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E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y GETTING THE SKINNY ON EXERCISE Also in this issue: Staging a career, Advances in aviation safety, Reflections on the Tex-Mex border r e s e a r c h a n d c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y SPRING 2005 EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Spring 2005 w w w . n e w s . e c u . e d u PUBLISHER Dr. John Lehman Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies EXECUTIVE EDITOR John Durham Director, Public Affairs EDITORIAL BOARD Dr. Alan A. Schreier Director, Program Development and Coordinator of Institutional Compliance Marti Van Scott Director, Office of Technology Transfer EDITOR & SENIOR WRITER Garnet Bass DESIGNER Linda Noble PHOTOGRAPHERS Cliff Hollis Marc J. Kawanishi edge is published by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies at East Carolina University. Any written portion of this publication may be reprinted with appropriate credit. COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS John Durham East Carolina University News and Communications Services Howard House Greenville, NC 27858-4353 252-328-6481 d u r h a m j @ m a i l . e c u . e d u © 2005 by East Carolina University Printed by Theo Davis Sons, Zebulon, NC Printed on recycled paper. 3,500 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $0000.00, or $0.00 per copy. 20 24 9 15 features 9 Rx: Exercise Studies at the Human Performance Laboratory refine knowledge about the benefits of exercise. 15 Rooted in Theater After early ambitions as a farmer, John Shearin finds fertile ground in acting, directing. 20 Decreasing Cloudiness Forecasts of commercial feasibility help clear way for improvements to aviation safety. 24 Chaos in South Texas A sociologist who spent two years shadowing the U.S. Border Patrol reflects on fear, frustration along the Rio Grande. profile 28 Exposed Could foods, chemicals, air pollution lie behind diseases associated with chronic inflammation? A physician suggests itʼs time to find out. on the cover Jennifer McCartney, a study coordinator for the Human Performance Laboratory, coaches study participant Marian Mills in a trial comparing the health benefits of different exercise regimes: resistance training, aerobic exercise, or a combination of the two. ECU and Duke University are collaborating on the study. A previous collaboration found that even modest amount of aerobic exercise can halt middle-age spread. Story begins on page 8. edge t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s edge • SPRING 2005 • 1 2 abstracts • General Assembly funds Cardiovascular Institute • Music professor wins fellowship • Maine scholar to lead research, graduate studies • From black holes to blocked arteries — a unified theory of a different sort • Unschooled artist captures imagination, dedication • Surprise finding caps dive on old shipwreck • Art professor earns hall of fame honor • Getting down to basics with swallowing disorders 31 explorations • Two Sides of the Coin Geographers ask how Latino immigration affects communities in rural N.C., Mexico. • Direction Central Unlocking protein synthesis holds key to development, disease. • En-Chanting For musicologist, complex 15th-century church music unsurpassed. • Fugitive Slave/Best-selling Author Victorian specialist traces the North Carolina connection. 35 in print • A look at recent publications by ECU faculty. 2 • SPRING 2005 • edge General Assembly funds Cardiovascular Institute The Eastern Carolina Cardiovascular Institute took another step toward reality March 8 when the North Carolina Council of State approved issuing bonds to finance its construction. The General Assembly passed legislation to fund a $60 million research center at ECU in summer 2004 as part of larger package for university projects statewide. The Council of State vote was the last major hurdle in making the money available. The state funds will cover construction of a 180,000-square-foot center for cardiovascular clinical research, outpatient programs and education programs and a 40,000-square-foot addition to the Warren Life Sciences Building for a cardiovascular basic science research center. As the other component of the institute, Pitt County Memorial Hospital is building a 120-bed tower to consolidate its cardiovascular services under one roof. All of the construction is expected to be completed by late 2008. “The population of individuals with cardiovascular disease and those who are at-risk are extremely important in the overall health care equation,” Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood said at the bill-signing last August. “We need to make sure that they are properly served in order to gain the advantage over the disease.” Chitwood, who will serve as the institute’s director, is an internationally recognized heart surgeon and ECU’s senior associate vice chancellor for health sciences. North Carolina has one of the highest rates of advanced cardiovascular disease in the nation, accounting for one in four deaths. Furthermore, eastern North Carolina consistently leads the rest of the state in mortality from heart and vascular disease. Research at the new institute will leverage the Brody School of Medicine’s existing strengths, said Dr. Wayne Cascio, chief of the division of cardiology, and Brody faculty members already are applying for grants to gear up their programs. Cascio named six areas where research efforts are expected to intensify. • Congestive heart failure and the management of heart failure treatment. Congress has earmarked $750,000 for program looking at racial disparities in heart failure occurrence and care, a cooperative effort involving ECU and UNC-Chapel Hill. In addition, Cascio said, ECU investigators will try to learn more about the overall problem of heart failure in eastern North Carolina and assess treatments. • Clinical trials. ECU has conducted numerous trials of new drugs in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies. Cascio expects this effort to intensify “so we can give our patients access to cutting-edge therapies.” • Environmental cardiology. Cardiologists and physiologist will combine to study the effects of air pollution on heart disease. “We’ve already submitted four grant proposals and developed interesting data to support them,” Cascio said. • Minimally invasive surgery. Chitwood is among the world’s leading figures in the development of minimally invasive methods of surgery. He and his surgical team were the first in North America to use the da Vinci robot to repair cardiac valves, and they later led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trial of the da Vinci robot for mitral valve operations. Research will continue to further refine surgical techniques and expand their utility to more types of surgery. • Stem cell therapy for heart disease. Research in animals has shown that adult stem cells inserted into the heart can be transformed into new heart cells to repair damage from disease. A new grant will fund research at ECU to understand how this transformation takes place and the best way to deliver stem cells to the heart. This line of research could result in clinical trials in humans within five to seven years, Cascio said. • Epidemiology. The institute will work with personnel from ECU’s new program in public health to understand what is unique about heart and vascular disease in eastern North Carolina and develop better methods of prevention and treatment. Cascio said the institute will encourage collaborations with faculty from other disciplines across the ECU campus and will increase alliances with other research institutions, inside and outside academia. “By virtue of having an institute with a name, we’ll start to get attention and we’ll take advantage of that,” he said. • abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Randolph Chitwood, a pioneer in minimally invasive surgery, will serve as the Cardiovascular Institute’s director She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and philosophy from Queen’s University of Belfast, a master’s in sociology from the University of York and a Ph.D. in geography from The Open University in the United Kingdom. At ECU, she will succeed Dr. Tom Feldbush, who retired from the vice chancellorship. “I am very pleased to be joining ECU and the team Chancellor Ballard is putting together,” Mageean said. “I am excited about the possibilities for research and graduate studies, which are already strong. I look forward to helping them advance and to seeing the results translated for the benefit of the state and the local community.” • edge • SPRING 2005 • 3 abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Maine scholar to lead research, graduate studies Dr. Deirdre Mageean, associate vice president for research and dean of the graduate school at the University of Maine, has been appointed ECU’s new vice chancellor for research and graduate studies. She will begin work at ECU on July 1. In announcing the appointment, Chancellor Steve Ballard said Mageean’s experience at the University of Maine, a land and sea grant institution, positions her well to lead ECU to greatly expanded research activity. “Dr. Mageean is an accomplished teacher, researcher and administrator,” Ballard said. “Her background with government agencies, interdisciplinary centers, research centers and graduate programs is exactly the right experience to lead our move forward in the research enterprise. I am delighted that she has accepted this appointment, and I am eager for her to get started at East Carolina.” Mageean has been at the University of Maine since 1987, first as an instructor and researcher in the sociology department and subsequently as director of the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy. She has been in her current position since 2002. Her own research in demography, socio-economic change and social policy has been supported by grants and awards totaling more than $3 million. She is a prolific author of reports and articles in scholarly journals and a frequent presenter at conferences and seminars. Music professor wins fellowship Dr. Edward Jacobs, an associate professor of music, has won the $15,000 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Founded in 1898, the academy annually honors more than 50 composers, artists, architects and writers with cash awards ranging from $2,500 to $75,000. “It’s a wonderful honor to be recognized alongside so many distinct composers,” Jacobs said. “I’m flattered to be included among such a wonderful group.” Jacobs teaches composition and musicology. He is the director of the New Music Festival at ECU, and his compositions have been performed by trumpeter Britton Theurer, choreographer Patricia Weeks and the Meridian Arts Ensemble. His piece, al momento, for cello and pre-recorded sound, was commissioned and premiered by cellist Kelley Mikkelsen. The academy awards were scheduled to be presented in May at a ceremony in New York City. The academy’s 250 members nominate candidates for the music awards. The Charles Ives Fellowship was created by Harmony Ives to honor her husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer Charles Ives. The award, which has been given since 1970, is considered a distinct honor. “The Charles Ives Fellowship is named for an icon of American music,” said Wade Hobgood, chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. “The American Academy of Arts of Letters selection for the award represents significant recognition of an individual’s past and future achievement contributing to the advancement of music in America. Ed Jacobs and East Carolina University are to be congratulated on this distinction.” Jacobs studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned his master’s degree in composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his doctorate of musical arts from Columbia University. His composition teachers include Mario Davidovsky, Andrew Imbrie, Chou Wen- Chung and Olly Wilson. • Composer Edward Jacobs Deidre Mageean 4 • SPRING 2005 • edge abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s From black holes to blocked arteries — a unified theory of a different sort Once it falls in, nothing can escape a black hole. Not matter, not even light. These mysterious objects in space are so dense that anything pulled into their core will be stuck there forever. Nothing can muster enough energy to escape. Except an idea. Over the past three years, physicist Dr. Orville Day and mathematician Dr. David Pravica have combined their expertise to develop a theory that allows them to predict the mass and size of black holes based on the vibrations of energy swirling around them. Now, in a leap of imagination they consider only logical, they have found a new application for their theory: early detection of coronary artery disease. Clinical trials beginning this spring will help prove whether their theory can be turned into a device that accurately detects atherosclerosis, plaque formation and aneurysms based on the vibrations caused by blood moving past the arterial walls. If so, primary care physicians, nurse practitioners and others on the front lines of health care may soon have a new, low-cost tool to guide patient diagnosis and treatment. Most black holes have a disk of matter and energy swirling around them, somewhat like the rings of Saturn. Gradually, the material is pulled closer and closer to the black hole until it reaches a point of no return and falls into the black hole itself. Since black holes cannot be measured directly, a number of theories have been developed to predict their size from indirect measures. Most of those theories are based on the size of the surrounding disk. The accuracy of these theories is generally estimated at plus or minus 30 to 50 percent. Day and Pravica have taken a different approach. They combined the mathematical field of complex equations with Einstein’s theory of general relativity to come up with estimates based on the electromagnetic waves trapped in the rings swirling closest the black hole. “These signals go up and down at certain low frequencies, depending on the resonance of the black hole,” Day said. The larger the black hole, the slower the resonance, he said, just as the thicker strings on a musical instrument vibrate at lower frequencies than lighter weight strings. They believe their equations are accurate within 2 to 3 percent. Pravica had previously spent time in Europe working with physicians interested in interpreting bruits, the abnormal cardiovascular sounds that can be heard through a stethoscope. In May 2003, he brought those physicians to ECU for a medical mathematics conference, and with Day, he began to see possibilities for connecting two seemingly unconnected fields. “We’ve been looking at so many waves from black holes that it’s second nature to look at wave forms and get a sense of what’s causing what,” Pravica said. “In the same way that a black hole will release sound waves or flares, the body emits sound waves or bruits for geometrical reasons.” Healthy, elastic arteries will vibrate hardly at all, producing little sound other than that resulting from the heart beat. Arteries stiffened by atherosclerosis will vibrate faster. Where plaque has built up, a little whirlpool of blood on the back side of the blockage will trigger its own bruit, and so on. Day and Pravica believe they can determine the condition of the arteries based on such vibrations. “The math is possible to reconstruct the whole arterial system through sound,” Pravica said. Their tools are a laptop computer and physiology sensors somewhat like highly tuned stethoscopes. The sensors, originally developed by the Army Research Laboratory, filter out external noise, convert the sounds into electronic signals and feed the signals into the computer programmed with their formulas. In less than two minutes, doctor and patients could have practical results — telling them, for example, that the arteries are 30 percent blocked by plaque. Day said they expect the device, which has a patent pending, to sell for a few hundred dollars. It will not replace the detailed pictures provided by more costly ultrasound and MRI machines, but it may prove to be a valuable tool for screening and early detection. “If you can tell people earlier in their lives they’re headed for trouble, you might be able to delay the onset of serious disease 20 years,” Day said. “Think of the difference that will make. It’s like getting a blood pressure reading once a year now. If your blood pressure starts going up, you try to get it down. And if you do, maybe you can stay away from serious consequences for the rest of your life.” This spring, the scientists have started to work with faculty from the Brody School of Medicine to compare their math-based calculations against ultrasound and MRI pictures. While they refine their techniques, they’re concentrating on measurements of the aorta, the main artery from the heart, and carotid arteries on each side of the neck. Eventually, they expect to add 10 other points that physicians tell them are critical in picking up potential problems, primarily where branching arteries increase the likelihood of plaque formation. • ABOVE: Vibrations from black holes and from arteries yield valuable information. Image courtesy NASA/CXC/M. Weiss. edge • SPRING 2005 • 5 abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Grieving over the death of his wife, José Expectación Navarro taught himself to paint. Over the next 20 years, he created murals covering his family’s life, Central American history, Catholic and Mayan religion — and every inch of every wall of his modest home in the remote village of Guarita, Honduras. The elaborate murals represent an expression of unrivaled visual imagination, according to Gay Wilentz, professor of English and director of ethnic studies. She’s working with photographer Henry Stindt, a former ECU faculty member, to honor Expectación’s work and explain its context in a book tentatively titled The Murals of Don José Expectación: Familia, Patria y Religion. Wilentz spent much of February in Honduras investigating the events and culture depicted in Expectación’s murals. When it is published, the book may be the only evidence left of the murals’ existence. Expectación died in 2001, and despite efforts to preserve his home, it and the artwork it contains will likely be demolished soon to make way for a new home for Expectación’s son. A school principal for his village, Expectación worked far outside the artistic mainstream. Wilentz said the murals display an eclectic style and were executed in natural earthen pigments with handmade brushes. He also wove into the art his own poetic commentary written in archaic Spanish. Stindt and Wilentz’s husband, Agromedicine Institute director John Sabella, first brought Wilentz’s attention to Expectación. They had been visiting Honduras in connection with recovery efforts following Hurricane Mitch. Expectación was alive at the time, and local aid workers introduced them. They later returned with Wilentz and ECU graduate art student Patricia Hayes, who is drawing on Expectación’s work for her MFA thesis. Wilentz also has a second book project under way, an exploration of the friendship between writers Fannie Hurst and Nora Neale Hurston. Hurst was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the author of such popular 1930s tearjerkers as Imitation of Life. She was Jewish but hid her ethnic identity. Hurston, a black woman born in Florida, was a critically acclaimed author of the Harlem Renaissance movement. A made-for-TV movie of her most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was shown on ABC in March. Wilentz was a recipient of ECU’s 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity. • ABOVE: Gay Wilentz, English professor and director of ethnic studies, hopes to preserve the art of José Expectación Navarro in a book. BELOW: Photog-rapher Henry Stindt visited with Expectación before the artist’s death in 2001 and captured the images below, showing the artist and some of his murals. The paintings, which cover the walls of Expectación’s home, draw on religion, history and family life for inspiration. Photographs courtesy of Henry Stindt Unschooled artist captures imagination, dedication Henry Surprise finding caps dive on old shipwreck In the cold, dark waters off the coast of Alaska, Frank Cantelas had a genuine “Eureka!” moment last July, but he played it cool. The staff archaeologist with the marine history program, he was on a research trip with Dr. Timothy Runyan and others from ECU, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-istration and Alaska agencies to investigate a shipwreck 80 feet below the surface. On a dive the day before, Runyan had spotted an object buried in the sand that seemed worth a second look. But dives are short when the water temperature is 37 degrees. Runyan passed the tip on to Cantelas for his dive. “I just remember swimming up to it and slowly fanning the sand away from one end,” Cantelas said. “All of a sudden, I realized there were letters there.” What he read was big news. Still, he just kept working. After dinner that evening, he turned to Runyan and casually asked, “Did you take a close look at that object?” The Cyrillic letters, on what appeared to be the brass cap of a wooden barrel, spelled out Kad’yak. On only the third day of diving, they had the evidence to identify the wreck as that of the lost cargo ship Kad’yak. “It is extraordinary for underwater archaeologists to identify a 144-year-old shipwreck this quickly,” Runyan said. The Kad’yak is the oldest shipwreck to be identified in Alaska and the first to be investigated by professional underwater archaeologists. The discovery made the front page of the Anchorage Daily News and the science section of The New York Times. National Public Radio also featured it. Shortly after returning from Alaska, Runyan led another ECU contingent on a joint operation by the Office of Naval Research and NOAA trying to locate the remains of the Navy’s first submarine. The USS Alligator sank off the coast of Cape Hatteras during a storm in 1863. The 2004 “Hunt for the Alligator” failed in its quest, but Runyan said the work will continue. “There’s a lot of water out there,” he said. The Kad’yak was a three-masted vessel operated by the Russian- American Company in the final years before the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. It sank in Icon Bay after hitting an uncharted submerged rock. At the time, it was hauling a load of ice to San Francisco. The wreck site was discovered in 2003. The three-week ECU expedition was intended primarily to map the site. Others from ECU participating in the dive were students Evguenia Anichtchenki and Jason Rogers and diving safety officer Steve Sellers. Anichtchenki had spent the previous two years researching the Kad’yak in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; the city archives of Lübeck, Germany, where the ship was built; and the Russian Naval Yards in St. Petersburg, her hometown. The lingering elation of the team’s discovery was tempered by sad news in January. Their host vessel for the expedition, the 92-foot ship the Big Valley, sank in the Bering Sea while crab fishing. Among those lost was the captain, Gary Edwards. • TOP: Jason Rogers maps wreckage of the Kad’yak, a 19th century Russian cargo ship. BOTTOM: The inscription on the brass cap allowed archaeologists to identify the wreckage. abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s 6 • SPRING 2005 • edge Getting down to basics with swallowing disorders abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s edge • SPRING 2005 • 7 ABOVE: Robert Ebendorf incorporates found objects into his art. Art professor earns hall of fame honor Art professor Robert Ebendorf has been inducted into the National Metalsmiths Hall of Fame. The professor of metals was honored in the artist/arts educator category. Ebendorf is known for innovative approaches to the fabrication of jewelry, such as incorporating steel and found objects with gold and silver. He was honored last year with a 40-year retrospective exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C, and is slated to receive a Master of the Medium award from the Renwick this year. The award is given to four artists every two years and is considered capstone recognition. Ebendorf holds the Carol Grotnes Belk distinguished chair in the School of Art and Design. He recently published the book 1000 Rings, lectured at the Northwest Jewelry/Metals Symposium at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and was included in a Penland School retrospective exhibit at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte. • As a speech pathologist, Teresa Lever found one of the most frustrating parts of her job was trying to help patients cope with chronic swallowing disorders, or dysphagia. Treatment options were limited, especially for people with progressive neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Now, as a Ph.D. student in communication sciences and disorders, she’s investigating both short-term coping strategies and potential long-term treatment. Swallowing disorders typically fall under the treatment of speech pathologists because speaking and swallowing involve many of the same muscles. Swallowing alone calls on more than two dozen muscles from the lips to the top of the stomach working in coordination. When those muscles go awry, the result can be malnutrition, dehydration or pneumonia, if food takes a wrong turn and goes into the trachea. As a result, 90 percent of Lever’s hospital caseload involved trying to help people learn new swallowing techniques. What she taught them came primarily from on-the-job training. “There’s not much research out there to explain the most effective treatments or why treatments work,” she said. “Much of it is based on behavioral science, and that doesn’t tell us why it works. I want to get down to the basics, muscles and nerves.” She has begun by studying a typical coping strategy, called effortful swallowing, to see whether the exaggerated swallowing technique actually has an effect on the motion of the esophagus. Collaborating with the gastrointestinal department at Pitt County Memorial Hospital, she’s measuring the pressure of the squeezing motion that results from normal and effortful swallowing. She measures the strength and endurance of the contractions using sensors placed in the mouth and lining a catheter inserted through the nose down the throat to the stomach. If results from normal, healthy volunteers look promising, she’ll move on to see whether they hold up for people with neurological swallowing disorders. A more long-term investigation centers on the nerves that order the swallowing response. In some diseases, unwanted proteins produced in the nerves interrupt their signaling processes. Ultimately, this can impair muscle strength, range of motion and coordination. Working with Dr. Alexander Murashov of the Brody School of Medicine physiology department, Lever is beginning to investigate whether a process called RNA interference can be used to disrupt the production of those proteins. Their first experiment, involving the sciatic nerve in mice, yielded promising results. “In our experiment, we were able to suppress the protein we were interested in and the effects traveled toward the spine,” she said. “So we may be able to attack a central nervous system disease by treating the peripheral nerves.” For her dissertation, Lever plans to follow up on that work with more specific application to swallowing disorders. • BELOW: Teresa Lever, at left, is studying whether effortful swallowing affects the motion of the esophogus. 8 • SPRING 2005 • edge Rx: Exercise is beginning to sound like the cure-all for half of what ails us. Need to lose weight, strengthen the heart muscle or improve cholesterol and blood pressure readings? Exercise. Blood sugar getting a little high? Exercise will bring it down. Depressed? Exercise releases mood-lifting endorphins. Worried about Alzheimerʼs disease? Exercise enhances mental acuity. It also builds bone and muscle, to prevent fall-related injuries in the elderly. Having trouble sleeping? Exercise can help there, too. To top it all off, exercise is an all-natural, non-pharmacological treatment with few adverse side effects. Studies at the Human Performance Laboratory refine knowledge about the benefits of exercise Yet, for all we know of the benefits of exercise, thereʼs just as much we donʼt know. What kind of exercise works best and how much? How does it work, on the basic biochemical level? Does it work equally well for everyone? And why is it that, as the years creep along, our muscles shrink and stamina decreases, no matter how hard we try to fight it? In the Human Performance Laboratory (HPL), researchers are unraveling the answers to these and a host of other questions about health and fitness. The lab is a longstanding partner with surgeons, physiologists and biochemists in the Brody School of Medicine on investigations into the causes and treatment of obesity and diabetes. HPL researchers also conduct independent inquiries, some spurred by results of the obesity studies, others arising from more general wellness questions. Hereʼs a look at a few of those studies. Taking exercise in STRRIDE You know itʼs time to get serious about exercise. Youʼve gotten soft around the middle, the doctor says your cholesterol is too high, and yesterday you had to rest midway up a flight of stairs. But you want to do this right so you check to see what the experts say about how much exercise you should be getting. edge • SPRING 2005 • 9 C o n t i n u e d EXERCISE 10 • SPRING 2005 • edge Until recently, recommendations varied so widely that your query may have left you more confused. Now, a long-running collaboration between ECU and Duke University is refining the answers. Dr. Joseph A. Houmard, professor and director of the Human Performance Laboratory, leads the ECU portion of the project, called Studies of Targeted Risk Reduction Interventions through Defined Exercise, or STRRIDE. STRRIDEʼs first, five-year trial tested the effects of different levels of aerobic exercise. It showed, among other findings, that even modest amounts of exercise — the equivalent of walking about 12 miles a week — can stop the creeping weight gain that so often comes with middle age. Nearly 400 volunteers participated in the study, all of them middle-aged, overweight and, before the study, sedentary. They were divided into four groups, three testing different exercise regimens over a nine-month period and one control group that did not exercise. The exercise groups had no opportunity to cheat: they worked out under the watchful eyes of research assistants. To prevent weight loss from confounding the results, the exercisers were forbidden from dieting during the study. In fact, if they lost more than a few pounds, they were encouraged to eat more. “I think some people were more successful sticking with the exercise program because they couldnʼt diet,” said Jennifer McCartney, the study coordinator. “Itʼs enough to get one thing going at a time.” Measuring results, though, required more than stepping on the scales. Stress tests had the volunteers running on a treadmill to the point of exhaustion while hooked up to machines that monitored how efficiently their bodies used oxygen. Other tests measured body fat, blood lipids such as cholesterol, and glucose levels. Biopsies of thigh muscle provided a chance to study gene regulation, to understand the mechanisms behind glucose uptake and fat burning. For Houmard, one of the most important lessons came from the control group. “If you donʼt do anything, you get worse,” Houmard said. “We shouldnʼt have been surprised at that, but we were by the magnitude of difference. A couple of pounds made a big difference, especially with insulin resistance.” Insulin resistance is associated with type 2 diabetes. Seeing the results of just a few months of inactivity changes the viewpoint about exercise. “Everybody thinks I have to lose weight if exercise is helping,” he said, “but just staying the same is not a bad goal.” The really good news is that edge • SPRING 2005 • 11 training only or a combination of the two. “We think resistance training and aerobics are totally different in terms of the biochemical pathways for improving fitness so weʼll see an added effect,” Houmard said. Overcoming an inherent disadvantage African-American women may be among those with the most to benefit from exercise. Americans across the board are losing the struggle to stay fit and slim, and African- American women are putting on more pounds than most. