big dork, sticking his tongue out, not taking himself too seriously," Hattikudur explains of the photo selection. "That seemed perfect for us." The late, great physicist has appeared on the cover ever since.</p><p>In addition to selling about 6,500 copies, Pearson and Hattikudur showed the magazine to potential investors--including former corporate executives Toby Maloney and Melanie Maloney. Initially tapped for a modest outlay, the married couple from Russell, Ohio, later sank significantly more into mental_floss--and joined the magazine's staff. Both are now vice presidents, of business development and planning and operations, respectively.</p><p>"What was appealing to me was the freshness of the idea and the product," says Toby Maloney, a self-described "media junkie." "You're really talking about an educational self-help magazine that is original, irreverent, and humorous. And there's a real desire in this country for self-improvement."</p><p>Mental_floss could hardly have chosen a less propitious time to be unveiled: the middle of the biggest magazine-industry slump since World War II. What was worse, they had little advertising income and no budget for marketing and could hardly afford to pay their own staff, let alone freelance writers. But the magazine persevered, garnering positive reviews, including a spot on Library Journal's list of the ten best magazines of 2001--and kept adding readers.</p><p>One factor working in their favor was the wide demographic appeal of the magazine. "We've been completely fooled since the outset by the diverse ages of our readers," says Harris. "We have high-school classes reading us, as well as residents of nursing homes."</p><p>More important, instead of following the herd and relying on advertising revenue to support the magazine, mental_floss zagged and relied on subscriptions and circulation. And it worked. The sell-through rate (number of newsstand copies that sold) for those early issues topped 60 to 65 percent--nearly tripling the industry average. Subscription and circulation numbers climbed steadily. Mental_floss moved from publishing quarterly to bimonthly.</p><p>Some industry analysts say it's too early to tell whether mental_floss is a success. But for others, the very fact that they're still in business is reason enough to break out the champagne. "My definition of success is, if you're still in business, you're a success," says Husni. Nearly two out of three magazines fail within the first year; only one in five magazine start-ups makes it to the fourth year. About one in ten magazines lasts long enough to publish a tenth-anniversary issue. "They've managed to stay in business and to get a lot of good coverage."</p><p>Advisory board member Footlick was initially skeptical about mental_floss' chances without significant increases in advertising. But the magazine's continued growth is making him a believer. "It shows me there are a lot of ways to skin a cat," he says. "You can burn tens of millions of dollars, like Talk did. Or you can do it this way by not throwing money around."</p><p>Money is still tight and the hours can be long, but staffers aren't complaining. "It's a testament to how all the main players at mental_floss are committed to the growth of the magazine and the company and the brand," Harris says. "Everyone here has said, 'I will take only as much as I need to live.' Everything else is put back into the company. We wouldn't want it any other way."</p><p>Not that Harris or the others are averse to living a more comfortable life someday. "I think we are very confident that day will come," she says. "We're just not anxious to get there."</p><p>Pearson garners much of the credit not only for building, but also for maintaining the buzz around mental_floss. He serves as "Mr. Outside" for the magazine, doing the bulk of interviews and eschewing fancy public-relations firms and press releases for personalized pitches, contacts, and relationships. "We try to tailor any material we send to specific journalists and their publications or stations," he explains. "So it is a win for both them and mental_floss."</p><p>"And Will does it without being noticeably pushy," notes Footlick. "It's really Southern style at its best. It doesn't come across as a hard sell."</p><p>Newsweek's Adler had originally planned to do a story about the trend toward books on miscellaneous facts--such as the best-selling Schott's Original Miscellany--but that plan fizzled when an interview with Ben Schott fell through. Pearson, meanwhile, cleared his schedule, quickly agreeing to the interview and welcoming a team of photographers into his cramped Durham apartment. It didn't hurt that one of Adler's colleagues on the magazine, Mary Carmichael, is a 2001 Duke graduate or that mental_floss adviser Footlick was Adler's first editor at Newsweek almost twenty-five years ago.</p><p>"We have had quite a few Duke alums work for us in the past few years," Adler says, and they do bring Duke-related ideas to people's attention. Although, he quickly adds, "that doesn't mean something with a Duke connection will automatically get into print."</p><p>Duke connection or not, mental_floss--the magazine and its evolving manifestations--will continue to grow as long as people hanker after the answers to questions such as why Hiram Ulysses Grant, our eighteenth president, has an "S" as a middle initial, or how many mosquitoes it would take to drink all your blood.</p><p>"We thought the magazine would be doing well after three years," says Pearson. "We're all optimists. But if somebody had said that at age twenty-four we'd have a book published, a board game in the works, regular appearances on CNN, partnerships with Reader's Digest and the Discovery Channel, and so on? No way. We've just been so lucky."</p><p>Luck is how you define it, Footlick says. "As the former Dodgers owner Branch Rickey once said, 'Luck is the residue of design.' Sometimes you have to work hard to be lucky. Will and Mangesh have certainly done that."</p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="85%" /><p> </p><p class="byline" style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"><em>—Dickinson '87 is a senior writer for Duke's Office of News and Communications.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/lg_dscn8957.jpg" width="620" height="361" alt="First in a series: Condensed Knowledge, a less-than-trivial pursuit Photo: Beau Gustafson" /></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/blake-dickinson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Blake Dickinson</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Mental_floss offers information in a cheeky style that deliberately mixes education and fun. </div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500512 at https://alumni.duke.edu Root Cause https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/root-cause <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">At six foot three, Philip Benfey towers incongruously over the bedraggled-looking collection of shriveled plants that he displays with considerable pride. The plants languish in plastic pots on a shelf in his laboratory's closet-like plant-growth room. They remain stubbornly, even ungratefully stunted, although they bask in brilliant artificial sunlight, ensconce their roots in the best soil, and imbibe the scientifically determined optimal measure of water and fertilizer.