One thing certain about the flu is uncertainty, according to Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a prominent authority on the spread of infectious disease.

The rise and rapid spread of H1N1 flu virus, known as swine flu, has kept Lipsitch busy in recent months. An expert in computer modeling of disease dynamics, Lipsitch has been part of a team advising federal officials on swine flu's likely behavior and the government's response to it.

In April, shortly after the flu hit the headlines, Lipsitch was called to Atlanta as an adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For a week, he worked intensively with other advisers and officials there to provide analysis and perspective. He appreciated, he said, how difficult the job of health policymakers is in the early stages of a pandemic, when difficult decisions are being made on the basis of still-sketchy information about how dangerous and contagious a pathogen is.

'Academics have the ability to spend more time thinking about these questions than people who provide valuable services,' Lipsitch said. 'I felt frantic the whole time, but not nearly as frantic as the people who had to [make decisions] each day.'

Lipsitch kept in touch with officials in Atlanta after he returned to Boston through conference calls, at first daily and now weekly.

Last summer, as a member of the 2009 H1N1 Working Group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped draft an assessment of the federal government's handling of the swine flu outbreak so far. He gave it high marks, particularly for its flexibility.

Flexibility is key in handling an outbreak's beginning, he said. Because officials didn't know how dangerous H1N1 was, the initial response included fairly dramatic steps, such as closing schools if a case were diagnosed there. Those responses were dialed back as officials began to understand that, while contagious, H1N1 wasn't as deadly as past pandemic flus have been ' at least so far.

'People took it seriously and then scaled back as the nature of it was shown,' Lipsitch said. 'The response was well-tailored to cover the range of possibilities at any one time.'

Lipsitch was recently named the head of a new center at the Harvard School of Public Health designed to provide better information about disease outbreaks to public health officials and policymakers. The Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, which received a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will focus on mathematical modeling of seasonal infectious diseases such as the flu, on drug resistance, and on the best ways to allocate resources in interventions.

Lipsitch said that more people with such public health expertise are needed in the United States, so part of the center's mission will also be to educate a new generation of students in the discipline.

Lipsitch, who received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1995, has considerable experience to lend to the effort. Much of his study has focused on the pathogen that causes pneumonia, childhood ear infections, and meningitis, Streptococcus pneumoniae. He has evaluated how it spreads, how it is affected by interventions, and what the patterns of drug resistance are. He also worked on the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and has worked to better understand the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions around the world.

With the Northern Hemisphere flu season looming with the pending of winter, Lipsitch said uncertainty remains about the nature of the flu's coming second round. Though H1N1 is so far not as severe as past flu epidemics, it is clear that some will die from the ailment, Lipsitch said. Vaccines, which are being rushed through development and distribution, will be available in October, but it takes time to administer the dose and more time for the body to develop immunity.

A new online journal developed by students at Harvard Law School (HLS) aims to shed light on the area of sports and entertainment law.

Students received approval for the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law in August and will release the inaugural issue of the annual online publication in the spring of 2010. Within the next couple of years, the journal's founders hope to launch a printed version of the publication that will publish twice yearly.

Through a collection of scholarly essays and articles, the new publication, states its Web site, intends to 'provide the academic community, the sports and entertainment industries, and the broader legal profession with scholarly analysis and research related to the legal aspects of the sports and entertainment communities.'

'There are a lot of legal issues in this field and there aren't many scholarly outlets for the investigation of these issues,' said one of the journal's founders and its editor-in-chief, HLS student Ashwin Krishnan '05, J.D. '10. 'We want to explore this field in depth and treat it in a scholarly and rigorous fashion.'

Krishnan, who worked with the Boston Celtics during the 2008-09 academic year, noted that there is enthusiasm on the part of both students and faculty for the new journal as well as a need for it to fill an important academic hole.

'There was no journal at a school like Harvard, and we felt like we could really come in and be the leader in this field as a top-tier law school in this space.'

The journal represents a growing interest in the field on the HLS campus.

The discipline was the original domain of Paul C. Weiler, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law Emeritus, whom Krishnan refers to as 'the godfather of sports law.' But since 2007, visiting lecturer on sports law Peter Carfagna, who studied with Weiler while a student at HLS, has taken the mantle, introducing a series of courses for students and clinical placements with professional sports teams and leagues, as well as independent writing projects.

Carfagna serves as the journal's faculty adviser and is ideally suited for the role. He was chief legal officer/general counsel of International Management Group ' one of the nation's top sports management and representation firms ' for more than 10 years, and currently heads his own private practice in sports law.

Carfagna's new courses in the Law School's curriculum include this fall's 'Sports and the Law: Examining the Legal History and Evolution of America’s Three 'Major League' Sports: MLB, NFL, and MBA,' and 'Sports and the Law: Representing the Professional Athlete,' which he will teach in the 2010 winter term.

He noted that the area of sports and entertainment law intersects with a number of other important legal topics.

'There are all sorts of [issues] ... that require serious academic consideration because the courts are going to listen to what publications like this journal have to say about where they should go next in these areas that intersect sports law but really define substantive areas like intellectual property, publicity rights, antitrust, and collective bargaining-related issues.'

Sports and entertainment law 'really needs serious scholarship from a place like Harvard,' added Carfagna. 'I think Harvard can put its indelible stamp on the area.'

Krishnan and his fellow journal founders, Josh Podoll, J.D. '11 and Ryan Gauthier, J.D. '10, are not only developing the first issue of the journal, but also hoping to ensure the longevity of the publication by involving first- and second-year HLS students in the project who can step into management roles when the original team graduates.

'Everything that we do with this journal,' said Krishnan, 'is looking toward the long term as well.'

The journal will accept articles, essays, book reviews, notes, and comments regarding legal and/or public policy issues related to the field. For more information on submissions, visit http://harvardjsel.com/submissions/.

Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for pioneering work in the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects chromosomes from degrading.

The work not only revealed a key cellular function, it also illuminated processes involved in disease and aging.

Szostak called the prize 'the highest scientific honor' and thanked his co-winners and collaborators, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

'It started off as work on a very basic question that has turned out, to our delight and surprise, to have much broader implications,' Szostak said.

The three won the prize for work conducted during the 1980s to discover and understand the operation of telomerase, an enzyme that forms protective caps called telomeres on the ends of chromosomes.

Subsequent research has shown that telomerase and telomeres hold key roles in cell aging and death and also play a part in the aging of the entire organism. Research has also shown that cancer cells have increased telomerase activity, protecting them from death.

Harvard President Drew Faust congratulated Szostak, saying his achievement highlights the importance of basic scientific research, which may not have an apparent practical application when it is conducted.

'I congratulate Jack Szostak and his colleagues on this singular honor,' Faust said. 'Their work has not only shed light on the central scientific issues of aging and disease, it also clearly illustrated the importance of unfettered basic research.”

Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier said the work highlights not just the importance of basic research, but also that of the ongoing collaboration between the University and its hospitals ' in this case, Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics and MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, where Szostak holds appointments.

'These two units have worked together in tremendous and beautiful synergy, scientifically, for so many years, and have been a breeding ground for so many scientific breakthroughs, including those being recognized today,' Flier said. 'The things [Szostak] did to understand how yeast cells work are now leading to what we think are going to be important breakthroughs in therapies for cancer, approaches to aging, and [important in] many other human diseases.'

MGH President Peter Slavin said the hospital was 'thrilled and honored' to learn of Szostak's award and thanked him for his contributions to biomedical research and for advancing the understanding of human biology and disease.

Robert Kingston, chief of MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, called Szostak 'a scientist's scientist' with an 'absolutely remarkable record of scientific achievement.'

'Jack is among a handful of the most respected scientists in the field,' Kingston said. 'He's immensely, immensely deserving of this recognition.'

In addition to being a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, Szostak is the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator in the MGH Department of Molecular Biology, a member of MGH's Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Szostak's day began at 4:45 a.m. with a phone call from the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which awards the prize. By midday, he said, his phone still hadn't stopped ringing.

Later Monday, Szostak missed the introductory biochemistry class he was scheduled to teach and appeared instead at a news conference at Massachusetts General Hospital's Simches Research Center. He entered the room, beaming, to a standing ovation by colleagues from the hospital.

Matthew Powner, a postdoctoral fellow in Szostak's laboratory on the building's seventh floor, said he and the rest of the lab were excited for Szostak. The lab was decorated with congratulatory notes, ribbons, and gold balloons.

'I think it's fantastic news,' Powner said.

Telomeres' existence was hypothesized in the 1930s after scientists observed that, though the ends of normal chromosomes never fuse with each other, the ends of chromosome fragments do. In 1980, Szostak began collaborating with Blackburn. Together they showed that repeated nucleotide sequences found in telomeres of a single-celled protozoan also worked to protect chromosomes in yeast cells, illustrating they had discovered something very basic that worked in a wide range of creatures.

Blackburn and Greider went on to isolate telomerase, while Szostak identified a protein essential for maintaining telomeres in yeast, which turned out to be a key component of the enzyme. His work showed that the inability to add nucleotide repeats to chromosomes led to telomere shortening and eventually cell death. This was the first link between the molecular biology of telomeres and cellular senescence, the aging and death of cells.

Although this work was not known to be relevant to human disease when carried out in the 1980s, subsequent studies of telomeres and telomerase in human cells have shown that the enzyme plays crucial roles in both cancer and aging.

Since his work on telomeres and telomerase, Szostak has shifted focus. Today he is exploring the very beginnings of life, focusing on how the first cells were created. He is co-director of Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative.

With Szostak's award, 44 current and former Harvard faculty members have been recipients of Nobel Prizes for wide-ranging work, including the tissue culture breakthrough that led to the creation of the polio vaccine, negotiations that led to an armistice in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the first description of the structure of DNA, pioneering procedures for organ transplants, and the development of Gross National Product as a measure of national economic change.

The most recent Harvard faculty member to win a Nobel Prize was in 2005, when physicist Roy Glauber received the physics Nobel for work on the nature and behavior of light and Thomas Schelling won in economics for work on conflict and cooperation in game theory. Previous winners this decade include Linda Buck, in physiology or medicine in 2004, Richard Giacconi, in physics in 2002, and A. Michael Spence, in economics in 2001.

The Institute of Politics (IOP) remembers Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an active member of the Institute's Senior Advisory Committee since the IOP's creation in 1966 as a living memorial to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. The IOP's mission is to unite and engage students, particularly undergraduates, with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership.

"Ted Kennedy has for decades been a paragon of public service and an impassioned champion of education and opportunity for all. His profound commitment to making the American dream real for people from all walks of life, and his special devotion to higher education, will endure and inspire us long beyond his passing. We have been privileged and proud to have him as a member of the Harvard family, and I am one of the many, many people who will deeply miss his leadership, his courage, and his friendship." Harvard President Drew Faust

Katherine N. Lapp, executive vice president for business operations for the University of California, will become Harvard University’s executive vice president, President Drew Faust announced today (Aug. 20). Lapp will assume her duties in early October.

As executive vice president, Lapp will be the chief administrative officer within the University’s central administration and a member of the president’s senior management team. She will oversee the financial, administrative, human resources, and capital planning functions of the central administration, as well as administrative aspects of information technology. She will also work with colleagues across the University to identify areas in which greater coordination or collaboration can improve the quality or cost-effectiveness of operations, services, or administrative support. In addition, Lapp will serve as an ex officio member of the board of the Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard’s endowment.

Lapp has served as the chief business officer for the University of California (UC) since May of 2007, overseeing a system consisting of the Office of the President, 10 separate campuses, five medical centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with a system-wide budget that exceeded $18 billion this past fiscal year. Before moving to California, Lapp had a distinguished career in leadership roles in city and state government in New York, including serving as executive director and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, North America’s largest regional transportation network.

“Katie Lapp brings extraordinary management experience and an impressive breadth of accomplishment to this role,” said Faust. “She has extensive expertise in budget and finance, exceptionally strong credentials as a leader and reformer of systems and operations, and demonstrated success in the higher education environment.

“Katie has a reputation for effectiveness, honesty, and integrity in whatever she undertakes, and she has shown that she has the capacity to work with multiple constituencies to accomplish common goals,” Faust continued. “I very much look forward to working with Katie, and I know that she will be a superb addition to the Harvard community.”

“I am very excited about this opportunity to return to the East Coast while continuing to work in higher education,” said Lapp. “I was brought to California to strengthen the administrative effectiveness of the President’s Office and system-wide operations, and I have loved supporting the academic mission of this great public university system. I look forward now to the opportunity to immerse myself in the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for Harvard.”

The search was guided by an advisory group co-chaired by Vice Presidents Clayton Spencer and Robert Iuliano, and also including David Ellwood, dean of the Kennedy School, Daniel Ennis, executive dean of the Medical School, Christine Heenan, vice president for Government, Community and Public Affairs, Jay Light, dean of the Business School, Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, Peter Tufano, Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Financial Management and senior associate dean of the Business School, and Thomas Vautin, acting vice president for administration.

In addition to serving as the chief budget officer for the University of California, Lapp has provided administrative oversight of finances, human resources, real estate and facilities management, and information resources. She has overseen the university’s financial management, including the issuance of bonds and debt service strategies for all university locations, and the implementation of campus-based capital projects and the development of capital plans to ensure compliance with system-wide budget and finance approvals. Over the past two years, Lapp has overseen a complete restructuring of the Office of the President, including reducing the budget in excess of $60 million. More recently, for the current fiscal year, she has directed the effort to reduce the system-wide budget by $800 million to meet state budget requirements.

Prior to her time at UC, Lapp spent her entire career in New York. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, then-Gov. George Pataki appointed her executive director and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In this role, Lapp oversaw the operations, finances, and long-term business strategies of a transportation network with more than 2 billion riders and consisting of New York City Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road, Long Island Bus, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, and the MTA Bus and MTA Capital Construction companies. As CEO, Lapp, along with the MTA’s board, was responsible for 65,000 employees, an annual budget of more than $7 billion, and a $21 billion five-year capital program for system maintenance and expansion.

Before moving to the MTA in 2002, she served in a variety of positions in the criminal justice system of the State and City of New York, culminating in her role as the state’s director of criminal justice and commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) from 1997 to 2001.

Lapp received her B.A. in 1978 from Fairfield University and her J.D. in 1981 from Hofstra University.

Lapp succeeds Edward C. Forst, who served as Harvard’s first executive vice president.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have substantially improved the odds of successfully reprogramming differentiated cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) by blocking the activity of the gene that instructs the cells to stop dividing.

Konrad Hochedlinger and colleagues at the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine also found that reprogramming efforts are more likely to be successful if they target immature cells rather than their more mature counterparts for reprogramming.

Induced pluripotent cells are adult cells that have been reprogrammed back to an embryo-like state in which they have regained the potential to turn into any of the 220 cell types in the body, such as liver cells, skin cells, or heart cells. “This has been a main question and main interest in the field for a long time,” says Hochedlinger. “When you work with mature cells, for some reason only a few of them actually reprogram into an iPS cell: Why is the reprogramming process so inefficient?”

The team has devised two solutions for the problem of inefficiency, one of which involves selecting only certain cell types for reprogramming. The work is being published in two separate reports, one in the journal Nature, and the other in Nature Genetics.

Researchers know how to reprogram fully developed cells into iPS cells, yet the efficiency of the process remains very low – only about one in every 1,000 mature cells is successfully reprogrammed. Hochedlinger explained that because it’s been difficult to reprogram mature differentiated cells, he and his colleagues focused their effort on a population of relatively rare progenitor cells, cells heading down a particular developmental pathway, but not yet turned into the eventual cell type.

“By attempting to reprogram a population of progenitor cells, you have a way to increase efficiency,” says Hochedlinger. “This may be relevant when you think about upscaling iPS technology in a human setting. If you want to make iPS disease-specific cells from a limited amount of tissue material, you may want to specifically isolate these rare progenitor cells because you know the chance is much higher that they will give rise to an iPS cell compared with the mature cells which actually make the bulk of the tissue.”

Progenitor cells can give rise to a number of mature cell types within a given tissue type. For instance, blood progenitor cells give rise to all types of blood cells. Cardiac progenitors give rise to a number of different types of cardiac cells. But cardiac progenitors do not develop into blood cells, and vice versa.

“The second solution we came up with was identifying molecules whose manipulation enhances the cell division cycle, the proliferation of the cells, and thereby also enhances the efficiency of the reprogramming,” Hochedlinger continues.

Normally adult cells have a limited number of cell division they can go through before they stop dividing. “Certain molecules turn on to tell the cell ‘stop dividing now,’” he says. “We find that if we inactivate the molecule, it makes the cell continue dividing. And we can increase the efficiency of reprogramming by making the cell grow indefinitely.”

The work is an important step in “fine-tuning” the science of creating iPS cells. It both takes advantage of progenitor cells’ability to be reprogrammed, and also allows researchers to begin the process with a mature cell, where specific molecules are manipulated to obtain cell division and enhance the efficiency.

Producing iPS cells en masse will provide researchers with a way to study diseases in the laboratory, as well as provide targets for drug development, and, if the iPS cells prove to be biologically identical to human embryonic stem cells, they may provide material for cell transplants in diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and heart disease.

Adam Cohen and Ben Rapoport needed materials to conduct a science experiment, but supplies were hard to come by.

Cohen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Rapoport, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were in the West African nation of Liberia, devastated by two civil wars that ended in 2003. Its classrooms had been stripped during the wars, leaving Liberian teachers and students with few resources beyond the desire to learn.

So Cohen and Rapoport went shopping for limes.

A short time later, their trip to the open-air market was done and they had what they needed: limes, metal nails, and copper wire. Soon they were demonstrating how to make a simple battery to Liberian science teachers, daring them to feel the admittedly small electrical current on their tongues, and offering a hands-on illustration of scientific principles that across the war-devastated nation are taught mainly through lecture and memorization.

“That’s what we want to do, teach relevant science and make it self-sustaining,” Rapoport said.

Liberia presents fertile ground for Cohen and Rapoport’s efforts. The nation, founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, was torn by two civil wars that began in 1989 and ended in 2003. The wars killed hundreds of thousands, generated tales of beheadings, torture, and other atrocities, and devastated the nation’s infrastructure.

Though the fighting has been over for several years, its effects are still apparent.

During their two weeks in Liberia in June, the two scholars were struck by the bare classrooms and stripped labs — even metal drawers were taken for sale as scrap. The years of war had seen schools abandoned, leaving nearly a generation of adults with little education. During the war, soldiers took what they needed, removing metal from buildings not damaged or destroyed in the fighting, killing livestock, and burning rubber trees for charcoal. On the palm oil plantation of the family that hosted Cohen and Rapoport, machines with key parts missing lay rusting in the underbrush while the oil harvesting — crushing and extracting the liquid from oil palm fruits — was done entirely by hand.

“Education is the one thing you can’t steal from people,” Cohen said. “People are very open to new ideas there and there’s a tremendous amount to do.”

During the course of their trip, Cohen and Rapoport visited the University of Liberia at Monrovia, the Liberian Ministry of Education, several civic groups, and 10 schools, doing some classroom teaching but mainly focusing their efforts on providing science training for the teachers.

The two strove to make their presentations as hands-on and relevant as possible, demonstrating several simple experiments that could be done with local ingredients. For example, they showed faculty and students how to extract DNA from local produce using kitchen utensils as laboratory equipment and easily obtained chemicals, such as soap, salt, and rubbing alcohol, as reagents.

They also added a module on nutrition after seeing the distended bellies of children across the countryside, a sign of kwashiorkor, or a deficiency of protein and micronutrients. Protein-rich foods are available, though they’re not typically given to children, whose diet, they observed, is almost exclusively made up of high-starch foods such as rice and cassava, often cooked with palm oil. Meat, for example, is considered a food for men, Rapoport said, but nuts, beans, and eggs are all available locally and would add protein to a child’s diet.

Most schools had little by way of laboratory equipment. What was there was often locked away unused or broken in a way that might be easily fixable, if parts were available. At one school though, the pair came upon a laboratory complete with equipment such as scales, beakers, and microscopes, some of it still bound in packing material. The room, however, had been padlocked and unused. When the two asked to get inside, the headmaster had to send for a key to open the heavy metal doors.

The layer of dust on the equipment spoke of their lack of use. The teachers, Rapoport said, didn’t know how to use the equipment, so he and Cohen conducted an impromptu lesson on basic laboratory skills, weighing a cell phone and different liquids to spark a discussion of density. It wasn’t long before a few students entered, then more, and the lesson eventually drew 30 students into the unused room.

“There was this beautiful lab, all laid out, but it had never been used,” Rapoport said.

Wherever they went, the complaints from science teachers were the same: no equipment, teaching that was theoretical and by rote, and a lack of job prospects in scientific fields — the medical school has only 50 slots — that keeps student interest low. The two stressed that science learning isn’t only important if one wants to be a doctor or scientist. Understanding the scientific method and how to gather and analyze information is important in a host of fields.

“For me, part of science education was memorizing facts, but a big part of it was fostering inventiveness,” Cohen said.

Though this year’s trip was exploratory in nature, Cohen and Rapoport are already thinking about what to do next. They’ve begun constructing an online journal, The Liberian Scientist, in an effort they hope will not only provide a showcase for what science is being conducted in the nation, but also help build the scientific community there.

Though computer equipment does exist, much of it is broken or heavily virus-infected, Cohen said. He’s thinking of purchasing USB flash drives, loading them with antivirus software, open source software such as Open Office and Wikipedia, and perhaps electronic versions of key texts, such as medical books, and sending them over. Though he and Rapoport are still assessing the results of this year’s trip, they’re also talking about returning next summer, spending less time running around the country and more time in focused workshops aimed at teachers.

Cohen and Rapoport became interested in Liberia back when the two were in high school together at Hunter College High School in New York City. While there, they met Asumana Randolph, a science teacher originally from Liberia who worked as a technician in the science labs and adviser to the science club and to students’ independent research projects. The two said they learned a lot from Randolph, who stayed connected to his large family in Liberia, often shipping home needed materials. (Once he collected thousands of shoes and shipped them off.) Randolph eventually created a nonprofit organization, the I-Help Liberia Project, to help in the effort and got the school involved, bringing some high school students back to Liberia with him.

Randolph said it was very gratifying to see two former students take up the cause to help Liberia, particularly since he had always preached that, as a scientist, one should not live in a world bounded by a laboratory, but reach out and help people as well.

“It is all about, ‘ I’m going to leave this world.’ You ask yourself what do you leave behind?” Randolph said.

In this case, Randolph said, Cohen and Rapoport are tackling a task critical to Liberia’s future because science underlies all development.

“If you talk about transportation, you’re talking about science. If you talk about public health, you’re talking about science,” Randolph said. “If you want to look at Liberia for the next 10 years to come, you have to look at the science curriculum and teach students how to think for themselves. Development in Liberia cannot happen without a strong science background.”

Cohen said he had always meant to visit Liberia and this summer finally put the trip together. He and Rapoport remain in touch with Randolph, who helped organize the visit. Randolph scheduled trips to various schools and put Cohen and Rapoport in touch with family members who hosted them. The two said that though people typically think that aid always flows from the United States to other countries, in this case it was Liberia that exported an important mentor to the United States.

Cohen said the trip has already borne some fruit. The first day after he returned, he hosted a group of seventh-graders from New York City. He showed them the lab and then showed them some photos from Liberia and told the students the story of students there. He heard recently that the class has decided to sponsor a class of Liberian seventh-graders, helping them stay in school. He said he is also working with the Harvard Islamic Society to raise funds to rebuild a local mosque that was damaged during the fighting.

Political and philosophical differences aside, it’s the economic crisis that’s driving the current national health care reform debate.

“Every day the president gets an envelope [that] says, ‘Whoa! Bigger [deficit] this day than yesterday,’” noted Robert J. Blendon, professor of health policy and management, speaking at the Harvard School of Public Health on Tuesday.

Couple the worst economy since the 1930s, with the reality that President Obama “does not have the statutory power to enact health care reform,” and the reform effort is headed for major reformation, contends Blendon.

The structural and economic realities simply cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that the structure of the U.S. government requires House, Senate, and the president to negotiate major issues as though they were “coalition partners.” But in the case of health care reform, they aren’t doing that, he added.

Blendon, who is also a professor of political analysis at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that what is being debated now is not a real restructuring of the American health care system, but a “[proposed] law that says ‘everybody who works at Dunkin’ Donuts has to have insurance.’

“It turns out millions of people work full time, but they get no [health] benefits. Cost and the [state] of the economy are the problems,” Blendon said. People across the country can be heard crying, ‘I can’t afford to pay. Do whatever you want – just don’t ask me to pay.’”

The tax issue presents a perfect example of why it’s not really up to the president to decide what health care reform will look like. In fact, Blendon said, “the discussions about Obama’s health plan are actually, politically fictitious” because Congress controls the power to tax and “in a deep recession you have people saying ‘I can’t pay more taxes. I can’t even pay for my kids to go to college,’” Blendon said.

“So this is no small issue at any level,” he continued. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Of course I want reform. I want coverage, but somebody else has to pay for this,’” he said. “… And every time that happens, Obama turns to [his director of the National Economic Council] Larry Summers and says, ‘Take it out of Medicare.’ Summers gets it out of Medicare, and then Mom and Dad start firing off e-mails [to the White House] about it” and the fight starts all over again.

It may be that everyone has agreed that providing universal health care coverage is the socially right thing to do, but then comes the reality of the proposed law, said Blendon. And a number of realities trump principle, he added.

Blendon explained that when most people think of health care reform, a national health insurance plan of some sort, they envision everyone having something like a national insurance card, “mostly paid for by tax payers ahead of time. But the U.S. model is not going to work that way,” Blendon said. “People are going to be asked to pay thousands of dollars for a subsidized policy unless their income is very low. And a lot of young people who are healthy,” and don’t think they need insurance, and the “‘I hate the government’ types are not going to buy it.”

Despite the endless discussion on talk radio and in the blogosphere, none of the major players in the current health care debate is pushing for an all-government, “socialized medicine” form of health care, Blendon told his audience. In reality, all the proposals are solidly anchored “in the existing system, which is an employer-based insurance for people who work, a public insurance plan, like Medicare, for the retiree, and some kind of insurance for the unemployed or those working only part time.” There is a new government portion to Obama’s plan, which proposes to mandate employer coverage, creating a public insurance option that will compete with private insurance companies, a government body to regulate cost, and a guarantee of insurance for all Americans, Blendon said.

Here, defining the role of government becomes significant. “The public wants much more involvement with the government in decisions about insurance companies through hospitals, and doctors … in quality and in cost. They want to share it. But when you push them, [people] all say the same thing: ‘I don’t want the government running the system,’” Blendon said. “The issue in the American debate right now is: ‘I want Obama to do more, but I don’t want him to end up running it.’”

In fact, Blendon said, special interest groups – such as the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and the American Medical Association — are playing to people’s fears of a government take-over of the health care system, and are themselves in a position to shape the plan that ultimately emerges.

The reason the special interests are so powerful is obvious, Blendon said: “If I have to run every two years (for a seat in the House) there are two things in the United States political system that I need, and that’s voters and money to run,” and the special interests provide some of the former and a lot of the latter.

However rough — and complex — the debate is, Blendon is convinced that a very significant, yet not as broad piece of legislation, will get produced by the first of the year. “It possibly won’t solve as many problems as people expected when they started the debate. But we’ll have a reform that will be a compromise bill.”

This bill, when enacted in its final form, will probably be a compromise. In Blendon’s opinion, it will move the discussion forward with a lot of improvements, but rather than say “health care solved” it will raise a lot of issues that will continue to be very important for both experts at Harvard and people across the country.

Leaders in the city of San Francisco worry that they may be due for another “big one.” Scientists estimate there is a 62 percent chance that a 6.7 magnitude or greater earthquake will occur in the San Francisco Bay Area within the next 25 years. Disaster loss estimates forecast up to 30,000 homes destroyed with billions of dollars in damage.

What can San Francisco do to prepare for catastrophe and make recovery after an earthquake more effective, reliable and less expensive? More broadly, how can all cities located in high hazard areas subject to periodic earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis, be better prepared?

A team of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) researchers has been working with municipal leaders in San Francisco on HKS’s first Advance Recovery Action research project, building on the intellectual framework of Dean David Ellwood’s Acting in Time (AIT) initiative.

The foundation for this Advance Recovery Action project is based on the HKS Broadmoor Project, a multi-year New Orleans-based recovery collaboration with local community leaders coordinated by Doug Ahlers, adjunct lecturer and Belfer Center senior fellow. Ahlers’ long-time connections with both New Orleans and San Francisco spurred the new alliance.

San Francisco sent delegations to the Broadmoor neighborhood in New Orleans to study HKS-supported disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Together, HKS researchers and San Francisco officials outlined plans for recovery before the next disaster, an evolutionary leap in natural hazards research.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s staff team, led by City Administrator Ed Lee, crafted a proactive strategy to prepare for the inevitable earthquake recovery needs of San Francisco. An interagency project work group was convened to “create a recovery roadmap...to accelerate the long-term recovery and reconstruction efforts...” Before long, HKS alumnus David Chiu MPP 1995, president of the Board of Supervisors, was briefed on the partnership and reacquainted with his former professor, Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, the project sponsor.

The HKS Advance Recovery Project team, led by Leonard along with Ahlers and project director, Arrietta Chakos, began working with the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) in May 2007. This fall, Ahlers will be teaching a course at HKS, “Disaster Recovery Management and Urban Development: Rebuilding New Orleans,” based on the New Orleans experience. Ahlers will bring in disaster recovery experts from Washington, D.C. and the Gulf Coast region to convey lessons learned from catastrophic disasters and to provide MPP and MPA students with an array of practical risk counter-measures.

The larger Acting in Time initiative was launched in 2007 by Dean Ellwood to identify effective public policy interventions for consequential public problems approaching a crisis stage. With HKS faculty, he harnessed school and university research to examine why particular problems are not addressed early on and to foster effective interventions promoting human and societal well-being. As several HKS research teams pursue different areas of concern, they are considering analysis, governance, policy design, political mobilization, and leadership as factors in the ability – or inability – to act in time.

When Ron Brummitt emerged from the Harvard Square subway stop on a recent summer morning he was met by some of the area’s sadly familiar fixtures: homeless adolescents looking for a handout.

Though he was on his way to the Harvard Business School (HBS) across the river, Brummitt took time to stop and talk with the group of three teens. Refusing to give them money, he escorted them instead to a nearby convenience store, where he bought them something to eat.

Before leaving, the fit-looking 54-year-old asked one of them why they were there. “What is it to you, sir?” the teen replied. Brummitt’s response was brief.

“I was on the streets,” he told him; “You don’t have to be on the streets.”

As a boy growing up in Florida, Brummitt’s abusive, “out of control” parents shattered his childhood. Later, drugs and alcohol led him to a life of addiction and crime.

“Drugs will take you farther than you ever want to go,” he said, “and will keep you there longer than you ever thought was possible.”

Eventually homeless, he landed at the doorstep of the Miami Rescue Mission one night in 1990, seeking refuge from a drug supplier he couldn’t pay.

The decision changed his life. Brummitt stayed at the homeless shelter, entered a detoxification program, went straight, and ultimately straight to the top of the organization. He has been the Miami Rescue Mission’s president and CEO since 2007.

Brummitt, who has a degree in psychology and is an ordained minister, was at Harvard in July to take part in Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management, a weeklong, HBS seminar that aids senior executives from the nonprofit sector in developing leadership strategies.

Participants review cases – specific examples of conflicts or problems taken from the real nonprofit world – with an HBS instructor and explore possible solutions. In addition to class discussions, they meet frequently in small group sessions with their peers to talk about the particular challenges they encounter in their line of work.

This year the program, which was developed in 1994, had its biggest enrollment to date with 156 executives from 20 different countries.

“In my view, this sector has the hardest problems, the least resources, and the least structural help in achieving high performance,” said Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS and George F. Baker Jr. Professor of Public Management in the Kennedy School of Government. “The vision and excellence in this sector has to come from its organizations’ leaders.”

Throughout the week, participants discuss a wide range of topics, said Leonard, including ways to develop and implement strategic visions, navigate the struggling economy and work with increasingly limited resources, and engage with their employees about the challenges they face. Participants also leave the campus with a robust network of peers in the nonprofit sector.

“We hope we are arming them for a wider engagement within their organization … but it’s a dance they are involved in, not a battle, and we are trying to prepare them for that larger dance,” said Leonard, chair of the program for the last five years, who praised the groups’ commitment and dedication.

“It’s an inspiration for us to have a chance to work with them.”

Brummitt said he plans to use his Harvard experience in part to develop better training for his staff, re-examine ways to reach specific goals established by his board of directors, and explore other areas of growth for his organization.

“You can read books about nonprofit management, but to come [to Harvard] … and then to be able to take back maybe two or three things I can do right away, implement right away [is invaluable]. … This has been a different, unique type of learning experience.”

Brummitt also praised the talent and devotion of his peers in the program.

“There’s a lot of people in the world,” he said, “who want to do a lot of good.”

New research from Harvard University traces the history of how human resource managers, not legislatures or courts, have defined equal opportunity and anti-discrimination policies in the workplace.

Frank Dobbin, professor of sociology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), is the author of “Inventing Equal Opportunity” (Princeton University Press, 2009), which examines the way that personnel managers have determined practices for creating workforce diversity, and how top companies’ policies have gone on to be upheld by the courts. Many of these policies have emphasized process over outcomes, allowing programs to flourish whether or not they produce measurable results, says Dobbin.

