Hart joined the Vanderbilt Board of Trust upon the merger of Peabody and Vanderbilt in 1979 and has served in numerous capacities, including chairing Peabody College’s fundraising efforts in the Shape the Future campaign. Last year he became an emeritus trustee.

“Chairing the balance of the Shape the Future campaign for Vanderbilt is a humbling privilege, a great opportunity and a serious challenge,” says Hart, noting that the goal for the campaign has significantly increased from an original goal of $1.25 billion. “It will be accomplished as a result of the resolute committee so successfully chaired by Monroe Carell Jr. since the campaign’s inception and as the result of the many, many contributors who have exceeded the original goal well ahead of schedule.”

During a 51-year business career, Hart was chief executive officer of Franklin Industries, a Tennessee-based company involved in brick distribution and chemical limestone mining, processing and marketing. In 2006 he sold Franklin Industries to a Belgian conglomerate and retired from active business to pursue various interests, including his support of Vanderbilt.

He received his secondary school education at Phillips Exeter Academy and completed the advanced management program at Harvard Business School. Hart and his wife of 50 years, Patricia Ingram Hart, BA’57, have three grown children and nine grandchildren.

Several years ago I was asked to develop a course on risk management at Vanderbilt based on case studies of actual historical events. The course has since evolved into a popular offering on campus. Each case is researched, debated and reconciled: Could the incident have been prevented? Preventable or not, what could have been done to manage the emergency response more effectively? What actions have we taken since the event to make the world a safer place? Could it happen again?

While man-made accidents, intentional acts and natural disasters may seem dissimilar, a closer look at how these events unfold reveals a remarkable similarity. Collectively, they provide a wealth of information about how disaster situations evolve, what can go wrong, the aftermath of these events, and whether we remain vulnerable to the recurrence of a similar event.

My Vanderbilt students, colleagues and I have drawn 12 key lessons from a number of actual disasters that can be applied to improve the way we manage risks as individuals, communities, businesses and public servants. It is not necessary for history to repeat itself.

U.S. Coast Guardsman Shawn Beaty searches for Hurricane Katrina survivors from a helicopter over New Orleans. [U.S. Coast Guard]

August 2005—Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 2,000 fatalities and an estimated economic loss of $125 billion, in addition to displacing hundreds of thousands of people. The destruction and loss of life cannot be attributed entirely to the storm itself. Numerous failures of the city’s flood-protection system, due to poor design and construction, deferred maintenance, and a lack of funding, left New Orleans vulnerable. As the city filled with water, insufficient emergency planning and preparedness, and the inability of responders to communicate, compounded the hurricane’s effects. Moreover, drilling for fossil fuels and engineering of the Mississippi River had destroyed wetlands that could have buffered the storm’s surge.
[Joseph F. Nickischer/ISTOCK]

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest carrier on the Great Lakes when it launched in 1958.

Nov. 10, 1975—Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Under the command of 37-year veteran captain Ernest McSorley, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a freak early-winter storm in Lake Superior. The ship was loaded with iron-ore pellets for a trip from Superior, Wis., to Detroit, Mich. Of the 29 crew members aboard, none was ever found.

A variety of risk factors has been cited as contributing to the Fitzgerald’s loss, including captain’s pride. The sinking helped lead to numerous changes in maritime regulations, industry practice and technology.

Two hours after the trip began Nov. 9, the ship encountered the SS Arthur M. Anderson, a cargo vessel traveling along a similar route with Capt. Jesse Cooper at the helm. By early evening the National Weather Service (NWS) had issued gale warnings for Lake Superior. Early the next day, the NWS upgraded its forecast to a storm warning. Both captains changed course and headed northward. That afternoon changing winds left the vessels exposed to large waves, and Cooper radioed that his ship would alter its course again. McSorley responded that he would stay on his current course although the Fitzgerald was “rolling some.”

An hour later Cooper radioed to McSorley that he thought the Fitzgerald might be too close to an area of shallow water known as the “Six Fathom Shoal.” As the Fitzgerald was taking on heavy seas over the ship’s deck, Capt. McSorley did not call for help even after it had been clear for several hours that his ship was in serious trouble.

A boat rests on top of a house in the distance as a woman surveys the rubble of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after a 2004 tsunami virtually leveled the city. [Lynsey Addario/Corbis]

Dec. 26, 2004—Sumatra-Andaman Tsunami

The second-largest earthquake ever recorded spawned a massive tsunami that struck the coasts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and several African nations. (The largest ever recorded occurred in Chile in 1960.)

Damage from the Sumatra-Andaman tsunami resulted in more than 300,000 people declared dead or missing and more than 1 million left homeless. The many countries that suffered from exposure to the tsunami had neither the knowledge nor the means to institute an effective warning system. A reasonable disaster-preparedness plan and early-warning system might have averted most of these consequences.

Tsunamis have been fairly unusual throughout recent history in the Indian Ocean, with the last major occurrence more than 120 years ago. Because giant earthquakes often occur in groups—seven of 10 occurring in the 20th century happened in a 15-year span, and five of those were clustered in one geographical area—it is reasonable to expect other major quakes in southern Asia in the near future. Countries bordering the Indian Ocean are working with the United Nations on early-detection and public education systems to avert future disasters.

Children run through the streets of Bhopal, India, after the Union Carbide Corp. leaked a poisonous gas. [Pablo Bartholomew / Getty Images]

Dec. 2, 1984—Nightmare in Bhopal

A chemical plant in Bhopal, India, owned and operated by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp., accidentally released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas (MIC). Plant workers had allowed water to seep into the MIC tanks, causing a reaction that led to the release. Poorly maintained safety systems failed to contain its movement.

A toxic cloud drifted over residents of Bhopal while they were asleep and eventually covered an area of more than eight square miles, affecting a population of nearly 900,000 people. As many as 4,000 men, women and children died that night while in bed or trying to escape the fumes. Estimates of those injured or disabled are as high as 400,000. Within three days, estimated fatalities had risen to between 7,000 and 10,000 people. As many as 15,000 more have since reportedly died from residual exposure.

The Union Carbide Corp. was one of the earliest U.S. companies to establish a subsidiary in India, beginning in 1934. India was seeking to attract foreign investors to strengthen its economy and often did so, like many other developing countries, by relaxing safety standards or ignoring violations. Union Carbide, without any objection from the Indian government, applied different safety standards than those used in its West Virginia plant that manufactured similar products.

The Bhopal disaster involved such a large number of risk factors—including lack of planning and preparedness, poor communications, hands-off management, understaffing, and a culture and company that placed economic priorities over safety—that the occurrence of a catastrophe was not so much a matter of “whether” but “when.” It led to the worst disaster in the history of the chemical manufacturing industry and served as a bellwether event for the industry and a catalyst for safety reform.

Cranes lift the tail section of the downed United DC-10 onto a flatbed truck at the Sioux City airport. [James Finley, AP/Wide World Photos]

July 19, 1989—United Flight 232

Flying debris severed all three hydraulic systems on United Airlines Flight 232 while en route from Denver to Chicago, leaving the pilot without any control of the DC-10 aircraft. Through the integrated effort of a well-trained cockpit crew and a highly coordinated emergency response, the plane was able to make a crash landing at the Sioux City, Iowa, airport. Exemplary risk-management practices both in the air and on the ground meant that of 296 passengers and crew on board, 184 survived.

Survival was aided, too, by the lack of thunderstorm activity during a time when it is typically frequent, occurrence of the incident on the one day of the month that the Iowa Air National Guard was on duty, and the presence of an off-duty instructor pilot as a passenger on the aircraft.

The eruption of Mount St. Helens was the worst volcanic disaster in U.S. history. [U.S. Geological Survey]

May 18, 1980—Eruption of Mount St. Helens

After two months of increasing seismic activity, Mount St. Helens in Washington State erupted in full fury, leaving a path of destruction. The blast and ensuing landslides, mudflows and eruption cloud killed 57 people, destroyed 27 bridges, ruined 200 homes, and toppled about 4 billion board-feet of timber. Nearly all wildlife within a 15-mile radius was wiped out.

Before 1980, concerns about Mount St. Helens and other peaks within the Cascade Range had caused the U.S. Geological Survey to request additional funding for volcano monitoring and hazards studies, but when these requests went unfulfilled, the agency focused its limited resources on Hawaiian volcanoes, which were thought to present a greater threat. Available monitoring technology was not able to predict the type, magnitude or affected areas of an eruption, leaving geologists unaware that a massive explosion was about to take place.

After the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the federal government dramatically increased funding for volcano monitoring and research.

Circumstances beyond human control, often called luck, always influence the extent to which a potentially catastrophic situation becomes a reality. Sometimes, due to poor risk management, bad luck allows a vulnerable situation to unravel. In other instances, as with United Flight 232, good luck enables a well-managed situation to prevail against seemingly long odds.

Some people believe that you make your own luck through effective planning and preparedness. If you consider a variety of disaster scenarios and devise strategies to limit their likelihood and severity, then—when faced with bad luck—there is a better chance your contingency plan can offset an unfortunate roll of the dice.

Two skywalks at a new Kansas City hotel collapsed onto a crowded dance floor in 1981, killing 114 people and injuring 216 others. [Pete Leabo, AP/Wide World Photos]

July 17, 1981—Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

A tea dance in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Mo., ended in tragedy when the second- and fourth-floor skywalks collapsed onto a crowded dance floor, leaving 114 people dead and another 216 injured.

The hotel had opened its doors just a year earlier. Flaws in a simple design change made to a support mechanism went unnoticed, allowing the skywalk to buckle at the worst possible moment. The fourth-floor walkway fell 30 feet to the floor below, but not before landing on the second-floor sky bridge, causing it to collapse as well. More than 70 tons of debris fell, crushing or trapping hundreds of partygoers, some of whom could not be reached for more than seven hours.

The engineering contractor had failed to follow the formal design-review process, allowing a flaw in the hanger-rod configuration to go uncorrected. Design of the connections in the walkways was never even checked, despite the project engineer’s written assurance to the contrary. Seven weeks before scheduled completion, a worker noticed deformation of the walkway and reported it to the architect’s on-site representative, but the report never received attention. The following February two more observations were made of deformation in the walkways, but both were discounted.

U.S. space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, 72 seconds before explosion kills its crew of seven. [NASA, AP/Wide World Photos]

Jan. 28, 1986, and Feb. 1, 2003—The Challenger and Columbia Disasters

The U.S. space shuttle program suffered a serious setback in 1986 after the shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after takeoff, killing the entire crew. Although the official cause of the disaster was mechanical malfunction, it was discovered that NASA and its contractor knew about the existence of the O-ring design flaw but allowed the flight to proceed.

NASA subsequently took corrective actions to ensure that such institutional failures would not allow for another shuttle disaster.

But in 2003 the shuttle Columbia tore apart during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The post-accident Columbia investigation revealed risk factors eerily similar to those of its Challenger predecessor. Once again, design flaws—this time associated with the insulating foam on the external tank—were known ahead of time, yet the launch was not stopped.

A Ferris wheel near Chernobyl was scheduled to be unveiled for May Day festivities in 1986. Instead, it has grown rusty in the still-contaminated ghost town of Pripyat, built in the 1970s as a home for Chernobyl workers. [photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/Corbis]

April 25–26, 1986—Meltdown at Chernobyl

A planned experiment gone badly at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union created a reactor core explosion that sent a huge radioactive cloud into the atmosphere. Thirty-one people died from immediate radiation poisoning, 130,000 residents were evacuated, and radiation effects were felt across most of Europe and beyond.

For 12 days after the accident, an immense plume of radioactive material more than 400 times the magnitude released at Hiroshima spewed from the explosion site into the upper atmosphere, where weather patterns carried it north over Russia, then northeast over Poland and Scandinavia. Within days, Danish and Swedish nuclear monitors began detecting elevated levels of radiation, but the first media coverage did not occur until April 29, when a German newscast reported that there had been a major nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Though the Soviet government initially denied the allegations, increasing international pressure finally caused Soviet leaders to acknowledge what had taken place.

The Chernobyl accident caused staggering economic losses for the USSR and the former Soviet nations. Long-term human health effects of radiation exposure are now being realized, and a large area around the plant site remains off limits to human habitation.

In the mid-1980s, as the Soviet Union was locked in a decades-old power struggle with Western Europe and the United States, participants on both sides attempted to gain political, economic and military advantage, with new technologies being developed to strengthen their cause. One of these was the nuclear reactor for creating electricity. Many believe the Chernobyl meltdown was the catalyst for ending the Cold War.

A fireman calls for more rescue workers to make their way into the rubble of the World Trade Center. [U.S. Navy photo by Preston Keres]

Sept. 11, 2001—The World Trade Center Attacks

Terrorists affiliated with the international al Qaeda organization hijacked two commercial airliners, crashing the planes minutes apart into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City. Each aircraft was directed into a different tower, resulting in the eventual collapse of both buildings and destruction of other infrastructure in the vicinity.

Nearly 3,000 people died in the towers and on the ground, including more than 400 firefighters and police officers. The terrorists exploited weaknesses in U.S. aviation security and communications gaps in the U.S. intelligence system.

The federal government implemented a number of changes as a direct result of the attacks. Little more than a month later, the Patriot Act was enacted, aimed at bolstering counterterrorism resources, improving border security, and undermining terrorist funding sources. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed one year later, establishing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security within the executive branch of the federal government.

Since September 2001, terrorists have made numerous attempts to carry out large-scale attacks against the United States, all of which have been disrupted by U.S. and allied efforts.

Storm King Mountain bears the scars of a Colorado wildfire that began in South Canyon. [Raymond Gehman/CORBIS]

July 1994—South Canyon Fire

What began as a relatively small Colorado wildfire July 3 grew into a dangerous blaze during the ensuing days while firefighting resources were allocated to other fires in the district. Once fragmented resources began to arrive, the fire could not be easily contained, and firefighters found themselves with no escape routes if a sudden reverse in the direction of the blaze occurred.

The afternoon of July 6, a cold front created a wind shift and subsequent “blowup” that trapped and killed 14 firefighters. Management, leadership and communication within the firefighting community contributed to the tragedy.

They are the first entering Vanderbilt class to live and learn in The Commons, in close community with one another and with 10 of their professors.

 
They made it through the most competitive admissions pool in Vanderbilt history—16,944 applicants for 1,569 slots. They come from 934 different high schools. They are the most academically prepared and the most ethnically and geographically diverse class ever.  

They are leaders in 1,569 different ways. One is a state debating champion. Another owns a baking business and founded the high school culinary club. A third was the only student member of the state board of education.

A fourth earned one of 10 National Caring Awards after helping raise more than $60,000 for school supplies for two villages in India.

And talk about bright. “The light from up here is almost blinding,” Frank Wcislo, dean of The Commons and associate professor of history, remarked during Convocation as he surveyed the Class of 2012. Their average SAT score is 1400, and 25 percent of the class scored 1500 or higher. This year’s average is a 21-point increase over last year; in 2000 the average was 1313.

More than 84 percent ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class. More than 130 were valedictorians or salutatorians. One hundred seventy are National Merit scholars; eight are National Achievement scholars.

These students hold a unique place in university history, but as they embarked on their college journey in August, they shared the same mixture of exhilaration and apprehension as generations of Vanderbilt first-year students before them.

“It’s a great idea,” said first-year student Yousuf Ahmad when asked for his impressions of residential life on Move-In Day. “By putting freshman students together, we can share the same anxiety that comes with being a first-year student and learn and grow together and make mistakes together.”

Move-In Weekend		First-years say their goodbyes
Navy ROTC first-year orientation graduation.	First-years say their goodbyes	Chancellor Zeppos on the hall.
Move-In Weekend	Dorm life, week one.
	Dorm life, week one.	Frank Wcislo, dean of The Commons
Dorm life, week one.		Games on The Commons Lawn.
Games on The Commons Lawn.	Habitat for Humanity service work
Party at the Hank Ingram House.	Dancing and cruising on the showboat.	Signing of the honor code.
“I know how you feel. I was a little homesick when I moved in,” Murray House faculty head Sharon Shields tells students.
Dodgeball and pizza at the Student Recreation Center.	Games on The Commons Lawn.
	Dancing and cruising on the showboat.

Starting in the 2009–2010 academic year, all undergraduate students—both new and returning—who normally would have received need-based loans as part of their financial aid package to meet their demonstrated financial need will qualify for this program. All seniors slated to graduate in May 2009, in addition, will have their need-based loans for the spring 2009 semester replaced with Vanderbilt grant/scholarship assistance.

“This step is in keeping with Vanderbilt’s commitment that ability, achievement and hard work—not a family’s financial circumstances—should determine access to a great education,” said Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos in announcing the move.

During the past seven years, Vanderbilt has worked aggressively to reduce student loan debt, and this new initiative is the pinnacle of that strategy. Funding will come from a combination of strategic internal allocations and increased scholarship endowment, including an additional $100 million in gifts and pledges in new scholarship endowment that will need to be raised during the next several years.

“This ambitious goal gets at the very heart of what Vanderbilt is all about,” says Randall W. Smith, executive associate vice chancellor for development and alumni relations. Vanderbilt will be seeking new philanthropic gifts from alumni and friends for this initiative, he says. “As we look to the university’s future, the case for making education accessible is a compelling one that virtually everyone who cares about Vanderbilt appreciates and embraces.”

A top priority of Vanderbilt’s ongoing Shape the Future campaign has been increased scholarship support, paving the way for elimination of need-based loans in the financial packages the university offers to all eligible undergraduates. The Shape the Future campaign has been one of the sources that has allowed Vanderbilt to reduce students’ loan debt by 17 percent during the past several years, even as the cost of attending Vanderbilt has increased approximately 5 percent annually.

By eliminating need-based loans, notes Provost Richard C. McCarty, “We also free our students to consider choices about their careers or further study that they might have overlooked because of concern about the pressure of repaying student loans.”

Vanderbilt has determined not to impose specified income-level caps in deciding eligibility for the program. Vanderbilt’s policy is to admit students on the basis of their talents and ability, rather than their ability to pay. The university also commits to meeting 100 percent of students’ demonstrated financial need. In determining a student’s demonstrated financial need, Vanderbilt takes into account each student’s individual family circumstances and all educational costs such as tuition, fees, housing, meals, books and course materials; in addition, allowances are made for personal and travel expenses. With the additional investment by Vanderbilt, many students pay no more to attend Vanderbilt than they would to attend a college with a lower total cost. 

“Eliminating need-based loans is not only the competitive thing to do—it’s also the right thing to do,” says Douglas Christiansen, associate provost for enrollment and dean of admissions.

“The generosity and activism of those who are contributing to this massive need-based initiative reaffirm everyone’s passion for helping the most academically talented, diverse and engaged students.”

In the past few years, a handful of universities and colleges across America have announced similar initiatives—primarily top institutions with which Vanderbilt competes directly for students. Brown, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania offer need-based loan waivers for students from lower-income families. Harvard University offers free tuition to students whose parents earn less than $60,000 a year; Yale and Stanford have similar programs. Princeton and Dartmouth have also eliminated need-based loans in their financial aid offers based on demonstrated need, which most closely resembles Vanderbilt’s new expand-ed aid program.

At the same time, Vanderbilt has become both more selective academically, and more diverse culturally and geographically. Admissions applications jumped 31 percent for the undergraduate Class of 2012 over the previous year, according to Christiansen. Of the 1,569 students in this year’s entering class, 930 high schools are represented. Prior to enrolling, “most of our first-year students didn’t know anyone at Vanderbilt,” Christiansen says. 

“This bold step will allow Vanderbilt to continue recruiting the most highly achieving students in a very competitive way and will ensure a student body composed of young men and women of all economic, cultural and geographic backgrounds,” said Zeppos, “which will only further enrich the Vanderbilt experience for all of us.” 