</p><p>However, to Benfey, who is chair and professor of biology at Duke, the puny plants constitute the intellectual equivalent of giant redwoods. These particular mustard plants, scientific name Arabidopsis thaliana, harbor a fascinating gene mutation that eliminates a key growth-regulating gene. The mutation interferes with subtle biochemical signals between cells in their growing roots--stunting them, and, thus, the entire plant. In contrast, the normal plants nearby reach for the sun--or rather the brilliant artificial light in the growth room. They stretch their gangly stems upward about a foot, supported by clear plastic cylinders. Benfey studies what happens when arabidopsis genes known as "Short Root" and "Scarecrow" are mutated, in effect, broken so that they don't work properly. His work has yielded extraordinary insights into how these growing roots develop.</p><p>While Arabidopsis might seem an obscure bit of foliage, the little plant is celebrated among geneticists as the laboratory mouse of the plant kingdom. A relative of cabbage and radishes, Arabidopsis is small and prolific and grows easily and quickly.</p><p>"The root has a fairly complex structure, with lots of different cell types. And it all begins from a single cell," says Benfey. But unlike the impossibly intricate convolutions and migrations of developing animal bodies, each new Arabidopsis root cell arises conveniently from its neighbor. "When you look at the anatomy of the root, the origins of the entire structure are right there in front of you," he says. "You can see all the stages of development. For genomics, this is an enormously simplifying feature."Benfey's studies of the plant's tiny tangled roots might be considered just a minor botanical curiosity if they applied to only one species. But his research is helping science get to the ... well ... root of one of the central questions in all of biology: the immensely complex puzzle of how entire tissues, whether plant roots or human brains, blossom from a single cell. The solution would advance a vast range of disciplines from agriculture to medicine. And the Arabidopsis root has afforded Benfey and his colleagues a ringside seat at the biological spectacle of the development of living tissue.</p><p>Thus, says Benfey, exploring the consequences of mutations in just a single gene such as Short Root or Scarecrow can yield a world of insight into tissue development. Biologists, including Benfey and his cohorts, are gleeful scientific saboteurs, mutating genes to make them malfunction and keenly observing the resulting biological havoc. (The scientists, perhaps perversely, often name genes according to the ill effects of breaking them. The origin of the name Short Root is rather obvious; the mutation of the Scarecrow gene produces roots missing a critical layer of root cells--like the missing brain in the Wizard of Oz character.)</p><p>Sabotaging genes is especially informative because they are the blueprints for the multitude of proteins that make up the machinery that keeps cells--from plant roots to hair roots--functioning. A sabotaged blueprint produces a nonfunctional protein, disrupting that machinery in interesting and instructive ways. Benfey's research has revealed that Scarecrow and Short Root are blueprints for proteins that help form the same growth machinery pathway in the plant root.</p><table width="49%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_0453.jpg" alt="Stunting growth: plants with mutations in the Short Root gene" width="350" height="523" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Stunting growth: plants with mutations in the Short Root gene. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Les Todd.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>One of the holy grails in modern biology is understanding these pathways in order to learn to control them. The machinery of every living cell consists of a host of such molecular signaling pathways, like the systems that make up a car's machinery--the fuel system, cooling system, electrical system, drive train, and all-important entertainment system that keeps the kids quiet in the back seat. By assiduously breaking one component or another--like, say, taking a hammer to a carburetor--researchers can deduce which pathway each component belongs to.</p><p>The proteins made by the Short Root and Scarecrow genes are more than modest cogs in the cell's machinery--they are themselves master controllers of other genes. Such controllers, called transcription factors, orchestrate the activation of a multitude of other genes that themselves build the cell's machinery. The two transcription factors are the molecular equivalents of the Wizard of Oz--not the "great and powerful" public Oz, but the little man hidden behind the curtain, yanking genetic levers and poking genetic buttons that help orchestrate the amazing phenomenon of development. It's a phenomenon every bit as spectacular as the flame and folderol created by the little wizard--with myriad genes creating the miraculous, elegant symphony of growth that induces a single embryonic cell to burgeon into an intricate living organism.</p><p>In the quest that led to Short Root and Scarecrow, Benfey began, as have so many other scientists, with fingers tightly crossed. "When we did the first genetic screen of mutant plants, we didn't set out to answer a specific question and design a fancy, elegant screen that would get to an answer. Rather, I said, 'I'll take anything I can get,' and then go after it." But they were seeking mutations that affected plant growth, and they found many stunted plants among the mutants they created using gene-damaging chemicals. When the scientists analyzed the stunted plants, they pinpointed two particularly intriguing genes--Short Root and Scarecrow--with mutations that appeared to cause a very surprising pathology in their roots.</p><p>"Something I had no way of predicting was that the Short Root mutants were missing entire cell layers," says Benfey. The missing layers hinted tantalizingly at the failure of a critically important step in tissue development--the differentiation of a whole class of cells from general purpose into those with particular specialties and functions. In animals, a parallel might be the disappearance of a whole layer of the brain. The differentiation of cells from the general to the specialized is the hallmark of development from embryo to adult, and understanding differentiation is a central aim of biologists.</p><p>Benfey knew he had stumbled onto a key developmental gene. Further study of Short Root mutants yielded yet another scientific surprise: The gene makes a protein transcription factor that appears to activate genes in an entirely different set of cells from the ones in which it is made. "And then the big surprise was that the protein transcription factor, in fact, moves from cell to cell," says Benfey. That migration ran counter to all understanding of how transcription factors work--as if the Wizard of Oz had jumped books and somehow contrived to take the controls of the Little Engine that Could. "If you asked me ten years ago which of those I would have predicted," Benfey adds, "I would say neither of them."