“While most of us believe civil rights law came from the courts and from Congress, beginning with the Civil Rights Act in 1964, most of the work of defining discrimination has been done by personnel managers and now human resource managers,” says Dobbin.

In his sociological history of equal opportunity initiatives, Dobbin explains that anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s were weak and vague, and firms were left to invent what equal opportunity would mean in practice.

Opponents’ efforts to weaken the Civil Rights Act actually created an opportunity for firms to compose their own policies to define and eliminate discrimination. Most of the policies and procedures adopted by firms were later endorsed by the courts, says Dobbin, and the courts often looked to equal opportunity protocols from leading companies as models for fostering diversity. In this way, equal opportunity came to be defined through “best practices,” rather than through practices proven to increase workplace diversity.

Many of the policies that were promoted to fight bias, such as salary classification systems, performance reviews, and rules about job posting, have become so taken for granted that we forget that they were popularized as anti-discrimination policies, Dobbin writes. These initiatives were put into place in most companies to create companywide criteria for hiring and promotion. More recently, practices such as diversity training and protocols for filing grievances about discrimination and harassment have come to the forefront of the field.

By upholding the policies of prominent employers, the courts have fostered the spread of similar equal opportunity policies across firms and industries. However, judges seldom require employers to demonstrate that their programs have a measurable impact on workplace diversity.

“The best practices, or the practices of the leading companies, have defined what discrimination is and isn’t, rather than evidence from studies demonstrating the impact of these programs,” says Dobbin. “Whether a diversity innovation catches on depends more on whether it is embraced by leading firms than on whether it helps to improve opportunity.”

In his research, Dobbin conducted in-depth interviews with human resource managers to trace the “life history” of a company’s equal opportunity initiatives. In the book, he analyzes the histories of specific companies such as Lockheed Martin and General Electric, which were early leaders in developing equal opportunity practices, as well as statistical data from confidential surveys of more than 1,000 companies.

In his current research Dobbin is evaluating the effectiveness of different equal opportunity programs to show which result in greater workplace diversity.

“I think that we are going to continue to see the spread of practices that are unproven, until either the courts or human resources professionals take a more evidence-based view,” says Dobbin. “The issue is that best practices are defined not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of what the hot companies are doing.”

Like backyard barbecues and Red Sox baseball, the Harvard Yard Picnic is an annual rite of summer for the Cambridge seniors who have converged on Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre for 34 years.

Sponsored by the Office of the Mayor for Cambridge and the Office of the President of Harvard University, the picnic draws hundreds of senior members from the local community to Harvard Yard to enjoy food, friends, and music.

This year’s event saw more than 800 Cambridge residents gather for the baseball-themed afternoon with Red Sox mascot Wally the Green Monster shaking hands, former Sox great Frank Malzone posing for photos and signing autographs, and a chance to view the Red Sox World Series trophies.

“The senior picnic is just one example of the many programs that bring Harvard and Cambridge together every summer,” said Harvard Vice President of Government, Community and Public Affairs Christine Heenan, when welcoming the attendees to the July 29 festivities.

“Harvard is proud to be part of the great city of Cambridge, and proud of the many partnerships that bring us together,” she added.

Harvard retiree and 17-year picnic veteran Myra McCoy shared her enthusiasm for the yearly ritual: “The senior picnic is one of the highlights of the year for me and a lot of the others, too,” she said. “It gives me an opportunity to see people I don’t see too often; it’s a great summer event.”

Guests were treated to music from the Beantown Swing Connection and an eighth-inning Red Sox-style singalong with the Cambridge Senior Center Chorus leading the assembled in a chorus of “Sweet Caroline.” The summertime revelers also noshed on ballpark hotdogs and snacks served in popcorn buckets to round out the day’s events.

Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons thanked her staff and the other elected officials, as well as Harvard University, for all of the hard work that goes into planning the annual picnic. And in keeping with the day’s theme, the mayor led everyone in a spirited rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Cambridge Postmaster Kathy Lydon then unveiled the U.S. Postal Service’s “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” stamp, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the perennial favorite, written by Jack Norworth.

Since evolving to eat other fish, freshwater fish at the top of the food chain have remained relatively unchanged compared with their insect- and snail-eating cousins, according to new research.

Scientists report in the journal Evolution that once these fish, known as centrarchids, became top predators in aquatic ecosystems, natural selection put the brakes on their evolution.

“Throughout the tree of life, we find examples of groups whose species take on a wide variety of shapes and sizes, as well as groups of organisms that are surprisingly undiverse,” says first author David C. Collar, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “Our study shows that the evolutionary origin of some ways of making a living can cause diversification to slow, resulting in morphologically similar species. Of course, focusing on centrarchids, our study examines this pattern on a smaller scale, but the principles apply broadly to the diversity of life.”

Native to North America but now found in lakes, rivers, and streams world-wide, centrarchids eat a wide range of aquatic animals, including insects, snails, small crustaceans, and other fish. Biologists have long known that certain head and body shapes make some centrarchids better at catching fish than others. To catch, kill, and swallow fish prey, it helps to have a supersized mouth, like the largemouth bass.

“There are a lot of different sizes and shapes that will be fairly good at feeding on insects,” Collar says. “But there’s really only one way to be good at feeding on fish – you need a large mouth that can engulf the prey.”
While one key to making it to the top of the food chain is to have a large mouth, the other part of the equation is speed, Collar and his colleagues explain.

“A largemouth bass mostly relies on swimming to overtake its prey, and at the last moment will pop open its mouth — kind of like popping open an umbrella — and inhale the prey item,” says co-author Peter C. Wainwright of the University of California, Davis. “They’re able to strike very quickly and inhale a huge volume of water, which allows them to catch these big elusive prey.”

Collar, Wainwright, and co-authors Brian C. O’Meara of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, N.C., and Thomas J. Near of Yale University wanted to know how this feeding strategy affected the pace and shape of evolution among largemouth bass and other species that feed primarily on fish. 

To find out, they examined museum specimens representing 29 species of centrarchid fishes. Using a chemical process to stain and visualize the bones, muscles, and connective tissue, they measured the fine parts of the head and mouth.

By mapping these measurements onto the centrarchid family tree — together with data on what each fish eats — the researchers were able to reconstruct how diet and head shape have changed over time. “It looks as if the variety of head shapes and sizes in centrarchids is strongly in-fluenced by what they eat — primarily whether they eat other fish or not,” Collar says.

More importantly, when they compared fish-feeders with species that eat other types of prey, the researchers found that bass and other centrarchids that feed primarily on fish have remained relatively unchanged over time. Once they evolved the optimal size and shape for catching fish — roughly 20 million years ago — natural selection seems to have kept them in an evolutionary holding pattern, the researchers say.

“At some point in the history of this group, some of them started feeding on fish,” says Wainwright. “And once they achieved a morphology that was good at feeding on fish, they tended not to evolve away from that. They were already good at catching the best thing out there. Why should they diversify any more? Life was good.”
Collar, Wainwright, O’Meara, and Near’s research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

A blossoming musical career and a career dedicated to exploring religion go hand in hand for one talented Harvard Divinity School (HDS) professor.

The father of two young children and an amateur musician, Matthew Myer Boulton, HDS associate professor of ministry studies, is investigating the spiritual dimension of human experience through the use of song with his newly formed band Butterflyfish.

“As I understand theology, you are trying to make ideas clear and accessible; and for me one way to do that is by writing a book or an article. But a just as powerful – and arguably more powerful – way to do it is to write a song,” he said.

Boulton’s quest began two years ago while searching for spiritually engaging tunes for his kids. Discussing the subject over watermelon at a backyard picnic one afternoon, he and his friends agreed the musical landscape for such songs, ones that weren’t “drenched in synthesizers or theologically flat,” was bleak.

“We really wanted to find music that – in an interesting and intellectually vibrant way – was engaging spiritual life. And we couldn’t find much out there.”

With few viable alternatives, Boulton, his wife Elizabeth, and their close friend Zoë Khrone decided to make the music themselves. Together they created the trio Butterflyfish, which blends American folk, blues, gospel, country, and bluegrass styles with lyrics that explore “the simple, big, and beautiful ideas in the Christian tradition, but with a twist.” “Our music is sort of an ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ for all ages,” Boulton explained.

On a rare sunny Saturday afternoon in June, Boulton and his group had their debut performance at the historic Old South Church in Boston’s Back Bay. They transformed the church’s Gordon Chapel into the scene of an old-fashioned jam session that featured rich vocals and songs arranged for guitar, pipe organ, and harmonica. The concert also celebrated a preview of the group’s first album, “Ladybug.”

“One way to think about it is that it’s kids’ music,” Boulton said. “But I really try to steer away from that, even though some of the songs are childlike in their simplicity. As so often happens in religion generally, and certainly in Christianity, if you’re appealing to kids, you are often appealing to all ages.”

The new CD includes songs such as “What Jonah Learned Inside the Whale,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Old Hundredth,” which offer fresh takes on some familiar Christian themes and tunes. As well as its three founding members, Butterflyfish also draws from a stable of professional musicians, including bassist Zach Hickman, who also helped arrange and produce the group’s freshman album.

The son of a religion professor, Boulton shied away from religious studies in college, graduating from Northwestern with a degree in history and film. But an interest in anthropology, ritual studies, and theology eventually drew him to the Divinity School, where he received his master’s of divinity degree. (Boulton received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.)

At HDS, Boulton’s teaching and research revolves around the ways Christian worship founds and forms Christian life. Fascinated with the intersection of ideas and traditions, his work combines his interests in the history and practices of Christian liturgy, theology and public life, biblical interpretation and proclamation, as well as the performing arts, including theater, film, and music.

When it comes to his music, Boulton’s goal is to create songs that are memorable, easy to learn, thought provoking, and fun. His compositions involve a variety of instruments including the guitar, the banjo, the upright bass, and even the glockenspiel, and frequently impart an important message.

“Great songs have great ideas in them, too,” said Boulton. “They are simple but they are not simplistic.”

Though he is quick to refer to himself as an amateur musician – he admits his skill level with the guitar peaked sometime in junior high school ¬– Boulton’s lifelong relationship to music is a profound one.

“I like to say I am an amateur in every sense. The word ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin amare, ‘to love,’ so I am really an amateur musician through and through.”

Boulton will next perform with Butterflyfish on Sept. 13, at 10 a.m. as part of an intergenerational worship service at the Wellesley Village Church, located at 2 Central St. in Wellesley, Mass.

Harvard researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have shown that they can engineer mouse and human cells to produce brown fat, a natural energy-burning type of fat that counteracts obesity. If such a strategy can be developed for use in people, the scientists say, it might open a novel approach to treating obesity and diabetes.

A team led by Bruce Spiegelman, a Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor of cell biology, has identified both parts of a molecular switch that normally causes some immature muscle cells in the embryo to become brown fat cells. With this switch in hand, the scientists showed they could manipulate it to force other types of cells in the laboratory to produce brown fat, known as brown adipose tissue (BAT). Their findings are being reported today in the journal Nature on its Web site as an advanced online publication.

The scientists then transplanted these synthetic brown fat precursors, known as eBAT (engineered BAT), into adult mice to augment their innate stores of brown fat. Tests showed that the brown fat transplants were burning caloric energy at a high rate - energy that otherwise would have been stored as fat in white adipose tissue.

"Since brown fat cells have very high capacity to dissipate excess energy and counteract obesity, eBAT has a very high potential for treating obesity," said Shingo Kajimura, lead author of the paper. "We are currently working on this."

Excess caloric energy in the diet is stored in white fat cells that pile up in the body, particularly in the thighs and abdomen. The accumulated fat content in overweight people puts stress on these cells, which give out signals that cause inflammation in body organs and the circulatory system, creating risks of heart disease and diabetes.

Brown fat, by contrast, works in an opposite fashion; it evolved to protect animals from cold conditions and prevent obesity. Brown fat cells are equipped with a large supply of mitochondria - tiny organelles that use oxygen to burn sugar from the diet to generate heat, rather than store the energy as fat.

Scientists have long thought that brown fat was present in young animals and human newborns but virtually absent in human adults. Recently, however, researchers have used modern positron emission tomography (PET) scanners - which detect tissue that is actively absorbing sugar - to search for deposits of brown fat in adults. Such experiments have revealed unexpectedly large amounts of brown fat scattered through the neck and chest areas.

In 2007, Spiegelman's team, led by Patrick Seale, who is the second author of the new Nature paper, discovered a protein, PRDM16, that serves as a switch that determines whether immature muscle cells will develop into mature muscle cells or become brown fat cells.

But this was not the whole story. The scientists suspected that PRDM16 worked with another unknown protein to initiate brown fat development.

This proved to be the case. In the new experiments, the Spiegelman group found that PRMD16 works in tandem with the protein C/EBP-beta, and only as a two-part unit are they sufficient to jump-start brown fat development in several types of cells.

To find out if the PRDM16-C/EBP-beta switch could change the identity of other types of cells, forcing them to become brown fat cells, the researchers used viruses to transfer the switch into embryonic mouse connective tissue cells called fibroblasts. They also installed the switch into adult mouse skin cells, and into human skin cells isolated from foreskins removed from newborns during circumcision.

In all three cases, the fibroblasts produced mature brown fat cells. The scientists then transplanted the cells into mice, where they produced brown fat tissue. PET scans confirmed that the new brown fat tissue was burning excess energy in the animals, as they should. The experiments did not test whether the extra brown fat actually protected the mice from becoming obese.

Spiegelman said the results "give a lot more credence" to efforts to manipulate the brown fat switch as a potential means of treating people with obesity and diabetes. One strategy would be to remove some tissue from the patient, add the PRDM16-C/EBP switch, and return it to the patient where it would manufacture additional brown fat.

A more conventional possibility, Spiegelman said, would be to administer a drug to the patient that would ramp up the production of brown fat without the need for a transplant. "If we can find a hormone that does that, it's reasonable to think that it might provide a direct anti-obesity treatment."

An analysis of rare genetic disorders in which children lack some genes from one parent suggests that maternal and paternal genes engage in a subtle tug-of-war well into childhood, and possibly as late as the onset of puberty.

This striking new variety of intra-family conflict, described by Harvard researchers in today's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the latest wrinkle in the two-decades-old theory known as genomic imprinting, which holds that each parent contributes genes that seek to nudge his or her children's development in a direction most favorable, and least costly, to that parent.

"Compared to other primates, human babies are weaned quite early, yet take a very long time to reach full nutritional independence and sexual maturity," says author David Haig, George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Human mothers are also unusual among primates in that they often care for more than one child at a time. Evidence from disorders of genomic imprinting suggests that maternal and paternal genes may skirmish over the pace of human development."

Previous research has offered evidence of a genetic struggle for supremacy only during fetal development: In the womb, some genes of paternal origin have been shown to promote increased demands on mothers, leading to fetal overgrowth, while genes of maternal origin tend to have the opposite effect. This new work suggests maternal and paternal genes continue to engage in internal genetic conflict past childbirth.

"This analysis suggests that human life history, and especially humans' unusual extended childhood, may reflect a compromise between what's best for mothers, fathers, and the offspring themselves," Haig says.

Haig delved into clinical case reports on patients with four rare genetic disorders. He found evidence that children with disorders characterized by dominance of some maternal genes - Silver-Russell syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and Temple syndrome - place fewer demands on their mother's resources.
For example, newborns with all three disorders display a weak desire to nurse, and slower childhood growth in general. Many also show early onset of puberty, which often marks a point at which children become less dependent on their mothers' sustenance.

Conversely, babies with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, in which some maternally derived genes are suppressed and paternal genes dominate, are born heavy with particularly large tongues. These individuals usually end up being tall, owing to their rapid growth both in the womb and as young children. They have a high frequency of childhood cancers.

"Clinical data from imprinting disorders suggest paternally expressed genes promote, and maternally expressed genes inhibit, childhood growth," Haig writes.

Haig adds that further longitudinal study of feeding and development in individuals with Russell-Silver syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, Temple syndrome, and Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome is needed to more fully understand the role of genomic imprinting in such disorders.

As the climate warms in the coming decades, atmospheric scientists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and their colleagues expect that the frequency of wildfires will increase in many regions. The spike in the number of fires could also adversely affect air quality due to the greater presence of smoke.

The study, led by SEAS Senior Research Fellow Jennifer Logan, was published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research. In their pioneering work, Logan and her collaborators investigated the consequences of climate change on future forest fires and on air quality in the western United States.

Budding young scholars met with one of the University’s top scholars to learn about the finer points of academic research, the field of history, and what it’s like to be the president of Harvard.

As part of the Crimson Summer Academy (CSA) speaker series, Harvard President Drew Faust addressed a group of high school students at Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium on July 21.

In an informal discussion Faust explained how she did much of her research for her Civil War tome, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” The work, she said, involved travel to library archives around the country and countless hours poring over letters, manuscripts, diaries, and poems, searching for new insights about the past.

“It has always been for me a kind of time travel. … I try to remove myself from the present and really get inside the heads of people in the past,” she said.

Faust, Lincoln Professor of History, is a historian of the Civil War and the American South; she has written six books, including “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South.”

The University’s president also revealed her personal connection to the field of history, noting that growing up in Virginia during the Civil Rights era helped inspire in her an interest in the history of the South. The same issues of race, equality, and citizenship addressed by the Civil War, said Faust, were “very live issues” for her.

“It was a time of tremendous change in Virginia society, a time when segregation was beginning to break down,” she said.

Founded in 2004, the CSA offers students the opportunity to study and experience college during the summer months over the course of three years. The academy is aimed at helping prepare talented, low-income students from the surrounding area for a selective four-year college or university after graduation from high school.

Sira Fati, who loves debate and is considering studying the law, said her experience with the CSA “has been amazing.”

“I was surprised by the sense of community between everybody here,” she said, adding that she enjoys “getting to experience what dorm life might be like in college.”

A junior this fall at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Fati said she liked Faust’s approachable style. “She was very open to answering all of our questions and she seemed happy to talk to us.”

Shawnna Thomas was pleasantly surprised to learn that the University’s 28th president is a woman. “It’s really funny, because of the mindset that I have … and the name, I thought it was a man,” said the 16-year-old Boston Latin Academy student from Dorchester, who described having a woman as president of Harvard “cool.”

Thomas said her favorite thing about the CSA program, aside from studying cryptology in her quantitative reasoning class, is the people. “I feel like I have a second family here.”

Throughout the program, students from Boston and Cambridge high schools live on the Harvard campus and engage in an intense academic curriculum that involves group instruction conducted by a variety of experienced teachers, as well as a speaker series featuring Harvard scholars. The program also offers mentoring relationships with Harvard undergraduates that continue throughout the academic year, as well as full financial support. Participants who successfully complete the program receive a $3,000 scholarship for use at a college or university of their choice.

The program has 57 graduates currently in college, including five at Harvard and two who are set to attend the University this fall.

“Thanks to Harvard and the commitment it has made, we have a real track record of being able to help these students achieve what they deserve to achieve, which is ascending to the country’s best colleges and universities,” said CSA Director Maxine Rodburg.

After the discussion, 15-year-old Regal Sealy, who attends the Academy of the Pacific Rim in Hyde Park, said he was thankful Faust took the time to meet with them and admitted to being a little nervous when asking the University’s president a question about the Civil War.

“I was worried about messing up,” he said with a laugh, adding that he hopes Faust remembers him when he applies to Harvard in 2012.

In a single year, approximately 7,000 Harvard University students collectively performed more than 900,000 hours of community service work in and around metropolitan Boston, according to a new report released Thursday (July 23). This commitment by Harvard students in 2005-06 was the equivalent of having 450 people working full time, year-round, providing community services in local neighborhoods.

“Beyond the Yard: Community Engagement at Harvard University <photos/Harvard_Community_May20-09.pdf>,” a 57-page report compiled by the New York research firm Appleseed, gives a first-ever University-wide view of the breadth and depth of Harvard’s community service engagement in the Greater Boston-area. Facts include the following:

• Approximately 8,500 Greater Boston-area elementary and high school students participated in educational and cultural enrichment programs at Harvard in 2005-06, such as Step UP.

• Since 2000, Harvard has invested more than $26 million in the development of affordable housing in Boston and Cambridge, such as Harvard 20/20/2000.

• In 2005-06, about 1,200 students from Harvard Medical School, the School of Dental Medicine, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard College performed more than 150,000 hours of community service work through service learning and volunteer programs designed to meet health needs of Greater Boston communities, such as Family Van.

• Approximately 6,400 people — mostly Boston-area residents — took courses at Harvard’s Extension School.

"Community service is a core aspect of all we do at Harvard," said President Drew Faust. "Our students, faculty, and staff have a deep commitment to Cambridge and Boston, and to helping their neighbors and fellow citizens.

"The value of service learning and volunteer programs is difficult to measure, but 900,000 hours of community service work performed by students in a year shows how integral service is to the Harvard experience and its affect in the surrounding community," Faust said.

Harvard’s engagement with Boston-area communities takes several forms: students volunteering in the community through “service learning” courses or as part of their coursework; programs that give residents access to the University’s educational and cultural resources; faculty and students performing research that relates to community needs; and direct investment by the University in community programs and projects. The report chronicles the impact of Harvard’s community service contributions in five broad categories: education and achievement, health and the environment, affordable housing, civic life and culture, and economic opportunity.

“The services that universities like Harvard provide to neighboring communities are deep and diverse but often overlooked,” said Christine Heenan, vice president for government, community and public affairs at Harvard University. “Just as Harvard derives value from all that Boston and Cambridge offer, Boston and Cambridge also benefit from Harvard. The equivalent of 450 full-time community service jobs Harvard students perform each year is just one example of the important, positive impact of our partnership.

“This report underscores Harvard’s strong community service commitment to our neighboring communities,” added Heenan.

Harvard’s commitment to community service has been thriving for more than a century, says the report. “By several measures it is getting stronger. The University, its students, and Greater Boston-area communities all benefit from that commitment,” the report concludes.

Harvard’s community service contributions complement the University’s substantial financial, economic, and educational impact on the Boston region:

• Harvard is the second largest private employer in the Boston area, and third largest in Massachusetts, with a total annual investment in the local economy of approximately $4.8 billion.

• Over the past decade, more than 2,300 students from Massachusetts have attended Harvard, with the support of approximately $100 million in financial aid.

In 1788, Thomas Shippen of Philadelphia, a citizen of the world’s newest nation, visited the French royal court at Versailles. He was awed by its pomp, its riches, and – as he wrote – its “Oriental splendor.”

But Shippen was also repulsed. He remarked on the arrogance and waste of royal life, and on the fact that it required great suffering among France’s unrepresented poor.

“A certain degree of equality is essential to human bliss,” Shippen later reflected. “Happy above all Countries is our Country.”

In large part, that happiness hinged on one fact: The young United States was a republic, a form of government distinguished – first – by not having a monarch.

The idea of a republic was not invented in 1776, but appeared in a nascent form at least 2,500 years before, in ancient Rome.

And many related ideas had long predated electoral democracy in the United States, including parliaments, the rule of law, petitioning, and civic participation.

From Rome onward, the idea of what “republic” meant kept evolving, unspooling in a train of thought going back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.

By Shippen’s day, “republic” had come to mean a government that had a constitution; suffrage (the right to vote); elected representatives; and a government founded on civic virtue: moral and selfless action on behalf of the common good.

The idea of a republic is fundamental to understanding the origins of modern American democracy, yet it is little taught and little understood, said Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard’s Allie S. Freed Professor of Government. “People often don’t know what it means.”

To correct this seeming gap in our common education, Carpenter teaches a course on republicanism to Harvard undergraduates.

And for the past two summers, at the Center for Government and International Studies’ Knafel Building, he has offered an intense abbreviated version of that course to Boston-area high school and elementary school teachers.

The annual summer institute, part of Harvard’s two-year-old

American Republic Initiative, is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The Harvard initiative is administered by the Center for American Political Studies, where Carpenter is director.

During the July 13-16 summer program, mornings were devoted to lectures. Carpenter spun out a centuries-long narrative on the political theory and history of the republican idea.

He encouraged interruptions from his audience of teachers. One concern: In the modern urban classroom, how do you translate political theorizing from long ago into palatable lessons?

“You can’t text message the U.S. Constitution, or its meaning,” acknowledged Carpenter – but you can ask good questions and present texts that provoke discussion.

Afternoons were devoted to closer readings of assigned texts, with discussions moderated by Eric Lomazoff, a Ph.D. candidate in government.

“[The teachers] have things they want to talk about,” he said – including one afternoon given over to money and banking issues in Revolutionary-era America.

The challenge for all the teachers, said Lomazoff, “is how to really engage the material beyond memorization.”

The nine teachers worked through hundreds of pages of reading. They sampled the Roman, Greek, Italian, French, and English political thinkers who for centuries had puzzled over the republican ideal.

They moved from ancient Rome’s “mixed regime,” which endured for 500 years; to 17th century England, where a frustrated parliament briefly overthrew the monarchy, weakening it forever; and to the new United States, which rewrote again the idea of republicanism.

“I wish I had learned stuff like this in high school,” said Carpenter. “That doesn’t mean I would require reading the whole of Montesquieu’s ‘Spirit of the Laws’ in high school – but I wish I had understood something of the philosophical and historical traditions and patterns that produced American government and American democracy.”

Getting to what Carpenter called “the way of thinking” behind the republican idea requires some challenging reading. “Most of the texts that govern our lives are complicated,” he said. “You understand the complications of modern life by understanding the complications of the past.”

In the Twitter age, the teachers are aware that strands of political thought centuries old are a hard sell, so Carpenter offered some pedagogic strategies.

For one, he said, read a text in class that seems familiar, and mine it for nonstandard information.

The Declaration of Independence, for instance, is both a declaration and an enumeration – a list of grievances against English monarch George III, who “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Or assign an unfamiliar text that reveals what today is a surprising idea. Among others, Carpenter suggested Alexander Hamilton's essay No. 84 from the Federalist Papers, which argues against the Bill of Rights – based on the idea that listing rights puts obstructive boundaries on the concept of liberty.

And why not use the idea that early republics, like the United States, left out so many people – blacks and women, for example.

“How do you get these students interested in a document and in a history that often excluded them and people like them?” asked Carpenter, talking about the Declaration of Independence. “That’s a nontrivial problem.”

The class reading list included a series of political philosophers who pondered the meaning of republicanism, including Livy, Polybius, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu.

There were also close readings of two state constitutions that predated the 1787 U.S. Constitution: Pennsylvania (1776) and Massachusetts (1780).

These documents illustrate “the real-time evolution” of republican thinking, said Carpenter, and mark what he called the world’s most intensive period of “constitution-making.”

The students also read seven of the essays now called the Federalist Papers, which reveal behind-the-scenes arguments on which direction the new republic and its constitution should take.

There were readings from scholars: historian of ancient Rome Andrew Lintott, historian of Britain Rebecca Fraser, Americanist Gordon Wood, and Michael Sandel, Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government.

Carpenter used Sandel’s 1997 “Democracy’s Discontent” to offer one vision of what has become of the republican idea. The sense of “collective liberty” understood by the Founding Fathers, he said, was today trumped by the idea that individual liberty trumps all other kinds.

“Collective liberty” at the time of the American Revolution took a form that today seems radical.

Carpenter quoted Benjamin Rush: “Every man in a republic is public property. His time and his talents – his youth – his manhood – his old age – nay more, life, all belong to his country.”

When they hear such deeply anti-individualistic sentiments, said Carpenter, “my Harvard students always drop their jaws.”

Teaching to a text like that can engender a lot of discussion, said Carpenter.

Another example is Frederick Douglass' 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro,” assigned reading for the last day of class.

It illustrates that early republican ideals sometimes fell short, said Jewell Royster-Bratton, who teaches at predominately black William Monroe Trotter Elementary School in Boston – and it’s a way to fill in the gaps.

“These kids know nothing of their history,” she said of her students. “There was slavery, then we were free – and nothing in between.”

Carpenter also offered the teachers a largely untapped source of primary documents: the great flood of anti-slavery petitions sent to the 25th Congress (1837-1838) – and largely unread even then.

In the early American republic, these brief supplications, part prayer and part legal argument, “were more and more a tool of the dispossessed,” said Carpenter – in particular African Americans and women.

He and his colleagues have digitized about 7,000 of these petitions in the National Archives, and they just submitted an NEH grant application to have thousands more digitized from the Massachusetts state archives.

Any discussion of the evolution of republican thought – including its ironies and gaps, said Carpenter – has to include the very modern concerns of race and gender.

“Part of what you want to do in any class is examine people’s cozy assumptions,” he said – and about America’s founding documents, “a lot of people have cozy assumptions.”

By Lauren Marshall

Harvard News Office

Last week (July 8), Harvard University planners presented preliminary designs to residents of Allston for the new 1.74-acre public park to be constructed behind the Honan-Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library on North Harvard Street. The current vacant site, once home to a concrete plant, will be transformed into a tree-filled oasis. The park will be completed in 2011.

The preliminary design by the award-winning landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc. incorporates residents’ aspirations and reflects the community’s desire to create a unique park. The idea of introducing a new park behind the library originated during discussions with the Harvard Allston Task Force and members of the Allston community approximately two years ago. During more than a year of discussions about the park’s design, neighbors emphasized the wish to incorporate learning as a design element to take advantage of the park’s proximity to the Honan-Allston Library.

The public park will include space for reading and programming, such as storytelling and learning about nature, making the space an outdoor extension of the library itself.

The new park is part of a series of new programs and neighborhood improvements that Harvard committed to providing to the city of Boston.

Other examples include the year-old Harvard Allston Education Portal, where Harvard students mentor more than 80 Allston-Brighton children in science, math, and writing. Another example, the Harvard Allston Partnership Fund, recently gave $100,000 in grants to six local nonprofit organizations.

“Allston’s new ‘Library-in-the-Park’ will provide local families with open green space for educational programming, reading, and community events,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “We're pleased to partner with the city of Boston and the Allston community to develop this unique project that will serve as a magnet for this vibrant neighborhood.”

“This new public park will greatly complement the existing Honan-Allston Library, itself a gathering spot and tremendous public asset for the community,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said. “The Allston-Brighton neighborhood deserves to see this new, quality open space built that will support the great educational programming and cultural activities already offered at the library.”

The design maximizes the available space, relocates the existing parking lot, and is designed for sustainability, from plant choices to water management. The current plans add several new landscape features, including:

• An open lawn

• A small hill

• A tiered area for reading, small classes, or group activities

• An “ellipse lawn” for community events and picnics

• A quarter-mile of paths — lined with benches and lighting — that wrap around the library

• A variety of native deciduous trees and a rain garden that collects and cleans water as it seeps through the soil

“We have Smith Park where people play baseball, and Ringer and Portsmouth parks that both have tot lots, but there’s no park in Allston where you can go sit, read a book and be quiet,” said Rita DiGesse, Harvard Allston Task Force member and vice president of the Friends of Honan Library, who is also a lifelong resident of Allston. “It means a lot to a lot of people to have this green extension of the library.”

The park designer, Cambridge-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc. Landscape Architects, has worked on a number of local projects including the renovation and redesign of Harvard Yard nearly a decade ago.

The firm received a Design Honor Award last year from the American Society of Landscape Architects for the design of Boston Children’s Museum Plaza.

“The Allston Library is already a truly vital gathering place for residents throughout the neighborhood – the goal of the new park is to build on this sense of community through a vibrant new open space that supports library programming as well as other kinds of community uses,” said Michael Van Valkenburgh, the principal of the firm and tenured faculty member at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Planning for Library Park has been a collaborative, multifaceted effort among the Allston community, the city of Boston, and Harvard.

The planning process began last summer with a neighborhood barbecue where hundreds of residents shared their ideas directly with planners. Since then, Harvard and the community have held more than 12 additional meetings to discuss early concepts.

In cooperation with the city of Boston, Harvard supplemented the traditional planning process by utilizing Hub2. The interactive online planning program enabled local residents to enter a virtual world to suggest, create, and experience a variety of potential park concepts.

The design team, Harvard, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority will finalize the design over the next several months, and construction is slated to begin in the spring of 2010.

Four Harvard researchers have been named among the winners nationwide of this year’s Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). They are Roland G. Fryer Jr., Patrick J. Wolfe, Robert J. Wood, and Nonie K. Lesaux.

The announcement came today from the White House.

The PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. This presidential award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

Fryer, 32, joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor of economics in 2006. He was a junior fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2003 to 2006, and between 2001 and 2003 he was a postdoctoral fellow with the National Science Foundation and a doctoral fellow with the American Bar Foundation. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and his B.A. in economics from the University of Texas, Arlington.

Fryer has also served as the chief equality officer for the New York City Public Schools since 2007. Through his work, Fryer has focused on race, inequality, and education through a data-driven, economic lens. He has demonstrated how tension increases with education, along with potential for social and geographic mobility, among individuals in poor and segregated communities. He has also illustrated the ways that in some communities, educational underinvestment can signify peer acceptance, while academic success, or behaviors that might lead to higher pay or professional status, can lead to rejection from the group.

At Harvard, Fryer has been an associate director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, a faculty associate for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His award was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Wolfe received a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.Mus. concurrently from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1998. In 2003, he earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Cambridge as a U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, working on the application of perceptual criteria to statistical audio signal processing.

Prior to founding the Statistics and Information Sciences Laboratory at Harvard in 2004, Wolfe held a fellowship and college lectureship jointly in engineering and computer science at the University of Cambridge. He has also taught in the Department of Statistical Science at University College, London, and continues to act as a consultant to the professional audio community.