For information about how this initiative will impact a specific financial aid award, contact the Office of Student Financial Aid at finaid@vanderbilt.edu.

Find out more: www.vanderbilt.edu/expandedaidprogram

Participants in the alumni trip to China in October 2007.

Embark on a world of adventure in 2009 with family, friends, fellow alumni, and the Vanderbilt Travel Program. Sponsored by the Vanderbilt Alumni Association, 11 culturally rich destination packages are planned—each featuring a Vanderbilt professor who will offer an exclusive “beyond the classroom” experience.

Destinations include Tahiti and French Polynesia; Holland and Belgium; South Africa; Turkey and the Turquoise Coast; Canada’s historic cities and waterways; the highlands of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands; the Dalmatian Coast and islands; ancient cities of the Mediterranean Sea; Spain; the provincial French countryside; and Patagonia.

There’s something to suit everyone’s taste—all year long! For more information visit the Vanderbilt Travel Program’s Web site or call 615/322-2929. To request a 2009 travel brochure, please e-mail alumni.travel@vanderbilt.edu and provide your full name and mailing address.

CoRPs currently supports initiatives providing opportunities for alumni to volunteer in three distinct ways: as representatives of Vanderbilt at college fairs in their area; as interviewers of student applicants; and as speakers at local recruiting events. Through each volunteer opportunity, alumni help prospective students and their families to learn about Vanderbilt and the Nashville community.

“CoRPs provides a way for our office to reach hundreds more students than would be otherwise possible,” says John Gaines, director of enrollment management. “At the same time, students gain a more personalized admissions process when they speak with alumni who lived the Commodore experience.”

Learn more and volunteer by visiting the CoRPs Web site. The site includes information and training for CoRPs programs and answers frequently asked questions. Alumni must submit an enrollment form and can choose to participate in one, two or all three CoRPs initiatives.

This past admissions season was a historic one for Vanderbilt. The number of applications received increased more than 30 percent over the previous year, and the resulting first-year class this fall is stronger academically than any class in Vanderbilt’s history. The admissions and alumni relations staffs express their thanks to the thousands of alumni volunteers who helped to make this happen through their participation in CoRPs. Even more volunteers are needed as the university continues to seek exceptionally talented students from a wide array of backgrounds.

You are invited to join CoRPs today. For general inquiries about the program, please e-mail corps@vanderbilt.edu.

Originally from Jonesboro, Ark., 45-year-old Caldwell has lived in Nashville since 1991 and is owner of Caldwell Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisory firm. He and his wife, Maria Lisa Caldwell, both earned law degrees from the Duke University School of Law in 1988, and they have three children: Connor, 15; Colin, 13; and Olivia, 10.

“This is a very exciting time for Vanderbilt, and our new chancellor, Nick Zeppos, is providing a renewed enthusiasm toward alumni relations efforts,” says Caldwell. “With the renewed energy of the university behind me, I will be able to focus on increasing alumni interaction with both students and faculty—and to support more opportunities to assist other Vanderbilt offices as well.

“Alumni have great opportunities available to them in assisting the admissions office with interviewing potential Vanderbilt undergraduate students, for example, and in providing a network of alumni willing to assist students through the Vanderbilt Career Center.”

“We’re thrilled to have Billy Ray lead the Vanderbilt Alumni Association,” says Donna Johnson, interim executive director of alumni relations. “It would be difficult to find anyone who is more dedicated to the mission of the association or more enthusiastic about Vanderbilt University.”

The Student Alumni Board sponsored a “Popsicle Break” in September, handing out gourmet Mexican frozen desserts from Nashville’s Las Paletas to 750 students in an effort to raise awareness of SAB programs, which build class unity and alumni connections.

The Second Annual Seniorfest was held Sept. 18, as more than 450 seniors claimed “Almost” Alumni Lawn for a class-building afternoon of bands, free food and fun. The event was sponsored by the Student Alumni Board.

Ben Hindman, BS’07, and Brody Davis, BA’07

“The best things in life are free … tours.” That’s the favorite quote of Brody Davis and Ben Hindman, entrepreneurs and founders of DC by Foot Tours. Their 90-minute “More than Monuments” tour is entirely tip-based.

Former Vanderbilt fraternity brothers Davis, a political science and history major from Sarasota, Fla., and Hindman, a human and organizational development major from Boston, combined their talents for a unique look at Washington and its eccentric history using quirky anecdotes, jokes, theatrics and trivia questions to tell America’s story—from why Abraham Lincoln wore a beard to why Benjamin Franklin electrocuted a turkey.

“So the colonies got to fightin’ / Thomas Jefferson got to writin’ / He wrote a declaration / Gave birth to a nation / His words, they struck like lightnin’,” raps Hindman as Davis provides the rhythm section.

Long hours of meticulous research and rehearsal were involved in bringing DC by Foot Tours to fruition. That, and the necessary licensing. Sunday’s 6 p.m. tours are known as “BenefacTOURS,” with all proceeds donated to a local DC charity. They also offer DC by Phone, which loners can access on the go. Check out their Web site at www.dcbyfoot.com.

—Nelson Bryan

TO: Mick Jagger, Barry Manilow, Joe Namath, Al and Tipper Gore, Tuesday Weld, and the other nearly 3 million Americans turning 65 this year

FROM: The Baby Boomers

Happy birthday, everyone. (To be frank, the rest of us weren’t sure all of you would make it this far.)

Now more than ever, it’s important to look after your health. Had a fecal occult blood test lately? How about that colonoscopy? You are keeping up with those annual mammograms and prostate exams, aren’t you? Please don’t put them off—in the future, it may be harder to get in to see your doctor.

In less than three years, the first wave of baby boomers will hit 65—the age at which cancer incidence and mortality start to climb. The largest population bulge in America’s history is about to hit the health-care system like a freight train loaded with junk food.

For all cancers combined, the incidence of cancer is 10 times greater for people 65 or older. And older cancer patients are 16 times more likely to die from the disease than their younger counterparts.

By the time the last baby boomers reach 65 in 2030, the number of individuals in the United States who are that age and older is expected to double, from about 35 million to 70 million. By then, the group that is 85 and older is projected to reach about 9.6 million, more than double the number in that age range at the turn of the century. All this signals a runaway cancer hit barreling down the tracks, with twice as many people expected to get that diagnosis—about 2.6 million—by 2050.

Even though the individual cancer rate has remained stable since the early 1990s, the big boomer group will push up the nation’s overall cancer burden as they move into old age. Observers worry about a range of issues, including whether we’ll have enough oncologists (more than half the country’s oncologists are over age 50) and other specialists to treat them and whether patients will be able to pay for care.

Older cancer patients often suffer from one or more chronic conditions, with hypertension, arthritis and heart disease leading the list. These co-morbidities make treating cancer more complicated.

And while older patients in the United States aren’t excluded from clinical trials based solely on age, they don’t participate in great numbers. This means the learning curve may be steeper for managing the side effects of new cancer drugs and therapies for older patients.

“I think the bright side is that we are making continual inroads into our understanding of cancer and how cancer comes about in the first place,” says Vanderbilt-Ingram’s deputy director, Dr. David H. Johnson, past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Recent research breakthroughs hold the promise of great progress toward understanding the basic biology of cancer and devising treatment approaches that will manage it for a lifetime or perhaps even prevent it altogether.

The sequencing of the 20,000 or so human genes already has improved our understanding of the genetic “switches” that turn on tumors. One benefit: discovery of new compounds that can switch off malignant growth without harming normal cells. Also on the horizon: screening blood tests that harness the power of proteomic “fingerprints” to detect early cancer, even before symptoms occur (see sidebar article).

“The cancer field has made great progress,” says Jennifer Pietenpol, who in January was named director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. “The decline in cancer deaths across the country continues. That’s good news, but we still have a lot to do.”

Pietenpol, who is also the B.F. Byrd Jr. Professor of Oncology and a professor of biochemistry, was named to head the VICC after having served as interim director following the departure of Dr. Ray BuBois, who in 2007 left Vanderbilt to become provost and executive vice president of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Pietenpol received her doctoral degree in cell biology from Vanderbilt in 1990, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in oncology at Johns Hopkins University. In 1994 she joined the Vanderbilt faculty and soon after received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award for her research in cancer biology and toxicology.

Whether in conversation or in formal presentations, Pietenpol speaks clearly about the center’s overarching purpose—to eliminate death and suffering from cancer, for individual patients by delivering first-rate, evidence-based care, and on a global scale through its innovative science and translational research.

“Our goal is not to be one of many centers or hospitals doing the same thing,” Pietenpol says. “It’s to be at the cutting edge of research and clinical care and to set the example. I am very optimistic about our future.”

She has assumed leadership of VICC at a pivotal point in the growth and development of Vanderbilt-Ingram, which in only its second decade has established itself as one of the nation’s premier cancer research institutions and as the region’s leader in consumer preference for cancer care.

Nationwide, the National Cancer Institute has named 41 centers as Comprehensive Cancer Centers, a designation given to leaders in research, treatment, education and outreach. VICC is the only care center in Tennessee that conducts research and provides treatment in all cancers among adults and children, and one of just a handful in the Southeast.

“If you consider winning the war on cancer to be understanding the molecular basis of the disease, then we’ve made, and are making, huge strides,” Pietenpol says. “From a patient’s perspective, success means being diagnosed when you can be cured and when screening tools are available for early detection of recurrence or second cancers for years to come. That’s where we want to focus our resources. The clinical and basic research has built our reputation, and while it is expensive, it’s our most important investment.”

Over the past two years, Pietenpol has overseen a $15 million expansion that will double the capacity of the cancer outpatient clinic and chemotherapy infusion center.

Vanderbilt-Ingram’s focus is on areas that will have the greatest impact on future generations, including early detection and prevention; identification and validation of new molecular targets for therapy; design and initiation of high-impact clinical trials; development of “personalized” cancer treatment; and provision of the most innovative, compassionate care for patients, families and long-term cancer survivors.

“To this day, if there were a trial I were a candidate for, I’d be the first one to raise my hand because I’ve seen so much good come from these trials.”

~ Breast cancer survivor Teresa Lundberg, who believes participation in Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center trials of the drug Herceptin helped save her life

This emphasis on patient care, in particular, marks the recent evolution of VICC’s mission. “We have a commitment to provide excellent care to patients, regardless, but more patients also means more candidates for clinical trials, more tissue samples for research,” notes Pietenpol. “All of that increases, as does the opportunity for clinicians to provide feedback to fuel our discoveries in the lab. It’s synergistic.”

Tropic of Cancer

Before a discovery in the laboratory can become a treatment available to millions of patients, it must go through rigorous clinical trials. Among the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s achievements is its role in innovative, investigator-initiated trials with the greatest impact for patients.

And Vanderbilt has plenty of research subjects in its own backyard. Researchers have their own name for the Southern region of the United States—the Cancer Belt.

“When you look at a map of brain cancer incidence in the United States, the Southeast just lights up in red,” says Dr. Reid Thompson, associate professor and vice chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery. Thompson and co-investigator Kathleen Egan are participating in a study to find clues that may explain this brain cancer cluster. (Egan, formerly of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, is now on faculty at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla.)

Vanderbilt-Ingram, along with four other cancer centers in the region, will enroll as many as 1,000 patients in the federally funded initiative. “We’re asking patients about their diets, possible job-related exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, and we’re collecting DNA samples,” explains Thompson, who also serves as director of Vanderbilt’s Brain Tumor Center. “We know some genetic markers are linked to other forms of cancer, and they may play a role in brain cancer as well.”

Brain cancer isn’t the only cancer taking a disproportionate toll on Southern populations. Topping the list is lung cancer. Southerners smoke more than people in other regions and are far more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancers of the mouth and throat, also linked to tobacco use, are more prevalent in Southern states, too. “Instead of cigarettes, it is the use of snuff and chewing tobacco—among women as well as men—that causes this spike in oral cancers,” says William Blot, professor of medicine.

Behavior like tobacco use is clearly linked to some forms of cancer. But it is less easy to explain why people living in the South are developing many types of cancer at higher rates. And it doesn’t explain why African-Americans are more likely to develop and die from some cancers.

Blot leads the Southern Community Cohort Study (SCCS), the largest epidemiologic study in history, to explore why the South has become the Cancer Belt and why African-Americans experience higher rates of many types of cancer. Starting with a $28 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, the SCCS hopes to recruit 90,000 people in 12 Southern states to learn about their lifestyles, their medical histories, and their risk factors for cancer and other serious diseases. Two-thirds of the participants will be African-American, and many will be from rural areas.

The SCCS is a collaborative project among Vanderbilt-Ingram, Meharry Medical College, and the International Epidemiology Institute, as well as participating community health centers across the South. SCCS researchers rely on community health centers to enroll study participants, most of whom are low-income individuals.

“The study participants form one of the groups at highest risk for cancer that has ever been studied,” says Blot. “Most other investigations have not included large numbers of African-Americans, and few have included low-income individuals and people from rural parts of the country. This is the first large-scale study and the first in the South to include large numbers of all those groups.”

Even when the incidence of a form of cancer is higher among whites, the survival rate is nearly always lower for blacks. The reasons are not clear, but suspected culprits include differences in access to screening or treatment, stage at diagnosis and aggressiveness of disease.

Breast cancer is a good example of this anomaly. While white women in states like Tennessee are slightly more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than African-Americans, African-American women are far more likely to die from the disease.

“We do know that a significant lifestyle component is linked to cancer incidence,” says Bettina Beech, associate director of health disparities research for Vanderbilt-Ingram. “If we increase fruit and vegetable consumption, decrease fat consumption and increase physical activity, we can avoid a huge percentage of cancer cases. But it is not that simple for people living in some areas. For low-income individuals, regardless of whether they are minorities, there is reduced access to grocery stores with high-quality produce in many neighborhoods.”

While lifestyle factors and access to preventive surveillance and treatment play a role in cancer, scientists increasingly are finding genetic differences that may explain some of the disparities. African-American men are far more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than white men, and more than twice as likely to die from the disease. Researchers have discovered a combination of genes that appears to play a role in the aggressive forms of the disease often found among black men.

“It’s been speculated for a number of years that vitamin D may play a protective role in cancer,” Blot says. “Researchers have found lower blood levels of vitamin D among people living at northern latitudes, and those populations are more likely to develop certain forms of cancer. Because we know that exposure to sunlight helps the body produce vitamin D, it stands to reason that someone with dark skin may not be getting enough of the vitamin. Our study in the South found roughly half of the African-American population had insufficient levels of vitamin D versus only 10 to 15 percent of the white population.”

If researchers can determine exactly how vitamin D influences cancer risk, they may be able to supplement the diets of those who have insufficient levels of the vitamin.

Nutritional factors are thought to play a role in the etiology of more than one-third of all human cancers, yet information about the preventive potential of specific dietary compounds is scanty. But one study offers unique opportunities to fill such knowledge gaps.

Door to Door in Shanghai

Half a world away from the fast food and barbecue-laden tables of the American South, Dr. Wei Zheng earned a medical degree and master’s degree in public health at Shanghai Medical University, where he also met his wife and colleague, Xiao Ou Shu. Nearly 20 years ago they immigrated to the United States for Ph.D. training at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, respectively.

Zheng was involved with the Iowa Women’s Health Study while working at the University of Minnesota, writing a paper focusing on consumption and cancer risk, when it struck him: “Most studies look at what is bad about diet. I thought, We need to focus on what is good about diets to help protect against cancer,” Zheng says.

And so began the Shanghai Women’s Health Study, which has yielded important clues to the mysterious connections between environment, genetics and disease. Funded since 1996, the study includes 75,049 Chinese women who were between the ages of 40 and 70 at the time of enrollment between 1997 and 2000 and who lived in urban Shanghai, where intake levels of many hypothesized cancer-inhibitory dietary factors are high and diverse. The primary focus of the research is to determine whether certain diets—those with high intakes of folate, soy foods, allium vegetables, crucifers and tea—are associated with a reduced risk of cancer.

The Shanghai investigation is known as an epidemiologic “cohort” study. It is designed to track the development of disease in a large group of people over an extended period of time—usually decades. Cohort studies can help reveal the impact that diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors can have on health and longevity.

While working with her husband on this study, Xiao Ou Shu realized that more could be gained than by simply studying women. In 2001 she launched the Shanghai Men’s Health Study. To date, 60,000 men have been enrolled, half of whom are married to participants in the women’s cohort.

“First we did a small pilot study and discovered that the husbands’ and wives’ dietary habits are very different, although they share the same living environment,” Shu says. “For instance, men like to eat more meat compared to the women.”

The studies rely on trained interviewers who go door to door. Because most Shanghai residents live in apartment towers, dozens of study participants can be found in one building.

One goal of the Shanghai and Southern Community cohort studies is to determine whether differences in traditional Asian and Western diets account for widely varying incidences of different cancers among residents of China and the United States. Researchers know that Asia and the United States have quite different cancer spectra. In China and Japan, stomach cancer used to be the No. 1 culprit, followed by cancer of the esophagus, whereas in the United States, lung, colon and breast cancers dominate.

However, the cancer spectrum in some parts of China, such as Shanghai, is starting to more closely resemble that of the United States. For people who move from China to the United States, the risk of stomach and esophageal cancers decreases while the risk of lung, colon and breast cancers dramatically increases.

The Shanghai Women’s Study already has begun to shed light on a number of areas. “Sometimes the associations between lifestyle and disease are so striking it surprises us,” says Wei Zheng.

Among the findings: “Women who are nonsmokers but who are exposed to the cigarette smoking of their husbands have an increased risk of dying of stroke,” Zheng says. “We also learned that soy-food intake reduces the risk of fractures, hypertension, coronary heart disease and diabetes.”

Simply adopting Asian eating habits may not yield the same benefits in the United States. “Even though lots of people in the South eat rice and greens, as do people in Shanghai,” Shu says, “the specific type of vegetables and the way the food is prepared is very different.”

Both the Shanghai studies and the Southern Cohort Study track participants by name, address, Social Security number and, in Shanghai, by citizenship ID number. Researchers regularly monitor government registries in China and the U.S. that track disease and deaths reported by health officials. Participants also are contacted periodically to update their disease and exposure information.

Biological samples—urine, blood, cheek cells (for DNA)—are sent to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where they are stored in freezers for future analysis.

“We need to understand why people are at increased risk, to be the ones leading early detection and diagnosis, to use our research capabilities to offer the best treatments with the least side effects,” says Pietenpol. “That’s the position of this cancer center—to understand the molecular basis well enough to detect cancer early and to offer the most streamlined, individualized, multidisciplinary care.”

More than one-third of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s funding from the National Institutes of Health is cancer based. Traditionally, the federal government has led the charge in the war on cancer and other public health efforts by funneling dollars through national agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But federal funding to fight cancer, which will directly impact one in three Americans, has stalled. And the NIH-funding slice for the National Cancer Institute—the nation’s principal agency for cancer research—is expected to continue to decline.

“We’ve remained remarkably competitive for large collaborative grants, even in these tight times,” Pietenpol says. “For example, on the last four major grants for which we’ve competed, we not only received outstanding scores but the top scores in the nation. Yet we must be even more competitive for even tighter resources.

“Top-shelf research and quality care are very expensive,” she continues. “Our progress, to some extent, will be dictated by how much money is available. If we want to continue our momentum, we must be as competitive, if not more so, for the extramural funds that are available—in federal dollars, foundation support and private donations.

The progress in understanding cancer at the molecular level is due to what Pietenpol calls “mind-boggling” advances in technology, informatics, and the pace of scientific discovery in the past 20 years.

“A generation ago it was one scientist investigating one gene or pathway—or maybe pathways limited to one or two proteins,” Pietenpol says. “Today it’s not unusual for one scientist to study hundreds of proteins, thousands of genes, in collaboration with colleagues all over the world.”