</p><p>Benfey's research has revealed that the Short Root gene produces a biologically bossy protein that instructs neighboring root cells in three ways. It tells a neighboring cell's genes what kind of root cell to become, how to divide to make new cells, and even where to position itself in the burgeoning root. The researchers have also discovered that Short Root and Scarecrow are developmental partners, with Short Root's protein apparently activating Scarecrow's to govern cell division. Now the researchers are searching for the "downstream" genes that Short Root and Scarecrow control, and the "upstream" genes that control them. It's a process not unlike opening a mystery novel at the middle and trying to deduce how the mystery began and how it will end.</p><p>If Short Root and Scarecrow exemplify the traditional "retail" gene-by-gene study of root development, Benfey and his colleagues have now gone into the "wholesale" research business as well. Last year, they announced that they had created the first detailed "gene expression map." (Gene expression is the process by which a gene activates itself to make protein.) The map reveals when and where some 22,000 genes are activated in each of the intricate mosaic of cells of the growing Arabidopsis root. "This is the first time anybody has achieved this level of resolution of gene expression on a global basis for any organism," says Benfey. Other researchers had ground up whole plant tissues and analyzed their gene expression, he says. However, in such studies "critical information on the mechanisms of development was lost. Development occurs at the single-cell level, and there's a dramatic difference from one cell to the next, in terms of its gene expression."</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/benf.jpg" alt="Nan and Bob Keohane on campus" width="580" height="305" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">The Short Root gene produces a "biologically bossy" protein that tells the genes of neighboring cells what kind of root cell to become. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jim Wallace.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The results of the painstaking analyses, published in the journal Science, in essence told of a scientific race against time in the Benfey laboratory. Once the scientists had labeled an individual root-cell type with a fluorescent marker gene, they had only about ninety minutes to isolate the particular type of cell from the rapidly growing root for genetic analysis. "The cells are intimately connected to one another and constantly signaling to one another," says Benfey. "And, if you wait much longer, they begin to change their gene expression." Once the cells were isolated, and their genes extracted, the scientists used so-called "gene chips"--massive arrays of genes on fingernail-sized glass chips--to measure the activity of each of about 22,000 genes in each cell type.</p><p>The Arabidopsis gene profile exemplifies a new era of "systems biology," says Benfey, in which scientists graduate from studying individual genes to mapping interacting networks of genes and the proteins they produce. "A key to understanding development of plant tissues and organs is determining how whole networks of genes are regulated during development," he says. Such knowledge will bring profoundly important practical benefits. "In applying systems biology to agriculture, we can progress from altering one or two genes at a time. We can graduate from just putting a foreign gene from a bacterium into a plant to change one trait such as herbicide resistance. Rather, we can change broad traits that are already there, because we will know how regulatory networks function. We'll be able to modify plants to resist drought, grow in salty soil, resist higher temperatures due to global warming, or resist pathogens."</p><p>Benfey says he also believes that lessons learned from the Arabidopsis plant will likely apply to higher organisms, even humans. "It would surprise me if the particular processes that we are finding with Short Root and Scarecrow exist only in plants," he says. "The history of biology as I read it is that just about everything that seemed to be peculiar to one particular system or stage of an organism has turned out to be much more general."</p><p>His career will always reflect the search for scientific truths in straightforward structures such as roots, says Benfey. "In retrospect, my quest for simple systems is a theme throughout my scientific career. In the Arabidopsis root, I saw a tissue in which I could immediately identify the component parts, where its growth properties offered a simple model of development and differentiation."</p><p>And with the scientific truths from the plant root have come an appreciation of its unconventional beauty. "Most people think of the root as this very unaesthetic part of the plant. They focus on distinctive flowers or beautiful leaves," he says. "But if you think of aesthetics in the sense of simplicity, when you slice through a root and you show people that they can really see its various parts, they do find an immediate attraction there."</p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/lg_0463.jpg" width="620" height="926" alt="Les Todd." /></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/dennis-meredith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis Meredith</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Arabidopsis thaliana</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500511 at https://alumni.duke.edu Lights, Camera, Magic https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/lights-camera-magic <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 350px;"><div class="media-h-caption">Edward A. Kramer came face to face with the monster, and experienced not fear, but clarity.</div></div><p class="bodycontent">The year was 1999. The monster was a mummy with 300-year-old flesh hanging off its bones. Kramer '77, a computer-graphics sequence supervisor for George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, was working on lighting the mummy for the upcoming feature film in which the creature was to have a starring role.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"I was all of a sudden hit by this feeling," Kramer recalls. "I remembered when I was a kid and was into all these monster magazines. What was on my screen was exactly like what was in my magazines. I thought, 'Oh my God, I actually grew up to do the kind of thing that I thought was so cool.' "</span></p><p class="bodycontent">If you saw swarms of scarabs in <span class="pubtitle">The Mummy</span>, tornadoes in <span class="pubtitle">Twister</span>, sixty squirming puppies in <span class="pubtitle">101 Dalmatians</span>, the rock monster in<span class="pubtitle"> Galaxy Quest</span>, the werewolf in <span class="pubtitle">Van Helsing</span>, or just about anything to do with water in <span class="pubtitle">The Perfect Storm</span>, you saw Ed Kramer's work.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"It's kind of fun to be able to mention something and have somebody say, 'Oh yeah, I remember that!' " he says, sounding like a kid who's found a permanent home in a Never Never Land for computer geeks. "My whole career, I feel like I've been living on the edge of the latest and greatest all the time."</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">Convincing computer-generated imagery, or CG, calls for a programmer's mind and an artist's eye. For someone like Kramer, who has that combination in spades, it's a heckuva way to make a living. What he does is technically complex and evolves rapidly as new methods are invented, but in a nutshell: He takes the background that the film director has shot, adds an object that was never there, and makes it look real.