In addition to his diverse teaching activities, Wolfe has published in the literatures of engineering, computer science, and statistics, and has received honors from the Acoustical Society of America and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. His research group focuses on statistical signal processing and its application to tasks involving modern high-dimensional data sets, in particular sounds, images, and networks.

His award was sponsored by the Department of Defense.

Wood received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Syracuse University and completed his M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley's Biomimetic Milli-Systems Lab for one year before joining the faculty at Harvard. While at Berkeley, he invented a novel process for rapidly creating sub-millimeter to centimeter scale articulated, actuated, and rigid micromechanical structures. He has demonstrated both flying and ambulatory microrobot prototypes created using this paradigm.

At Harvard, he founded the Harvard Microrobotics Lab and has demonstrated the world's first robotic insect capable of generating sufficient thrust to takeoff. His current research interests involve the creation of biologically inspired aerial and ambulatory microrobots, minimal control of under-actuated nonholonomic nonlinear dynamical systems, and decentralized control of multi-agent systems. He is the winner of a 2008 NSF CAREER award, a 2008 ONR Young Investigator Program award, and multiple best paper/video awards.

His award was sponsored by the Department of Defense.

Lesaux received a B.A. from Mount Allison University in 1999, and an M.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2003) from the University of British Columbia. Her areas of expertise include bilingual education, child development, learning disorders, psychology, and reading development.

She leads a research program that focuses on the reading development and difficulties of children from linguistically diverse backgrounds; her developmental and instructional research has implications for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. Her research has focused on the reading development and the health and well-being of children who are at risk for learning difficulties, including children from language-minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds, and children with language impairments. Lesaux’s program of research is supported by research grants from several organizations, including the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, William T. Grant Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

From 2004 to 2006, Lesaux was senior research associate of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Youth and contributing author to three chapters in that national report. In the spring of 2007, Lesaux was named one of five WT Grant scholars, earning a $350,000 five-year award from the WT Grant Foundation in support of her research on English-language learners in urban public schools. Lesaux is a member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, and Society for Research in Child Development. She is also a member of the Reading First Advisory Committee for the Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education.

Her award was sponsored by the Department of Education.

Patients across the country are voicing a growing desire for greater engagement in, and control over, their own medical care. A new study led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) will examine the impact of adding a new layer of openness to a traditionally one-sided element of the doctor-patient relationship – the notes from patients’ doctors’ visits. 

Funded through a $1.4 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Pioneer Portfolio, the 12-month OpenNotes Project will bring together approximately 100 primary care physicians and 25,000 patients to evaluate the impact on both patients and physicians of sharing the comments and observations made by physicians after each patient encounter. Physicians and patients at Geisinger Health Systems in Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle will also participate in the 12-month trial.

“Patients remember precious little about what happens in the doctor’s office,” says Tom Delbanco, a primary care physician at BIDMC and the Richard and Florence Koplow-James Tullis Professor of General Medicine and Primary Care at Harvard Medical School. “We expect OpenNotes will improve patient recall, help patients take more charge of their care, and offer an opportunity for avoiding potential medical errors as patients and families monitor and think about their care in a much more active and knowledgeable way.”

That premise is based in part on a recent study by Delbanco and Jan Walker, an instructor in medicine in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School. Reporting in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Delbanco and Walker found that consumers want full access to all of their medical records and are willing to make some privacy concessions in the interest of making their medical records completely transparent.

The study also found that, going forward, consumers fully expect that computers will play a major role in their medical care, even substituting for face-to-face doctor visits.

“We learned that, for the most part, patients are very comfortable with the idea of computers playing a central role in their care,” Walker says. In fact, patients said they not only want computers to bring them customized medical information, they fully expect that in the future they will be able to rely on electronic technology for many routine medical issues, she says.

“Doctors have strong differences of opinion about this, but there is almost a religious character to the debate – it’s uniformed by evidence,” says Stephen Downs, an assistant vice president at RWJF and member of the foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, which supports innovative ideas and projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in health and health care. “It’s a subtle change – but it could reposition notes to be for the patient instead of about the patient, which might have a powerful impact on the doctor-patient relationship and, in the long run, lead to better care.”

To collect evidence, physicians and patients will fully share, through a simple one-step intervention, all encounter notes. By contrasting the experience of trial participants with unenrolled physicians and patients, the researchers hope to measure the impact of access to the notes through online surveys of both doctors and patients.

“While this intervention potentially could disrupt the current flow of primary health care, it holds considerable potential to transform the doctor-patient relationship,” says Delbanco. “By enabling patients to read their clinicians’ notes, OpenNotes may break down an important wall that currently separates patients from those who care for them. It may promote insight and shared decision making by bringing closer together the unique expertise of the clinician and the unique understanding of himself or herself that each patient possesses.”

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) presented five educators from the Boston and Cambridge public school systems with James Bryant Conant Fellowships in June. Each of the recipients will receive one year of study at HGSE.

This year's recipients are Marisa Bober, a mathematics teacher at Charlestown High School for grades nine-12; Elise Cucchi, a seventh-grade humanities and French teacher at the Mary Lyon K-8 in Brighton; Xavier Rozas, who has built an integrated media program to support and highlight staff and student achievements at The English High School in Jamaica Plain; Christopher Tsang, a sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade humanities teacher at The Harbor School in Boston; and Tanya Milner, an 11th-grade United States history, who also teaches freshmen in the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

HGSE awards the Conant Fellowships to support the professional growth of outstanding Boston and Cambridge public school teachers and administrators who have shown commitment to public education and demonstrated leadership potential. As a stipulation of the award, fellows are required to continue in their school systems for one year after receiving their advanced degree. Recipients are chosen by the Conant Fellowship Committee, which includes representatives from HGSE as well as the Boston and Cambridge public school systems.

The fellowships, named after the former Harvard University president who was a dedicated supporter of public education and a strong advocate of school reform, were established in 1986 to commemorate the University's 350th anniversary. The awards were presented by Boston Public Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson and Cambridge Public Schools Acting Superintendent Carolyn Turk.

Marisa Bober has taught mathematics at Charlestown High School for the past five years. She received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, where she was a member of the award-winning MIT Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team. Her interest in robotics, coupled with her professional experience as a mechanical engineer, led to becoming a founding member of the Charlestown High School FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team. In addition to mentoring the robotics team, she is also a faculty mentor of the Math Club. Bober will pursue a master's degree in education policy and management.

Over her many years as a teacher at the Mary Lyon K-8 in Brighton, Elise Cucchi has led the drama and science clubs and mentored several groups of students in the Boston Science Fair. Her interests include special education and inclusion models. At Harvard, she will pursue a second master's degree in the School Leadership Program, where she hopes to further advance special education services in public schools.

During the past five years at The English High School, Xavier Rozas built an integrated media program to support and highlight staff and student achievements. Drawing on his experience as a media professional, he designed and implemented an award-winning multimedia program at the school. Students in his classes embrace media literacy through the thoughtful creation of digital content including WEHS radio broadcasts, ETV Newscasts, 1821Club.com (a community Web site), and the Blue Planet Gazette. He is the recipient of the Dola Award for Innovative Teaching Methods in Media Literacy.

Christopher Tsang has taught humanities at the Harbor School for the past seven years. He is proud to be a part of the National Writing Project and the Boston Writing Project. Tsang currently is writing a young-adult novel that focuses on Asian-Americans living in the city. Tsang serves on the Urban Sites Network Leadership Team and chairs the 2011 Boston Urban Sites Conference Planning Team. He will pursue a master's degree in the School Leadership Program, specifically to earn a principal licensure.

Tanya Milner, who has taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School for 10 years, directs summer programs such as STEP, JumpStart, and Rise Up, which work to support at-risk ninth-graders. She has also mentored various interns from the HGSE and other graduate programs. Milner earned a master's in teaching and curriculum from HGSE in 1999 and a bachelor of arts degree from Haverford College in 1996. She will pursue a degree in the School Leadership Program to become a school developer.

How income is distributed throughout society and whether or not a ‘trickle-down effect’ actually benefits those at the bottom are questions explored in a new Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper.

“Do Rising Top Incomes Lift All Boats?,” co-authored by Christopher Jencks, Malcolm Wiener professor of social policy, Dan Andrews MPA 2007, and Andrew Leigh MPA 2002 PhD 2004, professor at Australian National University, uses tax data from 12 developed nations to analyze the aggregate effects of rising incomes at the top of the economic ladder.

“One central aim of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between inequality and growth,” the authors write. “We find evidence that since 1960 a rise in inequality has been associated with a modest short-term rise in the growth rate. Our second aim is to take advantage of annual data on inequality to calibrate the magnitude and persistence of these positive effects more precisely. Finally, we use these results to estimate how long it is likely to take for the positive effects of higher inequality on growth to offset the negative effects of higher inequality on the share of personal income going to those in the bottom 90 per cent of the distribution.”

The authors found that the ‘trickle-down effect’ does exist, but it often takes many years to work itself through the full economy.

“Our results support [the] conclusion that increases in inequality lead to more growth,” write the authors. “There appears to be some trickle-down effect in the long run, but since the impact of a change in inequality on economic growth is quite small, it is difficult to be sure from our estimates whether the bottom 90 per cent will really be better off or not.”

Christopher Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener professor of social policy at Harvard Kennedy School. His recent research deals with changes in family structure over the past generation, the costs and benefits of economic inequality, the extent to which economic advantages are inherited, and the effects of welfare reform. Dan Andrews earned a Master in Public Administration (MPA) at the Kennedy School in 2007. Andrew Leigh, who earned a Master in Public Administration (MPA) at the Kennedy School in 2002 and a PhD in 2004, is a professor at Australian National University. 

Read more on the Working Papers website: http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=6695

Harvard researchers are building a celestial time machine that lets astronomers look back at hundreds of thousands of objects in the Earth’s skies over the past century.

The effort aims to digitize 525,000 glass photographic plates taken at observing sites around the world between the 1880s and the 1980s. The collection, the largest such in the world, contains a treasure trove of largely unexamined data, according to Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy Jonathan Grindlay, who is leading the digitizing effort.

Grindlay said each of the plates has been examined for one or a few objects of interest to specific astronomers. When one considers that each plate holds images of upwards of 100,000 objects and that each visible object has been photographed between 50 and 3,000 times over the years, the potential knowledge about the changing universe hidden in the Harvard College Observatory plate stacks is enormous.

“DASCH will look at every object on the plate with specially developed software and measure its brightness. You can not know what you’re looking for and still find something,” Grindlay said. “We’re part of a wave that is looking at the sky for its variable objects, for everything that goes bump in the night — and that turns out to be a lot. DASCH will open a new window for time domain astronomy.”

The digitizing effort, called DASCH for Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard, got under way in 2004 when it received funding from the National Science Foundation. After two years spent on the development of a custom-made scanner for the plates and an initial version of the scanning software, the first scans began in 2006. Since then, work has focused on crafting software to make sense of the enormous amount of data the plates hold.

Though just 1 percent of the collection has been scanned so far, the effort is already bearing scientific fruit. Grindlay said that literally thousands of new “variables” — objects that change in brightness over time — have been discovered and three scientific papers describing new findings are in the works.

“It’s been a rich start so far,” Grindlay said.

Sumin Tang, a doctoral student of Grindlay’s, has been working on the project for nearly three years. For the first two, Tang worked on the software to analyze the data, but for the past year, she has been doing the analysis itself. She’s found several thousand variable objects, among them several dozen long-term variables that she calls “very special.”

One, Tang said, has become fainter over 90 years and may be a giant star that is giving off material that obscures its light. Another object tracked over a century dropped sharply in luminosity and then became brighter again.

“These variables are hard to find in other data sets because their time scale is so long,” Tang said. “This Harvard plate collection is unique.”

The plate collection is the result of an effort begun in the 1880s by Harvard College Observatory Director Edward C. Pickering. Pickering understood the potential of photography as a way to not only collect astronomical data, but to freeze a moment of time for celestial positions and brightnesses and preserve it for future astronomers.

Under Pickering’s leadership, astronomers began photographing the skies over the observatory in Cambridge and, later, in Harvard, Massachusetts. They also set up field stations around the world, including Peru, and later in South Africa and New Zealand. Those Southern Hemisphere sites looked at skies that were largely unstudied at the time. With up to hourlong exposures, researchers could take 20 images in a night, then painstakingly pack and ship the fragile glass plates back to Cambridge.

The plates were scanned for bodies that changed in luminosity. While astronomers of the day understood that binary stars eclipsing each other could cause variations in luminosity, they didn’t understand the extremes of stellar variability, novae, or supernovae.

“In the 1880s, nobody was surveying the sky in any systematic way, let alone looking for variables,” Grindlay said. “They had the foresight to be interested in these variables, even though the physics of them wouldn’t begin to be understood until the 1920s and 30s.”

The photography continued uninterrupted through the late 1980s except for a decade in the 1950s, when budget concerns led to a suspension of activities.

The result is the world’s largest collection of astronomical plates showing a vast array of stars, nebulae, and distant galaxies. Most of the plates are 8 inches by 10 inches in size and coated with a photographic emulsion on one side. Several thousand are larger – there are 25,000 14-by-17 plates — and just over 2,000 more are circular. Slipped into envelopes marked by handwritten notes about their contents, the plates sit in row after row of green metal cabinets that take up three floors in a specially constructed building at the Harvard College Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The building was specifically designed to support the plates’ weight — 170 tons — and to protect them from earthquakes, according to Curator of Plate Stacks Alison Doane. The three floors where the stacks are located are braced by metal supports every few feet. The supports sit on the foundation and stand independent of the building’s walls. Despite the plates’ significant weight, the building was actually built to hold about twice as many as are stored there now, Doane said.

Grindlay first conceived of digitizing the plates in the late 1980s as computers and digital imaging were supplanting traditional photographic observing. Grindlay understood then the potential of applying computer technology to the information contained in the plates, both in accessibility and in analytic power. He also knew the plates contained too much data — he estimates 1.5 petabytes — to be handled by the technology at the time.

“It took about 20 minutes to realize the technology was not there,” Grindlay said. “Every year that goes by it gets easier to store [large amounts of data].”

That changed in recent years. Grindlay said that in 2003, he realized that technology had advanced to the point where scanning and digitizing the plate collection was possible. Grindlay, with help from Doane, and a retired engineer named Bob Simcoe, applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation and DASCH was born.

Though they’ve scanned more than 5,500 plates so far, the project is still in its development phase, Grindlay said. The first years were spent designing and building a scanner capable of both handling the plates physically and detecting the slight differences in luminosity that are important clues to astronomers. Grindlay praised Simcoe’s work designing the custom-built scanner and that of Ed Los, who began as a volunteer and has since come on staff as a scanner software expert.

The scanner table is magnetically driven — it has no gears — and can handle two plates at a time. It is designed to measure the position of an exposure with an accuracy finer than a micron. The plates are scanned in a dark room and lit from below with a series of flashes from red LEDs. The scanner takes 60 overlapping images of each plate, captured through a fixed lens and high-speed charge-coupled device, or CCD, camera positioned above. The images are then stitched together with software. The whole process takes only 90 seconds for two plates.

The DASCH software not only captures a digital image of the plate, it also assigns a numerical value to the brightness and position of each distinct object in the image — information that can later be crunched by software. It can detect variations in brightness down to changes between 5 percent and 10 percent, Grindlay said.

As important as the plates themselves are the handwritten records of how each was taken. This meta-data, as Grindlay referred to it, is held in 1,200 logbooks kept at the observatory. The logbooks are also being digitized as part of DASCH. A dedicated DASCH volunteer, George Champine, recorded 80,000 photographs of the book pages so they could be sent to the American Museum of Natural History, where a team of volunteers is entering the information into a database by hand.

Grindlay said there’s still a lot of work to be done. The group is working to create a digital interface — likely a Web site with access to the massive database — to make the information held in the plates freely available to scholars around the world.

The biggest hurdle remaining, Grindlay said, is the scanning itself. Though the group scans perhaps 160 plates a week, DASCH is searching for funding that will allow them to really ramp up the process. The machine was designed to scan as many as 400 plates a day — a rate that would see the entire collection scanned within a few years.

“The whole idea is to get this incredible treasure trove online so astronomers and the public alike can get at it,” Grindlay said.

On the second floor of Harvard’s Science Center is a temporary exhibit of 75 patent models from the 19th century, a time of prolific American invention that produced the revolver, zippers, trolley cars, and cash registers.

“Patent models” are three-dimensional representations of inventions, required with each application from 1790 to 1870 by what is now called the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (A “Patent Board” handled the earliest applications, which cost 50 cents each.)

Patent models, by law, had to be free of glue, sturdy, and no larger than 12 inches wide, long, or high.

It was thought that models would help demonstrate an invention’s utility, as well as decide issues of intellectual property that had reached the courtroom.

“Patent Republic,” the exhibit, is sponsored by the Department of the History of Science. It’s open weekdays through Dec. 11.

One floor below is Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, established in 1948 and one of the three largest such university collections in the world. It contains more than 20,000 artifacts dating from 1400 to the present.

“Patent Republic” was inspired by Mario Biagioli, a Harvard professor of the history of science who has studied patentlike legal arrangements dating back to the 15th century.

The exhibit was designed, researched, and mounted by students from his spring 2009 course, HS-160: “Intellectual Property in Science.”

The display fits in with an effort to broaden the place of material culture in the study of the history of science, said curator Jean-Francois Gauvin, Ph.D. ’08.

Patent models, he said, “are another way of seeing how science evolved over time.”

Next year, the same display space will be given over to a student-designed exhibit on how early-modern instruments and maps were depicted in print.

The artifacts in “Patent Republic” make it clear that many technologies we enjoy today originated in the 19th century, said Gauvin. He pointed out early exercise equipment, washing machines, a heel-mounted braking device for roller skates, and a Bissell carpet sweeper whose pulleys foreshadowed modern vacuum cleaners.

“What we have now is [often] just an improvement on what we had before,” said Gauvin, who in July will move to Montreal for a position at McGill University.

The models in “Patent Republic” are on loan from the private collection of Susan M.E. Glendening, a New York City-area psychoanalyst. She plans to convert her 1844 Federal house on the Hudson River into a permanent museum for patent models and other historical artifacts.

Collecting patent models started as a curiosity, evolved into an interest, and is now a passion, she said. “I just love the stories they tell about our history, and the people who changed it.”

Of the 75 models, 12 are of inventions by women. Their largely unsung contributions to American invention started with a patent 200 years ago, said Glendening: In 1809, Mary Dixon Kies registered a novel method of weaving straw with thread to make hats. Women have contributed a lot since then to American invention, including windshield wipers and the fire escape.

The models in the exhibit, set on shelves behind glass cases, reveal fragments of a vanished material world, equal parts whimsical and rude. They could have leapt from the pages of Jules Verne.

There are life-size ice skates and tiny models of boats, washing machines, a gym apparatus, bicycles. Near the patent model for the modern safety pin is an early rubber-soled boot. There are models of machines that knit, stitch, thread, press bricks, wash dishes, and cut ice.

In one display case is a precarious-looking roller skate with a single wheel. In another is a Lilliputian bathtub, wired for electricity. (Kids, don’t try this at home.)

The exhibit includes a patent model that looks like a polished cigar box ringed by tubing. It’s a miniature of a “carbonizer” machine for making the first light bulb filaments, one of Thomas A. Edison’s 1,093 inventions.

Many of the models on display still bear their original Patent Office tags, ornately scrawled on and affixed with red ribbon. (The “red tape” on the tags, said Glendening, is the origin of the modern term for bureaucratic tangle.)

“Patent Republic” captures only a tiny fraction of the estimated 200,000 patent models built between 1790 and 1880.

After 1870, inventors were no longer obligated to include models with applications. Today, models are required only for perpetual motion machines.

More than 80,000 models had been destroyed by fires in 1836 and in 1877, but something like 125,000 survived into the 20th century.

With the requirement for models removed, patents flew into being faster than ever – 500,000 by 1893 and 1 million by 1911. Whimsy still often prevailed. Patent applications after 1870 offered up a flushing cuspidor, a fly-catching pistol, a butter churn powered by a rocking chair, and a machine for making dimples.

Gauvin pointed out that most inventions, including those on display at Harvard as models, never reach production.

After 1880, though patent models were no longer mandatory, they remained a popular tourist attraction. Thousands of models lined every corridor and crowded into every nook and cranny at the Parthenon-like Patent Office in Washington, D.C. (Even rejected models were stored there, in case of legal battles.)

Clerks used the plentiful models for ashtrays, paperweights, and – as one account put it – “ammunition against noisy cats at night.”

Patent models represented a rich trove of historical artifacts, but the federal record of caring for them was poor. In 1893, about 150,000 went into storage in an old livery stable. By 1923, tens of thousands of models were still carelessly packed away in a stable, stacked up in 2,700 wooden crates.

Neglect of material culture, unfortunately, is a recurring theme, historians aver. “Afterwards,” said Gauvin, “you look back and you say: This is a disgrace. We are missing so much.”

In 1908 and 1925, curators at the Smithsonian Institution combed through the surviving U.S. patent models, and took 3,500. The rest were culled by the families of inventors, sold at public auction, or relegated once again to haphazard storage.

In 1925, by order of Congress, the patent models were auctioned off. The highest bidder was British philanthropist Sir Henry Wellcome, whose plans for a dedicated museum were foiled by the Great Depression.

Over the next decades, the patent models were sold off piecemeal, bought in bulk by other collectors, and occasionally displayed.

By 1979, California collector Cliff Peterson owned 35,000 of the old models, including one of the Gatling gun and a sunshade for horses.

Patent models “are more than antiques,” he told an interviewer a few years later. “They represent the hopes and dreams of thousands of inventors.”

Models bring those hopes and dreams alive in vivid 3-D, but so far are little appreciated, said Glendening, who plans to open her own museum within 10 years.

“Many, many people have had them and many have tried to make museums,” she said of patent models. “I’m trying not to be deterred by that history.”

Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction and access to arts learning experiences remains a critical national challenge. Additionally, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious concern. Understanding this second challenge -- the challenge of creating and sustaining high quality formal arts learning experiences for K-12 youth, inside and outside of school -- is the focus of a new report from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education addresses the multiple challenges of achieving and sustaining quality in arts education, across major as well as emerging art forms in rural, urban, and suburban settings. The report is available as a free download from Project Zero at www.pz.harvard.edu and The Wallace Foundation at www.wallacefoundation.org. Hard copies of the report are available from Project Zero at www.pz.harvard.edu.

Lecturer Steve Seidel, lead principal investigator on the study, said, "Access and quality are the two great challenges for arts education. In the study, we found that while quality is a persistent challenge, many arts educators demonstrate that, with thoughtful, careful analysis, constant dialogue, and dogged persistence, it is possible to achieve and sustain high quality arts learning experiences for young people in and out of school settings."

Edward Pauly, director of research and evaluation at The Wallace Foundation, which commissioned the study, said, "In this difficult economic environment, arts educators need to use scarce resources to create high quality arts learning experiences. This timely report points the way for educators to focus on quality."

Major themes and findings of the study included:

• Reflection and dialogue is important at all levels. An overarching theme across many of the findings of this study is that continuous reflection and discussion about what constitutes quality and how to achieve it is not only a catalyst for quality, but also a sign of quality.
  The report includes dialogue tools to help arts educators build and clarify their own visions of high quality arts education, identify markers of quality in their own programs and practices, and seek alignment across decision-makers at all levels who help to shape a program's pursuit of quality.
• The drive for quality is personal, passionate, and persistent. For most of the people surveyed in this study, ideas about what constitutes quality in arts education are inextricably tied to funda?mental issues of identity and meaning and to their values as artists, educators, and citizens in the world.
• Quality arts education serves multiple purposes simultaneously. Most of those interviewed believe good arts programs tend to serve several purposes simultaneously. Though arts programs differ widely in their contexts, goals, art forms, and constituencies, a hallmark sign of high quality arts learning in any program is that the learning experiences are rich and complex for all learners, engaging them on many levels and helping them learn and grow in a variety of ways.
• Quality reveals itself "in the room" through four different lenses. There are multiple dimensions of quality in arts learning experiences. Four lenses were found to be especially useful in focusing attention on different aspects of excellence in arts education settings: learning, teaching, classroom community, and environment.
• Foundational decisions matter. Arts education programs are based on foundational, program-defining decisions that give a program its identity and provide parameters within which quality is pursued. These decisions include: (1) Who teaches the arts? (2) Where are the arts taught? (3) What is taught and how? and (4) How is arts learning assessed?
• Decisions and decision-makers at all levels affect quality. Critical decision-makers include people quite far away from the classroom (e.g., administrators, funders, policymakers); those just outside the room (notably program staff and parents); and those who are in the room (students, teachers, artists). While all decisions can have an important effect on quality, decisions made by those "in the room" have tremendous power to support or undermine the quality of the learning experience.

The study addressed three questions: How do U.S. arts educators, including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators, define high quality arts learning and teaching? What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in the actual activities of art learning and teaching in the classroom? And, how do a program's foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect quality? To answer these questions, researchers interviewed leading arts practitioners, theorists and administrators, visited exemplary arts programs across a range media and settings, and reviewed published literature.

The Qualities of Quality study was researched and written by senior researchers from Harvard University's Project Zero, including Seidel, Lecturer Shari Tishman, Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, and Patricia Palmer. Founded in 1967 by Nelson Goodman, Project Zero is a research center committed to understanding and enhancing learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels. For more details on the authors and Project Zero, visit www.pz.harvard.edu.

This study was commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and completed with support from the Arts Education Partnership. The Wallace Foundation seeks to support and share effective ideas and practices that will strengthen education leadership, arts participation, and out-of-school learning. For more information, visit www.wallacefoundation.org. The Arts Education Partnership provides information and communication about current and emerging arts education policies, issues, and activities at the national, state, and local levels. For more information, visit www.aep-arts.org.

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The recent Iranian election and subsequent protests have garnered much attention from the international community. More than two weeks after the election there are still many questions surrounding the future of Iran and any potential negotiations with the U.S.

Nicholas Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics and former top U.S. negotiator in talks aimed at Iran's nuclear program for George W. Bush, offers his thoughts on the situation in Iran.

Q. Opinions are divided about whether or not the U.S. should be entering the situation in Iran. What can the U.S. do to reach out diplomatically and how much should U.S. officials get involved?

I believe President Obama's reaction to the demonstrations in Iran was sophisticated and effective. He displayed clear sympathy for the protesters and his rhetoric escalated appropriately as the regime took increasingly brutal measures in the streets. Had he launched a shrill rhetorical attack from the start of the crisis, it very likely would have given Ahmadinejad and other hardliners greater credibility to charge the U.S. with interference. That would have harmed the reformers. When Ahamadinejad made that predictable accusation late last week, no one believed him. Obama knows the U.S. has had a poisonous thirty-year relationship with Iran. His smart instincts kept the focus where it should have been--on the struggle for freedom and reform in the streets of Tehran.

The crisis revealed a lot about President Obama. He could have played it very differently. A more cynical President might have used the White House soapbox to launch harsh verbal attacks against the Iranian regime from the first day. In other words, he could have used the crisis for short-term domestic political gain by matching his critics in their public attacks on the Iranian government. That would have protected him from the predictable partisan charge that he is insufficiently tough in his rhetoric and excessively enamored of diplomacy. Instead, by taking a more nuanced approach, he has given the U.S. greater credibility to lead the international response in the coming months--whether through increased sanctions or an eventual attempt to negotiate with Iran's notoriously difficult government.

Q.  How can Iran recover from the fallout of the elections? Indeed, can Iran recover?

I fear the brutality and effectiveness of the regime's security forces are overwhelming the reformers in the streets. In the short term, we will very likely witness the victory of the Ahmadinejad forces in consolidating their electoral theft.

But, in the long-term, the regime will be severely weakened. The energy and passion of the reformers will not disappear entirely. This protest effort was fundamentally different than most in the past because it encompassed nearly all age groups and classes. I suspect the anger and resentment of the regime will not disappear. We may see months and years of struggle in Iran given the wide divisions about fundamental issues of democratic liberties, the role of the clergy in politics and governance that will not go away.

Q. What do you perceive to the long-term effects of the protests and violence?

I expect that the Iranian government will see its international credibility severely diminished. The prominent role that women played in the protests illuminates the repression and denial of rights that women face there on a continual basis. The killings, brutal measures in the streets and arrests of leading reformers exposed the base and ugly nature of the leadership. The Iranian government was already viewed as a major international human rights violator. This crisis will only add to its lamentable reputation.

Q. Do the U.S. and UK hold some responsibility for the actions of the Iranian people? How should America and the UK react to this?

This was an Iranian drama caused by the pent-up emotion, disappointment and anger of ordinary people when their government tried to steal the election. Its causes were largely a product of the deep, internal divisions in Iran's society and government.

Obama and other world leaders will find Iran to be a difficult challenge in coming months as a result. It would be wrong and a mistake for the U.S., Europe and others to agree to negotiations with Iran in the short-term. That would be an insult to the brave Iranians who risked everything by taking to the streets. But, we also cannot ignore Iran forever given its drive for a nuclear weapons capability and its leading support of major terrorist groups in the Middle East. This is going to be a difficult balancing act for the Obama Administration.

At some point, we may have to test the proposition that negotiations might serve to both pressure Iran and to avoid a war with it over its nuclear ambitions. Should negotiations fail, Obama and the international coalition will have to turn to much tougher economic sanctions. Ultimately, should isolation, negotiations and sanctions all fail, which I believe is very possible, President Obama would then face a terrible choice--go to war to retard and delay the nuclear program with all of its risks or adopt a containment strategy of the type the U.S. used effectively after World War Two in limiting the power and ambition of the Soviet Union and Mao's China. I am afraid there will be many more dramatic days to come in America's difficult relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

One of the surprises of the global AIDS epidemic has been the high level of adherence to antiretroviral drug treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, whose impoverished population is so beset with treatment hurdles that authorities once believed that there was little chance patients there would be able to stick to complex drug regimens.

Harvard researchers examining the response to the disease in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda say that patients there are drawing on one resource they have in abundance to help them adhere to AIDS drug plans: their relationships with other people, or “social capital.” That reliance on friends and relatives, in turn, incurs a social obligation on the part of the patients to get well, creating a powerful feedback loop ensuring their adherence to their drug regimen.

“If he is sick, I have to help him so he will be ok,” one patient-helper told interviewers, according to the researchers’ published report on the study. “That’s why I insist, ‘My relative, don’t ignore what they instruct you to do. If they tell you to take [antiretroviral therapy] in the morning and evening – Do it! Don’t feel it is difficult work and don’t feel tired.’”

The lengths to which HIV-infected patients go to make their doctor appointments and take their antiretroviral drugs were also highlighted in the study, published in January in the journal PLoS Medicine. Patients described how they put their AIDS treatment first in their lives, begging or borrowing money for transportation, working in neighbors’ fields, forgoing important spending such as school fees and even food for their children to get to the clinic. And, when short on food themselves, they take their drugs anyway, despite the nausea, dizziness, and weakness the powerful medications can cause taken alone.

The ongoing work is led by Norma Ware, associate professor of social medicine and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Ware and colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, Jos University in Nigeria, Muhimbili University in Tanzania, and Mbarara University in Uganda, conducted 414 interviews of AIDS patients, their treatment partners, and health care professionals.

“One of the most important findings is the fact that this analysis sheds light on the importance of social context on adherence,” Ware said. “It shows that the people in Africa are doing a fine job coming up with treatment support models that function in their context. It’s important to build on these and support them, rather than always thinking everything should be imported.”

The study, which started in 2005 and which was funded by the Harvard University Program on AIDS and the National Institutes of Health, consisted of lengthy, open-ended interviews to allow those being interviewed to tell their stories freely rather than responding to set questions. Ware indicated that the qualitative rather than quantitative approach gives researchers the chance to come across unexpected findings.

The research was inspired by drug treatment adherence rates in sub-Saharan Africa that are greater than 90 percent, higher than levels observed in North America. The work reflects the success of the use of adherence facilitators in poor settings. These helpers support patients in a variety of ways. Some are community health workers who visit patients in their homes, delivering medication and providing support, and others are treatment supporters — often family members or friends — who live closely with patients and remind them to take their drugs.

Ware said the underlying culture in sub-Saharan Africa, which values extended family relationships, is an important factor in setting the stage for the success of adherence facilitator programs and of antiretroviral drug treatment.

“Relationships are critical resources in coping with poverty. They are a plentiful resource in a resource-poor environment,” Ware said during a recent presentation on her work at the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research’s 9th Annual Symposium on June 24.

Ware said work on related subjects continues at the three study sites: Jos, Nigeria; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Mbarara, Uganda. The research team is examining retention, or how well patients continue to make their physician and clinic visits, and plans to also examine the role of social capital in prevention of HIV infection.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have identified the earliest master human heart stem cell from human embryonic stem cells - ISL1+ progenitors - that give rise to a family of cells that form the essential portions of the human heart.

The discovery, by a group led by Kenneth Chien, director of both HSCI’s Cardiovascular Disease Program and the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center, is particularly important because the cells were found in regions of the heart known as hot spots for congenital heart disease.

These latest findings, published today in the journal Nature, build upon and expand earlier work by Chien’s team and others in mice.

What is truly groundbreaking about the study, and has enormous implications in terms of the future treatment of heart disease, Chien says, is that “the study provides a new way of understanding heart disease at it appears in children and in adults. Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in children worldwide, and the studies imply that congenital heart disease could be a stem cell disease.” A number of congenital cardiac diseases appear to begin in these cells, and genes that affect the cells are known to cause heart disease in children, he added.

