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A CENTURY OF FLIGHT
SYMBOLIZED, CELEBRATED
Also in this issue:
Dangers of Childhood Obesity,
Tracking Evolution’s Clues,
Historian’s Life Comes Full Circle
E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y
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 2004
EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
Spring 2004
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
Tom Fortner
Director, Medical Center News and Information
Dr. Alan A. Schreier
Director, Program Development and
Coordinator of Institutional Compliance
Dr. Emilie S. Kane
Director, Office of Sponsored Programs
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
© 2004 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 $ 7,980.00, or $ 2.28 per copy.
22
26
6
12
features
6 Too Many, Too Big, Too Soon
ECU center to address pandemic of childhood obesity, which threatens a
generation with disability, early death.
• Calculating Childhood Obesity
Organizations apply similar standards but different terminology.
• ECU Lands Role in NIH Study of Weight- loss Surgery
University receives $ 1.3 million grant to aid effort.
• Research Sampler
Projects examine causes and treatment.
12 Darwin’s Descendants
With travel to distant places and long hours in the lab, evolutionary biologists
expand and refine the field made famous by the father of natural selection.
22 Tattered Cocoon
Scholars examine the extent, nature of violence in African American families.
profile
26 ‘ I Couldn’t Escape My Past’
A medical school dropout, historian Todd Savitt follows a path that brings
him back to where he began.
on the cover
Stainless steel pylons direct attention to the sky over Kitty Hawk, where the
Wright brothers made their historic first flight with a powered aircraft.
Fourteen pylons are part of the Monument to a Century of Flight, the creation
of ECU art professors Hanna Jubran and Jodi Hollnagel and ECU graduate
Glenn Eure. For more on the monument and other projects connected to the
100th anniversary of flight, turn to page 31. Photos on the front and back covers
are by Forrest Croce.
edge t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s
edge • SPRING 2004 • 1
2 abstracts
• Geologist shines light
on an ancient reef’s demise
• Student’s design lights up
competition
• Scientist seeks way to predict
El Niño
• Researcher studies how
warm baths ease labor pains
• With NIH grant, pediatrician
splits time between stethoscope
and lab coat
31 explorations
• The Wright Stuff
ECU marks the 100th anniversary
of flight.
• Eavesdropping
Microbiologist deciphers how
bacteria communicate.
• Oh, Jimmy
She- crabs cozy up to a new lure
based on male pheromones.
• Customized Instruction
Software tool matches students’
learning styles to lesson plans.
35 in print
• A look at recent publications by
ECU faculty.
abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s
2 • SPRING 2004 • edge
Geologist shines light on an ancient reef’s demise
The muddy Mississippi may be at
fault for the demise of an ancient coral reef off
the coast of Florida.
While biologists ponder the massive die-off
of coral reefs worldwide, Dr. David Mallin-son,
assistant professor of geology, has turned
his attention to the oldest reef formation in the
Florida Keys. The reef called Tortugas Bank lies
more than 70 miles west of Key West and dates
back nearly 10,000 years.
Although Tortugas Bank still supports
living coral, it is obviously ailing. Coral reefs are
beautiful, complex saltwater ecosystems that
grow as the living corals secrete calcium carbon-ate,
which becomes the limestone formation
underlying the reef. “ Under normal conditions,
coral reefs should be able to keep up with sea
level rise,” Mallinson said. Tortugas Bank,
though, has not kept pace with sea level. Its
peak sits 60 feet below the surface of the water.
Just to the east of Tortugas Bank lies
another, larger coral reef complex known as
Dry Tortugas. It appears to be thriving. What,
Mallinson wondered, could account for the
difference? With a grant from the National
Undersea Research Center in Wilmington, he
set out to find an answer.
On a series of expeditions, Mallinson
pulled out most of the tools of the marine
geologist. Geophysical surveys mapped the
typography and subsurface of the reefs and
the neighboring areas. Drill cores brought up
growth rings with their clues to age, growth
patterns, and historical temperature and salin-ity
patterns. He also would pull in data on cur-rents
and climate. Eventually, he constructed a
timeline showing the formation and growth of
the reefs.
It started some 9,600 years ago, when
rising sea level had just begun to cover the
West Florida continental shelf. Coral spores
apparently drifted into the newly flooded area
of Tortugas Bank, latched onto the ocean floor
and began to multiply. For 3,000 years, Tortu-gas
Bank grew slowly but steadily.
The seas continued to rise, gradually cov-ering
more of the continental shelf, and another
coral growth took hold at Dry Tortugas. As
the reefs grew at Dry Tortugas, Tortugas Bank
experienced a sudden surge in growth. Perhaps
before that time, Mallinson said, water from
the shallow shelf area infiltrated, bringing with
it excessive nutrients and unhealthy fluctuations
in temperature and salinity. As the reefs of Dry
Tortugas grew, they blocked the freshwater
incursion, creating more hospitable conditions
for the coral of Tortugas Bank.
The Tortugas Bank growth spurt lasted
a couple of millennia, until about 4,000 years
ago. Then the decline began. Mallinson draws
on climate and current data for an explanation.
A major climate transition had just begun,
he said, bringing heavy precipitation to what
is now the continental United States. The
snow and rain were enough to cause massive
flooding, which in turn would have discharged
large quantities of nutrient- rich water down
the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Prevailing currents would have wrapped those
dark waters right around Tortugas Bank.
Mallinson’s hypothesis is that the
Mississippi’s dark, rich, fresh water — all con-ditions
inimical to coral — killed off the coral
in the shallow parts of Tortugas Bank. The
deeper corals continued to grow, but more
slowly. “ Reefs can handle a certain amount
of hardship,” he said, “ but if they’re stressed
too often, they start to die.” Dry Tortugas, he
theorizes, sat just far enough away to be out
of reach of the Mississippi’s deadly effects.
Recent history supplies additional
testimony to the possibility. “ When the Mis-sissippi
flooded in 1995- 96,” he said, “ you
could trace the plume along the western coast
of Florida, around the tip and back up to
Miami.” •
“ Reefs can handle a certain amount of hardship, but if they’re stressed too often, they start to die,” says David Mallinson,
who’s studying ailing coral reefs near the Florida Keys. He holds a sample core from the Tortugas Bank reef.
An ECU atmospheric scientist has received a $ 270,000 grant
that he hopes will pave the way to predicting the climate phenomenon
known as El Niño.
Originating in a warming pattern in the eastern Pacific
Ocean, El Niño disrupts normal weather around the
globe. It has been linked with seasons of heavy rainfall
across the southern United States and drought in
Australia and other areas of the western Pacific.
“ If you can tell six months in advance that El Niño
will hit a particular region or country, it helps a lot of
people,” said the award recipient, Dr. Scott Curtis, an
assistant professor of geography. “ We’re talking about a
region’s economic stability. ( Knowing in advance) might
shape what they plant that year or help them better
prepare for the consequences.”
The grant will enable Curtis to track rainfall
and wind in the East Indian Ocean, which he will then
try to tie to the larger picture. “ My research will look at
how storm systems are related to climate and their effects
on El Niño,” Curtis said. “ We have a relatively good understanding
of what ( El Niño) is. Now we want to study temperature, winds and
rainfall prior to the event.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
which awarded the grant, will supply much of the data for
Curtis’ project. The data are collected by NASA satellites as part
of the agency’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.
Curtis joined ECU’s faculty last fall after working as an
atmospheric scientist at NASA in Greenbelt, Md., and serving
as an adjunct professor at the University of
Maryland- Baltimore County. •
abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s
edge • SPRING 2004 • 3
Student’s design lights up competition
Going head to head against professional designers, an ECU junior
has placed in the finals of a national competition for energy- efficient lighting.
Stacey Gatt, an interior design major from Hershey, Pa., placed among
the top 24 in the first phase of the National Lighting Fixture Design Competi-tion.
The competition is sponsored by Lighting for Tomorrow, a consortium of
the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and several lighting companies.
Gatt’s was the only student entry to make it into the finals. She submitted
a prototype of her “ Mar- L- Light” sconce in January for the final judging. The
top prize is $ 10,000.
She designed the sconce to be used in children’s rooms. A wall- mounted
fixture, she said, would avoid lamps that could fall and cords that could trip.
It uses a fluorescent bulb as the light source and a cover decorated with inter-changeable
marbles.
Her inspiration: a piece of illuminated art glass she saw at a casino in the
Bahamas. •
Scientist seeks way to predict El Niño
Stacey Gatt’s wall sconce won her a place in the finals
of a national competition.
El Niño leaves countries in the western
Pacific parched even as it brings excessive
rain to the southern United States.
Researcher studies how warm baths ease labor pains
Nothing soothes so well as a long
soak in a warm tub. Anecdotal evidence suggests
a warm bath may be so relaxing that it can help
pregnant women avoid stress- related complica-tions
of labor while also reducing the use of pain
medications. How and why it works remain
unknown.
Dr. Rebecca Benfield, assistant professor
of nursing and clinical assistant professor of
obstetrics and gynecology, hopes to shed light
on those questions. She has received a Mentored
Research Scientist Development Award from the
National Institutes of Health to study the effects
of hydrotherapy on women in labor.
During the next three years, she will take a
number of courses in physiology and biostatis-tics
in preparation for the research project. The
project, beginning in January 2005, will involve
following 15 healthy women in spontaneous
labor at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. Each
woman will receive a warm tub soak for an
hour. Water depth and temperature will vary.
For each, Benfield will record subjective anxiety
and pain levels and such physiological mea-sures
as stress hormones and uterine contrac-tions.
The long- term goal is to help doctors and
nurse midwives better prescribe hydrotherapy.
The NIH award, valued at $ 265,566,
sponsors Benfield’s work under the tutelage
of Dr. Margaret Heitkemper of the University
of Washington School of Nursing and ECU’s
Dr. Edward Newton, chair of obstetrics and
gynecology, and Dr. Tibor Hortobagyi, director
of the Biomechanics Laboratory.
Benfield, a nurse midwife, first observed
the effects of hydrotherapy on labor while
working in Texas in the 1980s. “ It was so striking
that it really makes an impression on you,” she
said. •
4 • SPRING 2004 • edge
abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s
Using hydrotherapy tubs, Rebecca Benfield
is studying the effects of warm water on the
anxiety and pain of maternal labor.
An NIH grant will cover the cost of the
research project and related coursework.
As a pediatric critical care specialist, Dr. R. Ray Morrison
tends to youngsters edging their way back from the brink of death.
Now, with help from the National Institutes of Health, he also is seek-ing
out discoveries that will improve their chances of pulling through.
Last fall Morrison, an assistant professor of pediatrics, received
the NIH’s highly competitive Mentored Clinical Scientist Development
Award. Valued at nearly $ 625,000 over five years, it will support his
research in the laboratory of Dr. Jamal Mustafa, professor of pharma-cology.
Under Mustafa’s guidance, Morrison will seek to learn more
about the role of adenosine in the regulation of blood flow to the
heart. After a serious trauma — whether caused by an accident, illness
or open- heart surgery — the goal is to get blood flowing back to the
heart as quickly as possible to prevent permanent damage. Adenosine
stimulates the body’s natural recovery, signaling blood vessels to open
wider for improved circulation.
Four biochemical receptors, each with its own signaling pathway,
have been identified as keys to adenosine’s activity. Using mouse mod-els,
Morrison will study the two receptors that are less well understood.
As medical science zeroes in on which of the four receptors is most
important and how it works, chances improve for developing a highly
targeted drug that will stimulate adenosine’s protective properties
without potentially dangerous side effects.
“ The problem isn’t hitting all the adenosine receptors,” Morrison
said. “ We have drugs that can do that. Hitting them all gets too big a
jolt. We want a drug that will hit the pathway for just one. You’re elimi-nating
the toxicity
by hitting only the
pathway that’s
most important
for protecting the
heart.”
The NIH
grant is designed to
encourage practic-ing
physicians to
go into research.
By dividing his time
between the hos-pital
and the lab,
Morrison hopes to
avoid the burnout
that plagues
pediatric critical
With NIH grant, pediatrician
splits time between stethoscope
and lab coat
edge • SPRING 2004 • 5
care doctors. “ I wanted to be able to do this forever, but you can’t do it
every day,” he said. Research will bring relief from the emotional strain
of caring for sick children while medicine gives meaning to the research.
“ When you spend 75 percent of your time in the lab, every third
or fourth week you go back over to the hospital and see why it’s impor-tant,”
he said. “ This is basic science, but it’s very relevant to what I do in
the pediatric intensive care unit.” •
ABOVE: Ray Morrison hopes to lessen the stress of caring for critically ill children
by dividing his time between the hospital and research.
LEFT: A mouse heart, shown in an isolated organ bath, allows Morrison to learn
more about restoring blood flow to the human heart after trauma.
abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s
6 • SPRING 2004 • edge
Dr. Ronald Perkin comes face to face every day with one of
the most serious health crises facing the United States. But even amidst
the steady stream of 300- and 400- pound children, one boy commanded
attention. Only 14 years old, he stood 6 feet 4 and weighed 460 pounds.
“ He was hypertensive to an enormous degree and had type 2 dia-betes
already,” said Perkin, chairman of pediatrics at the Brody School of
Medicine and medical director of Children’s Hospital of the University
Health Systems of Eastern Carolina. “ His parents were proud of him,
thinking he was going to be the next great NFL lineman or something.
We were trying to tell them that he might not even live to be old enough
to do that.”
The youth represents what Perkin calls a pandemic of childhood
obesity. To address the problem, ECU and University Health Systems
announced plans last fall to establish the Pediatric Healthy Weight
TOO MANY, TOO Research and Treatment Center. The center will pool the expertise of
physicians and researchers across the ECU campus and medical school
to address childhood obesity and its complications.
It promises to be one of the most comprehensive such programs in
the country. Its location in Greenville reflects local challenges and local
expertise.
The dramatic increase in childhood obesity is evident nowhere
more than in Eastern North Carolina. Over the last 30 years, the propor-tion
of seriously overweight children rose from 5 percent to 15 percent
of children nationwide. Several surveys suggest that up to one- third of
Eastern North Carolina children are obese, twice the national average.
The medical implications are profound. Overweight children have
an increased risk of developing the complications associated with adult
obesity. Type 2 diabetes — which previously was called adult- onset
ECU center to address pandemic of childhood obesity, which threatens a generation with disability, early death
edge • SPRING 2004 • 7
diabetes — has been diagnosed in children as young as 5, and 20- year- olds
are having heart attacks. Hypertension, arthritis, high cholesterol and other
lipid disorders, asthma and sleep apnea also are common. Because over-weight
children tend to become overweight adults, the likelihood increases
that they will suffer the most extreme repercussions of these diseases:
kidney failure, nerve damage, blindness, amputations and early death.
“ I was at a conference the other day and heard this is the first gen-eration
of children who will not have a longer predicted life expectancy
than their parents,” Perkin said.
As serious as the medical issues are, the highest cost of childhood
obesity may be psychological. Mental health assessments put obese
children on a par with children diagnosed with cancer. “ They’re very
depressed,” Perkin said. “ They feel that they are doomed. They don’t
know how to solve it. They can’t hide their chronic illness, no matter how
baggy their clothes. The more depressed they get, the heavier they get.
The heavier they get, the more depressed they get.”
The Pediatric Healthy Weight Center will build on the expertise
that has earned ECU a national reputation for basic science, clini-cal
research and treatment of adult obesity, which is also prevalent
in Eastern North Carolina. Dr. Walter Pories, for example, pioneered
in the surgical treatment of morbid obesity, developing what became
known as the Greenville gastric bypass. Working with Pories and other
surgeons, biochemists Dr. Lynis Dohm, Dr. Hisham Barakat and others
have advanced understanding of the molecular mechanisms of insulin
resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes; the metabolism of fats; and the
effects of race and gender on the tendency toward obesity. Additional
studies have contributed to the understanding of the roles of nutrition,
BIG, TOO SOON
C o n t i n u e d
8 • SPRING 2004 • edge
physical activity, and body composition in
obesity and diabetes.
Complementing this expertise is a
growing body of work at ECU focused on the
psychosocial development of children and ado-lescents,
childhood sleep disorders, pediatric
hypertension and pediatric vascular disease.
All these fields will come together in the new
center, and most were represented last fall
when 40 faculty members attended a summit
on childhood obesity and its treatment.
The Pediatric Healthy Weight Center will
have a clinical treatment arm, led by Dr. John
Olsson, associate professor of pediatrics, and a
research arm, led by pediatric endocrinologist
Dr. Ying Chang. Initial funding for the center
has been set at $ 850,000. More will be sought
through grants.
Plans call for a multidisciplinary treatment facility to open by July.
The facility will try to enroll children in a structured, long- term program
of treatment. Nurse case managers will be employed to maintain contact
with the children and their families, similar to a successful program
dealing with childhood asthma. All University Health Systems’ pediatric
clinics will step up screening for early detection of weight problems,
Perkin said. The center also will try to engage schools and community
practitioners in identifying and intervening on behalf of overweight
children and in promoting physical activity and proper nutrition.
ABOVE: Walter Pories will direct ECU’s participation in a national
consortium studying bariatric surgery for weight loss.
ECU LANDS ROLE IN NIH STUDY
OF WEIGHT- LOSS SURGERY
If ECU goes forward with a trial of gastric bypass surgery
in obese adolescents, it likely will be in conjunction with a new
consortium of the nation’s leading bariatric surgery centers. The
National Institutes of Health announced establishment of the
consortium in October, naming ECU as one of its six members. The
consortium is charged with developing a deeper understanding of
obesity and standards for its surgical treatment.
The decision includes a $ 1.3 million grant to ECU to fund its
part of the investigation. Dr. Walter J. Pories, professor of surgery
and biochemistry, will direct the ECU center.
Consortium members will cooperate on research into some
of the most promising issues surrounding gastric bypass surgery.
They include comparisons of the various bariatric operations; the
relationship of muscle, fat, liver and the intestines to diabetes in
obese patients; social and ethical issues in the management of
obesity and obesity surgery; neuropsychiatric implications of the
surgery; and nutritional concerns.
A central database will be established at the University of
Pittsburgh. Other consortium members are Mt. Sinai Medical
Center in New York, University of Washington in Seattle, the
Neuropsychiatric Institute in Fargo, N. D., and University of Califor-nia
at Davis. The six participating centers were selected from 49
applications.
Each of the six centers has a particular expertise in an aspect
of bariatric surgery and research. At ECU, Pories developed the
most widely used version of gastric bypass surgery nearly 25 years
ago and discovered that obese patients with diabetes lose their
diabetes within a few days after surgery. That discovery led to the
establishment of a multi- disciplinary research program investigat-ing
the relationship of the surgery and metabolic change.
ECU’s long- term database of patients also has become a
model for bariatric surgery programs around the world. Pories and
his team were the first to collect detailed data on each gastric by-pass
patient and follow them for life. The database now includes
more than 1,720 patients, starting with the first one in 1978. •
edge • SPRING 2004 • 9
CALCULATING CHILDHOOD OBESITY
Nomenclature can be tricky, especially when it may ap-pear
laden with moral judgment.
These stories adopt the American Obesity Association’s use of
the terms overweight and obesity for children. The U. S. Centers for
Disease Control and many health- care professionals avoid using the
term obesity for children because of the stigma it can carry. Instead,
they refer to even the heaviest children as overweight. Some,
however, acknowledge that this usage can obscure the seriousness
of the problem, for individual children and for society in general.
The American Obesity Association uses the same terminology for
children and adults.
In adults, overweight and obesity are determined by a mea-surement
called the body mass index, which is calculated using a
person’s height and weight. For adults, a BMI of 25 to 30 is generally
considered overweight and a BMI of 30 or greater is obese.
For children, the determination is more complex. Body mass
changes as children grow, first decreasing in the preschool years and
then increasing into adulthood. Furthermore, boys and girls will dif-fer
in the percentage of body fat as they mature. To make sense of
these differences, the CDC has established age- and gender- specific
growth charts. Using these charts, health- care professionals use per-centile
cut- off points to help identify underweight and overweight
children.
The CDC defines children in the 85th to 95th percentile BMI for
age and sex as “ at risk of overweight” and children in the 95th per-centile
or higher as overweight. The American Obesity Association
uses these same percentiles but applies the term overweight to the
former and obese to the latter. By either term, the 95th percentile is
the point at which children are clearly at risk of health complications
related to weight.
The 1999- 2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination
Survey indicated that about 15 percent of children and adolescents
ages 6 to 19 are obese. Although there is no comparable data collec-tion
for Eastern North Carolina, several ECU studies have examined
height and weight for specific age groups.
In 2003, the department of family medicine collected measure-ments
from a representative sample of eighth- graders in Pitt, Mar-tin,
Hertford and Duplin counties as part of its Youth Risk Behavior
Survey. Of the 579 students measured, almost half exceeded healthy
weight goals and one child in four was obese.
Two Pitt County studies by Dr. Kristen Borré yielded similar
results. For example, her 1998 survey of a representative sample of
sixth grades found that 45 percent were overweight and 30 percent
obese. The second study looked at third through fifth graders. Those
data, collected as part of the Growing Up Fit! Project, show that
rural minority children are more likely than others to be overweight.
While not representative samples, data collected by hospital
clinics and local health departments also suggest that Eastern North
Carolina children are twice as likely as their national counterparts to
be overweight or obese. •
Researchers, meanwhile, will continue to address topics ranging
from the effects of a pregnant woman’s diet on her child’s eventual
weight to the cellular mechanisms of obesity. One initial focus will be on
identifying the genetic markers that increase the likelihood a child will
become overweight, as an aid to early intervention. Over the last several
years, ECU physicians have been collecting umbilical cord blood from
newborns to locate these markers.
Another focus will be identifying the best evidence- based
practices for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity.
The most controversial is sure to be surgery. Discussions are under
way that could lead to a trial of gastric bypass for the most seriously
obese adolescents. For any particular child, Perkin said, surgery
would be considered only after a rigorous program of non- surgical
interventions had failed.
Because gastric bypass severely limits food intake, physicians
are reluctant to recommend it for developing children. In fact, only a
few centers around the country perform gastric bypass on adolescents.
But for some children, Perkin said, it may be the only chance
to save their lives. “ These kids are just getting huge,” he said. “ They
can go one month ( between medical appointments) and gain 15
pounds. It’s almost like they cross a line somewhere, and then the
weight gain is just exponential. They’re coming in at four, five, six
hundred pounds.”
Whatever solutions are eventually found, Perkin is certain they
won’t be as simple as lectures on diet and exercise. “ Obesity isn’t
just a lack of motivation or poor will power,” he said. “ It is a disease.
It may start as bad eating habits, but it becomes a disease process
that’s very difficult to break out of.” •
ABOVE: “ This is the first generation of children who will not have
a longer predicted life expectancy than their parents,” says Ronald
Perkin, chairman of pediatrics at the Brody School of Medicine.
Hard questions from a community pediatrician sent Brody
medical school faculty scrambling for answers. The physician had grown
frustrated in working with overweight children. He was convinced
the children and their parents were adhering to his best advice, yet
the children failed to lose weight. Were other complicating factors
blocking their progress, he wanted to know, and were there better
recommendations he could give them on diet and exercise?
Most medical literature about obesity and its complications is
based on studies in adults. Spurred by the doctor’s questions, several
ECU researchers teamed up to seek answers that would apply to
children.
Taking referrals from private physicians and hospital clinics, they
enrolled 171 obese children in the project they dubbed Kidpower. The
children ranged in age from 4 to 18.
From detailed health assessments, the researchers learned that
about half of the children suffered from complications of excess
weight. The more overweight the children were, the more likely they
were to have complications. These complications included high blood
pressure, breathing difficulties, sleep apnea, elevated cholesterol and
hyperinsulinemia, which is closely related to insulin resistance and type 2
diabetes. Most of the children, however, had normal blood sugar levels,
indicating that standard testing would not have alerted physicians to
their risk of diabetes.
Children without hyperinsulinemia went directly into an age-specific
exercise program operated by the University Health Systems’
ViQuest wellness center. The programs lasted only eight to 12 weeks,
but that was long enough to see weight stabilize in the children who
stuck with the exercise. It also provided another bit of insight.
