Binghamton University / Research Magazine / 1999

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

1999

Interdisciplinary perspectives spark discovery

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INSIDE RESEARCH

Binghamton University Lois B. DeFleur President, Binghamton University State University of New York John Hachtel Associate Vice President for University Relations M. Stanley Whittingham Vice Provost for Research and Outreach

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Cover President DeFleur Letter Vice Provost for Research Letter

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Updates on new grants, programs and awards

EDITORIAL STAFF

Anita Knopp Doll Editor Susan E. Barker Writer/Editor Evangelos Dousmanis Photographer David Skyrca Designer

Inside Research is published annually as a joint project by the Office of University Relations and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Inside Research, Office of University Relations, State University of New York at Binghamton, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000.

Bulletin of the State University of New York 1999-2000 Volume 52, Number 4 1999 Publication # 886-280 The State University of New York at Binghamton Bulletin is published four times a year in March, June, August and September by the State University of New York at Binghamton, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000. Periodicals postage paid at Binghamton, New York.

State University of New York at Binghamton, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 139026000. 607-777-2000/TTY 777-2628.

The State University of New York at Binghamton is strongly committed to affirmative action. We offer access to services and recruit students and employees without regard to race, color, sex, religion, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or national origin.

www. binghamton. edu

Briefs

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Shifting paradigms Archaeological dig spurs new theories of local prehistory

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Under pressure Research targets role of blood pressure in daily living

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The hormonal connection Oxytocin may be linked to socio-sexual behavior

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Crossing boundaries Interdisciplinary perspectives spark discovery

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On the fly Fly ears provide model for better hearing aid

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Cells on ice Collaboration explores ways to extend tissue viability

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Plant power Tracking the enzymes that make plants tick

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A measure of intelligence Researcher quantifies strengths and limitations of artificial neural networks

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Materials research Research shines a light on mysteries of superconductivity

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New ‘wave’ thinker Geologist challenges theories on mountain making

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Telling ‘her-story’ Historian helps define women’s voice in history

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Blending body and mind Women struggle to gain ground in sports

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Profile Philosopher urges move to public intellectualism On the cover: Magnified image of a MicroElectroMechanical System (MEMS) courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories’ Intelligent Micromachine Initiative: www.mdl.sandia.gov/Micromachine, archaeological artifacts courtesy of the Public Archaeology Facility; photos of the Ormia ochracea fly atop a cricket and the Arabidopsis thaliana plant by Evangelos Dousmanis; hearing aid diagram by Ronald Miles, and cell photos courtesy of Robert VanBuskirk. Cover design: David Skyrca.

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lmost daily we are reminded of how interconnected our world has become. The Internet and other global communication systems are erasing geographical boundaries.

The rapid increase in new knowledge in academic fields is also breaking down many of the traditional borders for faculty and students. Here at Binghamton University, this dynamic is bringing new excitement to our research laboratories.

Engineers and systems scientists are collaborating with biologists and chemists. Anthropologists and economists are considering public health issues. Psychology is increasing its intersections with biology.

I am pleased to share some of these multidisciplinary efforts with you in this issue of Inside Research at Binghamton University. You will learn how a fly ear is inspiring the development of a new kind of hearing aid, how mussels may improve the manufacture of computer chips, and how studies in cryotechnology may speed the development of engineered human tissues for transplants.

I would also like to commend M. Stanley Whittingham for his work in developing our research programs. In August, Stan returned to his position as professor of chemistry and director of the Institute for Materials Research. We welcome Dr. Frances Carr, the former senior science advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, as our new vice provost for research and graduate studies. Dr. Carr also holds an appointment as professor of biological sciences.

I hope you will share our excitement as you read about some of our groundbreaking projects. We appreciate your interest and support of the University.

Lois B. DeFleur President

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his annual report brings to you some of the innovative research and scholarship underway at Binghamton University.

The examples of faculty research span a broad range of interests, from fundamental inquiry to applied projects.

The theme this year is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, an area where the University has shown particular strength. Several departments have received the majority of their external funding for projects beyond their traditional boundaries. It is between the disciplines where many future challenges lie, whether it is the mathematician working on DNA sequencing, the engineer studying how flies hear so as to design better hearing aids, or the chemist and physicist working together on materials problems.

Research continues to become more complex and expensive to perform, and this year the SUNY Research centers working with Cornell University developed a proposal named SMART-NY to move New York state into the 21st century and to allow the state to build its intellectual strength in high technology. This proposal targets four areas for investment: advanced materials, biotechnology, the environment and infrastructure, and information technology. All four are critical to the future economic development of New York state and have also been targeted by the federal government for enhanced research investment. Parts of this initiative will be funded through the newly created New York Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR).

The University is well poised for the new millennium, and is making its largest research investment in new faculty in more than a decade. Recent faculty recruitment resulted in the largest federal awards in Binghamton’s history and the largest ever applications for external funding, a 70 percent increase over 1997-98. This bodes well for the future and for attainment of Research II standing.

The strengths of our research and scholarship build a stronger undergraduate experience. The Research Office thanks all those faculty, staff and students who make Binghamton University an exciting place to teach and perform research.

M. Stanley Whittingham Vice Provost for Research

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BRIEFS DECKER SCHOOL TO OFFER PHD IN NURSING IN FALL

The Decker School of Nursing has begun offering a PhD in nursing with a focus on rural health this fall, following approval earlier this year from the State Education Department.

Dean Mary Collins said the primary focus of the program is to prepare nurse scholars to study the health needs of rural people, design supportive nursing practice models and analyze health care systems.

“Our faculty have built expertise in rural health care,” said Collins. “It is a natural progression for us to move in that direction.

This also gives our faculty the opportunity to continue in areas of research that they’ve already started. But now, they’ll have a cadre of students working by their side.”

Decker also expects to work with Cornell University’s Department of Rural Sociology to provide courses in rural studies.

Graduates are expected to be in great demand as the supply of nurses with doctorates currently falls far short of projected needs. While there are other doctoral programs in nursing (the EdD and DNS) in the state, Binghamton becomes the only school in the public sector to offer a PhD and the only school offering a program in rural nursing.