By identifying and manipulating the pathways along which these cells grow and differentiate, Chien says, researchers might be able to influence congenital heart disease significantly, converting severe forms of the disease to those with a better prognosis.

In adult heart disease, the major cause of morbidity is heart failure, where the implantation of human heart progenitors such as these might prove more therapeutically valuable than already differentiated heart muscle cells. “When people think of cardiovascular regenerative medicine, they think of end stage heart failure and humans needing a transplant,” Chien says. “This study has importance for both this adult form of heart disease as well as those in children, where understanding how embryonic heart stem cells build the heart may ultimately impact therapy.”

“This is a wonderful and important study for several reasons,” said Doug Melton, co-director of HSCI and co-chair of Harvard’s interschool Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.  “Finding a cell that can make all the parts of the heart, including the contracting muscle, the smooth muscle and the vessels, brings us much closer to the possibility of repairing human hearts with new cells.  In addition, this human progenitor cell will likely become the standard starting point for all researchers to aiming to investigate human heart development and genetic diseases of the cardiovascular system,” Melton added.

Because these cardiac progenitor cells are extremely rare in the adult heart, the researchers don’t believe they play a role in the regeneration of the fully developed adult organ. However, researchers do believe these cells have a potential role in the fetal and immediate post-natal heart to prevent congenital heart disease.

Chien’s group was particularly focused on answering the question of how the human heart expands from its small fetal size to its adult-form dimensions. “The human heart at birth is more than a thousand times bigger than the adult mouse heart, yet the size of the initial embryos are close in size.  Humans are just a heck of a lot bigger than mice, and every organ is bigger. How is that achieved?”

There are two possible answers to the question:

The first is that various independent cell lineages give rise to each of the heart structures. “The pacemaker, the valves, all these things arise, and then those cells replicate, and that replication accounts for the marked expansion,” Chien explains.

Or, the answer might be what Chien calls “a stem cell paradigm, in which a single form of progenitor cells replicate, and massively expand the pool of heart cell precursors, and then differentiate into the different structures. “The way that you could distinguish between those two possibilities,” he says, “is by looking for large numbers of those progenitors at a later stage of human cardiogenesis [in contrast with what you see in the mouse].” 

To identify and track the fate of human embryonic-stem-cell-derived ISL1+ progenitors, Chien and his team genetically tagged a human embryonic stem cell line. The researchers were then astonished that when they looked at the developing tissue they observed a heart “loaded” with progenitor ISL1+ stem cells. The biggest concentration of them was observed at a location associated with congenital heart disease, particularly in the outflow track, the aorta.

The team observed not only a large number of progenitor ISL1+ stem cells, but also distinctive intermediate cell types that give rise to all of the components of the heart. 

As Chien sees it, “a stem-cell-mediated process clearly exists for expansion of the human heart, particularly in regions that are affected by congenital heart disease,” which he and his colleagues believe implicates heart ILS1+ stem cell progenitors in undergrowth or mal-growth of heart structures.

Currently the team is studying three types of disease that affect children: Duchenne muscular dystrophy, specific chromosomal disorders such as DiGeorge and Down syndromes, and rare genetically based congenital heart diseases. In each of these case, Chien argues, mouse models are not enough: “They are not likely to fully recapitulate the human disease.”

For Chien and his colleagues, this study also underscores the importance of continuing to use human embryonic stem (ES) cells in research, and not just induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which are created in the lab by forcing gene expression.  “Manipulating human ES cells genetically, by gene targeting, you can create human models of human disease directly in a simplified format, in human ES cells,” Chien says. “I think the iPS cells are going to be good for some diseases, but not all. I’m not sure they will be good for heart diseases.”

The heart cells that come out of iPS cells may not be as strong, he says. “If you get iPS cells from a patient with congenital heart disease, what do you use as a control? Another patient?” Chien adds, “The degree of variation in the iPS cell lines is significant. So how do you even compare this cell to itself?  These are still early days for human heart iPS-derived cells.”

A renewable resource, ES cells may represent an alternative to adult cell-based therapy down the road, especially, says Chien, since the ability of most adult heart progenitor cells (as well as other non-heart adult cells such as bone marrow-, fat-, and endothelial-progenitor cells) to convert to authentic heart muscle over an extended period of time remains unclear.

Experts from several disciplines collaborate in Radcliffe seminar to advance understanding of cardiovascular risk factors in parents and offspring By Madeline Drexler
   
Not long ago, cardiovascular disease was considered an affliction primarily of men. But the fact is that more women than men die from disorders of the heart and blood vessels. Indeed, in the United States, cardiovascular disease, or CVD, claims nearly 460,000 women every year—more than are lost to the next five causes of death combined.  

There’s more to this story, however. Emerging evidence shows dramatic sex differences not only in risk for CVD, but in the disease’s presentation, progression, treatment response, and outcome. For example, women who suffer heart attacks are more likely than men to die from them. They are also more likely to suffer small-vessel disease that eludes traditional diagnostic tests. Perhaps most telling, complications during pregnancy and delivery, such as preeclampsia and preterm birth, are clear indicators of heart disease later in life—for both mother and child.

This evidence suggests that sex differences in CVD may hold precious clues to the underlying biology and early antecedents of the disease—clues that may lead to more effective treatments for all sufferers.

That was the vision of the seminar “Unexplored Sex Differences in Cardiovascular Disease,” convened on December 3 and 4, 2008, by the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Doctors have long noted clinical differences—whether hormonal, physical, or psychological—between male and female CVD patients, explained cardiologist Paula A. Johnson ’80, MD ’84, MPH ’85, SPH ’90, executive director of the Connors Centers. But “very little is known about the underlying differences in biology between men and women, and how those differences are influenced by the environment.”

“There’s vast unexplored territory to be covered by paying attention to women’s reproductive health,” added Janet Rich-Edwards ’84, SD ’95, director of developmental epidemiology at the Connors Center. “With the advent of a life-course approach, we’re understanding that the real foundations of chronic disease in maturity occur at much younger ages, and that the potential for intervening and preventing is at these younger ages.” Today’s refined epidemiologic and diagnostic tools, she said, strengthen the likelihood of improving pregnancy outcomes. “Now we need to marshal the evidence.”

To that end, the seminar’s 23 invited experts—basic scientists, clinicians, and population health scholars—forged a provocative research proposal, which will be submitted for grant funding this year. The study would examine cardiovascular sex differences and risk factors beginning in utero and continuing through childhood, adolescence, pregnancy, the menopausal transition, and postmenopause.

At the Connors Center, scientists hope to establish a “family cohort” that would enable researchers to track mothers, fathers, and offspring from the point of pregnancy. A long-term study like this could help pinpoint sex differences in the development of CVD risk and suggest early interventions that might alter the trajectory of the disease in individuals.

The seminar’s cross-disciplinary approach is unusual in medical research. “Radcliffe is this wonderful place—a kind of neutral place—for bringing together not only investigators across different hospitals and schools at Harvard, but also around the country,” said Jill M. Goldstein AM ’04, director of research for the Connors Center.

“We tend to operate in different spheres,” Rich-Edwards said. “When several people talk across the types of science they do, the conversation generates ideas that would never occur when two scientists talk one-on-one.”

Indeed, Paula Johnson sees Radcliffe’s convening role as essential to supporting nascent but potentially groundbreaking lines of research. “Radcliffe provides the funding, the space, and the philosophy that bringing groups of people together from different disciplines can be transformational, whether in the arts or in science,” she said. “We could not have done it without all three.”

In the United States, back pain continues to be a leading cause of disability and one of the most common reasons to see a physician for evaluation. Among various treatment options is spinal fusion surgery, which may use a biological agent known as bone-morphogenetic protein (BMP).

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that BMP is used in 25 percent of spinal fusion surgeries and is associated with a higher rate of complications in certain types of fusions, as well as greater hospital charges, compared with fusions that do not use BMP. The research appears in the June 30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers looked at the outcomes of more than 300,000 patients who underwent spinal fusion surgery. “The use of BMP in these surgeries jumped from less than 1 percent in 2002 to 25 percent in 2006,” said Kevin Cahill of the Neurosurgery Department at BWH, a clinical fellow in surgery, and lead author of the study. “With the use of BMP on the rise, this study illustrates the need to determine the cost-effectiveness of the product in different procedures.”

The researchers found that immediate postoperative, in-hospital rates of complications among patients undergoing spinal fusion by BMP were no higher for lumbar, thoracic, or posterior cervical procedures.

However, the use of BMP in anterior cervical (front of the neck) fusion procedures was associated with a higher rate of complications, with the primary increases seen in wound-related concerns, difficulty in swallowing, or hoarseness.

BMP use was associated with a longer length of stay in the hospital and greater inpatient hospital charges across all categories of fusion, with an 11 percent to 41 percent increase in total hospital charges.

“This study has highlighted the need to continue to develop refined guidelines for BMP usage and to further study its long-term risks and benefits,” Cahill said. Other investigators on the study include John H. Chi, Arthur Day, and Elizabeth B. Claus, all of the Neurosurgery Department at BWH.

The Brain Science Foundation funded the study.

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

Over the next five years, Harvard will award grants to nonprofit groups serving North Allston/North Brighton.

The first round of funding from the Harvard Allston Partnership Fund totals $100,000. Recipients were announced last Friday (June 26) in a public gathering at the Harvard Allston Education Portal on North Harvard Street.

An advisory committee made up of neighborhood residents chose the grant recipients after a detailed review process.

Six organizations share in the inaugural funding, with grants that range from $5,000 to $20,000. The money will go toward new projects, including an arts workshop, health education classes, and a poetry program for schoolchildren.

Harvard President Drew Faust – acknowledging “the hard times, the challenging times we all find ourselves in” – called the grants an example of the University’s sustained commitment to surrounding communities.

“We stand pledged to support that neighborhood connection,” she said, “to be your good neighbor, and to work together as partners in bringing some of these hopes and dreams to fruition.”

Joining Faust was Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who praised Harvard and its neighborhood partners.

“You judge a city by its neighborhoods,” he said. “If your neighborhoods are strong, your city is strong.”

John Palmieri, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority – which assisted the awards committee – pointed to a durable town-gown collaboration. “There is no better model,” he said, “than the Harvard-Allston model.”

Karen Smith, one of seven committee members, said the grants process was “an opportunity for true collaboration” that included voices from the neighborhoods, the city, and the Harvard Allston Task Force.

She called the grants process “joyful and easy.”

That was also true because of the quality of the applicants – many of whom already do great good with “modest dollars,” said Smith.

“They were all thoughtful; they were worthy,” she said of the applicants. “So many people are stepping up, often very quietly.”

John Hoffman is one. He’s executive director of The Fishing Academy, which received a grant this year.

For five years, his nonprofit public charity has sponsored river and ocean boat trips for urban youngsters. “It changes lives,” he said afterward.

Of the grant recipients, “We wish you every success,” said Smith. “We know you will inspire others to apply.”

Committee deliberations begin in September for the 2010-11 round of funding for Harvard Allston Partnership Fund grants.

The partnership fund is part of a cooperation agreement between Harvard and the city of Boston that has introduced new programs and neighborhood improvements in North Allston/North Brighton.

One such improvement already in place is the Harvard Allston Education Portal. More than 80 Allston-Brighton children are mentored by Harvard students there in science, math, and writing.

Forthcoming is Library Park, a one-acre public green space behind the Honan-Allston Library at 300 N. Harvard St. It’s currently in design and scheduled to be finished in 2011.

A closer look at the winners of this year’s Harvard Allston Partnership Fund grants:

¦ The Allston Brighton Arts Bridge – an arts project created for local teenagers by a filmmaker, director, and actress – will sponsor 18 weeks of workshops and culminate in a public screening.

¦ The Charles River Watershed Association will convert a barren paved lot alongside the German International School Boston on Holton Street into a lush, green, sustainable landscape.

¦ The Fishing Academy will increase scholarships to help local children attend a recreational fishing camp this summer.

¦ The Joseph M. Smith Community Health Center will offer health workshops and one-on-one patient education for at-risk populations.

¦ The Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project will host a poets-in-residence program for fourth- and fifth-grade writing classes at Gardner Pilot Academy, readings at the Honan-Allston Library, and a letterpress studio.

¦ St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church will offset the costs of diapers for 90 families that use the church’s free diaper service every month at the Allston-Brighton Baby Diaper Pantry.

By Michael Patrick Rutter

SEAS Communications

For someone who deep-sixed his BlackBerry (instant e-mail was taking over his life) and traded the local newspaper for a good book (“What do I need to know about Celtics’ scores?”), John Briscoe ’76 is as worldly a person as you are ever likely to meet.

An expert on water and economic development who most recently served as the World Bank’s senior water adviser and the country director for Brazil, Briscoe has lived in his native South Africa as well as Bangladesh, Mozambique, India, and Brazil.

Briscoe’s cultural comfort has been his guide amid what he calls the “changing economic geography” of the world. However painful and disorienting the current financial crisis, he insists that the true mover and shaker of the planet has never been the markets. It is instead the ebb and flow of the oceans.

“Water touches everything,” Briscoe explains. “It is about religion, culture, history, biology, government. It is everything.”

To make that point, the August 2008 Scientific American cover featured an image of the world as a sponge being wrung dry. The article’s author, Peter Rogers, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), concluded that if unchecked, “by midcentury as much as three-quarters of the Earth’s population could face scarcities of freshwater.”

Rich or poor, powerful or weak, water’s fate is our fate.

Briscoe arrived in January as the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering, a joint appointment between SEAS and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Having loved his roles as the “water guy” and the “Brazil guy” at “the Bank,” he did not make the change lightly.

His decision to come to Cambridge was influenced by the tug of ties both old and new. Two former deans, Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti (of SEAS) and Barry Bloom (of HSPH), urged him to create a water program for the 21st century, highlighting how Harvard was embracing integrative, global-minded science and engineering.

Only half a term in, he has discovered the promised openness and enthusiasm of the research community. Colleagues have filled up his schedule, asking Briscoe to give talks on behalf of the South Asia and Middle East Initiatives, present a lecture during Latin American Week, and meet with a group of visiting Chinese executives.

“Harvard is one of the few places where you can do this — and I feel like an absolute fish in water,” Briscoe says. Moreover, he has not had to give up his international connections. “The big ‘H’ counts for a lot. Everyone wants to partner with Harvard.”

At the same time, Briscoe was pulled in by past history, remembering fondly the achievements of his faculty advisers. From the late 1950s to the early ’60s, Harold A. Thomas Jr. (1913-2002) guided what became the famed Harvard Water Program. In tandem, Roger Revelle (1909-91), the man who inspired Al Gore about an inconvenient truth, focused on the link between population and natural resources as he created the Center for Population Studies at Harvard.

Both thinkers answered a call by John F. Kennedy, who was intent on offering a nonmilitary incentive to then-Pakistani President Muhammad Ayub Khan. As Pakistan was facing an agricultural crisis due to waterlogging (saturation) and salinization, Kennedy offered academic expertise. Thomas and Revelle’s diagnosis — more, not less, irrigation by supplementing canal water with the extensive use of groundwater — changed the history of the country and the region.

“By doing good science, [offering] good policy, and engaging politicians, they left a mark that is still revered by Pakistanis today,” says Briscoe.

Likewise, his goal is to craft a program that brings together politicians with policies and science. “The science part standing alone, is interesting, important, and obviously necessary, but not sufficient,” he says. “At the same time, even the best technocratic policies can be a bit blue-eyed and pie in the sky. Proposals will only work when they make political sense, too.”

Already, with no influence from Washington, 10 of the governors of Brazil’s 27 states — Briscoe knows them all — have said they are ready to work with Harvard on issues like sustainable development in the Amazon. On campus, students have pitched thesis topics, and policymakers have offered collaborations.

To best direct such enthusiasm, Briscoe advises those interested in the water development business to first overcome a common “moral hazard.” As many have never lived without water, “they come up with a whole set of prescriptions about an imagined solution that has nothing to do with people’s actual situation,” he says.

Put another way, water is deeply personal. “If you want to understand it in your heart, live in Mozambique or India or turn the taps or electricity off for a week.”

At Harvard, Briscoe’s vision is to create an environment where students, faculty, and politicians can come “in and out of the fray” and gain “a sense of what the battles are really about and find enough distance to see the science and what’s essential in it.”

He pictures a series of “horizontal partnerships” in which faculty and students pair with their peers in Brazil (to start) and then those within Australia and Pakistan. “The old model of ‘send your best and brightest to Harvard’ must,” says Briscoe, “be replaced by new types of partnerships that reflect the changed global economic geography.”

Part of his plan includes training a new generation of “integrators” — the kind of individuals a future world leader might call in a crunch. With a Harvard degree, he says, “you are equipped to be adventurous, and that’s a fantastic gift” — and essential, he has found, for tackling a moving target like the water problem.

Briscoe offers a sense of optimism rather than dire Malthusian predictions about a coming drought. That “water has no respite” inspires him. Even the pessimistic poet Philip Larkin saw beauty in the Earth’s most elusive element: “And I should raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled light/Would congregate endlessly.”

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

A surprise visitor put in an appearance at the corner of Harvard Street and Western Avenue last Friday (June 26): the sun.

Welcome solar rays scrubbed clouds out of the sky and shone down on the Harvard Allston Farmers’ Market.

Now in its second year, the market is open every Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., through October. Bring big bags, and your appetite.

On Friday, in a wide parking lot outside the Harvard Allston Education Portal, white-topped tents shaded the vendors. For sale were a medley of regional goods, including artisan chocolates, exotic breads, and fresh-picked bounty from local farms.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino stopped by to chat with Allston resident Theresa Magee, the market’s new manager, and Theresa McCulla ’04, administrator of the Food Literacy Project at Harvard University Dining Services.

Among the shoppers was Harvard President Drew Faust. She bought strawberries, a head of Romaine lettuce, and a cauliflower.

“My husband’s the cook,” she said, “and he’s going to go crazy with all this.”

Faust paused at the table for Big Sky Bakery, laden with scones, strudels, and – a specialty – dark rye Russian breads. Eyeing a tray of macaroons, she said, “One will do it.”

The clerk had no problem contradicting a president. “There’s going to be a fight,” he said. “You’ve got to get two.”

Faust gave in, then made her way across the pavement to a display showing how to make compost “tea” – a nutrient-rich liquid brewed from compost. In two vats, pumps sang merrily, roiling the darkening tea.

The display was one of several set up for a one-time sustainability fair. It diverted market shoppers with demonstrations on recycling, energy-efficient lighting, the environmental advantages of tap water, and composting.

Compost teas are a fixed part of landscaping at Harvard now, eliminating the need for artificial fertilizers and pesticides in many places.

Roots can get deeper into healthier, tea-augmented soils. Lawns in Harvard Yard have a heartiness that Faust herself has noticed.

“The landscaping looks beautiful,” she told former Loeb Fellow Eric T. Fleisher, who set up the guidelines for greening Harvard’s public space. “It’s working.”

Fleisher – a regular visitor to Harvard – is director of horticulture at Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, New York City’s only fully organic public landscape.

The art of compost tea, he said, involves coaxing beneficial organisms out of good quality compost and into a liquid form. Teas are brewed to be predominantly bacterial (for grasses, annuals, and vegetables) or fungal (for trees and shrubs).

In a separate display nearby, a shallow bin of compost – formerly banana peels, coffee grounds, and other organic waste – teemed with friendly microbes and wriggled with earthworms and millipedes.

Compost – the conversion of bulky waste into friable rich soil – is a one-stop environmental lesson, said Robert M. “Rob” Gogan Jr., associate manager for recycling and waste at Harvard. “It does everything good.”

At another table, Zachary Arnold ’10, who works for Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS), watched over a blind taste test: Is it bottled water or tap water?

Most of us can’t tell the difference, he said, but the taste test starts a conversation on tap water – and how drinking it circumvents the waste (and wasted energy) of bottled water.

Environmental lessons come naturally at a farmers’ market, said OFS director Heather Henriksen. For one, she said, very fresh food means less transportation pollution was required to get it from farm to farm stand.

“Food is a gateway issue” to creating a sustainable lifestyle, said Henriksen. “Everyone eats.”

Across the way, at the stand from Dragonfly Farms in Pepperell, Mass., there were garlic scapes for sale. The stalky flowering vegetable is one of the first items ready to be picked at New England farms.

Nearby, Bee Vue and his family – Hmong from the uplands of Laos – offered early-season greens and herbs, like bok choy, cilantro, and lettuces, from 70-acre Flats Mentor Farm in Lancaster, Mass., an hour away. The big seller on Friday was pea tendrils, tender and lacy – best sautéed with garlic in olive oil.

Rob Fitzhenry, chef and proprietor of Baked Orchard in Chelsea, Mass., had his own big sellers Friday: scones, chocolate chip cookies, and flourless tea cakes.

He uses local fruit, artisan chocolate from Taza in Somerville, Mass., and homemade preserves.

Said Fitzhenry, “I try to utilize as many local products as I can.”

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

A surprise visitor put in an appearance at the corner of Harvard Street and Western Avenue last Friday (June 26): the sun.

Welcome solar rays scrubbed clouds out of the sky and shone down on the Harvard Allston Farmers’ Market.

Now in its second year, the market is open every Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., through October. Bring big bags, and your appetite.

On Friday, in a wide parking lot outside the Harvard Allston Education Portal, white-topped tents shaded the vendors. For sale were a medley of regional goods, including artisan chocolates, exotic breads, and fresh-picked bounty from local farms.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino stopped by to chat with Allston resident Theresa Magee, the market’s new manager, and Theresa McCulla ’04, administrator of the Food Literacy Project at Harvard University Dining Services.

Among the shoppers was Harvard President Drew Faust. She bought strawberries, a head of Romaine lettuce, and a cauliflower.

“My husband’s the cook,” she said, “and he’s going to go crazy with all this.”

Faust paused at the table for Big Sky Bakery, laden with scones, strudels, and – a specialty – dark rye Russian breads. Eyeing a tray of macaroons, she said, “One will do it.”

The clerk had no problem contradicting a president. “There’s going to be a fight,” he said. “You’ve got to get two.”

Faust gave in, then made her way across the pavement to a display showing how to make compost “tea” – a nutrient-rich liquid brewed from compost. In two vats, pumps sang merrily, roiling the darkening tea.

The display was one of several set up for a one-time sustainability fair. It diverted market shoppers with demonstrations on recycling, energy-efficient lighting, the environmental advantages of tap water, and composting.

Compost teas are a fixed part of landscaping at Harvard now, eliminating the need for artificial fertilizers and pesticides in many places.

Roots can get deeper into healthier, tea-augmented soils. Lawns in Harvard Yard have a heartiness that Faust herself has noticed.

“The landscaping looks beautiful,” she told former Loeb Fellow Eric T. Fleisher, who set up the guidelines for greening Harvard’s public space. “It’s working.”

Fleisher – a regular visitor to Harvard – is director of horticulture at Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, New York City’s only fully organic public landscape.

The art of compost tea, he said, involves coaxing beneficial organisms out of good quality compost and into a liquid form. Teas are brewed to be predominantly bacterial (for grasses, annuals, and vegetables) or fungal (for trees and shrubs).

In a separate display nearby, a shallow bin of compost – formerly banana peels, coffee grounds, and other organic waste – teemed with friendly microbes and wriggled with earthworms and millipedes.

Compost – the conversion of bulky waste into friable rich soil – is a one-stop environmental lesson, said Robert M. “Rob” Gogan Jr., associate manager for recycling and waste at Harvard. “It does everything good.”

At another table, Zachary Arnold ’10, who works for Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS), watched over a blind taste test: Is it bottled water or tap water?

Most of us can’t tell the difference, he said, but the taste test starts a conversation on tap water – and how drinking it circumvents the waste (and wasted energy) of bottled water.

Environmental lessons come naturally at a farmers’ market, said OFS director Heather Henriksen. For one, she said, very fresh food means less transportation pollution was required to get it from farm to farm stand.

“Food is a gateway issue” to creating a sustainable lifestyle, said Henriksen. “Everyone eats.”

Across the way, at the stand from Dragonfly Farms in Pepperell, Mass., there were garlic scapes for sale. The stalky flowering vegetable is one of the first items ready to be picked at New England farms.

Nearby, Bee Vue and his family – Hmong from the uplands of Laos – offered early-season greens and herbs, like bok choy, cilantro, and lettuces, from 70-acre Flats Mentor Farm in Lancaster, Mass., an hour away. The big seller on Friday was pea tendrils, tender and lacy – best sautéed with garlic in olive oil.

Rob Fitzhenry, chef and proprietor of Baked Orchard in Chelsea, Mass., had his own big sellers Friday: scones, chocolate chip cookies, and flourless tea cakes.

He uses local fruit, artisan chocolate from Taza in Somerville, Mass., and homemade preserves.

Said Fitzhenry, “I try to utilize as many local products as I can.”

Harvard researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that diabetics hospitalized for noncritical illnesses who develop hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) during hospitalization have an increased likelihood of remaining hospitalized longer and a greater risk of mortality both during and after hospitalization. This research appears in the July 2009 issue of Diabetes Care.

Previous research showed an increased risk of mortality, seizures, and coma in patients who, while admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), developed hypoglycemia. “Ours is the first study to examine mortality risks for hospitalized diabetes patients outside of a critical care setting,” said Alexander Turchin of the Endocrinology Department at BWH. “This is crucial because a majority of hospitalized diabetics are treated on the general ward rather than the ICU.”

Researchers examined the medical records of more than 2,500 diabetics admitted to the general ward of a teaching hospital. They studied the association between the number and severity of hypoglycemic episodes with inpatient mortality, length of hospital stay, and mortality within one year of discharge. 

This study found that for each hospital day with at least one hypoglycemic episode, there was an 85.3 percent increased risk of dying as an inpatient and a 65.8 percent increased risk of dying within one year of discharge. The odds of inpatient death also tripled for every 10 mg/dl decrease in the lowest blood glucose during hospitalization. Additionally, a patient’s length of stay increased by 2.5 days for each day spent in the hospital with a hypoglycemic episode.

“Hypoglycemia is common among diabetics admitted to the general ward,” said Turchin. “These findings provide support for considering increased monitoring, more aggressive treatment of infections, and transitioning to a more intensive care setting for diabetic patients who have developed hypoglycemia in the general ward.”

The study was funded by grants from the Diabetes Action Research and Education Foundation and the National Library of Medicine.

When stem cell researchers in Japan and the United States announced in 2007 that they had developed long-sought methods to return fully developed adult human cells to an embryonic-like state, the world of stem cell research was turned upside down.

Media reports and conservative politicians prematurely hailed the discovery as a way to end the debate over the use of human embryonic stem cells. The discovery seemed to promise a way to produce endless supplies of stem cells that could be used to understand and treat a host of degenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, and ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Predictably, the scientific reality has proven to be far more complicated than the wishes of patients, politicians, and researchers.

In order to produce what are called induced pluripotent stem cells – iPS – researchers had to use combinations of genes, some of which can induce the development of cancer. The question is how those genes can be eliminated and still produce cells that can ultimately become one of the 220 cell types in the body, the building blocks for all our organs.

“It’s complicated,” says Konrad Hochedlinger, a Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) principal faculty member and an assistant professor in Harvard’s new Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB). And as Amy Wagers, who has the same HSCI and SCRB titles, adds, “Stem cell biology is a very young field. There are new discoveries happening all the time.”

Recently, in fact, researchers at HSCI and Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) without inserting foreign genes, an advance that may ultimately accelerate therapeutic development by making the resulting cells safer for use in humans.

The team, led by Kwang-Soo Kim of HSCI, McLean, and Harvard Medical School, created its iPS cell line by bathing adult skin cells — fibroblasts, the cells that produce collagen and aid in wound healing — in proteins that previous experiments had shown would reprogram them to the embryonic stem cell-like state of pluripotency.

“The way iPS cells were made initially was quite challenging,” says Hochedlinger, a leader in iPS creation. It involved inserting four genes known to be active in embryonic stem cells into differentiated (adult) skin cells, such as fibroblasts, in mice. “Retroviruses were the shuttle system for the genes,” he says. Retroviruses are viruses that, by definition, penetrate the cell, inserting their DNA permanently in the process. “And you don’t want to have viruses inside your cells,” Hochedlinger says, because tissues created from the iPS cells would also contain these extra viral genes, some of which are implicated in cancer, rendering them unsafe for use in tissue replacement therapy.

Researchers first addressed the problem by finding a method that would allow them to insert the genes only temporarily; they used adenoviruses, which are associated with usually minor respiratory illnesses such as the common cold. “Adenoviruses enter the cell, deliver the genes, but never insert themselves into the cell’s DNA material,” Hochedlinger explains.

For at least three decades, scientists have been working to understand and control both the process of generating stem cells and the ways in which the most basic form of stem cells – called pluripotent  – are able to differentiate into any form of body tissue, from blood, to heart, to nerve cell. Normally, pluripotent stem cells only exist in a very early stage of an embryo called the blastocyst.

The blastocyst is formed when egg and sperm combine to form a single cell with the potential to form an entire organism – a “totipotent” cell. After a few days, and several cycles of cell division, the single cell is transformed into the half-hollow sphere of cells that is the blastocyst.

Inside the body, where environmental factors trigger differentiation, the blastocyst’s pluripotent inner population of cells exists only transiently. “So it’s a very brief time window during development when we have pluripotent stem cells,” Hochedlinger says. “There’s no way we can derive embryonic stem cells from ourselves, unless we manipulate the system artificially.”

 “If you place this blastocyst in culture [a petri dish in a lab], its inner mass cells would not do much,” says Hochedlinger. “They’ll probably just poop out. They’ll die.” To keep them alive and proliferating, researchers must add a cocktail of growth factors important for cell division. The added growth factors arrest the cells in their pluripotent stages.

“Like a tumor, these cells grow and grow and, within four or five days, become what we call a permanent pluripotent embryonic cell line,” an immortal line of stem cells that do not develop further, and have no instructions except dividing. “But you have to push these undifferentiated cells into becoming the particular body cells you want to produce, say nerve cells or liver cells, by exchanging growth factors important for division with factors that are important for the development of the cell type you want.”

Another way to obtain pluripotent embryonic stem cells from a blastocyst is by nuclear transfer, popularly known as cloning. “It works in mice,” Hochedlinger explains. “Theoretically one could take skin cells, extract their nucleus [which contains DNA], put it into egg cells that have been devoid of their own nucleus, and make pluripotent embryonic stem cell lines out of that. This hasn’t worked in humans yet,” he adds.

An alternative to generating pluripotent embryonic stem cells is coaxing already adult cells into becoming pluripotent again. “We take our skin cells, then introduce genes into them with reprogramming factors that convert these cells into pluripotent entities that are very similar to pluripotent embryonic cells – without ever having gone through an actual embryonic stage,” Hochedlinger says. This is what researchers call “reprogramming,” their equivalent achievement of the medieval alchemists’ never-realized dream of turning lead into gold.

Nuclear transfer and the creation of patient-specific stem cell lines could, Hochedlinger says, be used to treat diseases that are not caused by genetic mutations. “Let’s say, for example, that you drink a lot of alcohol, and you destroy your liver. You don’t necessarily have a genetic mutation; you did this by yourself. Your DNA is still OK,” he says. “So we can get skin cells or any other adult cells easily accessible from your body, blood cells, say, reprogram them into iPS cells,” culture them in large quantities in the lab, and “then we could transplant those cells back into your body,” Hochedlinger explains, adding that the idea is to transfer normal cells back into patients whose cells are defective.

Induced pluripotency is a technology that some stem cell researchers regard as something short of revolutionary within the field of stem cells. It’s an idea that some researchers believe started with a creature named Dolly.

As Hochedlinger explains, induced pluripotent stem cells were the product of two main discoveries. The first one was the generation of Dolly the sheep, a light-brown-haired celebrity clone who captured the public’s imagination. Dolly died of progressive lung disease at merely six years old, in 2003.

“Dolly’s birth,” Hochedlinger says, “demonstrated that you can take an adult mammary gland cell and actually turn back time on it into a pluripotent embryonic state to generate an entire animal from it.” In other words, cloning showed that cells could be “reprogrammed”: An adult cell could be turned into a pluripotent embryonic cell again.  

Prior to the announcement of Dolly’s birth, even many biologists thought mammalian cell reprogramming was impossible, says Hochedlinger. The discovery, a year later, of human pluripotent stem cells taken directly from embryos taught researchers that it was also possible to maintain a pluripotent embryonic cell line culture from human cells.

“The possibility to reprogram led to the possibility to take a patient-specific cell, like a patient’s skin cell, and reverse it into a pluripotent embryonic stem cell that can be used for therapeutic purposes,” Hochedlinger says.

What many in the field refer to as the real breakthrough, however, took place merely two years ago, in 2007, when a team led by Japanese orthopedic surgeon-turned-stem-cell-researcher Shinya Yamanaka, working at Japan's Kyoto University, created the first iPS cells from human tissue. Yamanaka’s finding was hailed by those who oppose embryonic stem cell research for religious reasons as a way to eliminate the need to destroy embryos.

There are major questions still, says researcher Ole Isacson, professor of neurology at the Division of Medical Science at Harvard. “Taking an example from the context of neuroscience and neurology, the first question is whether a neuron generated from an iPS cell line is really equivalent to a neuron differentiated within the body. Moreover, is the iPS cell actually equivalent to the pluripotent stem cell derived from an embryo?” asks Isacson.