No one involved in the struggle to solve cancer’s riddles is underestimating the challenge, however. Cancer is an old and wily adversary, going back at least as far as the dinosaurs—evidence of malignancies has been found in fossils dating back 80 million years.

“Yes, cancer deaths are declining, but one in every two men and one in every three women will have cancer,” Pietepol says. “Tennessee is one of seven contiguous states with the highest cancer death rates. As a Comprehensive Cancer Center located right in the middle of these states, it is our obligation to focus our work where we can make the most impact. Until those outcomes change significantly, our jobs are not done.”

What keeps Pietenpol and Vanderbilt’s 300 other cancer investigators optimistic is part scientist’s curiosity and part pride in the team of professionals around them. “It’s the clinical enterprise, the investigators involved in treating patients with cancer,” says Pietenpol. “It’s the clinical, basic, translational and population-based research aimed at cancer. It’s the people who do the valet services for our patients. It’s the people doing the most complicated surgical resection.”

Not long before she became the VICC’s interim director in 2007, Pietenpol recalls, a childhood friend died of renal cancer. “She was diagnosed right after Labor Day and died the week after Thanksgiving—90 days from diagnosis to death. She was 40, and died three days shy of her daughter’s first birthday. So this is personal, and the older I get, it seems to get more personal every day. We must pick up the pace.

“I know far too many people who have suffered from cancer. It’s what’s always propelled me. When you’re involved in cancer research, cancer treatment and cancer education, everything you do, you’re doing for a reason.”

Cynthia Manley, Dagny Stuart, Elizabeth Older, Bill Snyder, Heather Newman, Stephen Doster and GayNelle Doll contributed to this story.

It’s the most common reaction I hear when someone finds out I’m the youngest of 12 children. (And they’re right—we’re Catholic, raised by the Sisters of Mercy.) The next most common reactions: “Your parents did know what causes pregnancy, didn’t they?” (I guess so—but, really, I try not to dwell on things like that) and “How many twins?” (None; they were all single births. No adoptions, no blended family—12 full siblings.)

Once people get over the initial shock, usually the next question is, “What was it like?”

The first house I can remember had multiple sets of bunk beds in each room. Even when we moved to a larger house, I always shared a room with at least one other person. Privacy was not something we had a lot of growing up.

It wasn’t until my freshman year at Vanderbilt that I truly experienced having a room of my own. I can remember listening to my hall mates in Kissam Hall complain about the size of our rooms and thinking, You know, they could squeeze another person in here with a bunk bed.

As the youngest I was always the patsy. When our family dog chased a skunk into the ditch in which we were playing, take a wild guess who was sent in to retrieve our abandoned toys. Yeah, that was fun.

Another time, one of my older brothers was trying to teach another how to throw a football by having me run across the backyard. They didn’t have any confidence in my ability to actually catch the ball (any athletic genes didn’t make it that far out on the family tree), so they just aimed at the back of my head.

A few years later they had graduated to throwing a lasso. Guess who got to be the running calf in this training session? Vanderbilt’s admissions standards must have been lower when I applied. I can’t imagine being that gullible and getting in today.

­­­As the youngest of 12, I’ve had to endure a litany of “when I was your age” rants by older siblings—stories about how strict our parents were with the older children, or how they “did without” when they were young.

My favorite? “When I was your age, we only got one cup of Coke on Friday night. We didn’t have 2-liter bottles in the refrigerator whenever we wanted it.”

My response? “Had glass been invented by then, or did Coke still come in stone jars?” (Well, let’s be honest. I didn’t actually say that out loud. Being the youngest also means learning that others may not always appreciate your brand of humor, and they will pummel you mercilessly.)

When I started at Vanderbilt, a new family dynamic became apparent to me, involving those who were die-hard Vanderbilt fans and those who were not. I was surprised to find out during my Vanderbilt years and afterward the number of my siblings who had season tickets to Vanderbilt sports. I also was surprised at the number who cheer on that “university” (and I use that term loosely) to the east.

Admittedly, over the years those of us who cheer on the Black and Gold have not always had much to gloat about over the Vol supporters in the family, so we enjoy it when we can. In hindsight, forcing them to watch a replay of the 2005 “Victory in Knoxville” at Christmas dinner might have been a little over the top.

Speaking of the holidays, people usually ask me about Thanksgiving and Christmas. They have preconceived notions of the family lovingly grouped around a large table—something right out of The Waltons meets Leave It to Beaver. “Sure,” I tell them, “if you throw in a side of The Munsters with just a touch of Nightmare on Elm Street.”

To feed a gathering that size (Thanksgiving and Christmas, on a good year, average about 40 people), everyone has assigned responsibilities. There’s broccoli casserole (two kinds—with and without almonds), potato salad (two kinds—with and without onions), dressing (two kinds—well, you get the picture). Everybody’s pet peeves must be accounted for.

Christmas, in the “Good Old Days,” used to be a monstrous affair. My mother would hang a stocking on the mantel for everyone. They’d be lined up from one end of the mantel to the other, wrapping around the corners as we added more spouses/nieces/nephews. And the stockings would be so full that you could see things poking out the top. When I was very young, that would include a carton of each person’s favorite cigarettes for those who smoked. Back then the surgeon general’s warning was more of a suggestion, and I don’t think they even put it on the box. I remember thinking, I can’t wait to start smoking so my mom can get me a carton of smokes for Christmas! Once my father stopped smoking and then survived his first bout of lung cancer, that Christmas tradition thankfully stopped.

With a group that size and a history that long, the holidays can be a ticking time bomb. My personal favorite: the year Thanksgiving broke up before dessert because of an argument over a high school football game that had happened more than 20 years earlier. As people quickly and quietly drifted for the exits, those not involved in the “discussion” wondered how long it would last and whether it might not be better to skip Christmas altogether.

But back to the original question, “What was it like?” The better question is, “What is it like?” We’re all grown with families of our own, but we’re still learning from each other, and after all these years they still surprise me.

When my father became terminally ill, the family spent a rough seven months together, but I learned more about them in those seven months than in all the years before. We spent a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms, telling stories about growing up.

I’ve heard other people talk about the first time they really saw their siblings as adults—that, until then, they had always looked on their brothers or sisters as the children they grew up with. For me the reverse is true. Because of the age difference (one week shy of 21 years between oldest and youngest), I’ve only known most of my siblings as the adults they’ve become. After that time tending to our father, I finally have a sense of what they were like as children.

And starting a family of my own has given me a better sense of what my parents went through. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, she was put on full bed rest, which left me to do all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for her, and trying to keep everything running and in order. One weekend she asked me to go to JCPenney for some fleece footies she had seen in the maternity section before she went on bed rest.

When I got to the mall, I was convinced they had moved the entire store around. Not only was I unable to find the footies—I couldn’t even find the maternity department where they had been. I was standing in line for customer service, ranting to my wife on the cell phone about JCPenney rearranging the entire store, when I spotted the gift cards. 

Macy’s, they said. I was in the wrong store. (Note to Chancellor Zeppos: Please don’t take away my diploma.)

A few minutes later, as I was standing in the JCPenney maternity department (right where we left it!), the thought hit me: How the heck did my parents go through this emotional roller coaster 12 times? I started doing the math then and there: My mother was pregnant 12 times, averaging nine months each time. This means, in a 21-year span, my mother was pregnant for nine years. Nine years. And by the time I left for Vanderbilt, my parents had been raising children for about 39 years.

My parents did know what causes pregnancy, didn’t they? 

Christopher Baltz and his wife, Jill Taggert Baltz, BS’92, both have management responsibilities within Vanderbilt’s Division of Development and Alumni Relations. They have one child.

The fact that it was uttered at all, let alone at the Peabody College of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, suggests the troubling ease with which it is possible for some of our country’s best and brightest aspiring educators to joke about the state of public education. Our public schools are far more important than most people appreciate.

It is a disturbing sign that we as a country have reached the point of no longer taking seriously the tragic failures and deplorable conditions of our most basic and universal public institution.

What gives me hope—and drives me to continue down my chosen career path to teaching in one of those countless overcrowded, ill-equipped classrooms you see on the evening news—is what I learn every day in class at Vanderbilt.

If I had to point to a specific lesson I’ve learned during my first year as a student in the master of education program that has changed my outlook on the world around me, it is that our country owes almost all its successes to the highly educated populace the founders envisioned and took steps to create in order to preserve our radical new democracy.

“Highly educated” may seem like an overstatement, until you remember that the idea of a free public education for all citizens—and not just the entitled—is a very young one. The fact that 90 percent of our country’s population could read by the turn of the 20th century is a remarkable credit to our country’s commitment to differentiating itself from the great cultures that came before it. The free public election in which all adults can vote may be the very basis of our government, but in order to make intelligent choices and ensure that our elected officials work for us, American citizens need an education in civics, politics, economics and history, among other subjects.

What does that have to do with public schools and their necessity or relevance in our technological age of instantly available information and cheap abundant learning materials? Can’t any religious or other private school, or sufficiently motivated parent, provide students with a proper education? The answer is yes; there are lots of places for children to be educated, and an infinite number of sources from which to gather information. However, I don’t believe these options should or could ever replace the public school system.

One of my professors at Vanderbilt once referred to me during class as a “public school success story.” From kindergarten until my graduation from college, I attended medium to large suburban public schools. I graduated from high school and college with above-average grades and excellent standardized test scores. I now attend one of the country’s preeminent private universities as a graduate student in one of its top programs.

I do not, however, consider myself a public school success story. I have gotten to where I am right now largely in spite of the public schools I attended—with a delay, in terms of time, that was due in some part to the dysfunction of those schools and the way they dealt with me.

I didn’t have a choice where I went to school. I am the second oldest of five children. I was born the year my father was accepted to medical school. My mother split time between working long hours as a pharmacist and raising five children—extremely well, I might add; she should be beatified. Public school was the only option for us, as it is for a very large portion of the population. There was no time for home schooling, no voucher program for private-school reimbursement. My mother had gone to parochial school and promised never to subject her children to the same experience. Magnet and charter schools did not exist on the south side of Indianapolis—a solidly middle-class part of town reluctant to adopt any new education programs or policies that might be viewed as frivolous, or worse, expensive.

I’ve had terrible teachers in my life. Terrible. Lots of them. I was bullied in school—occasionally by my teachers. I left high school with absolutely no idea of what I was passionate about in life that might translate to a meaningful career. As a student I was intelligent and motivated, so it was all but assumed that I would succeed on my own and find that bridge to professional life. It was assumed that the schooling and guidance I had received during those 12 years had equipped me with all the tools needed to become a happy, successful citizen.

I’ll spare you the dull story of how I spent my undergraduate years floundering at two Midwestern public universities until I came to the conclusion, thanks largely to a lovably cantankerous creative writing professor, that I should just study what I love and find out how to make a living doing that.

But the “making a living” part wasn’t so easy. I was earning $70 a day as a substitute teacher and looking for work as a writer/editor when I began to wonder how I had arrived at that point in my life. I was working on a freelance piece for a local newspaper one day while babysitting a class of high school seniors when they asked me what I was doing. I explained that someone was paying me to write an article about an upcoming concert downtown.

That was the moment—sitting there and explaining why someone would pay me to listen to a free CD and then attend a concert for free—when I realized where my public school career had gone wrong. If I had spent four years of high school and four years of college focused on becoming a writer, I realized, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been sitting in that classroom making 70 bucks a day to babysit.

Even so, I was really glad to be there, answering those kids’ questions, sitting on the same side of the desk my teacher had sat behind eight years earlier while absentmindedly scrawling “good job” on my papers. It felt just as good as seeing my name on a byline—and was much more meaningful.

As a teacher I can take what I learn and make a difference, even if only for 120 students a year. I believe my personal talents and graduate education are best utilized under the most difficult of conditions, which is why I came to Vanderbilt. I wanted to learn from the best so I could be ready for the worst.

Public schools may not be for everyone, and they may not have been the best option for my siblings and me, but for millions of families like my own, no other options exist. Public schools are the first, best and only opportunity for the children of these families to receive the education needed to secure good-paying jobs and to become contributing members of our society.

One of the central roles of our government, I believe, is to provide for us that which we cannot do for ourselves. Schooling is a prime example. And we, the voting, taxpaying public, should expect our government to provide the best possible education for our children.

I’ve heard the arguments about money mismanagement, tenured burnout teachers, violence and safety issues, and fear of children being inculcated with secular values. It’s true that too many schools have become stagnant, poorly staffed, and content to cruise along below the radar somewhere between mediocrity and irrelevance. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has tried to do something about public schools, those schools are still failing too many of our children.

My answer to those people who have doubts about the future of public schools is that we need to redirect our efforts toward holding schools accountable, rather than giving up on them.

Hold me accountable. I would love to have students, parents and administrators asking me about my lessons, intentions and objectives. If I demand to be regarded as a professional, then I have no problem being treated with the scrutiny that goes along with that. I wouldn’t mind some more professional pay while you’re at it, but I digress.

Get involved. Let your schools, your government and your children know what is important to you and that you are willing to do what it takes with your time, your money and your vote.

I am going to be a teacher. I am going to work in a public school. I know at least 50 or so grad students just like me who are going to make a difference any way we can. We will do so because we believe in the incontrovertible importance of public schools.

  The Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music each offered admission to Roumain after he finished high school, but insufficient financial aid put both schools out of reach.

His father suggested Daniel consider Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. Still mourning his lost chance in New York, Roumain said no, despite the scholarship money available. His father then insisted and, one visit later, Roumain decided to give Vanderbilt a try. Early trepidations soon gave way as he found himself, happily, among a group of musicians in Nashville all eagerly mixing genres, trying to bridge, as Roumain puts it, “what we saw weren’t gaps at all.”

After Vanderbilt came five years of graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom and others. Then, in 1998, he moved to New York, specifically Harlem, where he had always dreamed of living.

His first professional decade seemingly has been one of nonstop ascent. He collaborates frequently with such partners as composer Philip Glass, choreographer Bill T. Jones, and hip-hop artist DJ Spooky, among others. He has enjoyed commissions from such diverse sources as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (Fast Black Dance Machine, which calls for the orchestra to add a drum kit), the Lark Quintet (“Rosa Parks,” one of five string quartets collectively known as A Civil Rights Reader), and the University of Alabama (The Tuscaloosa Meditations, whose subject is Vivian Malone Jones, the student Gov. George Wallace tried to block from the university’s doors in 1963). He’s taught at the Harlem School of the Arts and teaches frequent workshops on the road, as he will this fall at his old elementary school in Margate. And he has his own eight-piece band, DBR & The Mission.

Roumain, says one critic, is a “force of nature.”

This October, for the second year in a row, he debuted a new piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Last year Roumain created One Loss Plus, a multimedia work for violin, piano, electronics and video, including thoughts on loss solicited from the public and submitted via YouTube and MySpace. 

“Mr. Roumain’s eclecticism was wide-ranging as ever,” said The New York Times’ critic of One Loss Plus. “Early in the score a Minimalist section, built on a repeating pizzicato violin and piano figure, gave way to more raucous bowed fiddling with a flourish borrowed from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return).’”

This year’s composition is Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln, which Roumain is creating with playwright Daniel Beaty and which he describes as a “quartet concerto based on the real and imagined relationship among Darwin, Lincoln, and the people of the United States born after the end of the Civil War.” (Scientist Charles Darwin and President Abraham Lincoln were born within hours of one another Feb. 12, 1809.)

In August we sat down for an hour’s conversation at a recording studio in Manhattan just north of SoHo.

What are you working on today?

I am finishing a CD of the sound tracks that I have written for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company during the last 10 years or so. I hope to release it this year and start touring it with my group, DBR & The Mission, in 2009.

And I’m finishing up Hip-Hop Studies & Etudes, which is also recorded and performed by DBR & The Mission.

Don’t you have a new piece debuting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall—Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln?

I’m working on that, too. [Laughs.] In the studio next door, one guy is mastering the Bill T. Jones CD and another is working on the hip-hop CD. At the same time, on my laptop, I’m composing the Darwin piece.

Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln is a large work—a quartet concerto for four soloists and a chamber orchestra. Phrases from the libretto will be projected in English and Creole on a screen above and behind the orchestra, but there will be no coordination between what is seen and heard. That’s a Glassian technique. I got the idea from Glass’s opera Satyagraha. Also, in the middle of the work, the musicians stop playing for a seven-minute monodrama, an imagined conversation between Darwin and Lincoln, performed by Daniel Beaty.

As a child of the South, did you grow up with a strong sense of Lincoln?

The earliest memory I have of Lincoln is my Haitian father taking the family to Washington, D.C. Literally, he was awestruck by the Lincoln Memorial, as was I. I was about 6. This was the classic all-American family trip to D.C., but with my Haitian father, who had a very different understanding of Lincoln. And Darwin is, in fact, about understanding the ideas of Lincoln and Darwin through an island nation called Haiti.

Was Lincoln a hero for you? 

Like many people, I think, I have struggled with Lincoln. What is his legacy? What were his intentions? My struggles with Lincoln started at Vanderbilt when I set the Gettysburg Address to music, for piano and baritone. When you’re a young composer asked to tackle a legendary historical text, I think you tend to gravitate toward the sensational—I’d even say the controversial. The piece that I wrote, Abraham’s Address, ended up being pretty innocuous, a pretty clear setting of the Gettysburg Address—actually, just fragments of it. I didn’t really take a stance, and I’m glad I didn’t. That was the right choice, the mature choice to make.

I remember thinking at the time that I might include text from Lincoln’s contemporaries who in their letters to him were very clear in their sense of the South’s right to secede from the Union. Lincoln would write them back, and he was always a diplomat. But it became confusing for me because I didn’t realize his diplomacy was in no way a surrendering of his morality. It was his diplomacy. So that was the confusion. It would have been controversial and sensational to include excerpts from those letters, but for all the wrong reasons.

[Darwin’s Meditation conveys] what I think about Lincoln now. Haiti had its first black president in 1804. It’s a little more interesting to me to look at American notions of democracy and liberation and freedom and equality through the eyes of other countries. We have been dealing with the “threat” of a black presidency while other countries have had black presidents for years. The notion of a woman being president in this country is radical, yet women are leading nations right now in Germany and elsewhere. So to me there’s something a little more informed about thinking of Lincoln and Darwin, not from North America or London, but from this island nation called Haiti.

So you’re drawing from different cultures for perspective as well as music. 

It’s almost become a cliché to look at different styles and perspectives in musical vernaculars and integrate them into a musical language. But hey, I’m guilty of that, absolutely. I think I’m also a little more specific. I deal from African-American music and Haitian music almost exclusively. But there’s a moment in Darwin where I suggest the sounds of Gregorian chant because my father talks about being a young boy in Haiti and only knowing the Catholic mass in Latin. If you were a young boy in Haiti in the 1950s, you learned the mass in Latin.

What drives me creatively is always about conversation. When you meet somebody for the first time, what will you say to them? I think the question for all of us is, Can we have great, substantive, amazing conversations with anybody? That’s not an easy thing to do. So as a way of preparing myself for the conversations that are coming, I’m a voracious reader. I love to see movies. I try to have an understanding of the struggles that other people have had and figure out how I can create a musical portrait of their struggles.

You’ve lived in Harlem for 10 years now. Has it turned out to be the place you thought it might be for you?

Everything and more. My landlady, Mrs. Logan, whose voice appears in Harlem Essay for Orchestra and Digital Audio Tape, knew Ralph Ellison. She saw Josephine Baker at the Apollo. She talks about this on the tape that plays during Essay.

Harlem’s history, its current gentrification and its future have all found a place in my music. I’m very much aware that when you live somewhere else, you’re not only living with the people who are there. You’re living with the people who were there and eventually died, all the things that they did, loved and felt. You kind of inhabit all the things they left behind.

For me that’s incredibly important. I don’t think it would be possible for me to have any sense of identity without being able to identify in a profound, meaningful, connected way not only with other people, but with their perspectives on life and loss.