</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">Sometimes that involves making a giant kick up dust as he walks or tornadoes twist across the horizon. At other times, it means creating lighting on a monster or a boat deck that matches the lighting in the background shot. Or it involves compositing, pulling together all of the computer-graphics elements and integrating them seamlessly with the background.</span> </p><p>The result is what moviemakers hope will help usher moviegoers into the suspension of disbelief that keeps them riveted to their seats. When Dracula bares his fangs in <span class="pubtitle">Van Helsing</span>, your blood pressure shoots up. When a 200-foot wave looms over the boat in The Perfect Storm, your heart leaps into your throat.</p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer works out of ILM's headquarters building in San Rafael, California, just north of San Francisco. Walking through the building is like taking a tour of the history of the feature-film special-effects industry. ILM has been doing special effects since 1975 and the making of the original<span class="pubtitle"> Star Wars</span> movie, released in 1977. Visitors are greeted by a life-size model of a Storm Trooper; around the next corner is Darth Vader standing next to R2-D2. ILM is considered one of the leaders in the advanced digital-effects industry. The company pioneered, among other things, the development of motion-control cameras and optical compositing. It has won fourteen Academy Awards for visual effects and sixteen more for technical achievement.</p><p class="bodycontent">A huge amount of the work that ILM does is what Kramer calls "practical effects"--things like miniature sets or models that exist in the real world. But Kramer's work in computer graphics concerns the "unreal" world. In <span class="pubtitle">Van Helsing</span>, he covered the werewolf in computer-generated fur, gave the vampire brides flowing hair, and helped the digital "double" for the star, Hugh Jackman, do the stunt work that the flesh-and-blood actor never could have achieved.</p><p class="bodycontent">Some of the movies Kramer has worked on have big-bang special effects--tornadoes, exploding comets, tumultuous seas. "The first killer wave you see in<span class="pubtitle"> The Perfect Storm</span>, the huge wall of water--that was my work," he says proudly. Basically, the more complex and realistic-looking it is, the tougher it was to do.<span class="pubtitle"> The Perfect Storm</span> is a perfect example. Computer-generated boats had to float with believable buoyancy, mist blowing off the top of waves had to look wispy, and objects flying off the boat and splashing into the sea had to have weight and trajectory. Kramer and dozens of others used special software to make the scene come to life in a believable, photo-realistic way.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"The human eye knows what's real and what isn't," Kramer says. "If I look at something and it doesn't look quite right, I have to figure out, well, what about that is not looking right? Is it the scale? The density? Does it need to be more particulate?"</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">"The mist coming off the tops of waves is a pretty good example. There's a whole new technology called 'particle systems' that allows us to animate millions of infinitely small particles. And we animate them using basically the language of physics: things like gravity and wind and turbulence," he says. "No one had ever done anything even approaching what we did on <span class="pubtitle">Perfect Storm</span>. It was totally uncharted computer-graphic technology. This was the first time that computer-generated water had to mix seamlessly with real ocean water."</span></p><p class="bodycontent">In fact, he says, he has yet to work on a movie and rely solely on known techniques, even those already invented by ILM. "There's never been a project where we've said, 'We have all the technology to do that.' That's why people come to ILM. A great deal of the groundbreaking work is done here. In some shows, every single shot, we have to develop new techniques. That was true of <span class="pubtitle">The Perfect Storm</span>. And <span class="pubtitle">The Mask</span>. When Jim Carrey turns into a tornado--ILM had to invent ways to do that."</p><p class="bodycontent">Not surprisingly, the same holds true with the movie he's now working on, a sequel to<span class="pubtitle"> The Mask </span>called <span class="pubtitle">Son of the Mask</span>. However, he says, it is too early in the production stage for him to be able to reveal any specifics. For this latest project, Kramer is a "sequence supervisor," overseeing teams of computer-graphics artists known as technical directors. He himself started as a technical director when ILM hired him back in 1994. He was put to work doing the CG equivalent of working with a needle and thread. "The first thing I did at ILM was 'sock' an elephant," he says, referring to the technique of using special software to stitch together a computer model by removing all the seams and cracks in the image. "We were able to realistically show muscles and fat working under the surface of the skin of the elephant. When the foot hits the ground, it ripples through his chest," he says.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"And immediately thereafter I had to sock a monkey."</span></p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer socked things so well that he was promoted to sequence supervisor in 1998 and now oversees the work of an average of ten technical directors on any given film. On a typical day, Kramer wanders from desk to desk, looking over shoulders, sharing software tips, and answering questions. "The paradigm of special effects here at ILM differs from the stylized, fully computer-generated techniques of Pixar or Dreamworks," he says. "Here, we have to invent techniques to mix computer-generated effects with live-action footage shot by the director, where the audience sees them side by side. Whether it's vampires, dinosaurs, Dalmatian puppies, or 200-foot ocean waves, our technical and artistic challenge is to create images that look so photo-realistic that you can't tell where in the frame the real footage ends and the CG begins."</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_2299h1.jpg" alt="Still of the night: Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Still of the night: Hugh Jackman in<span class="pubtitle"> Van Helsing. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Industrial Light and Magic; ©2004 Universal Studios; All Rights Reserved.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="bodycontent">Back at his own desk, with the mouse and monitor, he works on lighting in test frames. "During the day, you give to the computer a file that has all the scene-description information--everything the computer needs to know in order to create the final picture," he says.