So far, argues Hochedlinger, all the evidence indicates that these iPS cells are, at least, very similar to pluripotent embryonic stem cells that come from a blastocyst (embryo). “They grow indefinitely in culture, and they can be coaxed in vitro, when you expose them to growth factors, into becoming other cell types. But we don't yet know if iPS cells and pluripotent embryonic cells are truly identical.”

The process can be inefficient, as well.  Says Hochedlinger, “The cells that we end up with are often not equivalent to a cell that normally develops in the body, for whatever reason; probably because they don’t go through all the normal stages of development that they normally go through in the body.”

And there are other problems. “These cells have the potential to make any tissue in the body, but at the moment, we still have to figure out how to instruct them as to make any particular cell that you want, without them making cells that you don’t want,” says Wagers.

“Also, because they divide indefinitely in culture,” says Hochedlinger, “in experiments where you transplant them back into mice, they very often develop into tumors because it’s difficult to get rid of residual undifferentiated cells in your culture.” Only one cell that remains undifferentiated among the rest, and keeps dividing, could grow into a teratoma, a mass of cells that never got reprogrammed.

The recent report from HSCI researchers at McLean Hospital that they had produced iPS cells using proteins rather than genes offers promise as a safer method. Instead of inserting genes into the cell’s DNA, inducing the cell to make the proteins that will reprogram it, Kim and his colleagues attached a molecule that specializes in penetrating cell membranes to insert the needed reprogramming proteins. Once this molecule, called a “cell-penetrating peptide,” was attached, the proteins were able to enter the cell and begin reprogramming it.

For Kim, however, significant hurdles do remain. While foregoing the need to insert genes may eliminate many important concerns, the effects of the proteins themselves have to be thoroughly understood, since proteins fulfill many roles in the body and are not inherently “safe.”

Kim has been working on stem cells for about a decade and has focused his efforts to reprogram stem cells using proteins because he feels that cells created by gene insertion would not be useful in therapy.

“You don’t want these cells in your body,” Kim says. “I strongly believe this is a safer way and is medically and clinically feasible.”

The process used by his team and colleagues still needs improvement, Kim concedes, as it is much less efficient than the gene-insertion process, producing about 10 times fewer cells. He pinpointed one part of the process that can be improved immediately, saying his team used an extract of pluripotent embryonic stem cells as a source for proteins, rather than purified solutions of the proteins themselves. Using purified proteins, he says, will likely improve efficiency.

As Kim explains, the first hint that the research team had created iPS cells came around Christmas 2008. He and colleagues have spent the past several months checking their results and conducting tests to determine the character of the cells. The cells they created, he said, have passed every known test that indicates they are iPS cells.

Hochedlinger believes he and his colleagues will be modeling diseases in a petri dish within the next five or 10 years. “We will be able to recapitulate the course of a disease and find tracks that can possibly fix the problems,” he says. “Modeling a disease will give us the opportunity for drug discovery,” adds Wagers. 

“We could take skin cells from patients with ALS, for example,” says Isacson, “make them into iPS cells, reprogram them into becoming neurons over a few weeks in culture, and then see if these cells show some sign of the disease. If they do, drug companies can take the cells and start testing new drugs.”

“It may not be for all diseases,” Hochedlinger says, “but even just one out of 10 will be very good.”

Neither Hochedlinger nor Wagers believes this will happen soon. “That’s more like 20 years down the road, mostly for safety reasons,” Hochedlinger says.

Finally, will either pluripotent embryonic stem cells or iPS cells emerge as the 'tools' of choice for stem cell researchers? Hochedlinger doesn’t think so. “It's unclear at this point who's the winner; we still need to work on both types of stem cells.”

“Both pluripotent embryonic stem cells and iPS cells are equally tumorigenic, and rare undifferentiated cells could give rise to a teratoma from both sources when transplanted into a patient,” he adds. “The main advantage of iPS cells is that they can be derived from any living individual, especially patients. Pluripotent embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, are much better characterized than iPS cells and still represent the gold standard for a pluripotent cell line.”

By Alvin Powell

Harvard News Office

Harvard AIDS researchers detailed recent advances in the fight against the ongoing global pandemic Wednesday (June 24), including new vaccine strategies, insights into the disease’s progression in the world’s hardest-hit regions, and new knowledge about the body’s immune response against infection.

The presentations were part of the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research’s (CFAR) 9th Annual Symposium, highlighting recent research by investigators supported by CFAR and by the Harvard Initiative for Global Health’s (HIGH) Global Infectious Disease Program.

Harvard CFAR Director Bruce Walker, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, and co-chair of the Global Infectious Diseases Program at HIGH, introduced the event.

Walker tracked the evolution of Harvard’s Center for AIDS Research, which is part of a national program funded by the National Institutes of Health that created similar centers around the United States. Walker outlined achievements of the past five years, saying that the center has successfully fostered collaboration among researchers at the University and served as a catalyst for research into AIDS and HIV.

Over the past five years, Walker said, CFAR has given 73 awards to researchers, many of which were for early feasibility studies or for support of scholars in the early stages of their careers. The majority of the awards, 82 percent, went to junior investigators — assistant professors and below. The early financial support from CFAR, totaling $1.8 million, brought in $54 million in subsequent grants and led to 72 publications.

The symposium featured presentations from eight investigators whose work spans everything from stigma in central Haiti to RNA interference to the behavior of the immune system’s natural killer cells.

Ingrid Bassett, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, outlined several research efforts, including one evaluating the efficacy of separate voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) clinics in South Africa.

South Africa, Bassett said, is one of the nations hardest hit by AIDS and is home to the largest number of HIV-infected people in the world, with 5.4 million. The South African government has rolled out an antiretroviral drug program with the voluntary counseling and testing sites as its point of entry. The problem, however, is that the VCT program doesn’t seem to be working very well, with just 30 percent of South Africans having been tested for HIV.

Bassett and colleagues at McCord Hospital in Durban, South Africa, examined the potential effectiveness of a testing program that was offered as part of routine care. The alternative would offer patients a test during their regular doctor visit, rather than referring them to a VCT clinic, which requires them to make a second visit to attend the clinic and get HIV testing and counseling. The results, she and colleagues found, were a fivefold increase in the detection of new HIV cases per week in the routine testing program, to 39 from eight for the VCT program.

The trial, Bassett said, shows that a routine testing program not only uncovers more HIV cases, it also indicates that such a program is acceptable to patients.

“People are seeing … that this is just part of regular care,” Bassett said. “Incorporating it into general care makes people feel it’s routine.”

Dan Barouch, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and director of the Harvard CFAR Vaccines Program, described the challenges faced by vaccine researchers and recent work toward creating a vaccine that would have the breadth necessary to immunize against HIV. HIV, Barouch said, presents one of the biggest challenges in vaccine creation ever faced by science because it mutates so quickly that the virus is different in different places around the world. That creates a problem because a vaccine that is effective in one place may not be elsewhere.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) will endow a new chair named for child psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, the School’s longtime Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, starting July 1.

Emeritus since 1993, Eisenberg has taught and mentored generations of physicians at Harvard (since 1967) and elsewhere (since 1947).

At 86, Eisenberg is still an active medical scholar and writer. Most recently, he has pressed for a rigorous ethical code to avoid conflicts of interest in medical practice – and for screenings for depression in the primary care setting.

He was celebrated this week (June 22) with a symposium at Children’s Hospital Boston, an event in honor of both the new chair and the intellectual and moral legacy of the man for whom it is named.

At least 75 people crowded into the Enders Auditorium to hear; others listened and watched through a computer simulcast. Master of ceremonies was David DeMaso, who will first hold the new Eisenberg chair. DeMaso is psychiatrist-in-chief and chairman of psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at HMS.

Eisenberg, recovering at home in Cambridge from a fall suffered earlier this year, could not attend. But six of his former students and research collaborators told stories of his wide-ranging influence, and along the way compared the longtime researcher and practitioner to Darwin and Lincoln.

“Leon Eisenberg is one of the seminal figures in American medicine and in psych of the past half century,” said Arthur Kleinman, a friend and colleague since 1970. “He is surely – he is surely – one of Harvard’s greats.” (Kleinman, a physician, is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology and professor of medical anthropology in social medicine and professor of psychiatry at HMS.)

Myron Belfer, a professor of psychiatry in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, said his old friend was generous, witty, and modest – as well as the man who ushered in the “modern era” of child psychiatry.

DeMaso recently videotaped a series of oral history interviews with Eisenberg. He reminded the audience that the older scholar’s brilliance might never have lit up the practice of medicine.

He quoted Eisenberg, who grew up in Depression-era Philadelphia: “I had the damnedest time getting into medical school.”

Grades were not the issue; ethnicity was. Eisenberg was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, and the prejudices of the time held many back. But by 1946 Eisenberg was valedictorian of his medical school class at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the two hours of storytelling and reminiscence, a picture emerged of a man who since 1946 has been a nonstop student of how the human mind works, as well as a reliable critic of his own profession.

In a medical discipline once dominated by psychotherapy, Eisenberg was an early advocate for evidence-based psychiatry, arguing that mental illness can be understood best by studying measurable biological factors and environmental influences.

As a scientist, he is known for pioneering work in autism, child psychopharmacology, randomized controlled trials, “brief psychotherapy” for anxiety disorders, and stimulant drugs for troubled adolescents, and for investigating the ways brain structure is molded by social experience.

As a humanist, Eisenberg was an early supporter of social medicine – the practice of health care informed by the social and economic conditions borne by a patient.

He favored bringing the social sciences into a partnership with medicine to improve the delivery of care and forge awareness of cultural contexts.

At Harvard, Eisenberg was in 1968 part of what HMS Professor of Psychiatry Alvin Poussaint called a “gang of nine” – faculty members who pushed for affirmative action in HMS admission practices.

 Poussaint is director of the Media Center at the Judge Baker Children’s Center, and the HMS faculty associate dean for student affairs.

What Eisenberg made happen in 1968, said Poussaint, “had an impact on diversity efforts all around the country. … Leon cared.”

Eisenberg “lights up a room” with engaging ideas, always asks tough questions of his peers, and has created a medical legacy that will “endure long into the future,” said William R. Beardslee, the George P. Gardner and Olga E. Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry at HMS and director of Baer Prevention Initiatives at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Beardslee recalled Eisenberg’s classic paper on the mental health benefits of a healthy social order. Its gist, he said, was “a friend, not an apple a day, will keep the doctor away.”

Kleinman remembered that at professional meetings, Eisenberg was often the only dissenting voice. Over the years, he took on many prominent theorists of the mind, including B.F. Skinner.

“To stand up and speak out was a moral act,” said Kleinman, “not only an intellectual act.”

His old friend was also troubled by what he saw as psychiatry’s failure to influence effective social policy, said Kleinman – so he championed bringing social sciences into the realm of medicine.

Eisenberg “was always an empiricist at heart,” he added, “but one who realized that facts were nothing unless they advanced theories about how to intervene in the world to improve people’s lives.”

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists’ discovery of a cancer-causing gene – the first in its family to be linked to cancer – demonstrates how the panoramic view of genomics and the close-up perspective of molecular biology are needed to determine which genes are involved in cancer and which are mere bystanders. The findings are reported in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.

"In the coming years, we can expect genomic studies [which chart the activity of thousands of cell genes] to generate hundreds or thousands of genetic elements of interest in cancer research," says the study's senior author, Lynda Chin of Dana-Farber. "To narrow that group to the genes that actually drive cancer growth and metastasis, it's necessary to do functional studies, which focus on what individual genes do to turn a cell cancerous, and mechanistic studies, which examine how they turn cells cancerous and in what setting. It is a long and intensive effort that will leverage knowledge from different fields and different model systems."

In the study, Chin, lead author Kenneth Scott of Dana-Farber, and their colleagues worked their way through a series of experiments – in yeast cells, multiple types of human cancer cells, laboratory cell cultures, and mouse models – to demonstrate that a surplus of a gene known as GOLPH3 can spur cancer cell growth in a variety of tissues. It is the first gene associated with the Golgi complex, a tiny packaging plant that prepares proteins for their journey within and outside the cell, which has been found to play a role in cancer.

Chin's team also found that the protein made from GOLPH3 may serve as a biomarker for tumors that can be effectively treated with the chemotherapy drug rapamycin: Tumors with a high level of the protein are more apt to shrink in response to the drug than those with low levels.

The study began with an observation made years ago that a section of chromosome 5p13 is often duplicated, or amplified, in cancers of the lung, ovary, breast, and prostate gland, as well as melanoma. The presence of this abnormality in so many different types of cancer led Chin and her associates to take a closer look at that stretch of chromosome to see what genes reside there.

Using a method called genomic qPCR that can pick out specific sequences of DNA, they found four genes in the amplified region, two of which, GOLPH3 and SUB1, were expressed at high levels, due to the increase in gene copy. To determine whether both, or either, of these genes are involved in cancer, they conducted "loss of function" tests, in which they lowered each gene's activity in a set of lab-grown tumor cells. "When we 'knocked down' GOLPH3 expression [or activity] by 95 percent, it significantly inhibited the ability of these cell lines to grow in a semisolid condition, a cancerous quality that normal cells do not typically share," Chin says. "Knocking down SUB1 to a comparable level had only a minimal effect."

Intriguing as this finding was, it was hardly enough to prove that GOLPH3 is an oncogene – a contributor to cancer when overexpressed within a cell. Demonstrating that would require several experiments to ensure that GOLPH3 itself, and not a nearby "shadow" gene, is responsible for the effects. Next came gain-of-function studies to see whether revving up GOLPH3 activity can turn a noncancerous cell cancerous. It did in both mouse and human cells.

"All these results enabled us to build a case that GOLPH3 is an oncogene," Chin states. But there was a problem. "This information wasn't very helpful for achieving our ultimate goal, which is the translation of our findings into a form that is clinically useful for patients."

Despite their discovery that GOLPH3 can promote cancer, researchers didn't know the gene's role in normal cells. "There was literally no information on what it does," Chin remarks. The only hint was that the protein it encodes – designated GOLPH3 – is found in the Golgi network.

The team's first attempt to uncover GOLPH3's role – using gene expression profiling to see how protein levels track with various cell functions – was fruitless. So the researchers ran experiments with yeast cells to see which proteins share GOLPH3's cell neighborhood and which proteins it interacts with. One such partner was found to be VPS35, a component of a structure called the retromer complex. The complex's job is to recycle the antenna-like receptors that dot the cell surface.

From the many genetic screening tests that have been done in yeast, researchers knew that flaws in the retromer complex can cause cells to be vulnerable to rapamycin, just as excess GOLPH3 can. Rapamycin is known to interfere with a protein called TOR, whose job is to control yeast cell size. This suggested that the retromer complex in yeast is important for chemical signals sent to and from TOR.

Chin's team theorized that mammalian GOLPH3 also works with the retromer complex to control the activity of TOR in mammal cells (where it's known as mTOR). To test this idea, the investigators found that knocking down GOLPH3 reduced cell size just as rapamycin did. They followed those experiments with biochemical studies to explore how GOLPH3 affects cell size.

The team next sought to answer whether high GOLPH3 levels cause tumor cells to be more susceptible to rapamycin in animal studies. They took two sets of human melanoma skin cancer cells (one of which had excess GOLPH3 and the other had normal levels), implanted them in animals, allowed them to grow into tumors, then treated them with rapamycin. "In the animals where GOLPH3 was overexpressed, the cancer cells grew much faster, but the tumors were much more responsive to rapamycin," Chin notes, "suggesting the tumor-promoting effect of GOLPH3 is dependent on mTOR signaling."

Lastly, the team considered whether the same mechanism might be at work in human cancer cells. An experiment analyzing human tumor tissue for specific proteins suggested yes. The researchers found that non-small-cell lung cancer cells with too many copies of the GOLPH3 gene also had abnormally high levels of mTOR activity. "The mechanistic relationship we'd identified in the mouse system is also at work in human tumors," says Chin, who is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

In addition to identifying GOLPH3 as a bona fide oncogene and an indicator of whether rapamycin is likely to be effective against specific tumors, the study points to the need to follow genomic studies with a rigorous examination of the biological purpose and operation of potential cancer genes, Chin concludes. "Only then can we turn our intriguing discoveries in the cancer genome into something that is useful to cancer patients."

The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Co-authors include Omar Kabbarah, Mei-Chih Liang, Joyce Wu, Sabin Dhakal, Min Wu, Shujuan Chen, Tamar Feinberg, Joseph Huang, Hans Widlund, and Kowk-Kin Wong, Dana-Farber; Elena Ivanova, PYonghong Xiao, and Alexei Protopopov, Dana-Farber and the Broad Institute of Advanced Cancer Science; David E. Fisher, Massachusetts General Hospital; Valsamo Anagnostou, and David Rimm, Yale University School of Medicine; Abdel Saci, Harvard Medical School.

Women are more likely than men to reject unattractive-looking babies, according to a study by researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, possibly reflecting an evolutionary-derived need for diverting limited resources towards the nurturing of healthy offspring. The findings also challenge the idea of unconditional maternal love.

“Our study shows how beauty can affect parental attitudes,” said Igor Elman, senior author of the research, director of the Clinical Psychopathology Laboratory at McLean Hospital, and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “It shows women are more invested in raising healthy babies and that they are more prone to reject unattractive kids.”

The research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, sought to determine whether aesthetic appearance affects how hard that adults are willing to work in order to watch pictures of babies. 

Subjects, including 13 healthy men and 14 healthy women, were shown photos of 80 infants, including 50 normal ones and 30 who had abnormal facial features, including such abnormalities as cleft palates, skin disorders, Down syndrome, and others. 

Each photo was set to remain on screen for four seconds, but subjects could extend or shorten the viewing time of each photo by pressing certain computer keys. A second part of the experiment asked the subjects to rate the attractiveness of each infant on a numerical scale.

The study found that men and women expended a similar amount of effort – quantified by the number of key presses made to keep photos up on the screen – to extend the viewing time of the normal babies. At the same time, the attractiveness ratings given by men for these normal babies were significantly lower than those given by the women. However, when it came to the photos of abnormal babies, women made a greater effort to avoid looking at them, compared with men. Still, the women rated abnormal faces as unattractive as did men.

The differences between men and women in motivational effort to extend or shorten the viewing time of abnormal-looking babies “may reflect an evolutionary-derived need for diversion of limited resources to the nurturance of healthy offspring,” the paper concludes.

The findings question the concept of unconditional parental love, at least among women. “What our results suggest is that this is determined by facial attractiveness,” said Rinah Yamamoto, first author and a research fellow in psychiatry. “Women may be more sensitized to aesthetic defects and may be more prone to reject unattractive kids. Men do not appear to be as motivated. They didn’t expend the same effort.”

The study noted that work with abandoned and neglected children firmly links their abnormal appearance to maltreatment by caregivers. One study, done in Israel, found that 70 percent of children abandoned by their parents had a conspicuous flaw in their appearance even though those flaws were not life-threatening nor did they affect the children’s intellectual development.

“This may be to some extent because adults are unconsciously motivated to care for infants with healthy facial features, indicating fitness for survival and to exclude the least fit,” the paper said. 

“The abandonment and neglect data along with our findings may thus challenge the commonly held view of unconditional maternal love and acceptance of the offspring,” it said. “If mother’s love is not unconditional, what is the condition? The results provide indirect support for ... the idea that babies’ aesthetic appearance has a motivating influence on the adults’ caretaking behavior.”

The paper suggests that the findings may have clinical implications in terms of predicting potential for abuse and neglect of children.

Elman said that because the study involved a small number of subjects it must be replicated in larger follow-up studies. Future studies will also involve brain scans of subjects in order to try to pinpoint how men’s and women’s brains may be functioning differently while they view the images and make their choices for extending or shortening the time they are looking at the images.

The study, which also involved researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, was funded by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

 A common electrocardiogram (ECG) finding that has largely been considered insignificant may actually signal an increased risk of atrial fibrillation (a chronic heart rhythm disturbance), the future need for a permanent pacemaker, and an increased risk for premature death. 

In their report in the June 24 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston University School of Medicine describe results of the first large-scale study looking at the significance of a prolonged PR interval in a general population.

“Lengthening of the PR interval is commonly seen on routine electrocardiograms, more often in older patients, and has been considered a relatively harmless finding,” says Susan Cheng, a cardiology fellow at MGH and Brigham and Women’s Hospital who is lead author of the JAMA paper. “But our results indicate that PR interval prolongation is not as benign as previously thought.”

A common diagnostic test available in most physicians’ offices, the electrocardiogram records the heart’s electrical activity and translates it into waveforms that reflect how the contraction signal moves through the heart muscle.

A prolonged PR interval represents a delay in the time it takes for the signal to move across the atria at the top of the heart, which receive blood flowing in from the veins, into the ventricles at the bottom of the heart, which pump blood out into the arteries.

Although a prolonged PR interval can signify conduction problems related to serious conditions such as a heart attack, a prolonged PR interval is most commonly seen in generally healthy, middle-aged to older adults and has been thought to reflect normal age-related changes. But previous investigations of the impact of PR prolongation were limited to younger, healthy participants, such as members of the military. 

The current study analyzed data from more than 7,500 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, followed for more than three decades. Although only 124 of those participants showed a prolonged PR interval on the electrocardiogram taken when they entered the study, PR prolongation proved to be a significant risk factor.

A PR interval of less than 200 milliseconds is considered normal, and participants whose interval was longer than 200 milliseconds had twice the overall risk of developing atrial fibrillation, three times the risk of needing a pacemaker, and almost one and a half times the risk of early death. Further prolongation of the PR interval led to even greater risk.

“We do not yet know why a subtle finding such as a prolonged PR interval is associated with such serious adverse outcomes, but it may be a marker for progressive problems with the heart’s electrical conduction system,” says Thomas Wang of the MGH Heart Center, the study’s senior author. “We need to learn more about how a prolonged PR interval is linked to these serious events and what should be done to prevent them. Right now, clinicians might consider that their patients with PR prolongation may be at increased risk of these problems and follow their electrocardiograms more closely.” Wang is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

Co-authors of the JAMA report are Elizabeth McCabe and Christopher Newton-Cheh, MGH Cardiology; Michelle Keyes, Martin Larson, Daniel Levy, Emelia Benjamin, and Ramachandran Vasan, Boston University School of Medicine. The Framingham Heart Study is supported jointly by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and Boston University.

Six professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have been named Walter Channing Cabot Fellows. The annual awards recognize tenured faculty members for distinguished accomplishments in the fields of literature, history, or art, broadly conceived.

The 2009 honorees are Peter Bol, Vincent Brown, Timothy Colton, Marjorie Garber, Ann Harrington, and John Stauffer.

“The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is delighted to recognize these eminent scholars, whose innovative research has forged new paths in their respective fields,” said Michael D. Smith, dean of FAS. “We congratulate them for their outstanding accomplishments and commend them for their many contributions to the Harvard community, not only as scholars but also as teachers and mentors.”

Cabot Fellowships honor broad scholarly achievements, but the selection committee also takes note of recent book publications. This year’s awardees represent a prolific group. Their writings stretch across a range of subjects, from Russian politics to Civil War history.

Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, is a historian of later imperial China. He chairs the China Biographical Database Project, an online database that contains biographical information on individuals who lived between the seventh and 14th centuries. The data is primarily used for statistical and spatial analysis. He also chairs the China Historical GIS, a geographic information system covering 2,000 years of China’s history. Bol was honored with a Cabot Fellowship for “Neo-Confucianism in History” (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of Neo-Confucianism in China during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.

Vincent Brown is the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History. Brown studies the political implications of cultural practice within a broad sweep of American history, focusing especially on the history of slavery and the African diaspora. He has been awarded a Cabot Fellowship for his book “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery” (Harvard University Press, 2008), which has received the 2009 Merle Curti Award, the 2009 James A. Rawley Prize, and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize. “The Reaper’s Garden” is about the perception and role of death in cultural and political life in Jamaica, which was the hub of the British Empire in early America.

Timothy Colton is Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies and director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In his scholarly work, Colton explores Russian and post-Soviet government and politics. Colton was honored with a Cabot Fellowship for “Yeltsin: A Life” (Basic Books, 2008), a detailed and comprehensive biography of the controversial Russian leader who left office in 1999 and passed away in 2007. The book is the first to cover Yeltsin’s complete life, including his early childhood when his family was victimized by the Stalin regime.

Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies, chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. She is the author of 16 books on topics ranging from gender and sexuality to literary and cultural theory to animal studies. Her six books on Shakespeare include “Shakespeare After All” (Pantheon, 2004), 2005 winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Christian Gauss Book Award, and most recently, “Shakespeare and Modern Culture” (Pantheon, 2008), for which she was honored with a Cabot Fellowship. The book discusses the reciprocal relationship between the playwright’s work and modern culture.

Anne Harrington is professor of the history of science and chair of the Department of the History of Science. Her research addresses the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and other mind and behavioral sciences. Harrington received a Cabot Fellowship for her book “The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine” (W.W. Norton, 2008). The book looks at the historical emergence of six core stories — from “the power of positive thinking” to “healing ties” to “eastward journeys” — that collectively shape the way we think today about the role of the mind in illness and healing.  

John Stauffer is professor of English and of African and African American studies, and chair of Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization. Primarily a scholar of the Civil War, he also writes about social protest movements and visual culture. Stauffer has authored seven books. He is honored for “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln” (Twelve, 2008), a study of the unlikely friendship between the two eminent statesmen. This month Stauffer will publish his eighth book, “The State of Jones” (Doubleday), which he co-authored with Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post.

The Walter Channing Cabot Fund was established in 1905 and given in memory of Walter Channing Cabot by his wife, Elizabeth Rogers Cabot, and children, Henry Bromfield Cabot, Ruth Cabot Paine, Elise Cabot Forbes, Walter Mason Cabot, and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick.

amy_lavoie@harvard.edu

Harvard researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have identified a protein in the urine of appendicitis patients that they believe may provide the basis of a quick, noninvasive, accurate, and inexpensive test for the common condition.

Acute inflammation of the vermiform appendix, commonly known as appendicitis, is one of the oldest emergencies in the annals of medicine, but its diagnosis still can be challenging, leading to delays and mistakes that can result in complications and death. But all that may be changing.

In a report released today in the online edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine, the researchers at Children’s Proteomics Center say the marker they found is 500 times more abundant in the urine and tissue of those with appendicitis than in healthy individuals.  

The little worm-shaped organ featured in Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, and whose inflammation may have been forever preserved in an Egyptian mummy of the Byzantine era, continues to be the cause of one of the most common diseases in children and adults in this century, and remains among the most urgent surgical emergencies worldwide.

In the United States, approximately one in 1,000 people are afflicted by the disease yearly. About 3 percent to 30 percent of children arriving at the emergency room with abdominal pain are subject to unnecessary appendectomies, and a larger percentage, about 30 percent to 45 percent of those who are suffering from the disease, are diagnosed when the appendix has already ruptured.

“We wanted to develop ways to identify markers and to establish protocols for early diagnosis of disease,” says clinical fellow Alex Kentsis. “As a first step in the process, we thought we could use appendicitis as a test case because it is still a tremendously important problem in medicine for both kids and adults.”

“People come to the emergency room with abdominal pain; they can spend hours there before they get a slot for the CT, and while being there their appendix bursts because it just took so long,” says Hanno Steen, director of the Proteomics Center and assistant professor of pathology. “We wanted to come up with something that’s much faster and much easier; and what could be easier than peeing into a cup and putting a dipstick in and waiting a few minutes to see whether the color changes? That’s basically the motivation to take the technology out; because technology is always associated with significant costs and also takes time.”

Using proteomics, the systematic study of the proteins in tissues, cells, or body fluids, Kentsis, Steen, and Richard Bachur, associate professor of pediatrics and chief of emergency medicine at Children’s Hospital, analyzed the urine samples of 12 children: six healthy and six with appendicitis, the latter both before and after the removal of their appendixes. “We were looking for proteins that were significantly more abundant in urine,” recounts Steen.  

“Out of this study and other means we came up with a list of 57 proteins. Then we took 67 urine samples from children with suspected appendicitis. This time we only looked at those proteins that were both the most abundant in some samples and less abundant in others.” 

This was possible using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry, what Steen calls “a very fine balance” that allows researchers to measure and detect a wide range between the most abundant proteins and the least abundant proteins of about nine to 12 orders of magnitude. “That’s equivalent to the difference between the height of an ant and the distance from the Earth to the moon,” says Steen.

The team identified seven diagnostic marker candidates. “Out of those, we found this one protein, LRG, which was 500 times more abundant in urine from patients with appendicitis compared to controls,” says Steen. “That’s much more than we expected. It was a dream situation from our perspective. It made the study very easy.”

The protein, LRG, or leucine-rich alpha-2-glycoprotein, appears to be a specific marker of local inflammation. “During the second phase of the study, we attempted to validate this candidate blindly to determine how well it identified patients with appendicitis,” explains Kentsis. The researchers saw that LRG had the best performance in terms of specificity (how much it can distinguish those patients with appendicitis from those without it) and sensitivity (how well it serves as a marker to detect the disease).

The team also looked at the extracted appendix tissue, finding a correlation between the abundance of LRG in the tissue and its abundance in the urine samples.  “Patients with very high concentration of the protein in the urine also had very high concentration of the protein in their appendix,” adds Steen.

If the observed performance of LRG is confirmed in studies with a larger number of patients, the use of the protein as a diagnostic marker could be implemented in the emergency departments of hospitals, says Kentsis. “We hope using LRG will improve the accuracy in diagnostic evaluations for appendicitis, and hopefully make them faster, reducing the complications from delayed or wrong diagnosis, and the costs and mortality associated with that.”

It’s unlikely that the new diagnostic marker will be used in the form of a home test anytime soon.

“Having the test at the pharmacy is a dream,” says Steen. “But we first have to confirm our findings doing further and larger patient studies, and we also have to validate it in adults.”

“In a way, you could think of having this test available at any pharmacy as a dipstick, like you buy a pregnancy test,” says Steen, “but you have to be very careful because when you do the pregnancy test, and you get one result or the other, it doesn’t matter much what you do next. But if you have a dipstick test for appendicitis, and you don’t have the specificity or the sensitivity you need, if the test is negative, but it turns out you really do have the disease, you probably won’t go to the doctor, and in the case of appendicitis this would be very dangerous.” 

The biggest contribution to the diagnosis of appendicitis in this country, says Kentsis, has been the use of high-resolution imagery such as CT scanners. “Unfortunately, the technology is available in a more limited way in most of the rest of world, and in some places it is not available at all,” he says. “The diagnosis of appendicitis there really depends on the experience and skill of individual doctors, and it remains a challenging diagnosis to make.” 

The scientists hope that testing for LRG will make that easier.

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

Don't know much about history? Try studying art.

More than ever, the Harvard Art Museum is making it easier for scholars and students to use its permanent collection (more than 250,000 works) to shed light on a variety of disciplines.

Since January, museum educator Kelsey McNiff ’98 has been director of the academic partnerships program, designed to reach across intellectual borders to offer art as a touchstone to learning.

Those studying the classics at Harvard already make regular forays into the art world, she said, but now there are lively dialogues with scholars of Romance languages, anthropology, music, history, and literature.

McNiff, who has a doctorate in modern French history from Princeton University, put the art/touchstone idea to a test in a public gallery talk on Saturday (June 20). Using a close study of three Impressionist paintings, she cast light on the lives of women in 19th century France.

Arrayed behind her in a fourth-floor gallery at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum was what she called “a perfect intersection” of works. Each in its own way, she said, illuminates the emergence of women from the confines of the domestic sphere into the fullness of French society.

McNiff started with Camille Pissarro’s “Shrove Tuesday on the Boulevards” (1897). It’s a view from afar of a parade along a grand thoroughfare in Paris, a city that had been widely redesigned just a few decades before. An urban crowd presses beneath sketchy trees and uniform buildings. Men and women are indistinct, in a sign of what she called “this new parity ... of modern life.”

Still, that gender parity was not yet complete. McNiff quoted from contemporary documents — the historian’s usual grist — to show that men still largely identified with the public sphere, and women (if reluctantly) with the private.

In an 1863 essay, Charles Baudelaire evoked what McNiff called “the freedom, energy and spectacle [of a man’s] incognito freedom” in the emerging café culture of the day.

“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s and the water is that of the fish,” wrote Baudelaire of men in Paris, where he might “establish his dwelling in the throng” and partake of its “enormous reservoir of electricity.”

On the other hand, McNiff quoted an 1873 passage from the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff. The Ukrainian-born painter and early feminist lived in Paris, but was frustrated at the exclusions gender forced on her.

“What I long for is the freedom of going about alone,” she wrote — yet even to tour the Louvre she had to wait for “a lady companion” or her family.

“You get a sense,” said McNiff of the two passages, “there are very different experiences of this city.”

There was another subtext to Pissarro’s painting of a distant wide boulevard ringed by crowds, she said. Just 25 years before, the specter of revolution had haunted those same streets, when rioting communards had seized control of Paris.

As many as 20,000 were executed in May 1871 during a period called “Bloody Week.” The unrest ushered in France’s Third Republic, in whose conservative shadow Impressionism took root.

In Edouard Manet’s “Skating” (1877), the city crowd fades into the background. Dominating the painting’s center is an ornately dressed woman, who has turned from the skating rink to stare boldly outward. Almost as an afterthought, she holds the hand of an indistinctly rendered child.