“ In the younger kids, compliance and interest were much greater,”
said Dr. John Olsson, professor of pediatrics and one of Kidpower’s
lead investigators. “ We think it may be because parents still have more
influence on them than they do on teenagers.”
Children identified with hyperinsulinemia — about 30 percent of
the total — received 12 weeks of dietary guidance before beginning
the exercise program. Initial assessments had shown the children were
getting as much as 60 percent of their calories from carbohydrates.
“ It wouldn’t be bad if the children were getting complex carbohydrates
— whole grains, fruits and vegetables,” said Dr. Kathryn Kolasa, a
nutritionist and professor of family medicine who participated in
the study. “( But) most of the carbohydrates came from simple sugars
— sodas, juice, juice drinks, candy.” The children also were eating more
than they needed with little guidance from their parents.
Could the researchers get the children to adhere to a more
healthful diet? Meeting at least twice with parents and children,
10 • SPRING 2004 • edge
nutritionists guided them to better choices using the U. S. Department
of Agriculture’s food guide pyramid. One key to compliance was finding
healthful foods the children and their families liked to eat.
“ The majority of the children had parents or other relatives who
also struggled with their weight and had chronic conditions such as
diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease, so this is a family
concern that requires family treatment,” said Catherine Sullivan, the
lead dietitian on the project.
Overall, Olsson said, those who complied with the dietary and
exercise programs stabilized or lost weight and improved or reversed
the complications. Anecdotal evidence may have been most forceful.
“ We had one girl who was overweight and depressed,” he said. “ When
she finished, her weight had stabilized and her attitude was much
better. Her mom had a better of idea of proper diet and portion size,
and the girl and her family were more motivated.”
• • •
Subtle changes in the school day have led to healthier
weights for youngsters in another project.
Dr. Kristen Borré, a nutritional anthropologist now working
out of the N. C. Agromedicine Institute, designed the project after
documenting the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Pitt County
schoolchildren. Measurements of 598 sixth- graders selected to represent
their peers countywide found nearly half exceeded healthy weight
guidelines. Fully 30 percent could be classified as obese.
“ We were very concerned,” Borré said. “ When we look at
elementary school children, we know the weight issue accelerates as
they age. Our intervention is targeted for third through fifth graders,
when they’re old enough to have a say in what they eat but young
enough that we can make a difference.”
In collaboration with Pitt County Schools, Borré and her associates
introduced the program Growing Up FIT! into two elementary schools.
It incorporated both nutritional and physical activity through a number
of elements. College- age mentors led active recess periods, for example,
and each child received a personal fitness plan. In addition, community
volunteers at one school developed a walking trail.
On the nutrition front, the mentors led “ Discover Your Lunch”
activities to encourage healthier eating. “ When we started, many
couldn’t name their fruits and vegetables,” Borré said. “ Now they can.”
As knowledge of fruit and vegetables increased, so did
consumption. The number of children eating fruits and vegetables for
lunch at least three days a week tripled, to 65 percent. In addition, the
principals at both schools established a policy that snacks in their after-
Research Sampler
One goal of the Pediatric Healthy Weight Research and Treatment Center will be to encourage
more research into the causes and treatment of childhood obesity and its complications.
Several lines of investigation are already under way. Here are a few.
edge • SPRING 2004 • 11
school programs would be limited to fruits, vegetables, whole grains
and skim milk — no sugary drinks or snacks allowed. These healthy
snacks followed the recommendations of the Child Nutrition Program
for a USDA reimbursable snack. Community Schools and Recreation in
collaboration with Pitt County Schools’ Child Nutrition Program adopted
the healthy snack policy systemwide in March 2002.
“ These things together made a difference,” Borré said. Each year
of the program, the percentage of heavy students decreased. After
three years, the number of children who could be classified as obese fell
from 25 percent to 14 percent at one school and from 32 percent to 23
percent at the other.
With a successful pilot, Borré’s group received a grant to introduce
the program into four new schools with high proportions of low- income
students. This new phase is in its second year. Meanwhile, Pitt County
Schools this year won a Health and Wellness Trust Fund grant to expand
Growing Up FIT! countywide in kindergarten through eighth grade and
to develop it as a model for statewide implementation.
• • •
Physical activity has been shown not only to help control
weight but to help decrease the complications of obesity. For example, it
helps reduce insulin resistance, independent of weight loss.
But how do you get overweight children to exercise? “ We heard
from parents ( of overweight children) that there was nothing in the
community for them to do,” said Dr. Matthew T. Mahar, director
of the Activity Promotion Lab in the College of Health and Human
Performance. “ There are sports leagues, but these are kids who weren’t
successful in competitive sports.” So Mahar has been testing and
demonstrating ways to increase physical activity among overweight
children through several related projects.
For four years, his after- school activity
program drew obese children ages 8 to
11 to the ECU campus for fun and games.
Using high school students as mentors, the
program allowed the children to choose
their activities but kept them moving — with
bicycling, scooters and in- line skating, for
example. “ Everything focused on self-efficacy
and positive reinforcement,” he
said. “ And it had to be fun.”
The program did not track weight since
the children were still growing, but in each
of the eight semesters, Mahar said it found
consistent improvements in physical activity,
body composition and aerobic capacity.
Mahar is now taking his methodology
into after- school programs offered through
Pitt County Community Schools, where
jumping rope is proving to be one of the
most popular activities. Teachers are getting
in on the act, too, with their own faculty
wellness challenge. “ Don’t underestimate
the power of teachers to influence
children,” Mahar said.
Meanwhile, a different project to encourage physical activity
helps schoolteachers incorporate 10 minutes of movement into regular
classroom lessons. Called Take 10!, it is led by Dr. David Rowe. Yet
another project still in the planning stages for one rural school will
include after- school programs, Take Ten!, a faculty- staff challenge and a
walking trail designed for use by students and the community.
• • •
The adage “ you are what you eat” may understate the
influence of diet. You may be what your mother ate when she was
carrying you.
Dr. Sam N. Pennington, professor of biochemistry and molecular
biology at the medical school, has been investigating the influence of
maternal diet on the long- term health of the mother’s offspring. In
one line of experiments, he has varied the amount of fat in the diets
of pregnant rats and found lasting effects in the progeny. Female
rats fed a high- fat diet produced offspring who, as adults themselves,
experience a high degree of insulin resistance, a factor in type 2
diabetes.
“ This was a very long- term and profound effect, not a slight
change,” Pennington said. “ It’s especially significant given that we have
a high incidence of type 2 diabetes and a high fat diet in this area.”
Pennington is now examining how the mother’s high- fat diet
affects other health indicators, such as cholesterol levels. The eventual
goal is to learn whether the same effects occur in human beings. •
BELOW: Sam Pennington, right, has found that the amount of fat in a
pregnant rat’s diet can have long- term consequences for her progeny.
With him in his lab is graduate student Patrick Matthews.
RIGHT: Modern tools help redefine relationships
among southern African lizards, such as the web- footed
Palmatogecko rangei, right, and giant ground gecko
Chondrodactylus angulifer, far right.
12 • SPRING 2004 • edge
C o n t i n u e d
With travel
to distant
places and
long hours
in the lab,
evolutionary
biologists
expand and
refine the
field made
famous by
the father
of natural
selection
A s much as
any scientist before or since,
Charles Darwin changed the
way we view the world and
ourselves. He showed us
the continuity of life, from
one part of the world to
another and from one epoch
to another. He also proved to
be an excellent prophet.
It was 145 years ago
that Darwin published his landmark work, The Origin of
Species. In it he outlined his theory of natural selec-tion
as the means by which living things evolve, and
he predicted that with this theory, “ A grand and almost
untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes
and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the
effects of use or disuse, on the direct action of external
conditions, and so forth.”
He was right. Not only was a grand field of inquiry
opened, but it has continued to fascinate and confound
Darwin’s philosophical descendants to the present day.
Among them are eight members of the ECU biology
faculty whose research is featured here: Dr. Jason Bond,
Dr. Carol Goodwillie, Dr. Trip Lamb, Dr. Susan McRae,
Dr. Jean- Luc Scemama, Dr. Edmund Stellwag, Dr.
John Stiller and Dr. Kyle Summers. They study plants,
reptiles, spiders and birds. Some work in fields Darwin
DARWIN’S
DESCENDANTS
edge • SPRING 2004 • 13
The power
of sand
14 • SPRING 2004 • edge
relationships in un-expected
directions
among these lizard
families. Instead of
sticky feet for cling-ing
and climbing,
the dune- dwelling
geckos have modi-fied
feet for digging.
One genus, Palmato-gecko,
has developed
extensive webbing
between the toes to
facilitate walking
and burrowing in
loose, wind- blown
sands.
Traditional taxonomy had pegged these
geckos as distinctive genera, occupying distant
branches of the gecko family tree. Lamb’s
DNA analysis tells a different story. All three
genera of dune- dwelling geckos fall within a
widespread lineage of “ typical” geckos that
climb on rocks and trees. Moreover, the dune
dwellers are more closely related to species
with whom they share little outward appear-ance
than they are to each other.
The story is repeated for dune specialists
in other lizard families. Modified feet, spade-like
jaws for diving into the sand and scaled
flaps to keep grit out of ears yield morphologi-of
the time, Darwin never
regretted his 40,0000- mile
trip. “( I) t appears to me
that nothing can be more
improving to the young
naturalist, than a journey
in distant countries,” he
wrote in The Voyage of the
Beagle.
Trip Lamb’s journey
has taken him to the dunes
of the Namib and Kalahari
deserts and the rocky coast
of South Africa, all in
search of lizards. Southern
Africa supports as many
endemic species of lizards
as most whole continents
can claim. They range from inch- long leaf- toed
geckos to Angolosaurus, a herbivore measur-ing
up to 18 inches in length.
Six years ago, Lamb and Aaron Bauer,
a colleague from Villanova University, set out
to discern whether the origin of these species
could be traced to ancient geologic upheavals
that separated ancestral populations. As they
wrapped up their project recently, Lamb said
they have learned a separate, equally important
lesson: the power of sand.
At times together and at times on separate
journeys, Lamb and Bauer collected close to
100 species of lizards for study. Some had not
been observed in the field since the 1950s.
Others were never before recorded in scientific
literature. It’s easy to understand why. Search-ing
out desert dwellers, Lamb and Bauer once
traveled off road across sand dunes for five
days. During that time, they never saw another
human being. Almost as hard to sight were
some of the lizards. Angolosaurus in particular
“ is the most leery lizard I’ve ever encountered,”
Lamb said. “ They can spot you a couple
hundred yards away and dive a foot or more
into the sand. You mark where you think they
are and hope you can dig them up.”
In a monograph being published by the
California Academy of Sciences, Lamb and
Bauer have rewritten the evolutionary history
of southern Africa’s geckos, showing close
would recognize — taxonomy and morphol-ogy
— using many of the same techniques,
but with the added advantages of modern
molecular science. Some look at what makes
populations diverge. Others concentrate on
survival techniques. Still others delve into the
brand new field of evolutionary developmental
biology, “ evo devo” to the hipper biologists.
It is not merely life on Earth that has
evolved. Science has, too.
And because it has, Darwin’s descen-dants
worldwide are making advances at a
mind- boggling pace: adding 2,000 new species
a year to the botany world list alone, showing
connections among living organisms never
before imagined and tracing lineages nearer
and nearer to the beginning of life on Earth. As
so often happens, the more we know, the less
certain we become.
“ We had very nice, clear ideas about
evolution 50 years ago,” Stiller said. “ It’s
much more complicated now. We are closer to
understanding how nature works, but we have
a much less defined story. There are so many
kinds of data coming in and so many ways of
looking at them, that it will take a while. We’re
going into a period in which there will be lots
of competing ideas, and it will take time to sift
them all out. In our understanding of ancient
evolution, I’d say we’re back to many of the
same questions we had before we started se-quencing
molecules, but at least now we have
ways of addressing those questions.”
The power of sand
Ships’ surgeons on foreign trips often
sent specimens of flora and fauna back home
to 19th century Britain. For a survey of South
America, Capt. Robert FitzRoy proposed
something different. He thought it would be
enlightening to be accompanied by a full- time
naturalist. Barely out of college and eager to
see the tropics, Charles Darwin seized the
opportunity. The journey of the H. M. S. Beagle
stretched to nearly five years and allowed Dar-win
to explore the South American continent,
the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia
and parts of Africa. Though seasick for much
Back to
Basics
edge • SPRING 2004 • 15
tion of species around the world now, and it’s
caused by us, by human action,” he said. “ I’d
like to think there’s been a hard- core realization
of what the crisis entails.” Finding solutions,
he said, focuses new attention on taxonomy.
“ Species and how we define species are at the
core of any questions we might ask in biology
and how we define ecosystems. … It would be
impossible to develop conservation policy and
management approaches if you have no idea
what’s there.”
Bond has channeled his concern over
such questions into the study the Mygalo-morphae
order of spiders, which includes
tarantulas, funnelwebs and Bond’s special
interest, trapdoor spiders. He and a collaborator
from San Diego State University are charged
with documenting mygalomorph taxomony,
diversity and kinship for the National Science
Foundation’s project Assembling the Tree of
Life. They will sample up to 500 species of
mygalomorphs worldwide, trying to clarify
relationships to ensure that a family tree in-cludes
all related species and their most recent
common ancestor. “ Our classification system
should reflect the evolutionary relationship,”
he said.
Mygalomorphs appear to date back 450
million years. More primitive in physiology
and silk production than their web- spinning
kin, they live relatively long lives — as much
as 20 years for trapdoor females — but also
fairly sedentary ones. Nearly all trapdoor
spiders, for example, live in underground
burrows that they cover with a hinged flap
engineered out of silk and soil. They seldom
change address.
Long lives and a lack of wanderlust make
trapdoor spiders good subjects for evolutionary
studies. “ They have a strong tendency to be-come
isolated so they’re a well- designed model
for looking at simple population subdivisions,”
Bond said. The same traits, however, put them
at risk. One shopping center can wipe out
the habitat for a whole species. “ In Southern
California, the diversity we’re losing you could
put a stopwatch on,” he said.
Studying trapdoor spiders has its chal-cally
distinct forms long
recognized as separate
genera. In each case, the
dune dwellers turn out
to be closely related to
non- dune species. Fur-thermore,
the ancestors
of these dune dwellers
entered this harsh habitat
at different times in his-tory
and evolved similar
adaptations to the sand
independently of one another.
The upcoming monograph, together with
a series of other recent publications, depict
newly redrawn family trees for five lineages
of southern African lizards, each of which
includes dune and non- dune species. In addi-tion
to expectations of divergence driven by
geologic forces, Lamb and Bauer have docu-mented
remarkable examples of convergence.
“ One of the interesting things revealed in
our study has been the powerful influence of
the Namib and how it has similarly shaped the
morphology of different lizard species,” Lamb
said. “ There’s just a limited number of ways
to design a lizard, or anything else, for life in
loose sand.”
Back to basics
A century before Darwin, a Swede
named Carl Linnaeus developed a system
for naming, ranking and classifying living
organisms. Although his Systema Naturae
remains the basis of taxonomy today, the
field for a time lost much of its luster. Gene
splicing carried so much more panache than
fitting beetles into a family tree. Harvard’s E. O.
Wilson believes the trend has come full circle.
“ Systematics has returned to the center of the
action in biology,” he wrote in The Future of
Life. The molecular techniques that once led
biologist away from taxonomy now bring them
back, providing new tools to speed the discov-ery
of organisms and to define relationships
across species.
The trend has reversed none too soon for
Jason Bond. “ We’re seeing the mass extinc- C o n t i n u e d
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Trip Lamb, top
photo, and Jason Bond continue the work Charles
Darwin started, defining species and charting their
relationships. • In the field, scientists sometimes
have to be self- sufficient. Lamb has shot a rock
pigeon for dinner while in the Northern Province
of South Africa. • The dunes of the Namib desert,
home to several endemic lizards, rise above a dry
lake bed in central Namibia.
Evolution
in Action
16 • SPRING 2004 • edge
“ There was a clear- cut difference from
day one to day two,” Goodwillie said. “ This
had never been described before but I can eas-ily
imagine that someone could miss it.”
Jepsonii seems to have the best of both
worlds. If its pollinator — the small, hovering
beefly — is in abundance, genetic variation
can be enhanced through cross- pollination. But
if the beefly is scarce, as happens some years,
the plant at least stands a chance of producing
one more generation. Goodwillie, however,
suspects this is a transition phase, not a stable
adaptation.
By sampling different populations of
jepsonii, she has found a full range of variation
in the plant’s ability to self- fertilize: some are
fully self- fertilizing, some are self- incompat-
“ Without them, the world we know — even
man himself — would never have existed.”
As they aided the rise and diversification
of other species, flowering plants achieved
a remarkable diversity of their own. The diver-sity
shows not merely in size, color and shape,
but in the ways they reproduce. A few types,
such as hollies, have separate male and female
plants, but most species have both male and
female parts in the same flower. Among these,
some will fertilize themselves while others
have evolved showy flowers, sweet nectars
and easily dispersed pollen to help them
exchange gametes with others of their kind.
Some clever flowers not only promote cross-fertilization
but recognize and reject their own
pollen, which botanists refer to as self- incom-patibility.
In a tiny pink flower from northern
California, Carol Goodwillie has discovered
yet another reproductive strategy: transient
self- incompatibility, a peculiar trait that may
provide a glimpse of evolution in action.
Goodwillie was a doctoral student at the
University of Washington in 1995 when she
and her adviser stumbled across Leptosiphon
jepsonii, a previously undiscovered plant that
has now been found in a several isolated pock-ets
of the Napa Valley. Jepsonii hid its secret
well. To all appearances, it could self- fertilize,
just as its near relative Leptosiphon bicolor did.
In one sense, self- pollination confers
a tremendous advantage. When the plant no
longer needs to attract pollinators, flower size
can shrink over evolutionary time, conserving
energy for other uses, including seed produc-tion.
Just one little problem. “ Some think
that self- fertilization is a genetic dead- end,”
Goodwillie said. “ You lose genetic variation
and with it, the ability to adapt to change. So in
family trees, you see selfing at tips of branches,
usually not on the trunks. The idea is that it
leads to extinction.”
Goodwillie had moved to ECU and was
in her eighth year of studying jepsonii when
a series of unrelated experiments opened her
eyes. On the first day of a bloom’s four- day life
span, it rejected its own pollen but accepted the
pollen of others. Starting on the second day, it
could self- fertilize.
lenges. Whether he’s in Australia or South
America, South Africa or California, Bond
spends long hours looking at the ground.
“ They’re incredibly cryptic,” he said. He
recalled hiking up and down rocky ravines to
find one Australian species. After three hours in
a driving rain, he gave up. “ We got back to the
car and there was a little bank not a meter from
the car and they were all over the bank.” Even
when found, trapdoor spiders don’t give up
easily. Sensing prey, they can spring the door
for a lightning- speed capture, but in the face
of danger, they seal the door so tight even a
determined biologist can barely pry it open.
Bond brings live samples back to the
lab, to be photographed and measured. With a
graduate student, he is trying to use mathemati-cal
models to help define spider shape. DNA
sequencing will help reconstruct relationships,
to show how characteristics have evolved, per-haps
as far back as the breakup of continents.
Such modern tools are dramatically changing
the way biologists view species. “ Morphologi-cal
observations probably understate the extent
of genetic diversity out there,” he said. “ We’re
seeing extreme molecular diversity.”
A few of Bond’s specimens live in
terrariums in the lab, but most are sacrificed.
“ The longer I do this, the harder that becomes,”
Bond said. “ I limit the number I bring back
for that reason. It takes me days to kill them,
and I’m in a bad mood when I do, but I think it
may be the only hope for the species.”
Evolution in action
Just 100 million years ago, a mono-chromatic
color scheme bathed the planet.
Ferns, mosses and conifers supplied shades of
cooling green. Then flowering plants appeared
and, in what Loren Eiseley called “ a soundless,
violent explosion,” blanketed the Earth with
all the colors of the rainbow. Their seeds and
fruits provided the energy to fuel the larger
brains and higher metabolism of warm- blooded
creatures. Birds took to the sky, and on the
ground the age of reptiles gave way to the age
of mammals. “ Flowers changed the face of the
planet,” Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey.
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Carol Goodwillie
says the Leptosiphon jepsonii grown in her
greenhouse are more lush than their counterparts
in the wild. • Kyle Summers and a colleague say
a type of mimickry most likely accounts for the
coloration of several South American poisonous
frogs. • The Dendrobates fantasticus has a look-alike
that belongs to a different genus.
Survival of the
Fittest Frog
edge • SPRING 2004 • 17
and South America. He began by studying
patterns of parental investment, that is, how
much time, energy and effort the frogs spend
in producing and rearing their young, and how
that varies by sex.
Among frogs, most of the parental care
falls on the male, a pattern also common in
fish. Summers has spent up to nine hours in the
dense undergrowth of a rain forest observing
a single frog as it carried tadpoles from the
leaf litter where they hatched to pools of water
where they could grow and mature. Parental
care, Summers found, is not always benign.
“ A male frog will try to mate with as many
females as possible, but the more offspring, the
less attention he can give to each,” he said. “ In
some cases, he will feed one clutch to another,
for example, if he can’t find enough separate
pools of water in which to deposit them.”
Field experiments and observations
helped Summers sort out what kind of pool
parents prefer for their maturing offspring,
how pool type affects offspring survival and
whether tadpoles can recognize and avoid can-nibalizing
their kin. DNA sequencing enabled
him to determine how these and other behav-iors
evolved. As he worked, new questions
intrigued him. Prominent among them was the
relationship between coloration and toxic-ity.
For one project, he studied 21 species of
frogs, comparing the level of toxicity with the
intensity of color and plotting their family trees
based on DNA analysis. The patterns he found
supported theories that bright colors protect the
frogs by advertising their unsuitability for the
dinner menu to potential predators.
With Dr. Rainer Schulte, a collaborator
in Peru, he then investigated a different color
issue, mimicry. In the most widely recognized
form, called Batesian mimicry, nontoxic spe-cies
evolve to resemble a toxic one — benefit-ing
from predators’ recognition of the warning
colors. One example is the Viceroy butterfly, a
nontoxic species that looks nearly identical to
the unpalatable Monarch.
Summers believes he has found a dif-ferent
type of mimicry in poisonous frogs. In
three locations in north central Peru, Schulte
Most of
all, if this is a
transition phase, is
jepsonii on its way
to fully cross-pollinating
or to
fully selfing? If the
former, the short-term
advantage
that self- compat-ibility
confers may
spell doom for this
small pink flower.
“ Evolution
can’t look for-ward,”
Goodwillie
said. “ It can’t plan
ahead. Evolution
is always running to catch up. Any
species or population is well- adapted to
what’s happened over the last hundred
or thousand years, not necessary to
now and not to the future. So as the
environment changes, the ultimate fate
could be extinction. Natural selection is
just optimizing the fit for right now.”
Survival of the
fittest frogs
In Darwin’s Ghost, Steve
Jones wrote: “ Nature does not favor
beauty, or strength, or ferocity; all it can do is to
advance those best able to multiply them-selves.
Although its products include the most
beautiful and most repulsive beings, there is
no mystery to Darwin’s machine; it is no more
than genetics plus time.” He makes it sound
so simple and straightforward, yet mysteries
abound. What is it that gives an animal, plant
or bacterium the reproductive edge over those
of its own kind? Clearly, the first struggle is to
survive, against high odds, long enough to re-produce.
After that, what does it take to attract
a mate? Is it better to have a large number of
offspring or to invest high levels of energy into
a few, improving their odds of survival?
Kyle Summers has focused his search for
answers on poisonous frogs found in Central
ible, and some display transient self- incom-patibility.
“ So clearly, this is evolutionarily
dynamic,” she said. “ We’re looking at a slice of
time. This is an opportunity to watch evolution
in action.”