NIH GRANT HELPS BUILD BRIDGES IN SCIENCE

Binghamton University is working with three community colleges in an effort to increase the number of underrepresented minorities pursuing careers in science.

The University has been awarded a twoyear $322,773 grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund the SUNY Upstate Bridges to the Baccalaureate program to identify and support up to 15 students a year in a science curriculum.

Participating in the program are Monroe Community College in Rochester, Westchester Community College in Valhalla and Rockland Community College in Suffern.

The community colleges are asked to identify and mentor students during their first two years and encourage them to continue their studies at a university.

Binghamton faculty visit each campus in the

fall to talk about their research and science programs. In the spring, interested students are invited to spend two days in Binghamton, where they visit classes and the laboratories of the faculty they met the fall before. In the summer they are invited to participate in a six-week, hands-on summer research experience that will culminate with a poster session.

Students who decide to continue their studies at Binghamton will be asked to take a one-credit course on current issues in science and will receive mentoring and tutorial support from faculty and graduate students in their degree areas. In addition, the program provides some financial support for supplies and equipment.

WRIGHT GRANT TARGETS ATRISK YOUNGSTERS, FAMILIES

Criminologist Kevin Wright is serving as principal investigator for a three-year $1.4 million grant from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services to evaluate effective youth intervention strategies.

The funds will support Youth Connect, a mentoring project designed to prevent or reduce substance abuse WRIGHT among high-risk youth ages 9-15 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The program will provide services to students at two Tulsa middle schools that serve primarily low-income, minority families. Two participant groups will be established for the study: one group will focus intervention only on students, while the second will target youth and their families.

“The objectives of this project are to improve school bonding and academic performance, improve family bonding and functioning, and improve life skills management for these young people,” said Wright.

“As principal investigator, I will monitor a number of areas at the start of the project, including staffing, mentor training and supervision, relationships with school officials, and recruitment of participants

and families as well as volunteer mentors.”

The grant is being administered by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP). Wright is serving as chair of a steering committee that will set policy for 15 CSAP projects nationwide. At the conclusion of the study, Wright will be responsible for evaluating its success.

Wright, a professor of human development in the School of Education and Human Development, has an extensive background in juvenile delinquency and its prevention and strengthening families.

GRANT SUPPORTS RESEARCH ON LARGE VIDEO DISPLAYS

The Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC) has received a $200,000 award from the National Science Foundation for a two-year project to help an Endicott, N. Y., firm develop an innovative process for making large video displays.

The project builds on the research experience of three faculty members and their success in helping small firms. The lead researchers are James Constable, professor of electrical engineering, and Gary Lehmann and James Pitarresi, both associate professors in mechanical engineering.

The IEEC will oversee the project with Rainbow Displays, Inc. (RDI), which is demonstrating how to tile several liquid crystal displays (LCDs) together in what appears to be one large, seamless display.

Such a composite display is far less expensive to produce than a single large display. The world market for large flat panel displays is expected to grow to $60 billion by 2003.

RDI has focused on developing, manufacturing and marketing large flat-panel displays based on its proprietary technology, which is covered by 20 patents. The technology achieves precise tile alignment and optical continuity across the tiles. The composite displays can be used in multimedia, advertising, video conferencing and command control applications. The demand for large displays is also expected to grow for home entertainment systems and computers.

IEEC and RDI researchers will collaborate in two areas: developing a way to bond 4

kudos circuitry to glass panels that can perform reliably in the temperature range developed by large display panels and improving knowledge of how to best place flexible glass over the tile assemblies.

The NSF grant is part of the agency’s Small Firms Collaborative Research and Development program, which supports research likely to enhance the commercialization of promising technology.

SMART-NY TO ENHANCE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The State University of New York and Cornell University have been involved in a planning effort to enhance economic development in New York state through targeted research as part of an initiative named SMART-NY. This long-term initiative would ensure that New York maintains the intellectual infra-

structure to secure federal research grants and attract to the state the high-tech businesses that will be at the core of the 21st century economy. It will provide matching funds for research projects in one of four areas: advanced materials, biotechnology or biomedical research, the environment and infrastructure, and information technology.

The funds, which would be matched by campuses, would support the recruitment and retention of top faculty, graduate students and staff, secure research equipment and facilities, and fulfill the necessary federal matching grant requirements.

Two of the particular goals of the effort are to double both the level of federally funded research and the number of engineering graduates in the state.

The competitive program would be available to Cornell University and to SUNY campuses offering doctoral and engineering programs. The project was proposed by the SUNY Research Advisory Council of the office of Provost Peter Salins. M. Stanley Whittingham, vice provost for research at Binghamton University, served as co-chair of the SUNY Research Advisory Council. (See http://materials.binghamton.edu/smartny.)

Two Harpur College students were named Goldwater Scholars this spring. Juniors David P. Biddle, a math major, and Yevgeniya Kostareva, a double major in chemistry and an Innovational Projects Board Russian studies major, were among 304 students selected for one of the nation’s most prestigious academic science awards.

Named after former U. S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the scholarships recognize college sophomores and juniors who have excelled in science and mathematics.

Biddle is doing research on hyperbolic manifolds, which are negatively curved spaces, and their connection to knot theory.

He did research on this theory last summer at Williams College in Massachusetts. He plans to pursue a PhD in geometry and hyperbolic methods after he graduates in May 2000.

Kostareva, who came to the United States from St. Petersburg, Russia, five years ago, received the scholarship for her research on organometallic radicals, which are reactive unstable compounds that can catalyze various reactions. Aside from her research in chemistry, Kostareva has created her own double major in Russian studies through the Innovational Projects Board.

Chittaranjan Sahay, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The fellow grade is conferred upon a member with at least 10 years active engineering practice who has made significant SAHAY contributions to the field. The 125,000-member ASME International is a worldwide engineering society focused on technical, educational and research issues.

The State University of New York Board of Trustees has named Linda Patia Spear a distinguished professor of psychology in recognition of her pioneering work in the field of developmental pharmacology. Spear, the director of Binghamton’s Center for Developmental Psychobiology, was SPEAR cited in particular for her research on neurotransmitter systems and the benefits of pharmacological probes. Her work focuses on how prenatal drugs such as cocaine and ethanol, along with environmental factors, can influence subsequent behavior and has provided a critical data resource for policy decisions by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Distinguished professorships, which constitute a promotion above that of full professor, are conferred on individuals who have achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within a chosen field.