To one side, behind the honey-haired figure, is a severely dressed woman whose gaze might echo France’s “moral order government,” then in power.

McNiff called the younger woman’s pose and costume “rebellious” — a sign of a simmering cultural revolution that, in part, made gender roles increasingly “illegible.”

“Art is a disruptive act, in a way,” she said. “When things become illegible, they make us uncomfortable.”

The third painting in McNiff’s oblique tour of a changing France was Pablo Picasso’s 1901 “Mother and Child.” (Like the others, it’s part of the Fogg Art Museum’s permanent collection, some of which is now on display at the Sackler during a multiyear renovation of the Fogg.)

The Blue Period work struck a sober note. In place of Manet’s resplendent woman in a gay Parisian crowd, Picasso depicts a sober, quiet intimacy. A slender woman in blue robes holds a child wrapped close to her. The only light, on their faces, is as soft as candlelight.

“Mother and Child” is a timeless image, shaded by modern ironies. The painting, McNiff said, was inspired by a visit Picasso made to a hospital for women (many of them prostitutes) sick with venereal disease.

By 1901, in the wider world of France, options for women were expanding as they took their places as teachers and workers in an emerging middle class. And they shopped for upper class-like clothes in what McNiff called the “consumer democratization” of new department stores that offered payment plans — credit terms that, in effect, concealed class.

But meanwhile, she said, “a lot of that ‘official culture’ conversation ignores working class women.” In his 1901 painting, Picasso countered that neglect, sketching for the viewer, perhaps, the underside of gender liberation.

“It feels very honest,” said McNiff of the somber painting, with its shades of tenderness and tragedy. “It’s giving us a glimpse into a space we might not see.”

Here is a case of art illuminating history, which after all is a discipline devoted to “trying to imagine times different than our own,” she said. “It helps us make that imaginative leap.”

By Alvin Powell

Harvard News Office

Thousands of miles from his Harvard lab, Kit Parker is lugging a gun and his engineer’s sensibilities through the mountains south of Kabul, in Afghanistan’s Wardak and Logar Provinces.

Six years after his first tour as a U.S. Army captain in Afghanistan, Parker, Cabot Associate Professor of Applied Science, is back. He’s a major now, working with the 10th Mountain Division to improve how the Army carries out its evolving mission there.

Though the task includes analysis and report-writing, it’s far from a desk job. Parker goes on missions of a few days to a few weeks, observing and participating in the work of the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade.

Parker’s work for the Center for Army Lessons Learned seeks to engineer a more efficient American operation in Afghanistan by incorporating lessons from the field into the planning of future missions. Though Parker’s job is to understand everything from planning to execution, he says it is often most effective to look at a mission’s effects and work backwards, seeking ways to change the outcome.

“I am either outside the wire on a mission or I am inside the wire trying to get all the information so that another unit can replicate [that mission’s] successes or avoid its pitfalls,” Parker wrote in a mid-June e-mail.

By any account, Parker is an unusual soldier. In between deployments and training, he’s a Harvard professor and bioengineer, leading the Disease Biophysics Group at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He’s also a member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, dedicated to understanding nature’s own engineering methods and using them in medical and non-medical applications.

Parker’s Disease Biophysics Group studies the mechanical-electrical and mechanical-chemical pathways that influence the functioning of cardiac cells and tissue. In 2007, he and colleagues created what are essentially tissue robots by marrying human heart tissue with a rubber substrate. The resulting “muscular thin films” engaged in semi-autonomous gripping, pumping, walking, and swimming.

In his absence, the work of Parker’s lab has moved ahead under the guidance of postdoctoral fellow Adam Feinberg, who’s worked in the lab since 2005.

“This is a team effort. You can look to Kit’s military training [to see how] he put together a well functioning team to fill in and run the show in his absence. Everyone in our lab group — all six postdocs and seven graduate students — have really stepped up and done a great job,” Feinberg said.

Parker keeps in touch via e-mail and through monthly written updates from lab members. Despite the benefits of technology, though, Parker admits he can’t provide the same level of guidance that he would if he were on campus. Feinberg said he and the other postdocs fill in the gaps.

“All the projects have made great progress while Kit has been gone,” Feinberg said. “Our GlaxoSmithKline collaboration has produced a couple of breakthroughs and our traumatic brain injury project has finished developing some incredible new tools to study blast injury in the dish. … This has happened because Kit and the students/postdocs together developed well-thought-out plans with clear objectives.”

Parker’s first deployment to Afghanistan, in late 2002 and 2003, was a more traditional one. As a captain, he led a five-person team that patrolled 900 square miles of Afghanistan south of Kandahar near the Pakistan border. Before leaving on that deployment, Parker had to put off his initial appointment at Harvard, which was supposed to take effect in September 2002.

He finally made it to campus the following year, returning from Afghanistan the day before taking up his post in Cambridge. In the years since, he’s lived twin lives as a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of the Rhode Island Army National Guard. In addition to the regular National Guard training, Parker took part in several additional Army training courses and trained with British paratroopers in Great Britain prior to dropping into the Netherlands to mark the 60th anniversary of Operation Market Garden, the World War II parachute drop that remains the largest airborne assault in history.

In the years since he left Afghanistan, Parker has married. He and his wife, Kimberly, had a daughter, Caroline, last summer. She was just four months old when he departed for Afghanistan in December. Parker said leaving them was the hardest thing he’s ever done.

“I’d rather be shot at for hours than relive that,” Parker wrote.

Parker is deployed to a different part of Afghanistan from his initial stay, trading the heat of the desert for mountain snows. That makes it difficult to compare what progress has been made in the six years since. One thing that’s certain, he said, is that the needs remain great. Afghanistan needs engineers, teachers, managers, and other skilled professionals. The country’s future, he said, will depend on developing visionary, capable leadership to carry out the will of the people.

Though his job is more analytical than it was last time around, Parker gets into the countryside regularly. When he’s outside the wire, he spends most of his time looking for IED’s — improvised explosive devises.

“We’ve found quite a few, some the hard way,” Parker wrote.

The other main aspect of his mission is to observe how the Afghan government is operating and its effects on the economy and infrastructure.

Parker is reluctant to talk much about fighting he’s seen, though he said there’s been more of it than on his first tour, including the worst gun battle he’s experienced.

“Gunfights are not the big battle here,” Parker says. “The primary conflict here is a test of wills. … We’re in a phase transition. Phase transitions can be gnarly.”

Though the overall mission is important, Parker said the best part of his work is the fellowship with other soldiers, working together and trusting each other — even with their lives on the line — to accomplish a specific task.

Parker says he’ll be back on campus in July, when he’ll settle back into the life of a new father and a Harvard professor. His wife and daughter are eagerly awaiting that day. Kimberly said she’s grateful that the School has reached out to her in Kit’s absence, inviting her to events such as faculty retirement celebrations. She said she’s visited the lab and Kit’s office, staying involved as much as a mother of a now-10-month-old can. Taking advantage of the same technology that allows Parker to stay in touch with the lab, Kimberly e-mails pictures and video of Caroline, and reminds Caroline to kiss her father’s picture each night.

“Every night before we go to sleep we pray for him,” she said. “By his friends and his family, he is missed.”

By Elizabeth England

Joint Center for Housing Studies

The worst U.S. housing downturn in generations continues to grind on, finds a study released today (June 22) by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Despite some stabilization in home building and home sales in the spring, real home prices continued to fall and foreclosures continued to mount in most areas in the United States in the first quarter of the 2009. With mortgage interest rates heading higher in June and the economy still contracting, a sustained recovery for housing still faces an uphill climb.

“Although there are some signs of improvement, or at least steadiness, in new construction and sales,” says Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center, “housing starts stand near 60-plus-year lows and any life in home sales is coming from distressed foreclosure sales, temporary first-time buyer tax credits, and low interest rates that moved higher in recent weeks.”

Housing demand has withered under the weight of crushing job losses, house price deflation, and tighter credit standards, the report concludes. First-time homebuyers are struggling to meet today’s stricter underwriting guidelines, household growth is well below long-term trends, and immigration has slowed; as a result, the number of homes for sale and vacancies stand at near record levels despite sharp decreases in housing production.

“The best that can be said of the market is that house price corrections and steep cuts in housing production are creating the conditions that will lead to an eventual recovery,” remarks Eric S. Belsky, executive director of the Joint Center. “For now, markets remain under considerable stress.”

The housing downturn hit low-income minorities especially hard. With unemployment rates sharply higher among minorities, minority households are more likely than others to spend more than half of their incomes on housing. Also, higher shares of minorities live in neighborhoods with elevated foreclosure rates and where house prices fell the most.

Meanwhile, the number and share of households spending more than half their incomes on housing continues to remain at elevated levels. Before the economy began to shed jobs in 2008 and 2009, the number of households with such severe cost burdens, in 2007, stood at 18 million, up from 14 million, in 2001. Although renters are more cost burdened than homeowners, the most rapid growth in households with housing burdens, during the decade, occurred among owners.

Even though present housing challenges are legion — including still-soaring foreclosures, millions of homeowners stuck in homes worth less than the amount they owe on their mortgage, and falling rental property values — the “State of the Nation’s Housing” report concludes that the demographic moorings of future demand remain strong.

The largest generation in American history will be reaching young adulthood in record numbers over the next decade. As a result, even under a set of household projections that assume annual immigration falls some 40 percent below the average of the first half of this decade to just half of U.S. Census Bureau immigration projections, household growth from 2010 to 2020 should still rival the solid performance in the 1995-2005 period. Even if immigration slows considerably, minorities will still account for about three-quarters of household growth.

“With the echo baby boom driving demand for starter homes and apartments, and the baby boom powering demand for homes suited to older Americans,” explains Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, “the design professions will be called upon to deploy new technologies and designs to meet the aesthetic tastes and functional needs of a new, more diverse, younger generation on the one hand, and a generation in need of home modifications to help them age more safely and healthfully in place on the other.”

Looking beyond the current turmoil, the report underscores the potential to reduce domestic energy consumption by making the existing housing stock more energy efficient and creating dynamic mixed-use communities.

Bringing the efficiency of the existing housing stock up to that of homes built since 2000 could save as much as 20 percent of residential energy consumption, and more compact urban development could cut vehicle miles traveled substantially. Getting there will be a challenge, cautions the report, because local regulations often discourage compact and mixed-use developments. Further incentives may be necessary to get property owners to invest in meaningful energy upgrades.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies is one of the nation’s leading centers for information and research on housing markets and trends in the United States. Marking its 50th anniversary in 2009, the Joint Center is a collaborative unit affiliated with the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Kennedy School.

“The State of the Nation’s Housing” report has summarized national housing trends for a wide audience of policymakers, practitioners, industry decision makers, academics, affordable housing advocates, and public sector leaders since 1988.

By Elizabeth England

Joint Center for Housing Studies

The worst U.S. housing downturn in generations continues to grind on, finds a study released today (June 22) by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Despite some stabilization in home building and home sales in the spring, real home prices continued to fall and foreclosures continued to mount in most areas in the United States in the first quarter of the 2009. With mortgage interest rates heading higher in June and the economy still contracting, a sustained recovery for housing still faces an uphill climb.

“Although there are some signs of improvement, or at least steadiness, in new construction and sales,” says Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center, “housing starts stand near 60-plus-year lows and any life in home sales is coming from distressed foreclosure sales, temporary first-time buyer tax credits, and low interest rates that moved higher in recent weeks.”

Housing demand has withered under the weight of crushing job losses, house price deflation, and tighter credit standards, the report concludes. First-time homebuyers are struggling to meet today’s stricter underwriting guidelines, household growth is well below long-term trends, and immigration has slowed; as a result, the number of homes for sale and vacancies stand at near record levels despite sharp decreases in housing production.

“The best that can be said of the market is that house price corrections and steep cuts in housing production are creating the conditions that will lead to an eventual recovery,” remarks Eric S. Belsky, executive director of the Joint Center. “For now, markets remain under considerable stress.”

The housing downturn hit low-income minorities especially hard. With unemployment rates sharply higher among minorities, minority households are more likely than others to spend more than half of their incomes on housing. Also, higher shares of minorities live in neighborhoods with elevated foreclosure rates and where house prices fell the most.

Meanwhile, the number and share of households spending more than half their incomes on housing continues to remain at elevated levels. Before the economy began to shed jobs in 2008 and 2009, the number of households with such severe cost burdens, in 2007, stood at 18 million, up from 14 million, in 2001. Although renters are more cost burdened than homeowners, the most rapid growth in households with housing burdens, during the decade, occurred among owners.

Even though present housing challenges are legion — including still-soaring foreclosures, millions of homeowners stuck in homes worth less than the amount they owe on their mortgage, and falling rental property values — the “State of the Nation’s Housing” report concludes that the demographic moorings of future demand remain strong.

The largest generation in American history will be reaching young adulthood in record numbers over the next decade. As a result, even under a set of household projections that assume annual immigration falls some 40 percent below the average of the first half of this decade to just half of U.S. Census Bureau immigration projections, household growth from 2010 to 2020 should still rival the solid performance in the 1995-2005 period. Even if immigration slows considerably, minorities will still account for about three-quarters of household growth.

“With the echo baby boom driving demand for starter homes and apartments, and the baby boom powering demand for homes suited to older Americans,” explains Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, “the design professions will be called upon to deploy new technologies and designs to meet the aesthetic tastes and functional needs of a new, more diverse, younger generation on the one hand, and a generation in need of home modifications to help them age more safely and healthfully in place on the other.”

Looking beyond the current turmoil, the report underscores the potential to reduce domestic energy consumption by making the existing housing stock more energy efficient and creating dynamic mixed-use communities.

Bringing the efficiency of the existing housing stock up to that of homes built since 2000 could save as much as 20 percent of residential energy consumption, and more compact urban development could cut vehicle miles traveled substantially. Getting there will be a challenge, cautions the report, because local regulations often discourage compact and mixed-use developments. Further incentives may be necessary to get property owners to invest in meaningful energy upgrades.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies is one of the nation’s leading centers for information and research on housing markets and trends in the United States. Marking its 50th anniversary in 2009, the Joint Center is a collaborative unit affiliated with the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Kennedy School.

“The State of the Nation’s Housing” report has summarized national housing trends for a wide audience of policymakers, practitioners, industry decision makers, academics, affordable housing advocates, and public sector leaders since 1988.

As thousands of Harvard students celebrate their graduation in grand style, the first graduating class from a project across the river will depart with little fanfare but immeasurable success.

Among today’s (June 4) College seniors are students who worked at the Harvard Allston Education Portal, an academic collaboration that connects families in Allston and Brighton with Harvard’s vast intellectual resources.

The portal, located in a bright section of the one-story building at 175 N. Harvard St. with a large open area and cluster of computers as well as individual meeting rooms, is a multiuse center of learning for community residents, offering a series of educational programs run in part by Harvard undergraduates.

“The mission of the portal is meant to be a very powerful reflection of current educational priorities at Harvard. It’s a way for the community to be a partner with us as we engage and profoundly rethink how we teach,” said Rob Lue, Education Portal faculty director, professor in the practice of molecular and cellular biology, and director of Life Sciences Education at Harvard.

The site opened last July with math and science programming for small groups of children and one-on-one mentoring sessions. Today it includes a faculty lecture series featuring professors from the University’s new General Education curriculum, a writing program, as well as a new public speaking course. It currently serves 86 children and is one of several new Harvard-sponsored community programs and neighborhood improvement projects under way in Allston.

With the new Ed Portal programming, “the idea was to bring Harvard’s General Education program and our latest thinking on how to teach issues of wide concern to the Ed Portal as well,” said Lue.

Lue selected the original group of mentors from a diverse pool of applicants. All six were students with a passion for math and science in addition to a proven record of outreach and service. They leave Harvard today enriched not only by their college education, but by their work at the Ed Portal as teachers and mentors. Below are profiles of three of these dedicated students.

Becoming a mentor was always part of the plan for Hannah Chung. As a young teen, the Austin, Texas, math wiz honed her skills at a regular summer math camp where she studied college-level material and developed important relationships with mentors.

“[At math camp] I looked up to all of these [student counselors] and it just really got ingrained in me that I wanted to do the same thing when I was older.”

Chung, a chemical and physical biology concentrator who graduates today with a secondary concentration in mathematical sciences, mentored students at the Ed Portal in math, chemistry, and physics. One of her most rewarding experiences was seeing one of her young mentees, who was struggling with math, bring in a school quiz with a perfect score.

“That was just so exciting,” said Chung, “to see that our work had a positive effect.”

Chung’s experience at the Ed Portal will have a positive impact on her summer plans. She leaves this month for Tanzania where she will work to educate people about HIV/AIDS. After that she is considering pursuing an M.D./Ph.D., possibly focusing on a career in public health.

“I definitely think that working with the portal has kept me in this frame of mind where I want to help other people develop, no matter what situation I find myself in.”

The chance to build bridges was a critical part of Jimmy Yang’s decision to work at the Ed Portal.

“I saw the description of the program and it just seemed so amazing,” said Yang, who welcomed the opportunity to reach out to local community members and develop a strong academic partnership with them. “I knew I had to be part of this special project.”

Yang, who leaves Harvard today only to return in the fall as a first-year student at the Harvard Medical School, was influenced early on by a mentor. It was a scientist, a friend of the family, who opened up the world of experimentation to the young Yang, further fueling his childhood obsession with botany. He recalled that one of his earliest experiments, conducted with the help of his mentor, was determining the antibacterial properties of certain herbs.

“[Realizing] that I could make scientific discoveries was the best thing ever.”

At the Ed Portal, Yang brought his enthusiasm for hands-on learning to his students, helping them explore the wonders of science with simple household products like vinegar and baking soda, which, when combined produce an interesting — and fun — chemical reaction.

“What I wanted to show my own mentees was … that you can really see science all around you,” he said.

Clinical work and research lie ahead for Yang, who is interested in transplantation surgery. But teaching is another goal for the biochemistry concentrator, whose desire to give back through education was shaped by his work at the Ed Portal.

“This experience has taught me that I can inspire other people [and] it really makes me want to pursue a career in teaching because it makes me realize I can actually make a difference in someone else’s life.”

An Ed Portal science experiment involving first- and second-graders grinding up cereal in a bowl, and then using a magnet to coax iron from its crushed flakes, made its mark on a 7-year-old participant, as well as mentor Bianca Calderon.

On a trip to the pediatrician, the young girl, her mother recounted, promptly informed the doctor that she had cereal every day because of its iron content and iron’s importance to the body.

“She actually understood the principles and she was only 7. … Hearing stories like that really makes it worth all the time you put into it,” said Calderon.

Calderon’s passion for science developed at a similarly early age, when she made her mother buy her a copy of a massive book with endless science experiments for kids.

“I wanted to learn everything about the natural world,” she recalled.

Calderon, who hails from Ohio, plans to work at the Cleveland Clinic on genetic research before heading to medical school and hopes to one day work as a reproductive endocrinologist, said her experience with the Ed Portal reminded her about the wonders of science and reinforced her own love of the discipline.

“To see the world through a child’s eyes, where everything is new to them and fascinating and exciting, … it makes you excited again, and I think it helps us remember why we chose to be scientists in the first place.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of the ongoing collaboration, said Lue, is the connection it fosters between Harvard and its surrounding community.

“It’s really an opportunity,” he said, “for the community to come face to face with the human side of academic Harvard. These are Harvard students, faculty, and staff, people that are doing this because they are committed to the idea of a relationship.”

Cathi Campbell, an Allston mother of two children who attended the Ed Portal for one-on-one mentoring and the science “club” program for first- and second-graders, couldn’t agree more.

“The mentors convey a sense of their love of learning — and their love of being at Harvard — to the children. They are serving as true models for these young children, helping them understand that if they work hard at school and really follow through with their educations, their futures are limitless.”

Computer scientists at Harvard have developed a framework for studying the arrangement of tissue networks created by cell division across a diverse set of organisms, including fruit flies, tadpoles, and plants.

The finding, published in the June 2009 issue of PLoS Computational Biology, could lead to insights about how multicellular systems achieve (or fail to achieve) robustness from the seemingly random behavior of groups of cells, and provide a road map for researchers seeking to artificially emulate complex biological behavior.

"We developed a model that allows us to study the topologies of tissues, or how cells connect to each other, and understand how that connectivity network is created through generations of cell division," says senior author Radhika Nagpal, assistant professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. "Given a cell division strategy, even if cells divide at random, very predictable 'signature' features emerge at the tissue level."

Using their computational model, Nagpal and her collaborators demonstrated that the regularity of the tissue, such as the percentage of hexagons and the overall cell shape distribution, can act as an indicator for inferring properties about the cell division mechanism itself. In the epithelial tissues of growing organisms, from fruit flies to humans, the ability to cope with often-unpredictable variations (referred to as robustness) is critical for normal development. Rapid growth, entailing large amounts of cell division, must be balanced with the proper regulation of overall tissue and organ architecture.

"Even with modern imaging methods, we can rarely directly 'ask' the cell how it decided upon which way to divide. The computational tool allows us to generate and eliminate hypotheses about cell division. Looking at the final assembled tissue gives us a clue about what assembly process was used," explains Nagpal.

The model also sheds light on a prior discovery made by the team: that many proliferating epithelia, from those of plants to frogs, show a nearly identical cell shape distribution. While the reasons are not clear, the authors suggest that the high regularity observed in nature requires a strong correlation between how neighboring cells divide. While plants and fruit flies, for example, seem to have conserved cell shape distributions, the two organisms have, based on the computational and experimental evidence, evolved distinct ways of achieving such a pattern.

"Ultimately, the work offers a beautiful example of the way biological development can take advantage of very local and often random processes to create large-scale robust systems. Cells react to local context but still create organisms with incredible global predictability," says Nagpal.

In the future, the team plans to use its approach to detect and study various mutations that adversely affect the cell division process in epithelial tissues. Epithelial tissues are common throughout animals and form important structures in humans from skin to the inner lining of organs. Deviations from normal division can result in abnormal growth during early development and to the formation of cancers in adults.

"One day we may even be able to use our model to help researchers understand other kinds of natural cellular networks, from tissues to geological crack formations, and, by taking inspiration from biology, design more robust computer networks," adds Nagpal.

Nagpal's collaborators included Ankit B. Patel and William T. Gibson, both at Harvard, and Matthew C. Gibson at Stowers Institute.

Scientists at Harvard University have shown, for the first time, that intelligence varies among individual monkeys within a species – in this case, the cotton-top tamarin.

Testing for broad cognitive ability, the researchers identified high-, middle-, and low-performing monkeys, determined by a general intelligence score. General intelligence, or g, is a hallmark of human cognition, often described as similar to IQ. The effect of g in primates may offer insights into the evolution of human general intelligence.

The study, published this week in the journal PLoS One, is the first to examine differences of broad cognitive ability in primates within a single species. Previous studies of general intelligence in primates primarily concerned variation between species.

The research was led by Konika Banerjee, a research assistant in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Banerjee’s co-authors are Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, and James J. Lee, all of Harvard, along with Christopher Chabris of Union College, Fritz Tsao of Hillsdale College, and Valen Johnson of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

“We found that there was substantial individual variation in performance on these tasks,” says Banerjee. “A significant proportion of that variation can actually be accounted for by something that looks very similar to the general intelligence, or g factor, in humans. It appears to be the case that tamarins have something very similar to our general intelligence.”

General intelligence refers to the positive correlation of an individual’s performance on various subtasks within an intelligence test. Banerjee and her colleagues found that g accounted for 20 percent of the monkeys’ performance on the tasks in the study. The remaining 80 percent of the variation in performance was due to task-specific or environmental circumstances in testing the monkeys.

While not a direct comparison, human g accounts for 40 percent to 60 percent of the variation in an individual’s performance on the various subtasks of an IQ test. It may be that an increase in the magnitude of g was integral to the evolution of the human brain.

“General intelligence is an important component of human intelligence, but it is also possible that it relies upon ancient neural substrates,” says Banerjee. “If different primate taxa differ in the magnitude of g, with humans standing out from the rest of the pack, this might help explain how we, uniquely, can combine thoughts from different domains of knowledge to create new representations of the world. This cognitive domain general ability, captured by g, is something that you might see to varying degrees in other primate taxa.”

This study was conducted among 22 cotton-top tamarins, who were administered 11 unique tasks designed to assess different cognitive functions including working memory, executive control, information processing speed, and inhibitory control. For some tasks, the monkeys’ goal was to obtain a piece of food, but this was not the case for all the tasks. Monkeys with higher g scores tended to outperform monkeys with lower scores across the various subtasks in the cognitive task battery.

This particular set of tasks was developed for this study, but Banerjee hopes that it or other similar task batteries might be applied to future studies of primate general intelligence, to develop a standardized test for cognitive ability that could be administered to many species.

“We called our cognitive task battery the ‘monkey IQ test’ very crudely,” says Banerjee. “It’s a fun way to think about it, but to be more accurate, I would say that we are looking at global cognitive ability across an array of tasks that span multiple cognitive domains.”

The research was funded by grants to Banerjee from the Harvard College Research Program and the Goelet Fund, and from grants to Hauser from the McDonnell Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel, chosen by the BBC to deliver its Reith Lectures for 2009, can be heard on the BBC Web site. The Reith Lectures, considered the most prestigious public lectures in Britain, were delivered in May and early June in London, Oxford, Newcastle, and Washington, D.C, and were recorded before live audiences, and are being broadcast over the Web. The first lecture, titled “Markets and Morals,” is currently (June 15) online, and two more lectures will be available soon, one on June 16 and one on June 20.

Sandel is the first Harvard faculty member to receive the honor since John Kenneth Galbraith in 1966. His lectures, titled “A New Citizenship,” addressed the prospect for a new politics of the common good.

“The Reith Lectures are the premier national series of lectures sponsored by the BBC and are intended to look deeply at some of the ideas and theories addressing the major issues confronting the world,” says Shirley Williams, a leading British political figure and public service professor of electoral politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, emeritus. “Michael Sandel was chosen because of his outstanding, profound, and serious contribution to political and constitutional deliberation.”

In addition to Galbraith, previous Reith lecturers have included the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka, literary critic Edward Said, and nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

Sandel’s lecture topics are “Markets and Morals” (London), “Morality in Politics” (Oxford), “Genetics and Morals” (Newcastle), and “A New Politics of the Common Good” (Washington, D.C.). While in London, Sandel participated in a discussion of his work with government advisers and ministers at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence.

Sandel's scholarly work has addressed issues such as democracy, ethics, public philosophy, the role of markets, and the erosion of community and moral values. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and has taught political philosophy since 1980. More than 14,000 students have enrolled in his undergraduate course, “Justice.”

“The invitation to Professor Michael Sandel to deliver them came as no surprise to those who know his work,” says Bhikhu Parekh, professor of political philosophy at the University of Westminster. “Over the years he has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of the nature of the human self, political life, justice, and citizenship, and is rightly regarded as one of the most original political philosophers of our age. His unique voice cuts across the prevailing ideological and philosophical divides and offers important insights into the troubling issues of our age.”

Sandel gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University in 1998, has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, and recently delivered a series of seven lectures on political philosophy at major universities in China.

In his most recent book, “The Case Against Perfection,” Sandel argues against the use of genetic engineering to create designer children, and suggests that the genetic revolution will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda. His new book, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” will be published in September.

The Reith Lectures are named for John Reith, the BBC's first director-general, who maintained that broadcasting should be a public service that enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest. The Reith Lectures began in 1948.

One of the many months of New England farm abundance, June gives us fresh beets, cabbage, collards, kale, greens, radishes, and rhubarb.

June also gives us the start of Harvard’s two weekly farmers’ markets, open for the season through October.

Organizers promise a celebration of fresh, regional goods from a medley of vendors: bakers, beekeepers, chocolatiers, cheese makers, and local farmers.

The regional farmers, none farther than 50 miles from Harvard Yard, provide the poem of produce that marks every month of the growing season: the snap peas of June, the peaches of July, the corn of August, the peppers, pears, and pumpkins of September — and more.

Last year the Cambridge market (which opened in 2006) doubled in size. “It gets bigger every year,” said Theresa McCulla ’04, administrator of the Food Literacy Project at Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS).

Farmers’ markets illustrate “very explicitly” what food literacy means, she said: “a constant mindfulness” about what we eat.

McCulla, a onetime Romance languages concentrator, gave up a job as a media analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency to pursue her true passion in life: good food — and the nutrition it offers, the beauty it possesses, and the community it engenders.

She and other experts see farmers’ markets as a way of getting the freshest food, learning how to prepare it, and meeting the people who grow it.

And at markets like this, said McCulla, the money you spend goes directly to producers. (For food sold in a supermarket, farmers get only about 17 cents of every dollar.)

Then there’s sustainability: the practice of living within our means, environmentally speaking.

“Food is a gateway issue for sustainability,” said Heather Henriksen, director of Harvard’s Office for Sustainability. “Everyone eats.”

Farmers’ markets are sustainable in many ways, she said. “They bring communities together, create jobs, provide educational opportunities, and open access to healthy foods.”

Farmers’ markets provide local and in-season food that minimizes transportation from farm to table, said Henriksen. (By one estimate, a typical carrot travels more than 1,800 miles to reach the dinner table.)

“The farmers pick the produce the morning it’s sold,” said McCulla of the Harvard markets. “It’s important for shoppers to know it’s so fresh and so close.”

Farmers’ markets are also classrooms of a sort. Shoppers can pick up cooking tips, sample regional foods they may never have heard of, and learn the value of freshness.

Last year, McCulla — who directs the market near Harvard Yard — saw a shopper walk by, eating from a pint of Concord grapes. He asked his friend, “Have you tasted these grapes? They’re not normal grapes.”

“I love overhearing things like that,” she said.

“A farmers’ market is actually a chance to see what’s happening seasonally,” said Crista Martin, HUDS director of marketing and communications. “It’s such a different experience to get a bean when it’s available — fresh that day.”

The markets are a culinary history lesson too, she said. “It gives me an appreciation of what it must have been like to eat in New England” before the advent of supermarkets.

Martin, who grew up on a family farm in Delaware, is astonished all over again every year at the variety — sometimes the oddity — of regional foods at the markets — like bright orange squash blossoms, and long beans from a Hmong farmer who grows Asian vegetables and herbs.

Then there are “tomatoes of every color,” said Martin: purple, green, and variegated reds. “They’re beautiful.”

In season, there are maxixe, said McCulla — cucumberlike vegetables that look like spiky green pine cones. And don’t forget the fresh local breads, dessert sauces, jams, pies, pastries, artisan honeys, and regional chocolates.

“All these new taste experiences make everything worth it,” said Martin. “It’s fun to be at the market and see people unable to resist eating what they just bought.”

Both markets will accept Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) food stamps, Women, Infant & Children (WIC) vouchers, and Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) coupons.

Vendors at the Allston market will also accept Boston Bounty Bucks, which in Boston double the value of food stamps for purchases of between $1 and $10.

New this year at the Cambridge market is Cape Ann Fresh Catch, a community-supported fishery. Buy a share or a half-share and you get part of the weekly catch from the seas off Gloucester, Mass. — hake, dabs, grey sole, flounder, cod – “whatever’s abundant,” said McCulla, “super-fresh and never frozen.”

The farmers’ markets will reach beyond food. During a June 26 kick-off celebration at the Allston market, landscaping experts from Harvard’s Facilities Maintenance Operations will offer tips on home-scale organic composting, modeled on efforts already under way at the University.

The Office for Sustainability will have a display set up too. It will have top-10 tips on sustainable living, lessons in low-impact transportation and energy usage, and activities like a water tasting, a recycling game, and more.

Other special events will take place in Allston through the season.

In the market near Harvard Yard, local chefs will offer weekly food demonstrations, using ingredients from vendors at tents and tables nearby. (On June 16, the guest chef will be Jody Adams of the Rialto Restaurant in Cambridge.)

Farmers’ markets also give shoppers a refreshed sense of community, said Martin. “It’s one of those times you get the best-of-the-neighborhood feeling.”

And it gives shoppers a glimpse of a largely hidden world: artisan shops, corner bakeries, and — most of all — local farms.

“We do lose track, riding on the T every day,” said Martin. “These guys are operating just beyond the edge of town.”

Lin “William” Cong remembers his early childhood as a time of playing in the street, reading comic books, and coasting through the early grades. College was a dream.

But Cong graduates from Harvard today (June 4) with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a dual bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics, a secondary field degree in economics, a language citation in French, and — whew! — a master’s degree in physics.

At age 12, high test scores earned him the chance to board and study at Northeast Yucai School, a middle school just across town in Shenyang, his native city of 5 million in northeast China.

“It was my first time away from home,” said Cong (pronounced tsung), and he was ill-prepared academically. “I learned to work hard ... and to have empathy for others not doing well.”

At age 14, Cong won a competitive scholarship that took him even farther from home — to Hwa Chong Junior College in Singapore. He fought off loneliness, cultural isolation, and a crisis of confidence to burrow deep into physics, chemistry, higher math, and Chinese calligraphy.

In his gap year — Hwa Chong graduates its students in November — Cong worked in Singapore. Every month, he earned what his parents earned in a year.

In the time since, mostly from part-time work at Harvard, Cong has sent his parents enough money to buy a house and keep up with the payments. “My money is my parents’ money,” he said. “It’s not a separate account.”

His hometown, a thriving industrial hub, is famous for its airplane factory, for the pianist Lang Lang, and for being the founding capital of the Qing dynasty. But Shenyang may one day be famous for Cong himself.