Goodwillie’s questions are almost as
numerous as the jepsonii she has raised in her
greenhouse. Early cross- breeding experiments
indicate that a single recessive gene allows
jepsonii’s self- compatibility, but will this hold
true for all of the populations? Are the differ-ent
groups of jepsonii evolving in the same
direction and at the same rate? Will she be
able to locate the gene responsible for transient
self- fertilization? Why, if jepsonii’s transient
self- incompatibility actually confers the best of
both worlds, is its range so restricted? C o n t i n u e d
Photo courtesy of The Royal Society
Avian
Instincts
18 • SPRING 2004 • edge
which live in groups and appear to have strong
instincts against incest, offered a wealth of
opportunity for study. They range from the
white- browed sparrow weaver, whose adult
offspring help raise the parents’ new clutches,
to the sociable weaver, whose apartment- style
nests house as many a 100 birds, including
several breeding pairs and their non- breeding,
adult helpers.
With a colleague from Cornell Uni-versity,
McRae is studying the gray- capped
social weaver of Kenya. Family groups in this
species consist of the dominant pair and their
The victimized
English moorhens
incubated the
foreign egg
along with their
own, even when
McRae painted
the intruder’s
egg a bright red.
Related species
in Namibia and
Panama, on
the other hand,
usually reject
the foreign egg — the Namibian birds by
burying the offender, the Panamanian hens
by tossing it overboard. What accounted
for the different instincts in closely related
species?
“ There was a fairly simple explana-tion,
though it took a lot of work to figure it
out,” she said. “ In England, parasitism isn’t
costly. Most of the parasitic eggs were laid
after the host had finished laying her own
clutch so most never hatched. The incuba-tion
period is not particularly costly — it’s
the feeding stage that takes so much energy
— so if they don’t hatch, it’s not a problem.
In Africa, though, breeding is more syn-chronous
because it’s so dependent on rain
so ( without rejection techniques) the host birds
could raise offspring that are not their own.”
As McRae studied English moorhens,
she noticed something peculiar. Although most
family groups consisted of a single breeding
pair and their young, occasional territories
included a second breeding female. The second
female was almost always the daughter of the
first, and she mated with her father. “ Incest
is unusual in birds, and this might be a case
of evolutionary lag,” she said. “ The popula-tion
might be artificially dense so retention of
offspring may be unusual and they haven’t yet
adapted incest avoidance.”
The observations launched McRae on
an inquiry into social evolution of birds: how
the instinct for group living evolves, how the
birds solve conflicts such as who gets to breed
and how they avoid incest. African weavers,
had previously identified pairs of poisonous
frogs that looked similar but were clearly dif-ferent
species based on traits such as egg color
and mating calls. With DNA analysis, Sum-mers
and Schulte showed that three of the frogs
— one from each set — belong to the same
species, but in each locale they have taken on
the coloration and pattern of a different, more
distantly related poisonous frog. They suggest
this is evidence of a phenomenon called Mul-lerian
mimicry, in which toxic species provide
mutual benefit by sharing the cost of training
predators to keep their distance.
“ This ( pattern) is only consistent with
mimicry,” Summers said. “ Otherwise, it
doesn’t make sense.”
Avian instincts
Animal instincts nearly stumped Dar-win.
How could natural selection explain why
the European cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests
of other birds? Failing to explain such instincts,
he said, could overturn his whole theory.
By the time he wrote The Origin of Species,
Darwin had worked out his argument with the
help of slave- making ants and bees that build
geometrically perfect cells first time, every
time. “ No one will dispute that instincts are
of the highest importance to each animal,” he
wrote. “ Therefore I can see no difficulty, under
changing conditions of life, in natural selection
accumulating slight modifications of instinct
to any extent, in any useful direction…. This
theory is, also, strengthened by some few other
facts in regard to instincts; as by that common
case of closely allied, but certainly distinct,
species, when inhabiting distant parts of the
world and living under considerably different
conditions of life, yet often retaining nearly the
same instincts.”
Susan McRae shared Darwin’s interest
in birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests,
a behavior called brood parasitism. Study-ing
moorhens, she found consistent patterns
of intraspecies brood parasitism but a range
of responses to it. From England to Panama
and Namibia, she observed females that
would deposit eggs in other moorhens’ nests.
ABOVE: Susan McRae was first drawn to study
birds by an interest in brood parasitism. Now she
studies the instinct for group living in such species
as the gray- capped social weaver.
AT RIGHT: Many of the secrets of evolution are
hidden in the double helix of DNA.
Evolution’s
Master Genes
C o n t i n u e d
edge • SPRING 2004 • 19
first identified through research in fruit flies,
where alterations in an individual gene resulted
in dramatic and, after much study, predictable
mutations in the structure of the fly. Simple
mutations in a copy of one of these Hox genes,
for example, would result in a fly with two
midsections, each with its own set of wings,
creating a fly with four wings instead of two.
Other interesting characteristics also distinguish
Hox genes. They are relatively few in number,
occur in clearly defined clusters and appear in
the order in which they are expressed during
embryonic development. That is, the genes that
direct development of the head will be at one
end of the cluster, those dealing with midsec-tion
will be in the middle, and those specifying
the posterior section will be at the other end,
a highly unusual organization among genes.
“ These genes are unique in the way they are
organized and have been organized throughout
evolution,” Scemama said.
Among vertebrates, more interesting
developments have occurred. The closest
living relative to the common ancestor of all
vertebrates is a small wormlike sea creature
commonly called a lancelet. The lancelet has
one cluster of 14 Hox genes. As vertebrates
diverged from their common invertebrate
ancestor during evolution, they duplicated
the original Hox cluster. Lineages comprising
mammals have four, for example, and the
zebrafish has seven — but so far, no other
species studied has retained all 14 genes in each
cluster, and species vary in which genes they’ve
retained in their different clusters.
Two hypotheses could explain this
phenomenon, Scemama said. One is similar to
redundant duplication: two genes sharing the
work that one originally did so that together,
they equal the one original gene. The second
theory he called neofunctionalization. “ It could
be one kept the function of the ancestor gene
and the other duplicate took a new function,” he
said. “ It is complicated to understand because
the common ancestor that existed prior to the
gene duplication no longer exists.”
Also curious is why the major lineages of
vertebrates have the number of clusters they do.
Evolution’s
master genes
Little in the natural
world escaped Darwin’s
interest, but morphology
— with its questions about
the form and structure of
organisms — held special
appeal. “ This is the most
interesting department of
natural history, and may
be said to be its very soul,”
he wrote in The Origin of
Species. “ What can be more
curious than that the hand of
a man, formed for grasping,
that of a mole for digging, the leg of a horse,
the paddle of a porpoise, and the wing of a bat,
should all be constructed on the same pattern,
and should include the same bones, in the same
relative positions?”
What Darwin found curious has become
all the more intriguing. Scientists now know the
bones shaping those hands, legs, paddles and
wings resemble each other because all these
creatures descend from a common ancestor that
lived hundreds of millions of years ago. They’ve
also learned that a relatively few genes are
involved in directing the placement of these and
other body parts, and those genes bear remark-able
similarities across species. Now, scientists
are digging deep to understand what these simi-larities
mean. Among them are collaborators Ed
Stellwag and Jean- Luc Scemama.
Stellwag explained the larger question
this way: “ How do you think it is that humans
evolved such that our arms are extensions
from our shoulders? Why aren’t they located
somewhere else? Why do we have five fingers
and not seven? Most evolutionary biologists
will say, selection. We’ve been selected to have
those. And I agree. What we’re trying to get at
are the relationships between developmental
mechanisms and their role in the evolution of
morphology.”
Their focus is on what Scemama called
the master genes in evolution. Dubbed Hox
genes, their role in specifying morphology was
sons, who take mates from outside the family.
McRae is concentrating on the laboratory side
of the project: teasing out the DNA finger-prints
that allow her to determine paternity
and, with that, to reconstruct the pedigree of
the birds they’re studying.
“ We’re interested in how they partition
reproduction,” she said. “ Subordinates’
nesting creates strife because of the limited
resources. We’ve observed in the field some
egg- tossing — birds throwing out each other’s
eggs — and we’re just starting to look at
who’s doing it. It probably has a lot to do with
conflicts over reproduction.”
Eventually, she wants to do compara-tive
studies of all the weavers, to understand
the genetic, ecological and social factors that
influence the degree to which they cooperate
when it comes to building nests, breeding,
raising young and establishing and defending
territories. “ What drives me at moment are the
environmental influences,” she said. “ Group
living is not something birds do under ideal
circumstances. It’s often the result of habitat
saturation. When food or other resources
are limited, it becomes a necessity. Sociable
weavers, which have the apartment- style
nests, live in the harshest area of southern Af-rica.
Very few of other types live there. That’s
a clue. If you live in those areas, you have to
adopt this strategy to survive.”
Connecting
the Twigs
20 • SPRING 2004 • edge
Early on, scientists speculated that the number
of clusters would be related to morphological
complexity. Since fish seem to fall between the
wormlike lancelet and a mammal in terms of
complexity — a fish has fins, which the lancelet
lacks, but not a mammal’s seemingly more
complex limbs — it was expected to have an
intermediate number of clusters. Instead, it has
more.
“ Everybody’s still wondering what that
means,” Stellwag said. “ The only hypothesis
anyone has come up with is that maybe Hox
genes have a role not only in the determination
of morphological complexity but also in the
capacity for evolutionary diversification. That is,
the more of these genes a lineage has, the more
readily it can diversify its morphology, not in
a developmental sense, but in an evolutionary
sense. The only support for this theory is that
the lineage represented by the ray- finned fishes
is thought to have a greater number of species
than does the lineage to which mammals
belong.”
Unraveling the mystery of vertebrate
Hox genes means tackling a broad range
of questions, from when and how they are
expressed in the development of an embryo to
whether the corresponding genes in different
species — whether fish, mouse or man — have
the same role in development. “ Obviously,
fish morphology doesn’t look like human
morphology, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t
be specified in a similar way,” Stellwag said.
“ Or maybe, if the gene expression is different,
that’s why the morphology is different. In fish,
maybe the region of cells that is specified by a
particular Hox gene is greater than or less than
the region that is specified in humans, and that
would influence the structure.”
As in most areas of science, the big ques-tions
must be tackled in small segments. For
their segment, Stellwag and Scemama decided
to study striped bass development and compare
it with the best known of fishes, the zebrafish.
They narrowed it even further to the develop-ment
of the jaw.
They soon discovered a difference
between the two fishes, which diverged from
their common ancestor 150 millions years
ago. Where the zebrafish had two
copies of a specific gene involved
in making the jaw, the striped bass
had three.
A photograph taped to
Scemama’s lab door provides
insight into the next step of the
process. It shows a vibrant green
glow in the otherwise transparent
outline of a fish embryo. They had
successfully “ tagged” a gene they
were studying with a fluorescent
copy. As the embryo’s cells multi-plied
and migrated to form different
parts of the fish, they could follow
the action directed by this gene.
“ The presumption is that Hox genes
specify the destination of cells, like
a postal code,” Stellwag said.
Then they ran into difficulty. To fully
understand the gene’s function, they need to
be able to alter its expression in the developing
embryo — blocking it in some cases and in
others stimulating the expression in a region
where it does not normally occur — and study
the resulting malformations in the adult fish.
Striped bass, however, proved particularly
difficult subjects for genetic manipulation, and
because they spawn only once a year, progress
would be slow in coming.
So the researchers recently switched their
focus to tilapia, which breeds year round and
is more easily manipulated. Although tilapia is
a close relative of striped bass, they will have
to step back and duplicate their initial studies
in identifying and tagging genes.
Eventually, they hope to transfer genes
from one species to another, to see whether
and how they affect the jaw structure of the
fish. “ That’s not a trivial step,” Stellwag said.
“ Just because we put a gene in a zebrafish
doesn’t mean it will be expressed because all
the other mechanisms necessary for express-ing
the gene may have been lost evolutionarily.
But when it works, you can get valuable and
sometimes dramatic results.”
He pointed to experiments with fruit
flies and mice. Mutant flies were created that
were deficient in a particular Hox gene. When
the corresponding Hox gene from a mouse
was inserted into the fruit fly, it recovered its
normal function. The reverse also held true
— corresponding genes from a fly could
function in the mouse.
“ That was shocking when it was
done,” Stellwag said. “ This really goes back
to show these genes are descended from a
common ancestor, and they have retained over
enormous lengths of evolutionary time certain
deep, ancestral functions.”
Connecting the twigs
Back when Darwin explored aboard
the Beagle, living things were easily classi-fied.
They were animal or plant, with little
confusion between the two. Since that time,
whole new categories of life have been
discovered, more numerous and distinct from
one another than Darwin’s generation ever
dreamed of. Other discoveries have muddied
waters, showing similarities where once there
ABOVE: How genes specific morphology is the
focus of collaborators Ed Stellwag and Jean- Luc
Scemama ( not pictured).
AT RIGHT: John Stiller is looking billions of
years back in time for the moment that organisms
developed a new way to regulate genes.
Connecting
edge • SPRING 2004 • 21
were clear distinctions. “ The new taxonomy
has transformed the tree of life into an exotic
plant,” Steve Jones wrote in Darwin’s Ghost.
“ Men and chimps are indeed more related than
are men and bananas, but humans, insects, and
plants are, the DNA shows, all mere twigs on
the same branch.”
John Stiller has begun to take a hard
look at this branch, which includes life’s most
complex organisms, in hopes of finding one of
the smoking guns of evolution. With support
from an NSF Faculty Early Career Develop-ment
Award, he is looking a billion years
back in time for that moment, metaphorically
speaking, that organisms developed a new way
to regulate genes. With this ability, their cells
can differentiate, assuming different shapes
and functions, even changing throughout their
lifetimes. Organisms from the other major
branches retain relatively uniform cell shape
and function.
“ Even red algae that are large, multicel-lular
organisms don’t differentiate tissue so that
one type of cell is an eye or a foot or a leaf or
a root,” Stiller said. “ They have weird ways of
making cells twist together and form outwardly
complex forms, but they don’t differentiate cell
type.”
The reason, he suspects, is that they
evolved before his smoking gun was fired.
The gun in question has to do with something
called the C- terminal domain, a protein struc-ture
found on an enzyme that transcribes genes
into their biochemical messages. This domain
serves as a platform for binding many other
proteins involved in the process. Those proteins
in turn are responsible for controlling complex
maneuvers, such as putting an eye in its proper
place or telling a seed to sprout a root on one
side and a shoot on the other.
“ The fact that the dominant organisms
that we know are the same ones that have this
C- terminal domain, I don’t think is coinci-dental,”
he said. “ One of the reasons we have
evolved such complexity, and such a diversity
of complexity, is because we have a series of
key underlying mechanisms that arose during
our evolutionary history. I think this is one of
them.”
Stiller wants to learn when and how the
C- terminal domain, or CTD, originated and
what that has meant for the evolution of more
complicated forms of gene expression. As part
of his search, he has been crafting evolutionary
trees that identify which organisms have the C-terminal
domain and which don’t. As he looks
at those trees, one thing jumps out. Organisms
that evolve the CTD- based gene expression
keep it, without exception.
“ It’s surprisingly easy to lose functions in
evolution,” he said. “ A fish moves into a cave
and loses its eyes. Take something as funda-mental
as an arm, lose it and evolve a wing in-stead
if that’s more adaptable. Very complicated
structures are lost repeatedly in evolution. But
nothing we have looked at so far has lost this
domain. So something profound happened to
lock the CTD into the basic core functions of
gene expression. Once you have taken this step,
whatever it is, you can’t go back, you can’t lose
the CTD. Once it was there, the CTD proved
tremendously useful. You can lay all kinds of
proteins on it and make thousands of different
complicated organisms from very similar
genetic material. So here ( in the step that
locked CTD in place) is the foundation for the
development of a lot of complex organisms, as
well as tremendous evolutionary diversity, and
I want to know what that is.”
Organisms with the C- terminal domain
vary considerably, so to find the domain’s
original, core function, Stiller is trying to
identify the biochemical properties they have in
common and that are missing from organisms
lacking the domain. Dr. Zhenhau Gua, a post-doctoral
researcher in his lab, has identified one
likely set of proteins. These proteins are critical
to the CTD’s ability to initiate action and
appear to have evolved about the same time as
the domain itself. “ Have we demonstrated the
C- terminal domain was locked in at that point
because of this co- evolution? No, but I think
we are on to something,” Stiller said. “ Will we
fully understand this ‘ smoking gun’ during my
lifetime? Probably not, but it is a good start.”
In time, Stiller said, understanding the
evolution of the C- terminal domain will further
define relationships among the major groups
of organisms. “ One example is this issue of
red algae,” he said. “ I have been involved in
a philosophical and scientific debate over last
five or six years, based on different interpreta-tions
of different molecular analyses, as to
whether red algae and green plants are related
to one another. … It’s been hard to pin down.”
But similarities and differences that don’t
appear when looking at the external structure
may become apparent at the molecular level.
“ If we can say to other researchers, look, we
have a C- terminal domain along with the
following critical functions that are absolutely
conserved in plants and animals, and red algae
just don’t have them, doesn’t that mean that
plants are more closely related to animals than
they are to red algae?” he said. “ Then we will
have defined evolutionary relationships based
on something that’s both very complicated and
clearly shared, and it will be difficult to argue
it’s just an aberration in the data.” •
22 • SPRING 2004 • edge
edge: In February, experts on domestic
violence from across the United States will
be coming to Greenville. How did that come
about?
Griffin: I am a member of the
National Institute on Domestic Violence
in the African American Community and
have been a member for about the last eight
years. The institute consists of practitioners
and educators who have an interest in family
violence — that’s community violence, that’s
intimate partner violence, that’s elder abuse,
that’s child abuse. It’s the whole spectrum of
family violence.
About 3 1/ 2 years ago, the institute
and its steering committee, of which I’m
a member, decided that we had heard and
read a whole lot about domestic violence
but nobody had spent the time to do a real
assessment of what domestic violence and
community violence were like in the African
American community. We started by devel-oping
about 10 open- ended questions that we
wanted to ask in several communities. When
we put those communities together, we’d have
a national report. The community reports also
can stand independently as a bird’s eye view of
what’s going on in each community, or at least
the opinions of African Americans about what
is going on in terms of domestic violence in
their region.
The first one was in San Francisco- Oak-land
about three years ago. We’ve just published
the results from that. From there, we went to
Minneapolis- St. Paul. Then we went to Seattle.
After that we went to where they thought we
would get a rural perspective because I kept
telling them we had to do rural. They thought,
well Memphis is rural. This is a group of people
who live in large cities. All are in metropolitan
areas except me. So we went to Memphis and
had an inner city set of focus groups; then we
went to what was thought to be rural. It was a
suburban community right outside of Memphis.
It was not rural. Then after Memphis, we went
to Birmingham, Philadelphia and Detroit. I said
we still don’t have rural. They finally agreed
i n the most ideal picture, families are nurturing institutions — the secure cocoon from
which we learn to face the world with confidence, the soft place to land when things on
the outside go wrong. Whether at the beginning of life or the end, family members care
for us when we can’t take care of ourselves.
Too often, however, the ideal picture bears scant resemblance to reality. Since the
1960s, social scientists and public policymakers have paid increasing attention to what goes
wrong inside the family and how those problems can be addressed. Among those studying
such issues are members of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American
Community, an organization sponsored by the U. S. Department of Health and Human
Services and housed at the University of Minnesota. The institute has launched a multi-year
study of African American family violence involving intensive visits in communities
across the country.
Through the efforts of Dr. Linner Griffin, ECU professor of social work and a
member of the institute’s steering committee, Eastern North Carolina was selected as one
of the nine communities being studied. On Feb. 26, the institute met in Greenville with a
daylong series of events, including six focus groups of service providers, community activ-ists
and others with special interest in the issues and an evening forum open to the public.
Leading up to the meeting, edge spoke with Griffin about the institute’s plans and
about her area of special interest, elder abuse and maltreatment.
Tattered Cocoon Scholars examine the extent, nature of violence in African American families
C o n t i n u e d
edge • SPRING 2004 • 23
24 • SPRING 2004 • edge
and said if I’m insisting on rural, then I should
show them rural. So we will do a community
assessment here, with six different focus groups
from the community. Our community as we’ve
defined it is the area east of I- 95.
edge: Why was it so important to have
a rural area represented? Is domestic violence
different in different parts of the country?
Griffin: I think we’ll find some differ-ences
between what exists in eastern North
Carolina and Detroit, for example. I cannot
imagine that we wouldn’t because they’re deal-ing
with whole different economic systems and
different social support networks.
One of the things I know that’s likely to
come up is the lack of transportation in rural
communities. Cities don’t have that issue. They
have public transportation. They get to services
easily enough, plus the communities are large
enough that you’ll have various branches or
satellite offices of agencies in different parts
of the city, though not necessarily in African
American neighborhoods. In rural communities
on the other hand, you may find one agency
wearing multiple hats, or you may find the of-fice
located in the county seat, which is 50 miles
away. There’s not a real convenient way to get
there unless you can get someone to take you.
If you’re talking about domestic violence, the
victim would probably have to get the perpetra-tor
to take her there. That’s not likely to happen
very often.
edge: Why the specific focus on African
Americans?
Griffin: There has been a good bit of
research in family violence, but the majority of
respondents in all the studies have been Cau-casian.
They are the majority population. We
haven’t had the degree of representation neces-sary
to understand what’s happening within any
of the minority groups, whether we’re talking
about Asians and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics,
Native Americans or African Americans. That
means minority issues and differences in minor-ity
concerns are lost.
edge: Your own expertise lies in elder
abuse and maltreatment, which has been get-ting
a lot of press attention lately. How great a
problem is it?
Griffin: Physical abuse is often what
gets the attention, and it’s what gets perpetrated
in nursing homes, which is where you usually
hear of it. It happens in the home, too, but the
nursing home gets the big exposé. Physical
abuse is only part of it, however. When you talk
about elder abuse, you’re also talking about
emotional or psychological abuse. You’re talking
about neglect, both by others and self- neglect.
You’re talking about abandonment and financial
or material exploitation. I think of elder abuse as
behavior that can be either acts of commission
or omission that causes harm to an older person.
These acts are demonstrable and causally linked
to the harm, and they warrant intervention on the
part of the state.
In terms of numbers, it’s one of most
underreported types of abuse. There might be
a half million incidents reported a year, but the
National Elder Abuse Incidence Survey suggests
that for every reported incident, there might be
five not reported. So multiply that out — it’s
scary. We’re not equipped to deal with that. We
want the incidents to come to the forefront, but
if they do, we don’t have the manpower to deal
with it. We also need to prepare ourselves for
the future because the elderly population is the
fastest growing population we have. If we can’t
deal with it now, can you imagine what it will be
like in 30 years when the elderly will be at least
20 percent of the total population?
edge: What has been the focus of your
own research?
Griffin: Most of my research focuses in
African Americans, using both quantitative and
qualitative studies to develop a clear understand-ing
of what abuse looks like among African
Americans. It differs.
edge: How so?
Griffin: The context is often different, to
begin with. All of the definitions talk about the
victims of elder abuse as generally 75 years old
or older, they’re white females, they’re generally
widowed and in poor health. The definition for
whites makes mention that the victim often lives
in the home of the abuser so she’s dependent
on the abuser in some way. Well, in African
American families, most of the seniors — and
they usually are women — provide the home for
the adult children. That in itself is a difference.
You’re not living in the home of your child. The
child is coming back, if they ever left, to live in
the home of the mother.
In fact, we’ve found something that tends
to be a little bit reminiscent of a practice that
happened in early immigrant families. It is
that African American seniors, mostly elderly
women, sometimes enter mutually beneficial
relationships with their children. I call it encour-aged
infantilism. It’s where one person, usually
an unmarried daughter, but sometimes a son, is
kept at home to be with the parents. Sometimes
they’re encouraged to remain dependent on the
parent and not take on some of the responsibili-ties
that go with adulthood, such as going out to
get a job. Often the other siblings know it. It’s
the notion of the weaker one staying home and
being protected by the parent, but it also provides
companionship for the parent.