And I cannot imagine being 37 years old and not having that sense of, What does it mean to suffer? Harlem, for me, is the people who are there. They suffer every day to eat, to get food for their children. Forget about real estate—they’re just trying to pay the rent and make sure their kid doesn’t get shot today. That’s the reality for most of the people still on my block. At the same time there are very young black families there who have what they call “disposable income.” There’s the contrast.

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to think about not being in Harlem. As a composer I travel a lot. I have fortunately been all over the world. The 10 years I’ve spent in Harlem have been very good for my craft. Now I need to spend 10 years somewhere else because I think it would also be good for my craft.

In the U.S. or elsewhere? 

I’ve never wanted to live abroad, only because I’ve spent so much time traveling. I was just in Australia and Berlin. To me Europe, Asia and Australia are not foreign at all. They’re places I go to regularly. It’s a great honor and privilege. It’s funny, but I want to live in Margate.

You want to go home?

I do. Margate, in South Florida, is going through some very tough times. Margate is doing its best not only to survive but to renovate itself. And my parents are getting older. I feel a sort of paternal calling kicking in, toward their care. I want to buy a home in South Florida, not too far from my parents, and make my peace with those ghosts, the ghosts of Margate.

Now—you see—that’s how the title of a piece happens.

The Ghosts of Margate—that sounds like a good one. Wasn’t it your dad who picked Vanderbilt for you? 

Yes. I didn’t want to go.

You didn’t want to go to college, or you didn’t want to go to Vanderbilt?

Both. [Laughs.] I have to be honest about that. I wanted to go to Juilliard. I got in, but my family couldn’t afford it. I also got in the Manhattan School of Music, but we couldn’t afford that, either. So at that point I thought, “Well, if I can’t go to New York and study music, I’ll just make a career on my own.” I was working for 2 Live Crew, and I was 18 and I was just going to stay in hip-hop music and make great money.

My father persuaded me to go see [Associate Professor of Composition] Michael Rose [at the Blair School of Music]—it was through some sort of program that the Black Cultural Center had. I think it was called Black Student Weekend. They paid for minority students to come visit the school for the weekend, so I did.

Everything just happened very quickly. Professor Rose and my father came up with some sort of scheme where I would go for a semester and if I didn’t like it, I could quit. Of course, I fell in love.

With Blair, with the campus, with Nashville? 

I fell in love specifically with Michael Rose. I fell in love with [Joseph Joachim Professor of Violin] Chris Teal, [Associate Professor of Viola] John Kochanowski, and Dean [John “Del”] Sawyer. I fell in love with Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt, who was very supportive of my work as a composer and became a patron, literally, of a piece I wrote there, Haitian Essay Orchestra, using Haitian folk themes.

I fell in love with the Blair School, with the building, the atrium, Nashville. It was 

September. The leaves were changing. I’m from South Florida. We don’t get seasons, so I wasn’t accustomed to any kind of fall.

I was scared to go to Nashville. To me, Nashville represented rednecks and cowboys. I had no sense of the South versus the Deep South. 

So Nashville was different than what you were expecting? 

Totally different. I fell in love with [late music director and conductor of the Nashville Symphony] Kenneth Schermerhorn. He let me come to rehearsals at the War Memorial Auditorium. I rode my bike there. He’d see me there, and on a couple of occasions he let me follow along with the pocket score—really deep, heavy stuff for me at the time.

Did you go to Vanderbilt knowing you could get deep into that kind of music, hanging out with the Nashville Symphony and whatever else you could find in the city? 

It became obvious the first week that Nashville wasn’t just about country music; it was about great musicianship and great musicians—like Mark O’Connor, Edgar Meyer, Béla Fleck, the Blair String Quartet, all the musicians on faculty at the Blair School. It was instantly clear that these were great musicians who could play just about any kind of music.

And they were very welcoming of what I call my youthful transgressions and experiments in trying to combine hip-hop music with classical music. For them it was more about experimenting with folk music. Mark O’Connor was trying to combine bluegrass with classical in a sophisticated, intelligent way. Edgar Meyer and Béla Fleck were doing that also with bluegrass music. A lot of musicians there were trying to bridge what we saw weren’t gaps at all.

When my mother gets very mad, a sentence might begin in English, go into French, and end in really bad Creole. A lot of people have stories like that, and that’s the thing: As a musician it was very easy for me to take Bach and give it a beat or give it an inflection.

That’s what is so great about Nashville. It’s so open-minded on so many different levels—culturally, racially and, of course, musically.

Roumain’s ensemble, DBR & The Mission, includes a string quartet, rhythm section and a DJ.

But being black at Vanderbilt and in Nashville must have also offered some challenges.

Of course. But I take responsibility for that. If I had wanted a deep, meaningful African-American college experience, I could have gone to Howard University. I chose to go to Vanderbilt, specifically to study with Michael Rose and others, and a happy accident happened—Nashville.

That is not to say there weren’t moments of prejudice, moments of pain or feelings of segregation. Absolutely there were, but whether it’s Miami or Nashville, that, to me, is part of the American experience, quite frankly. It has happened to me here in New York.

There were certainly bad days, but I’ll say this: If it were not for Vanderbilt, I never would have ended up at the University of Michigan, and if not for the University of Michigan, I certainly never would have ended up in Harlem. I credit Vanderbilt University and Chancellor Wyatt with providing the tools and the equipment and the preparation for great success and great pain.

Coming from Miami, it would have been something less to have gone to Howard or even New York. It was important. Now I realize this. It was important for me to have that Southern experience.

You’ve studied and collaborated with an impressive range of talented musicians and performers. I’d like to go through a list and have you tell me, in a phrase or a sentence, what you think you’ve learned from them.

Philip Glass. 

Never surrender. If you create original music, you must take responsibility for that music and for creating an audience to support it.

Bill Jones.

Never surrender. Life is wonderful and precious and brutal. Now, create a piece based on those ideas.

DJ Spooky.

Never surrender. Give me one record, and I’ll give you a universe. Every sound is connected to every idea. Let me show you how.

William Bolcom.

Never surrender. Never surrender. Concern yourself with being a composer first, not a careerist.

Luther Campbell. 

[Laughs.] Wow. If you have something to say, don’t just say it—shout it over and over and over again. And never surrender.

One of the movements in your string quartet Rosa Parks is called “Klap Your Handz.” You’ve talked in other interviews about the clapping in Rosa Parks and other of your works as being a communal sound for you.

I grew up Catholic, so I’m well aware of those ever-elusive communal experiences. As much as I love the Internet and my laptop, I’m well aware of those truly communal experiences when you can make community with one, when you can communicate with someone.

Is it trite to clap one’s hands? Is it trite to do that in a string quartet? Well, even in that string quartet, it all had to be planned out. It’s a little more sophisticated. With the clapping I am talking about the Baptist church and how that referenced Rosa Parks and her father and what she was thinking about in that moment when she was asked to leave that bus seat.

Now, it’s one thing to hear Rosa Parks on a recording. But in an auditorium with 2,000 school kids, when unexpectedly the violinists start clapping—that’s how the string quartet starts—and suddenly, all these children are clapping their hands in perfect time along with the music. And not so loudly that they can’t still hear the music. It ebbs and flows and has a dynamic and a meaning, and they know that it’s going somewhere.

There’s a true collaboration going on and at the end of it, it’s reflected in the ovation. The best knowledge, to me, can be implied and the best experiences, to me, can also be implied. I’m very much interested in translating those things that remind me of what it is to be alive, what it is to be connected with something much larger than anything I might do.

From the time she was arrested at the age of 4 months, Sheryll Cashin's life was shaped by her parents' activism

It’s Aug. 11, 1969. Another hot day in Greene County, Ala. I am 7 years old, about to start the second grade. We are here to watch the swearing in of six men who were elected thanks to the NDPA. Daddy created the National Democratic Party of Alabama because he thought Alabamians deserved to vote for national Democrats rather than George Wallace for president. In 1964, he told me, Alabamians could not even vote to re-elect Lyndon Johnson because his name did not appear on the ballot.

Daddy also thought that black people needed a new party because they deserved to elect themselves. For the first time since 1816, when the Choctaw Nation had to give Greene County over to white people, some “colored” people will have a say.

We are standing outside the old courthouse in Eutaw, the county seat. Everybody is laughing and smiling. In this courtroom black people used to sit with fear in their stomachs, Daddy told me, afraid of what judgment would bring. Today they are giddy because they know what’s coming.

A white man with sagging jowls sits in the big chair in the courtroom, surrounded by other white, official-looking people. He gives this speech about how he is ready to work with the new (black) men coming in. He’s looking everybody dead in the eye, like he really means what he’s saying. Daddy is laughing because this is the same judge who left the NDPA candidates off the ballot last fall. Daddy’s lawyers had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States to get an order giving the NDPA the right to run candidates throughout the state. When the judge disobeyed that order, the lawyers went back to the Supreme Court and it ordered a special election just for Greene County. Blacks shocked everyone in the state, maybe the whole country, when they swept the election.

Something begins to stir in me at the swearing in. Before then, all the NDPA really meant to me was time away from Daddy—and licking envelopes.

We have a huge dining-room table that seats about 12 people the two times a year we use it for eating meals: Christmas and Thanksgiving. Otherwise, that table is always piled with NDPA stuff. Mama gathers us around the table—me and my two older brothers, Johnny and Carroll—and some kids from the neighborhood. Mama is our commander, and she teaches us how to fold, stuff, lick and then stamp the NDPA mail.

In this courtroom I begin to understand why my parents care so much about politics and civil rights, why they are always traveling, going to meetings, leaving us with babysitters, taking us along when they can.

I understand even more the following year when Dad decides to run for governor against George Wallace. I think he could win. Daddy can do anything. He’s the only black dentist in Huntsville, where we live. He flies his own airplane. He seems smarter than anyone else in the world.

The summer and fall of 1970, we are always going down to the “Black Belt.” Lowndes County. Marengo. Greene. Sumter. Wilcox. I always thought it was called the Black Belt because so many black people live there. My teacher tells me the area is named after its dark soil. I know that the dirt in other areas of Alabama tends to be red, so she could be right. But I still have doubts.

We drive the back roads, sometimes in Daddy’s gold Chrysler 300, sometimes in our camper van. Daddy always does the driving and always breaks the speed limit, by a lot. Mama sits in the front seat with him. The three of us are in the back. Carroll is one year older than me, and Johnny is one year older than him.

We play cow poker to pass the time. Grandma Grace, Daddy’s mother, taught us this game. I count all the cows on my side of the road. Johnny or Carroll counts all the cows on his side. Whoever has the most cows when we get to our destination wins. A cemetery on your side kills all your cows and you have to start from zero, if your opponent sees the cemetery. A white horse or mule is worth five, but otherwise horses and mules don’t count. A white cow costs you 30 points.

Sometimes we pass an old plantation house, like Thornhill near the farm Daddy bought for the Black Muslims. I think only of its beauty, never about the slaves who used to work these fields. The car radio is tuned to a soul station. That song “Oh Happy Day” plays constantly. Oh happy day. Oh happy da-ay. When Jesus washed, he washed my sins away. The chorus is the best part, a sea of black voices rising: He taught me hoooow, to liiiive—night and day—he washed my sins away. The chorus washes over me. We are Unitarians, but I still like the song.

Throughout Dad’s campaign it seems like we go to every church in the Black Belt, sometimes three or four in a day. Sometimes we act up, embarrassing Mama, although Daddy laughs when she tells him what we did. Like the time one of us farted; it made a loud sound against the wood of the church pew while the minister was talking. All three of us giggled. We couldn’t help it. Mama gave us that “stop it” look with her eyes, but it was only partially effective. She doesn’t have the power of Grandma, or Daddy. Her whippings are mild. With her we can, and often do, run wild.

I watch Daddy give the same speech, and I never get tired of it. The point is to get people to the polls on election day and vote the straight NDPA ticket by marking their “X” under the party’s ballot symbol, the eagle.

The symbol for the George Wallace Democrats is a white rooster. Folks don’t have to be able to read or write to know the difference. That rooster means everything bad that blacks have lived with in this state.

My favorite part is when Daddy quotes Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

Then Dad tells stories about people who won’t do for themselves. A man has tight new shoes. They hurt his feet. He wants to take them off, he could take them off, but he chooses to look good even if it hurts. A woman sits down on a nail. She doesn’t want to jump up and risk looking silly. Then Daddy’s voice rises to a crescendo. “Well, if you won’t get up, then you deserve that nail in your tail!”

The crowd begins to get it. “All right.” “Speak, Doc Cashin.” They like him and what he has to say. He is not one of them. He is from north Alabama, which may as well be Chicago. Yet they know he is with them and something is about to change.

I’m not always happy about Dad’s campaign. “Aug. 11, 1970. Dear Diary, Daddy is running for Gov. I don’t ever hardly get to talk to him.” Still, I am his only daughter and I support him. “Nov. 5, 1970. Dear Diary, the election is over. My father did not win, but I’m still proud of him.” Wallace won by a landslide.

Daddy chose to focus on the positive. On a shoestring budget he convinced 125,000 people to vote for him and the NDPA, nearly 15 percent of the total. Over the years, in his retelling, this will be the election in which the NDPA “swept four counties,” and his vote tally will rise to 175,000 votes. This is close enough to the truth. Dad and the NDPA did outpoll Wallace in four Black Belt counties, beginning a revolution that brought blacks back into the state legislature for the first time in nearly a century.

It was family lore that drove Dad. My great-grandfather H.V. Cashin—a radical Republican legislator in Alabama during Reconstruction—was born in antebellum Georgia, the child of a white Irishman and a free mulatto woman, the story went. He was sent north to be educated and avoid the possibility of enslavement. During Reconstruction he returned south and became the 

architect of that effort in Alabama, according to the embellishments of subsequent gener-ations. When the white supremacist Democrats extinguished the black vote in 1901, H.V. Cashin was helpless to stop it; he soldiered on with dignity as one of the first black lawyers of the state.

At a tender age, Dad had committed to returning blacks to their rightful place in democracy as a matter of family honor. A scion of a professional family, he graduated first in his class from Meharry Medical College in Nashville but refused to settle into bourgeois comfort.

My family endured a dramatic reversal of economic fortunes when I was entering the sixth grade. Some of this was due to economic and political reprisals against Dad’s activism. Some of it was due to the passion that blinded him. He spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars for his causes.

There were death threats and attempts. Twice the private plane he owned and piloted was sabotaged. He stopped flying when he survived a crash that was supposed to have killed him. His dental office and boyhood home were taken by eminent domain; the IRS harassed him for years on questionable charges.

The end result was a dramatic change in lifestyle for our family. Before the reversal we were the only black family in an all-white neighborhood, living in a grand house on a hill, a vintage Rolls Royce among the cars in the driveway. That ended when we returned to the all-black neighborhood where our 

family started out and Dad permanently stopped practicing dentistry. Henceforth, our family of five lived on my mother’s modest salary as a coordinator of federal anti-poverty programs and our home was filled with strife, even as love endured.

From the time I was arrested at the age of 4 months, along with my mother as she sat-in at a lunch counter, my life was shaped by my parents’ activism. My emotional inheritance of family pride and social commitment, and the confidence it engendered, enabled me to excel. I would go on to graduate co-valedictorian of my high school class, attend Vanderbilt on an honors scholarship, and graduate summa cum laude with a near-perfect GPA in electrical engineering. I would continue my studies as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, from which I received a degree in English law with honors, and would graduate from Harvard Law School with honors, working as an editor on the Harvard Law Review and a researcher for the Dukakis presidential campaign, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court and working in the Clinton White House, developing policies for inner cities.

In the meantime, though, while I am still 7 years old, election day is hard to endure at school because everybody seems to think my father lost badly. All eyes are on me, one of only two black kids in the class.

The other black student, Jennifer, lives in one of the poor neighborhoods. She smells bad and has a lot of wax in her ears. The teacher sits her next to me. I bring Kleenex to school with Mama’s perfume on it and sniff it every now and then to get over Jennifer’s funk.

I defend her, though, when the other kids look funny at the lunch she brings to school—nasty-looking cold cuts and cheese with crackers instead of bread. In the last year or so, I have begun to internalize my parents’ creed of caring deeply, especially about black people who have a lot less than we do, and I act on it now at the lunch table. I answer my classmates’ stares at Jennifer’s food.

“It’s a sandwich!” I declare, telling them with my eyes to stop making her feel different.

I don’t even like Jennifer, really. “She thinks she’s so tough,” I write in my diary.

But like Mama and Daddy, I am supposed to fight injustice where I find it, and I try to now. My activism is launched. 

This article has been adapted from Sheryll Cashin’s book The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family (2008, PublicAffairs).

David E. Lewis

Joseph S. Mella

David E. Lewis, professor of political science, has been presented the Herbert A. Simon Best Book Award for The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (2008, Princeton University Press). The award is given annually by the American Political Science Association’s Public Administration Section.

Joseph S. Mella, director of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, along with his collaborators Edward F. Fischer, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt and Carlos Jauregui, professor of Latin American literature and anthropology at Vanderbilt, were recognized recently by the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) with the SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalogue of Contemporary Materials. This award, part of SECAC’S annual awards program to recognize exemplary work in the visual arts in higher education, was bestowed to Mella and his fellow collaborators for the exhibition and companion catalogue Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín, which is currently on its North American tour.

Maria Louisa and Emily were the wife and daughter, respectively, of William Henry Vanderbilt, the eldest son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. The portraits were painted by Benjamin Curtis Porter, a significant artist during this era of portraiture but one less prolific than others of his time. They joined portraits of two of Maria Louisa’s other children—George Washington Vanderbilt and Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard—loaned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas.

Getting the paintings to Hamburg in June was no simple task, says Joseph Mella, director of Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Gallery. Mella served as the paintings’ official courier to ensure their safe arrival and installation, a crusade that put him on the road or in the air for almost 24 hours straight. “We do international shipping a fair amount,” Mella says, “but this is one of the more significant loans in our history.”

After graduating from Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science in 1970 with a degree in English, French and philosophy, Sharp set his sights on becoming an attorney. It soon became clear, however, that neither the law, nor a white-collar career, was his cup of tea.

While searching for something to keep body and soul together, Sharp began doing simple cabinetry jobs for pay. He became so successful that he soon found himself the owner of a mechanized furniture factory with 25 employees.

“But I was miserable,” he recalls. “I was hardly ever touching a piece of wood myself. To make matters worse, a few truly significant fine-furniture commissions were being offered to me, if I could somehow find the time.”

So Sharp decided to sell the business and open a small, handmade, custom-furniture workshop next to his home in Woodbury, Tenn., where he lives with his wife, Katherine Purvis Sharp, BA’70. There Alfred Sharp, cabinetmaker, lovingly crafts one-of-a-kind, handmade, 18th-century reproductions and original wood furniture.

Last January the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) gave Sharp its highest honor—the 2008 Cartouche Award—at a ceremony held, appropriately, in Williamsburg, Va. According to SAPFM, “The award is made in recognition of the recipient’s reputation for excellence in craftsmanship and contributions toward the understanding and appreciation of traditional American furniture design and construction.”

Sharp says his Vanderbilt liberal arts education has proven valuable to his chosen career. “I received a fairly deep immersion in art and art history,” he says. “I also studied the cultures of England and France, as well as their languages.”

He wishes, however, that he had taken more engineering electives. “Structural considerations are huge in building furniture,” he says. “You must make all kinds of geometrical calculations to put together the curves and angles of the pieces.”

Instead, the cabinetmaker learned the hard way—by trial and error—and was tutored by a handful of elderly craftsmen who were building furniture by hand. A time-consuming process, it takes Sharp anywhere from two weeks to more than a year to complete his exquisite, museum-quality furniture, which ranges in price from $1,600 to $100,000.