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, three-quarters of adult African-American women are overweight or obese, compared with 58 percent of white women. Being overweight places them at risk of diabetes, hypertension, cancer and heart disease. The higher prevalence of overweight is often attributed to such factors as poverty, low educational levels and poor diets, but statistics show that African-American women are more likely to be heavy no matter what their socioeconomic status or lifestyle. When studies by ECU colleagues suggested a metabolic reason, associate professor Dr. Ronald Cortright decided to look further. He wanted to know whether it was a disadvantage that could be overcome. At the heart of his work is the bodyʼs ability to oxidize or burn fatty acids. This oxidation is what gives the body energy. When it canʼt use up fatty acids, it stores them in muscle and fat tissue, leading to excess weight and obesity. Those added pounds, in turn, can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. Research in the Human Performance Lab and elsewhere has shown that obese individuals cannot burn fat as readily as people of normal weight. This holds true even when gastric bypass surgery has allowed formerly obese individuals to lose their excess weight. Their mitochondria, the organelles responsible for oxidizing fat, appear to be C o n t i n u e d all levels of exercise resulted in improvements. “We thought the high-intensity, longer workout would produce the most results, but it didnʼt,” Houmard said. “The lesson is that any exercise is good. Our low-intensity workout wasnʼt much more than walking the dog.” Furthermore, it was the exercise — rather than improvements in conditioning or weight loss — that resulted in better insulin and lipid readings. So exercise in and of itself is good for you. Subtle differences emerged across the levels of exercise, though. “You can almost customize an exercise program according to what you need,” he said. Insulin sensitivity responded to the time spent exercising more than to the intensity of the exercise. High-intensity workouts had more effect on lipid levels. A second, five-year phase of the study got under way in summer 2004. This time, resistance or weight training is being added to the mix. Volunteers ages 18 to 60 will be assigned to aerobic training only, resistance CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Under-graduate intern Cole Cash guides Rick Hamilton through resistance training. • Kelly Westbrook, another undergraduate intern, monitors blood pressure for Steve Duncan, a study participant and ECU director of military affairs. • NAME TO BE ADD-ED LATER rides an exercise bike while machines measure how efficiently her body uses oxygen; watching is study leader Ronald Cortright. • Rick Hamilton hits the treadmill while research technician Tamlyn Shields keeps an eye on his vital signs. 12 • SPRING 2005 • edge inherently smaller and fewer in number. One of those studying the issue was Cortrightʼs colleague, Dr. Robert Hickner. Hickner documented that, in a single bout of exercise, obese people burned half as much fat as lean individuals did. He expected as much, but the cross-sectional study allowed him to compare across race and gender, and there he found something totally unexpected. In at least one respect, lean African- American women looked obese. They burned fat at only half the rate of their lean, white counterparts during exercise. A study of abdominal muscle, collected from women undergoing gynecological surgery, confirmed the finding. Cortright decided to look further. Other studies had shown that a sustained exercise program could rev up the fat-burning engines of non-obese individuals. Would it do the same for obese women and, more specifically, African-American women regardless of body size? He enrolled 10 white and 10 African- American women in a study that had them exercising an hour a day for 10 days. The women were all non-smokers between the ages of 20 and 45 who were not already exercising. To account for as many variables as possible, Cortrightʼs team also collected details about diet and hormone cycles. The results were encouraging. Tiny biopsies of thigh muscle taken before and after exercise training showed that exercise doubled the womenʼs ability to burn fat across the board. “This represents the mitochondriaʼs capacity to use fat,” Cortright said. “So youʼve taken low-capacity mitochondria and made them more robust.” But what exactly is changing? With another group of volunteers, Cortright is trying to pinpoint which genes activate the fat burning. Heʼs also gearing up another phase of the project to learn how much exercise is necessary to keep the body burning fat more efficiently. “It might be that two times a week for half an hour is enough,” he said. “Maintenance costs a lot less than getting there in the first place.” Older and weaker, but is it inevitable? Like it or not, your body knows youʼre getting older. With added years, you tire faster, your muscles start to weaken, and your cardiovascular risk goes up, even if youʼre doing your best to stay in shape. Part of the reason may lie in the ability of blood to flow freely, supplying vital oxygen and nutrients to muscles and other tissues through the capillaries, the smallest blood vessels. Associate professor Dr. Robert Hickner and assistant professor Dr. Timothy Gavin are investigating age-related changes that affect blood flow and whether exercise can influence those changes. “Itʼs thought that capillaries play a role in a number of different processes — in the delivery of glucose and insulin, the delivery of oxygen during exercise or any kind of activity,” Gavin said. “They may play a role in how you regulate blood flow. The more you have, the better job you appear to be CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Study coordinator Jennifer McCartney coaches Marian Mills on resistance training. • Researchers with the Human Performance Laboratory include Timothy Gavin, Robert Hickner and lab director Joseph Houmard. edge • SPRING 2005 • 13 doing in regulating blood flow. And better blood flow may play a role in maintaining muscle fiber size so itʼs all interrelated.” For the elderly, at least part of the problem may be one of number. Older adults have fewer capillaries. Gavin wants to know whether age decreases the bodyʼs ability to make capillaries. A clue is offered by a protein that is critical to capillary growth, called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF. “What weʼve seen is that VEGF in aged muscles is inherently lower,” he said. “We see 25 percent lower VEGF in aged individuals, and we see about 25 percent fewer capillaries.” actually produces three types of NOS. Hickner is most interested in endothelial NOS, a helpful form that increased with exercise in his trial, and inducible NOS, a potentially harmful form related to inflammation. The latter decreased with endurance, or aerobic, exercise training. To obtain their results, both Hickner and Gavin employ muscle biopsies taken from the thighs of their volunteers and a process called microdialysis. For the latter technique, a porous hair-thin tube is inserted into the volunteersʼ muscle for as long as five hours. While itʼs in place, fluids can be passed through the probe to collect nutrients found in the muscle and to monitor blood flow. Samples are taken as often as every 10 minutes. While working on his Ph.D. in Sweden, Hickner was part of the team that developed microdialysis for use in humans. Moving forward, Hickner and Gavin hope to determine whether resistance exercise training results in improvements similar to those from endurance training. Resistance training focuses on muscle strength, which is particularly important in light of the loss of muscle mass that occurs with advanced age. Everyone loves stories of 92-year-old marathon runners. But learning about the effects of aging may do more to help seniors for whom a walk to the mailbox or a trip around the mall constitutes a strenuous workout. For them, many afflicted with chronic disease, the goal is to maintain their daily activities. What will it take to keep them up and moving? “There are a lot of positive adaptations that happen with exercise training,” Gavin said. “What we are starting to think as we integrate our findings is that all of these changes have to occur. There must be a coordinated adaptation for them to be maximized. And if aging affects one, it may affect others.” And that, Hickner pointed out, is why itʼs so difficult to develop effective drugs. “Drugs often target an individual problem,” he said, “while exercise induces this coordinated, positive adaptation that seems unlikely to be mimicked by drugs.” • In younger people, exercise is known to stimulate VEGF production so Gavin is now comparing the response to exercise of men and women ages 18 to 40 with that of older people, age 60 and up. “Acute exercise should start the process of VEGF production, and we see thatʼs lower in aged individuals as well,” he said. “That makes us think this is important, but weʼre still working to see if the long-term results are consistent.” While Gavin studies capillary growth, Hickner focuses on factors that encourage nutrients and oxygen to be exchanged through those capillaries. His special interest is nitric oxide, a blood gas thought to have a number of functions, including roles in metabolism and in the dilation of blood vessels. “The higher your nitric oxide levels, the better your blood circulates,” Hickner said. “But with aging, we found that they have a lower level of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), the enzyme that is responsible for producing nitric oxide. So that might be one system that is down with age and might be increased with exercise training or physical activity.” In a trial he conducted, an eight-week training regimen did improve NOS levels in older as well as younger volunteers. The body Rooted in Theater C o n t i n u e d Had his maternal grandfather lived longer, John Shearin figures heʼd have become a farmer. Growing up, he spent several summers working alongside “Capʼn Bob” and Sally Jenkins on their farm just outside of Pinetops. He loved the freedom, the open spaces, the fresh air. But Capʼn Bob died when his grandson was 12, and Shearinʼs life took a different path, one that wound through television studios and across theater stages on both coasts. Eventually, though, the path led back to his North Carolina roots. Sixteen years ago, Shearin took a job just a few miles down the road from his grandparentsʼ farm. Heʼs been chair of the ECU department of theater and dance ever since. Here, and at every step of the way up to now, the legacy of Capʼn Bob and Sally Jenkins lives on. “A huge portion of my work ethic comes from them,” Shearin says. “Itʼs the idea that no matter what you feel like, the work still has to get done. The hogs have to be fed. No excuses.” None for himself, and none for anyone else. “If you miss a rehearsal around here, you better be dead or in the hospital,” he says, trying to control the grin. “Youʼve got to be tough-minded to succeed. There are no weenies in this department.” The grin wins. In more than work ethic, Shearin seems every bit the farmer. He even looks the part. A big man dressed in denim and a plaid shirt, he could be reared back by the stove of a country store instead of swiveling behind a desk. Instead of crops and livestock, he nurtures students, seeing the fruits of his labor in their growth and maturity. As a producer and director, he plows deep to find the meaning of a playwrightʼs work. 14 • SPRING 2005 • edge After early ambitions as a farmer, John Shearin finds fertile ground in acting, directing For John Shearin, theater is serious business: “There are no weenies in this department.” edge • SPRING 2005 • 15 16 • SPRING 2005 • edge Shearin also possesses a farmerʼs versatility, according to friend and fellow actor Jon Korkes of New York City. “Heʼs a jack of all trades,” Korkes says. “If you gave him enough time, he could build the theater for you.” The two met in 1983, when they appeared in a theater tribute to the Beat Generation. Korkes played a nightclub operator. Shearin played Jack Kerouac. Ten years later, after arriving in Greenville, Shearin invited his buddy down for a summer theater role in Our Countryʼs Good, a play about the founding of Australia. It was a challenging production: actors playing multiple roles in different dialects, numerous costume changes and only two weeks to rehearse. “You only can get that done satisfactorily if you have someone you can trust, whoʼs focused and understands the work, who can get you there,” Korkes says. Shearin came though. “It was an amazing production. Iʼve been working in theater 30-some years so when I say I was impressed by how John ran the show down there, Iʼm not exaggerating.” Theater and academia may not have been Shearinʼs first chosen field, but he clearly relishes the work. Besides teaching and administration, he usually directs two plays during the academic year and two more for the summer season. “Itʼs never the same two days in a row so my interest is always being piqued,” he says. And he gets some of everything he wants — the country life, work with young people, theater. Especially the theater. For the first 14 years of his professional career, Shearin shifted between acting and directing, stage and television. When work lagged, he supplemented his income by applying his farming talents to running a landscaping sideline in Los Angeles. By the early ʻ80s, though, television roles paid the bills. He had regular appearances on prime-time shows like Hunter and featured roles in the likes of Matlock, Remington Steele and Designing Women. He appeared in the final episode of M*A*S*H, playing the helicopter pilot who ferried Charles Emerson Winchester back toward civilization. A short time before shooting, fire had swept through the canyon where the M*A*S*H exterior scenes were shot. The set had to be rebuilt. During the filming, Shearin glanced up at the surrounding hills, then looked again. “They had spray-painted the mountain green. All that burnt shrubbery was painted green.” Daytime TV roles included a short-lived lead in the ABC drama Loving, which was filmed in New York. A clash with the producer ended the run at 13 weeks. “He gave nasty acting notes over the loudspeaker to young actors in their first professional gigs,” Shearin remembers. “I basically called him out one day and said I wouldnʼt stand for that. It wasnʼt the smartest thing I ever did. I knew there would be consequences, but I didnʼt really care.” He caught a plane to Los Angeles, where his soon-to-be-wife Jennifer still lived. “I got off the plane, saw her at the end of the tunnel and said donʼt quit your job. Iʼm moving back.” All the while he was working in television, he continued working in theater — usually for little or no money. “Television was pretty good to me financially, but what I was doing was not gratifying to the soul,” he says. “In my heart of hearts, I was a theater guy.” In theater, he says, the ideas are bigger. “The theater embraces much more spiritual and intellectual content than television and film can. I find it moves one viscerally much more so than television or film when I see it done well. Thereʼs something about the magical communication of a live performance, the human component … the ephemeral nature of it. Itʼs done and gone. It goes into memory. I like that. But mostly, itʼs just working on stuff that I find deeply, deeply meaningful, and I didnʼt find any of that in TV.” From the beginning, Shearin determined he would act and direct. “The guy who was my absolute idol was Laurence Olivier,” he says. “Olivier was a consummate theater man. He could act the pants off everybody and then LEFT TO RIGHT: Sally and Bob Jenkins, John Shearinʼs maternal grandparents; John with his younger brother, Robert; John during his Army service; John and Jennifer on their wedding day; and the Shearin children, Sarah, Kathleen and Daniel. edge • SPRING 2005 • 17 direct the pants off them, too. He was a model that you could do both and both well.” The two roles offer very different challenges. “With acting, youʼre concentrating on one small aspect of a play. If I choose to act now, itʼs because I think the behavior of the character is intriguing or a lot of fun, or the behavior and motivation of the character is of a depth I really want to plumb and experience for myself. Thatʼs always been the case, but now even more so — as long as it doesnʼt have many lines. The brutal part of acting is all that memorization. I donʼt want to do a lot of that any more.” The grin returns. “I like small, rewarding parts now.” More and more, he prefers directing, the challenge of seeing the play as a whole and making it as engaging for the audience as possible. “One of the most rewarding parts for me is the deep association with brilliant playwrights,” he says. “I love the weeks and months I spend alone with he playwright, figuratively speaking, where I read and reread the play, trying to get deeper and deeper into it, doing all the parallel work to understand the history and art and behavior, to really try to get as deep into the play as possible and realize its potential.” He points with special satisfaction to an ECU production of the Greek drama Bacchai in 2003. He had first read Euripidesʼ play 25 years earlier. “It got me interested in Greek drama for life, but I could never figure out how to do it, so I ended up revising the text and doing my own version.” The Greeks, like most classics, call for some interpretation. “Almost every time I do a classic, I do at least some editing,” he says. “Even with Shakespeare, I do a fair amount of judicious editing to take out extended metaphors and similes that are hard for young people to sustain. It has to do more with style than substance. I donʼt want to strip a play of style or substance, but I also donʼt want anybody to say thatʼs boring.” Bacchai was anything but. The play is about the female followers, played by the chorus, of the god Dionysus. Shearin rewrote the part of the chorus into a rhythmic verse form. “Natalie Stewart, the voice coach, did heroic work,” he says. “The chorus had 20 girls, maybe more, and they had to speak in unison very articulately. The audience had to understand every word or they wouldnʼt get the play.” Rehearsals transformed improvisation into ritualistic dance. Costumes transformed college students into Amazons. “The girls were in patches and layers of animal skins that supposedly they had slaughtered and put on. And girls themselves performed in a way that was so savage it was really kind of scary. They had a great time. They scared a lot of guys.” The grin consumes his face once more. “I took my daughters and said, see, thatʼs the way I want you to act.” His children — two daughters and a son — were a large part Shearinʼs reason for leaving TV land. He and Jennifer were just starting their family, and he wanted their children to grow up with open space and small schools. He also found himself less and less satisfied with his career. “I remember one day I went in to audition for a part in the remake of Red River,” he says. “There were half a dozen old TV stars, people in their 60s and 70s auditioning for one- or two-line parts. I thought if this is the future, I donʼt want any part of it. Why would you want to spend your whole life doing this kind of empty material and you canʼt even count on doing that?” He didnʼt want to stay in L.A. He didnʼt want to do television. He wanted theater, but theater without long periods away from home on roadtrips. And he wanted to work with young people. He had begun teaching some, as an associate director of The Playhouse West School of Acting, where he also supervised the building the theater and studios. At just the right time, the chairmanship of the ECU drama department came open. “One of my teachers who was a Jungian said there are no coincidences; there are convergences.” Coming home, Shearin and his wife Jennifer created their own mini-farm on four acres in Grifton. At one point they had two horses, three dogs, three cats, fish and an C o n t i n u e d 18 • SPRING 2005 • edge iguana, plenty to keep three growing kids active. Any spare time, Dad kept filled. He followed his childrenʼs age group up the ladder, coaching t-ball, baseball and soccer. Even though he knew nothing about soccer beforehand, he says, “My team won the county championships several times. We were feared and despised.” Christmas break developed its own tradition. Every year on the day after Christmas, Dad and kids pack up the sleeping bags and head for the woods for a winter camping trip. All three children started school in Grifton, just as Shearin wanted. Large schools pigeon-hole students too quickly, he says. He hoped his children would have a broader experience. “I wanted them to develop into well-rounded, confident kids,” he says. Today Daniel, a music major, is a chancellorʼs scholar at Appalachian State. Kathleen is a senior at the N.C. School of Math and Science in Durham, and Sarah is finishing her junior year as a full scholarship student at St. Maryʼs School, a private high school in Raleigh. He gloats only a little. “The proof is in the pudding,” he says. “Theyʼre the kinds of kids I hoped they would be, and theyʼve all started to find the things they want to do.” Jennifer Shearin has found a calling, too. Although John handled kitchen duties early in their marriage, she took over the pots and pans when they decided she should stay home with the children. Cooking suited her. She now owns and operates The Daily Grind, a Greenville restaurant. The return to North Carolina brought Shearin back into the heart of an extended family, too. At Thanksgiving every year, he and his cousin Powell Jenkins stage a turkey cookoff. Shearin roasts his bird; Jenkins swears by deep-frying. Shearin leads the after-dinner sing-along. “On his first visit for a holiday event, my now son-in-law shook his head and said it was like visiting the Waltons,” says Carolyn Patton, who remembers cousin John teaching her to shag in their grandmotherʼs front parlor. He was four years older. “I worshipped the ground he walked on, so he must have been patient.” Now she must be forbearing, even if all in fun. “John can assume a role very quickly and disguise his voice,” she says. “Anytime I get a strange phone call, I assume itʼs John. Unfortunately, sometimes it isnʼt.” The stability of the extended family may have been part of the farmʼs early attraction for Shearin. Aside from summers there, his early life had little. He once counted 17 times his family moved before he graduated from high school. Early on, the moves followed his fatherʼs career in opera and musical theater. Even so, his father was often absent, and before Shearin was 10, his parents had divorced. Afterward, he seldom heard from his father. His mother scrambled to make ends meet, often working two jobs and frequently moving, usually to a cheaper apartment. During that period, Shearin took over most of the household work — cooking, cleaning and keeping an eye out for his younger brother Bob. “He was always my male figure,” Bob Shearin says now. “I derived safety from having a big brother who would make things OK, keep things safe and play baseball with me. He didnʼt have that. It probably gave him a little more sense that life can be unpredictable.” John Shearin gives it another spin. “We were raised to be self-reliant,” he says. “The positive part is weʼre very resilient. I donʼt think thereʼs a situation in the world that is scary to us.” Later, after his motherʼs remarriage, Shearin had a chance to shake off responsibility. He played through his freshman year of college, then hit the road for what he calls his Jack Kerouac period. First he hitchhiked to Florida, where he found work in a hotel kitchen. Then it was on to New Orleans, where he became an apprentice to a sculptor. In his free time he wrote poetry, kept journals and sang in coffee houses. “I was a halfway folk singer, just sort of following the muse,” he says. “It was about as good as it gets for a 19 year old. I had just enough money to get by. I got room and board from the sculptor fellow and about $25 a week on top of that. It was perfect.” Perfect, but not leading anywhere. In LEFT TO RIGHT: John Shearin performs in ECU productions of Biloxi Blues (1994), My Three Angels (2005) and Inherit the Wind (2002) and directs students in rehearsal. He chooses to act and direct, like his theatrical idol, Laurence Olivier. edge • SPRING 2005 • 19 Rooted in theater... continues 1965, with President Kennedyʼs inaugural address still ringing in his ears, Shearin decided that what he could do for his country was to follow family tradition and enlist in the Army. “I wanted to do my service in Vietnam,” he says. “It was early in the war. At the time it seemed we might have a real mission over there. While I was there, it became clear we were in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.” Only years later, when he wrote a trilogy of plays about emotional responses to the war, could he shake the images of women and children burned by napalm and the evacuations of wounded and dead soldiers as the Viet Cong overran outpost after outpost. In Vietnam, he was stationed with an advisory team near the Thai border. A compound security specialist, he ran what passed for an air strip. Stateside, he briefly took charge of a rehabilitation training program at the Fort Dix stockade in New Jersey before spending his final months of duty on the California coast. “The Army was the best thing that happened to me in terms of running an academic department,” he says, “not in the sense of giving orders because that doesnʼt work very well, but in terms of being able to work with a lot of different kinds of people and understand them.” After the Army, Shearin settled down for serious academic life at the College of William and Mary. He calls it the perfect environment, intense and nurturing yet peaceful. He enrolled as an English major. He planned to write poetry and songs and one day teach English in college. Theater was not a consideration. The memories of his childhood, with his father constantly pulled away from home, were too strong. Then, like Saul on the road to Damascus, he was struck by a blinding light. “This very beautiful girl who sat next to me in Shakespeare class had an extra ticket to the William and Mary Theatre,” he recalls. “I didnʼt care all that much about going to the play, but since she was asking, I said OK. I was sitting there on the first row of the mezzanine and it was like a message from on high: ʻThis is what you must do.ʼ The next day, I changed my major.” Kiss Me Kate probably never had as much effect on anyone before or since. William and Mary gave him an academic background that served him well as a future director, but he recognized the need for more technical training. “Very few undergraduate programs have specific structured approach to acting,” he says. Graduate school at Penn State helped fill the gap for him. Further study fol-lowed with professional workshops and classes in New York and programs in the Sanford Meisner Acting Technique in Los Angeles. When he took the ECU job, he knew he was he inheriting a department built on the Meisner program. “The genius to me of Sandy Meisner is his organization and progression of exercises,” Shearin says. “He builds a step at a time, so you get a progressive and cumulative effect. Each exercise is directly connected to the previous one, so itʼs growing as an organic whole, not just linear. At the end, itʼs also reasonably comprehensive.” When students leave ECU with a BFA in drama, he says, they should be able to go out and compete effectively in a highly competitive field. Just before they do, they get one last lesson from John Shearin. His capstone course covers the preparation of audition material and the how-to steps of building a career. “I encourage them to make conscious choices,” he says. “And I stress ethics a lot, networking, helping your brothers and sisters. I tell them itʼs better to be supportive than combative.” Itʼs part of what he learned from Capʼn Bob and Sally Jenkins. “The golden rule came very strongly from them: treat other people the way youʼd like to be treated. Donʼt use them as a means to an end.” If only Capʼn Bob and Sally had lived a few decades more, they no doubt would have taken pleasure in how their careful lessons took root in their grandson, the one who went off to Hollywood and came home again. They would have recognized what they surely already knew, the simple and honest truth behind another age-old lesson: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. • 20 • SPRING 2005 • edge Decreasing Forecasts of commercial feasibility help clear way for improvements to aviation safety edge • SPRING 2005 • 21 C o n t i n u e d Cloudiness LEFT: The tropospheric airborne metereological data and reporting system, now being tested, is designed to provide better short-term weather information. Image courtesy of Airdat. Five years ago, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law died when Kennedyʼs Piper Saratoga crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The cause of the accident remains a mystery, but a chief suspect is the dense haze that hung over his route between New Jersey and Massachusetts. The weather report before Kennedyʼs takeoff had indicated good flying conditions with visibility of six to eight miles. “Thatʼs probably a case where better information could have helped,” said Dr. Paul J. Kauffmann, chairman of the department of technology systems. Better information may soon be on the way. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and other partners are testing a new weather data collection system during the first six months of 2005 — one that may eventually lead to better short-term forecasts and immediate reports of dangerous turbulence and icing. The idea for the system originated with NASA, but it was Kauffmann who tested its commercial feasibility: calculating the amount of data that would be needed to improve forecasts, estimating the number of airplanes needed to collect the data, and putting dollars and cents to the costs and savings. “He came in when nothing existed, which is difficult,” said Jay Ladd, CEO of Airdat, one of the partners in the project. “He took the concept and said, this doesnʼt exist but if it did, hereʼs what it would take. He did a really terrific study thatʼs been a cornerstone of the project.” Paul Stough, the aviation weather information team leader at NASAʼs Langley Research Center, concurred. “The work that Paul has done has been applied by industry to show the financial payoff, by NASA to help guide our research and by the FAA to plan for implementation,” he said. The study is one of a series Kauffmann has conducted since 1998 in connection with NASAʼs Weather Accident Prevention Project. The overall project was stimulated by former President Clintonʼs goal of reducing the rate of aviation accidents by 80 percent. Weather is implicated in a third of those accidents, whether they involve small private planes like Kennedyʼs or large commercial airliners. The critical need, Kauffmann said, is for better short-term forecasts to improve safety and the efficiency of the air transportation network. “Weʼre looking at two to four hours from now,” he said. “Thatʼs the interval that impacts air transportation. If Iʼm flying an airplane from Greenville to Washington, I need to know whatʼs going to be happening in the next hour and 45 minutes. Or if Iʼm scheduling runways at OʼHare, I need to know if that thunderstorm over Wisconsin is moving this way. Itʼs a big deal if you have to shut down a runway and change the direction of landing or if youʼre leaving Los Angeles and you have to load extra fuel to allow for circling or diversion in case of bad weather. Weʼre getting back to a pre-9/11 level of air traffic. One of the ways to enhance productivity and minimize delays is to provide better weather data.” Current forecasts draw on information from radar, satellites, weather balloons and sensors mounted on large commercial airliners. None of those sources provides frequent, timely and widespread coverage of the humidity, temperature, air pressure and wind in the lower 15,000 feet of the atmosphere, where thunderstorms and other dangerous conditions form. The system now being tested — called TAMDAR, for tropospheric airborne meteorological data and reporting system — is designed to fill the gap. It will also, for the first time, collect scientific data on two other conditions that are critical for pilots: turbulence and icing. In the current test, sensors designed by Morrisville-based Airdat have been mounted on 60 planes operated by Mesaba, Northwest Airlinesʼ regional feeder airline in the Great Lakes region. Data collected throughout a flight are transmitted at regular intervals, such as every 5 to 15 minutes, over a satellite- and ground-based communications network, then assembled into a useful format for weather forecasters, aviation control centers and, eventually, other users. The sensors worked well on hurricane trackers and other research aircraft. This study will show whether they prove practical under real-world conditions of commercial aviation and whether the data improve forecasting. The cooperation of regional airlines will be an important factor in TAMDARʼs success. “For the data we want, we need fairly low-flying planes and planes that go short distances so theyʼre going up and down often,” Kauffmann said. “Thereʼs not a whole lot of short-term weather data that youʼre interested in at 30,000 feet where the big aircraft are.” Regional carriers fit the bill. In addition, unlike private planes, they fly on regular schedules, and unlike large carriers, they fly to in and out of smaller airports, providing more widespread coverage. Kauffmannʼs feasibility study estimated that nationwide implementation would require sensors on about 1,500 planes. For Airdatʼs Ladd, that was a critical piece of information. “You have someone who is objective, credible and knowledgeable saying thereʼs economic value in developing and deploying the system, and when you do deploy, the TOP: Paul Kauffman, right, is credited with proving the commercial feasibility of TAMDAR. With him is collaborator Erol Ozan. BOTTOM: This prototype of a data-link cockpit weather information display was developed by NASA in conjunction with Honeywell Bendix and King Air. Photography courtesy of NASA. 22 • SPRING 2005 • edge order of magnitude is feasible — itʼs 1,500, not 15,000 or 20,000,” he said. “Paul helped get this off the drawing board.” Kauffmann credits two of his former graduate students for their work on the TAMDAR assessments. One, Dr. Erol Ozan, is now an assistant professor at ECU. The other, Dr. Yesim Sireli, is teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Ozan has contributed further by developing a model for optimizing data collection, to improve TAMDARʼs cost-effectiveness. Itʼs not just deploying the system that costs money; so do transmitting and analyzing data. “When the weather is calm, you can reduce sampling,” Ozan said. “But if thereʼs a critical situation like a storm or fog coming, you increase sampling to collect more data, and the data you get will be more valuable.” Ozanʼs model provides guidance on which data to collect and when and where to collect them. Kauffmann began his NASA collaboration when he was teaching at Old Dominion University. His first study examined whether it made good business sense to install cockpit weather information systems, to provide information directly to pilots, and predicted the rate at which the industry would adopt the newly developing technology. Later, he led feasibility studies for adopting particular types of technology — improved radar systems at small airports and turbulence sensors on airliners, for example. Now heʼs going back to the first study to see how his predictions compare with industry trends: who has bought what and why. “Back at the time of the original study, we thought weʼd be looking at a cohesive delivery system — an integrated multifunction display that would go into new planes,” he said. The rise of satellite radio, Palm Pilots and wireless technologies has made it less expensive to get the Weather Channel or its equivalent in the cockpit. As a result, business aircraft owners — always leading innovators — have adopted cockpit weather systems even faster than predicted. Recreational pilots and the rest of the general aviation market are right on track. The large transport airlines are lagging behind. “I thought issues that are difficult to measure, like fuel savings, would be a bigger motivation,” he said. “Iʼm still trying to get into the factors, but I think what got in the way of the original forecast was 9/11 and the current financial bankruptcies. Theyʼre not spending money right now. “Thereʼs also a bit of chicken or egg situation. Business and general aviation are buying current weather information because without it, no one is telling them anything about the weather. On the other side, big aircraft donʼt have that kind of problem. They have central facilities collecting weather information and feeding it to the pilots. The bigger issue for them is does the weather service have information for them to use? They arenʼt making a move because the improved weather data arenʼt available yet.” That brings the question back around to TAMDAR. The six-month trial is scheduled to run through mid-July, and NASAʼs Stough hopes to expand it to a full year of data collection. “So far weʼre getting some very good reports,” he said, “but itʼs just starting.” • TOP: Airdat employees, who helped design the TAMDAR sensors, pose with a Northwest Airlines commuter plane. Photography courtesy of NASA. MIDDLE: Planes like the one above are transmitting weather information throughout the Great Lakes Region. Image courtesy of Airdat. BOTTOM: A close-up shows the sensor mounted on a Saab 340. Photograph courtesy of Airdat. edge • SPRING 2005 • 23 Chiano s TSeoxuatsh • • • • • • • • • • • A sociologist who spent two years with the U.S. Border Patrol reflects on fear, frustration along the Rio Grande Photograph courtesy Lee Maril 24 • SPRING 2005 • edge C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2005 • 25 D r. Robert Lee Maril, professor and chair of sociology, has worked alongside Gulf Coast shrimpers, dwelled among Mexican- Americans and immersed himself in the daily struggles for existence of Oklahomaʼs poor. In January 2000, while teaching at the University of Texas-Pan American, he set out to do what at first seemed a similar project, an exploration of the lives and work of U.S. Border Patrol agents of the McAllen Station in southern Texas. Over the next two years, he rode, walked, tracked, ran and waited alongside agents at every opportunity — spending 600 hours covering shifts with them, plus hours more conducting interviews, accompanying agents to court proceedings and researching the history and policies of the region and the Border Patrol. Looking back, he recognizes that this was anything but a normal research project. It is not, he said recently, something he would do again. “It never occurred to me it would be that dangerous,” he said. “Youʼre running around in the dark in the middle of the desert. You donʼt know who the good guys are so youʼre trying to keep as close as possible to the agent youʼre with. This is not what a rational person does who wants to live as long as possible.” The product of Marilʼs labor, Patrolling Chaos: the U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas, was published in November 2004 by the Texas Tech University Press. In it, he documents the lives of a dozen agents as they combat illegal immigration, drug smuggling and stifling bureaucracy. Along the way, he introduces a host of other characters. They include “coyotes” who guide illegal aliens across the border for pay and would-be immigrants. Thereʼs Nature Boy, the coyote who works in the nude, and Fat Man, a coyote of ample girth and growing wealth, who salutes agents from the southern bank of the Rio Grande with his ever-present can of beer. Thereʼs Onion Girl, an 11-year-old captured with her mother and sister trying to make their way into the United States through an onion field. She stands out from the multitude of others at first because of a blind right eye and thick knit cap worn despite sweltering heat. When the cap falls off, it reveals a bald head and disfiguring tumor. And then thereʼs Benny, an illegal alien of a different sort. A three-ton elephant, Benny makes his way across the border, appearing in Houston one week and Mexico City the next, without any documentation to show for his trip. Finally, thereʼs a much-respected supervisor arrested on charges of accepting bribes. In a situation as bizarre as Bennyʼs, none of the agents mentions the supervisor again, not at the station house, not during long nights on patrol, not over lunch at the agentsʼ favorite diner, not under the tree where they gather to unwind. Itʼs as if he never existed. Maril fills his account with sweat, stench, dust and pain. Fear rides shotgun to boredom, the potential for violent death as omnipresent as mosquitoes and prickly pear cactus. Comic moments — an agent hanging onto the legs of an immigrant whoʼs trying to pull himself back through a gap in a bridge, Nature Boy misjudging the distance as he dives toward the Rio Grande — quickly lose their humor in the shadow of immense human tragedy. As much as anything, frustration rules. An entrenched bureaucracy values procedure over results, evident nowhere more than in the policy of deterrence. The policy requires agents to spend shifts sitting in trucks, making themselves obvious at official crossings, while miles of border go unpatrolled. Maril concludes his account with a call for a bipartisan, binational task force to study the issues of the southern border, reach a consensus about border policy and reform the Border Patrol. edge sat down with Maril to talk about his experience and perspective on border issues. 26 • SPRING 2005 • edge edge: Most of your previous work focused on poverty. How did this topic entice you? Maril: I had a few students in my class who were Border Patrol agents. They were coming back to get their degrees at night. I started talking with them during break, and they said you should come along and see what we do. (Getting permission from their bosses proved to be far more difficult, however.) I also really believe that what happens in the border area happens in the interior. Take industrialization and the use of low-wage workers. We started seeing twin plants, one on each side of the border, the maquiladoras, in early ʻ60s and ʻ70s. Now we call it out-sourcing. Another thing, the area is a huge human laboratory full of extremes. One of the extremes is poverty. The region is far poorer than Appalachia. edge: You spent 600 hours on patrol with these agents. Did the experience have a lasting impact? Maril: It was 600 hours on patrol, plus a lot of time hanging around the station, interviewing people around the Border Patrol. Originally, I had planned to spend one year going out on patrol, but I was there when 9/11 happened so I decided I should stay and see how that evolved. But in answer to your question, I came away with a much better appreciation of what they do. These are honest men and women, most of them, trying to make a living the best way they can, and they are doing their job with integrity. I had done work with law enforcement before, with police departments and prosecuting attorneys, so I had some comparison. I had great appreciation at the end of it that they really do risk their lives and put themselves in high-risk situations. At the same time, they pay a cost. It is very difficult work. So it has changed me in my admiration for what they are trying to do. I also had no in-person experience before with the problems undocumented workers face. I interviewed a number of them in doing the book. Itʼs a tragic situation. Thatʼs why I wrote about Onion Girl and several of the other people. These are typical of the kind of people trying to cross. Theyʼre putting their lives at risk to look for a better job. edge: You left a lot of those stories unfinished. Maril: I wanted to write this not as a typical sociological tome. I wanted to give people a flavor for the diversity of the agents and the diversity of the people along the border. I chose the word chaos (for the title) very carefully. I really think it is a chaotic human situation. By not finishing those stories, I was trying to leave readers up in the air and give them the sense of all these influences that I was seeing, to give them a sense of the chaotic nature of the whole enterprise. So I intentionally didnʼt finish some of those stories, and of course some I donʼt know how they finished. The last I looked, Nature Boy was still thriving. He didnʼt have a lot of overhead. The agent that was accused of taking bribes as far as I know was allowed to retire. As far as I know, Fat Man is doing quite well. He lost his boat (in an arrest), but his boat was a wreck anyway so it was no loss to him. I had figured out that he was making about $300,000 a year when he worked in human smuggling. I tell my students now that if youʼre going to engage in crime along the border, donʼt waste your time with drugs, itʼs all about human smuggling. Thatʼs really where a lot of money is being made. edge: Despite the valor of individual agents, the picture is discouraging. When you look at all the burdens placed on them — stopping illegal immigrants and drugs, serving as the first line of defense against terrorism — is the charge too great? Maril: I couldnʼt have made up Benny the elephant. It happened right in the middle of this. I only regret that I didnʼt get to talk to the people involved personally. The argument is that if Benny, a three-ton male elephant, can be in Houston one day and Mexico City the next with no paper trail, then really we do have an open, porous border. We have in fact just kind of a theatrical production of what itʼs supposed to be like, and we have all these regulations, all this barbed wire and this high technology theyʼre talking about — the drones or pilot-less aircraft that have been used successfully in Afghanistan — as the next answer for this. The reality is that it is chaotic and has been for some time. Anyone who thinks itʼs different hasnʼt been there or looked at it for any period of time. edge: You make a good case that deterrence isnʼt working. If not deterrence, what? Maril: Not only did it not work, but every agent who did his job was discrediting his supervisor because they were catching people they werenʼt supposed to catch. That was the absurdity of it. The better the agent, the more he was going to be discouraged by his supervisor because they wanted to see low apprehension rates among illegal aliens. That whole logic that I tried to explain was absurd, but thatʼs what was there and what I found in the Congressional Record. First (the Border Patrolʼs top officials) justified needing more money from Congress because they were catching more and more people. Then in the early ʻ90s they totally turned 180 degrees and said now because of deterrence we can show that weʼre doing a great job because weʼre catching fewer and fewer people. Since that really wasnʼt the case, they had to increasingly clamp down on agents who were being productive. And of course that meant that some of the agents left or got frustrated. That to me is almost at the level of absurdity in terms of this federal bureaucracy, not only in handling the situation but in creating problems for itself. edge: So what do you do? Maril: What theyʼre doing right now is pretending that it does work. President Bush just came out saying what they need is 2,000 more agents. Tom Ridge, who just stepped down as Homeland Security chief, said they could do it with a thousand more agents and more reliance on high technology. I would throw out numbers like 30,000 more agents, or 50,000 more. Right now we have 11,000. To really do what theyʼre supposed to be doing, there has to be a massive investment in border guards. Theyʼre not even thinking in those terms. The 2000 Census documents it quite well. There are 9 million to 13 million undocumented workers in this country, and there are more coming every day. Where are they coming from? Theyʼre coming predominantly across our southern border. So what can we do? One solution would be more and more agents if we want to get Lee Maril, author of Patrolling Chaos: the U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas edge • SPRING 2005 • 27 serious about it. What I suggested was a bipartisan task force that would make it a public debate that everyone could weigh in on it, and we could decide what kind of border we want, in reality. Do we want a closed border? Do we want to have an open border? Right now we have a totally open border, but the public is being told that it isnʼt. edge: In the book, you note that drug trafficking brings Mexico a billion dollars or more in annual income, more than the country earns from oil exports. Does this support arguments that controlling narcotics from the supply side is doomed? Maril: I think it does, if Mexico is any kind of example. It has corrupted their society to a large degree. Itʼs a phenomenon that has only happened in about the last 15 years, and it has changed how their society functions. I tried to point out through numerous examples that the Border Patrol was up against a situation in which they couldnʼt win. The drug cartels have all the money, better equipment, more highly paid men and women, more technology, and theyʼre always one big step ahead. The test — itʼs like the Census and the count of undocumented workers. The test with drugs is in terms of availability and price. Right now in this country, drugs are very available and very cheap. So thatʼs the proof that the Border Patrol isnʼt able to do that part of its job. edge: Knowing how the border functions, does thinking about the potential for terrorists coming in through there keep you awake at night? Maril: I just canʼt believe weʼre not doing more. If I can take you there now and show you 100 different places where you can just walk across, then certainly people who want to do us a lot of harm have found those places and know how to do that. Remember that, as a part of this, I mentioned the Mexican armyʼs participation in this whole thing, in the smuggling of humans and also illegal drugs. I have no question that if there are terrorists who want to come into this country, theyʼre already here. And itʼs not just the southern border. The northern border is open, too. edge: Have their been any major changes along the border since you finished the book? Maril: Itʼs alarming. In the last six months, violence related to narcotrafficking has increased dramatically … such that the United States issued a travelers alert to stay away from the northern border area of Mexico. edge: As you noted in the book, one reform after 9/11 was to combine the Border Patrol and Customs and bring both under the umbrella of Homeland Security. Do you see any reason for hope in that? Maril: The positive I see is that theyʼre now sharing information. The Border Patrol is now getting information directly from the FBI through their computer systems. If youʼre an undocumented worker and they catch you coming across the river, the first thing they do is fingerprint you and take your name. If it shows up on their computer that it matches information from the FBI, youʼre going to get nailed and youʼre not going to be set free, which was previously the case. On the other hand, I honestly can see no other change. In fact, on the negative side, an Associated Press story says that BORSTAR, which is the Border Patrolʼs tactical squad, has sent Border Patrol agents to Afghanistan and Iraq to help the military with border situations there. Itʼs draining the very few resources we have. edge: I saw another story announcing the opening of a new training facility, bringing all the Border Patrol training into one place. Maril: Yes, but I havenʼt seen evidence that what theyʼre training them in has changed. I put this question to my students: If you were going to hire people to patrol a river and you were going to require them on a regular basis to try to save someone who was drowning, wouldnʼt it make sense to teach them how to swim? Thatʼs not happening. I credit all these problems the Border Patrol has to the fact that itʼs very insular and very 1950s militaristic. It hasnʼt and wonʼt reform itself. Theyʼre going to keep doing what theyʼve done until someone tells them to do differently because itʼs a top-down organization. What the agents think has no bearing. edge: Has your call for a task force had any effect? Maril: Not yet. Iʼm hoping that when the book has been out six months to a year, it will gain some momentum. I certainly intend to participate in lobbying Congress about these Border Patrol issues. The Border Patrol really needs our help. • Frustration runs high among agents patrolling the Rio Grande. Photograph courtesy of Lee Maril EXCERPT FROM PATROLLING CHAOS “The border in Deep South Texas meant and was many things to many different people. But maybe it could best be understood by an agent in the middle of a dark night along the banks of the Rio Grande, tracking fresh sign along a hidden trail. Agents — good or bad, strong or weak — experienced similar epiphanies when they realized that it was just them out there in the vast darkness, when they recognized that the only link with the McAllen Station was a plastic radio pinned to the shoulder of their shirt. That was when the sheer magnitude of this human conundrum could perhaps best be configured, when an image of the border could be conjured based upon empirical data interpreted within the context of real human experience including fear. “The border was at least in part this: an enormous, dark brown, hairy tarantula ten thousand times the size of Agent Humberto Taylor’s specimen, a beast moving at its own pace through time and space, oblivious and amorphous, hideous yet compelling, its sweaty infectious bite the front edge of decay and death. It waited out there along the banks of the stinking, toxic river, or in among the fields of ten-foot-tall sugar cane, or down at the bottom of the cesspool of flowing waters where the hydrilla rooted, or deep in the thick forests of prickly pear. Although not human, this border creature was a product of human society, a scumbag nightmare from the Freudian deep.” From Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas by Robert Lee Maril. Texas Tech University Press, 2004 28 • SPRING 2005 • edge Could foods, chemicals, air pollution lie behind diseases associated with chronic inflammation? A physician suggests it’s time to find out. Exposed C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2005 • 29 Dr. William Joel Meggs ran down the list of diseases associated with inflammation. Leading the list was the nation’s No. 1 killer, cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. “If you put blood vessels under a microscope, what you see is that the cells involved in inflammation are there,” he said. “These cells come from white blood cells designed to destroy germs. They will not only destroy germs, but will destroy or damage epithelial cells (which line blood vessels).” Next came the nation’s No. 2 killer, cancer. “Cancer develops at sites of inflammation.” Then he added arthritis, asthma, allergies, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus and multiple sclerosis, all long known to involve inflammatory response. Now, researchers are linking inflammation with type 2 diabetes and obesity. “The more we know about inflammation and how it causes diseases and ways to block it,” he said, “the healthier we’re going to be.” That conviction lay behind Meggs’ decision to write The Inflammation Cure: How to Combat the Hidden Factor Behind Heart Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, Osteoporosis and Other Diseases of Aging, published in 2004 by McGraw Hill’s Contemporary Books. In it Meggs, professor of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology, and co-author Carol Svec, a health writer based in Raleigh, describe for a lay audience the growing scientific evidence linking chronic inflammation and potentially life-threatening disease. They also outline evidence suggesting that in at least in some cases the inflammation may be triggered by diet, chemical exposure, air pollution and other environmental factors. Meggs hopes to take his campaign further. As president of the newly created Environmental Health Research Foundation, he is leading a group of physicians and scientists seeking to build a laboratory where researchers can conduct experiments to learn which environmental factors cause or exacerbate disease. The group includes physicians from North America and Europe. “People are exposed to so many things — chemicals that never existed before, electromagnetic radiation, very monotonous diets for many of us,” he said. “There’s a limit to how much you can do (to understand the consequences) with epidemiological studies. The other approach is to look at individuals who are suffering from these diseases, isolate them from environmental factors and then re-expose them to see if these factors modulate disease.” That, among other things, is what the research facility would enable. Back in the 1950s, Meggs said, several hospitals around the country established environmental control units that allowed this type of experimentation. Air purification systems eliminated natural and manmade pollutants, and food and other exposures could be carefully monitored. Patients with severe disease that didn’t respond to other types of treatment could be sent to a unit for treatment, sometimes with spectacular success, sometimes with none. The experiments, though, were never conducted in a systematic way that allowed scientific conclusions. Insurance companies stopped providing coverage, and eventually every environmental control unit in the United States closed. With growing evidence linking inflammation to disease and environmental factors to inflammation, Meggs said, it’s time to re-evaluate environmental control units. “Five expert panels assembled by the federal government have recommended that this technique be studied on a research level, but funding has not been made available,” he said. His group, which incorporated as a non-profit organization earlier this year, will try to raise private money to build the research laboratory. The location has yet to be determined, though Meggs considers Greenville an ideal location. While a conclusive case for an environmental connection has yet to be built, anecdotal evidence is enticing. Meggs gave examples. A severe case of rheumatoid arthritis was sent into remission by eliminating a single food from the patient’s diet. A case of Crohn’s disease cleared up when the patient stopped smoking. Population-based LEFT: William Meggs receives an award from Dr. Cynda Johnson, dean of the Brody School of Medicine, on the publication of his book. RIGHT: Meggs checks an x-ray with senior emergency medicine resident Chris Register. 