We also find in the African American
community a greater dependence and a greater
recognition of non- kin family. African Ameri-cans
have more aunts and cousins who really
aren’t blood kin. So when you have abuse, it’s
important to determine the actual relationship,
and it’s not always easy because they’ve been
together for so long.
edge: What are you finding? Are there
differences between kin- and non- kin?
Griffin: So far, we haven’t found any
more abuse by the non- kin than family mem-bers.
I’m talking primarily about financial ex-ploitation
because one thing we’ve found is that
African Americans find the concept of physical
abuse of their parents particularly unacceptable.
You’ll find other kinds of abuse, but you don’t
find the mother figure physically beaten up.
edge: We often think of elder abuse as an
adult child taking frustrations out on a parent, but
I saw a study recently showing that elder abuse is
more often committed by the spouse.
Griffin: I haven’t seen the study you
refer to, but the national elder abuse survey con-ducted
in 1998- 99 reported there was a change
in who was actually the perpetrator. In the 1980s,
it most often was thought to be the daughter
( who is usually the caretaker). But this survey
found it was most often a male child when you
count neglect and financial exploitation. Also,
the notion of a relationship between caregiver
stress and acts of violence has been shown to be
unfounded.
At the same time, people have been
saying for years that we often do have spousal
abuse among seniors and often it is the female
who is the perpetrator. The rationale is that the
wife may have been victimized over the years.
edge • SPRING 2004 • 25
Because women tend to have longer life spans
and be healthier than the males, the female
then becomes the caregiver and there’s a shift
in power. Theoretically what transpires is when
the women finally get the upper hand, they can
sometimes be angry and seek to retaliate.
edge: Is some of that also going on with
the children, adult children who were abused as
children later becoming violent?
Griffin: This gets into learned violence.
I’m not saying that black people are more
violent than whites. The research shows that’s
not true. But they often live in communities
where they see more violence, even if it’s at
the hands of the police. If they’ve been raised
in a home where there is violence — where it
could be domestic abuse or related to substance
abuse, then that’s the learned behavior. It’s what
they know so they perpetuate the only behavior
they know, and you get spouse abuse and child
abuse. Poverty is another piece of what can lead
to violence in the community. Poverty is one
of the primary initiators, and we know there is
a higher incidence of poverty among African
Americans.
It’s amazing to me when I talk with some
seniors and they talk about what their parents
were like. They talk about having been pinched.
The father wouldn’t spank them, but he would
pinch them and sometimes pinch them until
they bled. I would consider that violence. They
consider it love. Dad was showing interest.
Dad was paying attention. Dad was wrestling
and tussling. Dad at least was attempting to
discipline. You have to understand that when
you have a group of people who feel totally
deprived, they grab at straws. There’s the whole
psychological aspect that any attention is better
than no attention. But what you learn in those
instances is how to be cruel.
edge: Why is elder abuse so underre-ported?
Griffin: One reason is something Sue
Tomita writes about, the minimization and
neutralization theory. Sometimes when you get
groups of minority elders, they make all kinds
of wonderful excuses for the neglect or abuse
against them. One of reasons is that they raised
these children so they assume part of the respon-sibility
for their own maltreatment. The result
is they make all kinds of excuses for why this is
happening that would in some way absolve the
children who are committing this abuse against
them. The same thing happens in the African
American community.
Another aspect is that African Americans
are particularly resistant to institutional
help because they don’t trust the institu-tions.
They’re isolated from services
by virtue of where they live and the
fact that when satellite offices open
for different services, they’re generally
not put in high risk areas. Then, too,
African Americans have been quite
demoralized at various times in their
history. It’s a struggle just try to make
sure people can keep looking forward
rather than looking back.
edge: Are there other issues that
have come up in your research?
Griffin: I’ve looked at the rela-tionships
of certain kinds of health con-ditions
and the emotional conditions
of the person. One thing that’s very
prevalent in this area is kidney disease
and subsequent dialysis. Many African
Americans — as a result of diet, diabe-tes
and hypertension — receive dialysis
for 10 to 20 years. When you look
at the number of patients on dialysis
and on waiting lists for transplantation, they
are predominantly African American. Most
patients receive dialysis three days a week. You
wonder how they survive. These are the people
who are most susceptible to different forms of
social and health- care maltreatment.
edge: You mentioned that we’re not pre-pared
as a society to deal with all the cases of
elder abuse now or in the future. What should
we be doing?
Griffin: We have to find ways to
protect our senior citizens. One of the ways
is to have a network such as the Council on
Aging out there monitoring what’s happening,
making sure they’re being fed every day, that
they’re being take care of on some level. But
there’s also a whole range of needs such as
housing, transportation and basic health care.
Some of these services are out there, but they
are sprinkled around and are not sufficient to
meet the needs.
It’s also important to understand the need
for culturally or ethnically sensitive services.
We need to offer services where people need
them, and they should be provided by people
who are sensitive to the issues, and not just by
someone who’s been through two hours of
diversity training. •
ABOVE: Among African Americans, elder abuse seldom takes the form of physical violence,
says social work professor Linner Griffin.
A large, tea- colored map dominates one
wall of Dr. Todd Savitt’s office. Suggestive
of a Victorian tax assessor’s tool, it pinpoints
the location and names the residents of every
home in Belknap County, N. H., in 1860. Savitt
bought the map when he was in high school,
after stumbling across it in an antiques store.
Years later, he discovered an interesting tidbit
on the map — the family home of Mary Baker
Eddy, founder of Christian Science.
Savitt loves maps, especially old ones,
and pores over them, absorbing every detail.
It makes him a good navigator. He knows the
twists and turns of city streets and country by-ways
long before he visits. He seldom gets lost.
Yet for a time, many years ago, Savitt felt
lost. Lost and trapped. A medical school stu-dent,
he doubted — with increasing conviction
— that he wanted to become a physician. He
finally withdrew, certain that medical school
had been a seriously wrong turn. But even
wrong turns, he found, can bring him back to
where he’s supposed to be.
Today, that place is the Brody School of
Medicine. As a professor of medical humani-ties,
Savitt teaches ethics to aspiring physicians
and leads the country’s oldest, continuously
running medical readers’ theater program,
which he founded. But most of all, he is a his-torian,
a specialist in African American medi-cal
history. His groundbreaking work Medicine
and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care
of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia was recently
reissued by the University of Illinois Press, and
he is editing a collection of his articles about
African American medical history for a book to
be published in 2005 by Kent State University
Press. The working title is Race and Medicine
in 19th and Early 20th Century America.
“ I couldn’t escape my past,” he says.
“ I tell people if they decide to leave medical
school, they will use the knowledge they have
gained in some way. Here I wound up writing a
26 • SPRING 2004 • edge
‘ I couldn’t escape my past’
A medical school dropout, historian Todd Savitt
follows a path that brings him back to where he began
C o n t i n u e d
As they describe his virtues,
friends and associates
also delight in Savitt’s quirks.
He runs daily, rain or shine,
at home or away.
A vegetarian ( it makes keeping
kosher easier, he says),
he snacks on M& Ms every night.
He shows up for classes
and meetings bearing his
home- baked chocolate chip
cookies. And then there
are the maps.
book on the subject of medical history. I teach
in a medical school. I love it. I’m very happy.
I couldn’t have picked a job that would give me
everything I want the way this does.”
Savitt sits behind a desk he has straight-ened
up in anticipation of a guest. As always he
is nattily attired. This, after all, is a man who
disdains the thought of running errands in the
grubby clothes of weekend chores. Better to
take a few minutes to change into something
presentable. On this day, he wears gray slacks
with a blue- striped shirt and a tie in an abstract
design of rust, gold and brown, with just a hint
of blue. Gray dusts his neatly trimmed beard
and hair. The corners of his mouth turn up.
“ His default setting is a smile,” says
Dr. Jacalyn Duffin of Queen’s University
in Kingston, Canada, president- elect of the
American Association for the History of
Medicine. “ He has this childlike sense of
wonder that’s totally infectious.”
Duffin has known Savitt for more than a
dozen years, working alongside him in
professional workshops and in the AAHM.
“ I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like him,”
she says. “ He is the opposite of a snob. In
academic meetings, a lot of times people ask
questions of speakers to try to show off or
catch them. Todd asks enthusiastic questions
because he’s interested, even when it’s not in
his area. It could be medieval European medi-cine,
and he’d be enthusiastic.”
He is widely regarded as courteous,
thoughtful and generous with his time.
For six years, he has served as the AAHM’s
secretary- treasurer, a job that entails tending
to all the daily business of the organization
and its conferences, and as chair of the
History of Medicine Study Section of the
National Library of Medicine, an arm
of the National Institutes of Health.
A former board member of the North
Carolina Humanities Council, he
edge • SPRING 2004 • 27
have to shape my whole identity around being a
physician.”
For the next year, he taught junior high sci-ence,
an experience more stressful than medical
school, and picked up a few more history cours-es.
Those classes confirmed his abiding interest
in the subject. He entered graduate school at the
University of Virginia to study Southern history,
drawn in part by a longtime fascination with the
experience of African Americans. Eventually
he would do post- doctoral studies at Duke and
teach at the University of Florida before coming
to ECU in 1982, all the while concentrating on
the one thing he thought he had left behind.
“ I had no interest in studying the history
of medicine,” he says, “ but as I took courses
in Southern history, I was able to apply what I
learned in medical school and a year in a pathol-ogy
lab doing autopsies to my graduate courses.
I wound up saying I guess I’m going to learn
medical history, but what I did was combine my
interest in blacks with my interest in medicine.”
Medicine and Slavery marked the first
time that the science of medicine had been
applied to a retrospective examination of slave
health. He not only tackled scientifically what
was then a hotly debated subject — were blacks
medically different from whites? — but covered
whippings as a medical problem and slave quar-ters
as a public health issue. Historians polled by
the journal Reviews in American History named
it one of the two most influential works of medi-cal
history published in the 1970s.
Savitt loves maps, especially old ones,
and pores over them, absorbing every
detail. It makes him a good navigator.
He knows the twists and turns of city
streets and country byways long before
he visits. He seldom gets lost.
Savitt has since gone on to chronicle the
history of every black medical school in the
United States, to detail the case histories of
the first two people diagnosed with sickle cell
anemia and to chronicle the early experiences of
black physicians.
“ Nobody knows more about the medical
history of blacks in America than Savitt,” says
28 • SPRING 2004 • edge
gives frequent talks on medical history and con-ducts
workshops on readers’ theater around the
state and nation. A new six- month project for
the Humanities Council has him driving the six
hours to Greensboro and back every month to
lead book discussions for hospital workers. He
is a past board president of the Country Doctor
Museum in Bailey and has advised the N. C.
Museum of History and Somerset Plantation
historic site on medical exhibits and programs.
As they describe his virtues, friends and
associates also delight in Savitt’s quirks. He
runs daily, rain or shine, at home or away. A
vegetarian ( it makes keeping kosher easier, he
says), he snacks on M& Ms every night. He
shows up for classes and meetings bearing his
home- baked chocolate chip cookies. And then
there are the maps.
He indulges his fascination for maps and
for research by planning the trips he takes with
his wife, Carole. He filled an 11- day drive to
Montana with out- of- the- ordinary points of
interest along the way, she says. He
navigated. She drove. “ Todd bikes,”
she says. “ Todd doesn’t drive. A person
who’s so interested in his surroundings
doesn’t necessarily keep both eyes on
the road.”
Savitt grew up in New York City,
playing stickball in the streets with
kids of Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish and
African American descent. His father
manufactured little girls’ bathrobes and
clothing. “ I thought he was famous be-cause
his stuff was in stores,” Savitt says.
His mother, a homemaker, occasionally
modeled for clothing manufacturers.
As youngsters, he and his brother
Bob would catch the bus from Bayside
to Flushing, then pick up the subway
into lower Manhattan to visit stamp
dealers. “ It was great fun,” he says.
“ We never thought twice about being
on our own in the city. In high school,
we would take dates to the theater and
sit up high in the $ 2.90 seats. The city
was accessible in a way it may not be
anymore.”
Later, the Savitt brothers spent
a summer traveling cross- country to-gether,
driving the maroon Corvair Todd
had bought on halves with his dad. They
camped most of the time and picked up odd
jobs whenever they ran out of money, working
construction in Texas, picking beans alongside
migrant workers in Oregon. “ It gave us insight
into a different way of life,” he says. “ We were
relatively privileged, middle- class whites.”
Despite their privileges, a cloud hung
over the Savitt household. Rheumatic fever
had given Mrs. Savitt a weak heart that left her
more and more incapacitated. “ Part of wanting
to be doctor was that childhood dream of want-ing
to cure her,” Savitt says.
He graduated from college with a major
in history before entering medical school at the
University of Rochester. It was there he met
Carole, a medical secretary. They married while
he worked in a pathology lab, officially still in
medical school but rethinking his career choice.
Her support helped give him the strength to
drop out. “ I had somebody I could talk to,
who could say I was worthy of quitting and
of doing something else,” he says. “ I didn’t
“ I couldn’t have picked a job that would give me everything
I want the way this does,” says Todd Savitt.
Dr. Ronald Numbers, a professor of medical
history at the University of Wisconsin- Madison
and Savitt’s longtime friend.
The two met 25 years ago. “ I was asked to
be a commentator at a conference in Washing-ton,”
Numbers says. “ Two guys were presenting
papers, Savitt and someone else. I was rather
harsh on Savitt. He made a blunder in logic.
I had only mild criticism of the other guy, but
that guy was so angry he almost wouldn’t
speak. Todd and I went out and had a meal and
became best friends.”
Yet for a time, many years ago, Savitt felt
lost. Lost and trapped. A medical school
student, he doubted — with increasing
conviction — that he wanted to become
a physician. He finally withdrew, certain
that medical school had been a seriously
wrong turn. But even wrong turns,
he found, can bring him back to where
he’s supposed to be.
Savitt’s easy temper is part of what
makes him invaluable to the AAHM, says its
president, Dr. Kenneth Ludmerer. “ He’s a kind
person, and I don’t mean that in a trivial way,”
Ludmerer says. “ He’s kind and caring. I can’t
imagine a mean bone in his body. He always
has the best interest of the association at heart.
If a decision might have a negative impact on
someone, he tries to phrase it in a way that will
soften the blow. And he’s unflappable. Issues
that some people get riled and emotional about,
he faces with equanimity.
“( And) he is an exemplary scholar
— wise, insightful and valid. His work on
African Americans has been pioneering, with
implications for society, not just history.”
Taking history and other humanities out
into society lies behind Savitt’s work with the
N. C. Humanities Council, where he is known
for an ability to engage audiences with the
heart and the intellect. He was serving on the
council’s board in 1988 when a grant applicant
proposed establishing medical readers’ theater
groups at the state’s four medical schools.
Medical students would go out in the com-edge
• SPRING 2004 • 29
munity to stage theatrical- style readings
based on literary works with a medical
theme. Then students and audience
together would discuss the issues raised
by the piece.
At ECU, none of Savitt’s col-leagues
was interested in taking on
the project so “ by default, I did.” It has
continued to the present day, long after
sister programs fell by the wayside.
Savitt and his group present four to six
program each semester at churches,
retirement centers and other public
venues.
The program’s success brings
invitations from around the country.
“ I probably do as many readers’ theater
programs as history talks,” he says. “ I
was just invited to give a history lecture
in Schenectady, and I’ll do a readers’
theater program while I’m there.”
He conducts a program for minor-ity
students each summer in Seattle, and
he works with students at the Medical
College of Georgia each year. To assist
fledging groups, Savitt compiled 14 of
the readers’ theater scripts he has used,
with his discussion questions and an
introduction, into Medical Reader’s
Theater: A Guide to Scripts. It was pub-lished
by the University of Iowa Press in 2002.
Harlan Gradin, associate director of the
N. C. Humanities Council, credits the success
of the readers’ theater and many other public
programs to Savitt’s personality, which he calls
warm and user- friendly.
“ He’s a mensch,” Gradin says. “ There
is no higher compliment. Todd is a mensch, a
complete person. He makes you comfortable,
and that allows him to communicate across
boundary lines like race and class, which is
critical when dealing with the programs of the
Humanities Council. He not only has the great-est
integrity but always shows the highest degree
of respect for people with whom he’s working
and for his audience. And he makes amazing
chocolate chip cookies.”
Savitt’s students know the cookies well.
At first he baked them only for first- and sec-ond-
year students in his medical ethics classes,
but the disappointment of third- year students
doing monthly ethics rounds proved too much.
“ They guilted me into it,” he says.
Savitt’s experience in medical school
pays off for students, whether he’s assuring
them that life will not end if they drop out of
medical school or listening as they reflect on
losing their first patient. Ron Numbers admires
Savitt’s commitment to medical education. “ I
teach in a medical school, but I’m not a medi-cal
educator the way he is,” Numbers says.
“ He cares just as much about training good
physicians ( as he does history) and thoroughly
enjoys it. That’s fairly unusual, especially for a
non- M. D.”
Although he could, Savitt refrains from
using one experience in his classes — his
mother’s surgery in 1988 to replace a heart
valve. “ She died on the table,” he says. “ It was
totally unexpected. Here I am teaching ethics,
and that surgeon didn’t tell us — at least not
that my father, brother or I can recall — that
she might die in surgery. He said it was risky
Savitt’s medical school experience deepens the discussions
with students in his ethics classes.
C o n t i n u e d
surgery, but we thought if it didn’t work, she’d
just be back to where she was, not that she
could die.”
A year later, Savitt attended a medical
conference in Montana. Still raw from the expe-rience,
he went out into the Rocky Mountain’s
Glacier National Park to say prayers for his
mother.
Religion was only casually observed in
Savitt’s childhood. The family went to syna-gogue
on high holy days, had Passover seders
and lit candles for Hanukkah. He attended
religious school just enough to become a bar
mitzvah when he turned 13. But the sicker his
mother became, the more he turned against
religion. “ How could God let this happen to
Mom?” he recalls questioning. “ It really was an
anger that I had. I pretty much stayed away until
I had kids of my own, which is a typical story.”
In returning to his religious roots,
Savitt sought a new depth of experi-ence.
He found beauty and mystery in
congregational singing in ancient Hebrew.
As part of a study group in Gainesville,
he learned to conduct services. “ It gave
me insight I didn’t have before into why
we do the things we do in the service,”
he says. In North Carolina, he was intro-duced
to the annual B’nai B’rith Institute
on Judaism at Wildacres Retreat near
Little Switzerland. For the past decade,
he has organized the four- day event,
scheduling speakers, performances and
services around such subjects as the Bible
and music.
Although he once led services at
synagogue, including wedding ceremo-nies
for his daughters, today Savitt finds
himself drawn more toward private ob-servances.
But all of it has enriched him.
“ It got me back into understanding what I
like about Judaism,” he says. “ If you look
for it through readings and commentaries,
you get a sense of how rich the religion is,
how it has been refined over the centuries.
… It’s an intellectual tradition, a historical
tradition and a culture that gets passed
down, whether we like it or not. I had to
grow up enough to appreciate that.”
His daughters didn’t have to grow
up to appreciate life with their father.
Each got her own special time with Dad
every year. Jodey would choose week-ends
at Kings Dominion. Allyson preferred
camping and hiking. “ He’s always been a sup-portive
dad,” Allyson Savitt Forrester says. “ I
was in a play in high school once. I was a bird,
and they built a big cage and hoisted me up 30
feet in the gym every night. Dad came to every
single performance. I did horribly in that play,
but he was there every night. I asked him why.
He said it was to make sure I didn’t fall.”
Now Savitt spends time with his
grandchildren on leisurely walks through the
neighborhood, letting 6- year- old Maddie stop
to watch ants or sharing 3- year- old Mitchell’s
excitement over construction equipment. “ He
likes to observe her,” Forrester says of her fa-ther
and Maddie. “ I think the phrase he uses is,
he likes to watch children before they become
self- aware.”
Savitt rises each morning before most
people are aware of themselves or anything else,
starting the day with a pre- dawn, 45- minute run.
He also bikes to and from work, several days
a week stopping by the gym for more exercise
before returning home in the evening. By then,
Carole will already have eaten dinner. “ Lean
Cuisine is my friend,” she says. Todd prepares
his own kosher meal. “ He does a whole meal
from scratch every night,” she says. Then he’ll
settle in at the kitchen table. As he listens to jazz
recordings, he reads — history, short stories,
Jewish literature — and eats two snack- size
bags of M& Ms. Two bags. Not one. Not three.
Two. Those two bags of pleasure, he says, are
part of what keeps him running, lest the calories
catch up.
Like its occupant, Todd Savitt’s office
slowly reveals itself. It is deep and narrow,
its width further constricted by a long row of
filing cabinets, each drawer closed and latched.
Western scenes with buffalo and wagon trains
decorate the drawer fronts. On the opposite wall,
near the Belknap County map, a calendar sports
a reproduction of a painting by Western artist
Charlie Russell. On the back of the door hangs a
stylized map depicting the Missoula Valley.
The artwork reflects one of Savitt’s newer
interests, one that began with the trip to Montana
soon after his mother’s death. Since then, he has
become enthralled by the state, its landscape, its
people, its history. “ I’m an opportunist,” he says.
“ I decided if I were to be able to return, I would
have to develop some expertise in Montana his-tory.”
He has published an article on the founding
of St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula and has
begun work on a piece describing medicine and
health in Helena in 1900. He also helps organize
an annual conference on medical history at
Montana State University. Whenever he goes to
Bozeman for the conference, he adds time for re-search
and hiking. Last summer, he spent a week
on solitary hikes in Glacier National Park.
“ It’s nice to be alone sometimes,” he says.
“ Part of that is spiritual, being closer to God,
that mysterious force.” Part is the beauty of the
unspoiled nature. “ You don’t have to go very far
in Montana to get into the wilderness.”
Though he may visit the wilderness, Todd
Savitt no longer dwells there. He was not cut out
to be a physician, but in a medical school and in
medical history, he has found his way home. •
30 • SPRING 2004 • edge
“ Todd bikes. Todd doesn’t drive,” says his wife, Carole
Savitt. “ A person who’s so interested in his surroundings
doesn’t necessarily keep both eyes on the road.”
explore e x p l o r a t i o n s
edge • SPRING 2004 • 31
A monument soars
Seven miles north of where the Wrights
took flight, a new monument directs the imagi-nation
skyward. Called Monument to a Century
of Flight, it results from the collaboration of two
ECU art professors and sculptors, Hanna Jubran
and Jodi Hollnagel, and Glenn Eure, an ECU
graduate and Outer Banks artist.
The monument features 14 stainless
steel pylons in the shape of airplane wings that
ascend from 10 feet to 20 feet in height in a
120- foot ellipse, symbolizing the distance of the
first flight. Black granite panels on the pylons
are engraved with words and images reflecting
100 significant events in the history of aviation.
Among the pylons rests a six- foot bronze dome
depicting the continents of Earth ringed by bas-relief
depictions of historical aircraft. An infinity
symbol points from North Carolina.
Located at the N. C. Department of
Transportation’s Aycock Brown Welcome
Center in Kitty Hawk, the monument is the first
major landmark visible to people traveling to the
Outer Banks over the Wright Brothers Memorial
Bridge. Its creation was initiated by Eure and
Icarus International, a non- profit organization
that raised $ 1 million for the project.
Jubran and Hollnagel fabricated the
pylons, which weigh between 1,000 and 2,000
pounds each, over a 3 1/ 2 year period and
installed the work last fall. The monument was
dedicated and opened to the public Nov. 8.
The Wright details
The Wright brothers’ days on the Outer
Banks came to life in fresh detail with the Wright
Brothers Centennial Digital Exhibit at Joyner
Library. The exhibit included the
Wrights’ diary entries, weather
data and more than 100 image
details from photographs taken
by the Wrights in North Carolina.
Dr. Larry Tise, an expert in
the history of flight and the Wil-bur
and Orville Wright visiting
distinguished professor of his-tory,
worked with the university
to identify images from the digitally
enhanced photographs. The images
reveal more buildings and community
activities than generally assumed for
the early 20th century at Kill Devil Hills.