“This is not a career in which to get rich,” he says, “but it is a privilege.”

Sharp’s furniture can be found in historic homes and museums across the nation. They also can be seen online at www.alfredsharp.com.

The program also will be open to select students from other Curb-supported colleges and universities, including Belmont University, Fisk University, California State University, Daytona College and Rhodes College.

“By demonstrating the value of linking artistic skills and vision with work in business and government, it is Mike Curb’s career that provides inspiration for the Creative Campus Program,” says Bill Ivey, director of the Curb Center.

“American universities must recognize their defining role in nurturing creativity and linking it to teaching, learning and citizenship,” says Steven Tepper, associate director of the Curb Center. “The Curb program will establish a new relationship between students and art on Vanderbilt’s campus.”

Key components of the Mike Curb Creative Campus Program will be phased in over five years, beginning in the fall of 2009 with acceptance of the first cohort of undergraduate Curb Leadership Scholars. The fifth-year master’s program in creative enterprise and public leadership will be launched in 2011, as will a series of month-long summer internships offering graduate and undergraduate students unique opportunities to test their leadership skills through real-life work experiences with government agencies and in the recording, film and broadcasting industries.

Open by audition to all Vanderbilt students, the Opera Theatre presents up to two productions annually, in the fall and spring semesters. Productions are fully staged and costumed, with orchestra. Past productions have crossed the musical divide to embrace fine and light opera, as well as musical theatre. Audiences have enjoyed such shows as The Magic Flute, Gianni Schicchi, The Pirates of Penzance, The Fantasticks, and A Little Night Music in past seasons and in November will see the Opera Theatre’s production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.

“The primary goal of the Opera Theatre is to give students the opportunity to use their vocal skills,” explains Shay. “So I always pick shows with students in the vocal program in mind—but I don’t pre-cast because you can always be surprised in auditions.” This year, Shay notes, the voice department has 40 students, making it easy to fill the large cast requirements of Street Scene. “It’s a great show for young singers, and we need a lot of them for this show.”

Each fall, Vanderbilt Opera Theatre presents a fully staged production with full orchestra. Last year’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute featured Tara Burns, BMus’07, as Queen of the Night.

Street Scene, based on Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, features lyrics by Rice and the great American poet Langston Hughes. The Weill score is a hybrid of European opera and musical theatre, says Shay. “Weill called it an ‘American opera,’ and he really wanted to write an opera that was very much of the time and the place.” Set in Depression-era New York City, the opera tells a tale of love, jealousy, and a youthful desire to break with the past that’s universal and timeless. “It also has fabulous music and lots of dialogue with underscoring,” says Shay. “The costumes and set evoke an Edward Hopper look and mood.”

Shay—who holds a B.A. from Luther College (Iowa), a master of music degree from the University of Maryland, and a doctorate in music arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder—is herself an accomplished performer and guest director in musical theater, opera and oratorio at venues around the country. Despite her own successful career, Shay sees a value to the study of singing that goes far beyond performing or teaching.

“The training we give students at Blair will prepare them to leave here and serve their community—be it as a singer or a doctor or a teacher or a CEO,” says Shay. “When students have pursued something as personal as singing—and the voice is an expression of personality—they will have had, if they’ve been paying attention, an opportunity to understand themselves in a way that no other course of study provides. As Leonard Bernstein once said, ‘It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers, who will ultimately save us, who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.’”

Born to jazz-loving parents in post-World War II Michigan, Ivey achieved national recognition as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Clinton administration. Here in Nashville, Ivey is remembered for his work as director of the Country Music Foundation and as two-time board chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He is currently president of the American Folklore Society and chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a federally chartered foundation affiliated with the Library of Congress, and is board chairman of WPLN, Nashville Public Radio.

All of which makes Ivey uniquely qualified to map a course on arts policy that embraces highbrow culture and hardball commerce, grass-roots art and global distribution. “The center’s approach is one that engages issues for both nonprofit and for-profit groups,” Ivey says. “Other universities have cultural policy programs, but they concentrate only on nonprofit arts issues and don’t engage issues like copyright, trade and arts learning outside of school.”

The center, founded in 2002, has emerged as a leading voice for arts policy on a national level. Besides its campus headquarters, it maintains a Washington, D.C., office whose mission is to develop an arts-policy community among senior career staff there. “If we’re not yet setting the agenda,” notes Ivey, “we are at least asking the questions that are getting attention.”

Many of those questions are raised in Ivey’s new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (2008, University of California Press). In his book Ivey proposes a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and proceeds, chapter by chapter, to examine these rights, how they have been eroded, and what must be done to restore them. Among the rights Ivey sets forth are the right to our heritage, the right to the prominent presence of artists in public life, the right to an artistic life, and the right to be represented to the world by art that communicates the diversity of American values and ideals. Public policies that support these rights, Ivey believes, would link what he calls our “expressive life” with overall quality of life, with implications far beyond mere entertainment or enrichment.

In 2009 many of Ivey’s ideas will be incorporated into the Mike Curb Creative Campus Program (see story, left), an initiative that puts Vanderbilt at the forefront of a national movement to enhance creativity as a component of undergraduate education. New courses and new faculty will create an undergraduate track for creative leadership and, eventually, a fifth-year master’s-degree program in creative enterprise and public leadership. “Students will leave college more creative than when they came in,” Ivey says.

Not-so-conventional wisdom now predicts that creativity will be crucial to an economy with global reach—as well as the creation of a country whose culture enhances and uplifts the lives of its citizens. After all, as Ivey asks in his book, “Did Einstein’s brilliance derive from training in math and science or, just as likely, from his lifelong devotion to music and the violin?”

When David Wasserstein, the first holder of the Eugene Greener Jr. Chair in Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt, spoke at the Nash-ville downtown public library recently, he drew quite a crowd. His noontime talk, “Islam and Europe—Sites of Conflict,” was intended to get people thinking about Europe’s longstanding relationship with Islam and what it can teach us.

  For the general public, perhaps, it was clear that as a scholar of both Islamic and Judaic history, particularly of the medieval period, Wasserstein was in a unique position to address one of the great questions of our time: Is the war on terrorism part of an inherent clash of civilizations?

But that was far from the only question on the crowd’s mind. One after another they stood up: “Is religion the only filter in the Islamic world?” “With Muslims already outnumbering Jews in the U.S., will we soon have to tinker with our Constitution to accommodate them?”

One man compared Southerners’ display of the Confederate flag and their unwillingness to forget the Civil War to the Muslims’ unwillingness to forget the Crusades. And an older man lamented, “We Muslims are all paying for Sept. 11.”

Wasserstein may not have all the answers, but the fact that the questions are being so wholeheartedly asked of him—by students, public and the press—is how he knows he made the right decision in leaving a longtime post as an Islamicist at Tel Aviv University to take a position as a professor of history and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt in 2004.

“Before I left Israel,” recalls Wasserstein, “colleagues said to me, ‘You’ve never lived in America. You’ve never taught in an American university. Why not just take a year’s leave from Tel Aviv, go there, and see if you like it?’

“And that was excellent advice, from good friends,” he says. “So I did what one does with good advice—I totally ignored it. I resigned my job, came here and, I must say, seem to have landed on my feet. I’m very happy here. It’s been what a challenge should be. It’s made me think on my feet, and act, and get things done.”

Much of that challenge came as director of the fledgling Jewish Studies program. During his three-year-term, which ended last year and was only the second in the program’s history, his goal was to grow the number of students at both the undergraduate and master’s levels. He also worked to get more courses on the books, offered by different departments, and to deepen the relationship between the program and other parts of the university.

“We’ve always had a thin stream of majors and a slightly thicker stream of minors,” Wasserstein says. “It takes time. But the program is beginning to make its mark on campus.”

He gives Vanderbilt a lot of credit for that, expressed through both the generous support of the institution and the encouragement of its people. And he is quick to make clear that “Jewish studies is not just for Jews. I’ve had students of all religions and none. The way I see it, Jewish studies should be as much a part of the humanities and social sciences curriculum as economics or French.”

Exemplifying such universal significance is a class he is preparing for 2009–2010 that will take a wide variety of Jewish texts and pair each one with a non-Jewish text. Students might compare the New Testament with Homer, perhaps, or with the Koran.

“People think of the New Testament as a non-Jewish text, and in one sense, obviously, it is,” he says. “But I want to make my students think, to challenge them. So I point out that almost everything in the New Testament was written by Jews and addressed to Jews. The idea here is to make students ask themselves, What is Jewish about a Jewish text?”

Wasserstein himself came to Jewish studies only after beginning his college career in classics. Born and brought up in England, he moved with his family to Israel just two years after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, in which Israel gained control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights from its Arab neighbors.

“Shortly after we moved back to Israel, my interest in the Middle East was sparked. I wanted to understand that world—my world—much better. So a couple of years later, I gave up studying Latin and Greek to study Arabic and Islam. Then I added Hebrew and Jewish studies later on.”

By the time he earned his doctorate at Oxford University, his research of these cultures so often at odds had convinced him that a person really can’t study one without the other very easily. He also realized that because of his diverse academic background, he was less limited by disciplinary boundaries and could indulge interests that span all three areas, such as when he completed a book, The Legend of the Septuagint (2006, Cambridge University Press), that his father, a professor of Greek, had left unfinished at his death.

The Septuagint, the most influential of the Greek versions of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was adapted and changed through the centuries by Jews, pagans, Christians and Muslims. The Wassersteins’ book addresses all these versions, with the authors demonstrating “an extraordinary range of interests and linguistic skills,” according to the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

To aid his work, David Wasserstein has learned an astounding 22 languages well enough to read documents or books in those languages. He will draw on them, and a range of other interests, for his next book, which he plans to write on sabbatical as a fellow at the Davis Center at Princeton University during the 2008–09 academic year.

“I don’t know if this is going to be the title,” he says, “because it sounds a little flashy. But the subject, if you like, is ‘How Islam Saved the Jews.’”

When Islam came along, he explains, the number of Jews in the Christian world was dwindling. Oppressed by Christian states, the Jews’ legal and economic status was deteriorating, together with their cultural identity and knowledge of the Hebrew language.

“If you were an outside observer in 600, looking at the world of Christendom, you would have said the Jews were on their way out. They were basically all converting slowly—sometimes willingly, sometimes less willingly—and Judaism was on the way out.

“In the East, in the area that is now Iraq, Judaism probably would have died out, too, though over a much longer period. And Judaism simply would have disappeared from world history.

“But then Islam came along,” he continues, “conquered both the Persian Empire and most of the Byzantine Empire, and created a new world with new conditions—not deliberately, not consciously on the part of Islam—but created a new situation for Jews in which they could flourish. And they did flourish, particularly in Spain. They created a renaissance in Jewish life within the world of Islam.”

One could predict that when Wasserstein speaks publicly about this book, he’s likely to draw larger crowds than ever, providing an answer to that seemingly eternal question: No, there is no inherent clash of civilizations between Jews and Muslims, between the West and Islam.

As a historian, however, he’s also on guard against simplistic generalizations. “It’s absurd to look at some aspect of the Middle Ages and say, It was wonderful then; it can be wonderful again now. The situations are so different.”

Nevertheless, he believes the destiny of the Jews and Arabs is to live together, and that how they do so is a question that cannot be answered simply by extremists at either end of the spectrum of do-gooding peace lovers or terrorist ideologues.

“If you want to understand what’s going on in the Middle East, you don’t have to look backward,” says Wasserstein. “But it certainly is a very great help to do so.”  V

To find out, Timothy Gardner, associate professor of management (organizational studies) at the Owen Graduate School of Management, looked at 30 years of studies and literature about employee turnover, collaborating with Lisa Moynihan of the London Business School and Patrick Wright of Cornell University.

The researchers also collected data from human resources managers at a leading U.S. food-service distributor with more than 1,700 employees in five core organizations: sales, warehouse, delivery, front-line supervision and merchandising. Their findings, detailed in a study called “The Influence of Human Resource Practices and Collective Affective Organizational Commitment on Aggregate Voluntary Turnover,” were dramatic.

Motivation-enhancing practices had minimal impact on collective employee commitment or turnover. Skill-enhancing practices actually increased voluntary turnover at the aggregate level—a finding Gardner says is not all that surprising. “When you hire better people and train them,” he notes, “they’re more likely to turn over as their value and marketability outside the company increases.”

Empowerment-enhancing practices, by contrast, tended to reduce turnover. HR practices that give employees some level of autonomy and the ability to participate actively in the work group and in the decision-making dynamic proved to enhance the overall level of commitment and link HR practice to organizational outcome, making turnover less likely.

The study suggests that a more sophisticated, balanced approach to human-capital management, focused on achieving collective commitment, is required to tackle the turnover challenge.

“We were able to document that work groups have a common feeling of commitment among members, and that the level of shared commitment predicted whether the work group would have high or low turnover in the subsequent 12 months,” reports Gardner.

“Companies certainly need to hire good people and train them, but it’s simplistic to think that talent alone will provide the key to organizational success,” he adds. “To optimize the return on their investment, companies must also manage their people effectively by ensuring they have the right balance of programs in place to both empower and motivate them.”

What are the practical implications for managers?

“Managers who work to improve the overall collective commitment of their work groups will be rewarded with lower voluntary turnover,” the study asserts. To accomplish that goal, it suggests that managers focus on such empowerment-enhancing practices as grievance procedures, information sharing, and employee input into decision-making. 

The study also advises that while the data suggests skill-enhancing practices increase voluntary turnover, significant possibilities to reduce turnover exist by selecting employees based on their propensity to commit to an organization.

The most effective strategy for curbing aggregate turnover, says Gardner, actually lies in a sensible mix of all three areas of HR practice. “Once you have the very best people, you must empower them, which means providing information, authority and opportunity, and then properly motivate them to achieve the desired outcome,” he says. “In other words, it’s the way these talented people are managed that determines whether or not they will remain part of your organization over the longer term.”

An estimated one-third of stars in the Milky Way are binary or multiple stars. Far rarer—approximately one in every thousand stars—are what astronomers call “identical twin” stars, two stars that condensed from the same cloud of gas and dust and should have the same composition. According to current theories, mass and composition are the two factors that determine a star’s physical characteristics and dictate its entire life cycle.

But analysis of the youngest pair of identical-twin stars ever discovered reveals surprising differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even size. A study published in the June 19 issue of the journal Nature suggests that one of the stars formed significantly earlier than its twin. Because astrophysicists have assumed that binary stars form simultaneously, the discovery provides an important new test for successful star-formation theories, sending theorists back to the drawing board to determine if their models can produce binaries with stars that form at different times.

The newly discovered identical twins, dubbed Par 1802, were discovered in the Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery that is 1,500 light-years away. The young stars are about 1 million years old. With a full life span of about 50 billion years, that makes them equivalent to 1-day-old human babies.

“Very young eclipsing binaries like this are the Rosetta stones that tell us about the life history of newly formed stars,” says Keivan Stassun, associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt. He and Robert D. Mathieu from the University of Wisconsin-Madison headed up the project.

Eclipsing binaries are pairs of stars that revolve around an axis at a right angle to the direction of Earth. This orientation allows astronomers to determine the rate at which the two stars orbit around each other by measuring periodic variations in brightness that result when the stars pass in front of each other. With this information astronomers determine the masses of the two stars using Newton’s laws of motion.

By measuring Par 1802’s differences in light during eclipses, astronomers determined that one of the stars is two times brighter than the other and calculated that the brighter star has a surface temperature about 300 degrees higher than its twin. Analysis of the light spectrum coming from the pair also suggests that one of the stars is about 10 percent larger than the other, but additional observations are needed for confirmation.

“The easiest way to explain these differences is for one star to have been formed about 500,000 years before its twin,” says Stassun. “That is equivalent to a human birth-order difference of about half a day.”

In addition to causing theorists to re-examine star formation models, the new discovery may cause astronomers to readjust estimates of the masses and ages of thousands of young stars.

Astronomers made initial measurements of eclipses of the two stars by sifting through nearly 15 years’ worth of observations of several thousand stars using a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the SMARTS telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. They made additional measurements using the Hobby–Eberly Telescope in Texas.

Other participants in the study are doctoral students Phillip Cargile and Alicia Aarnio from Vanderbilt, Aaron Geller from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Eric Stempels from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The research is part of the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-Intensive Astrophysics and was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Research Corp.

It’s a trick question, and every four years we pound our heads against a wall trying to answer it, says Dana Nelson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies.

If we want to save America, contends Nelson, we have to do it ourselves. “The president-as-superhero myth promised all the democracy with none of the work,” she writes in her new book, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. “As such, it teaches citizens to admire rule by strong individuals and to abjure the messy workings—disagreements, slow debates, compromise, bargaining—of actual democracy.”

In the book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, Nelson tracks the steady drive by presidents—Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to increase executive power—to move more and more clout from the hands of the people to the Oval Office. Most of the time this power shift occurs because of fears about foreign relations or war powers, says Nelson.

“Democracy is not something that’s practiced just in government. Democracy is something you can work on in your business, social and religious communities. It’s all about trying to get involved with people genuinely different from you so you don’t just encounter people with whom you already agree politically.”

Click here to read Nelson’s list of 10 things you can do for democracy besides voting.

In the July 15, 2008, edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Alfred George Jr. and colleagues reported that genetic mutations linked to this rare form of familial migraine alter the function of sodium channels—protein “tunnels” through brain-cell membranes involved in the electrical conduction of nerve impulses.

The findings identify cellular events that may prompt migraines—specifically, the aura that precedes them—and suggest that medications targeting sodium channels might warrant a closer look as potential treatments for some forms of migraine.

George and colleagues investigated the physiological basis of a severe, inherited form of migraine called “familial hemiplegic migraine type-3” (FHM3). The aura associated with FHM3 often includes a transient weakness or paralysis of one side of the body.

FHM3 is caused by mutations in a sodium-channel gene, SCN1A. Researchers in Europe had identified three mutations associated with the condition and contacted George about studying the cellular effects of these mutations.

“We were already studying this gene, SCN1A, in genetic forms of epilepsy,” says George, who is the Grant W. Liddle Professor of Medicine, professor of pharmacology, director of the Division of Genetic Medicine, and director of the Institute of Integrative Genomics. “This was a great opportunity to investigate the physiology of SCN1A mutants linked to another episodic neurological disorder.”

George and colleagues genetically inserted the mutant sodium channels into cultured human cells and recorded the cells’ electrical properties—the key function modulated by sodium channels.

Dr. Alfred George, left, and Kris Kahlig are uncovering clues to the

One mutant failed to generate any measurable current, indicating that this mutant caused a complete loss of function of the sodium channel. The two other mutants “worked as sodium channels but were dysfunctional,” George says. “They didn’t operate normally.”

The mutations affected the opening and closing of the channel, a phenomenon known as “gating.” Under normal situations, sodium channels are usually closed but open briefly to allow sodium to flow into the cell, which helps generate the electrical current conducted by the cell.

“These dysfunctional sodium channels tend to stay open too long, as if the gating mechanism is stuck,” says George. “This problem may predispose neurons to fire more frequently.”

The enhanced predisposition to nerve-cell firing may be the spark that initiates the aura. “The aura has been linked to a brain phenomenon known as ‘cortical-spreading depression,’ which is essentially a wave of inexcitability that travels across the surface of the cortex,” George explains.

“The dysfunctional channels probably aren’t directly causing the headache. They’re likely involved in causing cortical-spreading depression, which then triggers other events ultimately culminating in the severe headache.”

Although FHM3 is a rare form of migraine, the findings open up the possibility that more common types of migraine might involve dysfunctional sodium channels. The results also suggest a link between migraine and epilepsy, which often occur together.

“There’s been evidence of some connection between migraine and epilepsy, but exactly how they’re related is not clear,” George says. “Now there’s a gene involved in both. So maybe what we’ve learned here is that a common genetic basis for epilepsy and migraine can exist in some people.”