Since high school, the John Harvard Scholar has authored five academic articles in mathematics and science; won many fellowships and prizes, including the Jack T. Sanderson Memorial Prize (for physics) and the Allston Burr Resident Dean’s Award (from Lowell House). Cong has also had six rigorous research jobs at Harvard, at the University of Cambridge, and in Singapore.

In the fall he will start a Ph.D. program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business to study finance and economics. China’s rapid growth is driven by Western economic models, said Cong, but few of its economists are trained in the United States.

His mother, Li Naiyan, is a nurse at a kindergarten, and his father, Cong Zhiliang, is a city policeman. For both his parents, education stopped at the ninth grade.

His father was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, but he managed to save his texts in physics, a favorite subject. The same books first inspired his son to study the science of matter and motion.

“They went through hardships,” Cong said of his parents, “but they aren’t bitter about it.” Both will be at the Harvard graduation ceremony. Cong’s mother had visited Cambridge once before; his father had never been on an airplane.

“I have great parents,” he said. “They love me deeply.”

Cong himself has visited home once or twice a year since coming to Harvard, but never for more than a month. “If I stayed longer,” he said, “I’d put on weight.”

Aside from his academic accomplishments, Cong is an ardent practitioner of the physical arts.

He was on Harvard’s badminton team in its championship 2005-06 season. He participated in intramural squash, crew, and swimming, and found time to study tae kwon do and aikido.

These days, the slight, muscular Cong practices CrossFit, a hell-bent combination of aerobic training and weight lifting that burns calories like a bonfire. “The movements,” he said of dead lifts, running, shoulder presses, and rowing, “you actually use in real life.”

Real life for Cong has also included volunteering at the Harvard College Fund, serving as president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students, and taking up French, from scratch, in his sophomore year.

Cong is studying Japanese now too, in part because of a Kawamura Fellowship this summer. “It’s like a cultural immersion,” he said: five weeks in Japan, and a week each in Korea and Thailand.

Cultural immersion was the idea behind the nonprofit foundation Cong co-founded in 2007: Initiating Mutual Understanding through Student Exchange (IMUSE).

The idea is to get future U.S. and Chinese leaders to experience each other’s culture — “to get them to talk,” he said, “even on sensitive issues.”

Harvard has taught Cong the value of exploring more than one academic pursuit, and of searching out your passion in learning. If students don’t feel it, he said, “they take a year off and find it.”

Harvard also taught him the true value of his parents, of fine teachers, and of lasting friends, said Cong. “I really want to thank them.”

The jersey, the helmet, the pads, the cleats — at a glance it’s easy for Andrew Berry to blend in with the rest of his teammates. But take a look at the Bel Air, Md., native after he’s left the stadium and you’ll realize that it isn’t just football that makes him special. Make no mistake, Berry’s athletic resume is impressive. Standing an inch over 6 feet, at 175 pounds, the Crimson cornerback finished his football career with three consecutive first-team All-Ivy League selections, racked up 125 tackles and five interceptions, and struck so much fear into opposing teams that quarterbacks rarely threw the ball in his direction. In his junior year he went four consecutive games without even having the ball thrown toward him.

Berry was named an All-American in his senior season; was one of five finalists for the John Wooden Citizenship Cup, which goes to the nation’s highest-achieving student-athlete who best displays character, teamwork, and citizenship; was a finalist for the Draddy Trophy as the national scholar-athlete of the year (academic Heisman Trophy); and was named the Football Championship Subdivision Athletic Director Association Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

While Berry’s on-field performance for the past four years has been nothing short of phenomenal, the All-American’s awards and statistics don’t tell the whole story.

Berry’s moves in the classroom were just as impressive. A John Harvard Scholar recently elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Berry will be receiving two degrees at Commencement — an A.B. in economics and an M.S. in computer science.

So how was it possible for Berry to find a way to excel at both athletics and academics? He explains that his passion for football, mixed with the expectations his parents had for him and his two siblings, motivated him at a young age.

“It was very simple in our household growing up,” said Berry. “Our parents set the bar very high for their kids: ‘If you guys don’t get straight A’s, you guys won’t play sports.’ It was as simple as that. … Because my brother and I loved sports so much, we never even flirted with that line. That mentality [was] engrained in us as we went through middle school, as we went through high school.”

Berry’s pigskin passion was shared with his twin brother Adam growing up, but despite playing on the same team in high school, Andrew found his brother on the other side of the line of scrimmage in college, after the two chose different college destinations: Andrew came to Harvard and Adam played for Princeton. Andrew said that lining up against his wide-receiver brother was odd for him — briefly.

“The first time was a little strange. I was a quarterback in high school so I was sort of used to throwing him the ball, so being against him was a little weird,” he said. “But after the first quarter of the first game, he was just another competitor.”

When asked if he ever laid a big hit on the Princeton Berry, Andrew said with a laugh, “He actually got me one year on a block.” Yet he didn’t neglect to add, “I never got a big hit on him, but he never caught a pass on me.”

Berry repeatedly credits his parents for the success he has had on and off the field, yet his most rewarding experiences at Harvard have not necessarily been on the turf or in the classroom, but in answering the call to serve the wider community.

“My parents were really good at making sure that we as kids always knew where we came from, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful we were,” Berry explains. “The one thing they said was, ‘Remember that as much as you have been blessed, as many people who have been blessings in your life, if you have that opportunity you should take that opportunity to be a blessing to someone else.’ That’s something I’m probably most proud of at my time at Harvard — the service opportunities I’ve been able to be part of.”

Andrew’s work with the Phillips Brooks House Association Summer Urban Program as a teacher and director; science and math tutoring at the St. Paul A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church; and after-school program volunteering are just a few examples of the commitment he has made in his four years.

Berry will continue to find ways to volunteer in his time after Harvard and hopes eventually to serve as a mentor to young men and children in some capacity. One certainly would be hard-pressed to find a better role model.

“I feel like I won the lottery in the sense of I had so many good supportive people around me that pointed me in the right direction at critical points of my life, and I feel like if I’m in a position where I might be able to help somebody else out, that’s an opportunity I’d love to take.”

Complete strangers recognize Dan Jones on campus all the time. It’s the same for his brother, Bill.

“I just play along,” said Dan. “I don’t know their names, I’ve never seen them before. I just assume Bill knows them and I try to be friendly so they don’t start hating him.”

There’s a connection between the graduating identical twins that runs much deeper than their looks: a sense of parallel lives and a profound love for, and dedication to, each other that has motivated them for 20 years. The pair falls into that category of twins who share an intense, almost indescribable relationship, one that transcends sibling attachment. And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’ve pretty much done everything together, all the time,” said Dan. “It’s very nice,” added Bill. “I think it’s an advantage. You are never alone. Whenever there is a new situation, your best friend is there.”

For the athletic duo, the water has had a lot to do with their bond.

Growing up in western Michigan in a small town surrounded by lakes — and with a mother who was uncomfortable in the water — swimming classes were a must.

“It just so happens we were good at it,” said Dan.

And they were good, indeed, very good. They began swimming competitively at the age of 6. But their team’s practice pool was too far away to get to, so they spent countless hours in a pool closer to home, honing their skills against each other. “It made us better,” said Dan. “We didn’t have a coach; there was nobody there to motivate us except for each other, and that was pretty much essential to us getting as far as we did.”

Both eventually chose to swim the strenuous butterfly stroke in competitions. As time passed, their rivalry became so fierce — their finishes often separated only by hundredths of a second — friends would wager on who would win.

The University of Michigan and its legendary sports program looms large in the eyes of many an athletic high school senior from the state, and initially the pair were intent on swimming for the Wolverines. But a trip east changed all that. The combination of Harvard’s rigorous academic curriculum and strong swimming program was a perfect fit for the Midwest pair who had excelled in high school as both scholars and athletes.

“We liked it; we felt like we fit in here with the team; we liked the coach, and there have been no regrets. We made the right choice,” said Bill.

Attending different schools was never even a consideration.

“That’s what we thrive on,” offered Dan as a simple explanation, “each other’s support.”

As freshmen, they were separated, residing in different dorms, but sophomore year they were together again, living as roommates through their senior year at Winthrop House.

Though they are intense rivals in the water, they also love seeing each other succeed. In 2008, Bill qualified for the Olympic Swimming Trials and for the past two years has qualified for the NCAA championships. Dan was thrilled his brother was able to compete on such a grand stage. When Dan, who had been sidelined for much of his final swimming season with an illness, made it back to the pool and shone at this year’s Ivy championships, the loudest cheers came from Bill.

“He didn’t just get best times,” said Bill, “he got best times by a significant margin, which is incredible.”

The Jones brothers are both organismic and evolutionary biology concentrators, and, as in the pool, have relied on each other for academic support. Both did their senior theses on different aspects of the Charles River. In their spare time, when not studying or swimming, their aquatic interest extends to their hobby of wooden fish carving, a skill they largely picked up on their own. What began as a childhood effort to carve fishing lures out of backyard willow tree branches has grown into a successful business. Today both are accomplished artists able to create intricately hand-carved and painted works of art.

But after graduation, their close connection will be severed by distance for the first time. Bill is headed to San Diego to pursue a Ph.D. in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Dan will remain on the East Coast to study for medical school entrance exams.

“Hopefully, without each other we will still accomplish something,” laughed Dan, who intends to go into cardiology or possibly heart surgery.

And though their competitive swimming careers are over, some day the two hope to complete an Ironman Triathlon. Together.

Matt Lauer, co-anchor of NBC News’ “Today,” delivered the 2009 Senior Class Day speech in Tercentenary Theatre on Wednesday (June 3) under a canopy of green leaves and slightly overcast skies. With a joke-filled address that had the large crowd frequently in stitches, the accomplished journalist proved he is also an accomplished stand-up comedian.

In addition to crisscrossing the globe for “Today’s” popular travel series, “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” Lauer has reported from Iraq, covered the Olympic Games in Beijing, and interviewed numerous prominent politicians, including President Barack Obama, then-first lady Hilary Rodham Clinton, and former President George W. Bush.

Recalling his own college application process, Lauer talked about a conversation with his guidance counselor in high school. Convinced he had a chance at getting into Harvard, Lauer made his case for applying. His guidance counselor, he recalled, set him straight, noting that he wasn’t allowed to add up his scores from the three times he took the SATs.

“He said, ‘Mr. Lauer, you applying to Harvard would be the biggest waste of fifteen dollars in the history of fifteen dollars.’”

Later, told by his “Today” executive producer that Harvard wanted him as the Class Day speaker, he said that he “immediately asked the question that any graduate of Ohio University would ask. I said, ‘Do I get an honorary degree? Do I get a doctorate? … Do I get a cap, a gown, a sash — anything I can sell on eBay?”

The journalist’s 20-minute speech was equal parts humor, equal parts heartfelt, as he left the seniors not only with laughs but with thoughtful parting advice.

“Have kids,” he said, “Have a lot of kids because when you find it hard to find humor in the world, kids will help you find that humor.”

Lauer told the graduating class to find at least one friend who would tell them the truth “every single time,” and to try to be that person for someone they loved, and to remember that the only thing that remains constant in life is their character.

Finally, he said, remember that a Harvard degree doesn’t mean entitlement.

“You did not win the chance to think that you are better than anyone else. This education is a powerful tool but it is just one of the tools at your disposal. I encourage you to use all your tools. Use your compassion, your kindness, your generosity, your sense of fair play, your sense of humor to build bridges to the people around you, not to erect barricades.

“You are the best and the brightest,” he added, “and I know you will make us proud.”

Class Day is a ceremony for Harvard College that is tinged with humor and is less formal than Commencement Exercises. It traditionally takes place in Harvard’s outdoor Tercentenary Theatre and includes addresses from members of the senior class.

Invited speakers Walter Cronkite, George Plimpton, Bono, Hank Aaron, and Conan O’Brien have all taken the Class Day podium.

The ceremony also included two Harvard Orations and two Ivy Orations from members of the senior class. The former took a reflective tone, while the latter were all about laughs.

In order to “resuscitate the Harvard brand,” spoofed Will Houghteling, “it will be necessary to remind the world how amazing a Harvard graduate is by keeping noses upturned at every occasion, and flouting superiority whenever possible.

“Over the next few days and week, countless people will try to humble us as we enter the ‘real’ world, constantly reminding us that hardship and failure are facts of life. Don’t listen to these people: They are losers, and they clearly did not graduate from Harvard like us.”

Trepidation is a normal and useful part of the transition from life at Harvard to the wider world, counseled Harvard orator Kendra Boothe, who in rhyming verse repeatedly advised the gathering of seniors to “Be nervous.”

“Let us sustain these nervous feelings. Let us take heart. Let us take responsibility for the spiritual currency that are our words. Let us place our attention on the positive and ignore fruitless worry.”

Alison Rich, the second Ivy orator, shared one of her future ambitions with the crowd. “I want yachts — 1,000 mink, encrusted-platinum, endangered baby yachts,” she mused.

Harvard orator Lewis Bollard told the 2009 senior class that the rigors of Harvard, which at times could lead to failure, provided an important lesson in true self-knowledge.

“The Puritans who founded Harvard College called this process finding one’s ‘calling.’ As we leave these gates, I hope that you have had enough doubts, setbacks, and frustrations to find yours.”

First Marshal of the 2009 Senior Class Committee Lumumba B. Seegars closed the event with an impromptu a cappella version of “Lean on Me,” by singer/songwriter Bill Withers.

“You are an amazing class,” he told the gathering of seniors, “and we should always be able to count on and call on each other.”

Barron, Bilotti, Bras, Chiappini, Doohovskoy, Kristol, Pellegrini, West.

That’s roll call for eight 2009 Harvard graduates who were commissioned late Wednesday morning (June 3). Five are new officers in the U.S. Army and three in the U.S. Marine Corps.

The eight students filled out their final commissioning paperwork (and took their official oaths) in front of the John Harvard Statue.

Among a small crowd of well-wishers was Capt. Thomas J. Hudner Jr., who as an aviator won the Navy’s first Medal of Honor of the Korean War. (His father, Thomas Hudner, was in Harvard’s Class of 1915.)

By 11 a.m., Harvard’s newest military officers were on stage in front of the Memorial Church for a public commissioning ceremony — at which Hudner took a bow, and won a standing ovation from the crowd of about 4,000.

Lt. Col. Timothy Hall, a professor of military leadership at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), praised the new officers for joining the military “fully knowing they will likely be in harm’s way.” (He directs MIT’s ROTC program to which Harvard cadets are attached.)

The new soldiers and Marines are part of a “long crimson line” at Harvard that stretches back to 1636, said Hall, and includes 10 Medal of Honor winners.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, re-administered the oath of office for what he said “must be the smartest new officers in our military.”

Harvard President Drew Faust set aside her prepared remarks to make an announcement: a new partnership with the federal government to help American military veterans get a Harvard education.

Starting this fall, she said, as many as 150 veterans will receive substantial financial aid at Harvard as part of the new federal Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program. The aid, good at every Harvard School, will be matched dollar for dollar by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“This is an opportunity for us to show our gratitude,” said Faust, “to the citizen soldiers who have given so much for our nation.” It’s an “investment,” she added, that will hopefully be “continued and even expanded” across Harvard in the years to come.

In his remarks, Petraeus imparted to the new lieutenants “five critical admonitions” necessary for leadership: Lead by example, stay humble, make timely decisions, build a team, and “don’t take yourself too seriously — but take your work seriously.”

In this day of multiple wars, he said, humility matters. New officers not only have to lead, they have to listen to combat-hardened veterans. “They have a lot to teach you,” said Petraeus.

Faust praised the general as the embodiment of an ideal she urged the new officers to follow: the soldier-scholar.

“He is a thinker,” she said, and offered a quote from Petraeus himself, who has a doctorate from Princeton University: “The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind.”

Faust, a historian, called war “arguably the most consequential activity any nation or society can undertake.” And so the soldier-scholar has the obligation, she said, to grasp the broad issues necessary to understand both opponents and ourselves.

A Harvard education has imparted the ability to “to think, to analyze, to make judgments — to turn information into understanding,” she said. “Your education has introduced you to the big picture — the sweep of history, of philosophy, of cultural difference and change. This is the context that necessarily shapes war and those who bear responsibility for it.”

To each new officer Faust gave a gift-wrapped book — a copy of “Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations” (1977), by political philosopher Michael Walzer, then a professor of government at Harvard.

Petraeus acknowledged that “individual study and education are of enormous importance” — and that “when we had Harvard grads in Iraq, we tried to hang on to them.”

To that he added a caution for the young officers: “You’ll learn the most by getting your hands dirty and your boots dusty.”

The ceremony included remarks by Capt. Darnell M. Whitt II, U.S. Navy (retired), a member of the 1959 cadre of ROTC cadets at Harvard, which numbered 121 students. (Many of them, on campus for a 50th anniversary, took seats close to the front, wearing single red-ribboned medals in their lapels.)

Whitt paid homage to that class — one of whom, a combat surgeon, died in Vietnam — and to the generations of Harvard students in ages past whose names are carved in stone.

In a whimsical look another 50 years ahead (“The president of Harvard might be a man!” he said), Whitt hoped that the number in the ROTC cadre of 2059 “will be much greater than the few in your cohort, or the 121 of us.”

He closed with a sober reminder: “Let us never forget that the land of the free is because of the brave.”

A journalist <#lois>, a landscape architect <#claghorn>, and a Latin scholar <#mumma> are today’s Commencement orators. They fulfill a University tradition dating back to 1642. They also embark on three journeys that hint at the wide array of academic paths leading outward from Harvard.

Lois Beckett ’09 drew on conversations with classmates to develop and refine her Commencement oration — which is no surprise, given this senior’s background in journalism.

“I love to learn by being out in the world and talking to people,” she said.

Beckett has been reporting for the Harvard Crimson since her first year at the College. She has also completed journalism internships in Ghana and India.

Her Crimson work covered a range of topics, including a series on the role of Harvard intellectuals in the Iraq War. But in thinking about Commencement, Beckett found that many of her conversations focused on uncertainty and instability in the current economic climate.

“Yes, Harvard students are privileged and very lucky … but we as much as anyone else have to deal with the fact that things we assumed to be true may not be true anymore,” Beckett said. “We have to deal with the question: ‘What does it mean to be responsible in a world that remains unsteady?’”

That question provided the inspiration for Beckett’s oration, and her discussions with friends and classmates across the College helped shape the talk.

“My speech has changed a lot based on what I’ve heard,” Beckett said.

This summer, she heads to Trinity College at Cambridge University in England to study domestic violence laws. The project is an extension of the reporting she did in Ghana and India.

“There is a huge gap between legislation and reality,” said Beckett, who will study the laws “on a more rigorous, intellectual level, so I can report on them in a more nuanced way.”

Despite the challenges facing the field, Beckett hopes to continue her career in journalism.

“I’d like to work for a local publication of some kind, preferably doing long-form narrative journalism,” Beckett said. “It’s a risky move in this economy — but it’s what I love.”

To Joseph Claghorn, Harvard Yard is more than stately buildings and centuries of tradition. It is a botanically diverse area of beautifying trees — red oak, honey locust, larch, blooming yellowwoods, and a few towering elms.

Observing the natural world comes naturally to Claghorn, a master’s candidate in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In his graduate oration, he’ll draw on the metaphor of Harvard’s diversiform tree cover.

At the heart of Claghorn’s trope are the elm trees, once so numerous that Harvard Yard was called “the Elm Yard.” Close to a century ago, most of the elms died, infested by beetles and browntail moths. More elms were planted, but without consideration of a monoculture’s ecological vulnerability. Starting in the 1950s, Harvard’s elms died by the hundreds again, this time weakened by Dutch elm disease.

In nature, at school, and in the broader culture, said Claghorn, diversity is a pathway to strength and resilience. The same lesson might apply to goal-setting graduates as they fix on a career path, he said. “If we’re too single-minded, it can blind us to other possibilities.”

Claghorn himself — born in Los Angeles, raised in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and educated in Utah — seems a model of intellectual flexibility and resilience. A trekker and mountain climber who is fluent in two languages (and can get by in four others), he earned a degree in history from Brigham Young University, then a master’s degree in architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he graduated first in his class.

After a few years with bricks and mortar — including a period designing townhouses in Vietnam — Claghorn realized that his design destiny lay with the outside environment. He moved on to Harvard, which has the world’s oldest landscape architecture program. Four intense semesters of studio work took him to many threatened environments, including an idyllic archipelago in Sardinia and a slum in São Paulo.

In his first year, Claghorn heard the story of Harvard’s beleaguered elms, and of the diversity of plantings that saved the few that had survived.

“People think of buildings changing,” he said, “but not of the landscape around them changing.”

When he entered middle school, Paul Mumma ’09 had no interest in foreign languages. He chose Latin only to meet a school requirement, figuring he wouldn’t have to learn how to pronounce anything.

Today he will deliver a speech, in Latin, for more than 30,000 people. The irony is not lost on this cheerful young man from Summit, N.J.

“Here I am, eight years later,” Mumma said, “doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do.”

Mumma fell in love with Latin after that first unwilling foray into the classroom. His passion for the language led him to a classics concentration at Harvard, and he has since studied ancient Greek, modern German, and Arabic.

Along the way, Mumma learned to pronounce the language that he once assumed he would never speak. “We have good linguistic and historical evidence that allows us to know how the Romans pronounced things,” he said.

In the fall, Mumma will head to Corpus Christi College at Oxford University to obtain a master of studies in Greek and Latin language and literature.

“It’s a shame that more people don’t study Latin and Greek at Harvard,” said Mumma, who sees classical languages as a portal to arts and humanities and to the world in general. “The more I learn, the more I think it is useful.”

For his oration, Mumma will draw on the “ages of man,” a frequent theme in Greek and Latin literature. He will apply it to the Harvard experience — a tongue-in-cheek view of the progress (or lack thereof) that characterizes the undergraduate experience between freshman and senior year.

He doesn’t have much public speaking experience, but Mumma hopes that he’ll be able to handle the crowd and draw some laughs.

“I’m one of six kids,” he said. “In that size family, if you made a bad joke you just got pushed around — so hopefully that honed my skills.”

He also has the benefit of observing past orators. As a member of Dorm Crew, the student-run custodial organization, Mumma worked at Commencement for the past three years. Each time the Latin orator took to the stage, Mumma’s fellow captains (as Dorm Crew leaders are called) would remind him that he could be up there in 2009.

“They called me the ‘great hope’ of Dorm Crew,” Mumma said, “and told me that it would bring honor to the team.”

Veritas.

Orations reporting by Corydon Ireland (Graduate) and Emily T. Simon (English, Latin).

xxxxx

Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.

Late Tuesday morning (June 2), in the shade of trees outside of Harvard Hall, this year’s recipients joined centuries of history. They gathered for the traditional fife-and-drum procession to Sanders Theatre and the PBK Literary Exercises, first held in 1782.

“All the tradition of Commencement,” said Vivek Viswanathan ’09, “is what makes it memorable.”

Just after 11 a.m., with bells tolling at the Memorial Church nearby, seniors settled into Sanders Theatre to watch the sedate Harvard tradition unfold. Joining them were about a thousand well-wishers, including President Drew Faust.

At the heart of the PBK ceremony are two addresses. One is by a poet, who reads a work written just for the occasion. The other is by an “orator” invited to offer a timely discourse.

Guest poets from the past include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Among the guest orators have been John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This year’s Phi Beta Kappa poet was Albert Goldbarth, the Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University.

The orator was James Engell, Harvard’s Gurney Professor of English Literature and professor of comparative literature.

Howard Georgi, president of the chapter and Harvard’s Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, moderated the 100-minute ceremony.

Delivering both the invocation and the benediction was the Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.

Goldbarth, a widely anthologized essayist and poet, is the author of more than 40 books and chapbooks, including — most recently — “To Be Read in 500 Years” (Graywolf Press, 2009).

He read two poems: “Voyage,” published last year, and “Days with the Family Realist,” written for the Literary Exercises.

“Voyage” is an homage to a young Charles Darwin, traveling aboard the HMS Beagle — a curious, relentless, and brave observer who seized the natural world with “the gale force of his zeals.”

But the sea brings Darwin down to size, a man whose seasickness was “his ocean-going frailty,” wrote Goldbarth.

That picture of anxiety extends “to my friends in their various sleeplessness,” he wrote — stand-ins for “… every one of us awake/ all night in a private hell on Her Majesty’s Ship Insomnia.”

But in the end Darwin awakes optimistic “when the bed has reached/ the shore of another morning… He says: Get up, go out./ Go out and see what’s new today with the species.”

With his second poem, Goldbarth offers a grittier view of the coming world — “just to put the brakes on that optimistic enthusiasm,” he told the seniors. The brief work begins:

A doorknob on a chicken/ my grandmother said once, meaning/ useless, stupid. Most of us,/ most of the time, are that/ exactly. …

Engell’s erudite oration offset Goldbarth’s evocation of the youthful Darwin’s loving amazement with the natural world, putting the brakes on enthusiasm.

He drew a picture of humankind that is, 170 years after Darwin’s voyage, racing to abuse, deplete, and threaten nature.

“We are living,” he said, “a giant Ponzi scheme played upon Nature and Earth. …We’ve entered an unprecedented era, and it will last.”

Needed are “tectonic shifts” in habit, learning, and ethos, said Engell, a faculty associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Our daily habits — for all that “we buy, build, and own,” said Engell — can’t be sustained. These old ways — “billions of daily habits thrown together,” he said — exert an insidious force stripping the Earth of its riches.

New learning is needed too, said Engell, wishing that Harvard’s new General Education requirements included instruction in the environment. After all, he said, “it’s utilitarian, it’s relevant, [and] it’s idealistic.”

Harvard’s Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Ann Blair — the PBK chapter’s president-elect — announced the traditional PBK teaching prizes, an honor based every year on student nominations.

Recognized were Joseph K. Blitzstein, an assistant professor of statistics; Daniel Donoghue, John P. Marquand Professor of English; and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture.

Everett Mendelsohn, professor of the history of science emeritus, introduced this year’s five honorary chapter members, including poet Goldbarth.

The others: Episcopal bishop Frank Tracy Griswold III ’59; history of science scholar and college administrator Jane Jervis ’59; law professor Roberta S. Karmel ’59; and Ralph Mitchell, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Biology, who retires this year after 43 years at Harvard.

Two gorgeous musical interludes — anthems by Gustav Holst and Sergei Rachmaninoff — were performed by the Commencement Choir, conducted by Jameson Marvin, Harvard’s director of choral activities.

The choir led in singing the “College Hymn,” too, joined by the crowd. It was a send-off for Harvard’s latest PBK scholars: “Farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright!”

Ernest May, a renowned historian of international relations and foreign policy and professor of history at Harvard University, died on June 1 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston from complications following surgery, according to his family. He was 80.

An esteemed member of the Harvard community for more than 55 years, May came to Harvard in 1954, was named associate professor of history in 1959, and became professor of history in 1963.

May served as dean of Harvard College from 1969 to 1971, during a time of upheaval and unrest on many college campuses. In 1969, under May’s deanship, Harvard College began its first comprehensive re-examination of undergraduate education in 25 years. From 1971 to 1972, May was associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“Ernest May was a wonderfully distinguished scholar and historian. He was beloved and admired by the Harvard community, and widely respected for his caring leadership as dean of Harvard College,” says Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard.

May served as chair of the Department of History from 1976 to 1979. In 1981, May was named Charles Warren Professor of American History.

May was also a member of the faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (HKS), and a member of the board of directors of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He was director of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics from 1971 to 1974.

“Ernest May was a man of uncommon wisdom and humanity — a rare gem whose sparkling insights influenced many of us,” said HKS Dean David T. Ellwood. “He played an absolutely vital role in the Kennedy School and the University and was a world-renowned international historian, who devoted his life to teaching people how to use history to make effective policy decisions. We all mourn the loss of our friend, and we will miss him dearly.”

“Ernest was widely recognized as the leading international historian in the country,” says Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Belfer Center. “No historian in recent memory so successfully bridged the chasm between history and public policy. Ernest demonstrated that the best source of insight into current policy choices is to be found in a sound analysis of history. It is hard to visualize Harvard without him.”

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1928, May received his A.B. in 1948 and Ph.D. in 1951, both from the University of California, Los Angeles.

May’s first book, “The World War & American Isolation 1914-17,” was published by Harvard University Press in 1959, and won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for the best work of that year.

May was co-author, with John Caughey and John Hope Franklin, of “Land of the Free” (Franklin Publications; Benziger Bros., 1965) an eighth-grade textbook that changed the way American history was taught by emphasizing primary sources and a more modern worldview.

May was also the author of a dozen other books, including “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers” (Free Press, 1986), written with Richard Neustadt. In 1988 he received the first Grawemeyer Award for “Ideas Improving World Order,” with Neustadt.

“Professionally, within the field of America’s relations with the outside world, Ernest was the leading historian of the second half of the 20th century,” says Philip Zelikow, White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. “As a teacher, his influence has been even more wide-ranging, leading Harvard’s Arts and Sciences faculty during difficult times and becoming a founding pillar of the Kennedy School of Government, while molding generations of other scholars now teaching around the world.

“But above all, as a person, it is hard to think of anyone who was at once so luminous and so beloved by so many students and colleagues. We may regret his absence in our scholarly conversations. But we will miss, and miss, his gentle spirit.”

With Zelikow, May was co-author of “The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis” (Harvard University Press, 1997), which analyzed detailed transcriptions of meetings and phone calls that took place during the Cuban missile crisis. The book was later turned into a feature film.

In 2002, May was awarded the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction, for pioneering research in international relations. From 2002 to 2004, May was senior adviser to the 9/11 Commission.

“Ernest May himself had much to do in broadening the field, for he was a passionate researcher in the archives of many countries,” says Akira Iriye, Charles Warren Research Professor of American History at Harvard. “He was interested not just in the top governmental leaders but also in public opinion, as he strongly believed that in a democratic country, foreign policy decisions ultimately reflected the public's perspectives and interests.”

May is survived by his wife, Susan B. Wood of Cambridge, Mass.; son, John E. May of Wenham, Mass.; daughter S. Rachel May of Syracuse, N.Y.; and daughter Donna L. May of Los Angeles. He is also survived by three grandchildren.

Viewing a video showing a patient with advanced dementia interacting with family and caregivers may help elderly patients plan for end-of-life care, according to a study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers.

In their report in the journal BMJ, the investigators found that participants who watched such a video in addition to listening to a verbal description of the condition were more likely to indicate they would choose only comfort care if they developed advanced dementia and also said they felt the video was helpful to their decision-making process.

“Decisions at the end of life can be complex and abstract; the video makes it real,” says Angelo Volandes of the MGH Department of Medicine, the study’s lead author and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Patients may not have experience with conditions like advanced dementia or the medical interventions involved, other than what they have seen on television or at the movies. Videos of real patients can offer more realistic images.”

Asking patients about their preferences for treatment in situations they may face in the future is an essential part of quality care, the authors note; but giving patients a clear understanding of the options they are considering and making sure that messages delivered by different health care providers are consistent can be challenging. Terms that have a specific meaning to medical professionals may be interpreted very differently by the general public.

To give patients a clearer idea of what advanced dementia involves, the research team developed a decision-support tool combining a standard verbal description of advanced dementia – including the fact that patients with the condition cannot move about independently, eat by themselves, or communicate with others – and a two-minute video of an 80-year-old dementia patient that clearly shows her inability to walk, to eat, or to communicate with family members.

While the system had been evaluated in a previous study involving middle-age participants, it had not formerly been tested in older individuals or in a way that allows comparison to verbal explanation only.

The current study enrolled 200 patients from four primary care or geriatric practices in the Boston area. Participants were 65 or older and had no significant cognitive impairment, based on a standard test of mental functioning. After an initial introductory interview – which included gathering basic demographic and personal health information, along with assessment of their knowledge about dementia – about half the participants listened to a narrative describing advanced dementia and then watched the video.

The other participants, the control group, only heard the narrative description. Then all participants had a second interview that included asking their preferences for the type of care they would prefer to receive if they developed advanced dementia – the options being care designed to prolong life at all costs, limited care designed to maintain physical functioning, and comfort care focused on relieving pain and maximizing comfort.

Among the control group that only heard the narrative description of advanced dementia, 64 percent of participants indicated they would choose comfort care, 19 percent limited care, and 14 percent life-prolonging care. Among participants who also viewed the video, 86 percent said they would choose comfort care, while 9 percent would choose limited care and only 4 percent indicated life-prolonging care. Most participants were contacted six weeks later and again asked about their care preferences, and while 29 percent of the control group indicated a change, only 6 percent of those viewing the video had changed their preferences.

“We also asked those who watched the video about their response to it, and the vast majority said they found it to be helpful, were comfortable watching it, and would recommend it to others. We want patients to be as informed as possible when making decisions at the end of life but not coerce them or unduly influence them in any manner,” Volandes explains.

“Since projections indicate that more than 13 million patients will develop dementia by 2050, it is critical that patients understand their options for end-of-life treatment and be able to communicate their preferences to their physicians,” he adds. “Using videos in patient-doctor discussions is new, so we need further work and studies before the use of videos like this can become a standard part of clinical care.”

Co-authors of the BMJ study are Michael Barry, Kenneth Minaker, Yu Chiao Chang, and Areej El-Jawahri, MGH; Michael Paasche-Orlow, Boston University School of Medicine; Muriel Gillick, Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care; Francis Cook, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Elmer Abbo, University of Chicago; and Susan Mitchell, Hebrew SeniorLife, Boston.