“ It’s not quite as bleak as we traditionally
think of it,” Tise said.
The images, property of the Library
of Congress and Wright State University,
were scanned in a high- resolution format
and provided to ECU. The high resolution
permitted the undistorted enlargement of
the images, bringing to life details down to the
pattern on suspenders, embroidered name
patches and reading materials.
The library exhibit ran from November to
February and may still be viewed online at www.
lib. ecu. edu/ exhibits/ wright.
A literary flight of fancy
North Carolina Literary Review commemo-rated
the first flight in its 2003 issue with a
special section on aviation in North Carolina
literature and letters.
Among the features were an interview
with author Clyde Edgerton, a former fighter
pilot who has featured aircraft in two of his
books, The Floatplane Notebooks and In Memory
of Junior; and the first- time publication of
photographs by Alpheus W. Drinkwater, a
telegraph operator on the Outer Banks early
in the 20th century and a longtime stringer for
the Associated Press. In a Readers Digest article
in 1956, Drinkwater recalled tapping out a
message from “ those crazy Wrights” to their
sister Katharine: “ Flight successful. Will be
home for Christmas.”
North Carolina Literary Review is published
by the ECU English department and the
Division of Academic Affairs and by the North
Carolina Literary and Historical Association.
The editor is Dr. Margaret D. Bauer, associate
professor of English. •
T H E W R I G H T
S T U F F
ECU marks the 100th anniversary of flight
In December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright labored in relative obscurity on North Carolina’s
Outer Banks on their way to achieving the world’s first powered flight. Last fall, people from around
the world joined in celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ accomplishment.
Among those commemorating the Dec. 17 event in different ways were faculty members from ECU.
explore e x p l o r a t i o n s
32 • SPRING 2004 • edge
E A V E S D R O P P I N G
Microbiologist deciphers
how bacteria communicate
Dr. Everett C. Pesci is an eavesdrop-per.
Like an FBI surveillance team, this assistant
professor of microbiology hopes his spying will
stop a killer in its tracks.
Pesci’s snooping focuses on a communica-tion
system he identified about five years ago in
the potentially deadly bacterium Pseudomonas
aeruginosa. “ It turns out that bacteria are not as
dumb as we thought they were,” he said. “ They’re
actually communicating with each other, and
we’re just learning how to listen to them now.”
At least four different types of cell- to- cell
communication have been identified among
bacteria. Often referred to as quorum sensing, the
communication systems usually signal the bacte-ria
that their numbers have reached an adequate
size for whatever task is at hand. The task may be
benign, for example, causing luminescence in the
light organ of the flashlight fish. In pathogenic bacteria, the task takes
a different turn.
“ The theory is it’s a way for the bacteria to hide out and not
cause a big stir in the immune system until their army gets big enough,”
Pesci said. “ Then they turn on all their virulence genes and try to make
you sick.”
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of these less- benign cases. An op-portunistic
pathogen, it lives almost everywhere without causing harm
to humans. In people with compromised immune systems, however, it
can quickly cause serious damage or death. It frequently infects burned
tissue, for example, and it loves the human lung. Ultimately it is what
kills most cystic fibrosis patients and many others with injured airways.
“ If you’re in the hospital and end up on a ventilator, you have a good
chance of getting Pseudomonas aeruginosa in your lungs,” Pesci said. “ If
that happens, you have only a 50- 50 shot of living.”
Quorum sensing is an important part of this deadly effect. Placed
in the lungs of a mouse, naturally occurring Pseudomonas aeruginosa kill
quickly. Mutant bacteria without the ability to communicate live but do
not make the mouse sick.
In the 1990s, medical scientists identified two signaling systems
integral to quorum sensing in P. aeruginosa. Five years ago, Pesci identi-fied
yet a third quorum sensing system in P. aeruginosa. Named the
Pseudomonas Quinolone Signal or PQS, it serves as a bridge between
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| Description | Spring 2004 |
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| Full Text | A CENTURY OF FLIGHT SYMBOLIZED, CELEBRATED Also in this issue: Dangers of Childhood Obesity, Tracking Evolution’s Clues, Historian’s Life Comes Full Circle E A S T C A R O L I N A U N I V E R S I T Y 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 2004 EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Spring 2004 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 Tom Fortner Director, Medical Center News and Information Dr. Alan A. Schreier Director, Program Development and Coordinator of Institutional Compliance Dr. Emilie S. Kane Director, Office of Sponsored Programs 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 © 2004 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 $ 7,980.00, or $ 2.28 per copy. 22 26 6 12 features 6 Too Many, Too Big, Too Soon ECU center to address pandemic of childhood obesity, which threatens a generation with disability, early death. • Calculating Childhood Obesity Organizations apply similar standards but different terminology. • ECU Lands Role in NIH Study of Weight- loss Surgery University receives $ 1.3 million grant to aid effort. • Research Sampler Projects examine causes and treatment. 12 Darwin’s Descendants With travel to distant places and long hours in the lab, evolutionary biologists expand and refine the field made famous by the father of natural selection. 22 Tattered Cocoon Scholars examine the extent, nature of violence in African American families. profile 26 ‘ I Couldn’t Escape My Past’ A medical school dropout, historian Todd Savitt follows a path that brings him back to where he began. on the cover Stainless steel pylons direct attention to the sky over Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers made their historic first flight with a powered aircraft. Fourteen pylons are part of the Monument to a Century of Flight, the creation of ECU art professors Hanna Jubran and Jodi Hollnagel and ECU graduate Glenn Eure. For more on the monument and other projects connected to the 100th anniversary of flight, turn to page 31. Photos on the front and back covers are by Forrest Croce. edge t a b l e o f c o n t e n t s edge • SPRING 2004 • 1 2 abstracts • Geologist shines light on an ancient reef’s demise • Student’s design lights up competition • Scientist seeks way to predict El Niño • Researcher studies how warm baths ease labor pains • With NIH grant, pediatrician splits time between stethoscope and lab coat 31 explorations • The Wright Stuff ECU marks the 100th anniversary of flight. • Eavesdropping Microbiologist deciphers how bacteria communicate. • Oh, Jimmy She- crabs cozy up to a new lure based on male pheromones. • Customized Instruction Software tool matches students’ learning styles to lesson plans. 35 in print • A look at recent publications by ECU faculty. abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s 2 • SPRING 2004 • edge Geologist shines light on an ancient reef’s demise The muddy Mississippi may be at fault for the demise of an ancient coral reef off the coast of Florida. While biologists ponder the massive die-off of coral reefs worldwide, Dr. David Mallin-son, assistant professor of geology, has turned his attention to the oldest reef formation in the Florida Keys. The reef called Tortugas Bank lies more than 70 miles west of Key West and dates back nearly 10,000 years. Although Tortugas Bank still supports living coral, it is obviously ailing. Coral reefs are beautiful, complex saltwater ecosystems that grow as the living corals secrete calcium carbon-ate, which becomes the limestone formation underlying the reef. “ Under normal conditions, coral reefs should be able to keep up with sea level rise,” Mallinson said. Tortugas Bank, though, has not kept pace with sea level. Its peak sits 60 feet below the surface of the water. Just to the east of Tortugas Bank lies another, larger coral reef complex known as Dry Tortugas. It appears to be thriving. What, Mallinson wondered, could account for the difference? With a grant from the National Undersea Research Center in Wilmington, he set out to find an answer. On a series of expeditions, Mallinson pulled out most of the tools of the marine geologist. Geophysical surveys mapped the typography and subsurface of the reefs and the neighboring areas. Drill cores brought up growth rings with their clues to age, growth patterns, and historical temperature and salin-ity patterns. He also would pull in data on cur-rents and climate. Eventually, he constructed a timeline showing the formation and growth of the reefs. It started some 9,600 years ago, when rising sea level had just begun to cover the West Florida continental shelf. Coral spores apparently drifted into the newly flooded area of Tortugas Bank, latched onto the ocean floor and began to multiply. For 3,000 years, Tortu-gas Bank grew slowly but steadily. The seas continued to rise, gradually cov-ering more of the continental shelf, and another coral growth took hold at Dry Tortugas. As the reefs grew at Dry Tortugas, Tortugas Bank experienced a sudden surge in growth. Perhaps before that time, Mallinson said, water from the shallow shelf area infiltrated, bringing with it excessive nutrients and unhealthy fluctuations in temperature and salinity. As the reefs of Dry Tortugas grew, they blocked the freshwater incursion, creating more hospitable conditions for the coral of Tortugas Bank. The Tortugas Bank growth spurt lasted a couple of millennia, until about 4,000 years ago. Then the decline began. Mallinson draws on climate and current data for an explanation. A major climate transition had just begun, he said, bringing heavy precipitation to what is now the continental United States. The snow and rain were enough to cause massive flooding, which in turn would have discharged large quantities of nutrient- rich water down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. Prevailing currents would have wrapped those dark waters right around Tortugas Bank. Mallinson’s hypothesis is that the Mississippi’s dark, rich, fresh water — all con-ditions inimical to coral — killed off the coral in the shallow parts of Tortugas Bank. The deeper corals continued to grow, but more slowly. “ Reefs can handle a certain amount of hardship,” he said, “ but if they’re stressed too often, they start to die.” Dry Tortugas, he theorizes, sat just far enough away to be out of reach of the Mississippi’s deadly effects. Recent history supplies additional testimony to the possibility. “ When the Mis-sissippi flooded in 1995- 96,” he said, “ you could trace the plume along the western coast of Florida, around the tip and back up to Miami.” • “ Reefs can handle a certain amount of hardship, but if they’re stressed too often, they start to die,” says David Mallinson, who’s studying ailing coral reefs near the Florida Keys. He holds a sample core from the Tortugas Bank reef. An ECU atmospheric scientist has received a $ 270,000 grant that he hopes will pave the way to predicting the climate phenomenon known as El Niño. Originating in a warming pattern in the eastern Pacific Ocean, El Niño disrupts normal weather around the globe. It has been linked with seasons of heavy rainfall across the southern United States and drought in Australia and other areas of the western Pacific. “ If you can tell six months in advance that El Niño will hit a particular region or country, it helps a lot of people,” said the award recipient, Dr. Scott Curtis, an assistant professor of geography. “ We’re talking about a region’s economic stability. ( Knowing in advance) might shape what they plant that year or help them better prepare for the consequences.” The grant will enable Curtis to track rainfall and wind in the East Indian Ocean, which he will then try to tie to the larger picture. “ My research will look at how storm systems are related to climate and their effects on El Niño,” Curtis said. “ We have a relatively good understanding of what ( El Niño) is. Now we want to study temperature, winds and rainfall prior to the event.” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which awarded the grant, will supply much of the data for Curtis’ project. The data are collected by NASA satellites as part of the agency’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. Curtis joined ECU’s faculty last fall after working as an atmospheric scientist at NASA in Greenbelt, Md., and serving as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County. • abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s edge • SPRING 2004 • 3 Student’s design lights up competition Going head to head against professional designers, an ECU junior has placed in the finals of a national competition for energy- efficient lighting. Stacey Gatt, an interior design major from Hershey, Pa., placed among the top 24 in the first phase of the National Lighting Fixture Design Competi-tion. The competition is sponsored by Lighting for Tomorrow, a consortium of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and several lighting companies. Gatt’s was the only student entry to make it into the finals. She submitted a prototype of her “ Mar- L- Light” sconce in January for the final judging. The top prize is $ 10,000. She designed the sconce to be used in children’s rooms. A wall- mounted fixture, she said, would avoid lamps that could fall and cords that could trip. It uses a fluorescent bulb as the light source and a cover decorated with inter-changeable marbles. Her inspiration: a piece of illuminated art glass she saw at a casino in the Bahamas. • Scientist seeks way to predict El Niño Stacey Gatt’s wall sconce won her a place in the finals of a national competition. El Niño leaves countries in the western Pacific parched even as it brings excessive rain to the southern United States. Researcher studies how warm baths ease labor pains Nothing soothes so well as a long soak in a warm tub. Anecdotal evidence suggests a warm bath may be so relaxing that it can help pregnant women avoid stress- related complica-tions of labor while also reducing the use of pain medications. How and why it works remain unknown. Dr. Rebecca Benfield, assistant professor of nursing and clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, hopes to shed light on those questions. She has received a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of hydrotherapy on women in labor. During the next three years, she will take a number of courses in physiology and biostatis-tics in preparation for the research project. The project, beginning in January 2005, will involve following 15 healthy women in spontaneous labor at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. Each woman will receive a warm tub soak for an hour. Water depth and temperature will vary. For each, Benfield will record subjective anxiety and pain levels and such physiological mea-sures as stress hormones and uterine contrac-tions. The long- term goal is to help doctors and nurse midwives better prescribe hydrotherapy. The NIH award, valued at $ 265,566, sponsors Benfield’s work under the tutelage of Dr. Margaret Heitkemper of the University of Washington School of Nursing and ECU’s Dr. Edward Newton, chair of obstetrics and gynecology, and Dr. Tibor Hortobagyi, director of the Biomechanics Laboratory. Benfield, a nurse midwife, first observed the effects of hydrotherapy on labor while working in Texas in the 1980s. “ It was so striking that it really makes an impression on you,” she said. • 4 • SPRING 2004 • edge abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s Using hydrotherapy tubs, Rebecca Benfield is studying the effects of warm water on the anxiety and pain of maternal labor. An NIH grant will cover the cost of the research project and related coursework. As a pediatric critical care specialist, Dr. R. Ray Morrison tends to youngsters edging their way back from the brink of death. Now, with help from the National Institutes of Health, he also is seek-ing out discoveries that will improve their chances of pulling through. Last fall Morrison, an assistant professor of pediatrics, received the NIH’s highly competitive Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Award. Valued at nearly $ 625,000 over five years, it will support his research in the laboratory of Dr. Jamal Mustafa, professor of pharma-cology. Under Mustafa’s guidance, Morrison will seek to learn more about the role of adenosine in the regulation of blood flow to the heart. After a serious trauma — whether caused by an accident, illness or open- heart surgery — the goal is to get blood flowing back to the heart as quickly as possible to prevent permanent damage. Adenosine stimulates the body’s natural recovery, signaling blood vessels to open wider for improved circulation. Four biochemical receptors, each with its own signaling pathway, have been identified as keys to adenosine’s activity. Using mouse mod-els, Morrison will study the two receptors that are less well understood. As medical science zeroes in on which of the four receptors is most important and how it works, chances improve for developing a highly targeted drug that will stimulate adenosine’s protective properties without potentially dangerous side effects. “ The problem isn’t hitting all the adenosine receptors,” Morrison said. “ We have drugs that can do that. Hitting them all gets too big a jolt. We want a drug that will hit the pathway for just one. You’re elimi-nating the toxicity by hitting only the pathway that’s most important for protecting the heart.” The NIH grant is designed to encourage practic-ing physicians to go into research. By dividing his time between the hos-pital and the lab, Morrison hopes to avoid the burnout that plagues pediatric critical With NIH grant, pediatrician splits time between stethoscope and lab coat edge • SPRING 2004 • 5 care doctors. “ I wanted to be able to do this forever, but you can’t do it every day,” he said. Research will bring relief from the emotional strain of caring for sick children while medicine gives meaning to the research. “ When you spend 75 percent of your time in the lab, every third or fourth week you go back over to the hospital and see why it’s impor-tant,” he said. “ This is basic science, but it’s very relevant to what I do in the pediatric intensive care unit.” • ABOVE: Ray Morrison hopes to lessen the stress of caring for critically ill children by dividing his time between the hospital and research. LEFT: A mouse heart, shown in an isolated organ bath, allows Morrison to learn more about restoring blood flow to the human heart after trauma. abstract r e s e a r c h b r i e f s 6 • SPRING 2004 • edge Dr. Ronald Perkin comes face to face every day with one of the most serious health crises facing the United States. But even amidst the steady stream of 300- and 400- pound children, one boy commanded attention. Only 14 years old, he stood 6 feet 4 and weighed 460 pounds. “ He was hypertensive to an enormous degree and had type 2 dia-betes already,” said Perkin, chairman of pediatrics at the Brody School of Medicine and medical director of Children’s Hospital of the University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina. “ His parents were proud of him, thinking he was going to be the next great NFL lineman or something. We were trying to tell them that he might not even live to be old enough to do that.” The youth represents what Perkin calls a pandemic of childhood obesity. To address the problem, ECU and University Health Systems announced plans last fall to establish the Pediatric Healthy Weight TOO MANY, TOO Research and Treatment Center. The center will pool the expertise of physicians and researchers across the ECU campus and medical school to address childhood obesity and its complications. It promises to be one of the most comprehensive such programs in the country. Its location in Greenville reflects local challenges and local expertise. The dramatic increase in childhood obesity is evident nowhere more than in Eastern North Carolina. Over the last 30 years, the propor-tion of seriously overweight children rose from 5 percent to 15 percent of children nationwide. Several surveys suggest that up to one- third of Eastern North Carolina children are obese, twice the national average. The medical implications are profound. Overweight children have an increased risk of developing the complications associated with adult obesity. Type 2 diabetes — which previously was called adult- onset ECU center to address pandemic of childhood obesity, which threatens a generation with disability, early death edge • SPRING 2004 • 7 diabetes — has been diagnosed in children as young as 5, and 20- year- olds are having heart attacks. Hypertension, arthritis, high cholesterol and other lipid disorders, asthma and sleep apnea also are common. Because over-weight children tend to become overweight adults, the likelihood increases that they will suffer the most extreme repercussions of these diseases: kidney failure, nerve damage, blindness, amputations and early death. “ I was at a conference the other day and heard this is the first gen-eration of children who will not have a longer predicted life expectancy than their parents,” Perkin said. As serious as the medical issues are, the highest cost of childhood obesity may be psychological. Mental health assessments put obese children on a par with children diagnosed with cancer. “ They’re very depressed,” Perkin said. “ They feel that they are doomed. They don’t know how to solve it. They can’t hide their chronic illness, no matter how baggy their clothes. The more depressed they get, the heavier they get. The heavier they get, the more depressed they get.” The Pediatric Healthy Weight Center will build on the expertise that has earned ECU a national reputation for basic science, clini-cal research and treatment of adult obesity, which is also prevalent in Eastern North Carolina. Dr. Walter Pories, for example, pioneered in the surgical treatment of morbid obesity, developing what became known as the Greenville gastric bypass. Working with Pories and other surgeons, biochemists Dr. Lynis Dohm, Dr. Hisham Barakat and others have advanced understanding of the molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes; the metabolism of fats; and the effects of race and gender on the tendency toward obesity. Additional studies have contributed to the understanding of the roles of nutrition, BIG, TOO SOON C o n t i n u e d 8 • SPRING 2004 • edge physical activity, and body composition in obesity and diabetes. Complementing this expertise is a growing body of work at ECU focused on the psychosocial development of children and ado-lescents, childhood sleep disorders, pediatric hypertension and pediatric vascular disease. All these fields will come together in the new center, and most were represented last fall when 40 faculty members attended a summit on childhood obesity and its treatment. The Pediatric Healthy Weight Center will have a clinical treatment arm, led by Dr. John Olsson, associate professor of pediatrics, and a research arm, led by pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Ying Chang. Initial funding for the center has been set at $ 850,000. More will be sought through grants. Plans call for a multidisciplinary treatment facility to open by July. The facility will try to enroll children in a structured, long- term program of treatment. Nurse case managers will be employed to maintain contact with the children and their families, similar to a successful program dealing with childhood asthma. All University Health Systems’ pediatric clinics will step up screening for early detection of weight problems, Perkin said. The center also will try to engage schools and community practitioners in identifying and intervening on behalf of overweight children and in promoting physical activity and proper nutrition. ABOVE: Walter Pories will direct ECU’s participation in a national consortium studying bariatric surgery for weight loss. ECU LANDS ROLE IN NIH STUDY OF WEIGHT- LOSS SURGERY If ECU goes forward with a trial of gastric bypass surgery in obese adolescents, it likely will be in conjunction with a new consortium of the nation’s leading bariatric surgery centers. The National Institutes of Health announced establishment of the consortium in October, naming ECU as one of its six members. The consortium is charged with developing a deeper understanding of obesity and standards for its surgical treatment. The decision includes a $ 1.3 million grant to ECU to fund its part of the investigation. Dr. Walter J. Pories, professor of surgery and biochemistry, will direct the ECU center. Consortium members will cooperate on research into some of the most promising issues surrounding gastric bypass surgery. They include comparisons of the various bariatric operations; the relationship of muscle, fat, liver and the intestines to diabetes in obese patients; social and ethical issues in the management of obesity and obesity surgery; neuropsychiatric implications of the surgery; and nutritional concerns. A central database will be established at the University of Pittsburgh. Other consortium members are Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, University of Washington in Seattle, the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Fargo, N. D., and University of Califor-nia at Davis. The six participating centers were selected from 49 applications. Each of the six centers has a particular expertise in an aspect of bariatric surgery and research. At ECU, Pories developed the most widely used version of gastric bypass surgery nearly 25 years ago and discovered that obese patients with diabetes lose their diabetes within a few days after surgery. That discovery led to the establishment of a multi- disciplinary research program investigat-ing the relationship of the surgery and metabolic change. ECU’s long- term database of patients also has become a model for bariatric surgery programs around the world. Pories and his team were the first to collect detailed data on each gastric by-pass patient and follow them for life. The database now includes more than 1,720 patients, starting with the first one in 1978. • edge • SPRING 2004 • 9 CALCULATING CHILDHOOD OBESITY Nomenclature can be tricky, especially when it may ap-pear laden with moral judgment. These stories adopt the American Obesity Association’s use of the terms overweight and obesity for children. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and many health- care professionals avoid using the term obesity for children because of the stigma it can carry. Instead, they refer to even the heaviest children as overweight. Some, however, acknowledge that this usage can obscure the seriousness of the problem, for individual children and for society in general. The American Obesity Association uses the same terminology for children and adults. In adults, overweight and obesity are determined by a mea-surement called the body mass index, which is calculated using a person’s height and weight. For adults, a BMI of 25 to 30 is generally considered overweight and a BMI of 30 or greater is obese. For children, the determination is more complex. Body mass changes as children grow, first decreasing in the preschool years and then increasing into adulthood. Furthermore, boys and girls will dif-fer in the percentage of body fat as they mature. To make sense of these differences, the CDC has established age- and gender- specific growth charts. Using these charts, health- care professionals use per-centile cut- off points to help identify underweight and overweight children. The CDC defines children in the 85th to 95th percentile BMI for age and sex as “ at risk of overweight” and children in the 95th per-centile or higher as overweight. The American Obesity Association uses these same percentiles but applies the term overweight to the former and obese to the latter. By either term, the 95th percentile is the point at which children are clearly at risk of health complications related to weight. The 1999- 2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey indicated that about 15 percent of children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 are obese. Although there is no comparable data collec-tion for Eastern North Carolina, several ECU studies have examined height and weight for specific age groups. In 2003, the department of family medicine collected measure-ments from a representative sample of eighth- graders in Pitt, Mar-tin, Hertford and Duplin counties as part of its Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Of the 579 students measured, almost half exceeded healthy weight goals and one child in four was obese. Two Pitt County studies by Dr. Kristen Borré yielded similar results. For example, her 1998 survey of a representative sample of sixth grades found that 45 percent were overweight and 30 percent obese. The second study looked at third through fifth graders. Those data, collected as part of the Growing Up Fit! Project, show that rural minority children are more likely than others to be overweight. While not representative samples, data collected by hospital clinics and local health departments also suggest that Eastern North Carolina children are twice as likely as their national counterparts to be overweight or obese. • Researchers, meanwhile, will continue to address topics ranging from the effects of a pregnant woman’s diet on her child’s eventual weight to the cellular mechanisms of obesity. One initial focus will be on identifying the genetic markers that increase the likelihood a child will become overweight, as an aid to early intervention. Over the last several years, ECU physicians have been collecting umbilical cord blood from newborns to locate these markers. Another focus will be identifying the best evidence- based practices for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity. The most controversial is sure to be surgery. Discussions are under way that could lead to a trial of gastric bypass for the most seriously obese adolescents. For any particular child, Perkin said, surgery would be considered only after a rigorous program of non- surgical interventions had failed. Because gastric bypass severely limits food intake, physicians are reluctant to recommend it for developing children. In fact, only a few centers around the country perform gastric bypass on adolescents. But for some children, Perkin said, it may be the only chance to save their lives. “ These kids are just getting huge,” he said. “ They can go one month ( between medical appointments) and gain 15 pounds. It’s almost like they cross a line somewhere, and then the weight gain is just exponential. They’re coming in at four, five, six hundred pounds.” Whatever solutions are eventually found, Perkin is certain they won’t be as simple as lectures on diet and exercise. “ Obesity isn’t just a lack of motivation or poor will power,” he said. “ It is a disease. It may start as bad eating habits, but it becomes a disease process that’s very difficult to break out of.” • ABOVE: “ This is the first generation of children who will not have a longer predicted life expectancy than their parents,” says Ronald Perkin, chairman of pediatrics at the Brody School of Medicine. Hard questions from a community pediatrician sent Brody medical school faculty scrambling for answers. The physician had grown frustrated in working with overweight children. He was convinced the children and their parents were adhering to his best advice, yet the children failed to lose weight. Were other complicating factors blocking their progress, he wanted to know, and were there better recommendations he could give them on diet and exercise? Most medical literature about obesity and its complications is based on studies in adults. Spurred by the doctor’s questions, several ECU researchers teamed up to seek answers that would apply to children. Taking referrals from private physicians and hospital clinics, they enrolled 171 obese children in the project they dubbed Kidpower. The children ranged in age from 4 to 18. From detailed health assessments, the researchers learned that about half of the children suffered from complications of excess weight. The more overweight the children were, the more likely they were to have complications. These complications included high blood pressure, breathing difficulties, sleep apnea, elevated cholesterol and hyperinsulinemia, which is closely related to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Most of the children, however, had normal blood sugar levels, indicating that standard testing would not have alerted physicians to their risk of diabetes. Children without hyperinsulinemia went directly into an age-specific exercise program operated by the University Health Systems’ ViQuest wellness center. The programs lasted only eight to 12 weeks, but that was long enough to see weight stabilize in the children who stuck with the exercise. It also provided another bit of insight. “ In the younger kids, compliance and interest were much greater,” said Dr. John Olsson, professor of pediatrics and one of Kidpower’s lead investigators. “ We think it may be because parents still have more influence on them than they do on teenagers.” Children identified with hyperinsulinemia — about 30 percent of the total — received 12 weeks of dietary guidance before beginning the exercise program. Initial assessments had shown the children were getting as much as 60 percent of their calories from carbohydrates. “ It wouldn’t be bad if the children were getting complex carbohydrates — whole grains, fruits and vegetables,” said Dr. Kathryn Kolasa, a nutritionist and professor of family medicine who participated in the study. “( But) most of the carbohydrates came from simple sugars — sodas, juice, juice drinks, candy.” The children also were eating more than they needed with little guidance from their parents. Could the researchers get the children to adhere to a more healthful diet? Meeting at least twice with parents and children, 10 • SPRING 2004 • edge nutritionists guided them to better choices using the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s food guide pyramid. One key to compliance was finding healthful foods the children and their families liked to eat. “ The majority of the children had parents or other relatives who also struggled with their weight and had chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension or cardiovascular disease, so this is a family concern that requires family treatment,” said Catherine Sullivan, the lead dietitian on the project. Overall, Olsson said, those who complied with the dietary and exercise programs stabilized or lost weight and improved or reversed the complications. Anecdotal evidence may have been most forceful. “ We had one girl who was overweight and depressed,” he said. “ When she finished, her weight had stabilized and her attitude was much better. Her mom had a better of idea of proper diet and portion size, and the girl and her family were more motivated.” • • • Subtle changes in the school day have led to healthier weights for youngsters in another project. Dr. Kristen Borré, a nutritional anthropologist now working out of the N. C. Agromedicine Institute, designed the project after documenting the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Pitt County schoolchildren. Measurements of 598 sixth- graders selected to represent their peers countywide found nearly half exceeded healthy weight guidelines. Fully 30 percent could be classified as obese. “ We were very concerned,” Borré said. “ When we look at elementary school children, we know the weight issue accelerates as they age. Our intervention is targeted for third through fifth graders, when they’re old enough to have a say in what they eat but young enough that we can make a difference.” In collaboration with Pitt County Schools, Borré and her associates introduced the program Growing Up FIT! into two elementary schools. It incorporated both nutritional and physical activity through a number of elements. College- age mentors led active recess periods, for example, and each child received a personal fitness plan. In addition, community volunteers at one school developed a walking trail. On the nutrition front, the mentors led “ Discover Your Lunch” activities to encourage healthier eating. “ When we started, many couldn’t name their fruits and vegetables,” Borré said. “ Now they can.” As knowledge of fruit and vegetables increased, so did consumption. The number of children eating fruits and vegetables for lunch at least three days a week tripled, to 65 percent. In addition, the principals at both schools established a policy that snacks in their after- Research Sampler One goal of the Pediatric Healthy Weight Research and Treatment Center will be to encourage more research into the causes and treatment of childhood obesity and its complications. Several lines of investigation are already under way. Here are a few. edge • SPRING 2004 • 11 school programs would be limited to fruits, vegetables, whole grains and skim milk — no sugary drinks or snacks allowed. These healthy snacks followed the recommendations of the Child Nutrition Program for a USDA reimbursable snack. Community Schools and Recreation in collaboration with Pitt County Schools’ Child Nutrition Program adopted the healthy snack policy systemwide in March 2002. “ These things together made a difference,” Borré said. Each year of the program, the percentage of heavy students decreased. After three years, the number of children who could be classified as obese fell from 25 percent to 14 percent at one school and from 32 percent to 23 percent at the other. With a successful pilot, Borré’s group received a grant to introduce the program into four new schools with high proportions of low- income students. This new phase is in its second year. Meanwhile, Pitt County Schools this year won a Health and Wellness Trust Fund grant to expand Growing Up FIT! countywide in kindergarten through eighth grade and to develop it as a model for statewide implementation. • • • Physical activity has been shown not only to help control weight but to help decrease the complications of obesity. For example, it helps reduce insulin resistance, independent of weight loss. But how do you get overweight children to exercise? “ We heard from parents ( of overweight children) that there was nothing in the community for them to do,” said Dr. Matthew T. Mahar, director of the Activity Promotion Lab in the College of Health and Human Performance. “ There are sports leagues, but these are kids who weren’t successful in competitive sports.” So Mahar has been testing and demonstrating ways to increase physical activity among overweight children through several related projects. For four years, his after- school activity program drew obese children ages 8 to 11 to the ECU campus for fun and games. Using high school students as mentors, the program allowed the children to choose their activities but kept them moving — with bicycling, scooters and in- line skating, for example. “ Everything focused on self-efficacy and positive reinforcement,” he said. “ And it had to be fun.” The program did not track weight since the children were still growing, but in each of the eight semesters, Mahar said it found consistent improvements in physical activity, body composition and aerobic capacity. Mahar is now taking his methodology into after- school programs offered through Pitt County Community Schools, where jumping rope is proving to be one of the most popular activities. Teachers are getting in on the act, too, with their own faculty wellness challenge. “ Don’t underestimate the power of teachers to influence children,” Mahar said. Meanwhile, a different project to encourage physical activity helps schoolteachers incorporate 10 minutes of movement into regular classroom lessons. Called Take 10!, it is led by Dr. David Rowe. Yet another project still in the planning stages for one rural school will include after- school programs, Take Ten!, a faculty- staff challenge and a walking trail designed for use by students and the community. • • • The adage “ you are what you eat” may understate the influence of diet. You may be what your mother ate when she was carrying you. Dr. Sam N. Pennington, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the medical school, has been investigating the influence of maternal diet on the long- term health of the mother’s offspring. In one line of experiments, he has varied the amount of fat in the diets of pregnant rats and found lasting effects in the progeny. Female rats fed a high- fat diet produced offspring who, as adults themselves, experience a high degree of insulin resistance, a factor in type 2 diabetes. “ This was a very long- term and profound effect, not a slight change,” Pennington said. “ It’s especially significant given that we have a high incidence of type 2 diabetes and a high fat diet in this area.” Pennington is now examining how the mother’s high- fat diet affects other health indicators, such as cholesterol levels. The eventual goal is to learn whether the same effects occur in human beings. • BELOW: Sam Pennington, right, has found that the amount of fat in a pregnant rat’s diet can have long- term consequences for her progeny. With him in his lab is graduate student Patrick Matthews. RIGHT: Modern tools help redefine relationships among southern African lizards, such as the web- footed Palmatogecko rangei, right, and giant ground gecko Chondrodactylus angulifer, far right. 12 • SPRING 2004 • edge C o n t i n u e d With travel to distant places and long hours in the lab, evolutionary biologists expand and refine the field made famous by the father of natural selection A s much as any scientist before or since, Charles Darwin changed the way we view the world and ourselves. He showed us the continuity of life, from one part of the world to another and from one epoch to another. He also proved to be an excellent prophet. It was 145 years ago that Darwin published his landmark work, The Origin of Species. In it he outlined his theory of natural selec-tion as the means by which living things evolve, and he predicted that with this theory, “ A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use or disuse, on the direct action of external conditions, and so forth.” He was right. Not only was a grand field of inquiry opened, but it has continued to fascinate and confound Darwin’s philosophical descendants to the present day. Among them are eight members of the ECU biology faculty whose research is featured here: Dr. Jason Bond, Dr. Carol Goodwillie, Dr. Trip Lamb, Dr. Susan McRae, Dr. Jean- Luc Scemama, Dr. Edmund Stellwag, Dr. John Stiller and Dr. Kyle Summers. They study plants, reptiles, spiders and birds. Some work in fields Darwin DARWIN’S DESCENDANTS edge • SPRING 2004 • 13 The power of sand 14 • SPRING 2004 • edge relationships in un-expected directions among these lizard families. Instead of sticky feet for cling-ing and climbing, the dune- dwelling geckos have modi-fied feet for digging. One genus, Palmato-gecko, has developed extensive webbing between the toes to facilitate walking and burrowing in loose, wind- blown sands. Traditional taxonomy had pegged these geckos as distinctive genera, occupying distant branches of the gecko family tree. Lamb’s DNA analysis tells a different story. All three genera of dune- dwelling geckos fall within a widespread lineage of “ typical” geckos that climb on rocks and trees. Moreover, the dune dwellers are more closely related to species with whom they share little outward appear-ance than they are to each other. The story is repeated for dune specialists in other lizard families. Modified feet, spade-like jaws for diving into the sand and scaled flaps to keep grit out of ears yield morphologi-of the time, Darwin never regretted his 40,0000- mile trip. “( I) t appears to me that nothing can be more improving to the young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries,” he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle. Trip Lamb’s journey has taken him to the dunes of the Namib and Kalahari deserts and the rocky coast of South Africa, all in search of lizards. Southern Africa supports as many endemic species of lizards as most whole continents can claim. They range from inch- long leaf- toed geckos to Angolosaurus, a herbivore measur-ing up to 18 inches in length. Six years ago, Lamb and Aaron Bauer, a colleague from Villanova University, set out to discern whether the origin of these species could be traced to ancient geologic upheavals that separated ancestral populations. As they wrapped up their project recently, Lamb said they have learned a separate, equally important lesson: the power of sand. At times together and at times on separate journeys, Lamb and Bauer collected close to 100 species of lizards for study. Some had not been observed in the field since the 1950s. Others were never before recorded in scientific literature. It’s easy to understand why. Search-ing out desert dwellers, Lamb and Bauer once traveled off road across sand dunes for five days. During that time, they never saw another human being. Almost as hard to sight were some of the lizards. Angolosaurus in particular “ is the most leery lizard I’ve ever encountered,” Lamb said. “ They can spot you a couple hundred yards away and dive a foot or more into the sand. You mark where you think they are and hope you can dig them up.” In a monograph being published by the California Academy of Sciences, Lamb and Bauer have rewritten the evolutionary history of southern Africa’s geckos, showing close would recognize — taxonomy and morphol-ogy — using many of the same techniques, but with the added advantages of modern molecular science. Some look at what makes populations diverge. Others concentrate on survival techniques. Still others delve into the brand new field of evolutionary developmental biology, “ evo devo” to the hipper biologists. It is not merely life on Earth that has evolved. Science has, too. And because it has, Darwin’s descen-dants worldwide are making advances at a mind- boggling pace: adding 2,000 new species a year to the botany world list alone, showing connections among living organisms never before imagined and tracing lineages nearer and nearer to the beginning of life on Earth. As so often happens, the more we know, the less certain we become. “ We had very nice, clear ideas about evolution 50 years ago,” Stiller said. “ It’s much more complicated now. We are closer to understanding how nature works, but we have a much less defined story. There are so many kinds of data coming in and so many ways of looking at them, that it will take a while. We’re going into a period in which there will be lots of competing ideas, and it will take time to sift them all out. In our understanding of ancient evolution, I’d say we’re back to many of the same questions we had before we started se-quencing molecules, but at least now we have ways of addressing those questions.” The power of sand Ships’ surgeons on foreign trips often sent specimens of flora and fauna back home to 19th century Britain. For a survey of South America, Capt. Robert FitzRoy proposed something different. He thought it would be enlightening to be accompanied by a full- time naturalist. Barely out of college and eager to see the tropics, Charles Darwin seized the opportunity. The journey of the H. M. S. Beagle stretched to nearly five years and allowed Dar-win to explore the South American continent, the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Africa. Though seasick for much Back to Basics edge • SPRING 2004 • 15 tion of species around the world now, and it’s caused by us, by human action,” he said. “ I’d like to think there’s been a hard- core realization of what the crisis entails.” Finding solutions, he said, focuses new attention on taxonomy. “ Species and how we define species are at the core of any questions we might ask in biology and how we define ecosystems. … It would be impossible to develop conservation policy and management approaches if you have no idea what’s there.” Bond has channeled his concern over such questions into the study the Mygalo-morphae order of spiders, which includes tarantulas, funnelwebs and Bond’s special interest, trapdoor spiders. He and a collaborator from San Diego State University are charged with documenting mygalomorph taxomony, diversity and kinship for the National Science Foundation’s project Assembling the Tree of Life. They will sample up to 500 species of mygalomorphs worldwide, trying to clarify relationships to ensure that a family tree in-cludes all related species and their most recent common ancestor. “ Our classification system should reflect the evolutionary relationship,” he said. Mygalomorphs appear to date back 450 million years. More primitive in physiology and silk production than their web- spinning kin, they live relatively long lives — as much as 20 years for trapdoor females — but also fairly sedentary ones. Nearly all trapdoor spiders, for example, live in underground burrows that they cover with a hinged flap engineered out of silk and soil. They seldom change address. Long lives and a lack of wanderlust make trapdoor spiders good subjects for evolutionary studies. “ They have a strong tendency to be-come isolated so they’re a well- designed model for looking at simple population subdivisions,” Bond said. The same traits, however, put them at risk. One shopping center can wipe out the habitat for a whole species. “ In Southern California, the diversity we’re losing you could put a stopwatch on,” he said. Studying trapdoor spiders has its chal-cally distinct forms long recognized as separate genera. In each case, the dune dwellers turn out to be closely related to non- dune species. Fur-thermore, the ancestors of these dune dwellers entered this harsh habitat at different times in his-tory and evolved similar adaptations to the sand independently of one another. The upcoming monograph, together with a series of other recent publications, depict newly redrawn family trees for five lineages of southern African lizards, each of which includes dune and non- dune species. In addi-tion to expectations of divergence driven by geologic forces, Lamb and Bauer have docu-mented remarkable examples of convergence. “ One of the interesting things revealed in our study has been the powerful influence of the Namib and how it has similarly shaped the morphology of different lizard species,” Lamb said. “ There’s just a limited number of ways to design a lizard, or anything else, for life in loose sand.” Back to basics A century before Darwin, a Swede named Carl Linnaeus developed a system for naming, ranking and classifying living organisms. Although his Systema Naturae remains the basis of taxonomy today, the field for a time lost much of its luster. Gene splicing carried so much more panache than fitting beetles into a family tree. Harvard’s E. O. Wilson believes the trend has come full circle. “ Systematics has returned to the center of the action in biology,” he wrote in The Future of Life. The molecular techniques that once led biologist away from taxonomy now bring them back, providing new tools to speed the discov-ery of organisms and to define relationships across species. The trend has reversed none too soon for Jason Bond. “ We’re seeing the mass extinc- C o n t i n u e d CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Trip Lamb, top photo, and Jason Bond continue the work Charles Darwin started, defining species and charting their relationships. • In the field, scientists sometimes have to be self- sufficient. Lamb has shot a rock pigeon for dinner while in the Northern Province of South Africa. • The dunes of the Namib desert, home to several endemic lizards, rise above a dry lake bed in central Namibia. Evolution in Action 16 • SPRING 2004 • edge “ There was a clear- cut difference from day one to day two,” Goodwillie said. “ This had never been described before but I can eas-ily imagine that someone could miss it.” Jepsonii seems to have the best of both worlds. If its pollinator — the small, hovering beefly — is in abundance, genetic variation can be enhanced through cross- pollination. But if the beefly is scarce, as happens some years, the plant at least stands a chance of producing one more generation. Goodwillie, however, suspects this is a transition phase, not a stable adaptation. By sampling different populations of jepsonii, she has found a full range of variation in the plant’s ability to self- fertilize: some are fully self- fertilizing, some are self- incompat- “ Without them, the world we know — even man himself — would never have existed.” As they aided the rise and diversification of other species, flowering plants achieved a remarkable diversity of their own. The diver-sity shows not merely in size, color and shape, but in the ways they reproduce. A few types, such as hollies, have separate male and female plants, but most species have both male and female parts in the same flower. Among these, some will fertilize themselves while others have evolved showy flowers, sweet nectars and easily dispersed pollen to help them exchange gametes with others of their kind. Some clever flowers not only promote cross-fertilization but recognize and reject their own pollen, which botanists refer to as self- incom-patibility. In a tiny pink flower from northern California, Carol Goodwillie has discovered yet another reproductive strategy: transient self- incompatibility, a peculiar trait that may provide a glimpse of evolution in action. Goodwillie was a doctoral student at the University of Washington in 1995 when she and her adviser stumbled across Leptosiphon jepsonii, a previously undiscovered plant that has now been found in a several isolated pock-ets of the Napa Valley. Jepsonii hid its secret well. To all appearances, it could self- fertilize, just as its near relative Leptosiphon bicolor did. In one sense, self- pollination confers a tremendous advantage. When the plant no longer needs to attract pollinators, flower size can shrink over evolutionary time, conserving energy for other uses, including seed produc-tion. Just one little problem. “ Some think that self- fertilization is a genetic dead- end,” Goodwillie said. “ You lose genetic variation and with it, the ability to adapt to change. So in family trees, you see selfing at tips of branches, usually not on the trunks. The idea is that it leads to extinction.” Goodwillie had moved to ECU and was in her eighth year of studying jepsonii when a series of unrelated experiments opened her eyes. On the first day of a bloom’s four- day life span, it rejected its own pollen but accepted the pollen of others. Starting on the second day, it could self- fertilize. lenges. Whether he’s in Australia or South America, South Africa or California, Bond spends long hours looking at the ground. “ They’re incredibly cryptic,” he said. He recalled hiking up and down rocky ravines to find one Australian species. After three hours in a driving rain, he gave up. “ We got back to the car and there was a little bank not a meter from the car and they were all over the bank.” Even when found, trapdoor spiders don’t give up easily. Sensing prey, they can spring the door for a lightning- speed capture, but in the face of danger, they seal the door so tight even a determined biologist can barely pry it open. Bond brings live samples back to the lab, to be photographed and measured. With a graduate student, he is trying to use mathemati-cal models to help define spider shape. DNA sequencing will help reconstruct relationships, to show how characteristics have evolved, per-haps as far back as the breakup of continents. Such modern tools are dramatically changing the way biologists view species. “ Morphologi-cal observations probably understate the extent of genetic diversity out there,” he said. “ We’re seeing extreme molecular diversity.” A few of Bond’s specimens live in terrariums in the lab, but most are sacrificed. “ The longer I do this, the harder that becomes,” Bond said. “ I limit the number I bring back for that reason. It takes me days to kill them, and I’m in a bad mood when I do, but I think it may be the only hope for the species.” Evolution in action Just 100 million years ago, a mono-chromatic color scheme bathed the planet. Ferns, mosses and conifers supplied shades of cooling green. Then flowering plants appeared and, in what Loren Eiseley called “ a soundless, violent explosion,” blanketed the Earth with all the colors of the rainbow. Their seeds and fruits provided the energy to fuel the larger brains and higher metabolism of warm- blooded creatures. Birds took to the sky, and on the ground the age of reptiles gave way to the age of mammals. “ Flowers changed the face of the planet,” Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey. CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Carol Goodwillie says the Leptosiphon jepsonii grown in her greenhouse are more lush than their counterparts in the wild. • Kyle Summers and a colleague say a type of mimickry most likely accounts for the coloration of several South American poisonous frogs. • The Dendrobates fantasticus has a look-alike that belongs to a different genus. Survival of the Fittest Frog edge • SPRING 2004 • 17 and South America. He began by studying patterns of parental investment, that is, how much time, energy and effort the frogs spend in producing and rearing their young, and how that varies by sex. Among frogs, most of the parental care falls on the male, a pattern also common in fish. Summers has spent up to nine hours in the dense undergrowth of a rain forest observing a single frog as it carried tadpoles from the leaf litter where they hatched to pools of water where they could grow and mature. Parental care, Summers found, is not always benign. “ A male frog will try to mate with as many females as possible, but the more offspring, the less attention he can give to each,” he said. “ In some cases, he will feed one clutch to another, for example, if he can’t find enough separate pools of water in which to deposit them.” Field experiments and observations helped Summers sort out what kind of pool parents prefer for their maturing offspring, how pool type affects offspring survival and whether tadpoles can recognize and avoid can-nibalizing their kin. DNA sequencing enabled him to determine how these and other behav-iors evolved. As he worked, new questions intrigued him. Prominent among them was the relationship between coloration and toxic-ity. For one project, he studied 21 species of frogs, comparing the level of toxicity with the intensity of color and plotting their family trees based on DNA analysis. The patterns he found supported theories that bright colors protect the frogs by advertising their unsuitability for the dinner menu to potential predators. With Dr. Rainer Schulte, a collaborator in Peru, he then investigated a different color issue, mimicry. In the most widely recognized form, called Batesian mimicry, nontoxic spe-cies evolve to resemble a toxic one — benefit-ing from predators’ recognition of the warning colors. One example is the Viceroy butterfly, a nontoxic species that looks nearly identical to the unpalatable Monarch. Summers believes he has found a dif-ferent type of mimicry in poisonous frogs. In three locations in north central Peru, Schulte Most of all, if this is a transition phase, is jepsonii on its way to fully cross-pollinating or to fully selfing? If the former, the short-term advantage that self- compat-ibility confers may spell doom for this small pink flower. “ Evolution can’t look for-ward,” Goodwillie said. “ It can’t plan ahead. Evolution is always running to catch up. Any species or population is well- adapted to what’s happened over the last hundred or thousand years, not necessary to now and not to the future. So as the environment changes, the ultimate fate could be extinction. Natural selection is just optimizing the fit for right now.” Survival of the fittest frogs In Darwin’s Ghost, Steve Jones wrote: “ Nature does not favor beauty, or strength, or ferocity; all it can do is to advance those best able to multiply them-selves. Although its products include the most beautiful and most repulsive beings, there is no mystery to Darwin’s machine; it is no more than genetics plus time.” He makes it sound so simple and straightforward, yet mysteries abound. What is it that gives an animal, plant or bacterium the reproductive edge over those of its own kind? Clearly, the first struggle is to survive, against high odds, long enough to re-produce. After that, what does it take to attract a mate? Is it better to have a large number of offspring or to invest high levels of energy into a few, improving their odds of survival? Kyle Summers has focused his search for answers on poisonous frogs found in Central ible, and some display transient self- incom-patibility. “ So clearly, this is evolutionarily dynamic,” she said. “ We’re looking at a slice of time. This is an opportunity to watch evolution in action.” Goodwillie’s questions are almost as numerous as the jepsonii she has raised in her greenhouse. Early cross- breeding experiments indicate that a single recessive gene allows jepsonii’s self- compatibility, but will this hold true for all of the populations? Are the differ-ent groups of jepsonii evolving in the same direction and at the same rate? Will she be able to locate the gene responsible for transient self- fertilization? Why, if