30 • SPRING 2005 • edge studies also show interesting correlations. The incidence of lupus increases in areas where industrial chemical exposure is high. Studies in large cities have shown that when air pollution spikes, the rate of heart attacks increases. And overall, the heart attack rate in New York City and Houston is twice the rate of the rest of the country. “So we have all these anecdotal cases,” he said. “What we want is to set up research protocols so we can bring in a number of people with Crohn’s disease, get rid of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, simplify their diets and study how those changes affect their inflammation.” Identifying and eliminating triggers for inflammation is especially critical because drug treatments for inflammatory diseases can have serious side effects. Some cause liver problems and accelerated atherosclerosis. Others leave patients more susceptible to a host of ailments because, in reducing inflammation, they also reduce the body’s ability to fight off infection. “What I’d like to see is more research into identifying the environmental causes of inflammation so we can rationalize that approach to medicine,” Meggs said. “Drug therapy has been rationalized in the sense that we can tell you specific indications for drugs, the side effects, whether there’s more than one treatment, and we can sit down and decide on a course of therapy. But the environmental approach has not been rationalized.” Despite his optimism about environmental therapy, Meggs acknowledged that it will not prove beneficial in all inflammatory diseases. In pure auto-immune disease, the body attacks itself rather than an external trigger. Multiple sclerosis is one example. In MS, the body mistakenly identifies a protein on the nerve sheath as a foreign object and attacks it. “In that type of case, we have to find a way to turn off the body’s response to that particular protein,” Meggs said. “We have the technology to turn on the body’s response to almost anything. We can inject rats with this protein and a chemical that will cause them to develop MS, but we don’t have the chemical to turn off the reaction. If I could make one contribution to medicine right now, it would be to find that chemical.” • Chronic inflammation: a good response gone bad If your doctor has said you need to watch your cholesterol level, you’ve probably heard the lecture about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Cholesterol carried in the blood by high-density lipoprotein can keep blood vessels clean. That’s the good form. The bad form rides along on low-density lipoprotein and helps clog arteries. Inflammation is a little bit the same way. Good inflammation results from the body’s attempt to heal itself. Whether triggered by a cold or a cut or pneumonia, it’s a short-term response that goes away as you heal. Inflammation turns bad when it becomes a chronic condition. That’s the inflammation Dr. William Meggs targets in his book The Inflammation Cure. In his office recently, he pointed to asthma as an example of how inflammation can go awry. “If you have pneumonia, inflammation helps you fight off germs,” he said. “With allergies, someone exposed to ragweed pollen will inappropriately fight off the pollen as if it is a germ. If this continues over time, changes occur. In asthma, which can be caused by allergies, you get a remodeling of the tissue of the lungs. In the tissues that are damaged, you actually see an increase in the nerve fibers that cause inflammation so you get almost a positive feedback result. Smaller insults that would have been tolerated before the damage occurred are now amplified. You also see a migration of inflammatory cells from the blood stream into lungs, and this is in the absence of infection. If the stimulus keeps on coming, chronic disease develops.” In The Inflammation Cure, Meggs and co-author Carol Svec describe the growing body of evidence linking inflammation to a host of diseases, from arthritis and Alzheimer’s to heart disease and stroke. They also provide practical tips for reducing your risk of inflammatory response. Most of those tips coincide with the good health practices you already know: Don’t smoke. Eat right, including lots of fruit and vegetables. Exercise. Brush your teeth and floss. (Though not fully understood, a connection has been found between gum disease and heart disease.) Adding fish oil supplements to your daily multivitamin regimen also could be a good move. Meggs cited one study that showed fish oil supplements, which are high in omega 3 fatty acids, cut the risk of dying of heart disease in half. “That’s one simple and inexpensive intervention,” he said. Overall, he said, reduce your exposure to sources of combustion as much as possible. That means staying away from cigarette smoke, car exhaust, gas cook stove fumes and wood burning fireplaces. From a public health standpoint, he said, one of the biggest improvements we can make is to reduce air pollution. “Air pollution is bad for lungs, for airways, for the cardiovascular system,” he said. “So when we move to all electric cars, the heart attack rate will decrease in big cities.” • explore e x p l o r a t i o n s edge • SPRING 2005 • 31 San Lucas, an impoverished town in a hot, dry region of south-central Mexico, hardly ranks as a typical tourist destination. So why did Dr. Jeff Popke, associate professor of geography, spot three North Carolina license plates there in a span of one week last summer? It was, he said, evidence of a deepening tie between rural North Carolina, on the one hand, and San Lucas and its surrounding Tierra Caliente region, on the other. Popke and Dr. Rebecca Torres, assistant professor of geography, are exploring that link as part of an ongoing study of rural North Carolina’s new and growing Latino population. “We’re interested not just in what’s happening here, but in the linkages back to Mexico and how these processes (of immigration) restructure the political, economic and social aspects of both the sending and receiving regions,” Torres said. San Lucas is a “sending” region: home to a significant number of Latinos who’ve settled in Greene County. This summer, working with a Mexican Ph.D. student, Popke will spend nine weeks in San Lucas conducting T W O S I D E S O F T H E C O I N Geographers ask how Latino immigration affects communities in rural N.C., Mexico door-to-door surveys of 300 households and in-depth interviews with at least 30 individuals who have made one or more trips to North Carolina. Torres will travel to Mexico to help with the interviews. They want to learn about the conditions that have encouraged the northern migration, Mexicans’ impressions of North Carolina and the ongoing ties between Latinos in North Carolina and Mexico. It goes to the heart of what geographers call transnationalism. “People don’t live their lives on one side of the border or another,” Popke said. “In many ways, people have meaningful social relationships that extend across all kinds of political borders.” The impetus for the study is the significant increase in Latinos settling in North Carolina over the past 10 to 15 years. Between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a 400 percent increase in its Latino population. In many rural areas, including Greene County, the impact was even greater. Greene doubled the state rate of growth. Today, Latinos account for 8 percent of the county’s total population. Popke, Torres and fellow geographer Holly Hapke conducted earlier research to learn, among other things, what draws Latinos to Greene. While jobs, education and family ties rank as the top draws, there appears to be another underlying attraction. “People are coming here because it’s rural,” Popke said. “Partly that’s the nature of the rural economy — they’re coming here for jobs — but people tell us they want to live in a rural area. The word tranquilo comes up constantly. Es tranquilo. It’s peaceful here.” Peace comes with a price. An overwhelming portion of Greene County Latinos are employed in low-skill jobs and live on the edge of poverty. They live in relative isolation, without the aid of Hispanic support organizations found where there are larger enclaves of Spanish speakers. But the crime rate is low. They can grow small gardens. People are friendly, and no one is constantly asking to seek their documentation. “We’ve started to think of this as a tacit agreement whereby Latinos accept some of the downside in exchange for tranquilo, this feeling of being left alone,” Popke said. “From the host community, people at the moment seem willing to accept outsiders who are quite different because they are providing useful labor and helping the economy. How long that will continue to last is an open question.” One outgrowth of the geographers’ research has been the creation of a dual-language immersion program in the Greene County Schools. Dubbed Los Puentes, or Bridges, the program is shrinking the language and cultural gap for 80 elementary school students, including native English and Spanish-speakers. It features classes conducted all in English or all in Spanish on alternate days. The program also is giving ECU researchers a rare opportunity. Linguists are studying how children in the program learn new languages and communicate with one another. Education faculty are getting insight into the preparation their students need for teaching in a culturally diverse classroom. And the geographers used their connection to the school system as an introduction to Latino families in their survey. Mostly, Torres said, she hopes the program fulfills its name, bridging the divide between people and cultures. “North Carolina is at a crossroads,” she said. “We can look at this (growing Latino population) as a potential asset or as an entrenched kind of underclass. How this is resolved will make a huge difference with what you can do in the future in terms of economic development. If you have tensions and a deep divide, it will be hard to create a situation of improving life for everybody. I see it as central to the future development for rural communities to address these issues head on.” • ABOVE: Kindergarten students enrolled in the Greene County dual-language immersion program. Photograph courtesy of Rebecca Torres. explore e x p l o r a t i o n s 32 • SPRING 2005 • edge D I R E C T I O N C E N T R A L Unlocking protein synthesis holds key to development, disease It’s the proteins, stupid. Though far too polite to state his case so bluntly, Dr. Brett D. Keiper quickly points out the importance of proteins in living organisms. “Up to now there’s been a lot of fervor about the genome, genes and the expression of genes and how they can lead to disease, including cancer,” said Keiper, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “What often gets overlooked is that none of these things happens without making the proteins in the cells. Genes don’t carry out function. It’s proteins that carry out function.” In other words, proteins direct the chemical reactions in cells, telling them when to multiply, whether to start up a new activity, when to turn on a defensive mechanism. In a developing embryo, they play a critical role in differentiation, the process that transforms an embryo from a uniform mass of cells into a complex individual with distinctive parts, such as heart, head and limbs for a human being. Certain proteins even direct cells to make new proteins. It’s that process of manufacturing, or synthesizing, new proteins that holds Keiper’s attention. He is particularly interested in the regulation of protein synthesis in developing embryos and in cancer. His research focuses on the role of a small protein known as translation initiation factor eIF4E, which seems to start the manufacturing process of other proteins. The eIF4E travels from the main body of the cell (the cytoplasm) into the nucleus to seek out messenger RNA (a copied portion of the genetic blueprint DNA), binds to it and transports it back to the cytoplasm. There, biochemical machines called ribosomes read, or translate, the message off the RNA and build the new protein it describes. Keiper wants to decipher how the new proteins that result from this activity affect the development of cells destined to become eggs or sperm. Keiper’s study subject is the nematode worm Caenorabditis elegans. “We can mutate a gene in the worm to knock out the function of this translation factor, then very quickly look at the next generation to see what difference it makes to the process of oogenesis when that protein is no longer there,” he said. “Do the oocytes (the precursors of eggs) grow in size, have normal morphology, become fertilized and go through normal growth stages to adulthood?” The process turned out to be even more complicated than Keiper first anticipated. The worm, it seems, has five versions, or isoforms, of the eIF4E protein, each encoded by its own gene and each affecting a different type of tissue. “We found out early that if we knocked out one isoform, it has only one effect,” Keiper said. “For example, getting rid of isoform 1 prevents the fertility of the oocyte or sperm, mostly sperm.” Another eIF4E isoform is expressed only in the nerve cells and muscles. “Worms deficient in this initiation factor look normal and grow normally at least in muscle structure, but their behavior is messed up. They don’t sense food, don’t use their muscles properly, don’t swim as well. So a lot of functions that have to do with nerves are either absent or very deficient.” Two other isoforms are expressed in the muscle and pharynx and in the gut, but their precise functions remain unclear. Only one version of eIF4E appears to be essential for survival. “When we look at embryos deficient in this protein, they will begin to divide to some hundred cells and then just stop,” Keiper said. “The cells no longer divide or differentiate. They die.” They die at the precise time that each cell would normally start on the path to becoming a new tissue type such as heart or nerve. “So isoform 3 is absolutely essential for some developmental step in going from a mass of undifferentiated cells to differentiated tissue.” In time, understanding the process of protein synthesis may not only deepen knowledge of how embryos develop, but could also shed light on potential treatments for cancer. The eIF4E translation initiation factor that Keiper studies is more abundant in embryonic cells than in adult cells. The only other place it is found at those levels, some five to 10 times the normal amount, is in cancer. “At the cellular level, there’s a lot of similarity between tumor development and embryo development,” Keiper said. “Both types of cells are growing and dividing, growing and dividing, in a very rapid cycle, and they use a lot of the same mechanisms to do that.” • Proteins in cells hold the secret to development and disease, says Brett Keiper. Let others proclaim the genius of Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. To Dr. Kevin Moll, those guys are mere johnny-come-latelys. His musical paragons carry names like Ockeghem, Regis and La Rue, who predate the great Classic composers by about 300 years. Moll, associate professor of musicology, rates Johannes Ockeghem, who died in 1497, as one of the top five composers in music history. “He is as hip as Bach. He is as hip as Beethoven,” Moll said. “He is as original and deep as any of those composers, and that is why I believe that over time, this music is going to get its due.” “This music” consists of European liturgical compositions dating to the 14th and 15th centuries. Their hallmark: polyphony, with multiple voices singing different notes in different rhythms simultaneously. Think of Gregorian chant, the plainsong revived and made popular by the monks of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, and multiply it. “This is Gregorian chant to the fourth power,” Moll said. A classical and jazz bassist, Moll came to early music almost by chance. Once introduced, E N - C H A N T I N G For musicologist, complex 15th-century church music unsurpassed he was hooked. The era of Dante, Chaucer, da Vinci and Botticelli, of mysticism and masses celebrated in soaring cathedrals, of a fellow named Copernicus who soon would propose an absurd theory that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe, this era had also given rise to a magnificent, complex musical traditional. “Fifteenth-century music is the first full maturity that Western music ever achieved, when you can say it really is at a place where it needs to go,” he said. “In my view, there are only a few peaks in music history. This is one of them.” As far as sacred music is concerned, Moll said, this repertoire has never been exceeded. That Mozart, not Ockeghem, has been celebrated through the ages has been due to historical, not aesthetic factors, he said. Part of it was that tastes simply shifted to favor newer composers. The music of Ockeghem, for example, was not performed regularly after about 1520. More fundamental changes occurred around 1600. “With the polyphonic tradition, all parts are basically equal,” Moll explained. “Around 1600, the type of music changed from a cappella polyphony to accompanied homophony, putting great weight on the top voice with a subordinate accompaniment.” This stylistic change was fundamental in the formation of so-called modern music. In addition, standards for notation developed that allowed a body of understood masterworks to flourish. “So these (earlier) pieces were obscured stylistically and then notationally,” Moll said. By the 18th century, everybody could play Mozart, but hardly anyone could translate Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. In this piece, the composer’s idea is to write a four-part mass, but only two parts are noted in the manuscript, Moll said. “You only know it’s four parts because one of the manuscripts in which it survives is in four-part realization,” he said. “But how can you have a four-part piece in which there are only two parts — and it is so beautiful? You do it by what’s called canon, two parts singing the same piece at different times. Like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. But that’s too easy for Ockeghem. Ockeghem starts the voices at the same time. The tenor will read the same note on a different clef in a different time signature. The title translates into the Mass of the Time Signatures.” Little wonder that Moll suggests it practically takes a Ph.D. in music to interpret and perform the music adequately. “It takes incredible intermediation,” he said. Even when he’s working with modern transcription, he finds it necessary to return to the original scores to confirm and sometimes correct the notations. Although a large amount of Renaissance music has been transcribed into modern notation, Moll’s mission has been to develop the interpretive tools for performing the Franco-Flemish music of the period and get it performed. In his 1997 book Counterpoint and Compositional Process in the Time of Dufay and in other publications, he explains for the modern performer such issues as the structure and performance practices of early music. He also leads two performance groups. The Early Music Singers, comprising ECU students, faculty and members of the community, perform an annual concert series that recreates a period church service. His professional vocal ensemble, Schola Discantus (The Choir of Discant), has produced six CDs of early music, most never before recorded, on the Lyrichord label. For three of the recordings, the group was joined by members of Grammy-winning male chorus Chanticleer. “These guys did it on their own time, for very little money,” Moll said. “That tells you how good the music is, that they want to perform the music that much.” • explore e x p l o r a t i o n s edge • SPRING 2005 • 33 Kevin Moll calls early music “Gregorian chant to the fourth power.” Moll directs the Early Music Singers in rehearsal. Pardon Dr. Gregg Hecimovich while he shakes off the dust. He’s been rooting around in 19th century family papers, following the clues in one of American literature’s more intriguing mysteries. Hecimovich, assistant pro-fessor of English, is hot on the trail of “Hannah Crafts,” author of The New York Times best-sell-ing novel The Bondswoman’s Narrative. Although written a century and a half earlier, The Bondswoman’s Narrative was first published in 2002 after Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovered the handwritten manuscript in an auction listing. It is believed to be the first novel written by an African-American woman. She also may have been an escaped slave. On the manuscript’s cover, she calls herself “a fugitive slave recently escaped from North Carolina.” Hannah Crafts is likely a pseudonym, but the text provides tantalizing hints that Crafts’ story may have been as much autobiography as fiction. So who was Hannah Crafts? And what can be learned about and from her these many years later? Hecimovich, a Victorian specialist, is taking a two-fold approach to answering those questions. On the historical level, he’s trying to clarify Crafts’ North Carolina connections. From the literary perspective, he’s unraveling the many ways in which Crafts borrowed from popular fiction of her day, especially Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. The result will be a book he has tentatively titled Hannah Crafts and North Carolina. Also in the works is a documentary to be developed in collaboration with the Museum of the Albemarle, a division of the N.C. Museum of History, in Elizabeth City. The novel tells the story of a slave woman’s escape from John Hill Wheeler and Ellen Wheeler of North Carolina and her eventual life as the wife of a minister in New Jersey. The Wheelers’ names also belong, perhaps not coincidentally, to real land- and slave-owners originally from Hertford County. Ellen Wheeler is cast in a particularly unflattering light, though one that historical records indicate may have been close to the mark. “At first Crafts scratched out the Wheeler name, as if she didn’t want to implicate herself, but at some point, she wrote it back in, perhaps after the Civil War, as if she were clearly desirous of implicating her oppressor,” Hecimovich said. “For historians and scholars, it is a clear link to someone recognizable in North Carolina and national history.” Hecimovich began his research with the papers of John Hill Wheeler’s niece, Kate Wheeler Cooper, which are held in the Joyner Library collection. Cooper’s papers include correspondence with her uncle during the period covered by the novel. He also has followed the trail to the North Carolina Collection of UNC-Chapel Hill, the N.C. State Archives and the Library of Congress. His examinations have encompassed unpublished letters and diaries, wills and Census records. He has identified two possible candidates for the real-life Hannah Crafts. One was a slave born into the household of Lewis Bond of Bertie County. Hecimovich speculates that on Bond’s death, she became the property of Samuel Jordan Wheeler and Lucinda Bond Wheeler, the parents of Kate Wheeler Cooper and John Hill Wheeler’s brother and sister-in-law. The second possible Crafts was inherited by Ann Ward from her father, James Ward of Bertie County. Ann Ward married John Wheeler Moore, a nephew and neighbor of Samuel Jordan Wheeler. John Hill Wheeler and his wife had moved to Washington, D.C., but maintained a financial interest in the family’s Murfreesboro plantation. They visited Hertford and Bertie F U G I T I V E S L A V E / B E S T - S E L L I N G A U T H O R tracing the North Carolina connection explore e x p l o r a t i o n s 34 • SPRING 2005 • edge counties frequently. Hecimovich suggests that John and Ellen Wheeler acquired Crafts either from his brother or from the Moores during one of those visits. Additional evidence also bolsters the authenticity of the Wheeler family connection. The family had an extensive library, including Bleak House and other works echoed by The Bondswoman’s Narrative. They had other literate slaves, and they were writers themselves. “A literary atmosphere pervaded this family,” Hecimovich said. “Their letters are filled with beautiful descriptions.” Uncertainties remain, however. Census records did not list the names of slaves, leaving only blanks where names should have gone. Was the 15-year-old mulatto owned by Lewis Bond in 1850 also the 25-year-old mulatto owned by Samuel Jordan Wheeler 10 years later? Furthermore, Hecimovich has not turned up a record that John Hill Wheeler searched for an escaped slave who might have been Crafts. Wheeler had been involved in a notorious court case over the escape of another slave, Jane Johnson. Would he have let Crafts’ escape pass unremarked? Scholars at least have ruled out Jane Johnson as the author of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. “This book encouraged scholars to go back and find out what happened to Jane Johnson,” Hecimovich said. “Finally, we have the rest of her story. This project gives more voice to all those little blank spots in the Census record. History has effaced everything, but it can’t ever fully erase the lives of these people.” • Gregg Hecimovich began his search for Hannah Crafts in the Joyner Library collection. edge • SPRING 2005 • 35 in print i n p r i n t • COMMAND AT SEA: NAVAL COMMAND AND CONTROL SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (Harvard University Press, 2005), by Michael A. Palmer. Whether using signal flags or satellite communications, naval commanders are challenged in efforts to communicate with and direct subordinates in battle. Palmer, professor and chair of history, explores the results in five centuries of encounters. “A feast for qualified readers,” Publishers Weekly says. “A distinguished historian, Palmer offers a valuable addition to naval history with this study of the problems of how to lead a fleet into battle, revising many previous conclusions and offering superb battle narratives.” • CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF MEXICO (Greenwood, 2004), by Peter Standish and Steven M. Bell. A nation of 90 million people, Mexico holds a special place in Latin America, particularly as a bridge between those countries and the United States. But Mexico and the United States have special ties of their own — cultural, economic and historical bonds that continue to evolve. This book offers students and general readers an understanding of Mexicoʼs dynamism: its history, institutions, religion, culture, and leisure and social customs. Standish is a professor of foreign languages. • THE ART OF ENAMELING: TECHNIQUES, PROJECTS, INSPIRATION (Lark Books, 2004), by Linda Darty. This book covers popular techniques and the fundamentals of setting up a studio. It also provides instruction for 14 projects in enameling. The methods covered range from traditional cloisonné to experimental techniques such as firing enamel into mesh forms. Darty is a professor of art and design. • Angelo Polizianoʼs SYLVAE (Harvard University Press, 2004), edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi. Poliziano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure of Lorenzo deʼMediciʼs circle in 15th century Florence. His Sylvae, written in Latin hexameters, are poetical introductions to his university courses. They contain some of the finest Latin poetry of the Renaissance and give insight into Polizianoʼs views of both his Greek and Latin predecessors and contemporary poets writing in Italian. Fantazzi is a visiting professor of classics. • MENTAL HEALTH IN LITERATURE: LITERACY LUNACY AND LUCIDITY (Lyceum Books, 2005) by Glenn Rohrer. Works of literature can be fascinating and stimulating alternatives to case studies when studying human behavior. In this anthology, Rohrer uses the poetry, fiction, drama, essays and autobiographies of literary masters to depict the symptoms and realities of a range of mental illnesses. Rohrer a professor of social work. • RE-ENVISIONING DANCE: PERCEIVING THE AESTHETICS OF DISABILITY (Kendall/Hunt, 2004) by Boni Boswell and Jane Elin. Who can and canʼt dance? This text presents new ways of seeing both dance and disability and suggests applications for educational settings. Information about individual differences covers physical, sensory and cognitive distinctions. Boswell is an associate professor of exercise and sport science. C o n t i n u e d in print i n p r i n t 36 • SPRING 2005 • edge • FROM IKARIA TO THE STARS: CLASSICAL MYTHIFICATION, ANCIENT AND MODERN (University of Texas Press, 2005) by Peter Green. Green has assembled 17 essays that ground myth in reality but emphasize his conviction that the myths are more impor-tant than historical narrative. His book was reviewed on the front page of the February 11 Times Literary Supplement. “As a clas-sicist,” writes reviewer Edith Hall, “(Greenʼs) most distinctive habit is the juxtaposition of Graeco-Roman history with the events that dominated the 20th century, creating between the two cultures a dialogue which is always arresting if archly contentious.” Green is the King Charles II visiting distinguished profes-sor of classical history. • VOTE AND VOICE: WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICAL LITERACY, 1915-1930 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004) by Wendy Sharer. • RHETORICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA (University of Alabama Press, 2004), edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret Lyday and Wendy Sharer. Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and teaching practices of members of the womenʼs political organizations in the time surrounding suffrage. It explores how the League of Women Voters and the Womenʼs International League for Peace and Freedom, in particular, challenge the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women to speak and write successfully in various political contexts. The essays in Rhetorical Education in America orient scholars and teachers in rhetoric and help set an agenda for curriculum design. Since the time of Socrates and Aristotle, education in rhetoric has been regarded as the lynchpin of participatory democracy. Sharer is an assistant professor of English. • WRITING PUBLIC POLICY: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO COMMUNICATING IN THE POLICY-MAKING PROCESS (Oxford University Press, 2005) by Catherine Smith. This college-level textbook is a hands-on, concise guide to writing and communicating as part of the public policy process, including communication to effect change. Features include scenarios that illustrate the complexity in policy processes and highlight their diversity of contexts, the variety of actors involved and the range of communication types produced. Smith is a professor of Englis
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Title | Edge |
Other Title | Edge (Greenville, N.C.) |
