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

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© 2004 by East Carolina University

Printed by Theo Davis Sons, Zebulon, NC

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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