jepsonii’s transient self- incompatibility actually confers the best of both worlds, is its range so restricted? C o n t i n u e d Photo courtesy of The Royal Society Avian Instincts 18 • SPRING 2004 • edge which live in groups and appear to have strong instincts against incest, offered a wealth of opportunity for study. They range from the white- browed sparrow weaver, whose adult offspring help raise the parents’ new clutches, to the sociable weaver, whose apartment- style nests house as many a 100 birds, including several breeding pairs and their non- breeding, adult helpers. With a colleague from Cornell Uni-versity, McRae is studying the gray- capped social weaver of Kenya. Family groups in this species consist of the dominant pair and their The victimized English moorhens incubated the foreign egg along with their own, even when McRae painted the intruder’s egg a bright red. Related species in Namibia and Panama, on the other hand, usually reject the foreign egg — the Namibian birds by burying the offender, the Panamanian hens by tossing it overboard. What accounted for the different instincts in closely related species? “ There was a fairly simple explana-tion, though it took a lot of work to figure it out,” she said. “ In England, parasitism isn’t costly. Most of the parasitic eggs were laid after the host had finished laying her own clutch so most never hatched. The incuba-tion period is not particularly costly — it’s the feeding stage that takes so much energy — so if they don’t hatch, it’s not a problem. In Africa, though, breeding is more syn-chronous because it’s so dependent on rain so ( without rejection techniques) the host birds could raise offspring that are not their own.” As McRae studied English moorhens, she noticed something peculiar. Although most family groups consisted of a single breeding pair and their young, occasional territories included a second breeding female. The second female was almost always the daughter of the first, and she mated with her father. “ Incest is unusual in birds, and this might be a case of evolutionary lag,” she said. “ The popula-tion might be artificially dense so retention of offspring may be unusual and they haven’t yet adapted incest avoidance.” The observations launched McRae on an inquiry into social evolution of birds: how the instinct for group living evolves, how the birds solve conflicts such as who gets to breed and how they avoid incest. African weavers, had previously identified pairs of poisonous frogs that looked similar but were clearly dif-ferent species based on traits such as egg color and mating calls. With DNA analysis, Sum-mers and Schulte showed that three of the frogs — one from each set — belong to the same species, but in each locale they have taken on the coloration and pattern of a different, more distantly related poisonous frog. They suggest this is evidence of a phenomenon called Mul-lerian mimicry, in which toxic species provide mutual benefit by sharing the cost of training predators to keep their distance. “ This ( pattern) is only consistent with mimicry,” Summers said. “ Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.” Avian instincts Animal instincts nearly stumped Dar-win. How could natural selection explain why the European cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds? Failing to explain such instincts, he said, could overturn his whole theory. By the time he wrote The Origin of Species, Darwin had worked out his argument with the help of slave- making ants and bees that build geometrically perfect cells first time, every time. “ No one will dispute that instincts are of the highest importance to each animal,” he wrote. “ Therefore I can see no difficulty, under changing conditions of life, in natural selection accumulating slight modifications of instinct to any extent, in any useful direction…. This theory is, also, strengthened by some few other facts in regard to instincts; as by that common case of closely allied, but certainly distinct, species, when inhabiting distant parts of the world and living under considerably different conditions of life, yet often retaining nearly the same instincts.” Susan McRae shared Darwin’s interest in birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, a behavior called brood parasitism. Study-ing moorhens, she found consistent patterns of intraspecies brood parasitism but a range of responses to it. From England to Panama and Namibia, she observed females that would deposit eggs in other moorhens’ nests. ABOVE: Susan McRae was first drawn to study birds by an interest in brood parasitism. Now she studies the instinct for group living in such species as the gray- capped social weaver. AT RIGHT: Many of the secrets of evolution are hidden in the double helix of DNA. Evolution’s Master Genes C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2004 • 19 first identified through research in fruit flies, where alterations in an individual gene resulted in dramatic and, after much study, predictable mutations in the structure of the fly. Simple mutations in a copy of one of these Hox genes, for example, would result in a fly with two midsections, each with its own set of wings, creating a fly with four wings instead of two. Other interesting characteristics also distinguish Hox genes. They are relatively few in number, occur in clearly defined clusters and appear in the order in which they are expressed during embryonic development. That is, the genes that direct development of the head will be at one end of the cluster, those dealing with midsec-tion will be in the middle, and those specifying the posterior section will be at the other end, a highly unusual organization among genes. “ These genes are unique in the way they are organized and have been organized throughout evolution,” Scemama said. Among vertebrates, more interesting developments have occurred. The closest living relative to the common ancestor of all vertebrates is a small wormlike sea creature commonly called a lancelet. The lancelet has one cluster of 14 Hox genes. As vertebrates diverged from their common invertebrate ancestor during evolution, they duplicated the original Hox cluster. Lineages comprising mammals have four, for example, and the zebrafish has seven — but so far, no other species studied has retained all 14 genes in each cluster, and species vary in which genes they’ve retained in their different clusters. Two hypotheses could explain this phenomenon, Scemama said. One is similar to redundant duplication: two genes sharing the work that one originally did so that together, they equal the one original gene. The second theory he called neofunctionalization. “ It could be one kept the function of the ancestor gene and the other duplicate took a new function,” he said. “ It is complicated to understand because the common ancestor that existed prior to the gene duplication no longer exists.” Also curious is why the major lineages of vertebrates have the number of clusters they do. Evolution’s master genes Little in the natural world escaped Darwin’s interest, but morphology — with its questions about the form and structure of organisms — held special appeal. “ This is the most interesting department of natural history, and may be said to be its very soul,” he wrote in The Origin of Species. “ What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of a horse, the paddle of a porpoise, and the wing of a bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?” What Darwin found curious has become all the more intriguing. Scientists now know the bones shaping those hands, legs, paddles and wings resemble each other because all these creatures descend from a common ancestor that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. They’ve also learned that a relatively few genes are involved in directing the placement of these and other body parts, and those genes bear remark-able similarities across species. Now, scientists are digging deep to understand what these simi-larities mean. Among them are collaborators Ed Stellwag and Jean- Luc Scemama. Stellwag explained the larger question this way: “ How do you think it is that humans evolved such that our arms are extensions from our shoulders? Why aren’t they located somewhere else? Why do we have five fingers and not seven? Most evolutionary biologists will say, selection. We’ve been selected to have those. And I agree. What we’re trying to get at are the relationships between developmental mechanisms and their role in the evolution of morphology.” Their focus is on what Scemama called the master genes in evolution. Dubbed Hox genes, their role in specifying morphology was sons, who take mates from outside the family. McRae is concentrating on the laboratory side of the project: teasing out the DNA finger-prints that allow her to determine paternity and, with that, to reconstruct the pedigree of the birds they’re studying. “ We’re interested in how they partition reproduction,” she said. “ Subordinates’ nesting creates strife because of the limited resources. We’ve observed in the field some egg- tossing — birds throwing out each other’s eggs — and we’re just starting to look at who’s doing it. It probably has a lot to do with conflicts over reproduction.” Eventually, she wants to do compara-tive studies of all the weavers, to understand the genetic, ecological and social factors that influence the degree to which they cooperate when it comes to building nests, breeding, raising young and establishing and defending territories. “ What drives me at moment are the environmental influences,” she said. “ Group living is not something birds do under ideal circumstances. It’s often the result of habitat saturation. When food or other resources are limited, it becomes a necessity. Sociable weavers, which have the apartment- style nests, live in the harshest area of southern Af-rica. Very few of other types live there. That’s a clue. If you live in those areas, you have to adopt this strategy to survive.” Connecting the Twigs 20 • SPRING 2004 • edge Early on, scientists speculated that the number of clusters would be related to morphological complexity. Since fish seem to fall between the wormlike lancelet and a mammal in terms of complexity — a fish has fins, which the lancelet lacks, but not a mammal’s seemingly more complex limbs — it was expected to have an intermediate number of clusters. Instead, it has more. “ Everybody’s still wondering what that means,” Stellwag said. “ The only hypothesis anyone has come up with is that maybe Hox genes have a role not only in the determination of morphological complexity but also in the capacity for evolutionary diversification. That is, the more of these genes a lineage has, the more readily it can diversify its morphology, not in a developmental sense, but in an evolutionary sense. The only support for this theory is that the lineage represented by the ray- finned fishes is thought to have a greater number of species than does the lineage to which mammals belong.” Unraveling the mystery of vertebrate Hox genes means tackling a broad range of questions, from when and how they are expressed in the development of an embryo to whether the corresponding genes in different species — whether fish, mouse or man — have the same role in development. “ Obviously, fish morphology doesn’t look like human morphology, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be specified in a similar way,” Stellwag said. “ Or maybe, if the gene expression is different, that’s why the morphology is different. In fish, maybe the region of cells that is specified by a particular Hox gene is greater than or less than the region that is specified in humans, and that would influence the structure.” As in most areas of science, the big ques-tions must be tackled in small segments. For their segment, Stellwag and Scemama decided to study striped bass development and compare it with the best known of fishes, the zebrafish. They narrowed it even further to the develop-ment of the jaw. They soon discovered a difference between the two fishes, which diverged from their common ancestor 150 millions years ago. Where the zebrafish had two copies of a specific gene involved in making the jaw, the striped bass had three. A photograph taped to Scemama’s lab door provides insight into the next step of the process. It shows a vibrant green glow in the otherwise transparent outline of a fish embryo. They had successfully “ tagged” a gene they were studying with a fluorescent copy. As the embryo’s cells multi-plied and migrated to form different parts of the fish, they could follow the action directed by this gene. “ The presumption is that Hox genes specify the destination of cells, like a postal code,” Stellwag said. Then they ran into difficulty. To fully understand the gene’s function, they need to be able to alter its expression in the developing embryo — blocking it in some cases and in others stimulating the expression in a region where it does not normally occur — and study the resulting malformations in the adult fish. Striped bass, however, proved particularly difficult subjects for genetic manipulation, and because they spawn only once a year, progress would be slow in coming. So the researchers recently switched their focus to tilapia, which breeds year round and is more easily manipulated. Although tilapia is a close relative of striped bass, they will have to step back and duplicate their initial studies in identifying and tagging genes. Eventually, they hope to transfer genes from one species to another, to see whether and how they affect the jaw structure of the fish. “ That’s not a trivial step,” Stellwag said. “ Just because we put a gene in a zebrafish doesn’t mean it will be expressed because all the other mechanisms necessary for express-ing the gene may have been lost evolutionarily. But when it works, you can get valuable and sometimes dramatic results.” He pointed to experiments with fruit flies and mice. Mutant flies were created that were deficient in a particular Hox gene. When the corresponding Hox gene from a mouse was inserted into the fruit fly, it recovered its normal function. The reverse also held true — corresponding genes from a fly could function in the mouse. “ That was shocking when it was done,” Stellwag said. “ This really goes back to show these genes are descended from a common ancestor, and they have retained over enormous lengths of evolutionary time certain deep, ancestral functions.” Connecting the twigs Back when Darwin explored aboard the Beagle, living things were easily classi-fied. They were animal or plant, with little confusion between the two. Since that time, whole new categories of life have been discovered, more numerous and distinct from one another than Darwin’s generation ever dreamed of. Other discoveries have muddied waters, showing similarities where once there ABOVE: How genes specific morphology is the focus of collaborators Ed Stellwag and Jean- Luc Scemama ( not pictured). AT RIGHT: John Stiller is looking billions of years back in time for the moment that organisms developed a new way to regulate genes. Connecting edge • SPRING 2004 • 21 were clear distinctions. “ The new taxonomy has transformed the tree of life into an exotic plant,” Steve Jones wrote in Darwin’s Ghost. “ Men and chimps are indeed more related than are men and bananas, but humans, insects, and plants are, the DNA shows, all mere twigs on the same branch.” John Stiller has begun to take a hard look at this branch, which includes life’s most complex organisms, in hopes of finding one of the smoking guns of evolution. With support from an NSF Faculty Early Career Develop-ment Award, he is looking a billion years back in time for that moment, metaphorically speaking, that organisms developed a new way to regulate genes. With this ability, their cells can differentiate, assuming different shapes and functions, even changing throughout their lifetimes. Organisms from the other major branches retain relatively uniform cell shape and function. “ Even red algae that are large, multicel-lular organisms don’t differentiate tissue so that one type of cell is an eye or a foot or a leaf or a root,” Stiller said. “ They have weird ways of making cells twist together and form outwardly complex forms, but they don’t differentiate cell type.” The reason, he suspects, is that they evolved before his smoking gun was fired. The gun in question has to do with something called the C- terminal domain, a protein struc-ture found on an enzyme that transcribes genes into their biochemical messages. This domain serves as a platform for binding many other proteins involved in the process. Those proteins in turn are responsible for controlling complex maneuvers, such as putting an eye in its proper place or telling a seed to sprout a root on one side and a shoot on the other. “ The fact that the dominant organisms that we know are the same ones that have this C- terminal domain, I don’t think is coinci-dental,” he said. “ One of the reasons we have evolved such complexity, and such a diversity of complexity, is because we have a series of key underlying mechanisms that arose during our evolutionary history. I think this is one of them.” Stiller wants to learn when and how the C- terminal domain, or CTD, originated and what that has meant for the evolution of more complicated forms of gene expression. As part of his search, he has been crafting evolutionary trees that identify which organisms have the C-terminal domain and which don’t. As he looks at those trees, one thing jumps out. Organisms that evolve the CTD- based gene expression keep it, without exception. “ It’s surprisingly easy to lose functions in evolution,” he said. “ A fish moves into a cave and loses its eyes. Take something as funda-mental as an arm, lose it and evolve a wing in-stead if that’s more adaptable. Very complicated structures are lost repeatedly in evolution. But nothing we have looked at so far has lost this domain. So something profound happened to lock the CTD into the basic core functions of gene expression. Once you have taken this step, whatever it is, you can’t go back, you can’t lose the CTD. Once it was there, the CTD proved tremendously useful. You can lay all kinds of proteins on it and make thousands of different complicated organisms from very similar genetic material. So here ( in the step that locked CTD in place) is the foundation for the development of a lot of complex organisms, as well as tremendous evolutionary diversity, and I want to know what that is.” Organisms with the C- terminal domain vary considerably, so to find the domain’s original, core function, Stiller is trying to identify the biochemical properties they have in common and that are missing from organisms lacking the domain. Dr. Zhenhau Gua, a post-doctoral researcher in his lab, has identified one likely set of proteins. These proteins are critical to the CTD’s ability to initiate action and appear to have evolved about the same time as the domain itself. “ Have we demonstrated the C- terminal domain was locked in at that point because of this co- evolution? No, but I think we are on to something,” Stiller said. “ Will we fully understand this ‘ smoking gun’ during my lifetime? Probably not, but it is a good start.” In time, Stiller said, understanding the evolution of the C- terminal domain will further define relationships among the major groups of organisms. “ One example is this issue of red algae,” he said. “ I have been involved in a philosophical and scientific debate over last five or six years, based on different interpreta-tions of different molecular analyses, as to whether red algae and green plants are related to one another. … It’s been hard to pin down.” But similarities and differences that don’t appear when looking at the external structure may become apparent at the molecular level. “ If we can say to other researchers, look, we have a C- terminal domain along with the following critical functions that are absolutely conserved in plants and animals, and red algae just don’t have them, doesn’t that mean that plants are more closely related to animals than they are to red algae?” he said. “ Then we will have defined evolutionary relationships based on something that’s both very complicated and clearly shared, and it will be difficult to argue it’s just an aberration in the data.” • 22 • SPRING 2004 • edge edge: In February, experts on domestic violence from across the United States will be coming to Greenville. How did that come about? Griffin: I am a member of the National Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and have been a member for about the last eight years. The institute consists of practitioners and educators who have an interest in family violence — that’s community violence, that’s intimate partner violence, that’s elder abuse, that’s child abuse. It’s the whole spectrum of family violence. About 3 1/ 2 years ago, the institute and its steering committee, of which I’m a member, decided that we had heard and read a whole lot about domestic violence but nobody had spent the time to do a real assessment of what domestic violence and community violence were like in the African American community. We started by devel-oping about 10 open- ended questions that we wanted to ask in several communities. When we put those communities together, we’d have a national report. The community reports also can stand independently as a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in each community, or at least the opinions of African Americans about what is going on in terms of domestic violence in their region. The first one was in San Francisco- Oak-land about three years ago. We’ve just published the results from that. From there, we went to Minneapolis- St. Paul. Then we went to Seattle. After that we went to where they thought we would get a rural perspective because I kept telling them we had to do rural. They thought, well Memphis is rural. This is a group of people who live in large cities. All are in metropolitan areas except me. So we went to Memphis and had an inner city set of focus groups; then we went to what was thought to be rural. It was a suburban community right outside of Memphis. It was not rural. Then after Memphis, we went to Birmingham, Philadelphia and Detroit. I said we still don’t have rural. They finally agreed i n the most ideal picture, families are nurturing institutions — the secure cocoon from which we learn to face the world with confidence, the soft place to land when things on the outside go wrong. Whether at the beginning of life or the end, family members care for us when we can’t take care of ourselves. Too often, however, the ideal picture bears scant resemblance to reality. Since the 1960s, social scientists and public policymakers have paid increasing attention to what goes wrong inside the family and how those problems can be addressed. Among those studying such issues are members of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, an organization sponsored by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services and housed at the University of Minnesota. The institute has launched a multi-year study of African American family violence involving intensive visits in communities across the country. Through the efforts of Dr. Linner Griffin, ECU professor of social work and a member of the institute’s steering committee, Eastern North Carolina was selected as one of the nine communities being studied. On Feb. 26, the institute met in Greenville with a daylong series of events, including six focus groups of service providers, community activ-ists and others with special interest in the issues and an evening forum open to the public. Leading up to the meeting, edge spoke with Griffin about the institute’s plans and about her area of special interest, elder abuse and maltreatment. Tattered Cocoon Scholars examine the extent, nature of violence in African American families C o n t i n u e d edge • SPRING 2004 • 23 24 • SPRING 2004 • edge and said if I’m insisting on rural, then I should show them rural. So we will do a community assessment here, with six different focus groups from the community. Our community as we’ve defined it is the area east of I- 95. edge: Why was it so important to have a rural area represented? Is domestic violence different in different parts of the country? Griffin: I think we’ll find some differ-ences between what exists in eastern North Carolina and Detroit, for example. I cannot imagine that we wouldn’t because they’re deal-ing with whole different economic systems and different social support networks. One of the things I know that’s likely to come up is the lack of transportation in rural communities. Cities don’t have that issue. They have public transportation. They get to services easily enough, plus the communities are large enough that you’ll have various branches or satellite offices of agencies in different parts of the city, though not necessarily in African American neighborhoods. In rural communities on the other hand, you may find one agency wearing multiple hats, or you may find the of-fice located in the county seat, which is 50 miles away. There’s not a real convenient way to get there unless you can get someone to take you. If you’re talking about domestic violence, the victim would probably have to get the perpetra-tor to take her there. That’s not likely to happen very often. edge: Why the specific focus on African Americans? Griffin: There has been a good bit of research in family violence, but the majority of respondents in all the studies have been Cau-casian. They are the majority population. We haven’t had the degree of representation neces-sary to understand what’s happening within any of the minority groups, whether we’re talking about Asians and Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Native Americans or African Americans. That means minority issues and differences in minor-ity concerns are lost. edge: Your own expertise lies in elder abuse and maltreatment, which has been get-ting a lot of press attention lately. How great a problem is it? Griffin: Physical abuse is often what gets the attention, and it’s what gets perpetrated in nursing homes, which is where you usually hear of it. It happens in the home, too, but the nursing home gets the big exposé. Physical abuse is only part of it, however. When you talk about elder abuse, you’re also talking about emotional or psychological abuse. You’re talking about neglect, both by others and self- neglect. You’re talking about abandonment and financial or material exploitation. I think of elder abuse as behavior that can be either acts of commission or omission that causes harm to an older person. These acts are demonstrable and causally linked to the harm, and they warrant intervention on the part of the state. In terms of numbers, it’s one of most underreported types of abuse. There might be a half million incidents reported a year, but the National Elder Abuse Incidence Survey suggests that for every reported incident, there might be five not reported. So multiply that out — it’s scary. We’re not equipped to deal with that. We want the incidents to come to the forefront, but if they do, we don’t have the manpower to deal with it. We also need to prepare ourselves for the future because the elderly population is the fastest growing population we have. If we can’t deal with it now, can you imagine what it will be like in 30 years when the elderly will be at least 20 percent of the total population? edge: What has been the focus of your own research? Griffin: Most of my research focuses in African Americans, using both quantitative and qualitative studies to develop a clear understand-ing of what abuse looks like among African Americans. It differs. edge: How so? Griffin: The context is often different, to begin with. All of the definitions talk about the victims of elder abuse as generally 75 years old or older, they’re white females, they’re generally widowed and in poor health. The definition for whites makes mention that the victim often lives in the home of the abuser so she’s dependent on the abuser in some way. Well, in African American families, most of the seniors — and they usually are women — provide the home for the adult children. That in itself is a difference. You’re not living in the home of your child. The child is coming back, if they ever left, to live in the home of the mother. In fact, we’ve found something that tends to be a little bit reminiscent of a practice that happened in early immigrant families. It is that African American seniors, mostly elderly women, sometimes enter mutually beneficial relationships with their children. I call it encour-aged infantilism. It’s where one person, usually an unmarried daughter, but sometimes a son, is kept at home to be with the parents. Sometimes they’re encouraged to remain dependent on the parent and not take on some of the responsibili-ties that go with adulthood, such as going out to get a job. Often the other siblings know it. It’s the notion of the weaker one staying home and being protected by the parent, but it also provides companionship for the parent. We also find in the African American community a greater dependence and a greater recognition of non- kin family. African Ameri-cans have more aunts and cousins who really aren’t blood kin. So when you have abuse, it’s important to determine the actual relationship, and it’s not always easy because they’ve been together for so long. edge: What are you finding? Are there differences between kin- and non- kin? Griffin: So far, we haven’t found any more abuse by the non- kin than family mem-bers. I’m talking primarily about financial ex-ploitation because one thing we’ve found is that African Americans find the concept of physical abuse of their parents particularly unacceptable. You’ll find other kinds of abuse, but you don’t find the mother figure physically beaten up. edge: We often think of elder abuse as an adult child taking frustrations out on a parent, but I saw a study recently showing that elder abuse is more often committed by the spouse. Griffin: I haven’t seen the study you refer to, but the national elder abuse survey con-ducted in 1998- 99 reported there was a change in who was actually the perpetrator. In the 1980s, it most often was thought to be the daughter ( who is usually the caretaker). But this survey found it was most often a male child when you count neglect and financial exploitation. Also, the notion of a relationship between caregiver stress and acts of violence has been shown to be unfounded. At the same time, people have been saying for years that we often do have spousal abuse among seniors and often it is the female who is the perpetrator. The rationale is that the wife may have been victimized over the years. edge • SPRING 2004 • 25 Because women tend to have longer life spans and be healthier than the males, the female then becomes the caregiver and there’s a shift in power. Theoretically