The study was supported by grants from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Hartford Foundation.

Daniel C. Tosteson, the Caroline Shields Walker Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology, who served an extraordinary two decades as dean of Harvard Medical School, from 1977 to 1997, died peacefully on May 27 after a long illness. He was 84 years old.

"He is a Harvard legend whose imprint on the university, and on medical education in particular, will be evident for many years to come," said President Drew Faust.

“Daniel Tosteson was a towering figure in the modern history of Harvard Medical School,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, the Medical School’s current dean. “His vision and leadership brought major and enduring changes in HMS education, research, and the School’s relationship to the world. Since I assumed leadership of the School, I met with him many times, and despite his increasing disability, his passion for education, research and the Medical School never waned. He will be sorely missed.”

By all accounts, Tosteson was an exceptional leader. His greatest legacy is the New Pathway, a radical restructuring of medical education launched in 1985 that combined several innovations being tested separately at other medical schools.

Part of Tosteson’s rationale for the New Pathway was his belief that medical students would learn better if they were responsible for their own learning. In lieu of learning primarily through lectures and texts, Harvard medical students began studying cases that guide them toward acquiring the core knowledge of medicine through their own efforts. In small groups, they analyze each case, seeking the information they need. They thereby cultivate skills and attitudes to decode unfamiliar medical situations and scientific understanding to deal with fields in which progress keeps accelerating.

Harvard was not the first medical school to institute problem-based learning, but its program was comprehensive and has since been emulated by medical schools all over the United States, as well as abroad.

“Dan’s clear objective was to prepare students to be lifelong learners as our knowledge of biomedical science expanded,” said S. James Adelstein, the Paul C. Cabot distinguished professor of medical biophysics at HMS, who served as executive dean for academic programs during most of Tosteson’s tenure. “He felt it was important to work not only on the knowledge base, but also on the attitudinal base, establishing attitudes toward learning and toward patients.”

Besides revolutionizing teaching, Tosteson kept the content of the curriculum more than current by anticipating future scientific developments. He was one of the first to foresee the revolution in molecular biology, and he positioned Harvard to move forward accordingly.

In 1980, he established the Department of Genetics, one of the first in the nation, “and reorganized the departmental structure on the School’s Boston Quadrangle, strengthening existing departments and creating the new Department of Cell Biology and that of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology,” said Philip Leder, the John Emory Andrus professor of genetics and former chair of the Genetics Department. In addition, while many others were debating the role of functional genomics, Tosteson implemented a plan to develop this nascent field, which investigates the function of genes in the living organism.

Tosteson also invested in graduate education. He expanded the size of the PhD program and established the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program, which enables students to pursue doctoral work with faculty members in one of five basic science departments at HMS or in its 17 affiliated hospitals and research institutes.

In addition, he expanded HMS’s scope beyond clinical and basic science, creating the Department of Health Care Policy and that of Social Medicine (now called Global Health and Social Medicine).

To help attract new faculty, Tosteson renovated most of the Medical School’s existing buildings, which had remained untouched since their construction in 1906. He also had several new ones constructed, including the Warren Alpert Building for basic research.

To finance these initiatives, Tosteson boosted HMS’s endowment from $128 million to $1.1 billion. At a time when other academic institutions eschewed collaborations with industry, Tosteson pursued support from corporations with strong programs in biomedical research and development, even while he protected the intellectual independence and discoveries of Harvard’s faculty. At the same time, Tosteson oversaw development of the School’s first conflict-of-interest policy that has served as a national model.

Tosteson opened the Medical School to a range of innovative initiatives. With Count Giovanni Auletta Armenise of Italy, he established the Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Foundation to support multidisciplinary, basic research by leading scientists at HMS and Italian institutions.

Under Tosteson’s leadership, HMS also established a publishing venture, now Harvard Health Publications, which helps faculty authors with the support and publishing expertise to produce and disseminate high-quality medical and health care information for a lay audience through books, newsletters, and electronic services.

“Dan Tosteson was a man of action,” said Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology at HMS. “He was inspired by a vision through which he reinvented medical education, completely renovated the aging physical structure of the Medical School, created new departments and then hired the very best scientists to lead them. Despite his outward formality, I will remember Dan as a passionate and loving person who created a unique community at Harvard, largely through his selfless commitment and fueled by his tireless personal efforts.”

Throughout his administrative career, Tosteson maintained his position as a laboratory researcher at the forefront of membrane phenomena. This work has led to a better understanding of degenerative diseases including atherosclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

A Milwaukee native, Tosteson attended Harvard College and was a 1949 graduate of Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital and held fellowships at Brookhaven National Laboratories, the National Institutes of Health, and Cambridge University in England. He served on the faculty at Duke University Medical School for 14 years, first as a professor and then as the chair of physiology and pharmacology. The two years prior to coming to HMS as dean, he was dean of the Division of Biological Science and vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Over his long career, Tosteson received numerous awards and honors, including the Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education from the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Harvard Medal for extraordinary service to Harvard University, and honorary degrees from New York University, Johns Hopkins University, the Université Catholique de Louvain, Duke University, Emory University, and Ludwig Maximilians University. Last year, Tosteson received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard University in recognition of his outstanding achievements.

Tosteson was a member of several scientific and scholarly societies, including the Institute of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he served as president from 1997 to 2000.

In addition to science, poetry was an important part of Tosteson’s life, and he kept a large portrait of Robert Frost in his office. “He believed strongly in the perfectibility of humans,” Adelstein said, “but science was only one tool; the humanistic side was equally important.”

Tosteson is survived by his wife, Magdalena Tosteson, a lecturer on biophysics in the HMS Department of Cell Biology, of Chestnut Hill, Mass.; sons Joshua of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Tor of Lyme, N.H.; and daughters Heather of Chattanooga, Tenn.; Ingrid of Chestnut Hill; and Zoe Tosteson Losada of Caracas, Venezuela.

A memorial service will be held on a date to be announced.

While much of the world tries to keep its footing in these most challenging of challenging times, we present to you 13 young individuals who have already proved themselves steady and grounded. The stories of this industrious, motivated, brilliant, imaginative, courageous, and morally responsible group of Harvard graduates will turn pessimists into optimists.

Call it fate. Just as the world’s financial markets started tumbling, a woman with unique understanding of the Harvard endowment took over the helm of the Harvard Management Company (HMC). Jane Mendillo came to the endowment from Wellesley College, where she restructured that school’s portfolio to strengthen investment results over the long term. Before that, she spent 15 years at HMC, handling everything from domestic equities to alternative assets and developing an appreciation for the team at HMC, which she says provides “important insight and flexibility” to the management of Harvard’s assets. Mendillo spoke with the Gazette about guiding the University’s portfolio through challenging economic times.

GAZETTE: By all measures, this has been an extraordinary year in the markets. How would you characterize your first 10 months at the helm of HMC?

MENDILLO: The markets during this time have been unprecedented in the strength of their movements and the suddenness of their corrections. We're fortunate that the Harvard endowment is very well diversified, both globally and with regard to individual asset classes and strategies. We’re also fortunate that the strong team here at HMC was able to very actively manage the portfolio, throughout this crisis. The Harvard portfolio was certainly not immune to strong market forces over the last year, and we have felt their impact. But over the long term, the endowment has done very well and we're confident it will continue to do well in the future, given the strategies and the plans we have in place.

GAZETTE: Back in December, the University reported that the endowment was down at least 22 percent through the end of October and that you’re anticipating a negative 30 percent return for the fiscal year. Do those predictions hold?

MENDILLO: We’re still estimating a negative 30 percent for the fiscal year, but given the volatility in the markets and the many assets we hold that are not traded on the public markets, it is difficult to predict with total accuracy where we will ultimately end the year. It is important to keep in mind that over the 10 years ending June 30, 2008, the average annual return on the endowment was 13.8 percent. It was 14.2 percent over the 20-year period ending June 30. Those returns are significantly higher than what we expect on average over the long term. So it stands to reason that returns going forward may well be lower than they have been over the last couple of decades. But we believe that we are well positioned, with a good mix of assets and strategies for facing the future.

We should note that although our returns during the economic crisis have been negative, they are not as sharply negative as many of the markets in which we participate. During this time period we have been very active in our management of the endowment — with the goal of increasing the flexibility of the overall portfolio and incrementally taking advantage of new investment opportunities. We continue to beat the returns generated by many other investors and believe our returns are in line with those being experienced by many of our peer universities. Many of the asset classes that gave us exceptional returns over the last decade have experienced strong reversals in the last several months, and we're all experiencing similar things.

GAZETTE: What have you learned as an investor over the past year?

MENDILLO: I think all investors have gotten a lesson in how fast and how far the markets can move. In recent months the value of our hybrid model of money management has become even more apparent — we are able to have a very close feel for the markets, trading every day here at HMC, and we can react to opportunities and threats on a more immediate basis than the average endowment. The combination of our team of internal money managers, who work exclusively for Harvard, with a set of carefully chosen external managers in different markets and asset classes across the globe is immensely powerful. The depth of understanding and the close feel for the markets we gain through the internal staff, and the breadth and global perspective we get through our external managers, give us a perspective that we think is unique to endowment management. The hybrid model really gives us the best of both worlds.

GAZETTE: Some have raised concerns about aggressive investment strategies pursued by HMC. How would you respond?

MENDILLO: The Harvard portfolio was positioned very well for the market conditions of the last several years. We benefited from significant positive returns from areas such as commodities and private equity, which contributed significantly to the total return of our endowment for many years running. Yes, some of these investments caused us some pain this year — but this needs to be viewed in the context of the long-term positive that has been gained by these strategies. As the financial crisis has evolved over the last year, we have further developed our thinking about flexibility, risk, and diversification. This thinking has led us to new considerations and additional factors that we will be weaving into our long-term strategy and our active management of the portfolio going forward.

GAZETTE: Did diversification fail?

MENDILLO: First, let’s remember that diversification is not a guarantee of positive annual returns — it can only work over the long term, and I would argue that over the long term, diversification has done very well for Harvard and many other investors. Second, I would not advocate that any investor pursue diversification simply for diversification’s sake. The combination of assets and strategies we put into place must offer real value, through risk control and return potential.

To your question, over a short period this year, in the extreme market conditions that we experienced, all asset classes moved together in a financial wind shear. Such a sudden and abrupt correction isn’t something that we can structure our portfolio to avoid. In most market conditions, wisely constructed diversification will provide a good degree of protection and benefit to the endowment portfolio.

This past year, despite the fact that all asset classes moved in the same direction at the same time, we did get some benefit in the portfolio from tail risk hedging strategies that were designed to gain from outlier events in the financial markets. So, as we saw some of these very unusual outlier events come to fruition, our tail risk hedges worked to help counterbalance some of the negative forces we were feeling throughout the rest of the portfolio.

GAZETTE: Talk further about the investment strategy you’re employing now. Where are you focusing your team’s efforts?

MENDILLO: Beginning last summer, we began actively taking some profits off the table in areas where we believed that pricing might have been peaking, and aggressively analyzing new investment opportunities in both liquid and illiquid markets where, over the next two to three years, there may be unusual return potential because of the disruption of normal investment activity that’s occurred across markets over the last several months.

GAZETTE: Some blame the level of leverage in Harvard’s portfolio for its current challenges. Is this fair?

MENDILLO: Our endowment’s exposure to the markets provided exceptional gains over the last several years, but also involved investment strategies that decreased the flexibility in the portfolio. When I started at HMC in July, the board had already begun to increase the endowment’s cash position, in order to increase flexibility. I accelerated the move in this direction over my first few months in the job, the early part of the fiscal year. Feeling that there were some disruptive elements in the markets and that we would see significant positive and attractive opportunities for new investments coming out the other side of the financial storm, we felt it was critical to create more flexibility for the portfolio going forward.

GAZETTE: Is there anything in hindsight that could have been done to prevent the market meltdown?

MENDILLO: From where we stand today, we can see there was a lot of mis-pricing of risk in many markets over the last several years. Investors simply were not being paid a very high price to assume risk, and so many overly eager investors across the world added increasing levels of risk to their portfolios, as they attempted to earn higher returns. The sense of balance between the expected return from those incremental investments and the amount of risk that was being added to the portfolios was lost. Some of Harvard’s tail risk hedging strategies were based on this imbalance. After many years, the markets reached a tipping point this past year — risk was suddenly apparent everywhere — and prices dropped precipitously as investors sought to curb their losses. Looking back, such a meltdown was probably in the cards for many reasons, whether we cite easy lending practices, inadequate credit ratings, or an excess of capital, on a worldwide basis. The trade-off between return and risk was clearly out of kilter.

GAZETTE: HMC’s compensation practices have received a great deal of scrutiny in recent years, and in the past year, executive compensation in the finance industry has received much wider scrutiny. Can you talk about the compensation structure and whether you think you'll be making changes?

MENDILLO: The compensation structure at HMC is based on the principle that managers are eligible for incentive compensation if they beat their market benchmark through active portfolio management. If they're able to beat the market, they receive a bonus that is partly paid out in the first year and partly held back for potential underperformance in future years. So we pay for outperformance, but only if it is sustained over time. Market-beating investment performance that can be sustained over time is rare, and adds much, much more value to the portfolio than the associated compensation costs.

GAZETTE: Can you estimate how much it might cost if we paid only external managers to manage the University's investments?

MENDILLO: The all-in cost of external management can easily be in the range of 300 to 500 basis points per year, depending on asset class and performance of the manager, and it is not always based on market-beating performance. The total cost of Harvard Management Company, relative to assets under management, including base salary, incentive compensation, and overhead costs last year was a small fraction of the external management cost, and is driven by investment performance.

GAZETTE: What is an appropriate level of compensation for investment managers?

MENDILLO: Harvard University's enduring excellence is due in large part to its ability to attract the best of the best. That is as apparent at the Harvard Management Company as it is at the University. In truth, however, the cost of investment management at HMC, where we use internal managers to actively manage a good portion of the endowment portfolio, is significantly less than the average in the field of investment management, and our performance is significantly better. The HMC board also reviews the HMC compensation system regularly to ensure that it is consistent with the trends in the industry and appropriate for the University.

Unlike employees at a traditional investment company, our top managers are attracted to HMC because they want to help support the University’s goals of education and research. I am continually impressed by those who are willing to forgo top-dollar compensation arrangements in order to be a part of this mission and team.

GAZETTE: HMC announced layoffs at the beginning of the year. Are you shrinking the size of the endowment management unit to reflect a shrinking endowment?

MENDILLO: No. The recent staffing changes were part of a rebalancing plan that I implemented as the new CEO, a plan that was formed beginning in the first days after I returned to HMC. Remember, I had 15 years of prior experience with the company, and with how we managed the portfolio and the staffing and support related to the variety of asset classes in which we operate. As a result, I already had some thoughts on how the company should be organized when I returned. I developed a plan for optimizing the structure of the company with the new COO of HMC and the heads of our internal and external management teams. The staffing plan currently reflects a strategic balance between investment strategy and support functions that we think is very appropriate to the portfolio and the management activities we anticipate going forward. We are planning to add a few key investment and support professionals to the team over the coming months, and we’re excited about the talent that we are attracting. As a result of these changes, I believe that the company and the team are exceptionally well positioned to provide excellent stewardship of the current portfolio and for the new and exciting investment environment we see going forward.

GAZETTE: Are there asset classes where you see particular opportunity for growth going forward?

MENDILLO: Again, I wouldn’t predict over the next year or two where any market might be, especially after the financial upheaval of the last year. But over the next three to five years, I expect we’ll see some interesting opportunities across the board, for example in real assets — real estate and natural resources — where we are uniquely positioned, given our experienced and pioneering teams. We also expect to see some attractive growth potential in equity markets as underlying world economies improve. And as individual companies recover from the effects of the credit crisis and seek capital to regain momentum, public and private debt markets may offer some interesting and potentially lucrative opportunities for investors.

GAZETTE: What advice would you give an individual investor reading this interview? What lessons can be learned from the last year, and how should we think about the year or years ahead?

MENDILLO: For an individual investor, I think that the most valuable lesson of the last year is that none of us can predict where the markets are going to go next week or next month, and so we should avoid positioning ourselves too aggressively for one set of conditions versus another. Keep your focus on the long-term goal — positive long-term average returns with tolerable volatility. If we maintain the principles of balancing risk and return, looking for market inefficiencies and investing in assets that hold growth potential for the future, our portfolios, over time, will recover and flourish.

Denis Mukwege has his hands full. So do Justin Kabanga and Maria Bard.

The three each have leadership roles in nonprofits engaged in meeting the needs of people caught up in the fighting along the Rwandan border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, is the founder of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a general hospital that specializes in the treatment of women caught up in an epidemic of rape and violence that goes hand in hand with the region’s ongoing fighting.

Kabanga is the national coordinator for the Centre d’Assistance Médico Psychosocial (CAMPS), a Congolese nonprofit that provides social services and counseling for victims of the sexual violence. Bard is project manager for PMU Interlife, the humanitarian and development arm of the Swedish Pentecostal Church, which is aiding Panzi Hospital and which manages the hospital’s programs for survivors of sexual violence.

These organizations are struggling to meet the almost overwhelming needs of thousands of women who suffer sexual attacks in the DRC. They are so occupied with the humanitarian efforts, the groups have no time to collect and analyze the information that comes to them through their activities.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), an interfaculty program based at the Harvard School of Public Health dedicated to bringing the strengths of Harvard’s various faculties to bear on the problems faced by humanitarian relief organizations, fills that gap. HHI brings researchers to the Congo to collect and analyze data in hopes of better understanding the problems there and designing programs and interventions by nonprofits and governments that could improve the lives of the region’s residents.

“[HHI] really helps us understand the problem of sexual violence and also the best ways to meet women’s needs as they go through treatment,” Mukwege said. “HHI is helping us handle some of the data at the hospital which has been a problem in the past. We’re searching for ways to collect and analyze all the data that comes in to the hospital.”

Kabanga, whose organization has worked with survivors of sexual violence for five years, said CAMPS would like to be able to analyze the data its work brings in, but staffers are too busy meeting the immediate needs of their clients. HHI’s involvement, he said, not only provides analysis but also — because of Harvard’s prominence — allows CAMPS’s work to have an impact at high levels of government.

Though HHI provides a missing research role, the partnerships are two-way streets. HHI Co-Director Michael VanRooyen, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical School and director of Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of International Health and Humanitarian Programs, said HHI would not be able to work without the help of its partners, both in the Congo and beyond.

HHI today is working in trouble spots around the world, including the Congo, Sudan’s Darfur region, and Chad. In each case, VanRooyen said, HHI’s researchers, fellows, and students are dependent on local partners — which in many cases are well-established relief organizations such as the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, and Doctors Without Borders.

HHI relies on its partners for logistics and their knowledge of the local scene. In the DRC, Panzi Hospital provides an important base for HHI’s work on sexual violence and holds the records of thousands of assaults in recent years. The hospital’s ongoing programs for women who’ve been attacked — managed by PMU Interlife — give the researchers access to the women themselves, whose stories are told in focus groups.

A recent research initiative that entails interviewing members of the military groups responsible for the violence is heavily dependent on CAMPS’s contacts in the community and in the military command structure. Both VanRooyen and HHI Research Coordinator Jocelyn Kelly, a Harvard School of Public Health graduate, said their partnership with CAMPS provides them critical access they would be hard-pressed to replace.

“It’s a local organization with limited capacity for analysis, but they’re deeply integrated in the community. They’re so good, they give us tremendous access,” VanRooyen said. “Local partnerships to us are essential. Harvard and HHI are not NGOs. We don’t have a logistical structure. We don’t have a security structure. We don’t have offices and vehicles, so local partners are absolutely critical to our work.”

From humanity’s close relationship to chimpanzees to the missing link between land and sea creatures, the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) has capped off a year celebrating Darwin and “On the Origin of Species” with a new exhibit that puts evolution front and center.

Called simply, “Evolution,” the exhibit, which opened in April, looks at evolution from a variety of angles, from tree-of-life relationships between creatures, to convergence that causes distantly related species to develop similar traits, to anatomical, fossil, and genetic evidence that evolution underlies life around us.

As it does so, the exhibit takes pains to highlight the role of Harvard faculty in important discoveries in the field, fulfilling the museum’s mission to be the public face of the collections and research that goes on beyond its galleries. Among the faculty whose work is mentioned in the exhibit is Agassiz Professor of Zoology Farish Jenkins’ discovery of the missing link between fishes and terrestrial vertebrates. Called Tiktaalik roseae, the fossil was discovered in 2004 by Jenkins and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, filling a blank in the fossil record. A model of Tiktaalik, gleaming as if still wet and peering out of a shallow, prehistoric stream or pond, is the first thing visitors see when they enter.

Among the many topics included in the displays are the evolution of anolis lizards on Caribbean islands, research conducted by Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America Jonathan Losos; the evolution of mammalian ear bones from analogs in reptilian jawbones, on which former Museum of Comparative Zoology Director Fuzz Crompton worked; and Anthropology Professor Maryellen Ruvolo’s work on the molecular roots of humankind. The exhibit includes an eye-catching “trophic pyramid” of beetles, conceived by Biology Professor Brian D. Farrell, with each specimen representing approximately 1,000 species, giving viewers a sense of the profusion of beetle species.

The exhibit tackles several major topics in evolution, including variation, which it terms the “raw material” of natural selection, natural selection itself, adaptive radiation, and convergent evolution, among others. It also presents a timeline of life, showing the progression from microbe to simple animal to complex animal to — very near the timeline’s end — humans.

The exhibit unequivocally highlights evolution’s central role in modern biological science, stating prominently that “evolution is a fact” and calling it “an essential truth supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.”

The evolution gallery is the first that visitors pass through when they enter the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), one of the HMNH’s three parent museums. Though that location is partly due to available space, HMNH Executive Director Elisabeth Werby said the location is important because “Evolution” underlies the exhibits visitors will find beyond, in galleries dedicated to the development and use of color in nature and to the enormous diversity of arthropods, and in halls dedicated to fossils, mammals, and other creatures.

The exhibit was paid for with a gift from members of the Class of 1958, which last year celebrated its 50th reunion. MCZ Director James Hanken, Agassiz Professor of Zoology, said there was tremendous interest from class members in having Harvard weigh in directly on the issue, which has been under scrutiny in broader society.

“The enthusiasm was really overwhelming,” Hanken said.

Michael Margolies, a member of the Class of 1958 who spearheaded the fundraising effort, said the donation to the museum was separate from the Class Gift typically made at reunion time and that a significant number of those approached agreed to give.

“What resonated a good deal — and surprised us — was that many people felt it was an important statement to make in the culture wars in this country,” Margolies said. “I was delighted to have the privilege to be part of it.”

Werby said the new permanent exhibit is the museum’s most significant achievement during Darwin Year, a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species” and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.

In addition to specimens from the MCZ’s collections, the exhibition includes interactive video terminals and a small theater space, where visitors can hear Harvard faculty members talk about major topics in evolution and in their own work. Werby said the space will also serve to give the museum a place to host gallery talks on other topics. The exhibit includes several displays that are designed to be changed, allowing the HMNH exhibits staff to update the gallery with new developments or to highlight the work of different faculty members.

“It will evolve,” Hanken said.

Five years from now, at high school graduation, the memory of their first visit to Harvard might not be as vivid, but it’s one that will last. The 40 young, inquisitive students who flocked to Cambridge on May 20 got a brief glimpse of a university with three and a half centuries of history — and a reminder of why they are pushed to work so hard in school.

For this group of 40, hailing from South Bronx, N.Y., the visit may have taken them more than 200 miles from home, but the reason these seventh-graders in navy polo shirts emblazoned with the letters “KIPP” were invited was to illustrate that, for them, Harvard — or any college for that matter — isn’t really all that far away.

KIPP, which stands for the Knowledge Is Power Program, was founded in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin — two ambitious Ivy League graduates who, upon joining the ranks of Teach for America, realized they wanted to make real progress in solving the problems of educational inequality in America’s low-income communities. So Feinberg and Levin created a fifth-grade public school program in inner-city Houston that has since expanded to a network of 66 charter schools (including one in the South Bronx), serving more than 16,000 students in 19 states from prekindergarten to high school, with a focus on preparing students in underserved communities for success in high school, college, and life.

The trip to Harvard was hosted by Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Executive Director Steven Bloomfield, who for five years has engaged KIPP seventh-graders, giving them a brief glimpse of where they could be if they put in the hard work.

After a New York Times article inspired Bloomfield and his wife to visit the South Bronx school, he was so impressed by the program that he asked KIPP to make Harvard a stop on its annual end-of-the-year New England trip. “We were entirely intrigued and in love with the place,” Bloomfield says.

Now in his fifth year of hosting the school, Bloomfield invites his current and former freshmen advisees as well as Harvard staff and faculty from around campus to talk with the visitors about their “Harvard experience.” The information, encouragement, and even inspiration the speakers provide makes this visit much more than a simple tour.

“When you see [the KIPP students] you get a sense how full of life, appreciation, and curiosity they are,” says Bloomfield. “KIPP has this really great formula in reaching students and their parents and so they’re worth every bit of investment that an institution like ours can make — not on behalf of the Harvard brand necessarily, but on behalf of education.”

The wide eyes, cheek-to-cheek grins, and thoughtful questions from the KIPP students spoke not only of their appreciation for the trip, but also to how special they are.

While only about a quarter of high school graduates in the South Bronx plan to go to college, almost 90 percent of the kids who start KIPP in fifth grade have gone on to higher education. And of those who do go to college, nearly three-fourths of the students graduate.

Davina Wu, a music teacher in her fifth year at KIPP, says, “The minute, in fifth grade, when they walk through the door, we say to them, ‘You’re going to college. You’re going to college.’”

And although their walk around campus is intended to be special for the students, Bloomfield tries to convince them that they are special too — and that for them, making it to Harvard is not unattainable. “It’s not really about the buildings and the green grass so much as the experience and the opportunity,” says Bloomfield.

“College anywhere is great, but if they come here and they see Harvard, and meet students and see their own people reflected in the faculty and staff, it helps them want to go to college,” says Wu. “They may not all end up at Harvard ... but to have them see what college could be like is very powerful.”

“The whole idea is not, ‘This is Harvard in all of its grandeur,’” says Bloomfield. “The idea is, ‘This is college. You need to do it too.’”

A new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) found that only about half the patients diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer discuss hospice care with their physician within four to seven months of their diagnosis.

“Many terminally ill patients who might benefit from hospice aren’t discussing it with their physicians and may not be aware of the services hospice could offer,” says Haiden Huskamp, lead author of the study and HMS associate professor of health care policy. Findings are published in the May 25 Archives of Internal Medicine.

Hospice, a well-established approach to palliative care, has enabled countless people worldwide to die with dignity. Through focusing on the patient rather than the disease, hospice ensures that individuals spend the last weeks of their lives in an environment where caregivers minimize their pain, maximize their comfort, and provide bereavement services for loved ones and family members.

Through the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium, the researchers surveyed 1,517 patients diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. For reasons not clear, blacks and Hispanics were less likely to discuss hospice than whites and Asians. Forty-nine percent of blacks and 43 percent of Hispanics discussed hospice with their doctors; for whites and Asians the percentages were 53 and 57, respectively. Married people were also less likely than unmarried people to have this discussion (51 percent compared with 57 percent, respectively).

In general, the longer patients expected to live after their diagnosis, the less likely they were to have explored hospice care with their doctors. However, the researchers also found that patients tended to overestimate how long they had to live. For example, about 30 percent of the patients thought that they would live up to two years. In reality, though, only about 6 percent of patients with metastatic lung cancer will survive that long.

What’s more, patients who preferred care that eased their pain and suffering at the end of life over care that extended life (roughly 50 percent of patients) were no more likely to have discussed hospice than patients who had the opposite preference.

“These conversations can be difficult for everyone involved — patients, families, and physicians,” says Huskamp. “But discussing prognosis and end-of-life care options in advance is essential to make sure that patients receive care that reflects their wishes.”

“Patients with advanced lung cancer understandably hope that cancer treatments can extend their lives,” notes John Ayanian, senior author on the study and HMS professor of medicine and health care policy. “When these treatments are no longer working, their doctors have an important role to play in offering them hospice care that will ease their symptoms as they approach the end of life.”

This study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles, the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles, showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA).

James Maki, a 59-year-old who became the nation’s second face transplant recipient in April to repair injuries from a horrific subway accident, left Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Thursday (May 21), thankful for what he called a “new chance to build my life.”

Men's lightweight and heavyweight crew finish first, second at EARC Sprints

We are likely not alone in the universe, though it may feel like it, since life on other planets is probably dominated by microbes or other nonspeaking creatures, according to scientists who gave their take on extraterrestrial life at Harvard last week.

“May I have your attention!” yells Bill Boone, director of the Frances Addelson Shakespeare Players at the Harvard Institute of Learning in Retirement (HILR). “Frances is in Harvard Square!”

It’s Frances Addelson’s 100th birthday, and her friends are throwing her a surprise party. But this centenarian, a 1930 graduate of Radcliffe, isn’t in for the usual reception. This party involves Shakespeare, the second guest of honor, the playwright to whom Addelson has devoted countless hours of memorizing, directing, and performing as the founder of HILR’s Shakespeare Players.

New research from the Harvard Forest shows that carnivorous pitcher plants use sweet nectar to attract ants and flies to their water-filled traps, not color, as earlier research had indicated.

What happens when a Buddhist monk visiting the United States is hospitalized, terminally ill with liver cancer? Does religion interfere with his medical care? What about his Buddhist brethren, unable to join him bedside? Who will provide the appropriate services and ceremonies? Well, says Wendy Cadge, that's where hospital chaplains come in.

For some, words are both a way of life and a way of risking life. Last year, 877 writers and journalists around the world were killed, jailed, or attacked.

Clayton and Ko receive Player of the Year honors

Crimson win 3 in walk-off fashion

In the early part of the season, the Harvard Crimson softball team has racked up their fair share of frequent-flier miles. The first 25 games of the season have seen the Crimson play up and down the East Coast - from Rhode Island to Florida - but it was about time for a game in front of a friendly crowd as Harvard opened its home schedule with a six-game series culminating in a 4-2 record - the result of two wins over the Rhode Island Rams and two split doubleheaders against Cornell and Princeton.

Starting in the 1920s, Chinese writer Lin Yutang earned a reputation as an urbane essayist and translator who moved easily between the literary cultures of the East and West.

Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never-depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.

Urban areas around the world are places of hidden biodiversity that need to be protected and encouraged through smart urban design, said an authority in green city design. Kristina Hill, associate professor and director of the Program in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia, said considering biodiversity in urban design is particularly important as human density in coastal areas continues to increase. These areas are not just attractive for their beauty, they’re also critical transition zones from marine to terrestrial and freshwater habitats, and are the sites of nurseries for a host of marine species in the form of salt marshes and eelgrass beds.

There is a new kind of Spring Break, one that has nothing to do with sunny beaches and tall tales of partying.

More than 175 Harvard students associated with the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) are fanning out this week to partner with nonprofit organizations in communities from the Northeast to the Deep South to Latin America.

The winners of the Shorenstein Center's annual Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism are by definition accomplished. But in listing all the achievements of this year's recipient, Gwen Ifill, Shorenstein Center director Alex Jones chose to focus on something that is unlikely to find its way onto her resumé.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers are investigating a new way to block reproduction of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) — targeting not the virus itself but the human genes the virus exploits in its life cycle. In the March 19 Cell Host & Microbe, they report finding nearly 100 genes that support the replication of HCV and show that blocking several of them can suppress viral replication in cultured cells.

As many parents know, getting a young bookworm to the dinner table can be a daunting task. When there are magic lessons to learn at Hogwarts, tea parties to host with Alice, or pirates to fight in Neverland, meatloaf with the family sounds less than thrilling.

It began, as many courses do, with a book. Distinguished philosopher Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age,” to be precise, a weighty tome that takes up an even weightier subject. The book, published in 2007 by Harvard University Press and honored with the 2008 Kyoto Prize, explores religious life in modern society and traces the development of secular culture. It’s an ambitious, complex project that unfolds over nearly 900 pages. And it’s causing something of a stir at Harvard.

Can a diverse religious community unite and heal after a brutal murder in broad daylight, one possibly motivated by religious hatred?

As a girl, Elaine Fuchs borrowed her mother’s old strainers and mixing bowls to collect polliwogs, an activity she credits for her present-day career as a biologist. It also helped that her father was a geochemist who studied meteorites, her aunt a radiation expert, her older sister a neuroscientist.

Amid the pop music countdowns, the nightly news, and the laugh-show programs, radio waves across the world crackle softly with the voices of indigenous peoples. Their stories — too often unheard — tell of struggles for recognition, enfranchisement, territory, and cultural preservation. For these communities, radio does far more than entertain.

What is creativity? Does it depend on more than that red wheelbarrow that William Carlos Williams saw? Is creativity a creature of neuron bundles, brain size, daydreaming? Is it the capacity for metaphor or divergent thinking?

Truck crashes are a significant public health hazard, causing thousands of deaths and injuries each year, with driver fatigue and sleepiness being major causes. A new study by Harvard researchers has confirmed previous findings that obesity-driven testing strategies identify commercial truck drivers with a high likelihood of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and suggests that mandating OSA screenings could reduce the risk of truck crashes.

Despite starting the season with a 2-4 record, a recent five-game homestand in which the Harvard men's volleyball team went 4-1 may have been exactly what the doctor ordered for the Crimson.

Women's hockey upset by RPI