Francis J. Yammarino, professor of management in the School of Management and associate director of the Center for Leadership Studies, has been elected a fellow of the Society for Industrial YAMMARINO and Organizational Psychology of the American Psychological Society. He was previously awarded fellow status in the American Psychological Society in 1990. Fellowship in both professional societies is limited to about the top 3 percent of their membership.

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Archaeological dig spurs new theories of local prehistory

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for instance, seem to inghamton University show the persistence at archaeologists didn’t this site of a huntingfind the remains of a and-gathering lifestyle wooly mammoth or that other theories Tyrannosaurus rex suggest ended in New when they excavated the York state up to 700 1.5-acre “Broome Tech” site years earlier. between Front Street and NINA VERSAGGI DIRECTS “We’re getting dates Interstate 81 in Binghamton BINGHAMTON’S PUBLIC that don’t reflect what last year. But the implications ARCHAEOLOGY FACILITY the artifacts from other of the dig could be every bit as sites say they should,” Versaggi said. big, figuratively speaking.

According to accepted theory, fishtail Existent theories about prehistoric life points and steatite soapstone bowl fragin the Susquehanna and Chenango river ments found at the Broome Tech site belong valleys are falling by the wayside as the to the Orient phase, which dates, according botanical remains and artifacts found at the to the literature, to about 1300 B.C., site give up their secrets to scientific analyVersaggi said. But five radiocarbon dates sis. established on remains from the Broome “Everything is doing something differTech site range from 900 to 100 B.C., with ent than what we’d expect on this site,” the bulk of the dates clustering at 700 to said Nina Versaggi, director of the 300 B.C. University’s Public Archaeology Facility.

Unless the overarching theories are “But that’s good. It helps us to get on the wrong, which is always a possibility, that cutting edge. It points to the need to start would suggest that people living at this site making our own models and interpretations continued to rely on tools and practices of what prehistoric people were doing given up elsewhere in the state anywhere here.” from 15 to 45 generations earlier.

In the case of the Broome Tech dig, All of which raises lots of questions building an interpretive model of prehisabout how and why this might have been. toric life requires detailed examination and “Part of the clue has to do with botanianalysis of clues as small as corn kernels cal remains,” Versaggi said, “and those are and as diverse as nutshells, arrowheads and very closely tied to these stone bowls, soapstone bowl fragments. And it depends which are made from a material that isn’t heavily not just on this objective evidence, from around here.” but also on subjective interpretations about Versaggi and associates like Timothy everything from dietary needs and cooking Knapp, who headed the University’s 40utensils to trade routes and tree growth. member Broome Tech site team, think the Radiocarbon dates on botanical remains,

quantity of nutshells found might explain why people living here went out of their way to obtain steatite bowls.

Soapstone’s thermal qualities make it ideal for repetitive boiling and cooling, without fear that it will crack, Knapp and Versaggi said. An analysis of the residues found in similar bowls elsewhere in the country suggest that they were often used to cook nuts, a theory validated by the large amount and wide variety of nutshells found at the Broome Tech site.

“It would seem at a time when the deciduous forests were at their peak here, that nuts and the oil they provided were an important part of these people’s diet,” Versaggi said. “But they needed to boil out the tannic acids to make these nuts, which are a huge source of protein and other nutrients, edible.”

Versaggi and Knapp aren’t prepared to hypothesize about what their findings might mean to theories about the rest of the state.

But based on evidence from this and other sites in the Susquehanna River valley, they are prepared to suggest there was something very different going on in this region than has previously been theorized.

“After we got our dates back on this site, we went back in our records and found another site, the Owego Southside Sewer Plant site, that had the same range of radiocarbon dates and artifacts,” Versaggi said.

Versaggi wrote part of the original report on the Owego site in 1982. Afterwards, she was disturbed to see theorists discount what appeared to be valid radiocarbon dates simply because the dates fell outside the range of 6

Shifting paradigms LEFT: MEMBERS OF BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY’S 40-MEMBER ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEAM PROCESS AND CATALOG ARROWHEADS, POTTERY SHERDS AND BOTANICAL REMAINS FROM THE “BROOME TECH” SITE. THE DIG WAS FUNDED BY A CONTRACT WITH THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION. IT WAS CAREFULLY REBURIED THE DAY AFTER THIS PICTURE WAS TAKEN IN THE SUMMER OF 1998 TO ALLOW FOR DEVELOPMENT IN THE AREA.

existent archaeological theory.

“We had these artifacts that didn’t match the dates they were ‘supposed’ to, so everybody told me our dates were wrong,” she said. “So every time they show up in a publication they have an asterisk next to them indicating ‘Bad Date. ’ But I just hadn’t been able to forget that site. It has always bothered me.”

Versaggi thinks the new dates, along with another radiocarbon date from a site behind the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, corroborate the original Owego dates. In addition, she said it won’t be so easy for anyone to discount the body of evidence from the Broome Tech dig.

“In Owego, it was easier to say the sample was contaminated with recent carbon than to look at the possibility that the theory might be wrong,” she said. “But it’s very hard to argue that nutshells are contaminated. And at this site, we radiocarbon dated lots and lots of nutshells.”

Radiocarbon dates on wood samples, she noted, could be tainted by the presence of rootlets from a more recent time period.

And wood samples from the outside of a tree might be much younger than the wood from the inside of the tree. But like other botanical remains such as corn or beans, nuts have such a short lifetime that radiocarbon dates on their shells are presumed to be particularly accurate.

The Broome Tech site is located at the north end of a 16-acre tract where a new Cracker Barrel restaurant opened this spring

and where a 12-screen cinema complex and a motel are under construction.

University archaeologists excavated about 10 percent of the site under consecutive contracts with Newman Brothers Development Group and the New York State Department of Transportation before construction began.

The dig site was originally designated to become part of the parking lot, a plan that would have required builders to scrape down through the top layer to stable soil and then backfill the area with gravel.