Vanderbilt co-authors included Kristopher Kahlig and Thomas Rhodes. Their work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Epilepsy Foundation.

Hoping to ward off the flu bug, these boys wear bags of camphor around their necks during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed nearly 50 million people worldwide, including many healthy young adults. With fears of another flu pandemic stoked by “bird flu” in Asia in recent years, researchers have wanted to study history’s most lethal flu and the immune response to it.

But how do you go about obtaining samples from something that happened 90 years ago? First you mine Mother Nature’s deep-freeze for the virus. Then you find a hardy group of elderly survivors for antibodies.

In 2005 researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology resurrected the 1918 virus from the bodies of people killed in the outbreak. The bodies, and the virus, had been preserved in the permanently frozen soil of Alaska.

The investigators approached Dr. James E. Crowe Jr., professor of pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Program in Vaccine Sciences, whose lab had developed methods of making antibodies, about trying to make antibodies to the 1918 flu.

Crowe was skeptical but agreed to try. Researchers collected blood samples from 32 survivors, and not a minute too soon. They ranged in age from 91 to 101. All of them reacted to the 1918 virus—suggesting they still possessed antibodies to the virus.

Crowe’s team isolated exceedingly rare B cells—the immune cells that produce antibodies—from eight of those samples and grew them in culture. Seven of those samples produced antibodies to a 1918 virus protein, suggesting that their immune systems were waiting on standby for a long-awaited second outbreak.

“The B cells have been waiting for at least 60 years—if not 90 years—for that flu to come around again,” says Crowe, who is also the Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and professor of microbiology and immunology. “That’s amazing … because it’s the longest memory anyone’s ever demonstrated.”

Crowe’s team then fused cells showing the highest levels of activity against the virus with “immortal” cells to create a cell line that secretes monoclonal (or identical) antibodies to the 1918 flu. The antibodies reacted strongly to the 1918 virus and cross-reacted with proteins from the related 1930 swine flu—but not to more modern flu strains.

To test if these antibodies still work against 1918 flu in a living animal, Crowe’s collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infected mice with the 1918 flu and then administered the antibodies at varying doses. Mice receiving the lowest dose of 1918 antibody—and those receiving a nonreactive “control” antibody—died. All mice given the highest doses of 1918 antibodies survived.

Although aging typically causes immunity to weaken, “these are some of the most potent antibodies ever isolated against a virus,” Crowe says. “They’re the best antibodies I’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that B cells responding to a viral infection—and the antibody-based immunity that results—may last a lifetime, even nine or more decades after exposure.

In addition to revealing the surprisingly long-lasting immunity to such viruses, these antibodies could be effective treatments to have on hand if another virus similar to the 1918 flu breaks out in the future. And the technology theoretically could be used to develop antibodies against other viruses, like HIV.

Most important, says Crowe, “the lessons we are learning about the 1918 flu tell us a lot about what may happen during a future pandemic.”

The study—led by Crowe, Christopher Basler of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Dr. Eric Altschuler of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—is published in the Aug. 17 edition of the online journal Nature.

Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., also contributed to the study. The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. 

Find out more: www.nature.com/nature

Vanderbilt panty-raid coverage in the 1958 Peabody Pillar yearbook

On May 20, 1952, during my first year of graduate work at Vanderbilt, I phoned a nursing student who lived in Mary Henderson Hall, the nursing dormitory. I had casually dated her a few times, and attended the same church with her and one of her two roommates. I wanted to learn their reactions to the first Vanderbilt panty raid, which two days earlier had culminated in a siege of their dorm by hundreds of male students.

The “boys” had earlier tried, with some success, to gain access to other women’s dorms and sorority houses. But this raid led to $700 in damages, suspension of five students, and probation for 25 others. Overwhelmed and inept city police could do little to contain the mob, and during the assault on Mary Henderson, one policeman received a serious injury from a falling window screen. Everyone assumed that some of the women had thrown it from an upper-story window.

Thus, as a way to tease my friend, I began the phone conversation by asking why these three very serious, very conscientious, very religious young women had thrown a window screen at the loud, taunting mob below. I never dreamed that they were actually involved.

My question led to a long silence. Then in a voice that reflected both surprise and fear came her reply: “How in the world did you know it was our screen?”

She explained that the panty raid had scared them half to death. They were afraid some of the men would climb up fire escapes and invade their dorm room. They feared rape. Thus, they had tried better to secure the window screen and, in doing so, accidentally jarred it loose. They were horrified when they learned from newspapers the impact of the screen.

For them, this panty raid had led to a night of sheer terror. I suddenly realized that panty raids, so easily viewed as frivolous pranks by sexually repressed young men, could have serious, even deadly, consequences.

The raid at Vanderbilt was but one of many that took place on at least 70 campuses nationwide within a span of a few months. Everyone agrees that the first panty raid occurred at the University of Michigan, although it was only retrospectively so named.

On the first warm spring day in 1952, students at Michigan overturned police cars, invaded several women’s dorms, and stole what local newspapers delicately called “unmentionables” or “items of lingerie.”

Vanderbilt panty-raid coverage in the Dec. 6, 1957, edition of the Vanderbilt Hustler

This “mass riot,” as the campus newspaper dubbed it, gained national news coverage, but it is not clear who first referred to it as a “panty raid.” “Panty,” a derivative of the common word “panties,” was a new word. Panty raids continued for a decade, with the largest and most violent in the mid-’50s. The gathering of the mass of students needed for such raids variously involved pep rallies or celebrations of athletic victories, protests against university policies, or police-student conflict. At Vanderbilt the original raid of 1952 would be followed by at least four others, with the most infamous raid in 1957 and the last in 1959.

Panty raids were only one outlet for the student boredom, anxieties and frustrations that marked the whole decade of the 1950s. Unlike many northern universities, for Vanderbilt the ’50s, not the ’60s, was the most turbulent decade in student history, and the decade in which student morale probably reached its lowest ebb.

By the mid-’50s, at Vanderbilt and at other universities, almost any large gathering of students risked some type of disruption. The first major disturbance at Vanderbilt occurred in 1950, when a boisterous serenade of a sorority led to neighborhood protest and police intervention. What followed was a type of ongoing warfare between elite Vanderbilt students and non–college-educated police officers, in a decade marked by intense town-gown conflict.

In 1954 a snowball fight between students and Nashville police ballooned into a near-riot, with minor injuries and a few arrests. During a snowball fight in 1963, students shot pellets at policemen, broke windows of police cars, and easily could have blinded someone. At times, students rushed out of their dorms at the slightest provocation. Personnel deans prayed that snowstorms would miss Nashville, and they dreaded evening phone calls informing them that “the boys were out.”

Several circumstances helped account for student unrest at Vanderbilt. By 1951 college men were subject to the draft and likely service in Korea if they did not maintain the grades needed to justify student deferments. This meant uncertainty and insecurity for average students. For almost a decade a majority of students, most from Tennessee, almost all from the South, fought against new policies designed to rein in the fraternity system at Vanderbilt. Three-fourths of all undergraduates belonged to social fraternities and jealously defended the degree of independence they enjoyed in their aging, off-campus houses, a freedom they lost by the end of the decade.

Students also resented new course require-ments, such as a yearlong course in Western Civilization. They chafed at new, required parking permits. Most absorbed the fashionable social criticism of American society in the Eisenhower ’50s: that youth were part of a conforming, other-directed, mediocre generation. Thus, students constantly bemoaned the lack of intellectuality at Vanderbilt, the poor quality of teaching, the lack of in-depth dialogue with faculty.

Panty raids quickly became a nationwide phenomenon in the 1950s, including this one at the University of Southern California.

Theories abound about the deeper causes of panty raids, with emphasis on their sexual overtones. Many students joined in simply because they were a fashionable fad on campuses. Unlike campus unrest in the late ’60s, panty raids were not directed at major social ills such as racial discrimination or a war in Vietnam. At best, one can view them as an opening barrage in the type of counter-cultural rebellion that peaked in the early 1970s. Students were rebelling against the uptight mores of their parents and, in particular, against in loco parentis on campus.

At Vanderbilt the gender imbalance (three males for each female), a higher admission requirement for coeds (and thus their higher academic achievement), and very restrictive dorm rules for women all impeded the mating game. It was truer at Vanderbilt than at most campuses that men talked about sex all the time in large part because they had such little opportunity to indulge in it. Their assault on the chastity barrier reflected in women’s dorms, and their display of panties as trophies of conquest on the gender battlefield, may have relieved some sexual tensions. But even this conclusion is highly speculative.

The terribly serious damage that could result from panty raids was made clear during the raid at Vanderbilt on Nov. 26–27, 1957. It followed a pep rally that preceded a University of Tennessee football game, and came in the midst of intense student anger at a faculty vote to deny students a Thanksgiving break in the midst of a resented new semester system. A slowly gathering mob of young men successfully invaded McTyeire, stealing under-garments. They failed to break the doors to Cole, but moved on to Tolman where they broke windows. By 11:15 p.m. they again invaded McTyeire, this time breaking windows and screens and stealing valuable clothing. They then besieged Mary Henderson, set fire to trash cans, and blocked and then crossed 21st Avenue in an invasion of Peabody College (then not part of Vanderbilt). They broke into Confederate Hall and then into East Hall, a graduate women’s dorm, where they stole not only clothes but wallets and money.

Many of the Peabody women were older, some were foreign students, and all were frightened by an unfamiliar invasion. One foreign student was so terrorized as to require hospitalization. The Nashville police, who had learned that their presence usually only made things worse, stayed away until after midnight, when it was clear that the mob was increasingly violent. Young men slashed tires on police cars. As the mob finally dispersed by 2 a.m., police arrested every student they could catch—37 in all—regardless of their degree of involvement in the violence.

It was now time for repentance and apologies. The student senate called a special convocation and wrote a letter of apology to Peabody. At the arraignment of the 37 men arrested, the local judge made them responsible for identifying those students actually involved in the break-ins. In light of the Vanderbilt honor system, he challenged those guilty to show their honor by confessing. The tactic worked; 265 men confessed and thereby suffered probation at Vanderbilt. They promised to pay for all damages, which they did. The impressed judge dismissed all criminal charges just before Christmas.

Never again would such a raid take place at Vanderbilt. The last panty raid in 1959, following two days of protest against the closing of the old fraternity houses, involved only 250 men and an unsuccessful attempt to gain entrance to one women’s dorm. Despite the intense anti-administration sentiment, few men chose to join what was by then a dying fad. A few years later a more open dorm policy would make such raids pointless. V

Change the “V” to a “P” on Pedro Alvarez’s cap: He has signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Baseball

MLB Raids Commodore Roster in 2008 Draft

Major League Baseball liked what it saw and snatched 18 Commodores (eight current, 10 signees) in the 2008 draft. Junior third baseman Pedro Alvarez was nabbed quickly by the Pittsburgh Pirates with the second pick of the first round. Following Alvarez were: senior shortstop Ryan Flaherty, Chicago Cubs; junior pitcher Brett Jacobson, Detroit Tigers; senior infielder Dominic de la Osa, Minnesota Twins; senior utility player David Macias, Chicago Cubs; senior catcher Shea Robin, Houston Astros; junior pitcher Nick Christiani, Cleveland Indians; and senior infielder Alex Feinberg, Colorado Rockies. The Commodores finished the 2008 season with a 41-22 record and advanced to NCAA Regionals in postseason play.

Swimming

Dyer Cited for Community Service

Rachel Dyer was named to the SEC Women’s Swimming and Diving Community Service Team last spring. A sophomore from Chattanooga, Tenn., she is active with the Athletes Against Assault organization. The community service teams highlight an athlete from each school who gives back to the community in superior service efforts.

Men’s Golf

Johnson Wins Way to U.S. Amateur

Junior Hudson Johnson earned a spot in the United States Amateur golf tournament after winning medalist honors at a sectional qualifying event at the Reunion Golf and Country Club in Madison, Miss. His two-round total of 8-under par was the best in the field of 45 amateur golfers. “From the first day, I just told myself to focus on every shot and not worry about what was going on in front of me or behind me,” Johnson said of his victory. 

Bowling

Importance of Being Earnest 

Josie Earnest was voted the Division I Player of the Year by the National Tenpin Coaches Association in June. A junior from Vandalia, Ill., she is believed to be the first Vanderbilt female student-athlete in school history to become a national Player of the Year. She led Vanderbilt to the NCAA semifinals with a 205 average in 67 games. She also was named to the five-woman first-team All-America squad. Teammates Michelle Peloquin and Tara Kane, both seniors, were third-team selections, and senior Karen Grygiel received an honorable mention. Freshman Brittni Hamilton of Webster, N.Y., joined the team after finishing second at the 2008 Teen Masters, a prestigious junior tournament held in Las Vegas.

Football

Sports Writers Honor Bennett

The Tennessee Sports Writers Association named former Commodore wide receiver Earl Bennett the 2007 College Football Player of the Year in July. He was the first Vanderbilt football player to win that award in this decade. Two years ago Head Football Coach Bobby Johnson was named TSWA College Football Coach of the Year.

SEC News

Conference Joins with ESPN and CBS for Extended Coverage

Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive recently announced that the SEC has reached a long-term agreement with the ESPN television network. “The SEC’s strength, combined with the prowess of ESPN’s promotional ability and marketing savvy, will enable us to expand national coverage of our great league,” Slive said. “This agreement, coupled with the recent extension of our CBS contract, will make the SEC the most nationally televised conference in the nation.” This is the final year for the current television agreement. More about the SEC’s television future can be found at www.secsports.com.

Who’s your all-time favorite Commodore?

That’s the question the university asked alumni, fans and friends of the varsity athletic program when it set about creating the new Athletics Hall of Fame to recognize and honor outstanding achievement and celebrate its (black and) golden sporting heritage.

Hundreds of nominations were reviewed and voted upon by the senior athletic administration team—a fun but difficult task spanning more than a century’s worth of achievements. Individuals are not eligible until four years after they last participated in intercollegiate athletics. Selection was based on these criteria:

Commodore Greats: Athletes who have brought recognition and prominence to the university and themselves by their athletic accomplishments as undergraduates. Criteria to be considered included All-American and All-SEC honors and exceptional leadership.

Distinguished Letterwinners: Athletes who have made major contributions to the athletic program through time, effort, interest, through many years of service, or have otherwise distinguished themselves.

Lifetime Achievement: Individuals, coaches, athletic officials, staff members and other university officials who were not athletes at Vanderbilt but rendered outstanding service to the intercollegiate athletic program through time, effort, interest and service.

Vanderbilt held a special Hall of Fame weekend of events Sept. 12–13, capped by an induction banquet Friday evening and the Class of 2008 presentation during halftime of the Rice football game.

The inaugural Hall of Fame inductees are:

Chantelle Anderson Chantelle Anderson, BS’03 (basketball, 1999–2003), is the most decorated women’s basketball player in school history and the youngest Hall of Fame inductee. She was the Commodores’ only two-time Kodak All-American, is the school’s leading scorer, and was voted Vanderbilt’s Female Athlete of the Year three times. She was the second player chosen in the WNBA draft in 2003, and has played for the Sacramento Monarchs and San Antonio Silver Stars.

Peggy Harmon Brady Peggy Harmon Brady, BE’72 (golf, 1968–1972), came to Vanderbilt after winning the USGA Junior Championship at a time when the university had no varsity teams for women. During her sophomore year Athletic Director Jess Neely asked her to represent Vanderbilt at the National Intercollegiate in Athens, Ga., where she placed third. In 1971 she won medalist honors at the Intercollegiate held at Singing Hills in San Diego. She and her daughter, Chris, also a Commodore golfer, are the only mother/daughter All-Americans in Vanderbilt history.

John Hall John Hall, BE’55 (football, 1951–1954), a self-described overachiever on and off the football field, became Vanderbilt’s first academic All-American in 1954. The only Vanderbilt student-athlete elected to the CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America) Academic Hall of Fame, he later became chairman and chief executive officer of Ashland Inc. in Kentucky. Hall is a member of the Vanderbilt Board of Trust and served as its president in 1995.

Roy Kramer Roy Kramer (director of athletics, 1978–1990) energized Vanderbilt’s athletic department with new facilities and popular coaches. He oversaw renovation of Vanderbilt Stadium and the McGugin Center, brought SEC and NCAA men’s basketball tournaments to Memorial Gym, and merged the women’s and men’s athletic departments. Kramer later became commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, overseeing its expansion from 10 to 12 member institutions and the inception of the SEC Football Championship game, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Bowl Championship Series. He was honored by the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 2003 as a Distinguished American Sportsman.

Clyde Lee Clyde Lee, BA’70 (basketball, 1963–1966), was a first-team All-America center in 1966, two-time SEC Player of the Year, and a member of the NCAA All-Tournament team in 1965. Game attendance boomed during those years, and Memorial Gym’s second and third tiers have been called “the balconies that Clyde built.” Lee followed his college career with an 11-year stint in the NBA. He was the first Vanderbilt athlete to have his jersey retired.

Dan McGugin Dan McGugin (head football coach, 1904–1934) is the winningest football coach in Vanderbilt history. He compiled an overall record of 197-55-19 and was elected to the National Football Hall of Fame in 1951. McGugin coached four undefeated teams between 1904 and 1922.

John Rich John Rich, BA’51 (football/baseball, 1945–1951), came to Vanderbilt from Mississippi as a scholarship football player and also lettered in baseball. Founder of Delta Coals in Nashville, he joined the Vanderbilt Board of Trust in 1988 and was named trustee, emeritus, in 2003. During his time on the board, he served on the steering committee for the Athletics Campaign and provided leadership for the expansion of McGugin Center and construction of Vanderbilt Stadium and the John Rich Football Training Complex.

Fred Russell Fred Russell, ’27 (baseball, 1925–1926), was a nationally renowned and respected sports journalist with the Nashville Banner newspaper for 70 years. He was the first recipient of the Grantland Rice Memorial Award in 1955 and was honored with the naming of the Russell-Rice Scholarship, presented annually to a high school senior showing outstanding promise in journalism. The press boxes in Vanderbilt Stadium and Hawkins Field are named in his honor. He died in 2003 at the age of 96, having retired just four years earlier.

June Stewart June Stewart (administration, 1973–2001) joined the Vanderbilt athletic department as a secretary in the sports information and National Commodore Club offices. During her tenure she was promoted to senior women’s sports administrator and was elected the first female president of CoSIDA. She later was named associate director of athletics and inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Sports Writers Hall of Fame.

Ryan Tolbert Jackson Ryan Tolbert Jackson, BS’98 (track and field, 1994–1998), is the only Vanderbilt athlete to claim an individual NCAA championship, winning the 1997 400-meters in a time of 54.54, a record at that time. Vanderbilt’s highest internal team honor, the Tolbert Cup, named in her honor, is presented annually to the varsity squad exhibiting the best combination of athletic success, academic achievement and community service. She holds seven school outdoor records and three indoor records.

Bill Wade Bill Wade, BA’52 (football, 1949–1951), made the cover of Look magazine as a Vanderbilt player and was named SEC Player of the Year and a second-team All-American in 1951. He was the No. 1 pick in the 1952 NFL draft, taken by the Los Angeles Rams. He ended his 14-year professional career after leading the Chicago Bears to the 1963 world championship.

Perry Wallace Perry Wallace, BE’70 (basketball, 1966–1970), was the first African-American athlete to receive a basketball scholarship in the Southeastern Conference. His jersey is one of only three in school history to be retired. He remains Vanderbilt’s second-leading rebounder and ranks 35th in scoring, having played just three seasons. Wallace won the SEC Sportsmanship Trophy after a vote by league players in 1970. He is an inductee in the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame and was named by the National Association of Basketball Coaches to its five-man Silver Anniversary All-America team.