what transpires is when the women finally get the upper hand, they can sometimes be angry and seek to retaliate. edge: Is some of that also going on with the children, adult children who were abused as children later becoming violent? Griffin: This gets into learned violence. I’m not saying that black people are more violent than whites. The research shows that’s not true. But they often live in communities where they see more violence, even if it’s at the hands of the police. If they’ve been raised in a home where there is violence — where it could be domestic abuse or related to substance abuse, then that’s the learned behavior. It’s what they know so they perpetuate the only behavior they know, and you get spouse abuse and child abuse. Poverty is another piece of what can lead to violence in the community. Poverty is one of the primary initiators, and we know there is a higher incidence of poverty among African Americans. It’s amazing to me when I talk with some seniors and they talk about what their parents were like. They talk about having been pinched. The father wouldn’t spank them, but he would pinch them and sometimes pinch them until they bled. I would consider that violence. They consider it love. Dad was showing interest. Dad was paying attention. Dad was wrestling and tussling. Dad at least was attempting to discipline. You have to understand that when you have a group of people who feel totally deprived, they grab at straws. There’s the whole psychological aspect that any attention is better than no attention. But what you learn in those instances is how to be cruel. edge: Why is elder abuse so underre-ported? Griffin: One reason is something Sue Tomita writes about, the minimization and neutralization theory. Sometimes when you get groups of minority elders, they make all kinds of wonderful excuses for the neglect or abuse against them. One of reasons is that they raised these children so they assume part of the respon-sibility for their own maltreatment. The result is they make all kinds of excuses for why this is happening that would in some way absolve the children who are committing this abuse against them. The same thing happens in the African American community. Another aspect is that African Americans are particularly resistant to institutional help because they don’t trust the institu-tions. They’re isolated from services by virtue of where they live and the fact that when satellite offices open for different services, they’re generally not put in high risk areas. Then, too, African Americans have been quite demoralized at various times in their history. It’s a struggle just try to make sure people can keep looking forward rather than looking back. edge: Are there other issues that have come up in your research? Griffin: I’ve looked at the rela-tionships of certain kinds of health con-ditions and the emotional conditions of the person. One thing that’s very prevalent in this area is kidney disease and subsequent dialysis. Many African Americans — as a result of diet, diabe-tes and hypertension — receive dialysis for 10 to 20 years. When you look at the number of patients on dialysis and on waiting lists for transplantation, they are predominantly African American. Most patients receive dialysis three days a week. You wonder how they survive. These are the people who are most susceptible to different forms of social and health- care maltreatment. edge: You mentioned that we’re not pre-pared as a society to deal with all the cases of elder abuse now or in the future. What should we be doing? Griffin: We have to find ways to protect our senior citizens. One of the ways is to have a network such as the Council on Aging out there monitoring what’s happening, making sure they’re being fed every day, that they’re being take care of on some level. But there’s also a whole range of needs such as housing, transportation and basic health care. Some of these services are out there, but they are sprinkled around and are not sufficient to meet the needs. It’s also important to understand the need for culturally or ethnically sensitive services. We need to offer services where people need them, and they should be provided by people who are sensitive to the issues, and not just by someone who’s been through two hours of diversity training. • ABOVE: Among African Americans, elder abuse seldom takes the form of physical violence, says social work professor Linner Griffin. A large, tea- colored map dominates one wall of Dr. Todd Savitt’s office. Suggestive of a Victorian tax assessor’s tool, it pinpoints the location and names the residents of every home in Belknap County, N. H., in 1860. Savitt bought the map when he was in high school, after stumbling across it in an antiques store. Years later, he discovered an interesting tidbit on the map — the family home of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. Savitt loves maps, especially old ones, and pores over them, absorbing every detail. It makes him a good navigator. He knows the twists and turns of city streets and country by-ways long before he visits. He seldom gets lost. Yet for a time, many years ago, Savitt felt lost. Lost and trapped. A medical school stu-dent, he doubted — with increasing conviction — that he wanted to become a physician. He finally withdrew, certain that medical school had been a seriously wrong turn. But even wrong turns, he found, can bring him back to where he’s supposed to be. Today, that place is the Brody School of Medicine. As a professor of medical humani-ties, Savitt teaches ethics to aspiring physicians and leads the country’s oldest, continuously running medical readers’ theater program, which he founded. But most of all, he is a his-torian, a specialist in African American medi-cal history. His groundbreaking work Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia was recently reissued by the University of Illinois Press, and he is editing a collection of his articles about African American medical history for a book to be published in 2005 by Kent State University Press. The working title is Race and Medicine in 19th and Early 20th Century America. “ I couldn’t escape my past,” he says. “ I tell people if they decide to leave medical school, they will use the knowledge they have gained in some way. Here I wound up writing a 26 • SPRING 2004 • edge ‘ I couldn’t escape my past’ A medical school dropout, historian Todd Savitt follows a path that brings him back to where he began C o n t i n u e d As they describe his virtues, friends and associates also delight in Savitt’s quirks. He runs daily, rain or shine, at home or away. A vegetarian ( it makes keeping kosher easier, he says), he snacks on M& Ms every night. He shows up for classes and meetings bearing his home- baked chocolate chip cookies. And then there are the maps. book on the subject of medical history. I teach in a medical school. I love it. I’m very happy. I couldn’t have picked a job that would give me everything I want the way this does.” Savitt sits behind a desk he has straight-ened up in anticipation of a guest. As always he is nattily attired. This, after all, is a man who disdains the thought of running errands in the grubby clothes of weekend chores. Better to take a few minutes to change into something presentable. On this day, he wears gray slacks with a blue- striped shirt and a tie in an abstract design of rust, gold and brown, with just a hint of blue. Gray dusts his neatly trimmed beard and hair. The corners of his mouth turn up. “ His default setting is a smile,” says Dr. Jacalyn Duffin of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, president- elect of the American Association for the History of Medicine. “ He has this childlike sense of wonder that’s totally infectious.” Duffin has known Savitt for more than a dozen years, working alongside him in professional workshops and in the AAHM. “ I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like him,” she says. “ He is the opposite of a snob. In academic meetings, a lot of times people ask questions of speakers to try to show off or catch them. Todd asks enthusiastic questions because he’s interested, even when it’s not in his area. It could be medieval European medi-cine, and he’d be enthusiastic.” He is widely regarded as courteous, thoughtful and generous with his time. For six years, he has served as the AAHM’s secretary- treasurer, a job that entails tending to all the daily business of the organization and its conferences, and as chair of the History of Medicine Study Section of the National Library of Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health. A former board member of the North Carolina Humanities Council, he edge • SPRING 2004 • 27 have to shape my whole identity around being a physician.” For the next year, he taught junior high sci-ence, an experience more stressful than medical school, and picked up a few more history cours-es. Those classes confirmed his abiding interest in the subject. He entered graduate school at the University of Virginia to study Southern history, drawn in part by a longtime fascination with the experience of African Americans. Eventually he would do post- doctoral studies at Duke and teach at the University of Florida before coming to ECU in 1982, all the while concentrating on the one thing he thought he had left behind. “ I had no interest in studying the history of medicine,” he says, “ but as I took courses in Southern history, I was able to apply what I learned in medical school and a year in a pathol-ogy lab doing autopsies to my graduate courses. I wound up saying I guess I’m going to learn medical history, but what I did was combine my interest in blacks with my interest in medicine.” Medicine and Slavery marked the first time that the science of medicine had been applied to a retrospective examination of slave health. He not only tackled scientifically what was then a hotly debated subject — were blacks medically different from whites? — but covered whippings as a medical problem and slave quar-ters as a public health issue. Historians polled by the journal Reviews in American History named it one of the two most influential works of medi-cal history published in the 1970s. Savitt loves maps, especially old ones, and pores over them, absorbing every detail. It makes him a good navigator. He knows the twists and turns of city streets and country byways long before he visits. He seldom gets lost. Savitt has since gone on to chronicle the history of every black medical school in the United States, to detail the case histories of the first two people diagnosed with sickle cell anemia and to chronicle the early experiences of black physicians. “ Nobody knows more about the medical history of blacks in America than Savitt,” says 28 • SPRING 2004 • edge gives frequent talks on medical history and con-ducts workshops on readers’ theater around the state and nation. A new six- month project for the Humanities Council has him driving the six hours to Greensboro and back every month to lead book discussions for hospital workers. He is a past board president of the Country Doctor Museum in Bailey and has advised the N. C. Museum of History and Somerset Plantation historic site on medical exhibits and programs. As they describe his virtues, friends and associates also delight in Savitt’s quirks. He runs daily, rain or shine, at home or away. A vegetarian ( it makes keeping kosher easier, he says), he snacks on M& Ms every night. He shows up for classes and meetings bearing his home- baked chocolate chip cookies. And then there are the maps. He indulges his fascination for maps and for research by planning the trips he takes with his wife, Carole. He filled an 11- day drive to Montana with out- of- the- ordinary points of interest along the way, she says. He navigated. She drove. “ Todd bikes,” she says. “ Todd doesn’t drive. A person who’s so interested in his surroundings doesn’t necessarily keep both eyes on the road.” Savitt grew up in New York City, playing stickball in the streets with kids of Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish and African American descent. His father manufactured little girls’ bathrobes and clothing. “ I thought he was famous be-cause his stuff was in stores,” Savitt says. His mother, a homemaker, occasionally modeled for clothing manufacturers. As youngsters, he and his brother Bob would catch the bus from Bayside to Flushing, then pick up the subway into lower Manhattan to visit stamp dealers. “ It was great fun,” he says. “ We never thought twice about being on our own in the city. In high school, we would take dates to the theater and sit up high in the $ 2.90 seats. The city was accessible in a way it may not be anymore.” Later, the Savitt brothers spent a summer traveling cross- country to-gether, driving the maroon Corvair Todd had bought on halves with his dad. They camped most of the time and picked up odd jobs whenever they ran out of money, working construction in Texas, picking beans alongside migrant workers in Oregon. “ It gave us insight into a different way of life,” he says. “ We were relatively privileged, middle- class whites.” Despite their privileges, a cloud hung over the Savitt household. Rheumatic fever had given Mrs. Savitt a weak heart that left her more and more incapacitated. “ Part of wanting to be doctor was that childhood dream of want-ing to cure her,” Savitt says. He graduated from college with a major in history before entering medical school at the University of Rochester. It was there he met Carole, a medical secretary. They married while he worked in a pathology lab, officially still in medical school but rethinking his career choice. Her support helped give him the strength to drop out. “ I had somebody I could talk to, who could say I was worthy of quitting and of doing something else,” he says. “ I didn’t “ I couldn’t have picked a job that would give me everything I want the way this does,” says Todd Savitt. Dr. Ronald Numbers, a professor of medical history at the University of Wisconsin- Madison and Savitt’s longtime friend. The two met 25 years ago. “ I was asked to be a commentator at a conference in Washing-ton,” Numbers says. “ Two guys were presenting papers, Savitt and someone else. I was rather harsh on Savitt. He made a blunder in logic. I had only mild criticism of the other guy, but that guy was so angry he almost wouldn’t speak. Todd and I went out and had a meal and became best friends.” Yet for a time, many years ago, Savitt felt lost. Lost and trapped. A medical school student, he doubted — with increasing conviction — that he wanted to become a physician. He finally withdrew, certain that medical school had been a seriously wrong turn. But even wrong turns, he found, can bring him back to where he’s supposed to be. Savitt’s easy temper is part of what makes him invaluable to the AAHM, says its president, Dr. Kenneth Ludmerer. “ He’s a kind person, and I don’t mean that in a trivial way,” Ludmerer says. “ He’s kind and caring. I can’t imagine a mean bone in his body. He always has the best interest of the association at heart. If a decision might have a negative impact on someone, he tries to phrase it in a way that will soften the blow. And he’s unflappable. Issues that some people get riled and emotional about, he faces with equanimity. “( And) he is an exemplary scholar — wise, insightful and valid. His work on African Americans has been pioneering, with implications for society, not just history.” Taking history and other humanities out into society lies behind Savitt’s work with the N. C. Humanities Council, where he is known for an ability to engage audiences with the heart and the intellect. He was serving on the council’s board in 1988 when a grant applicant proposed establishing medical readers’ theater groups at the state’s four medical schools. Medical students would go out in the com-edge • SPRING 2004 • 29 munity to stage theatrical- style readings based on literary works with a medical theme. Then students and audience together would discuss the issues raised by the piece. At ECU, none of Savitt’s col-leagues was interested in taking on the project so “ by default, I did.” It has continued to the present day, long after sister programs fell by the wayside. Savitt and his group present four to six program each semester at churches, retirement centers and other public venues. The program’s success brings invitations from around the country. “ I probably do as many readers’ theater programs as history talks,” he says. “ I was just invited to give a history lecture in Schenectady, and I’ll do a readers’ theater program while I’m there.” He conducts a program for minor-ity students each summer in Seattle, and he works with students at the Medical College of Georgia each year. To assist fledging groups, Savitt compiled 14 of the readers’ theater scripts he has used, with his discussion questions and an introduction, into Medical Reader’s Theater: A Guide to Scripts. It was pub-lished by the University of Iowa Press in 2002. Harlan Gradin, associate director of the N. C. Humanities Council, credits the success of the readers’ theater and many other public programs to Savitt’s personality, which he calls warm and user- friendly. “ He’s a mensch,” Gradin says. “ There is no higher compliment. Todd is a mensch, a complete person. He makes you comfortable, and that allows him to communicate across boundary lines like race and class, which is critical when dealing with the programs of the Humanities Council. He not only has the great-est integrity but always shows the highest degree of respect for people with whom he’s working and for his audience. And he makes amazing chocolate chip cookies.” Savitt’s students know the cookies well. At first he baked them only for first- and sec-ond- year students in his medical ethics classes, but the disappointment of third- year students doing monthly ethics rounds proved too much. “ They guilted me into it,” he says. Savitt’s experience in medical school pays off for students, whether he’s assuring them that life will not end if they drop out of medical school or listening as they reflect on losing their first patient. Ron Numbers admires Savitt’s commitment to medical education. “ I teach in a medical school, but I’m not a medi-cal educator the way he is,” Numbers says. “ He cares just as much about training good physicians ( as he does history) and thoroughly enjoys it. That’s fairly unusual, especially for a non- M. D.” Although he could, Savitt refrains from using one experience in his classes — his mother’s surgery in 1988 to replace a heart valve. “ She died on the table,” he says. “ It was totally unexpected. Here I am teaching ethics, and that surgeon didn’t tell us — at least not that my father, brother or I can recall — that she might die in surgery. He said it was risky Savitt’s medical school experience deepens the discussions with students in his ethics classes. C o n t i n u e d surgery, but we thought if it didn’t work, she’d just be back to where she was, not that she could die.” A year later, Savitt attended a medical conference in Montana. Still raw from the expe-rience, he went out into the Rocky Mountain’s Glacier National Park to say prayers for his mother. Religion was only casually observed in Savitt’s childhood. The family went to syna-gogue on high holy days, had Passover seders and lit candles for Hanukkah. He attended religious school just enough to become a bar mitzvah when he turned 13. But the sicker his mother became, the more he turned against religion. “ How could God let this happen to Mom?” he recalls questioning. “ It really was an anger that I had. I pretty much stayed away until I had kids of my own, which is a typical story.” In returning to his religious roots, Savitt sought a new depth of experi-ence. He found beauty and mystery in congregational singing in ancient Hebrew. As part of a study group in Gainesville, he learned to conduct services. “ It gave me insight I didn’t have before into why we do the things we do in the service,” he says. In North Carolina, he was intro-duced to the annual B’nai B’rith Institute on Judaism at Wildacres Retreat near Little Switzerland. For the past decade, he has organized the four- day event, scheduling speakers, performances and services around such subjects as the Bible and music. Although he once led services at synagogue, including wedding ceremo-nies for his daughters, today Savitt finds himself drawn more toward private ob-servances. But all of it has enriched him. “ It got me back into understanding what I like about Judaism,” he says. “ If you look for it through readings and commentaries, you get a sense of how rich the religion is, how it has been refined over the centuries. … It’s an intellectual tradition, a historical tradition and a culture that gets passed down, whether we like it or not. I had to grow up enough to appreciate that.” His daughters didn’t have to grow up to appreciate life with their father. Each got her own special time with Dad every year. Jodey would choose week-ends at Kings Dominion. Allyson preferred camping and hiking. “ He’s always been a sup-portive dad,” Allyson Savitt Forrester says. “ I was in a play in high school once. I was a bird, and they built a big cage and hoisted me up 30 feet in the gym every night. Dad came to every single performance. I did horribly in that play, but he was there every night. I asked him why. He said it was to make sure I didn’t fall.” Now Savitt spends time with his grandchildren on leisurely walks through the neighborhood, letting 6- year- old Maddie stop to watch ants or sharing 3- year- old Mitchell’s excitement over construction equipment. “ He likes to observe her,” Forrester says of her fa-ther and Maddie. “ I think the phrase he uses is, he likes to watch children before they become self- aware.” Savitt rises each morning before most people are aware of themselves or anything else, starting the day with a pre- dawn, 45- minute run. He also bikes to and from work, several days a week stopping by the gym for more exercise before returning home in the evening. By then, Carole will already have eaten dinner. “ Lean Cuisine is my friend,” she says. Todd prepares his own kosher meal. “ He does a whole meal from scratch every night,” she says. Then he’ll settle in at the kitchen table. As he listens to jazz recordings, he reads — history, short stories, Jewish literature — and eats two snack- size bags of M& Ms. Two bags. Not one. Not three. Two. Those two bags of pleasure, he says, are part of what keeps him running, lest the calories catch up. Like its occupant, Todd Savitt’s office slowly reveals itself. It is deep and narrow, its width further constricted by a long row of filing cabinets, each drawer closed and latched. Western scenes with buffalo and wagon trains decorate the drawer fronts. On the opposite wall, near the Belknap County map, a calendar sports a reproduction of a painting by Western artist Charlie Russell. On the back of the door hangs a stylized map depicting the Missoula Valley. The artwork reflects one of Savitt’s newer interests, one that began with the trip to Montana soon after his mother’s death. Since then, he has become enthralled by the state, its landscape, its people, its history. “ I’m an opportunist,” he says. “ I decided if I were to be able to return, I would have to develop some expertise in Montana his-tory.” He has published an article on the founding of St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula and has begun work on a piece describing medicine and health in Helena in 1900. He also helps organize an annual conference on medical history at Montana State University. Whenever he goes to Bozeman for the conference, he adds time for re-search and hiking. Last summer, he spent a week on solitary hikes in Glacier National Park. “ It’s nice to be alone sometimes,” he says. “ Part of that is spiritual, being closer to God, that mysterious force.” Part is the beauty of the unspoiled nature. “ You don’t have to go very far in Montana to get into the wilderness.” Though he may visit the wilderness, Todd Savitt no longer dwells there. He was not cut out to be a physician, but in a medical school and in medical history, he has found his way home. • 30 • SPRING 2004 • edge “ Todd bikes. Todd doesn’t drive,” says his wife, Carole Savitt. “ A person who’s so interested in his surroundings doesn’t necessarily keep both eyes on the road.” explore e x p l o r a t i o n s edge • SPRING 2004 • 31 A monument soars Seven miles north of where the Wrights took flight, a new monument directs the imagi-nation skyward. Called Monument to a Century of Flight, it results from the collaboration of two ECU art professors and sculptors, Hanna Jubran and Jodi Hollnagel, and Glenn Eure, an ECU graduate and Outer Banks artist. The monument features 14 stainless steel pylons in the shape of airplane wings that ascend from 10 feet to 20 feet in height in a 120- foot ellipse, symbolizing the distance of the first flight. Black granite panels on the pylons are engraved with words and images reflecting 100 significant events in the history of aviation. Among the pylons rests a six- foot bronze dome depicting the continents of Earth ringed by bas-relief depictions of historical aircraft. An infinity symbol points from North Carolina. Located at the N. C. Department of Transportation’s Aycock Brown Welcome Center in Kitty Hawk, the monument is the first major landmark visible to people traveling to the Outer Banks over the Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge. Its creation was initiated by Eure and Icarus International, a non- profit organization that raised $ 1 million for the project. Jubran and Hollnagel fabricated the pylons, which weigh between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds each, over a 3 1/ 2 year period and installed the work last fall. The monument was dedicated and opened to the public Nov. 8. The Wright details The Wright brothers’ days on the Outer Banks came to life in fresh detail with the Wright Brothers Centennial Digital Exhibit at Joyner Library. The exhibit included the Wrights’ diary entries, weather data and more than 100 image details from photographs taken by the Wrights in North Carolina. Dr. Larry Tise, an expert in the history of flight and the Wil-bur and Orville Wright visiting distinguished professor of his-tory, worked with the university to identify images from the digitally enhanced photographs. The images reveal more buildings and community activities than generally assumed for the early 20th century at Kill Devil Hills. “ It’s not quite as bleak as we traditionally think of it,” Tise said. The images, property of the Library of Congress and Wright State University, were scanned in a high- resolution format and provided to ECU. The high resolution permitted the undistorted enlargement of the images, bringing to life details down to the pattern on suspenders, embroidered name patches and reading materials. The library exhibit ran from November to February and may still be viewed online at www. lib. ecu. edu/ exhibits/ wright. A literary flight of fancy North Carolina Literary Review commemo-rated the first flight in its 2003 issue with a special section on aviation in North Carolina literature and letters. Among the features were an interview with author Clyde Edgerton, a former fighter pilot who has featured aircraft in two of his books, The Floatplane Notebooks and In Memory of Junior; and the first- time publication of photographs by Alpheus W. Drinkwater, a telegraph operator on the Outer Banks early in the 20th century and a longtime stringer for the Associated Press. In a Readers Digest article in 1956, Drinkwater recalled tapping out a message from “ those crazy Wrights” to their sister Katharine: “ Flight successful. Will be home for Christmas.” North Carolina Literary Review is published by the ECU English department and the Division of Academic Affairs and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. The editor is Dr. Margaret D. Bauer, associate professor of English. • T H E W R I G H T S T U F F ECU marks the 100th anniversary of flight In December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright labored in relative obscurity on North Carolina’s Outer Banks on their way to achieving the world’s first powered flight. Last fall, people from around the world joined in celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ accomplishment. Among those commemorating the Dec. 17 event in different ways were faculty members from ECU. explore e x p l o r a t i o n s 32 • SPRING 2004 • edge E A V E S D R O P P I N G Microbiologist deciphers how bacteria communicate Dr. Everett C. Pesci is an eavesdrop-per. Like an FBI surveillance team, this assistant professor of microbiology hopes his spying will stop a killer in its tracks. Pesci’s snooping focuses on a communica-tion system he identified about five years ago in the potentially deadly bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa. “ It turns out that bacteria are not as dumb as we thought they were,” he said. “ They’re actually communicating with each other, and we’re just learning how to listen to them now.” At least four different types of cell- to- cell communication have been identified among bacteria. Often referred to as quorum sensing, the communication systems usually signal the bacte-ria that their numbers have reached an adequate size for whatever task is at hand. The task may be benign, for example, causing luminescence in the light organ of the flashlight fish. In pathogenic bacteria, the task takes a different turn. “ The theory is it’s a way for the bacteria to hide out and not cause a big stir in the immune system until their army gets big enough,” Pesci said. “ Then they turn on all their virulence genes and try to make you sick.” Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of these less- benign cases. An op-portunistic pathogen, it lives almost everywhere without causing harm to humans. In people with compromised immune systems, however, it can quickly cause serious damage or death. It frequently infects burned tissue, for example, and it loves the human lung. Ultimately it is what kills most cystic fibrosis patients and many others with injured airways. “ If you’re in the hospital and end up on a ventilator, you have a good chance of getting Pseudomonas aeruginosa in your lungs,” Pesci said. “ If that happens, you have only a 50- 50 shot of living.” Quorum sensing is an important part of this deadly effect. Placed in the lungs of a mouse, naturally occurring Pseudomonas aeruginosa kill quickly. Mutant bacteria without the ability to communicate live but do not make the mouse sick. In the 1990s, medical scientists identified two signaling systems integral to quorum sensing in P. aeruginosa. Five years ago, Pesci identi-fied yet a third quorum sensing system in P. aeruginosa. Named the Pseudomonas Quinolone Signal or PQS, it serves as a bridge between |
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