That plan would have destroyed the site from an archaeological perspective, Versaggi said.

An 11th-hour plea to spare the site by incorporating it into planned green space resulted from discussions among the archaeologists, local preservationists, developers and Town of Dickinson officials. The commitments secured by Binghamton archaeologists to preserve the site are ultimately as important as these initial findings, Versaggi said.

“In 10 years, we’re going to have methods available that will allow us to get so much more information from this site than we can today,” Versaggi said. “It would have seemed irresponsible to destroy it now. Ten years, 20 years, 50 years from now, they might even be able to find

ABOVE: A MEMBER OF THE EXCAVATING TEAM SIFTS THE SOIL FOR EVIDENCETHATCOULDHELP DETERMINETHESETTLEMENT PATTERNSOFEARLYPEOPLEIN SOUTHERNNEWYORK.ATEAM MEMBER DISPLAYS AN ARROWHEAD RECOVERED AT THE SITE, WHILE DIG DIRECTOR TIMOTHY KNAPP EXAMINES SEVERAL OF THE MORE THAN 70 PIECES OF STEATITE BOWLS FOUND AT THE SITE.

people’s fingerprints or footprints in the soil.”

Knapp and Versaggi still plan to enlist the help of geologists to help them determine the source of steatite found at the site. It probably came from either southern Pennsylvania or southern Connecticut, they said.

“If it was Pennsylvania, then we’re still following the route of the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers, a north-south introduction, a trade route that was ancient and maintained all the way up to centuries later when corn was coming in,” Versaggi said.

All of which could have meaning in the national debate about migration and the origins of the Iroquois people, Versaggi acknowledged.

“But it also means something in terms of what the people here were doing that they were able to trade or get this technology from the people who were practicing agriculture in the Mississippi Valley and the southwest and Mexico.”

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Under pressure Research targets role of blood pressure in daily living

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hile blood pressure may be one of the most commonly known and watched medical symptoms, the correlation between blood pressure and other body functions remains somewhat of a mystery.

That is true in large part because it has been difficult for researchers to precisely connect the occasional blood pressure taken in the doctor’s office with whatever else is happening in a person’s life.

“The reality of blood pressure is that it is changing all the time and can change significantly in seconds,” according to Gary

James, a research professor in the Decker School of Nursing. “In one day, even the most normal blood pressure can range over 50 points. In the doctor’s office we get one blood pressure reading. How representative is that?”

Probably not very, James says.

However, a portable blood pressure machine developed at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City several years ago is helping researchers understand the connection between blood pressure and daily living. It is also the foundation for several research projects James is pursuing that are designed to fill in the blanks on the role of blood pressure to health.

James, who heads Binghamton’s newest research center, the Institute for Primary and Preventive Health, was part of the research team at Weill that worked on the portable monitor and several subsequent research projects. James, who has a doctorate in anthropology, was an associate research professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill before coming to Binghamton.

“Before these devices became available, it was difficult to be sure that a high reading was not just a case of white-coat hypertension—that is a patient whose blood pressure goes up only when he or she is in GARY JAMES, WHO HEADS BINGHAMTON’S NEWEST RESEARCH CENTER, IS WORKING ON SEVERAL PROJECTS AIMED AT DISCOVERING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BLOOD PRESSURE AND SUCH FACTORS AS STRESS AND MENOPAUSE.

the doctor’s office,” James said.

Researchers depended on subjects to describe their stress levels and medical history on questionnaires, which were then compared to the occasional blood pressure readings taken in the doctor’s office.

The portable machines for the first time give researchers a means to directly examine the dynamic biological responses of the body to daily happenings. The body naturally adjusts blood pressure to accommodate its level of activity (running up the stairs as opposed to sitting in front of the television), James said, but it also changes in reaction to stress or other factors.

Subjects are asked to wear a blood pressure cuff for 24 hours and keep a diary of how they are feeling and what they are doing every time their blood pressure is recorded. Readings are taken every 15 minutes during waking hours and every half hour during sleep. The machine also records pulse rates.

James is using the portable monitors for several ongoing studies on the relationship between stress and hypertension and the production of stress hormones.

The device will also be key in a collaborative study James is planning with Professor Lynnette Leidy of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on the relationship of blood pressure to menopausal symptoms.

Such information could lead to more effective estrogen replacement therapy or treatment of hypertension, James said.

The two researchers are seeking a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services for a study to correlate menopausal symptoms with blood pressure among women in a rural county in upstate New York.

Ten years ago, Leidy gathered the menstrual and reproductive histories, health8

THE PORTABLE BLOOD PRESSURE MACHINES, WHICH JAMES HELPED DEVELOP AT THE WEILL MEDICAL COLLEGE OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK CITY, ALLOW RESEARCHERS TO MONITOR BLOOD PRESSURE OVER 24 HOURS.

related behaviors and menstrual and menopausal symptoms of some 376 women ages 39 to 82 in Greene County in the Hudson Valley. In this follow-up study, which will be done in two phases, the women will be asked to wear blood pressure monitors and keep diaries for 24 hours.

The first assessment will look at whether menopausal symptoms help predict a rise in blood pressure or the development of hypertension over the 10 years. The second study, which will be done two years later, will focus on the shorter term effect of menopausal symptoms on daily blood pressure variation, particularly that from day to night.

Blood pressure normally “dips” at night when a person is sleeping, James said, but in some people that doesn’t occur. People whose blood pressure doesn’t dip are considered at risk for left ventricular hypertrophy or an enlargement of the chamber that expels blood from the heart, which would ultimately lead to bigger problems.

James said the study will also look for a correlation between such menopausal symptoms as hot flashes and night sweats and blood pressure.

James is currently involved in three other research projects that are funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the American Heart Association.

At Weill, James directed two NIH-sponsored studies that investigated the bloodpressure effects of changing daily stress

levels in urban clerical workers.

The studies were prompted by the results of a NIH study of working women in Framingham, Massachusetts, in the 1980s that found that married clerical workers with children had especially high rates of heart disease.

In the Cornell studies, some 250 secretaries and technical workers at the Medical Center were recruited to wear the portable blood pressure monitors for 24 hours.

