1986
The MIR space station as seen from the departing space shuttle Discovery.
Eliza Barlow
of that year, 5,000 people flocked to the Dr. Verna Yiu, ’84 BMS, ’86 MD, will never University’s Butterdome for a forum and forget the day a young man with a mysterious inquiry into Canada’s defence policy and illness came into the Alberta hospital where nuclear arms. she was an intern. The 19-year-old patient An article in The Gateway advancing the was extremely sick with a rare form of forum said Edmontonians had been noted for pneumonia, but doctors were stumped as to “staying home in droves” during previous arms what the cause could be. “He was kept in an race demonstrations, and that the University’s isolation room and we all had to wear masks peace and disarmament club had only four when around him,” recalls Yiu. “We knew his immune system was depressed,” she continues, members in 1986. During the forum, guest David Suzuki—who once taught at the U of “we just didn’t know why.” A—cited both Chernobyl and Challenger as he Later, it was discovered that the sick man argued technology was out of control. had been infected with what was, in mid“Technology is totally out of control, human 1980s Alberta, a virtually unknown virus: HIV. control, and to speak as if we can control In retrospect, Yiu says, it seems silly to think of this by further technological devices simply the measures medical staff took to isolate the man, given what’s known now about how AIDS perpetuates a myth that we are in command of this technology,” said Suzuki. He went on is transmitted. But, at the time, they had no to blame human error for the Challenger and idea what they were dealing with. “It was one of the things I recall very vividly,” Chernobyl disasters. “No technology today is foolproof because no human being is not a says Yiu, who, 25 years later, is a respected fool at some time in their lives,” he said, while U of A professor, a pediatric nephrologist at also labelling nuclear weapons as “insane.” Stollery Children’s Hospital and interim dean Though Suzuki was already convinced of the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. Though technology was out of control, U of A students every year is tumultuous in its own way, the in 1986 could scarcely imagine the gadgets class of 1986 graduated during one that was, that would be available to students 25 years perhaps, especially so—it was also the first later. Cellphones and computers still weren’t year that BAs and BScs took four years to commonplace. Yiu had to tote heavy medical complete rather than three. textbooks around in the era before laptops and Early in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger smartphones. “I used to get a lot of shoulder disintegrated just over a minute into its flight, pain from carrying my knapsack around,” she killing its seven-member crew that included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. April brought recalls with a chuckle. However, the advent of personal the worst nuclear power plant accident in computers and technology at one’s fingertips history with the explosion and fire at the was already whispering in the wind. That year, Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the then-Soviet IBM released its first laptop computer, the Union (an event frighteningly re-enacted with PC Convertible ($1,995 US). The high-tech Japan’s recent Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power machine ran on batteries and weighed a lapPlant disaster). As the cloud of radioactive crushing 13 pounds (six kg). fallout spread across Europe, fear spread Closer to home, Alberta’s frenzied oil across the world. It was heightened by the boom of the 1970s was in the middle of a suspicion and distrust many felt toward serious bust; by mid-1986 the world price of Soviet leaders as the Cold War persisted, oil had plummeted below $10 a barrel. The still three years before the beginning of the crisis led to much uncertainty for 1986 grads Fall of Communism. who were looking toward careers in the oil “I remember a lot of anxiety—feeling and gas industry. Jeff Green, ’86 BSc(Eng), anxious and helpless,” says artist Christine counts himself one of the lucky ones. “It was a Koch, ’81 BA, ’86 BFA. Chernobyl, in really rough time to graduate,” recalls Green, particular, stirred up a swell of activism that now vice-president of production operations had been largely dormant. In November 32
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and administration for Perpetual Energy in Calgary. Although in December 1985, before he graduated, he’d been hired by Norcen Energy Resources. “Norcen hired 10 engineers that year and they stuck to their hiring and kept us on, whereas numerous other companies were saying, ‘Here’s a couple thousand bucks, don’t come.’” Green started his job in June 1986 and was only there a few months before layoffs started coming down that fall. “I was very nervous. I actually thought I’d be laid off.” Although Yiu has never faced the prospect of being laid off, she has faced her share of challenges over the last 25 years. When she started her medical career, her specialty— kidney transplants for infants—was really an experiment, she says, adding that patients were sent to Minneapolis for the transplants. “Now, not only do we do it in Edmonton, but the survival rate is really good.” Yiu feels th U of A’s medical curriculum has also improved. In her day, students would memorize every human body part for anatomy class. Today—100 years after the medical school opened—she says instruction is “systems-based.” For example, medical students study the heart and everything to do with the heart, then do the same with lungs and so on. “It’s much better,” she says, “more integrated, because there’s some form of context.” Yiu is looking forward to September’s Alumni Weekend for a chance to reconnect with some of her long-lost classmates, noting that in the era before Facebook or e-mail it was tough to stay in touch with anyone who moved away from Edmonton. “I haven’t seen many of my classmates for 25 years,” she says.