Date | 2005 |
Description | Spring 2005 |
Digital Characteristics-A | 100243 KB; 40 p. |
Digital Format | application/pdf |
Full Text | E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y GETTING THE SKINNY ON EXERCISE Also in this issue: Staging a career, Advances in aviation safety, Reflections on the Tex-Mex border r e s e a r c h a n d c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y SPRING 2005 EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Spring 2005 w w w . n e w s . e c u . e d u PUBLISHER Dr. John Lehman Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies EXECUTIVE EDITOR John Durham Director, Public Affairs EDITORIAL BOARD Dr. Alan A. Schreier Director, Program Development and Coordinator of Institutional Compliance Marti Van Scott Director, Office of Technology Transfer EDITOR & SENIOR WRITER Garnet Bass DESIGNER Linda Noble PHOTOGRAPHERS Cliff Hollis Marc J. Kawanishi edge is published by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies at East Carolina University. Any written portion of this publication may be reprinted with appropriate credit. COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS John Durham East Carolina University News and Communications Services Howard House Greenville, NC 27858-4353 252-328-6481 d u r h a m j @ m a i l . e c u . e d u © 2005 by East Carolina University Printed by Theo Davis Sons, Zebulon, NC Printed on recycled paper. 3,500 copies of this public document were printed at a cost of $0000.00, or $0.00 per copy. 20 24 9 15 features 9 Rx: Exercise Studies at the Human Performance Laboratory refine knowledge about the benefits of exercise. 15 Rooted in Theater After early ambitions as a farmer, John Shearin finds fertile ground in acting, directing. 20 Decreasing Cloudiness Forecasts of commercial feasibility help clear way for improvements to aviation safety. 24 Chaos in South Texas A sociologist who spent two years shadowing the U.S. Border Patrol reflects on fear, frustration along the Rio Grande. profile 28 Exposed Could foods, chemicals, air pollution lie behind diseases associated with chronic inflammation? A physician suggests itʼs time to find out. on the cover Jennifer McCartney, a study coordinator for the Human Performance Laboratory, coaches study participant Marian Mills in a trial comparing the health benefits of different exercise regimes: resistance training, aerobic exercise, or a combination of the two. ECU and Duke University are collaborating on the study. A previous collaboration found that even modest amount of aerobic exercise can halt middle-age spread. Story begins on page 8. edge t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s edge • SPRING 2005 • 1 2 abstracts • General Assembly funds Cardiovascular Institute • Music professor wins fellowship • Maine scholar to lead research, graduate studies • From black holes to blocked arteries — a unified theory of a different sort • Unschooled artist captures imagination, dedication • Surprise finding caps dive on old shipwreck • Art professor earns hall of fame honor • Getting down to basics with swallowing disorders 31 explorations • Two Sides of the Coin Geographers ask how Latino immigration affects communities in rural N.C., Mexico. • Direction Central Unlocking protein synthesis holds key to development, disease. • En-Chanting For musicologist, complex 15th-century church music unsurpassed. • Fugitive Slave/Best-selling Author Victorian specialist traces the North Carolina connection. 35 in print • A look at recent publications by ECU faculty. 2 • SPRING 2005 • edge General Assembly funds Cardiovascular Institute The Eastern Carolina Cardiovascular Institute took another step toward reality March 8 when the North Carolina Council of State approved issuing bonds to finance its construction. The General Assembly passed legislation to fund a $60 million research center at ECU in summer 2004 as part of larger package for university projects statewide. The Council of State vote was the last major hurdle in making the money available. The state funds will cover construction of a 180,000-square-foot center for cardiovascular clinical research, outpatient programs and education programs and a 40,000-square-foot addition to the Warren Life Sciences Building for a cardiovascular basic science research center. As the other component of the institute, Pitt County Memorial Hospital is building a 120-bed tower to consolidate its cardiovascular services under one roof. All of the construction is expected to be completed by late 2008. “The population of individuals with cardiovascular disease and those who are at-risk are extremely important in the overall health care equation,” Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood said at the bill-signing last August. “We need to make sure that they are properly served in order to gain the advantage over the disease.” Chitwood, who will serve as the institute’s director, is an internationally recognized heart surgeon and ECU’s senior associate vice chancellor for health sciences. North Carolina has one of the highest rates of advanced cardiovascular disease in the nation, accounting for one in four deaths. Furthermore, eastern North Carolina consistently leads the rest of the state in mortality from heart and vascular disease. Research at the new institute will leverage the Brody School of Medicine’s existing strengths, said Dr. Wayne Cascio, chief of the division of cardiology, and Brody faculty members already are applying for grants to gear up their programs. Cascio named six areas where research efforts are expected to intensify. • Congestive heart failure and the management of heart failure treatment. Congress has earmarked $750,000 for program looking at racial disparities in heart failure occurrence and care, a cooperative effort involving ECU and UNC-Chapel Hill. In addition, Cascio said, ECU investigators will try to learn more about the overall problem of heart failure in eastern North Carolina and assess treatments. • Clinical trials. ECU has conducted numerous trials of new drugs in conjunction with pharmaceutical companies. Cascio expects this effort to intensify “so we can give our patients access to cutting-edge therapies.” • Environmental cardiology. Cardiologists and physiologist will combine to study the effects of air pollution on heart disease. “We’ve already submitted four grant proposals and developed interesting data to support them,” Cascio said. • Minimally invasive surgery. Chitwood is among the world’s leading figures in the development of minimally invasive methods of surgery. He and his surgical team were the first in North America to use the da Vinci robot to repair cardiac valves, and they later led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trial of the da Vinci robot for mitral valve operations. Research will continue to further refine surgical techniques and expand their utility to more types of surgery. • Stem cell therapy for heart disease. Research in animals has shown that adult stem cells inserted into the heart can be transformed into new heart cells to repair damage from disease. A new grant will fund research at ECU to understand how this transformation takes place and the best way to deliver stem cells to the heart. This line of research could result in clinical trials in humans within five to seven years, Cascio said. • Epidemiology. The institute will work with personnel from ECU’s new program in public health to understand what is unique about heart and vascular disease in eastern North Carolina and develop better methods of prevention and treatment. Cascio said the institute will encourage collaborations with faculty from other disciplines across the ECU campus and will increase alliances with other research institutions, inside and outside academia. “By virtue of having an institute with a name, we’ll start to get attention and we’ll take advantage of that,” he said. • abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Randolph Chitwood, a pioneer in minimally invasive surgery, will serve as the Cardiovascular Institute’s director She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and philosophy from Queen’s University of Belfast, a master’s in sociology from the University of York and a Ph.D. in geography from The Open University in the United Kingdom. At ECU, she will succeed Dr. Tom Feldbush, who retired from the vice chancellorship. “I am very pleased to be joining ECU and the team Chancellor Ballard is putting together,” Mageean said. “I am excited about the possibilities for research and graduate studies, which are already strong. I look forward to helping them advance and to seeing the results translated for the benefit of the state and the local community.” • edge • SPRING 2005 • 3 abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Maine scholar to lead research, graduate studies Dr. Deirdre Mageean, associate vice president for research and dean of the graduate school at the University of Maine, has been appointed ECU’s new vice chancellor for research and graduate studies. She will begin work at ECU on July 1. In announcing the appointment, Chancellor Steve Ballard said Mageean’s experience at the University of Maine, a land and sea grant institution, positions her well to lead ECU to greatly expanded research activity. “Dr. Mageean is an accomplished teacher, researcher and administrator,” Ballard said. “Her background with government agencies, interdisciplinary centers, research centers and graduate programs is exactly the right experience to lead our move forward in the research enterprise. I am delighted that she has accepted this appointment, and I am eager for her to get started at East Carolina.” Mageean has been at the University of Maine since 1987, first as an instructor and researcher in the sociology department and subsequently as director of the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy. She has been in her current position since 2002. Her own research in demography, socio-economic change and social policy has been supported by grants and awards totaling more than $3 million. She is a prolific author of reports and articles in scholarly journals and a frequent presenter at conferences and seminars. Music professor wins fellowship Dr. Edward Jacobs, an associate professor of music, has won the $15,000 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Founded in 1898, the academy annually honors more than 50 composers, artists, architects and writers with cash awards ranging from $2,500 to $75,000. “It’s a wonderful honor to be recognized alongside so many distinct composers,” Jacobs said. “I’m flattered to be included among such a wonderful group.” Jacobs teaches composition and musicology. He is the director of the New Music Festival at ECU, and his compositions have been performed by trumpeter Britton Theurer, choreographer Patricia Weeks and the Meridian Arts Ensemble. His piece, al momento, for cello and pre-recorded sound, was commissioned and premiered by cellist Kelley Mikkelsen. The academy awards were scheduled to be presented in May at a ceremony in New York City. The academy’s 250 members nominate candidates for the music awards. The Charles Ives Fellowship was created by Harmony Ives to honor her husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer Charles Ives. The award, which has been given since 1970, is considered a distinct honor. “The Charles Ives Fellowship is named for an icon of American music,” said Wade Hobgood, chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. “The American Academy of Arts of Letters selection for the award represents significant recognition of an individual’s past and future achievement contributing to the advancement of music in America. Ed Jacobs and East Carolina University are to be congratulated on this distinction.” Jacobs studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and earned his master’s degree in composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his doctorate of musical arts from Columbia University. His composition teachers include Mario Davidovsky, Andrew Imbrie, Chou Wen- Chung and Olly Wilson. • Composer Edward Jacobs Deidre Mageean 4 • SPRING 2005 • edge abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s From black holes to blocked arteries — a unified theory of a different sort Once it falls in, nothing can escape a black hole. Not matter, not even light. These mysterious objects in space are so dense that anything pulled into their core will be stuck there forever. Nothing can muster enough energy to escape. Except an idea. Over the past three years, physicist Dr. Orville Day and mathematician Dr. David Pravica have combined their expertise to develop a theory that allows them to predict the mass and size of black holes based on the vibrations of energy swirling around them. Now, in a leap of imagination they consider only logical, they have found a new application for their theory: early detection of coronary artery disease. Clinical trials beginning this spring will help prove whether their theory can be turned into a device that accurately detects atherosclerosis, plaque formation and aneurysms based on the vibrations caused by blood moving past the arterial walls. If so, primary care physicians, nurse practitioners and others on the front lines of health care may soon have a new, low-cost tool to guide patient diagnosis and treatment. Most black holes have a disk of matter and energy swirling around them, somewhat like the rings of Saturn. Gradually, the material is pulled closer and closer to the black hole until it reaches a point of no return and falls into the black hole itself. Since black holes cannot be measured directly, a number of theories have been developed to predict their size from indirect measures. Most of those theories are based on the size of the surrounding disk. The accuracy of these theories is generally estimated at plus or minus 30 to 50 percent. Day and Pravica have taken a different approach. They combined the mathematical field of complex equations with Einstein’s theory of general relativity to come up with estimates based on the electromagnetic waves trapped in the rings swirling closest the black hole. “These signals go up and down at certain low frequencies, depending on the resonance of the black hole,” Day said. The larger the black hole, the slower the resonance, he said, just as the thicker strings on a musical instrument vibrate at lower frequencies than lighter weight strings. They believe their equations are accurate within 2 to 3 percent. Pravica had previously spent time in Europe working with physicians interested in interpreting bruits, the abnormal cardiovascular sounds that can be heard through a stethoscope. In May 2003, he brought those physicians to ECU for a medical mathematics conference, and with Day, he began to see possibilities for connecting two seemingly unconnected fields. “We’ve been looking at so many waves from black holes that it’s second nature to look at wave forms and get a sense of what’s causing what,” Pravica said. “In the same way that a black hole will release sound waves or flares, the body emits sound waves or bruits for geometrical reasons.” Healthy, elastic arteries will vibrate hardly at all, producing little sound other than that resulting from the heart beat. Arteries stiffened by atherosclerosis will vibrate faster. Where plaque has built up, a little whirlpool of blood on the back side of the blockage will trigger its own bruit, and so on. Day and Pravica believe they can determine the condition of the arteries based on such vibrations. “The math is possible to reconstruct the whole arterial system through sound,” Pravica said. Their tools are a laptop computer and physiology sensors somewhat like highly tuned stethoscopes. The sensors, originally developed by the Army Research Laboratory, filter out external noise, convert the sounds into electronic signals and feed the signals into the computer programmed with their formulas. In less than two minutes, doctor and patients could have practical results — telling them, for example, that the arteries are 30 percent blocked by plaque. Day said they expect the device, which has a patent pending, to sell for a few hundred dollars. It will not replace the detailed pictures provided by more costly ultrasound and MRI machines, but it may prove to be a valuable tool for screening and early detection. “If you can tell people earlier in their lives they’re headed for trouble, you might be able to delay the onset of serious disease 20 years,” Day said. “Think of the difference that will make. It’s like getting a blood pressure reading once a year now. If your blood pressure starts going up, you try to get it down. And if you do, maybe you can stay away from serious consequences for the rest of your life.” This spring, the scientists have started to work with faculty from the Brody School of Medicine to compare their math-based calculations against ultrasound and MRI pictures. While they refine their techniques, they’re concentrating on measurements of the aorta, the main artery from the heart, and carotid arteries on each side of the neck. Eventually, they expect to add 10 other points that physicians tell them are critical in picking up potential problems, primarily where branching arteries increase the likelihood of plaque formation. • ABOVE: Vibrations from black holes and from arteries yield valuable information. Image courtesy NASA/CXC/M. Weiss. edge • SPRING 2005 • 5 abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Grieving over the death of his wife, José Expectación Navarro taught himself to paint. Over the next 20 years, he created murals covering his family’s life, Central American history, Catholic and Mayan religion — and every inch of every wall of his modest home in the remote village of Guarita, Honduras. The elaborate murals represent an expression of unrivaled visual imagination, according to Gay Wilentz, professor of English and director of ethnic studies. She’s working with photographer Henry Stindt, a former ECU faculty member, to honor Expectación’s work and explain its context in a book tentatively titled The Murals of Don José Expectación: Familia, Patria y Religion. Wilentz spent much of February in Honduras investigating the events and culture depicted in Expectación’s murals. When it is published, the book may be the only evidence left of the murals’ existence. Expectación died in 2001, and despite efforts to preserve his home, it and the artwork it contains will likely be demolished soon to make way for a new home for Expectación’s son. A school principal for his village, Expectación worked far outside the artistic mainstream. Wilentz said the murals display an eclectic style and were executed in natural earthen pigments with handmade brushes. He also wove into the art his own poetic commentary written in archaic Spanish. Stindt and Wilentz’s husband, Agromedicine Institute director John Sabella, first brought Wilentz’s attention to Expectación. They had been visiting Honduras in connection with recovery efforts following Hurricane Mitch. Expectación was alive at the time, and local aid workers introduced them. They later returned with Wilentz and ECU graduate art student Patricia Hayes, who is drawing on Expectación’s work for her MFA thesis. Wilentz also has a second book project under way, an exploration of the friendship between writers Fannie Hurst and Nora Neale Hurston. Hurst was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the author of such popular 1930s tearjerkers as Imitation of Life. She was Jewish but hid her ethnic identity. Hurston, a black woman born in Florida, was a critically acclaimed author of the Harlem Renaissance movement. A made-for-TV movie of her most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was shown on ABC in March. Wilentz was a recipient of ECU’s 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity. • ABOVE: Gay Wilentz, English professor and director of ethnic studies, hopes to preserve the art of José Expectación Navarro in a book. BELOW: Photog-rapher Henry Stindt visited with Expectación before the artist’s death in 2001 and captured the images below, showing the artist and some of his murals. The paintings, which cover the walls of Expectación’s home, draw on religion, history and family life for inspiration. Photographs courtesy of Henry Stindt Unschooled artist captures imagination, dedication Henry Surprise finding caps dive on old shipwreck In the cold, dark waters off the coast of Alaska, Frank Cantelas had a genuine “Eureka!” moment last July, but he played it cool. The staff archaeologist with the marine history program, he was on a research trip with Dr. Timothy Runyan and others from ECU, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-istration and Alaska agencies to investigate a shipwreck 80 feet below the surface. On a dive the day before, Runyan had spotted an object buried in the sand that seemed worth a second look. But dives are short when the water temperature is 37 degrees. Runyan passed the tip on to Cantelas for his dive. “I just remember swimming up to it and slowly fanning the sand away from one end,” Cantelas said. “All of a sudden, I realized there were letters there.” What he read was big news. Still, he just kept working. After dinner that evening, he turned to Runyan and casually asked, “Did you take a close look at that object?” The Cyrillic letters, on what appeared to be the brass cap of a wooden barrel, spelled out Kad’yak. On only the third day of diving, they had the evidence to identify the wreck as that of the lost cargo ship Kad’yak. “It is extraordinary for underwater archaeologists to identify a 144-year-old shipwreck this quickly,” Runyan said. The Kad’yak is the oldest shipwreck to be identified in Alaska and the first to be investigated by professional underwater archaeologists. The discovery made the front page of the Anchorage Daily News and the science section of The New York Times. National Public Radio also featured it. Shortly after returning from Alaska, Runyan led another ECU contingent on a joint operation by the Office of Naval Research and NOAA trying to locate the remains of the Navy’s first submarine. The USS Alligator sank off the coast of Cape Hatteras during a storm in 1863. The 2004 “Hunt for the Alligator” failed in its quest, but Runyan said the work will continue. “There’s a lot of water out there,” he said. The Kad’yak was a three-masted vessel operated by the Russian- American Company in the final years before the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. It sank in Icon Bay after hitting an uncharted submerged rock. At the time, it was hauling a load of ice to San Francisco. The wreck site was discovered in 2003. The three-week ECU expedition was intended primarily to map the site. Others from ECU participating in the dive were students Evguenia Anichtchenki and Jason Rogers and diving safety officer Steve Sellers. Anichtchenki had spent the previous two years researching the Kad’yak in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; the city archives of Lübeck, Germany, where the ship was built; and the Russian Naval Yards in St. Petersburg, her hometown. The lingering elation of the team’s discovery was tempered by sad news in January. Their host vessel for the expedition, the 92-foot ship the Big Valley, sank in the Bering Sea while crab fishing. Among those lost was the captain, Gary Edwards. • TOP: Jason Rogers maps wreckage of the Kad’yak, a 19th century Russian cargo ship. BOTTOM: The inscription on the brass cap allowed archaeologists to identify the wreckage. abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s 6 • SPRING 2005 • edge Getting down to basics with swallowing disorders abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s edge • SPRING 2005 • 7 ABOVE: Robert Ebendorf incorporates found objects into his art. Art professor earns hall of fame honor Art professor Robert Ebendorf has been inducted into the National Metalsmiths Hall of Fame. The professor of metals was honored in the artist/arts educator category. Ebendorf is known for innovative approaches to the fabrication of jewelry, such as incorporating steel and found objects with gold and silver. He was honored last year with a 40-year retrospective exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C, and is slated to receive a Master of the Medium award from the Renwick this year. The award is given to four artists every two years and is considered capstone recognition. Ebendorf holds the Carol Grotnes Belk distinguished chair in the School of Art and Design. He recently published the book 1000 Rings, lectured at the Northwest Jewelry/Metals Symposium at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and was included in a Penland School retrospective exhibit at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte. • As a speech pathologist, Teresa Lever found one of the most frustrating parts of her job was trying to help patients cope with chronic swallowing disorders, or dysphagia. Treatment options were limited, especially for people with progressive neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. Now, as a Ph.D. student in communication sciences and disorders, she’s investigating both short-term coping strategies and potential long-term treatment. Swallowing disorders typically fall under the treatment of speech pathologists because speaking and swallowing involve many of the same muscles. Swallowing alone calls on more than two dozen muscles from the lips to the top of the stomach working in coordination. When those muscles go awry, the result can be malnutrition, dehydration or pneumonia, if food takes a wrong turn and goes into the trachea. As a result, 90 percent of Lever’s hospital caseload involved trying to help people learn new swallowing techniques. What she taught them came primarily from on-the-job training. “There’s not much research out there to explain the most effective treatments or why treatments work,” she said. “Much of it is based on behavioral science, and that doesn’t tell us why it works. I want to get down to the basics, muscles and nerves.” She has begun by studying a typical coping strategy, called effortful swallowing, to see whether the exaggerated swallowing technique actually has an effect on the motion of the esophagus. Collaborating with the gastrointestinal department at Pitt County Memorial Hospital, she’s measuring the pressure of the squeezing motion that results from normal and effortful swallowing. She measures the strength and endurance of the contractions using sensors placed in the mouth and lining a catheter inserted through the nose down the throat to the stomach. If results from normal, healthy volunteers look promising, she’ll move on to see whether they hold up for people with neurological swallowing disorders. A more long-term investigation centers on the nerves that order the swallowing response. In some diseases, unwanted proteins produced in the nerves interrupt their signaling processes. Ultimately, this can impair muscle strength, range of motion and coordination. Working with Dr. Alexander Murashov of the Brody School of Medicine physiology department, Lever is beginning to investigate whether a process called RNA interference can be used to disrupt the production of those proteins. Their first experiment, involving the sciatic nerve in mice, yielded promising results. “In our experiment, we were able to suppress the protein we were interested in and the effects traveled toward the spine,” she said. “So we may be able to attack a central nervous system disease by treating the peripheral nerves.” For her dissertation, Lever plans to follow up on that work with more specific application to swallowing disorders. • BELOW: Teresa Lever, at left, is studying whether effortful swallowing affects the motion of the esophogus. 8 • SPRING 2005 • edge Rx: Exercise is beginning to sound like the cure-all for half of what ails us. Need to lose weight, strengthen the heart muscle or improve cholesterol and blood pressure readings? Exercise. Blood sugar getting a little high? Exercise will bring it down. Depressed? Exercise releases mood-lifting endorphins. Worried about Alzheimerʼs disease? Exercise enhances mental acuity. It also builds bone and muscle, to prevent fall-related injuries in the elderly. Having trouble sleeping? Exercise can help there, too. To top it all off, exercise is an all-natural, non-pharmacological treatment with few adverse side effects. Studies at the Human Performance Laboratory refine knowledge about the benefits of exercise Yet, for all we know of the benefits of exercise, thereʼs just as much we donʼt know. What kind of exercise works best and how much? How does it work, on the basic biochemical level? Does it work equally well for everyone? And why is it that, as the years creep along, our muscles shrink and stamina decreases, no matter how hard we try to fight it? In the Human Performance Laboratory (HPL), researchers are unraveling the answers to these and a host of other questions about health and fitness. The lab is a longstanding partner with surgeons, physiologists and biochemists in the Brody School of Medicine on investigations into the causes and treatment of obesity and diabetes. HPL researchers also conduct independent inquiries, some spurred by results of the obesity studies, others arising from more general wellness questions. Hereʼs a look at a few of those studies. Taking exercise in STRRIDE You know itʼs time to get serious about exercise. Youʼve gotten soft around the middle, the doctor says your cholesterol is too high, and yesterday you had to rest midway up a flight of stairs. But you want to do this right so you check to see what the experts say about how much exercise you should be getting. edge • SPRING 2005 • 9 C o n t i n u e d EXERCISE 10 • SPRING 2005 • edge Until recently, recommendations varied so widely that your query may have left you more confused. Now, a long-running collaboration between ECU and Duke University is refining the answers. Dr. Joseph A. Houmard, professor and director of the Human Performance Laboratory, leads the ECU portion of the project, called Studies of Targeted Risk Reduction Interventions through Defined Exercise, or STRRIDE. STRRIDEʼs first, five-year trial tested the effects of different levels of aerobic exercise. It showed, among other findings, that even modest amounts of exercise — the equivalent of walking about 12 miles a week — can stop the creeping weight gain that so often comes with middle age. Nearly 400 volunteers participated in the study, all of them middle-aged, overweight and, before the study, sedentary. They were divided into four groups, three testing different exercise regimens over a nine-month period and one control group that did not exercise. The exercise groups had no opportunity to cheat: they worked out under the watchful eyes of research assistants. To prevent weight loss from confounding the results, the exercisers were forbidden from dieting during the study. In fact, if they lost more than a few pounds, they were encouraged to eat more. “I think some people were more successful sticking with the exercise program because they couldnʼt diet,” said Jennifer McCartney, the study coordinator. “Itʼs enough to get one thing going at a time.” Measuring results, though, required more than stepping on the scales. Stress tests had the volunteers running on a treadmill to the point of exhaustion while hooked up to machines that monitored how efficiently their bodies used oxygen. Other tests measured body fat, blood lipids such as cholesterol, and glucose levels. Biopsies of thigh muscle provided a chance to study gene regulation, to understand the mechanisms behind glucose uptake and fat burning. For Houmard, one of the most important lessons came from the control group. “If you donʼt do anything, you get worse,” Houmard said. “We shouldnʼt have been surprised at that, but we were by the magnitude of difference. A couple of pounds made a big difference, especially with insulin resistance.” Insulin resistance is associated with type 2 diabetes. Seeing the results of just a few months of inactivity changes the viewpoint about exercise. “Everybody thinks I have to lose weight if exercise is helping,” he said, “but just staying the same is not a bad goal.” The really good news is that edge • SPRING 2005 • 11 training only or a combination of the two. “We think resistance training and aerobics are totally different in terms of the biochemical pathways for improving fitness so weʼll see an added effect,” Houmard said. Overcoming an inherent disadvantage African-American women may be among those with the most to benefit from exercise. Americans across the board are losing the struggle to stay fit and slim, and African- American women are putting on more pounds than most. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, three-quarters of adult African-American women are overweight or obese, compared with 58 percent of white women. Being overweight places them at risk of diabetes, hypertension, cancer and heart disease. The higher prevalence of overweight is often attributed to such factors as poverty, low educational levels and poor diets, but statistics show that African-American women are more likely to be heavy no matter what their socioeconomic status or lifestyle. When studies by ECU colleagues suggested a metabolic reason, associate professor Dr. Ronald Cortright decided to look further. He wanted to know whether it was a disadvantage that could be overcome. At the heart of his work is the bodyʼs ability to oxidize or burn fatty acids. This oxidation is what gives the body energy. When it canʼt use up fatty acids, it stores them in muscle and fat tissue, leading to excess weight and obesity. Those added pounds, in turn, can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. Research in the Human Performance Lab and elsewhere has shown that obese individuals cannot burn fat as readily as people of normal weight. This holds true even when gastric bypass surgery has allowed formerly obese individuals to lose their excess weight. Their mitochondria, the organelles responsible for oxidizing fat, appear to be C o n t i n u e d all levels of exercise resulted in improvements. “We thought the high-intensity, longer workout would produce the most results, but it didnʼt,” Houmard said. “The lesson is that any exercise is good. Our low-intensity workout wasnʼt much more than walking the dog.” Furthermore, it was the exercise — rather than improvements in conditioning or weight loss — that resulted in better insulin and lipid readings. So exercise in and of itself is good for you. Subtle differences emerged across the levels of exercise, though. “You can almost customize an exercise program according to what you need,” he said. Insulin sensitivity responded to the time spent exercising more than to the intensity of the exercise. High-intensity workouts had more effect on lipid levels. A second, five-year phase of the study got under way in summer 2004. This time, resistance or weight training is being added to the mix. Volunteers ages 18 to 60 will be assigned to aerobic training only, resistance CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Under-graduate intern Cole Cash guides Rick Hamilton through resistance training. • Kelly Westbrook, another undergraduate intern, monitors blood pressure for Steve Duncan, a study participant and ECU director of military affairs. • NAME TO BE ADD-ED LATER rides an exercise bike while machines measure how efficiently her body uses oxygen; watching is study leader Ronald Cortright. • Rick Hamilton hits the treadmill while research technician Tamlyn Shields keeps an eye on his vital signs. 12 • SPRING 2005 • edge inherently smaller and fewer in number. One of those studying the issue was Cortrightʼs colleague, Dr. Robert Hickner. Hickner documented that, in a single bout of exercise, obese people burned half as much fat as lean individuals did. He expected as much, but the cross-sectional study allowed him to compare across race and gender, and there he found something totally unexpected. In at least one respect, lean African- American women looked obese. They burned fat at only half the rate of their lean, white counterparts during exercise. A study of abdominal muscle, collected from women undergoing gynecological surgery, confirmed the finding. Cortright decided to look further. Other studies had shown that a sustained exercise program could rev up the fat-burning engines of non-obese individuals. Would it do the same for obese women and, more specifically, African-American women regardless of body size? He enrolled 10 white and 10 African- American women in a study that had them exercising an hour a day for 10 days. The women were all non-smokers between the ages of 20 and 45 who were not already exercising. To account for as many variables as possible, Cortrightʼs team also collected details about diet and hormone cycles. The results were encouraging. Tiny biopsies of thigh muscle taken before and after exercise training showed that exercise doubled the womenʼs ability to burn fat across the board. “This represents the mitochondriaʼs capacity to use fat,” Cortright said. “So youʼve taken low-capacity mitochondria and made them more robust.” But what exactly is changing? With another group of volunteers, Cortright is trying to pinpoint which genes activate the fat burning. Heʼs also gearing up another phase of the project to learn how much exercise is necessary to keep the body burning fat more efficiently. “It might be that two times a week for half an hour is enough,” he said. “Maintenance costs a lot less than getting there in the first place.” Older and weaker, but is it inevitable? Like it or not, your body knows youʼre getting older. With added years, you tire faster, your muscles start to weaken, and your cardiovascular risk goes up, even if youʼre doing your best to stay in shape. Part of the reason may lie in the ability of blood to flow freely, supplying vital oxygen and nutrients to muscles and other tissues through the capillaries, the smallest blood vessels. Associate professor Dr. Robert Hickner and assistant professor Dr. Timothy Gavin are investigating age-related changes that affect blood flow and whether exercise can influence those changes. “Itʼs thought that capillaries play a role in a number of different processes — in the delivery of glucose and insulin, the delivery of oxygen during exercise or any kind of activity,” Gavin said. “They may play a role in how you regulate blood flow. The more you have, the better job you appear to be CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Study coordinator Jennifer McCartney coaches Marian Mills on resistance training. • Researchers with the Human Performance Laboratory include Timothy Gavin, Robert Hickner and lab director Joseph Houmard. edge • SPRING 2005 • 13 doing in regulating blood flow. And better blood flow may play a role in maintaining muscle fiber size so itʼs all interrelated.” For the elderly, at least part of the problem may be one of number. Older adults have fewer capillaries. Gavin wants to know whether age decreases the bodyʼs ability to make capillaries. A clue is offered by a protein that is critical to capillary growth, called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF. “What weʼve seen is that VEGF in aged muscles is inherently lower,” he said. “We see 25 percent lower VEGF in aged individuals, and we see about 25 percent fewer capillaries.” actually produces three types of NOS. Hickner is most interested in endothelial NOS, a helpful form that increased with exercise in his trial, and inducible NOS, a potentially harmful form related to inflammation. The latter decreased with endurance, or aerobic, exercise training. To obtain their results, both Hickner and Gavin employ muscle biopsies taken from the thighs of their volunteers and a process called microdialysis. For the latter technique, a porous hair-thin tube is inserted into the volunteersʼ muscle for as long as five hours. While itʼs in place, fluids can be passed through the probe to collect nutrients found in the muscle and to monitor blood flow. Samples are taken as often as every 10 minutes. While working on his Ph.D. in Sweden, Hickner was part of the team that developed microdialysis for use in humans. Moving forward, Hickner and Gavin hope to determine whether resistance exercise training results in improvements similar to those from endurance training. Resistance training focuses on muscle strength, which is particularly important in light of the loss of muscle mass that occurs with advanced age. Everyone loves stories of 92-year-old marathon runners. But learning about the effects of aging may do more to help seniors for whom a walk to the mailbox or a trip around the mall constitutes a strenuous workout. For them, many afflicted with chronic disease, the goal is to maintain their daily activities. What will it take to keep them up and moving? “There are a lot of positive adaptations that happen with exercise training,” Gavin said. “What we are starting to think as we integrate our findings is that all of these changes have to occur. There must be a coordinated adaptation for them to be maximized. And if aging affects one, it may affect others.” And that, Hickner pointed out, is why itʼs so difficult to develop effective drugs. “Drugs often target an individual problem,” he said, “while exercise induces this coordinated, positive adaptation that seems unlikely to be mimicked by drugs.” • In younger people, exercise is known to stimulate VEGF production so Gavin is now comparing the response to exercise of men and women ages 18 to 40 with that of older people, age 60 and up. “Acute exercise should start the process of VEGF production, and we see thatʼs lower in aged individuals as well,” he said. “That makes us think this is important, but weʼre still working to see if the long-term results are consistent.” While Gavin studies capillary growth, Hickner focuses on factors that encourage nutrients and oxygen to be exchanged through those capillaries. His special interest is nitric oxide, a blood gas thought to have a number of functions, including roles in metabolism and in the dilation of blood vessels. “The higher your nitric oxide levels, the better your blood circulates,” Hickner said. “But with aging, we found that they have a lower level of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), the enzyme that is responsible for producing nitric oxide. So that might be one system that is down with age and might be increased with exercise training or physical activity.” In a trial he conducted, an eight-week training regimen did improve NOS levels in older as well as younger volunteers. The body Rooted in Theater C o n t i n u e d Had his maternal grandfather lived longer, John Shearin figures heʼd have become a farmer. Growing up, he spent several summers working alongside “Capʼn Bob” and Sally Jenkins on their farm just outside of Pinetops. He loved the freedom, the open spaces, the fresh air. But Capʼn Bob died when his grandson was 12, and Shearinʼs life took a different path, one that wound through television studios and across theater stages on both coasts. Eventually, though, the path led back to his North Carolina roots. Sixteen years ago, Shearin took a job just a few miles down the road from his grandparentsʼ farm. Heʼs been chair of the ECU department of theater and dance ever since. Here, and at every step of the way up to now, the legacy of Capʼn Bob and Sally Jenkins lives on. “A huge portion of my work ethic comes from them,” Shearin says. “Itʼs the idea that no matter what you feel like, the work still has to get done. The hogs have to be fed. No excuses.” None for himself, and none for anyone else. “If you miss a rehearsal around here, you better be dead or in the hospital,” he says, trying to control the grin. “Youʼve got to be tough-minded to succeed. There are no weenies in this department.” The grin wins. In more than work ethic, Shearin seems every bit the farmer. He even looks the part. A big man dressed in denim and a plaid shirt, he could be reared back by the stove of a country store instead of swiveling behind a desk. Instead of crops and livestock, he nurtures students, seeing the fruits of his labor in their growth and maturity. As a producer and director, he plows deep to find the meaning of a playwrightʼs work. 14 • SPRING 2005 • edge After early ambitions as a farmer, John Shearin finds fertile ground in acting, directing For John Shearin, theater is serious business: “There are no weenies in this department.” edge • SPRING 2005 • 15 16 • SPRING 2005 • edge Shearin also possesses a farmerʼs versatility, according to friend and fellow actor Jon Korkes of New York City. “Heʼs a jack of all trades,” Korkes says. “If you gave him enough time, he could build the theater for you.” The two met in 1983, when they appeared in a theater tribute to the Beat Generation. Korkes played a nightclub operator. Shearin played Jack Kerouac. Ten years later, after arriving in Greenville, Shearin invited his buddy down for a summer theater role in Our Countryʼs Good, a play about the founding of Australia. It was a challenging production: actors playing multiple roles in different dialects, numerous costume changes and only two weeks to rehearse. “You only can get that done satisfactorily if you have someone you can trust, whoʼs focused and understands the work, who can get you there,” Korkes says. Shearin came though. “It was an amazing production. Iʼve been working in theater 30-some years so when I say I was impressed by how John ran the show down there, Iʼm not exaggerating.” Theater and academia may not have been Shearinʼs first chosen field, but he clearly relishes the work. Besides teaching and administration, he usually directs two plays during the academic year and two more for the summer season. “Itʼs never the same two days in a row so my interest is always being piqued,” he says. And he gets some of everything he wants — the country life, work with young people, theater. Especially the theater. For the first 14 years of his professional career, Shearin shifted between acting and directing, stage and television. When work lagged, he supplemented his income by applying his farming talents to running a landscaping sideline in Los Angeles. By the early ʻ80s, though, television roles paid the bills. He had regular appearances on prime-time shows like Hunter and featured roles in the likes of Matlock, Remington Steele and Designing Women. He appeared in the final episode of M*A*S*H, playing the helicopter pilot who ferried Charles Emerson Winchester back toward civilization. A short time before shooting, fire had swept through the canyon where the M*A*S*H exterior scenes were shot. The set had to be rebuilt. During the filming, Shearin glanced up at the surrounding hills, then looked again. “They had spray-painted the mountain green. All that burnt shrubbery was painted green.” Daytime TV roles included a short-lived lead in the ABC drama Loving, which was filmed in New York. A clash with the producer ended the run at 13 weeks. “He gave nasty acting notes over the loudspeaker to young actors in their first professional gigs,” Shearin remembers. “I basically called him out one day and said I wouldnʼt stand for that. It wasnʼt the smartest thing I ever did. I knew there would be consequences, but I didnʼt really care.” He caught a plane to Los Angeles, where his soon-to-be-wife Jennifer still lived. “I got off the plane, saw her at the end of the tunnel and said donʼt quit your job. Iʼm moving back.” All the while he was working in television, he continued working in theater — usually for little or no money. “Television was pretty good to me financially, but what I was doing was not gratifying to the soul,” he says. “In my heart of hearts, I was a theater guy.” In theater, he says, the ideas are bigger. “The theater embraces much more spiritual and intellectual content than television and film can. I find it moves one viscerally much more so than television or film when I see it done well. Thereʼs something about the magical communication of a live performance, the human component … the ephemeral nature of it. Itʼs done and gone. It goes into memory. I like that. But mostly, itʼs just working on stuff that I find deeply, deeply meaningful, and I didnʼt find any of that in TV.” From the beginning, Shearin determined he would act and direct. “The guy who was my absolute idol was Laurence Olivier,” he says. “Olivier was a consummate theater man. He could act the pants off everybody and then LEFT TO RIGHT: Sally and Bob Jenkins, John Shearinʼs maternal grandparents; John with his younger brother, Robert; John during his Army service; John and Jennifer on their wedding day; and the Shearin children, Sarah, Kathleen and Daniel. edge • SPRING 2005 • 17 direct the pants off them, too. He was a model that you could do both and both well.” The two roles offer very different challenges. “With acting, youʼre concentrating on one small aspect of a play. If I choose to act now, itʼs because I think the behavior of the character is intriguing or a lot of fun, or the behavior and motivation of the character is of a depth I really want to plumb and experience for myself. Thatʼs always been the case, but now even more so — as long as it doesnʼt have many lines. The brutal part of acting is all that memorization. I donʼt want to do a lot of that any more.” The grin returns. “I like small, rewarding parts now.” More and more, he prefers directing, the challenge of seeing the play as a whole and making it as engaging for the audience as possible. “One of the most rewarding parts for me is the deep association with brilliant playwrights,” he says. “I love the weeks and months I spend alone with he playwright, figuratively speaking, where I read and reread the play, trying to get deeper and deeper into it, doing all the parallel work to understand the history and art and behavior, to really try to get as deep into the play as possible and realize its potential.” He points with special satisfaction to an ECU production of the Greek drama Bacchai in 2003. He had first read Euripidesʼ play 25 years earlier. “It got me interested in Greek drama for life, but I could never figure out how to do it, so I ended up revising the text and doing my own version.” The Greeks, like most classics, call for some interpretation. “Almost every time I do a classic, I do at least some editing,” he says. “Even with Shakespeare, I do a fair amount of judicious editing to take out extended metaphors and similes that are hard for young people to sustain. It has to do more with style than substance. I donʼt want to strip a play of style or substance, but I also donʼt want anybody to say thatʼs boring.” Bacchai was anything but. The play is about the female followers, played by the chorus, of the god Dionysus. Shearin rewrote the part of the chorus into a rhythmic verse form. “Natalie Stewart, the voice coach, did heroic work,” he says. “The chorus had 20 girls, maybe more, and they had to speak in unison very articulately. The audience had to understand every word or they wouldnʼt get the play.” Rehearsals transformed improvisation into ritualistic dance. Costumes transformed college students into Amazons. “The girls were in patches and layers of animal skins that supposedly they had slaughtered and put on. And girls themselves performed in a way that was so savage it was really kind of scary. They had a great time. They scared a lot of guys.” The grin consumes his face once more. “I took my daughters and said, see, thatʼs the way I want you to act.” His children — two daughters and a son — were a large part Shearinʼs reason for leaving TV land. He and Jennifer were just starting their family, and he wanted their children to grow up with open space and small schools. He also found himself less and less satisfied with his career. “I remember one day I went in to audition for a part in the remake of Red River,” he says. “There were half a dozen old TV stars, people in their 60s and 70s auditioning for one- or two-line parts. I thought if this is the future, I donʼt want any part of it. Why would you want to spend your whole life doing this kind of empty material and you canʼt even count on doing that?” He didnʼt want to stay in L.A. He didnʼt want to do television. He wanted theater, but theater without long periods away from home on roadtrips. And he wanted to work with young people. He had begun teaching some, as an associate director of The Playhouse West School of Acting, where he also supervised the building the theater and studios. At just the right time, the chairmanship of the ECU drama department came open. “One of my teachers who was a Jungian said there are no coincidences; there are convergences.” Coming home, Shearin and his wife Jennifer created their own mini-farm on four acres in Grifton. At one point they had two horses, three dogs, three cats, fish and an C o n t i n u e d 18 • SPRING 2005 • edge iguana, plenty to keep three growing kids active. Any spare time, Dad kept filled. He followed his childrenʼs age group up the ladder, coaching t-ball, baseball and soccer. Even though he knew nothing about soccer beforehand, he says, “My team won the county championships several times. We were feared and despised.” Christmas break developed its own tradition. Every year on the day after Christmas, Dad and kids pack up the sleeping bags and head for the woods for a winter camping trip. All three children started school in Grifton, just as Shearin wanted. Large schools pigeon-hole students too quickly, he says. He hoped his children would have a broader experience. “I wanted them to develop into well-rounded, confident kids,” he says. Today Daniel, a music major, is a chancellorʼs scholar at Appalachian State. Kathleen is a senior at the N.C. School of Math and Science in Durham, and Sarah is finishing her junior year as a full scholarship student at St. Maryʼs School, a private high school in Raleigh. He gloats only a little. “The proof is in the pudding,” he says. “Theyʼre the kinds of kids I hoped they would be, and theyʼve all started to find the things they want to do.” Jennifer Shearin has found a calling, too. Although John handled kitchen duties early in their marriage, she took over the pots and pans when they decided she should stay home with the children. Cooking suited her. She now owns and operates The Daily Grind, a Greenville restaurant. The return to North Carolina brought Shearin back into the heart of an extended family, too. At Thanksgiving every year, he and his cousin Powell Jenkins stage a turkey cookoff. Shearin roasts his bird; Jenkins swears by deep-frying. Shearin leads the after-dinner sing-along. “On his first visit for a holiday event, my now son-in-law shook his head and said it was like visiting the Waltons,” says Carolyn Patton, who remembers cousin John teaching her to shag in their grandmotherʼs front parlor. He was four years older. “I worshipped the ground he walked on, so he must have been patient.” Now she must be forbearing, even if all in fun. “John can assume a role very quickly and disguise his voice,” she says. “Anytime I get a strange phone call, I assume itʼs John. Unfortunately, sometimes it isnʼt.” The stability of the extended family may have been part of the farmʼs early attraction for Shearin. Aside from summers there, his early life had little. He once counted 17 times his family moved before he graduated from high school. Early on, the moves followed his fatherʼs career in opera and musical theater. Even so, his father was often absent, and before Shearin was 10, his parents had divorced. Afterward, he seldom heard from his father. His mother scrambled to make ends meet, often working two jobs and frequently moving, usually to a cheaper apartment. During that period, Shearin took over most of the household work — cooking, cleaning and keeping an eye out for his younger brother Bob. “He was always my male figure,” Bob Shearin says now. “I derived safety from having a big brother who would make things OK, keep things safe and play baseball with me. He didnʼt have that. It probably gave him a little more sense that life can be unpredictable.” John Shearin gives it another spin. “We were raised to be self-reliant,” he says. “The positive part is weʼre very resilient. I donʼt think thereʼs a situation in the world that is scary to us.” Later, after his motherʼs remarriage, Shearin had a chance to shake off responsibility. He played through his freshman year of college, then hit the road for what he calls his Jack Kerouac period. First he hitchhiked to Florida, where he found work in a hotel kitchen. Then it was on to New Orleans, where he became an apprentice to a sculptor. In his free time he wrote poetry, kept journals and sang in coffee houses. “I was a halfway folk singer, just sort of following the muse,” he says. “It was about as good as it gets for a 19 year old. I had just enough money to get by. I got room and board from the sculptor fellow and about $25 a week on top of that. It was perfect.” Perfect, but not leading anywhere. In LEFT TO RIGHT: John Shearin performs in ECU productions of Biloxi Blues (1994), My Three Angels (2005) and Inherit the Wind (2002) and directs students in rehearsal. He chooses to act and direct, like his theatrical idol, Laurence Olivier. edge • SPRING 2005 • 19 Rooted in theater... continues 1965, with President Kennedyʼs inaugural address still ringing in his ears, Shearin decided that what he could do for his country was to follow family tradition and enlist in the Army. “I wanted to do my service in Vietnam,” he says. “It was early in the war. At the time it seemed we might have a real mission over there. While I was there, it became clear we were in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.” Only years later, when he wrote a trilogy of plays about emotional responses to the war, could he shake the images of women and children burned by napalm and the evacuations of wounded and dead soldiers as the Viet Cong overran outpost after outpost. In Vietnam, he was stationed with an advisory team near the Thai border. A compound security specialist, he ran what passed for an air strip. Stateside, he briefly took charge of a rehabilitation training program at the Fort Dix stockade in New Jersey before spending his final months of duty on the California coast. “The Army was the best thing that happened to me in terms of running an academic department,” he says, “not in the sense of giving orders because that doesnʼt work very well, but in terms of being able to work with a lot of different kinds of people and understand them.” After the Army, Shearin settled down for serious academic life at the College of William and Mary. He calls it the perfect environment, intense and nurturing yet peaceful. He enrolled as an English major. He planned to write poetry and songs and one day teach English in college. Theater was not a consideration. The memories of his childhood, with his father constantly pulled away from home, were too strong. Then, like Saul on the road to Damascus, he was struck by a blinding light. “This very beautiful girl who sat next to me in Shakespeare class had an extra ticket to the William and Mary Theatre,” he recalls. “I didnʼt care all that much about going to the play, but since she was asking, I said OK. I was sitting there on the first row of the mezzanine and it was like a message from on high: ʻThis is what you must do.ʼ The next day, I changed my major.” Kiss Me Kate probably never had as much effect on anyone before or since. William and Mary gave him an academic background that served him well as a future director, but he recognized the need for more technical training. “Very few undergraduate programs have specific structured approach to acting,” he says. Graduate school at Penn State helped fill the gap for him. Further study fol-lowed with professional workshops and classes in New York and programs in the Sanford Meisner Acting Technique in Los Angeles. When he took the ECU job, he knew he was he inheriting a department built on the Meisner program. “The genius to me of Sandy Meisner is his organization and progression of exercises,” Shearin says. “He builds a step at a time, so you get a progressive and cumulative effect. Each exercise is directly connected to the previous one, so itʼs growing as an organic whole, not just linear. At the end, itʼs also reasonably comprehensive.” When students leave ECU with a BFA in drama, he says, they should be able to go out and compete effectively in a highly competitive field. Just before they do, they get one last lesson from John Shearin. His capstone course covers the preparation of audition material and the how-to steps of building a career. “I encourage them to make conscious choices,” he says. “And I stress ethics a lot, networking, helping your brothers and sisters. I tell them itʼs better to be supportive than combative.” Itʼs part of what he learned from Capʼn Bob and Sally Jenkins. “The golden rule came very strongly from them: treat other people the way youʼd like to be treated. Donʼt use them as a means to an end.” If only Capʼn Bob and Sally had lived a few decades more, they no doubt would have taken pleasure in how their careful lessons took root in their grandson, the one who went off to Hollywood and came home again. They would have recognized what they surely already knew, the simple and honest truth behind another age-old lesson: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. • 20 • SPRING 2005 • edge Decreasing Forecasts of commercial feasibility help clear way for improvements to aviation safety edge • SPRING 2005 • 21 C o n t i n u e d Cloudiness LEFT: The tropospheric airborne metereological data and reporting system, now being tested, is designed to provide better short-term weather information. Image courtesy of Airdat. Five years ago, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law died when Kennedyʼs Piper Saratoga crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The cause of the accident remains a mystery, but a chief suspect is the dense haze that hung over his route between New Jersey and Massachusetts. The weather report before Kennedyʼs takeoff had indicated good flying conditions with visibility of six to eight miles. “Thatʼs probably a case where better information could have helped,” said Dr. Paul J. Kauffmann, chairman of the department of technology systems. Better information may soon be on the way. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and other partners are testing a new weather data collection system during the first six months of 2005 — one that may eventually lead to better short-term forecasts and immediate reports of dangerous turbulence and icing. The idea for the system originated with NASA, but it was Kauffmann who tested its commercial feasibility: calculating the amount of data that would be needed to improve forecasts, estimating the number of airplanes needed to collect the data, and putting dollars and cents to the costs and savings. “He came in when nothing existed, which is difficult,” said Jay Ladd, CEO of Airdat, one of the partners in the project. “He took the concept and said, this doesnʼt exist but if it did, hereʼs what it would take. He did a really terrific study thatʼs been a cornerstone of the project.” Paul Stough, the aviation weather information team leader at NASAʼs Langley Research Center, concurred. “The work that Paul has done has been applied by industry to show the financial payoff, by NASA to help guide our research and by the FAA to plan for implementation,” he said. The study is one of a series Kauffmann has conducted since 1998 in connection with NASAʼs Weather Accident Prevention Project. The overall project was stimulated by former President Clintonʼs goal of reducing the rate of aviation accidents by 80 percent. Weather is implicated in a third of those accidents, whether they involve small private planes like Kennedyʼs or large commercial airliners. The critical need, Kauffmann said, is for better short-term forecasts to improve safety and the efficiency of the air transportation network. “Weʼre looking at two to four hours from now,” he said. “Thatʼs the interval that impacts air transportation. If Iʼm flying an airplane from Greenville to Washington, I need to know whatʼs going to be happening in the next hour and 45 minutes. Or if Iʼm scheduling runways at OʼHare, I need to know if that thunderstorm over Wisconsin is moving this way. Itʼs a big deal if you have to shut down a runway and change the direction of landing or if youʼre leaving Los Angeles and you have to load extra fuel to allow for circling or diversion in case of bad weather. Weʼre getting back to a pre-9/11 level of air traffic. One of the ways to enhance productivity and minimize delays is to provide better weather data.” Current forecasts draw on information from radar, satellites, weather balloons and sensors mounted on large commercial airliners. None of those sources provides frequent, timely and widespread coverage of the humidity, temperature, air pressure and wind in the lower 15,000 feet of the atmosphere, where thunderstorms and other dangerous conditions form. The system now being tested — called TAMDAR, for tropospheric airborne meteorological data and reporting system — is designed to fill the gap. It will also, for the first time, collect scientific data on two other conditions that are critical for pilots: turbulence and icing. In the current test, sensors designed by Morrisville-based Airdat have been mounted on 60 planes operated by Mesaba, Northwest Airlinesʼ regional feeder airline in the Great Lakes region. Data collected throughout a flight are transmitted at regular intervals, such as every 5 to 15 minutes, over a satellite- and ground-based communications network, then assembled into a useful format for weather forecasters, aviation control centers and, eventually, other users. The sensors worked well on hurricane trackers and other research aircraft. This study will show whether they prove practical under real-world conditions of commercial aviation and whether the data improve forecasting. The cooperation of regional airlines will be an important factor in TAMDARʼs success. “For the data we want, we need fairly low-flying planes and planes that go short distances so theyʼre going up and down often,” Kauffmann said. “Thereʼs not a whole lot of short-term weather data that youʼre interested in at 30,000 feet where the big aircraft are.” Regional carriers fit the bill. In addition, unlike private planes, they fly on regular schedules, and unlike large carriers, they fly to in and out of smaller airports, providing more widespread coverage. Kauffmannʼs feasibility study estimated that nationwide implementation would require sensors on about 1,500 planes. For Airdatʼs Ladd, that was a critical piece of information. “You have someone who is objective, credible and knowledgeable saying thereʼs economic value in developing and deploying the system, and when you do deploy, the TOP: Paul Kauffman, right, is credited with proving the commercial feasibility of TAMDAR. With him is collaborator Erol Ozan. BOTTOM: This prototype of a data-link cockpit weather information display was developed by NASA in conjunction with Honeywell Bendix and King Air. Photography courtesy of NASA. 22 • SPRING 2005 • edge order of magnitude is feasible — itʼs 1,500, not 15,000 or 20,000,” he said. “Paul helped get this off the drawing board.” Kauffmann credits two of his former graduate students for their work on the TAMDAR assessments. One, Dr. Erol Ozan, is now an assistant professor at ECU. The other, Dr. Yesim Sireli, is teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Ozan has contributed further by developing a model for optimizing data collection, to improve TAMDARʼs cost-effectiveness. Itʼs not just deploying the system that costs money; so do transmitting and analyzing data. “When the weather is calm, you can reduce sampling,” Ozan said. “But if thereʼs a critical situation like a storm or fog coming, you increase sampling to collect more data, and the data you get will be more valuable.” Ozanʼs model provides guidance on which data to collect and when and where to collect them. Kauffmann began his NASA collaboration when he was teaching at Old Dominion University. His first study examined whether it made good business sense to install cockpit weather information systems, to provide information directly to pilots, and predicted the rate at which the industry would adopt the newly developing technology. Later, he led feasibility studies for adopting particular types of technology — improved radar systems at small airports and turbulence sensors on airliners, for example. Now heʼs going back to the first study to see how his predictions compare with industry trends: who has bought what and why. “Back at the time of the original study, we thought weʼd be looking at a cohesive delivery system — an integrated multifunction display that would go into new planes,” he said. The rise of satellite radio, Palm Pilots and wireless technologies has made it less expensive to get the Weather Channel or its equivalent in the cockpit. As a result, business aircraft owners — always leading innovators — have adopted cockpit weather systems even faster than predicted. Recreational pilots and the rest of the general aviation market are right on track. The large transport airlines are lagging behind. “I thought issues that are difficult to measure, like fuel savings, would be a bigger motivation,” he said. “Iʼm still trying to get into the factors, but I think what got in the way of the original forecast was 9/11 and the current financial bankruptcies. Theyʼre not spending money right now. “Thereʼs also a bit of chicken or egg situation. Business and general aviation are buying current weather information because without it, no one is telling them anything about the weather. On the other side, big aircraft donʼt have that kind of problem. They have central facilities collecting weather information and feeding it to the pilots. The bigger issue for them is does the weather service have information for them to use? They arenʼt making a move because the improved weather data arenʼt available yet.” That brings the question back around to TAMDAR. The six-month trial is scheduled to run through mid-July, and NASAʼs Stough hopes to expand it to a full year of data collection. “So far weʼre getting some very good reports,” he said, “but itʼs just starting.” • TOP: Airdat employees, who helped design the TAMDAR sensors, pose with a Northwest Airlines commuter plane. Photography courtesy of NASA. MIDDLE: Planes like the one above are transmitting weather information throughout the Great Lakes Region. Image courtesy of Airdat. BOTTOM: A close-up shows the sensor mounted on a Saab 340. Photograph courtesy of Airdat. edge • SPRING 2005 • 23 Chiano s TSeoxuatsh • • • • • • • • • • • A sociologist who spent two years with the U.S. Border Patrol reflects on fear, frustration along the Rio Grande Photograph courtesy Lee Maril 24 • SPRING 2005 • edge C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2005 • 25 D r. Robert Lee Maril, professor and chair of sociology, has worked alongside Gulf Coast shrimpers, dwelled among Mexican- Americans and immersed himself in the daily struggles for existence of Oklahomaʼs poor. In January 2000, while teaching at the University of Texas-Pan American, he set out to do what at first seemed a similar project, an exploration of the lives and work of U.S. Border Patrol agents of the McAllen Station in southern Texas. Over the next two years, he rode, walked, tracked, ran and waited alongside agents at every opportunity — spending 600 hours covering shifts with them, plus hours more conducting interviews, accompanying agents to court proceedings and researching the history and policies of the region and the Border Patrol. Looking back, he recognizes that this was anything but a normal research project. It is not, he said recently, something he would do again. “It never occurred to me it would be that dangerous,” he said. “Youʼre running around in the dark in the middle of the desert. You donʼt know who the good guys are so youʼre trying to keep as close as possible to the agent youʼre with. This is not what a rational person does who wants to live as long as possible.” The product of Marilʼs labor, Patrolling Chaos: the U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas, was published in November 2004 by the Texas Tech University Press. In it, he documents the lives of a dozen agents as they combat illegal immigration, drug smuggling and stifling bureaucracy. Along the way, he introduces a host of other characters. They include “coyotes” who guide illegal aliens across the border for pay and would-be immigrants. Thereʼs Nature Boy, the coyote who works in the nude, and Fat Man, a coyote of ample girth and growing wealth, who salutes agents from the southern bank of the Rio Grande with his ever-present can of beer. Thereʼs Onion Girl, an 11-year-old captured with her mother and sister trying to make their way into the United States through an onion field. She stands out from the multitude of others at first because of a blind right eye and thick knit cap worn despite sweltering heat. When the cap falls off, it reveals a bald head and disfiguring tumor. And then thereʼs Benny, an illegal alien of a different sort. A three-ton elephant, Benny makes his way across the border, appearing in Houston one week and Mexico City the next, without any documentation to show for his trip. Finally, thereʼs a much-respected supervisor arrested on charges of accepting bribes. In a situation as bizarre as Bennyʼs, none of the agents mentions the supervisor again, not at the station house, not during long nights on patrol, not over lunch at the agentsʼ favorite diner, not under the tree where they gather to unwind. Itʼs as if he never existed. Maril fills his account with sweat, stench, dust and pain. Fear rides shotgun to boredom, the potential for violent death as omnipresent as mosquitoes and prickly pear cactus. Comic moments — an agent hanging onto the legs of an immigrant whoʼs trying to pull himself back through a gap in a bridge, Nature Boy misjudging the distance as he dives toward the Rio Grande — quickly lose their humor in the shadow of immense human tragedy. As much as anything, frustration rules. An entrenched bureaucracy values procedure over results, evident nowhere more than in the policy of deterrence. The policy requires agents to spend shifts sitting in trucks, making themselves obvious at official crossings, while miles of border go unpatrolled. Maril concludes his account with a call for a bipartisan, binational task force to study the issues of the southern border, reach a consensus about border policy and reform the Border Patrol. edge sat down with Maril to talk about his experience and perspective on border issues. 26 • SPRING 2005 • edge edge: Most of your previous work focused on poverty. How did this topic entice you? Maril: I had a few students in my class who were Border Patrol agents. They were coming back to get their degrees at night. I started talking with them during break, and they said you should come along and see what we do. (Getting permission from their bosses proved to be far more difficult, however.) I also really believe that what happens in the border area happens in the interior. Take industrialization and the use of low-wage workers. We started seeing twin plants, one on each side of the border, the maquiladoras, in early ʻ60s and ʻ70s. Now we call it out-sourcing. Another thing, the area is a huge human laboratory full of extremes. One of the extremes is poverty. The region is far poorer than Appalachia. edge: You spent 600 hours on patrol with these agents. Did the experience have a lasting impact? Maril: It was 600 hours on patrol, plus a lot of time hanging around the station, interviewing people around the Border Patrol. Originally, I had planned to spend one year going out on patrol, but I was there when 9/11 happened so I decided I should stay and see how that evolved. But in answer to your question, I came away with a much better appreciation of what they do. These are honest men and women, most of them, trying to make a living the best way they can, and they are doing their job with integrity. I had done work with law enforcement before, with police departments and prosecuting attorneys, so I had some comparison. I had great appreciation at the end of it that they really do risk their lives and put themselves in high-risk situations. At the same time, they pay a cost. It is very difficult work. So it has changed me in my admiration for what they are trying to do. I also had no in-person experience before with the problems undocumented workers face. I interviewed a number of them in doing the book. Itʼs a tragic situation. Thatʼs why I wrote about Onion Girl and several of the other people. These are typical of the kind of people trying to cross. Theyʼre putting their lives at risk to look for a better job. edge: You left a lot of those stories unfinished. Maril: I wanted to write this not as a typical sociological tome. I wanted to give people a flavor for the diversity of the agents and the diversity of the people along the border. I chose the word chaos (for the title) very carefully. I really think it is a chaotic human situation. By not finishing those stories, I was trying to leave readers up in the air and give them the sense of all these influences that I was seeing, to give them a sense of the chaotic nature of the whole enterprise. So I intentionally didnʼt finish some of those stories, and of course some I donʼt know how they finished. The last I looked, Nature Boy was still thriving. He didnʼt have a lot of overhead. The agent that was accused of taking bribes as far as I know was allowed to retire. As far as I know, Fat Man is doing quite well. He lost his boat (in an arrest), but his boat was a wreck anyway so it was no loss to him. I had figured out that he was making about $300,000 a year when he worked in human smuggling. I tell my students now that if youʼre going to engage in crime along the border, donʼt waste your time with drugs, itʼs all about human smuggling. Thatʼs really where a lot of money is being made. edge: Despite the valor of individual agents, the picture is discouraging. When you look at all the burdens placed on them — stopping illegal immigrants and drugs, serving as the first line of defense against terrorism — is the charge too great? Maril: I couldnʼt have made up Benny the elephant. It happened right in the middle of this. I only regret that I didnʼt get to talk to the people involved personally. The argument is that if Benny, a three-ton male elephant, can be in Houston one day and Mexico City the next with no paper trail, then really we do have an open, porous border. We have in fact just kind of a theatrical production of what itʼs supposed to be like, and we have all these regulations, all this barbed wire and this high technology theyʼre talking about — the drones or pilot-less aircraft that have been used successfully in Afghanistan — as the next answer for this. The reality is that it is chaotic and has been for some time. Anyone who thinks itʼs different hasnʼt been there or looked at it for any period of time. edge: You make a good case that deterrence isnʼt working. If not deterrence, what? Maril: Not only did it not work, but every agent who did his job was discrediting his supervisor because they were catching people they werenʼt supposed to catch. That was the absurdity of it. The better the agent, the more he was going to be discouraged by his supervisor because they wanted to see low apprehension rates among illegal aliens. That whole logic that I tried to explain was absurd, but thatʼs what was there and what I found in the Congressional Record. First (the Border Patrolʼs top officials) justified needing more money from Congress because they were catching more and more people. Then in the early ʻ90s they totally turned 180 degrees and said now because of deterrence we can show that weʼre doing a great job because weʼre catching fewer and fewer people. Since that really wasnʼt the case, they had to increasingly clamp down on agents who were being productive. And of course that meant that some of the agents left or got frustrated. That to me is almost at the level of absurdity in terms of this federal bureaucracy, not only in handling the situation but in creating problems for itself. edge: So what do you do? Maril: What theyʼre doing right now is pretending that it does work. President Bush just came out saying what they need is 2,000 more agents. Tom Ridge, who just stepped down as Homeland Security chief, said they could do it with a thousand more agents and more reliance on high technology. I would throw out numbers like 30,000 more agents, or 50,000 more. Right now we have 11,000. To really do what theyʼre supposed to be doing, there has to be a massive investment in border guards. Theyʼre not even thinking in those terms. The 2000 Census documents it quite well. There are 9 million to 13 million undocumented workers in this country, and there are more coming every day. Where are they coming from? Theyʼre coming predominantly across our southern border. So what can we do? One solution would be more and more agents if we want to get Lee Maril, author of Patrolling Chaos: the U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas edge • SPRING 2005 • 27 serious about it. What I suggested was a bipartisan task force that would make it a public debate that everyone could weigh in on it, and we could decide what kind of border we want, in reality. Do we want a closed border? Do we want to have an open border? Right now we have a totally open border, but the public is being told that it isnʼt. edge: In the book, you note that drug trafficking brings Mexico a billion dollars or more in annual income, more than the country earns from oil exports. Does this support arguments that controlling narcotics from the supply side is doomed? Maril: I think it does, if Mexico is any kind of example. It has corrupted their society to a large degree. Itʼs a phenomenon that has only happened in about the last 15 years, and it has changed how their society functions. I tried to point out through numerous examples that the Border Patrol was up against a situation in which they couldnʼt win. The drug cartels have all the money, better equipment, more highly paid men and women, more technology, and theyʼre always one big step ahead. The test — itʼs like the Census and the count of undocumented workers. The test with drugs is in terms of availability and price. Right now in this country, drugs are very available and very cheap. So thatʼs the proof that the Border Patrol isnʼt able to do that part of its job. edge: Knowing how the border functions, does thinking about the potential for terrorists coming in through there keep you awake at night? Maril: I just canʼt believe weʼre not doing more. If I can take you there now and show you 100 different places where you can just walk across, then certainly people who want to do us a lot of harm have found those places and know how to do that. Remember that, as a part of this, I mentioned the Mexican armyʼs participation in this whole thing, in the smuggling of humans and also illegal drugs. I have no question that if there are terrorists who want to come into this country, theyʼre already here. And itʼs not just the southern border. The northern border is open, too. edge: Have their been any major changes along the border since you finished the book? Maril: Itʼs alarming. In the last six months, violence related to narcotrafficking has increased dramatically … such that the United States issued a travelers alert to stay away from the northern border area of Mexico. edge: As you noted in the book, one reform after 9/11 was to combine the Border Patrol and Customs and bring both under the umbrella of Homeland Security. Do you see any reason for hope in that? Maril: The positive I see is that theyʼre now sharing information. The Border Patrol is now getting information directly from the FBI through their computer systems. If youʼre an undocumented worker and they catch you coming across the river, the first thing they do is fingerprint you and take your name. If it shows up on their computer that it matches information from the FBI, youʼre going to get nailed and youʼre not going to be set free, which was previously the case. On the other hand, I honestly can see no other change. In fact, on the negative side, an Associated Press story says that BORSTAR, which is the Border Patrolʼs tactical squad, has sent Border Patrol agents to Afghanistan and Iraq to help the military with border situations there. Itʼs draining the very few resources we have. edge: I saw another story announcing the opening of a new training facility, bringing all the Border Patrol training into one place. Maril: Yes, but I havenʼt seen evidence that what theyʼre training them in has changed. I put this question to my students: If you were going to hire people to patrol a river and you were going to require them on a regular basis to try to save someone who was drowning, wouldnʼt it make sense to teach them how to swim? Thatʼs not happening. I credit all these problems the Border Patrol has to the fact that itʼs very insular and very 1950s militaristic. It hasnʼt and wonʼt reform itself. Theyʼre going to keep doing what theyʼve done until someone tells them to do differently because itʼs a top-down organization. What the agents think has no bearing. edge: Has your call for a task force had any effect? Maril: Not yet. Iʼm hoping that when the book has been out six months to a year, it will gain some momentum. I certainly intend to participate in lobbying Congress about these Border Patrol issues. The Border Patrol really needs our help. • Frustration runs high among agents patrolling the Rio Grande. Photograph courtesy of Lee Maril EXCERPT FROM PATROLLING CHAOS “The border in Deep South Texas meant and was many things to many different people. But maybe it could best be understood by an agent in the middle of a dark night along the banks of the Rio Grande, tracking fresh sign along a hidden trail. Agents — good or bad, strong or weak — experienced similar epiphanies when they realized that it was just them out there in the vast darkness, when they recognized that the only link with the McAllen Station was a plastic radio pinned to the shoulder of their shirt. That was when the sheer magnitude of this human conundrum could perhaps best be configured, when an image of the border could be conjured based upon empirical data interpreted within the context of real human experience including fear. “The border was at least in part this: an enormous, dark brown, hairy tarantula ten thousand times the size of Agent Humberto Taylor’s specimen, a beast moving at its own pace through time and space, oblivious and amorphous, hideous yet compelling, its sweaty infectious bite the front edge of decay and death. It waited out there along the banks of the stinking, toxic river, or in among the fields of ten-foot-tall sugar cane, or down at the bottom of the cesspool of flowing waters where the hydrilla rooted, or deep in the thick forests of prickly pear. Although not human, this border creature was a product of human society, a scumbag nightmare from the Freudian deep.” From Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas by Robert Lee Maril. Texas Tech University Press, 2004 28 • SPRING 2005 • edge Could foods, chemicals, air pollution lie behind diseases associated with chronic inflammation? A physician suggests it’s time to find out. Exposed C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2005 • 29 Dr. William Joel Meggs ran down the list of diseases associated with inflammation. Leading the list was the nation’s No. 1 killer, cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. “If you put blood vessels under a microscope, what you see is that the cells involved in inflammation are there,” he said. “These cells come from white blood cells designed to destroy germs. They will not only destroy germs, but will destroy or damage epithelial cells (which line blood vessels).” Next came the nation’s No. 2 killer, cancer. “Cancer develops at sites of inflammation.” Then he added arthritis, asthma, allergies, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus and multiple sclerosis, all long known to involve inflammatory response. Now, researchers are linking inflammation with type 2 diabetes and obesity. “The more we know about inflammation and how it causes diseases and ways to block it,” he said, “the healthier we’re going to be.” That conviction lay behind Meggs’ decision to write The Inflammation Cure: How to Combat the Hidden Factor Behind Heart Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, Osteoporosis and Other Diseases of Aging, published in 2004 by McGraw Hill’s Contemporary Books. In it Meggs, professor of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology, and co-author Carol Svec, a health writer based in Raleigh, describe for a lay audience the growing scientific evidence linking chronic inflammation and potentially life-threatening disease. They also outline evidence suggesting that in at least in some cases the inflammation may be triggered by diet, chemical exposure, air pollution and other environmental factors. Meggs hopes to take his campaign further. As president of the newly created Environmental Health Research Foundation, he is leading a group of physicians and scientists seeking to build a laboratory where researchers can conduct experiments to learn which environmental factors cause or exacerbate disease. The group includes physicians from North America and Europe. “People are exposed to so many things — chemicals that never existed before, electromagnetic radiation, very monotonous diets for many of us,” he said. “There’s a limit to how much you can do (to understand the consequences) with epidemiological studies. The other approach is to look at individuals who are suffering from these diseases, isolate them from environmental factors and then re-expose them to see if these factors modulate disease.” That, among other things, is what the research facility would enable. Back in the 1950s, Meggs said, several hospitals around the country established environmental control units that allowed this type of experimentation. Air purification systems eliminated natural and manmade pollutants, and food and other exposures could be carefully monitored. Patients with severe disease that didn’t respond to other types of treatment could be sent to a unit for treatment, sometimes with spectacular success, sometimes with none. The experiments, though, were never conducted in a systematic way that allowed scientific conclusions. Insurance companies stopped providing coverage, and eventually every environmental control unit in the United States closed. With growing evidence linking inflammation to disease and environmental factors to inflammation, Meggs said, it’s time to re-evaluate environmental control units. “Five expert panels assembled by the federal government have recommended that this technique be studied on a research level, but funding has not been made available,” he said. His group, which incorporated as a non-profit organization earlier this year, will try to raise private money to build the research laboratory. The location has yet to be determined, though Meggs considers Greenville an ideal location. While a conclusive case for an environmental connection has yet to be built, anecdotal evidence is enticing. Meggs gave examples. A severe case of rheumatoid arthritis was sent into remission by eliminating a single food from the patient’s diet. A case of Crohn’s disease cleared up when the patient stopped smoking. Population-based LEFT: William Meggs receives an award from Dr. Cynda Johnson, dean of the Brody School of Medicine, on the publication of his book. RIGHT: Meggs checks an x-ray with senior emergency medicine resident Chris Register. 