Among the surprising findings was a direct correlation between the blood pressure level at home and the number of children a woman had.

The research garnered national attention in the popular press with media as diverse as the New York Times Magazine and Mademoiselle writing lengthy articles about the findings.

James said that the research group at Cornell’s Weill College of Medicine is expanding its studies to compare blood pressures among differing ethnic groups in the urban setting. James plans to develop similar studies in rural groups.

“Almost every study that has examined the daily stress response of working women has been conducted on urban groups,” James said. “With the Decker School’s emphasis on rural health, this is a good place to develop stress research in non-urban settings.”

James is also collaborating with researchers in the Biobehavioral Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in a study correlating stress and breast cancer.

That study compares immune function and the stress-related variation of blood pressure and the “fight or flight” hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine in women with and without a family history of breast cancer.

In a third study, James is working with researchers at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, in an effort to understand how stress affects ambulatory blood pressures in Japanese Americans.

Binghamton University’s newest research center seeks to foster interdisciplinary approaches to health care

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lthough based at the Decker School of Nursing, the Institute for Primary and Preventive

Health draws on biological sciences, anthropology and psychology, as well as the local medical community.

The institute is headed by Gary James, formerly an associate research professor of physiology and biophysics at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. James, who has a doctorate in anthropology from Pennsylvania State University, studies the relationship between stress and hypertension and the production of stress hormones. He has also done extensive research on the effect of cultural variation and change on cardiovascular health.

“He brings to this campus a strong record of research on important health topics,” said Provost Mary Ann Swain. “His previous experiences in interdisciplinary research teams made him an especially attractive candidate for this position.”

Biomedical and health systems are one of the four areas identified by the SUNY University Centers and Cornell University as critical to the development of New York state for the 21st century.

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The hormonal connection Oxytocin may be linked to socio-sexual behavior

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upid’s arrows just might be dipped in it, and Love Potion #9 could be nothing more than a brand-name gimmick.

In fact, if it isn’t the master key that unlocks the heart to love, the neuropeptide oxytocin is at least a crucial part of the combination, neuroscientists seem to agree.

But a Binghamton researcher’s work is suggesting that oxytocin, sometimes known as the “cuddle hormone” because of its influence on maternal behavior and pair bonding, may be tied to such pressing sociosexual problems as eating disorders, pedophilia, and child abuse and neglect.

“These are all speculation,” cautions Diane Witt, assistant professor of psychology. “All we know at this point is that in animal models, including non-human primates, oxytocin at the level of the brain plays a role in the expression of maternal, sexual, social, stress and feeding behaviors, as well as learning and memory.”

“THE BRAIN AFFECTS BEHAVIOR, BUT BEHAVIOR ALSO AFFECTS THE BRAIN.” Until 10 years ago, it wasn’t even known that the brain contained oxytocin receptors. These receptors mediate these numerous behavioral responses, Witt and others have shown.

Although oxytocin is produced in both males and females and receptors for it are found all over the brains and reproductive systems of both sexes, the name oxytocin is derived originally from the Greek for “swift birth.” That’s fitting given that a synthetic form of the substance is currently administered to about 75 percent of all women entering labor and delivery rooms in the United States to induce or speed their labor, Witt said.

Witt doesn’t want to make broad-brush criticisms of this practice until the basic research is completed. But she does count herself among “the increasing number of researchers who are leading the crusade to think twice before putting an oxytocin line in,” she said.

Among other things, oxytocin, which is produced naturally in the hypothalamus in the brain, stimulates uterine contractions and allows the breasts to “let down” milk in pregnant and lactating women.

The hormone is naturally released in response to a variety of environmental stimuli including nipple stimulation in lactating women, uterine or cervical stimulation during sex, or as the result of a baby moving down the birth canal.

In China, which enjoys a far lower birthrelated morbidity rate than the United States, cool showers, which would stimulate the nipples and cause the brain to release its own oxytocin, are advised when labor needs a boost. In the United States, too, midwives have long known the benefits of applying ice to the nipples of women whose labor is stalled, Witt said.

These natural means of releasing oxytocin have several advantages over intravenous injections of the hormone, Witt said.

First, you avoid the risk of an overdose, which can cause the uterus to contract so severely that the baby cannot be delivered normally.

“Birth does not progress with a tonically contracted uterus,” Witt said, “so with excessive amounts of oxytocin, you can actually make the immediate situation worse.”

But of possibly greater concern, Witt said, is this simple fact: Until researchers are able to more accurately establish how and where oxytocin affects the brain—and, ultimately, human behavior—short-term oxytocin therapy could be having long-term unknown consequences for mothers, their children and society at large.

“In order to understand a pathology, you first have to understand what the normal

condition is,” Witt said. “We’ve just begun studying the normal condition and have found, for instance, that oxytocin plays a key role in bonding, even in species that are known to be anti-social.”

Oxytocin is a pro-social hormone that affects the brain as a result of its interactions with gonadal steroids like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone and corticosterone.

“The brain affects behavior, but behavior also affects the brain,” Witt said. “The brain is very plastic and these gonadal steroids provide a certain milieu in which other chemicals, like oxytocin, can affect the brain.”

Animal studies, from Witt’s lab and others, have shown that oxytocin can have dramatic effects on behavior. When the natural release of oxytocin is blocked, for instance, mothers— from sheep to rats—reject their own young. Meanwhile, virgin female rats injected with oxytocin fawn over another female’s young, nuzzling the pups and protecting them as if they were their own.

In addition, studies show that oxytocin in females, as well as the closely related vasopressin in males, is key to pair bonding.

“Cosmopolitan once described sexual attraction this way: ‘You first meet him and he’s passable,’” Witt said. “The second time you go out with him, he’s OK. The third time you go out with him, you have sex. And from that point on you can’t imagine what life would be like without him.

“What’s behind it?” she added. “It could be oxytocin.”

Since the release of oxytocin can be classically conditioned, after repeatedly having sex with the same partner, just seeing that partner could release more oxytocin, making you want to be with that person all the more, and you bond, she said.

But just as oxytocin is linked to the positive aspects of bonding, Witt thinks there’s 10

every reason to suspect that pathological conditions—situations in which bonding breaks down or is established inappropriately—might well be linked to oxytocin, too.