Find out more online.

Wirth will be wearing a newly designed uniform to complement her trusted old number.

In the 1954 film White Christmas, the singing/dancing Haynes sisters (played by Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) perform a number titled “Sisters.” The lyrics, in part, contain these lines: “Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters … Caring, sharing, every little thing that we are wearing.” Some 50-plus years later, those lines take on new significance for Vanderbilt when senior guard/forward Christina Wirth takes to the basketball court wearing the number 34—the same number she’s worn since high school and the same number she shares with her sisters.

Her older sister, Alana, was the first Wirth to wear number 34 when they played together at Seton Catholic High School in Mesa, Ariz. “When she graduated she asked, ‘Will you take my number?’ So I took her number.”

Their 16-year-old sister, Theresa, now a sophomore at the same high school, wears 34, but she is the last player at Seton High who ever will.

“My high-school coach actually retired my jersey this past year,” Christina says. “It was pretty neat. I had no idea she was going to do that. I talked to her about it, though, because my younger sister really wanted to wear that number.” That was acceptable to the coach. Theresa is wearing 34 even as Christina’s jerseyhangs from the rafters.

“I have 9-year-old twin sisters, too,” Christina says with a laugh. “We joke with them that when they’re in high school, they’ll wear the numbers 3 and 4.”

During her high school career, Wirth compiled 2,550 points, 1,173 rebounds, 312 steals, 266 assists and 120 blocked shots. In 2005 she was selected as the Arizona Player of the Year and the Gatorade Arizona Player of the Year, and was named to the USA Today All-America Top 25 and to Street and Smith’s and McDonald’s All-America teams.

“I had never really heard of Vanderbilt until I got my first letter from them in high school,” Wirth recalls. “I researched Vanderbilt and learned a lot that I liked. For me it came down to Vanderbilt and Stanford as the final two choices. Distance was never really a factor for me.”

She also had been courted by Arizona State, but that was too close to home. “You grow up a lot when you move away. I took my official visit here and loved the other players. That was probably the biggest selling point for me. I could tell that the team had great chemistry, and I wanted to be a part of that. I could see myself as having them as my friends.”

Thus a new sisterhood entered Wirth’s life.

“We had a great summer,” Wirth says of this year’s team. “We were all here spending time together when things weren’t quite so hectic, and also were training with our strength coach. We got in pretty good shape this summer, so we’ll try to carry that over to the preseason and practice.

“During the summer, when mostly athletes are here, it’s fun to meet people on other teams who are going through the same things you are. During the school year we don’t all live in the same dorm. In the summer we do—most of us on the same floor. You walk out of your room, and next door is your teammate. You just hang out and fun stuff happens.”

During her Vanderbilt career Wirth’s numbers have continued to climb. Last year she started all 34 games (there’s that number again). She scored 446 points for an average 13.1 per game; had a shooting percentage of .473, which included a .415 three-point shot percentage, and a free-throw percentage of .833; grabbed 170 rebounds for an average of five per game; and accounted for 89 assists, nine blocked shots and 48 steals.

Club 34: Christina is flanked by sisters Alana and Theresa. (photo courtesy of Christina Wirth)

The 2008–09 season began Oct. 17 with an intense practice schedule. “We go really hard the first few weeks of practice and always have a pretty tough nonconference schedule,” Wirth says. “The SEC is tough from top to bottom. You can’t really take a night off, which is the way it should be.”

When it comes to her studies, Wirth doesn’t take a night off, either. “Through all her success, Tina has always been very humble,” says Christy Hogan, academic counselor and tutor co-coordinator. “She is a talented, well-rounded person who works hard in everything she does and never loses her faith.”

Wirth is on track to achieve her goal of becoming a nurse practitioner, specializing in pediatrics. “Human and organizational development at Peabody was my undergraduate major,” she says, “with a minor in child development. There’s a master’s bridge program with the nursing school, and now I have two years of nursing school to get my master’s and become a nurse practitioner. They’ve been great about my basketball schedule. Just being able to start my master’s while I’m still on scholarship is great.”

On the basketball court, as on a health-care team, “It’s about being part of something bigger than you,” says Wirth, who has volunteered at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. “You want to give your best and work together for amazing results.”

Moral distress—negative feelings that arise when one knows the morally correct thing to do but cannot take action because of system constraints or hierarchies—had been highly studied in the nursing profession but never among medical students, until Vanderbilt University School of Medicine researchers tackled the subject. Dr. Bonnie Miller, associate dean for undergraduate medical education, leads the study, which has shown that episodes of moral distress are frequently experienced by VUSM students. Vanderbilt researchers have been awarded a $199,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation to further their work.
  

Sanctions Impact Iraqi Children with Leukemia

Iraqi children with leukemia paid a steep price for economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations against the Iraqi government, reveals a study led by Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center researchers. The sanctions were imposed in 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait and remained in effect until 2003. During that time a shortage of medications was widespread.

‘Dr. Haydar Frangoul, director of the Pediatric Stem Cell Transplant Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram, and colleagues from the Baghdad Medical College studied medical records of 651 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The proportion of patients receiving less than 50 percent of their prescribed chemotherapy because of medication shortages increased from 20.1 percent to 54.3 percent.
The findings were published in the July 24, 2008, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
  

Starbucks, Not Seagram’s

Not all recovering alcoholics smoke cigarettes, but almost all drink coffee, according to a study suggesting coffee could help addicts kick their habit. The results, by Dr. Peter Martin, director of the Vanderbilt Division of Addiction Medicine, and study co-author Michael Reich, a Vanderbilt medical student, were released online in July and featured in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The study found that 88 percent of the Alcoholics Anonymous participants surveyed drink coffee and 56.9 percent smoke cigarettes.

The study’s authors are now examining whether changes in coffee and cigarette use are predictive of recovery from alcoholism. The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Mark Cohen, the Justin Potter Distinguished Professor of American Competitive Business and professor of law at Vanderbilt, is taking on a new role as vice president of research for Research for Resources for the Future (RFF). RFF is an independent, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving environmental, energy and natural-resource policymaking worldwide through social-science research of the highest caliber. Cohen has been granted a sabbatical from the Owen Graduate School of Management to lead a team of 40 researchers in Washington, D.C.

A leading expert on the enforcement of environmental regulations and on corporate crime and punishment, Cohen is co-director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies and part of a team of researchers investigating greenhouse gases and individual behavior through Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network.

Peabody Alumna to Oversee Library System

Connie Vinita Dowell, a Vanderbilt graduate with three decades of experience working in academic libraries, has been named dean of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Dowell earned her master’s degree in library science from Peabody College in 1979. “Being asked to return to Vanderbilt in this capacity is truly a dream come true,” Dowell says. “Vanderbilt’s generosity to me as a student paved the way for my entire career.”
For the past nine years, Dowell has served as dean of the library and information access at San Diego State University. She previously was employed at Connecticut College for six years, starting as college librarian and then dean, later becoming vice president for information services and librarian of the college.

Biologist Awarded Searle Scholar Grant

A Vanderbilt biologist who studies the genetics of animal development is one of 15 up-and-coming professors to be named a 2008 Searle Scholar, a distinction accompanied by a $300,000 research grant. Antonis Rokas, assistant professor of biological sciences, will use the grant money over three years to study the origins and assembly of the genetic toolkit for animal development. In the long term he hopes to map the evolution of animals from their single-cell-organism predecessors.

In selecting Searle Scholars, the board looks for scientists who have demonstrated innovative research with the potential for making significant contributions to biological research over an extended period of time. The funds that support the awards come from trusts established by the wills of John G. and Frances C. Searle. John Searle was president of G.D. & Searle Co., a research-based pharmaceutical company.

For more than a month last year, Shawn Coltharp kept vigil while her 26-year-old daughter lay critically injured in Vanderbilt’s Trauma Center after a car accident. Coltharp wasn’t sure what to do or where to turn. Now patients and family members in Coltharp’s shoes can learn from the Vanderbilt Trauma Survivor’s Network (TSN), an Internet-based system for communication among current and former patients’ families. Through blogs and chat rooms, families share experiences and learn from others. 

The site contains loads of practical information, from explanations of different types of injuries to information about medical rounds.

“We’re going to help those families who were just like mine—frustrated, angry and scared,” says Coltharp, who is acting as a consultant to the TSN.

If anyone has the right stuff to handle the new wave of federal export control regulations that is crashing down on Vanderbilt and the nation’s other research universities, it’s Marcia E. Williams. An attorney, former airline pilot, business owner and classroom instructor, Williams, who has served as an assistant director of sponsored research at Vanderbilt since 2006, recently took on the newly created position of assistant director, export compliance. Her job: to develop and implement a system that allows the university and medical center to comply with complex U.S. export control laws and regulations.

Since the days of the Cold War, the United States has regulated export of sensitive technology to other countries. In the past this primarily centered on physical export of high-tech computer chips, advanced weapons systems, and other technology that could be used against the country. Activities of research universities generally were not subject to such regulation under a “fundamental research exemption.”

Since 9/11, however, you don’t even have to leave the country to get into trouble. Regulations apply increasingly to information as well as hardware—and not just to devices and data that researchers take abroad with them, but also to the access that researchers provide to foreign nationals, both students and visitors, in their labs at home. Regulations have grown more complicated, with different technologies restricted to different groups of countries.

“I’ve been in university administration nearly 27 years and have been involved in implementation of a variety of federal regulations,” says John Childress, director of Vanderbilt’s Division of Sponsored Research, “and this is, by far, the most difficult set of federal regulations to implement I’ve seen. Violations can involve significant fines and even jail time.”

Williams came to Vanderbilt with a 15-year career as an airline pilot, a law degree, and considerable expertise in areas such as pensions, medical malpractice, executive compensation, training and software development. While a pilot for United Airlines, she assisted in developing training courses and safety videos for pilots, flight attendants and dispatchers. She left her pilot position in 2004 and set up her own aviation law and consulting company.

In her new role, Williams says her goal is to set up a management system that is “as unburdensome and unobtrusive as possible. I find it an interesting, challenging and very relevant task.”

The article, written in a time-stamp format, is prefaced with the headline “America’s Best Hospitals: Vanderbilt’s special mix of skill, passion and Southern comfort hits all the right notes in Nashville,” and opens with a two-page photo of LifeFlight offloading a patient.

The article is an account of events that happened during a six-day visit to Vanderbilt in June by U.S. News staff writers Sarah Baldauf and Lindsay Lyon and photographer Jim Lo Scalzo.

Find out more: http://health.usnews.com/sections/health/best-hospitals

Project scientists Joshua Pepper, Keivan Stassun and David James with the KELT telescope

Vanderbilt astronomers have constructed a special-purpose telescope that will allow them to participate in one of the hottest areas in astronomy: the hunt for earthlike planets circling other stars.

The instrument, called the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT), has been assembled and is being tested at Vanderbilt’s Dyer Observa-tory. It will be shipped to South Africa where it will become only the second dedicated planet-finder scanning the stars in the southern sky.

The KELT project is a collaboration between Vanderbilt and the University of Cape Town. The instrument will be set up at the South African Astronomical Observatory about 200 miles northeast of Cape Town. South Africans will maintain the instrument and ship data back to Nashville. Astronomers at both universities can control the telescope by remote operation.

KELT is about the size of some telescopes used by amateur astronomers, and its optics are surprisingly modest: It uses a professional-quality photographic lens. But it has an extremely high-quality imaging system that captures light and converts it to digital data.

“The telescope has been designed to detect planets passing across the face of bright stars,” says Joshua Pepper, the postdoctoral fellow who is managing the project. Unlike large telescopes that focus in on small parts of the sky to produce extremely high-resolution images, KELT looks at large areas of the sky that contain thousands of stars. In order to see variations in brightness, it must revisit each area many times every night. As a result, the small scope will produce prodigious amounts of data—enough to fill a typical laptop computer’s hard drive in a few days.

“Astronomy is entering a period in which the way astronomers do their work is fundamentally changing,” notes Associate Professor of Astronomy Keivan Stassun. “The traditional model has been that of
an individual astronomer, or a small team of astronomers, going to a telescope and pointing it at a star or a galaxy, collecting data, analyzing the data and publishing the results. But with the advent of high-performance computers, robotic telescopes and digital detectors that are able to see large swaths of the sky at once, the quantities of data we can collect are rapidly increasing, so we need new ways of analyzing them in real time.”

The Cape Town agreement is one of five core partnerships established by the Vanderbilt International Office. The other four are with the University of Melbourne (Australia), the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Fudan University (China), and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile).

Dr. Andy Norman meets with a former patient in Nigeria.

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Institute for Global Health has received a one-year, $3 million federal grant to provide AIDS treatment and prevention services in Nigeria. It is the second major treatment grant the institute has received under PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established by President George Bush in 2003.

The institute received a $1 million pilot grant under PEPFAR in 2006 to provide AIDS treatment and other services in three rural hospitals in Mozambique. That program was expanded to about 10 clinics throughout the country last year with the help of another $4.1 million in PEPFAR funding.

In Nigeria and Mozambique, as of 2005 nearly 5 million people were living with the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and approximately 1.4 million children had been orphaned by the disease, according to the 2006 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.

Prevention efforts are crucial, says Institute Director Dr. Sten Vermund, who also is principal investigator of the grants. For every person who is put on anti-retroviral treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, Vermund says, four more people are newly infected with HIV. “But treatment is an essential stopgap to stem the devastation. We must offer care and treatment even as we strive to expand prevention approaches.”

Anti-retroviral drugs block HIV, a retrovirus, from infecting—and killing—the white blood cells of its host.

Educational outdoor theater for World AIDS Day in Mozambique

As of March 31, PEPFAR had supported anti-retroviral treatment for more than 1.6 million people in 15 “focus countries” in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, according to the program’s Web site, www.pepfar.gov.

The Vanderbilt-led program in west central Nigeria was developed with the help of two Vanderbilt couples: Dr. John Tarpley, professor of surgery, and his wife, Margaret Tarpley, senior associate in surgery; and Dr. Andy Norman, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and his wife, Judy Norman, a nurse in the Vanderbilt International Travel Medicine Clinic. They have spent many years in Nigeria providing medical and educational services, and John Tarpley continues to train physicians there.

With the help of their contacts, the institute established partnerships with Baptist Medical Center in Ogbomoso, a city of 1.2 million people, and Sobi Specialist Hospital in Ilorin, population 850,000.
Services at five satellite sites will include HIV counseling and testing, treatment to prevent HIV-positive women from infecting their babies, and services for people co-infected with HIV and tuberculosis.

“We will support essential community-based promotion of prevention messages and awareness of all these new services,” Vermund says. “Our program will emphasize close collaboration with national, state and local leadership, including traditional (tribal) rulers.”

“The two most important dates in everyone’s life [are] the day you were born and the day you realized why you were born. When I landed in New Orleans after Katrina, I knew why I was born.”

~Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré in a Sept. 18 address launching the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing Centennial Lecture Series

This new procedure for organ recovery and transplantation—called Donation After Cardiac Death (DCD)—offers promising options for families wanting to donate a loved one’s organs, and increases the availability  of donor organs desperately needed for transplantation. 

Vanderbilt’s three DCD donors have helped eight recipients receive a total of six kidney and two liver transplants.

With a growing number of patients on orga­­n-transplant waiting lists—estimates are nearly 100,000 in the U.S.—the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) recently implemented DCD as another donation opportunity for families.

Dr. Beau Kelly

“Currently, 85 percent of organ donation is in the form of organs donated after patients have suffered a brain death,” says Dr. Beau Kelly, surgical director for the pediatric liver transplant program. “But now, donation after cardiac death is being offered as an option for families interested in organ 

donation. With donation after cardiac death, these people are not brain dead; rather, they have suffered an anoxic brain injury and are in a debilitated state … with no chance of recovery.”

Examples of such scenarios include heart attacks with low blood flow to the brain and high spinal-cord injuries from motor vehicle accidents. “In a donation after cardiac death, you are recovering those organs after the heart has stopped and there is no blood circulation. The need for recovery, therefore, is much more urgent.”

In both donation scenarios the families must initiate the request or process—either the patient has documented wishes or the family has decided to withdraw all care and support, Kelly explains.

“Families withdraw care and support from loved ones every day across the country, leaving the hospital only with a memory of the person they knew,” says Kelly. “But organ donation after withdrawal of care can give life to another person.”

Find out more: www.vanderbilthealth.com/transplant

Vanderbilt also ranked No. 14 among national universities in the “Great Schools, Great Prices” category, marking it as a good value for its tuition costs. The magazine noted that 12 percent of Vanderbilt students receive Pell Grants for low-income students, ranking the university among the top 25. Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering improved five positions to No. 38.

In the overall rankings Vanderbilt has progressed from No. 24 in 1989 to cracking the top 20 consistently since 2003. 

Harvard University was named the top national university. Rounding out the top five were Princeton University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Highlights of the rankings were published in the Sept. 1 issue of U.S. News & World Report.

Vanderbilt also placed No. 42 in an academic ranking of the top 500 world universities by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which compiles one of the leading international indexes of major universities. The Chinese university also ranked Vanderbilt No. 34 on a breakdown of the top 100 North and Latin American universities.

“We’re extremely pleased to be recognized as one of the top universities in the world. The ranking reflects the hard work and dedication of our faculty, students and staff members, as well as the distinction of our alumni,” says Richard McCarty, Vanderbilt provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The universities are ranked by the Chinese university according to several indicators of academic or research performance, including the numbers of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published in the leading international journals Nature and Science, peer-reviewed articles published by faculty and students, and the overall research productivity of the faculty. 

Find out more: www.usnews.com/sections/rankings

It’s hard to find good smoke patrols. They’re expected to go up to people and explain that they’re violating our rules.

~Ken Browning, director of VUMC Plant Services

Don’t even think about lighting up on the Vanderbilt Medical Center campus. On Sept. 1, VUMC enacted a ban reflecting a strong statement that smoking, linked to the development of cancer, heart disease and stroke, has no place on a hospital campus.

The complete smoking ban is the latest in a series of increased restrictions on campus smoking that began in 1989 with a ban on indoor smoking. Designated outdoor smoking areas were established on campus in the 1990s, and enforcement has been stepped up in recent years.

But those designated spots disappeared Sept. 1. Faculty and staff who want to quit smoking are being offered a series of self-help and support resources to help them do so, and a hotline—615/936-QUIT—has been set up to help employees.

Vanderbilt now employs five “smoke patrollers” to guide faculty, staff, patients and visitors to the closest areas where they can smoke—the sidewalks along 21st Avenue or Blakemore Avenue, says Ken Browning, director of VUMC Plant Services. It’s not a job for everyone.

Smoke-patrol employees Tommy Metty, right, and Joseph Glenn

“It’s one thing to tell people to go to a covered area to smoke; it’s another to tell them to go to a public sidewalk,” Browning says. “It’s hard to find good smoke patrols. They’re expected to go up to people and explain that they’re violating our rules. Not everyone is cut out for that. It will take time to get people to understand that they have to go off campus.”

Browning estimates that about 99 percent of people approached about not smoking in a given area are accepting. “Most people will do what you ask, if they understand what you want them to do.”

Vanderbilt’s football team rocketed to No. 13 in national rankings—no, that’s not a misprint—after beating Auburn University 14-13 on Oct. 4. The game marked the Commodores’ fifth straight win this year and its first win against the Tigers since 1955, giving Vanderbilt a 5-0 season for the first time since 1943.

Editor
GayNelle Doll

Art Director and Designer
Donna DeVore Pritchett

Editorial

Associate Editor and Advertising Manager
Phillip B. Tucker

Arts and Culture Editor
Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81

Class Notes and Sports Editor
Nelson Bryan, BA’73

Production and Design

Assistant Director, Photography Services
Daniel Dubois

Photographers
Steve Green
John Russell

Color Correction and Retouching
Julie Luckett Turner

Web Edition Design and Development
Lacy Tite

Please send address corrections to Gift Records Office, Vanderbilt University, PMB 407727, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-7703. Vanderbilt Magazine is printed by Lane Press in Burlington, Vt.