</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">"The computer knows what all the geometry looks like--the shape of things, like the shape of the dinosaur in <span class="pubtitle">The Lost World: Jurassic Park</span>; it knows the images that are on the surface, the scales, toenails, and that kind of stuff. Then it knows the intensity, the direction of lights, and where shadows are supposed to fall. If, for instance, the jungle has a lot of leaves that are creating mottled shadows everywhere, the dinosaur has to have the same kind of shadows on his back as he walks through."</span></p><p class="bodycontent">In what's called "look development," sequence supervisors like Kramer also figure out how characters look and move. For <span class="pubtitle">The Mummy</span>, he researched how to animate thousands of squirming little bugs all at the same time, each with its own unique animation. He also developed the reflective look of the scarabs through the use of "shaders" that tell the computer how the surface of the bugs would react to light in terms of things such as color, shininess, and shadow. Basically, every kind of surface has a shader, says Kramer, "so you could have the same light falling on a man's face and his clothing, and it reacts totally differently because of the skin shader or the clothing shader."</p><p class="bodycontent">At the end of the day, Kramer will set his computer to "render" or create the entire sequence. Although the computer's memory is "in the terabytes," Kramer says, referring to a unit of data-storage capacity that is equal to more than 1,000 gigabytes, it takes all night for the computer to pull together all of the information that Kramer has fed into it over the course of the day. While he sleeps, the computer "is actually looking at every pixel on the screen and figuring out what color that pixel should be based on the information it was given. It does that for every frame, and there are twenty-four frames for every second of screen time. And each one of those frames is made up of hundreds of thousands of pixels."</p><p class="bodycontent">The next day, Kramer will look over the results with the visual-effects supervisor, and together they'll pinpoint blips in the sequence that need more work. Depending on the complexity of the sequence, he, and the computer, will repeat the process "forty, fifty, 100 takes, until the director says, 'That's a final. That's in my movie.' We may have something we think looks great but is not what the director wants. The ultimate arbiter is in the director's head."</p><p class="bodycontent">When Ed Kramer was an undergraduate at Duke, his future line of work didn't even exist. Which is probably okay, as he chose Duke over his other top options, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt, because the university boasted a nationally recognized program in psychology, his intended major. He loved people, he says, loved finding out what makes them tick. He had a knack for science and math and was fascinated by things like personality studies and the physiology of the brain and visual system. In his senior year, he became interested in how memory works, and completed an honors thesis, "A Reinterpretation of the Literature on Human Memory," under the guidance of psychology professor William Bevan M.A. '43, Ph.D. '48, Hon.'72.</p><p class="bodycontent">His parents, he says, were sure their son was destined for a star career as an expert in psychology. But as immersed as he was in a field he loved, Kramer says he felt that something about the path he was following wasn't the right fit for him. It had already dawned on him when he was taking a class in abnormal psychology. "I decided I didn't want to spend my entire career in the company of clinically sick individuals," he recalls, somewhat apologetically.</p><p class="bodycontent">There were clues he could go any number of directions. One was his sense of humor. "Ed is dedicated to making the world a funnier place," says Earl Vickers '78, who shared a room with Kramer at York House. "If necessary, he would pour a glass of water on his head to make people laugh. Fortunately, this is not always necessary."</p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer was also known for a propensity to empty his dorm-room trash can, glue the contents to the wall, and call it art. In fact, he says, "I was always the artist. I did a lot of artwork for the high-school yearbook and newspaper." At Duke, he frequently contributed drawings and advertisements to <span class="pubtitle">The Chronicle</span>. After graduating, he founded and ran a one-man advertising agency with three clients, all stereo stores in Durham.</p><p class="bodycontent">It was a fun gig, he recalls, but he soon became restless. With a childhood buddy, Kramer set off on a three-month cross-country trip. The two chose a route that took them from Atlanta, Kramer's hometown, through the Deep South states and out to California. "We had no itinerary, so we were just stopping wherever we thought would be interesting." On impulse, they stopped in Austin, Texas, "just to see it."</p><p class="bodycontent">On a similar impulse, Kramer wandered into the film school at the University of Texas and struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be a professor of film theory. The professor and Kramer got to talking about philosophy and psychology and how it all related to film. He asked Kramer whether he'd ever considered going to graduate school in filmmaking.</p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer thought about all the hours he had spent organizing Cable 13, the university cable TV channel. He and his roommate, David M. Frey '76, had founded the station, and Kramer had been in charge of the on-air graphics for the shows the station produced. He thought about all the basketball games he had videotaped using a thirty-pound Video Porta-Pak, of all the times he had threaded the three-quarter-inch tape through the reel-to-reel machine. He thought of the video-switching technology he had mastered to run three cameras simultaneously during the games.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"I took the application with me," Kramer says. "I think I filled it out when we were in Vegas. When I got to San Francisco, I called my parents and they said, 'Did you apply to film school?'</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">"I said, 'Well, yeah.'</span></p><p><span class="bodycontent">"And they said, 'Well, you've been accepted.' "</span></p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_du8.jpg" alt=""The first killer wave you see in The Perfect Storm, the huge wall of water--that was my work."" width="580" height="295" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><p>"The first killer wave you see in The Perfect Storm, the huge wall of water--that was my work." <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Noah Berger.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="bodycontent">At film school, Kramer soaked up everything he could about movies: directing, lighting, editing, screenwriting, film history and criticism. He also discovered computer animation. Much to his delight, he found that animation gives the creator total control over every aspect of the filmmaking process. "I kind of philosophically looked at it as an extraordinarily high art form because of the auteurship it afforded," he says.</span></p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer persuaded the university to create a course in animation. That took some doing, as the field of animation was still in its infancy and looked, to the serious filmmaker, like child's play, or at least a colossal waste of time. Once the course was in place, he got himself hired as the graduate teaching assistant for the course.