“If there is a pathological condition— that is, if there is too much oxytocin or a heightened sensitivity to oxytocin—there could be inappropriate pair bonding such as pedophilia,” she said.

Conversely, too little oxytocin or a reduced sensitivity to it could also be one of several factors in maternal child abuse or neglect, Witt said.

Stripped of the buffer afforded by

“mother love,” mothers could be indifferent to their children or could quickly come to see their children as burdensome or worse.

So how does this relate to the use of oxytocin in delivery rooms?

“If we are altering the normal system, that affords the opportunity for a pathology to occur,” Witt said. “And it’s not just the mother being exposed to it, but the baby, in whom it could later show up as problems.”

“Of course,” she added, “it could work the opposite way. It could make things better. We just don’t know at this point.”

What Witt does know is that when the brain is exposed to overdoses of chemicals like oxytocin or other neurotransmitters, the numbers of

available brain receptors for that chemical decrease while the sensitivity of remaining receptors may increase.

That kind of see-sawing makes it all the more difficult for researchers to gauge what’s really going on. Neuroscientists such as Witt track excitatory and inhibitory responses by scanning brain tissue for the appearance of immediate early genes (IEGs), which are markers of neuronal activity.

By figuring out what areas in the brain IEGs are “lighting up,” researchers can begin to determine what brain regions are regulating behaviors that might be affected by specific chemicals.

Witt, who recently finished working with a one-year $40,000 National Institutes of Health grant, is particularly interested in how progesterone and oxytocin interact or “talk to one another in specific brain regions.”

RESEARCHER DIANE WITT IS FINDING A POSSIBLE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE BODY’S PRODUCTION OF THE HORMONE OXYTOCIN AND SUCH BEHAVIORS AS EATING DISORDERS, PEDOPHILIA AND CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT.

Progesterone treatment needs further exploration The relatively accepted use of progesterone to curb the libido of felony

sex offenders might, over the long haul, actually produce the opposite effect, according to recent findings by Binghamton University neuroscientist Diane Witt.

Progesterone, a steroid hormone long recognized for its role in female reproduction, appears also to influence the socio-sexual behaviors of males.

It works in two different ways.

Acting as a “classical steroid,” progesterone diffuses through the cell membrane into the cytoplasm where a hormone receptor complex is formed.

The hormone receptor complex then goes into the nucleus of the cell and alters the DNA. Behavioral changes induced by progesterone, as a result of this classical process, might not be seen for days, Witt said.

In the past five to seven years, however, researchers have also discovered that hormones work through plasma membrane receptors, which effectively eliminate the need for diffusion into the cytoplasm and formation of hormone receptor complexes by using other, faster messengers to affect changes in the DNA. When progesterone affects the brain in this way, it produces observable changes within seconds to minutes, Witt said.

In her studies with laboratory rats, she used a technique that allowed her to pre-determine the way progesterone would operate in the rats. She found that progesterone binding to plasma membrane receptors immediately de-

creased the number of males showing sex, but, hours or days later, progesterone acting as a classical steroid increased the number of males showing sex.

“The initial response is to turn the sex off, but later it may actually increase sex,” Witt said.

What does that mean for progesterone therapy for felony sex offenders?

“I think we need to re-evaluate the therapy more closely to understand the role of progesterone in males,” Witt said.

Witt’s research also seems likely to help debunk the myth that testosterone is the key to male sex behavior.

By looking at what she terms the “dud or stud” phenomenon in male laboratory animals, Witt has found that some animals in the natural population don’t reproduce. Those animals don’t lack testosterone, but are instead proving insensitive to progesterone, the hormone linked to the social behaviors that precede mating, she said.

“If their progesterone system is not working, they can have all the testosterone in the world, but they’re not going to show the social behavior that leads to sex,” Witt said, extracting from the research done in animals. “And there’s no way that sex is going to happen if you don’t first act social to the female.”

11

crossing boundaries

Interdisciplinary perspectives spark discovery

ENGINEER RON MILES HAS DRAWN INSPIRATION FOR THE DESIGN OF A MORE EFFECTIVE HEARING AID FROM THE MICROSCOPIC HEARING STRUCTURE FOUND IN THE EARS OF A COMMON FLY. BINGHAMTON BIOLOGISTS, CHEMISTS AND PHYSICISTS ARE COLLABORATING WITH ENGINEERS TO UNLOCK THE SECRETS OF THE ADHESIVE PRODUCED BY THE LOWLY MUSSEL FOR USE IN HIGH-TECH CIRCUIT BOARDS.

MATH PROFESSOR THOMAS HEAD HAS TURNED TO BIOLOGIST SUSANNAH GAL TO LEARN ABOUT PLANT GENETICS WITH HOPES OF IMPROVING HIS UNDERSTANDING OF DNA SEQUENCING FOR HIS RESEARCH ON BIOMOLECULAR COMPUTATION.

A

t Binghamton University, as elsewhere in the research world, disciplinary walls are tumbling down.

With a force like the legendary blast from Joshua’s trumpet, information technology, funding priorities and the explosion in knowledge are joining to herald one compelling message: Researchers must forsake the constraints of traditional disciplinary camps for the higher ground of collaborative approaches to problem solving.

“A century ago,” notes Binghamton’s Vice Provost for Research M. Stanley Whittingham, “the limited scope of human knowledge made it possible for a scientist to master biology, chemistry, physics and technology.

“Today, with the scope of human knowledge doubling every 10 to 20 years, it’s impossible for one person to have that kind of command over all of these areas. You’d have

to pull together a team of experts to attain such broad-based mastery.”

While some older, larger and betterequipped schools struggle to keep up with the trend toward multidisciplinary research, such interdisciplinary study has long been encouraged and practiced at Binghamton University, according to Provost Mary Ann Swain.

“One of Binghamton’s advantages is that it’s small enough for faculty to work together easily,” Swain said.

“Not only is it easier for members of our small faculty to know each other across departmental boundaries,” echoed Whittingham, “but because our resources have always been more limited than those of larger schools, where departments have been able to build self-sufficient empires, faculty here are used to maximizing re12

sources by sharing across the disciplines.”