Opinions expressed in Vanderbilt Magazine are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine or the university administration. Vanderbilt University is committed to the principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

A week later the man returns to his physician—still with symptoms of atrial fibrillation, and now with extensive bruising caused by excess warfarin.

Fast forward to October 2020: Different patient, same symptoms. While the physician and patient discuss atrial fibrillation and its potential treatment, the computerized medical information system interrogates the patient’s DNA sequence, which was obtained and archived on his personal medical Web site in 2012. The interrogation identifies variants that likely pre-disposed the patient to the abnormal rhythm. Based on the specific genes involved, a medicine with more than a 95 percent chance of suppressing his symptoms is prescribed. The interrogation reports variants in the genes responsible for degradation of warfarin, and a safer starting dose, 2 milligrams a day, is suggested.

It is axiomatic that not every patient responds to drugs in an identical fashion. Similarly, we vary in our susceptibility to most diseases like infections, Alzheimer’s or cancer. The idea that this variability lies in our genes has been widely accepted for decades—but which genes? And can knowing which genes help us better to care for patients?

Vanderbilt is positioned to be a leader in answering these questions and moving the 2020 scenario to reality. In 2004, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, recognizing the opportunities as well as the challenges in implementing a genome-based view of 21st-century medicine, committed to the creation of a large DNA databank—a project now termed “BioVU.”

The university now has, by far, the largest DNA biobank in the country. During the course of the next several years, it will grow into one of the largest worldwide. BioVU’s overriding aim is to serve as a very large clinical laboratory in which questions like those posed above can be addressed.

Building such a capability is a team effort, and VUMC is uniquely poised to bring that team together. Translational science, the idea of bringing advances at the laboratory bench to the bedside and vice versa, has been a traditional strength of ours. The Division of Clinical Pharmacology has had a decades-long interest in the mechanisms underlying variability in response to drug treatment in humans and is a world leader in identifying genetic causes for such variability. Vanderbilt’s Center for Human Genetic Research has become a leader in the application of new genomic technologies to understand disease susceptibility.

Nationally and internationally, Vanderbilt’s capabilities in the discipline of biomedical informatics are second to none. Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics is the largest in the country by far, reflecting a commitment to information technology and medicine made almost two decades ago.

Before we delve deeper into Vanderbilt’s plans, though, a quick refresher on genetics and DNA may prove useful.

A Primer in Modern Genetics

The classic pea-cultivation experiments of the Bohemian monk Gregor Mendel in the late 19th century established the basic ground rules for modern genetics and how diseases can be transmitted in families. Mendel had no idea how this process worked at the molecular level. Indeed, it was not until the 1950s that the mechanism for transmitting genetic information from parent to child and from cell to cell was identified and represented accurately in the now-familiar model of the DNA double helix structure. Cells use the 3-billion-letter-long biochemical code to manufacture proteins—the molecules that determine virtually all cellular functions.

The discovery of DNA as the carrier of the code led quickly to identification of very small changes in its sequence—termed “mutations”—that cause thousands of rare diseases like sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis. For the family affected, the consequences of a mutation can be devastating. A huge effort has gone into identifying mutations, understanding how they affect cellular function, and developing methods for early diagnosis and treatment.

But genetics determine common characteristics as well: You look like your grandfather; your uncle had high blood pressure, and so do you; people in your family react badly to some medicines.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that common diseases like cancer, atherosclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease include a “genetic component,” but that’s about as far as things got. The notion of actually naming those genes was far-fetched. In the 1980s, however, two apparently unrelated events spawned a revolution in modern genetics that is now identifying those genes and many others that contribute to the ways we differ in our disease susceptibility or drug responses.

The first event was development of the “polymerase chain reaction,” a simple method to rapidly generate large quantities of DNA that can then be analyzed in myriad ways in the laboratory. The second was the very rapid acceleration of information technology.

The merging of these two advances 

allowed researchers to generate and share DNA sequence—from humans and other animals down to bacteria. So during the 1980s it became increasingly clear that each human being carries millions of DNA variants.

Only a few variants, however, cause diseases like sickle cell anemia. One reasonable idea is that those millions of others, which we term polymorphisms, contribute to variability in the way we respond to our environment: to viruses, drugs or toxins, for example.

This change in emphasis from rare disease-associated mutations to common polymorphisms was accompanied by a change in terminology. Studying one gene at a time is one way of thinking about “genetics,” while studying large collections of genes in a patient or a population is now termed “genomics.”

Amazing new technologies that can generate precise sequences of very long stretches of DNA have enabled genomic experiments. The first full sequence of a human genome (the “Human Genome Project”) was completed in 2000, took three years, and cost about $300 million. A next step, the creation of a catalog of several million common polymorphisms—ones shared by 1 to 50 percent of all humans—has been largely accomplished. Since 2005 this catalog has allowed researchers to identify regions of DNA, and sometimes specific variants, that increase risk for dozens of common diseases by 50 to 100 percent.

But that resource pertains only to the common variants; each of us also harbors millions of rare (less than 1 percent frequency) variants. The technology to find these is also on the horizon. Within five years (some say as soon as two years), we will be able to generate a full DNA sequence from any individual in less than 15 minutes. The cost to do so will be $1,000 or less, and because one’s DNA doesn’t change, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime expense.

Data Isn’t Information, and Information Isn’t Knowledge

The idea that we all harbor both rare and common DNA-sequence variants that make us like our grandparents, predispose us to disease, or cause us to have unusual drug reactions is at the heart of modern medicine. We are now at the threshold of actually knowing those variants and applying them to routine patient care.

Huge obstacles must be overcome, however, before that vision can even approach reality. How can we translate billions of pieces of raw data into useable information? Which of these DNA-sequence variants makes a difference? Does a large group of patients fare better if a disease is treated with drugs prescribed based on individual DNA sequences, or if everyone is given the same dose of the same drug? How much better? Is it cheaper? How much cheaper? How is that best measured? Is there a likelihood of discrimination (for jobs or insurance, for example) based on genetic sequences? Does a genetic sequence guarantee a disease or abnormal drug response, or does it merely predispose? How do multiple genetic variants interact with each other and with environmental stressors to which we all are subject every day? Can lives be saved by avoiding life-threatening drug reactions that are genetically determined?

During the next several years, it should be possible to begin answering these questions—to begin to use the raw data we can generate right now to create the knowledge that will impact patient care.

BioVU

The BioVU project entered a three-year planning phase in 2004. Focus groups were conducted, sample handling and storage mechanisms were developed, and a plan for sample accrual was put in place.

Our electronic medical-record systems support all patient care at VUMC. They can be “mined” for information, such as outcomes of drug treatment, and can provide a platform for delivering patient-specific information—such as drug interactions (now) or genetic information (soon)—to prescribers.

Patients receiving treatment at VUMC now sign a new “consent to treat” form that features a prominently displayed box that allows a patient to opt out of participation in the BioVU project. Only samples that are left over after being obtained for routine clinical testing, and that also include a signed consent form without a mark in the opt-out box, are accrued into the databank.

Because of this unique design, the project is reviewed and has continuing oversight at many levels, including by Medical Center and external ethics boards, the Institutional Review Board that reviews all human-subjects research at Vanderbilt, the Medical Center’s legal department, the federal office responsible for human-subjects oversight, and a community advisory board made up of patients and lay representatives.

The opt-out approach has advantages and disadvantages.

The only information available about the diseases of a particular individual or drugs used by that person is the data contained in the electronic medical record, so new computer methods are in development to mine this information effectively. If a researcher needs information that is not in the electronic medical record (details of food intake or extensive family history, for example), BioVU may not be the most suitable platform for their work. Privacy and data security are continuing focuses of the project; indeed, propelled largely by BioVU, Vanderbilt is developing into a national center of excellence for work in this area.

One major advantage is that the resource is “real world,” with records containing many different diagnoses and drug therapies. Another advantage of the approach is scale: The project began collecting samples in spring 2007 and, by June 2008, had surpassed 40,000 samples—making it easily the largest DNA biobank in the country. 

What Could BioVU Accomplish?

Just getting the DNA databank project off the ground has been an enormous undertaking. It already has generated national and international recognition for Vanderbilt Medical Center because of its vision and commitment to the project. BioVU and the Department of Biomedical Informatics are key partners in a network launched by the National Human Genome Research Institute to explore the utility of DNA biobanks linked to electronic medical-record systems. Most recently, the federal government awarded VUMC $1 million to purchase a robot for sample handling.

BioVU will be a crucial national resource in understanding how to get new genome science to the bedside to improve patient care. The databank will be invaluable to studies of the role played by genetics in the development of complications like kidney disease or amputation in diabetes, drugs used to treat common diseases like HIV or depression, survival of cancer, and many other diverse scenarios.

BioVU also is serving as a platform for the development of new science in the study of data privacy and security, and will be an integral partner in electronic surveillance to identify side effects of both new and old drugs.

We are only beginning to realize the promise of the BioVU DNA Databank Project. The ability to generate very large sets of records with defined diseases and controls offers us opportunities to understand not only how genetic variation affects outcomes in VUMC patients, but how that information can be coupled to advanced information technology to actually deliver improved health care. The July 2020 vision will become reality, and VUMC will have played a huge role in creating that reality. 

Dr. Dan Roden is a professor of medicine and pharmacology, director of the Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics, and assistant vice chancellor for personalized medicine at the 

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He is the principal investigator for the BioVU Project.

First, I want to say a word about how much I am enjoying the magazine. The Spring 2008 issue with the Holocaust memories [“In the Face of Destruction”] was very personal because of the real Vanderbilt people involved. The story of Montgomery Bell [Southern Journal, “Best Laid Plans”] was fascinating. I am still reading the summer issue but was glad to see Ray Waddle’s article, “Chancellor Checkmates Bishops” [Collective Memory], about the famous trial. My father, Littell Rust (BA 1904, JD 1906), talked about it, but his details were not clear. I have always wanted to know.

How can I purchase a copy of Co. “Aytch”: First Tennessee Regiment or a Side Show of the Big Show, edited by Ruth Hill Fulton McAllister, including the recently found handwritten manuscript [Summer 2008 issue, The Mind’s Eye]? Sam Watkins became part of our family history when his daughter, Virginia (Jenny), married my grandmother’s brother.

Vanderbilt has always been dear to my heart.

Emmaline Rust Henry, BA’42
Carmel, Ind.

[Editor’s Note: Co. “Aytch” may be purchased at retail stores, or you may contact Providence House Publishers at 615/771-2020 or visit www.providencehouse.com.]

Plagiarism as Disempowerment

As a teacher of English as a second language (in Africa, the South Pacific and the Middle East), I read with interest the article by Michelle Miller Sulikowski, “Copy, Paste, Plagiarize” [Spring 2008 issue, VJournal]. It is especially encouraging that an instructor in a subject like chemistry is thinking about how to deal with a problem that is all too often perceived in universities to be the sole responsibility of language teachers. I am also interested to see that plagiarism appears to be just as much a problem for first-language users of English at Vanderbilt as it is for the ESL university students I teach.

There are two kinds of plagiarism: willful and unintentional. The first needs to be severely dealt with; penalties should be applied consistently and forcefully in some of the ways Sulikowski suggests. But students, especially freshmen, often are unaware of what plagiarism involves and why it is a serious infringement. Mastering a discipline involves not just acquiring knowledge and skills; it also entails a familiarity with how the subject is practiced and the conventions through which communication between scholars is conducted. These insights cannot be assumed. They have to be taught and learned.

Before we “police” plagiarism, then, we have a responsibility to make sure students understand, for example, when a source needs to be cited, what can and cannot be assumed as “general knowledge” in an academic field, the distinction between reporting and using information, etc. In the end, plagiarism is wrong because it is a kind of disempowerment. When students plagiarize, they are being used by rather than using their sources. Even freshmen are members of an academic community, albeit novices. And like all novices they need to learn appropriate behavior. But by beginning to see their written assignments and research essays as unique contributions—however humble—to an ongoing discourse among scholars in their field, they are likely to develop an intellectual self-respect that should equip them to resist what may initially appear to be the temptations of plagiarism.

James Moody, BA’61
Muscat, Sultanate of Oman

Echoes of the Holocaust

Keep up the good work! There’s nothing like sitting down and reading—anything—whether it’s your magazine, a good book, whatever. Please don’t go electronic on us. And the story about the Holocaust survivors at Vanderbilt [Spring 2008 issue, “In the Face of Destruction”] struck quite a chord and was among the best stories I’ve read in the magazine.

Jody Collins Bronstein, BA’82
North Miami Beach, Fla.

I just had to write and tell you how much I enjoy the articles in Vanderbilt Magazine. It keeps getting better and better. I especially enjoyed “In the Face of Destruction” and reading about all that the refugees and survivors went through to get an education. Thanks for your tireless efforts.

Nancy Holt Garver, BA’56
Richmond, Va.

The Lawson Affair

Vanderbilt Magazine changed drastically for the better a few years ago when there was an article about a shameful event involving the expulsion of a seminary student [James Lawson] who was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in downtown Nashville [Fall 2002 issue, “Days of Thunder”]. The article held me spellbound, as did the other stories and all the issues since that time. Each one is a “keeper.” I share them with friends over and over.

Olwyn K. Carpenter, BA’48, MA’48
Suwanee, Ga.

Close, But No Cigar

The magazine has really improved over the years. It’s not yet the Atlantic Monthly, which is still my favorite, but some of the in-depth articles are right up there. Keep up the good work.

Scarlett Weakley Martin, BA’88, MBA’92
Nashville

Sometimes I recall my younger self devouring Reader’s Digest while I’m working on story ideas for Vanderbilt Magazine. Vanderbilt researchers offer limitless fodder for anyone with a bent toward strange and obscure medical knowledge, and over the years I’ve absorbed just enough to annoy my friends. Your nephew has an insatiable appetite? It could be Prader-Willi syndrome. Your brother-in-law exudes a fishy odor? Maybe his body can’t produce monooxygenase 3.

In this issue, however, we turn to a disease that is anything but rare—cancer. Dr. David Johnson, deputy director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and himself a cancer survivor, often asks people he meets, “What’s your cancer story?” Everyone, Johnson maintains, has a cancer story.

I am no exception. My maternal grandmother and five of her siblings died of various cancers—the first in her mid-50s, the last at age 88. My mother has lost two siblings to cancer, and her surviving brother is in treatment for colon cancer. Last year two of my maternal cousins in their 50s lost their youngest sister to breast cancer; now they are both battling the disease. Cancer has become more relevant to me than it was 12 years ago when I wrote a feature story about the subject for Vanderbilt Magazine. The options for treatment have progressed greatly since then, but cancer still holds many medical mysteries.

If, after reading our cancer article or Mark Abkowitz’s story about disasters and risk management, you’re ready for something lighter, turn to page 70 and read Christopher Baltz’s account of growing up the youngest of 12 children. Think of Chris—for whom Thanksgiving may mean sweating over a deep fryer as he cooks up turkeys for 40 relatives in his garage—while you’re dragging out the folding chairs for your own holiday feast. And eat some cranberries. I read somewhere they are a source of polyphenol antioxidants, which may function as anti-cancer agents.

Eric Etheridge

Eric Etheridge, BA’79, grew up in Mississippi and has worked as an editor at several magazines, including Rolling Stone, The New York Observer and Harper’s. For his recent book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, Etheridge paired original mug shots with contemporary portraits, personal accounts and updates on 80 former Freedom Riders. He also has worked online, creating and running Web sites for Microsoft, The New York Times and others. Etheridge lives in New York City with his wife, Kate Browne, and their daughter, Maud.

Mark Abkowitz

Mark Abkowitz, professor of civil and environmental engineering and professor of engineering management, serves as director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies. He is the author of Operational Risk Management: A Case Study Approach to Effective Planning and Response. The founder and former chairman of Visual Risk Technologies, an operational risk-management consulting firm headquartered in Nashville, Abkowitz has appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News and CNBC.

Sheryll D. Cashin

Sheryll D. Cashin, BE’84, is author of The Failures of Integration and The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family. A professor of law at Georgetown University, she has served on the Vanderbilt Board of Trust since 2002. Cashin graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor on the Harvard Law Review, and she served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She is married to Marque Chambliss, and they have two sons, Logan and Langston.

Paul K. Conkin

Paul K. Conkin, MA’53, PhD’57, distinguished professor of history, emeritus, and former chair of the Department of History, first came to Vanderbilt more than 55 years ago as a graduate student. He is the author or co-author of 23 books, including the recently published The Revolution Down on the Farm, as well as his definitive 1985 work, Gone with the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University. 

Taylor Holliday

Taylor Holliday is a Nashville-based writer and editor who specializes in the arts, food and travel. She earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University with a focus on media and communications. A former Wall Street Journal arts editor, she now freelances regularly for the Journal as well as The New York Times and other national publications.

Additional Contributors:  Christopher Baltz, Carole Bartoo, Joanne Lamphere Beckham, Craig Boerner, Stephen Doster, Angela Fox, John Howser, Jerry Jones, Elizabeth Latt, Princine Lewis, Cynthia Manley, Melissa Marino, Brent McNew, Elizabeth Older, Jessica Pasley, Jim Patterson, Dan Roden, David F. Salisbury, Bill Snyder, Dagny Stuart, J. Luke Webb, Adele White, Amy Wolf

Eugene Watkins, BS’77, the first president of AVBA

Reunion and Homecoming Weekend in October kicked off a yearlong series of events commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni (AVBA).

Tremayne Anderson, BE’95, the current AVBA president.

AVBA was founded as part of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association during Homecoming Weekend in 1983, the same year as the first Vanderbilt Accolade, a gala affair that raised money for minority scholarships and recruiting efforts. The Special Committee on Minority Affairs, with the support of the Office of Alumni Relations, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for AVBA’s establishment.

On Oct. 28, 1983, following a “town meeting” of black alumni, students and faculty, black alumni met in Sarratt Cinema and voted to form an Association of Black Alumni with Eugene Watkins, BS’77, as its first president. That same weekend the Black Cultural Center was renamed to honor the late Bishop Joseph A. Johnson Jr., BDiv’54, PhD’58, Vanderbilt’s first African-American graduate.

Twenty-five years later AVBA has nearly 3,400 members and a growing number of programs and events throughout the year, including a student recruitment program, a welcome reception for new African-American students, and a reception honoring graduating seniors. AVBA also interacts with African-American student organizations and promotes interaction with Vanderbilt chapter events.

Seniors Briana Johnson, left, and Hamida Labi attend an AVBA event, one of several planned year-round by AVBA and its representatives nationwide.

In conjunction with the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, AVBA supports the annual Martin Luther King Lecture Series, events celebrating Black History Month, the Living History Series, the Black Graduate Ceremony, and various other programs throughout the year.

AVBA has regional alumni representatives in California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C., who help to organize alumni events. The organization’s current officers are Tremayne Anderson, BE’95, president, of Nashville; Antonio Britton, MEd’04, vice president, of Nashville; and Kim Wright, MEd’00, secretary, of Rock Hill, S.C.

As part of its 25th anniversary celebration, AVBA is sponsoring the Vanderbilt Travel Program’s alumni trip to South Africa on May 9–18, 2009. Leading the excursion is David Williams, Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for university affairs and athletics, general counsel, and secretary of the university. Call 615/322-2929 for more information about the trip.

The AVBA anniversary year culminates with a recognition banquet and other activities during Reunion Weekend 2009. Until then, check the AVBA Web site regularly for updates on other anniversary-related events during the coming year, or e-mail carolyn.dunlap@vanderbilt.edu for more information.