</p><p class="bodycontent">Using punch cards on the physics department's computer, he created animation for a children's news program on Austin's public-television station. The work became his master's thesis production project. No one, not his parents, not his film-school instructors, not even Kramer himself, could have predicted what the field of animation would become. It was 1980, and the field was about to explode.</p><p class="bodycontent">He listened to Ronald Reagan's swearing-in ceremony the day he drove out of Austin, degree in hand. Back home in Atlanta, he tracked down a copy of the premiere issue of<span class="pubtitle"> Computer Pictures </span>magazine, the first magazine about the field of computer graphics, now defunct, and sent his rèsumè to all ten computer-graphics companies mentioned there. Responses came back fast and furious. People with experience in computer graphics and a master's degree in film were rare indeed. A company in Los Angeles sent a letter saying they were interested, but wanted to meet him. He decided to go for it. The best he can figure, he follows his instincts, and the cosmos cooperates. "It's not just chance or fate," he says, "and it's not just perseverance. It's where chance and fate intersect with perseverance. I follow my instincts and then happen to have the serendipitous events that take place. But it's all while I've been following a road."</p><p class="bodycontent">He arrived in L.A. on New Year's Day, 1981. He had an interview at the company that had sent the letter, and with three others. In the end, he chose Image West. They worked in video, not film. Kramer reasoned he already had experience in the medium, and at five projects a week, he could fatten his portfolio more quickly than he could in film (four or five projects a year).</p><p class="bodycontent">Kramer threw himself into the work, racking up eighty to 100 hours a week on the Scanimate, an analog computer that "looked really sci fi," he recalls. Only seven of the machines existed, and he was one of only about twenty people in the world who could program it.</p><p class="bodycontent">Riding the wave of a soaring industry, he spent the early 1980s creating computer images for the 1982 World Series for NBC, ABC's <span class="pubtitle">Wide World of Sports</span>, and the Rose Bowl and logos for Hitachi and the 1984 Olympics. This was sports graphics in its infancy, a long way from the animated play-by-plays, stats charts, and yellow first-down markers seen today on ESPN and other sports channels.</p><p class="bodycontent">By the mid-1980s, visual-effects companies were multiplying and clamoring for talent, and Kramer was in heavy demand. As the digital wave gained speed, he kept piling more video work into his portfolio: computer graphics for the<span class="pubtitle"> CBS Evening News</span>, ABC Sports, HBO, Cinemax, Lifetime Cable Network when it went on the air on 1985. He was working sixty-hour weeks in New York when the space program called.</p><p class="bodycontent">A self-described "outer-space nut," Kramer went into orbit. NASA wanted him to create a computer-graphics film about an unmanned mission on Mars. It didn't matter that the job was temporary, he says. "If NASA called and said, 'Come work at the space center,' wouldn't you drop everything?" He worked with aerospace engineers. He wandered through the mission-control room. He went to the swimming pool to watch astronauts practice maneuvers to simulate weightlessness.</p><p><span class="bodycontent">"I could look at moon rocks at lunch!"</span></p><p class="bodycontent">A short year later, his NASA contract ended, and he went back into commercial video work. It was 1988 and the next four years were "when I honed my skills," he says. "Those were really the years where I got good. And those were also years when computer graphics became increasingly sophisticated." Kramer did CG work for blue-chip clients such as TBS, CNN, Coca Cola, and the Atlanta Olympics. In 1992, he worked on a ride film--that early 1990s amusement where viewers sat on a moving platform and viewed imagery projected around them. The project not only offered interesting computer-graphics work, it also led to work on his first feature films, <span class="pubtitle">Stargate</span> and <span class="pubtitle">Clear and Present Danger</span>. "You remember in <span class="pubtitle">Clear and Present Danger</span>, they drop that smart bomb? I did the smart bomb. I built it in the computer, I lit it, and I made it fly through the clouds on its way down."</p><p class="bodycontent">After a decade of sixty- to 100-hour weeks in video, Kramer says, he finally had his foot in the door to the movie industry. He got the call from ILM in 1994, and has been there ever since. "It was right after<span class="pubtitle"> Jurassic Park</span> and <span class="pubtitle">The Abyss</span> had come out. Both of those were jaw-dropping, eye-opening events in special-effects history. No one had ever done such realistic computer-generated work. I was making flying logos that, if they looked like beveled glass and gold, the client would be happy. And along came this stuff that looked incredibly real, and it was dinosaurs. There's a big leap between flying gold logos and dinosaurs," he says wryly.</p><p class="bodycontent">Dinosaurs it was. Among other things, Kramer was soon working on <span class="pubtitle">The Lost World: Jurassic Park</span> and then two of the <span class="pubtitle">Star Wars</span> movies, <span class="pubtitle">The Phantom Menace </span>and <span class="pubtitle">Attack of the Clones</span>, followed by <span class="pubtitle">Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets</span>. And boy is he having fun. What else can you say about a man whose voicemail greeting says, "Hi, you've reached Ed Magic at Industrial Light & Kramer"?</p><p class="bodycontent">Looking back now, he says, it all fits together. In CG-speak, he's socked his life. The monster comic books, the gut-level computer-science courses, the science-fiction class at Duke that his parents dismissed. "My parents were lamenting, 'Oh my God, why are you wasting your time on something so trivial?' And here I am working on<span class="pubtitle"> Star Wars</span>."</p><p><em><span class="byline">Parker is a freelance writer in Rochester, New York, and an editor of the </span>Rochester Business Journal<span class="byline">.</span></em></p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/lg_du11.jpg" width="620" height="903" alt="Kramer: fx sorcerer. Noah Berger." /></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/sally-parker" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sally Parker</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Computer Graphics expert Ed Kramer</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500508 at https://alumni.duke.edu In Brief: September-October 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/brief-september-october-2004 <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> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><ul><li>Four Duke faculty members, as well as Duke President Richard H. Brodhead,were among the 202 men and women recently elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The new members from Duke are Paul L. Modrich, James B. Duke Professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator; Joseph R. Nevins, James B. Duke Professor of molecular genetics and HHMI investigator; Stuart L. Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of conservation ecology; and Anne Firor Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor of history emerita.</li><li>John V. Brown, visiting director of the Duke Jazz Ensemble in 2003-04, has been appointed director of the jazz program and assistant professor of the practice of music. An accomplished jazz and classical musician-- he plays the double bass--he has performed with many of the greats, including Wynton and Ellis Marsalis, Rosemary Clooney, Nicholas Payton, and Mark Whitfield. He received a Grammy nomination for his performance and co-writing on Nnenna Freelon's1995 release, Shaking Free.</li><li>Under a new agreement between the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Duke will offer reduced tuition each year for two or three Army officers to earn master's degrees in public policy. After completing Duke's two-year master's program with courses in political analysis, leadership and management, ethics, economics, international relations, and political science, officers will return to West Point.</li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500507 at https://alumni.duke.edu Building Memories https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/building-memories <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> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><p class="articletitle">If the emotional memory of a traumatic car accident or the thrill of first love are remembered with a special resonance, it is because they engage different brain structures than do normal memories, say Duke researchers reporting in a June issue of the journal Neuron.</p><p>Their new study provides clear evidence from humans that the brain's emotional center, called the amygdala, interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of emotional memories, perhaps to give such memories their indelible emotional resonance.</p><p>The study by Florin Dolcos, Kevin LaBar, and Roberto Cabeza was reported in June in the journal Neuron. Dolcos is a research associate in the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center; LaBar and Cabeza are assistant and associate professors of psychological and brain sciences, respectively. They are also on the faculty of the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences. Their research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.</p><p>According to Dolcos, the researchers were seeking evidence for the "modulation hypothesis"--evidence that the brain's emotional region modulates activity in the memory regions to form an emotional memory. "This idea was supported by animal research, but the evidence from neurologically intact humans was scarce and indirect. So, our goal was to find the right method that would allow us to demonstrate that this phenomenon happens in humans, too."</p><p>The researchers exposed volunteer subjects to a slideshow of both positive and negative images. The negative images were a grisly display of aggressive acts and injured people; the positive pictures presented the viewer with scenes of romance or sporting triumph. Neutral pictures were also part of the slideshow: a building, a person shopping in a mall.</p><p>Throughout the slideshow, participants' brain activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging that measured blood flow to different regions of the brain. Following the show, the researchers tested participants' memory of the images they viewed.</p><p>As expected, says Dolcos, "we found evidence that the interaction between the emotional and memory regions occurred more systematically and consistently during the formation of emotional memories than during the formation of neutral memories. And we found that the subjects showing greater successful encoding activity in the emotional region also had greater activity in the memory regions."</p><p>According to Cabeza, "We also found indications that some regions within the medial temporal lobe may actually be more specialized for encoding neutral information. We don't know exactly what the processes involved are, or why these regions are engaged. But we speculate that the regions that were more activated for emotional stimuli are involved in semantic processing of the meaning of the images, whereas those that are more activated by neutral stimuli reflect perceptual processing."</p><p>The findings not only establish the functional link between the emotional and memory areas, says Cabeza, but also hint at differences within the memory areas that should be the subject of further studies. As part of their research, the authors are now exploring the role of these brain regions during the retrieval of well-consolidated emotional memories.</p><p>Cabeza says that better delineation of the role of the amygdala in emotional memory could aid understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder--especially such phenomena as flashbacks of traumatic memories.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500506 at https://alumni.duke.edu Dispatches from the Campaign Trail: September-October 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dispatches-campaign-trail-september-october-2004 <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> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr valign="top"><td colspan="2" height="15"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="49%"><table width="18%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 175px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/070804/images/lg_goth09049830.jpg" alt="A campus gargoyle" width="175" height="261" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Les Todd.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Pictures of Iraqi detainees being physically abused and humiliated by U.S. soldiers in the cellblocks of Abu Ghraib prison shocked and angered us all when first shown last April. They also created a firestorm of criticism abroad that has not yet abated. Our claims of being a nation under the rule of law are greeted with cries of hypocrisy. The resulting damage to our credibility in the international community is, in large measure, irreparable; any healing balm will come not from mere rhetoric alone, but only from our proven actions over the long term.</p><p>Was what happened at Abu Ghraib an isolated instance of abuse by a few miscreants or perhaps the unintended result of some larger governmental program or policy? In June, we learned of a series of legal memoranda, emanating principally from the Department of Justice and covering a span of some eighteen months, that advocated a theory under which extremely coercive interrogation tactics, perhaps even extending to what many would consider torture, could be used at the detention facility at Guant·namo Bay, immune from any dictates of domestic and international law.</p><p>The memoranda posit the argument that the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war cannot be constricted by any act of Congress, treaty, or principle of customary international law. Therefore, since we are in a war against terrorism, and the interrogation of those captured in this "war" is vital to gaining intelligence to preclude further attacks, the means by which they are interrogated is akin to a battlefield tactic that is solely within the province of the president.