National Science Foundation spokesperson William Noxon agrees that smaller schools appear to have an advantage in encouraging such collaborations.

“Multidisciplinary projects seem to come together a lot more easily at small schools like Binghamton,” he said. “At larger institutions it can be a logistical problem just getting people together.”

Still, what’s been happening in Binghamton is a trend that is being encouraged and funded.

“I don’t have the facts or figures at my fingertips, but I can tell you anecdotally that the NSF is funding more and more multidisciplinary proposals,” Noxon said.

Noxon, like Whittingham, said the sophisticated nature of today’s issues requires a team approach. The most exciting problems no longer lend themselves to the narrowly focused approach of any single discipline, they said.

Examples of multidisciplinary collaborations on Binghamton’s campus are plentiful, mixing basic research with applied science and ranging from anthropology and biology to math and materials science.

Take for example the work being done by a Binghamton team that draws on biology, chemistry, physics and engineering.

Electrical engineering professor Hari Srihari last year recruited chemist Wayne Jones and biologist R. Stimson Wilcox to help him look for new and improved adhesives for bonding chips to printed circuit boards. Srihari is the head of the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science’s team for research in electronics manufacturing. The team is supported in part by the University’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Consortium.

Engineers, like Srihari, who are looking for a different perspective on systems science, quite naturally turn to biologists, like Wilcox, who study life systems, Jones said.

The focus of Wilcox’s attention is the mussel, a common mollusk, and its ability to attach itself to piers, rocks and other shells. Mussel adhesive protein, which is commercially distributed by a Swedish company, is one of the most effective biological adhesives. It will adhere to everything including Teflon, glass, graphite and human and animal tissues and is already used in surgical applications because it is also non-toxic.

Wilcox said studying it could lead to new and more effective ways of bonding chips to circuit boards, particularly given its peculiar and as yet mysterious ability to bond even underwater and through layers of detritus.

Jones is researching the molecular architecture of the adhesive, while Wilcox is setting up a marine tank in his laboratory to observe a population of mussels. With help from James Pittarresi, a Watson School engineer, he hopes to measure their glue disks for strength and conductivity.

While chemists look at the system from the molecular level, physicists, like Eric Cotts, who is working with Srihari to explore ways of improving circuit board assembly processes, can provide perspectives on the most basic laws that influence such systems.

“Anytime you get faculty in a room talking, something good can come of it,” said Jones. “From completely different disciplines, overlapping interests fall out.”

While most collaborations have grown out of informal interactions and connections, and many faculty members point to the importance of personalities and work styles in forming these partnerships, administrators and faculty members also recognize the need for more formal mechanisms to encourage interaction.

“We try to foster the conversations that will generate the research,” said Provost Mary Ann Swain.

“Some of the most critical issues of our times—

health, environment, poverty, urban and rural problems—all are major issues that are best addressed by more than one discipline.”

Last spring, John Fillo, associate dean of the Watson School, invited faculty from biology, physics and chemistry to meet with engineering faculty to explore possible collaborations. A similar meeting is planned this fall.

The University is currently seeking a $2.6 million NSF grant to support interdisciplinary work by graduate students in such areas as anthropology, biology and nursing.

Area studies departments in Asia, Africa and the Middle East also encourage crossdisciplinary approaches, Swain said.

Perhaps the most effective means of supporting multidisciplinary research at Binghamton is through the University’s 15 research centers, said Whittingham. The centers have proven effective in attracting grant money, graduate students and international scholars, he said.

While many faculty have embraced the approach, there is still resistance, Swain acknowledged.

“There are those who are excited about an interdisciplinary approach and actively support it,” Swain said. “Others fear that they might lose strength in their discipline.

What we have to arrive at is an amalgam.

We have to arrive at a balance and mixture of both. This is not an either-or proposition.”

The interrelation between graduate education and research is one of the biggest challenges to interdisciplinary research, Swain said. “To the extent that traditional research is much more discipline directed, the University has an obligation to ensure that our graduate students look enough like traditional members of their disciplines so that they will be competitive in a still relatively tight job market,” Swain said. “At the same time, the best and brightest graduate students tend to be attracted to these interdisciplinary initiatives.”

Whittingham said the key is to maintain distinct and traditional academic disciplines, without allowing those disciplines to limit research initiatives that combine them in new and productive ways.

NSF’s Noxon agreed.

“I don’t know what the next decade will bring,” he said. “But there seems little doubt that we will be seeing major breakthroughs in all quarters as a result of this trend.”

13

ON THE FLY

a warm southern night, a cricket chirps and attracts not the mate it was seeking but the deadly attention of the parasitoid fly, Ormia ochracea.

The fly’s reproductive cycle demands that it deposit its larvae on or near a live cricket, and evolution has afforded the night-flying Ormia specialized equipment to home in on the hapless host insect by sound alone. Unlike most flies, which rely on sensor hairs on their legs and can “hear” only low frequencies, Ormia has ears on its chest that have actual eardrums. The ears are connected by a tiny mechanical structure that uses two resonant modes of vibration to provide the insect with directional, high-frequency hearing.

Flying through the darkness with uncanny accuracy, Ormia lands on the cricket and deposits her larvae.

The larvae burrow into the host and begin devouring it from the inside out.

Later, the larvae abandon the cricket’s desiccated exoskeleton to pupate.

Binghamton University Professor Ronald Miles is hoping a tiny mechanical structure that allows the parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea to locate its victims with unerring and deadly accuracy may soon prove equally beneficial to the millions of Americans who suffer from hearing loss.

Miles and associate researchers from Cornell University are developing a directional microphone for hearing aids that is smaller and more effective than anything currently available. With support from a $1.1 million grant, the team is basing its design on the unique structure found in the

THEJUXTAPOSITIONOFTHEORMIAOCHRACEAFLYONTHEBACKOFACRICKETAMIDSEVERALHEARINGAIDSGIVESASENSE OFSCALETOENGINEERRONALDMILES’ RESEARCH. MILES IS ATTEMPTING TO MIMIC THE MECHANICAL STRUCTURE OF THE FLY’S AUDITORY SYSTEM IN HIS DESIGN OF WHAT WILL BE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST DIRECTIONAL MICROPHONE. THE MICROPHONE WILL BE USED IN A HEARING AID THAT CAN BE WORN INSIDE THE EAR AND ALLOW USERS TO DETERMINE THE DIRECTION OF SOUND.

auditory system of a fly that is native to the southern United States and Central America.