30 • SPRING 2005 • edge studies also show interesting correlations. The incidence of lupus increases in areas where industrial chemical exposure is high. Studies in large cities have shown that when air pollution spikes, the rate of heart attacks increases. And overall, the heart attack rate in New York City and Houston is twice the rate of the rest of the country. “So we have all these anecdotal cases,” he said. “What we want is to set up research protocols so we can bring in a number of people with Crohn’s disease, get rid of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, simplify their diets and study how those changes affect their inflammation.” Identifying and eliminating triggers for inflammation is especially critical because drug treatments for inflammatory diseases can have serious side effects. Some cause liver problems and accelerated atherosclerosis. Others leave patients more susceptible to a host of ailments because, in reducing inflammation, they also reduce the body’s ability to fight off infection. “What I’d like to see is more research into identifying the environmental causes of inflammation so we can rationalize that approach to medicine,” Meggs said. “Drug therapy has been rationalized in the sense that we can tell you specific indications for drugs, the side effects, whether there’s more than one treatment, and we can sit down and decide on a course of therapy. But the environmental approach has not been rationalized.” Despite his optimism about environmental therapy, Meggs acknowledged that it will not prove beneficial in all inflammatory diseases. In pure auto-immune disease, the body attacks itself rather than an external trigger. Multiple sclerosis is one example. In MS, the body mistakenly identifies a protein on the nerve sheath as a foreign object and attacks it. “In that type of case, we have to find a way to turn off the body’s response to that particular protein,” Meggs said. “We have the technology to turn on the body’s response to almost anything. We can inject rats with this protein and a chemical that will cause them to develop MS, but we don’t have the chemical to turn off the reaction. If I could make one contribution to medicine right now, it would be to find that chemical.” • Chronic inflammation: a good response gone bad If your doctor has said you need to watch your cholesterol level, you’ve probably heard the lecture about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Cholesterol carried in the blood by high-density lipoprotein can keep blood vessels clean. That’s the good form. The bad form rides along on low-density lipoprotein and helps clog arteries. Inflammation is a little bit the same way. Good inflammation results from the body’s attempt to heal itself. Whether triggered by a cold or a cut or pneumonia, it’s a short-term response that goes away as you heal. Inflammation turns bad when it becomes a chronic condition. That’s the inflammation Dr. William Meggs targets in his book The Inflammation Cure. In his office recently, he pointed to asthma as an example of how inflammation can go awry. “If you have pneumonia, inflammation helps you fight off germs,” he said. “With allergies, someone exposed to ragweed pollen will inappropriately fight off the pollen as if it is a germ. If this continues over time, changes occur. In asthma, which can be caused by allergies, you get a remodeling of the tissue of the lungs. In the tissues that are damaged, you actually see an increase in the nerve fibers that cause inflammation so you get almost a positive feedback result. Smaller insults that would have been tolerated before the damage occurred are now amplified. You also see a migration of inflammatory cells from the blood stream into lungs, and this is in the absence of infection. If the stimulus keeps on coming, chronic disease develops.” In The Inflammation Cure, Meggs and co-author Carol Svec describe the growing body of evidence linking inflammation to a host of diseases, from arthritis and Alzheimer’s to heart disease and stroke. They also provide practical tips for reducing your risk of inflammatory response. Most of those tips coincide with the good health practices you already know: Don’t smoke. Eat right, including lots of fruit and vegetables. Exercise. Brush your teeth and floss. (Though not fully understood, a connection has been found between gum disease and heart disease.) Adding fish oil supplements to your daily multivitamin regimen also could be a good move. Meggs cited one study that showed fish oil supplements, which are high in omega 3 fatty acids, cut the risk of dying of heart disease in half. “That’s one simple and inexpensive intervention,” he said. Overall, he said, reduce your exposure to sources of combustion as much as possible. That means staying away from cigarette smoke, car exhaust, gas cook stove fumes and wood burning fireplaces. From a public health standpoint, he said, one of the biggest improvements we can make is to reduce air pollution. “Air pollution is bad for lungs, for airways, for the cardiovascular system,” he said. “So when we move to all electric cars, the heart attack rate will decrease in big cities.” • explore e x p l o r a t i o n s edge • SPRING 2005 • 31 San Lucas, an impoverished town in a hot, dry region of south-central Mexico, hardly ranks as a typical tourist destination. So why did Dr. Jeff Popke, associate professor of geography, spot three North Carolina license plates there in a span of one week last summer? It was, he said, evidence of a deepening tie between rural North Carolina, on the one hand, and San Lucas and its surrounding Tierra Caliente region, on the other. Popke and Dr. Rebecca Torres, assistant professor of geography, are exploring that link as part of an ongoing study of rural North Carolina’s new and growing Latino population. “We’re interested not just in what’s happening here, but in the linkages back to Mexico and how these processes (of immigration) restructure the political, economic and social aspects of both the sending and receiving regions,” Torres said. San Lucas is a “sending” region: home to a significant number of Latinos who’ve settled in Greene County. This summer, working with a Mexican Ph.D. student, Popke will spend nine weeks in San Lucas conducting T W O S I D E S O F T H E C O I N Geographers ask how Latino immigration affects communities in rural N.C., Mexico door-to-door surveys of 300 households and in-depth interviews with at least 30 individuals who have made one or more trips to North Carolina. Torres will travel to Mexico to help with the interviews. They want to learn about the conditions that have encouraged the northern migration, Mexicans’ impressions of North Carolina and the ongoing ties between Latinos in North Carolina and Mexico. It goes to the heart of what geographers call transnationalism. “People don’t live their lives on one side of the border or another,” Popke said. “In many ways, people have meaningful social relationships that extend across all kinds of political borders.” The impetus for the study is the significant increase in Latinos settling in North Carolina over the past 10 to 15 years. Between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a 400 percent increase in its Latino population. In many rural areas, including Greene County, the impact was even greater. Greene doubled the state rate of growth. Today, Latinos account for 8 percent of the county’s total population. Popke, Torres and fellow geographer Holly Hapke conducted earlier research to learn, among other things, what draws Latinos to Greene. While jobs, education and family ties rank as the top draws, there appears to be another underlying attraction. “People are coming here because it’s rural,” Popke said. “Partly that’s the nature of the rural economy — they’re coming here for jobs — but people tell us they want to live in a rural area. The word tranquilo comes up constantly. Es tranquilo. It’s peaceful here.” Peace comes with a price. An overwhelming portion of Greene County Latinos are employed in low-skill jobs and live on the edge of poverty. They live in relative isolation, without the aid of Hispanic support organizations found where there are larger enclaves of Spanish speakers. But the crime rate is low. They can grow small gardens. People are friendly, and no one is constantly asking to seek their documentation. “We’ve started to think of this as a tacit agreement whereby Latinos accept some of the downside in exchange for tranquilo, this feeling of being left alone,” Popke said. “From the host community, people at the moment seem willing to accept outsiders who are quite different because they are providing useful labor and helping the economy. How long that will continue to last is an open question.” One outgrowth of the geographers’ research has been the creation of a dual-language immersion program in the Greene County Schools. Dubbed Los Puentes, or Bridges, the program is shrinking the language and cultural gap for 80 elementary school students, including native English and Spanish-speakers. It features classes conducted all in English or all in Spanish on alternate days. The program also is giving ECU researchers a rare opportunity. Linguists are studying how children in the program learn new languages and communicate with one another. Education faculty are getting insight into the preparation their students need for teaching in a culturally diverse classroom. And the geographers used their connection to the school system as an introduction to Latino families in their survey. Mostly, Torres said, she hopes the program fulfills its name, bridging the divide between people and cultures. “North Carolina is at a crossroads,” she said. “We can look at this (growing Latino population) as a potential asset or as an entrenched kind of underclass. How this is resolved will make a huge difference with what you can do in the future in terms of economic development. If you have tensions and a deep divide, it will be hard to create a situation of improving life for everybody. I see it as central to the future development for rural communities to address these issues head on.” • ABOVE: Kindergarten students enrolled in the Greene County dual-language immersion program. Photograph courtesy of Rebecca Torres. explore e x p l o r a t i o n s 32 • SPRING 2005 • edge D I R E C T I O N C E N T R A L Unlocking protein synthesis holds key to development, disease It’s the proteins, stupid. Though far too polite to state his case so bluntly, Dr. Brett D. Keiper quickly points out the importance of proteins in living organisms. “Up to now there’s been a lot of fervor about the genome, genes and the expression of genes and how they can lead to disease, including cancer,” said Keiper, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “What often gets overlooked is that none of these things happens without making the proteins in the cells. Genes don’t carry out function. It’s proteins that carry out function.” In other words, proteins direct the chemical reactions in cells, telling them when to multiply, whether to start up a new activity, when to turn on a defensive mechanism. In a developing embryo, they play a critical role in differentiation, the process that transforms an embryo from a uniform mass of cells into a complex individual with distinctive parts, such as heart, head and limbs for a human being. Certain proteins even direct cells to make new proteins. It’s that process of manufacturing, or synthesizing, new proteins that holds Keiper’s attention. He is particularly interested in the regulation of protein synthesis in developing embryos and in cancer. His research focuses on the role of a small protein known as translation initiation factor eIF4E, which seems to start the manufacturing process of other proteins. The eIF4E travels from the main body of the cell (the cytoplasm) into the nucleus to seek out messenger RNA (a copied portion of the genetic blueprint DNA), binds to it and transports it back to the cytoplasm. There, biochemical machines called ribosomes read, or translate, the message off the RNA and build the new protein it describes. Keiper wants to decipher how the new proteins that result from this activity affect the development of cells destined to become eggs or sperm. Keiper’s study subject is the nematode worm Caenorabditis elegans. “We can mutate a gene in the worm to knock out the function of this translation factor, then very quickly look at the next generation to see what difference it makes to the process of oogenesis when that protein is no longer there,” he said. “Do the oocytes (the precursors of eggs) grow in size, have normal morphology, become fertilized and go through normal growth stages to adulthood?” The process turned out to be even more complicated than Keiper first anticipated. The worm, it seems, has five versions, or isoforms, of the eIF4E protein, each encoded by its own gene and each affecting a different type of tissue. “We found out early that if we knocked out one isoform, it has only one effect,” Keiper said. “For example, getting rid of isoform 1 prevents the fertility of the oocyte or sperm, mostly sperm.” Another eIF4E isoform is expressed only in the nerve cells and muscles. “Worms deficient in this initiation factor look normal and grow normally at least in muscle structure, but their behavior is messed up. They don’t sense food, don’t use their muscles properly, don’t swim as well. So a lot of functions that have to do with nerves are either absent or very deficient.” Two other isoforms are expressed in the muscle and pharynx and in the gut, but their precise functions remain unclear. Only one version of eIF4E appears to be essential for survival. “When we look at embryos deficient in this protein, they will begin to divide to some hundred cells and then just stop,” Keiper said. “The cells no longer divide or differentiate. They die.” They die at the precise time that each cell would normally start on the path to becoming a new tissue type such as heart or nerve. “So isoform 3 is absolutely essential for some developmental step in going from a mass of undifferentiated cells to differentiated tissue.” In time, understanding the process of protein synthesis may not only deepen knowledge of how embryos develop, but could also shed light on potential treatments for cancer. The eIF4E translation initiation factor that Keiper studies is more abundant in embryonic cells than in adult cells. The only other place it is found at those levels, some five to 10 times the normal amount, is in cancer. “At the cellular level, there’s a lot of similarity between tumor development and embryo development,” Keiper said. “Both types of cells are growing and dividing, growing and dividing, in a very rapid cycle, and they use a lot of the same mechanisms to do that.” • Proteins in cells hold the secret to development and disease, says Brett Keiper. Let others proclaim the genius of Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. To Dr. Kevin Moll, those guys are mere johnny-come-latelys. His musical paragons carry names like Ockeghem, Regis and La Rue, who predate the great Classic composers by about 300 years. Moll, associate professor of musicology, rates Johannes Ockeghem, who died in 1497, as one of the top five composers in music history. “He is as hip as Bach. He is as hip as Beethoven,” Moll said. “He is as original and deep as any of those composers, and that is why I believe that over time, this music is going to get its due.” “This music” consists of European liturgical compositions dating to the 14th and 15th centuries. Their hallmark: polyphony, with multiple voices singing different notes in different rhythms simultaneously. Think of Gregorian chant, the plainsong revived and made popular by the monks of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, and multiply it. “This is Gregorian chant to the fourth power,” Moll said. A classical and jazz bassist, Moll came to early music almost by chance. Once introduced, E N - C H A N T I N G For musicologist, complex 15th-century church music unsurpassed he was hooked. The era of Dante, Chaucer, da Vinci and Botticelli, of mysticism and masses celebrated in soaring cathedrals, of a fellow named Copernicus who soon would propose an absurd theory that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe, this era had also given rise to a magnificent, complex musical traditional. “Fifteenth-century music is the first full maturity that Western music ever achieved, when you can say it really is at a place where it needs to go,” he said. “In my view, there are only a few peaks in music history. This is one of them.” As far as sacred music is concerned, Moll said, this repertoire has never been exceeded. That Mozart, not Ockeghem, has been celebrated through the ages has been due to historical, not aesthetic factors, he said. Part of it was that tastes simply shifted to favor newer composers. The music of Ockeghem, for example, was not performed regularly after about 1520. More fundamental changes occurred around 1600. “With the polyphonic tradition, all parts are basically equal,” Moll explained. “Around 1600, the type of music changed from a cappella polyphony to accompanied homophony, putting great weight on the top voice with a subordinate accompaniment.” This stylistic change was fundamental in the formation of so-called modern music. In addition, standards for notation developed that allowed a body of understood masterworks to flourish. “So these (earlier) pieces were obscured stylistically and then notationally,” Moll said. By the 18th century, everybody could play Mozart, but hardly anyone could translate Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. In this piece, the composer’s idea is to write a four-part mass, but only two parts are noted in the manuscript, Moll said. “You only know it’s four parts because one of the manuscripts in which it survives is in four-part realization,” he said. “But how can you have a four-part piece in which there are only two parts — and it is so beautiful? You do it by what’s called canon, two parts singing the same piece at different times. Like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. But that’s too easy for Ockeghem. Ockeghem starts the voices at the same time. The tenor will read the same note on a different clef in a different time signature. The title translates into the Mass of the Time Signatures.” Little wonder that Moll suggests it practically takes a Ph.D. in music to interpret and perform the music adequately. “It takes incredible intermediation,” he said. Even when he’s working with modern transcription, he finds it necessary to return to the original scores to confirm and sometimes correct the notations. Although a large amount of Renaissance music has been transcribed into modern notation, Moll’s mission has been to develop the interpretive tools for performing the Franco-Flemish music of the period and get it performed. In his 1997 book Counterpoint and Compositional Process in the Time of Dufay and in other publications, he explains for the modern performer such issues as the structure and performance practices of early music. He also leads two performance groups. The Early Music Singers, comprising ECU students, faculty and members of the community, perform an annual concert series that recreates a period church service. His professional vocal ensemble, Schola Discantus (The Choir of Discant), has produced six CDs of early music, most never before recorded, on the Lyrichord label. For three of the recordings, the group was joined by members of Grammy-winning male chorus Chanticleer. “These guys did it on their own time, for very little money,” Moll said. “That tells you how good the music is, that they want to perform the music that much.” • explore e x p l o r a t i o n s edge • SPRING 2005 • 33 Kevin Moll calls early music “Gregorian chant to the fourth power.” Moll directs the Early Music Singers in rehearsal. Pardon Dr. Gregg Hecimovich while he shakes off the dust. He’s been rooting around in 19th century family papers, following the clues in one of American literature’s more intriguing mysteries. Hecimovich, assistant pro-fessor of English, is hot on the trail of “Hannah Crafts,” author of The New York Times best-sell-ing novel The Bondswoman’s Narrative. Although written a century and a half earlier, The Bondswoman’s Narrative was first published in 2002 after Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovered the handwritten manuscript in an auction listing. It is believed to be the first novel written by an African-American woman. She also may have been an escaped slave. On the manuscript’s cover, she calls herself “a fugitive slave recently escaped from North Carolina.” Hannah Crafts is likely a pseudonym, but the text provides tantalizing hints that Crafts’ story may have been as much autobiography as fiction. So who was Hannah Crafts? And what can be learned about and from her these many years later? Hecimovich, a Victorian specialist, is taking a two-fold approach to answering those questions. On the historical level, he’s trying to clarify Crafts’ North Carolina connections. From the literary perspective, he’s unraveling the many ways in which Crafts borrowed from popular fiction of her day, especially Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. The result will be a book he has tentatively titled Hannah Crafts and North Carolina. Also in the works is a documentary to be developed in collaboration with the Museum of the Albemarle, a division of the N.C. Museum of History, in Elizabeth City. The novel tells the story of a slave woman’s escape from John Hill Wheeler and Ellen Wheeler of North Carolina and her eventual life as the wife of a minister in New Jersey. The Wheelers’ names also belong, perhaps not coincidentally, to real land- and slave-owners originally from Hertford County. Ellen Wheeler is cast in a particularly unflattering light, though one that historical records indicate may have been close to the mark. “At first Crafts scratched out the Wheeler name, as if she didn’t want to implicate herself, but at some point, she wrote it back in, perhaps after the Civil War, as if she were clearly desirous of implicating her oppressor,” Hecimovich said. “For historians and scholars, it is a clear link to someone recognizable in North Carolina and national history.” Hecimovich began his research with the papers of John Hill Wheeler’s niece, Kate Wheeler Cooper, which are held in the Joyner Library collection. Cooper’s papers include correspondence with her uncle during the period covered by the novel. He also has followed the trail to the North Carolina Collection of UNC-Chapel Hill, the N.C. State Archives and the Library of Congress. His examinations have encompassed unpublished letters and diaries, wills and Census records. He has identified two possible candidates for the real-life Hannah Crafts. One was a slave born into the household of Lewis Bond of Bertie County. Hecimovich speculates that on Bond’s death, she became the property of Samuel Jordan Wheeler and Lucinda Bond Wheeler, the parents of Kate Wheeler Cooper and John Hill Wheeler’s brother and sister-in-law. The second possible Crafts was inherited by Ann Ward from her father, James Ward of Bertie County. Ann Ward married John Wheeler Moore, a nephew and neighbor of Samuel Jordan Wheeler. John Hill Wheeler and his wife had moved to Washington, D.C., but maintained a financial interest in the family’s Murfreesboro plantation. They visited Hertford and Bertie F U G I T I V E S L A V E / B E S T - S E L L I N G A U T H O R tracing the North Carolina connection explore e x p l o r a t i o n s 34 • SPRING 2005 • edge counties frequently. Hecimovich suggests that John and Ellen Wheeler acquired Crafts either from his brother or from the Moores during one of those visits. Additional evidence also bolsters the authenticity of the Wheeler family connection. The family had an extensive library, including Bleak House and other works echoed by The Bondswoman’s Narrative. They had other literate slaves, and they were writers themselves. “A literary atmosphere pervaded this family,” Hecimovich said. “Their letters are filled with beautiful descriptions.” Uncertainties remain, however. Census records did not list the names of slaves, leaving only blanks where names should have gone. Was the 15-year-old mulatto owned by Lewis Bond in 1850 also the 25-year-old mulatto owned by Samuel Jordan Wheeler 10 years later? Furthermore, Hecimovich has not turned up a record that John Hill Wheeler searched for an escaped slave who might have been Crafts. Wheeler had been involved in a notorious court case over the escape of another slave, Jane Johnson. Would he have let Crafts’ escape pass unremarked? Scholars at least have ruled out Jane Johnson as the author of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. “This book encouraged scholars to go back and find out what happened to Jane Johnson,” Hecimovich said. “Finally, we have the rest of her story. This project gives more voice to all those little blank spots in the Census record. History has effaced everything, but it can’t ever fully erase the lives of these people.” • Gregg Hecimovich began his search for Hannah Crafts in the Joyner Library collection. edge • SPRING 2005 • 35 in print i n p r i n t • COMMAND AT SEA: NAVAL COMMAND AND CONTROL SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (Harvard University Press, 2005), by Michael A. Palmer. Whether using signal flags or satellite communications, naval commanders are challenged in efforts to communicate with and direct subordinates in battle. Palmer, professor and chair of history, explores the results in five centuries of encounters. “A feast for qualified readers,” Publishers Weekly says. “A distinguished historian, Palmer offers a valuable addition to naval history with this study of the problems of how to lead a fleet into battle, revising many previous conclusions and offering superb battle narratives.” • CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF MEXICO (Greenwood, 2004), by Peter Standish and Steven M. Bell. A nation of 90 million people, Mexico holds a special place in Latin America, particularly as a bridge between those countries and the United States. But Mexico and the United States have special ties of their own — cultural, economic and historical bonds that continue to evolve. This book offers students and general readers an understanding of Mexicoʼs dynamism: its history, institutions, religion, culture, and leisure and social customs. Standish is a professor of foreign languages. • THE ART OF ENAMELING: TECHNIQUES, PROJECTS, INSPIRATION (Lark Books, 2004), by Linda Darty. This book covers popular techniques and the fundamentals of setting up a studio. It also provides instruction for 14 projects in enameling. The methods covered range from traditional cloisonné to experimental techniques such as firing enamel into mesh forms. Darty is a professor of art and design. • Angelo Polizianoʼs SYLVAE (Harvard University Press, 2004), edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi. Poliziano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure of Lorenzo deʼMediciʼs circle in 15th century Florence. His Sylvae, written in Latin hexameters, are poetical introductions to his university courses. They contain some of the finest Latin poetry of the Renaissance and give insight into Polizianoʼs views of both his Greek and Latin predecessors and contemporary poets writing in Italian. Fantazzi is a visiting professor of classics. • MENTAL HEALTH IN LITERATURE: LITERACY LUNACY AND LUCIDITY (Lyceum Books, 2005) by Glenn Rohrer. Works of literature can be fascinating and stimulating alternatives to case studies when studying human behavior. In this anthology, Rohrer uses the poetry, fiction, drama, essays and autobiographies of literary masters to depict the symptoms and realities of a range of mental illnesses. Rohrer a professor of social work. • RE-ENVISIONING DANCE: PERCEIVING THE AESTHETICS OF DISABILITY (Kendall/Hunt, 2004) by Boni Boswell and Jane Elin. Who can and canʼt dance? This text presents new ways of seeing both dance and disability and suggests applications for educational settings. Information about individual differences covers physical, sensory and cognitive distinctions. Boswell is an associate professor of exercise and sport science. C o n t i n u e d in print i n p r i n t 36 • SPRING 2005 • edge • FROM IKARIA TO THE STARS: CLASSICAL MYTHIFICATION, ANCIENT AND MODERN (University of Texas Press, 2005) by Peter Green. Green has assembled 17 essays that ground myth in reality but emphasize his conviction that the myths are more impor-tant than historical narrative. His book was reviewed on the front page of the February 11 Times Literary Supplement. “As a clas-sicist,” writes reviewer Edith Hall, “(Greenʼs) most distinctive habit is the juxtaposition of Graeco-Roman history with the events that dominated the 20th century, creating between the two cultures a dialogue which is always arresting if archly contentious.” Green is the King Charles II visiting distinguished profes-sor of classical history. • VOTE AND VOICE: WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICAL LITERACY, 1915-1930 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004) by Wendy Sharer. • RHETORICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA (University of Alabama Press, 2004), edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret Lyday and Wendy Sharer. Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and teaching practices of members of the womenʼs political organizations in the time surrounding suffrage. It explores how the League of Women Voters and the Womenʼs International League for Peace and Freedom, in particular, challenge the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women to speak and write successfully in various political contexts. The essays in Rhetorical Education in America orient scholars and teachers in rhetoric and help set an agenda for curriculum design. Since the time of Socrates and Aristotle, education in rhetoric has been regarded as the lynchpin of participatory democracy. Sharer is an assistant professor of English. • WRITING PUBLIC POLICY: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO COMMUNICATING IN THE POLICY-MAKING PROCESS (Oxford University Press, 2005) by Catherine Smith. This college-level textbook is a hands-on, concise guide to writing and communicating as part of the public policy process, including communication to effect change. Features include scenarios that illustrate the complexity in policy processes and highlight their diversity of contexts, the variety of actors involved and the range of communication types produced. Smith is a professor of Englis |
OCLC number | 55652679 |