</p><p>This is breathtaking in its scope and worrisome in its implications. Under the administration's concept of the war on terrorism, the world is the battlefield, and the "war" will go on as long as any terrorist cell exists anywhere with the capability to strike at our national interests, whether at home or abroad.</p><p>But this theory, with its clearly stated principle of evasion of domestic and international law, is not widely accepted in legal circles, even among those of a conservative bent. Further, even within the administration, attorneys at the State Department strongly objected to several key points made in the memoranda, as did many uniformed military lawyers who, along with their civilian Department of Defense counterparts, served as part of a Pentagon working group that met in the spring of 2003 to vet specific techniques for possible use at Guant·namo Bay. Many of the objections of these military lawyers, however, were neither heeded by the rest of the group nor contained in the final report sent to and accepted by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It is perplexing that civilian decision makers in the Pentagon did not listen to the voices of those most experienced in the nuances of the application of domestic and international law in combat operations.</p><p>Whether expressly or by implication, the interrogation techniques designed for use against those supposedly outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions at Guant·namo Bay were somehow "exported" to Southwest Asia and became some of the very ones used against detainees in Iraq, who clearly were under the protection of the conventions. Granted, the abuses at Abu Ghraib undoubtedly exceeded anything authorized by Secretary Rumsfeld. But they were, nonetheless, the indirect product of a counter culture fostered by the memoranda--a counter culture epitomized by a legal regime that had as its principal goal the skirting of the rule of law.</p><p>Although one may challenge the memoranda as being technically flawed, as many knowledgeable critics have, the more troubling aspect in all this is the apparent shift in our fundamental national principles--a shift from being a nation that claims itself to be under the rule of law to one that now strives to find ways to avoid it. Some, even including the counsel to the president, have argued that, because we are dealing with terrorists who do not adhere to the laws of war, they should not be treated the same as those who do.</p><p>But complying with our obligations under domestic and international law has never been dependent upon reciprocity. To the contrary, whether as a nation or simply as individuals, we have always prided ourselves on submitting to the rule of law because it is the right thing to do, regardless of the actions of others. A firm tenet of the democratic principles that we tout as our hallmark and that we now seek to export to the Muslim world is compliance with what is called for under law and established moral principles, rather than what the exigencies of the moment might suggest. In this instance, if we adopt the notion that the use of torture in interrogation is justified under circumstances of our own construct--the notion set forth in the memoranda--we risk becoming much like those we claim to be our enemies.</p><p>More than 130 years ago, Walt Whitman wrote, "Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy. Of value is thy freight." If we as a nation expect to continue in our role of world leadership in the difficult times ahead, our heading must remain straight, and our compass true.</p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="90%" /><p class="byline"><em>Silliman is a professor of the practice of law at Duke Law School and the executive director of Duke's Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security. Before joining the law faculty in 1993, he spent twenty-five years as a uniformed Air Force attorney.</em></p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" 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/scott-l-silliman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott L. Silliman</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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Troubling Questions in Interrogating Terrorists</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500505 at https://alumni.duke.edu Drawing on War https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/drawing-war <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> </p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091004/images/lg_eleano1.jpg" alt="Redan, September 8, 1855" width="580" height="405" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Redan, September 8, 1855 <br />By Sir Henry Charles Eden Malet Watercolor from the Malet <br />Family Papers.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">At the height of the Crimean War (1854-56), Sir Henry Charles Eden Malet, a young British officer, recounted his experiences in a series of letters to his family. What distinguishes these letters from other wartime correspondence is the accompanying album of watercolors and sketches illustrating scenes that Malet mentioned in his letters.</p><p>Born in 1835 to Sir Alexander Malet, a career diplomat, and his wife, Marian Dora Spalding Malet, Henry Malet began sketching at age six and developed this skill into adulthood. In 1854, he was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards, and in May 1855, at the age of nineteen, he arrived on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea (modern-day Ukraine).</p><p>As the French and British waged war against the Russians, Malet recorded his observations in paintings and sketches. He sent some of his drawings home in his letters; others were saved and assembled into an album. The drawings range in size from roughly four-by-six inches to fourteen-by-twenty inches.</p><p>Malet's letters and drawings document scenes of the countryside, military life, and combat, as experienced by a young officer and amateur artist. Images include the siege of Sevastopol and the battles of Balaklava, Inkerman, Mamelon Hill, and Malakoff Tower. The paintings attest to Malet's desire to record the war and to serve as an eyewitness for those not present.</p><p>After the war, his family sent him to Montreal to thwart an undesirable romance. He remained in North America through the early 1860s, traveling to Washington and Fredericksburg, Virginia, to witness and sketch scenes of the American Civil War.</p><p>This album is part of a larger collection of more than 6,000 items, "the Malet Family Papers, 1808-1937." This collection consists mostly of correspondence among various family members, as well as prominent contemporaries. Lady Marian Dora Malet's diary, financial papers, and photographs round out the collection. The Malet Family Papers were acquired by Duke in several purchases between 1970 and 1990.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, October 1, 2004</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/sep-oct-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2004</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">Selections from Duke Library</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500504 at https://alumni.duke.edu