The structure, known as the intertympanal bridge, makes it possible for the fly to localize sounds even though its ears are very close together. Localizing sounds is a special challenge for small animals like Ormia, which is the size of the common housefly. To be able to localize sounds, small animals must be able to discern and process minute differences in signals that arrive almost simultaneously in ears that are of necessity very close together.

The challenge might be easiest to appreciate by thinking about how humans tell where sounds are coming from. When there is a question about the source of a sound, most people have a tendency to cock or turn their heads in an attempt to exaggerate and weigh the difference in signals reaching one ear over the other. Even aided by this behavioral adaptation, higher vertebrates rely on sophisticated neural processing to determine the origins of sounds.

For Ormia, whose eardrums are located less than 100 microns apart on its chest, turning its head to discern minute differ14

ences in signals would be nonproductive. And sophisticated neural processing is out of the question. Instead, such discernment is made possible by the intertympanal bridge, which links the insects’ ears and provides a sort of mechanical pre-processing that reduces the processing requirements on the central nervous system.

The horizontal bridge is designed so that it can rock back and forth across a

These uncoupled resonant modes make it possible for the combined movements to “add” on one side and “cancel” on the other. This causes the two ears to have significantly different responses to sound, helping the fly to recognize where sounds are coming from.

The responses of the uncoupled resonant modes are analogous to an electronic circuit for recording stereophonic sound.

This type of circuit allows two non-

people have about hearing aids is that they typically do nothing to help the user distinguish speech, which generally comes from in front of the user, from the ambient noise coming from everywhere around the user, Miles said.

The new microphone will be sensitive to speech range frequencies from 400 hertz to 4 kilohertz and allow a 20-decibel attenuation of sounds that come from behind the wearer, which should make a “substantial” improvement in speech intelligibility, Miles said.

A 20decibel difference is approximately the difference between a whisper and a normal speaking voice.

The smallest directional microphone now available is about the size of a pencil eraser. While that might seem small, it is too large to allow the use of directional microphones in the cosmetically preferable inthe-ear hearing aids, Miles said.

Instead, users must wear bulky behind-the-ear hearing aids if they need directional microphones.

The new microphone, which is expected to be about one-third that size—or only about 2 millimeters across—ought to fit easily in an inthe-ear package, he added.

Miles and his team expect to design and develop a prototype microphone over the next three years. With Miles providing the design work, the prototypes will be produced at the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell using microelectromechanical technology (MEMS). Sandia National Laboratories, home of the world’s most extensive MEMS fabrication facility, will ready the product for commercial production in what promises to be a ground-breaking hearing aid.

In less than five years, in-the-ear hearing aids with directional capabilities should be commonly available, Miles said.

As a vibrations specialist, Miles said he is intrigued by basic research questions.

But, ultimately, as an engineer, he is compelled to look for practical ways to use the findings of basic science. By working on consecutive projects to study Ormia’s auditory system and then to put that knowledge to practical use, Miles said he’s enjoying the best of both worlds.

Fly ears provide model for better hearing aid pivot like a teeter-totter or, like a hinged teeter-totter, simultaneously rock back and forth and independently flap up and down on either side of the pivot in response to vibrations excited from a sound wave on the fly’s eardrums.

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT DEGREES OF HEARING LOSS? With mild hearing loss, in the 26-45 decibel (dB) range, one-on-one conversations are audible if the listener can see the speaker’s face and is standing at close range.

With a moderate hearing loss, in the 45-65 dB range, detecting conversational levels of speech through background noise is extremely difficult. Hearing and understanding conversational levels is difficult even in quiet backgrounds.

With a severe hearing loss, in the 66-85 dB range, hearing is difficult in all situations.

Those with profound hearing loss, beyond 85 dB, may not register even the loudest speech or environmental noises.

WHAT IS A DECIBEL? A decibel is a logarithmic expression used to express power ratios and is an important unit of measurement for indicating power level and pulse compression. A decibel is one-tenth of a bel. It is equal to the smallest degree of difference of loudness ordinarily detectable by the human ear.

HOW LOUD ARE THESE SOUNDS? Movie theater: 87 dB Living room band practice: 116 dB Jackhammer: 130 dB Gunshot: 140 dB Jet takeoff: 150 dB

directional microphones—in this case the tympanic membranes or eardrums of the fly— to construct a small directional receiver.

The intertympanal bridge was recently discovered and studied by Miles, Ronald Hoy of Cornell University’s Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and biologist Daniel Robert of the University of Zurich, who collaborated on a three-year project funded by a $340,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore Ormia’s auditory system.

Although scientists had been aware of Ormia’s ability to localize sound since the 1960s, Robert didn’t discover until 1992 where Ormia’s ears are, and the NSF project then answered a basic scientific question about how Ormia’s auditory system can determine the direction of sound.

The new $1.1 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health will allow Miles and a new team to take that basic science and put it to practical use in a way that will improve the quality of life for many. For this project, Miles is working with Cornell University, Sandia National Laboratories and a private sector enterprise—JVD Inc. More than 28 million Americans or about 10 percent of the population are afflicted with hearing loss. As babyboomers head into their senior years, the Better Hearing Institute in Washington D.C. predicts that the number of people with hearing and speech impairments will increase at a faster rate than the total U.S. population through the year 2050.

One of the biggest complaints most

15

Cells on Ice Collaboration explores ways to extend tissue viability B

inghamton University biology professors John Baust and Robert VanBuskirk had no way of knowing as they walked across campus one day three years ago that their conversation was about to take a turn that would forever change the direction of their professional lives.

They couldn’t have foreseen either that

burn victims and organ transplant candidates might soon be looking at exponential improvements in the quality of their lives and their medical care as a result of that talk.

But, with the benefit of hindsight, Baust and VanBuskirk agree that the foundation for their extraordinarily successful and productive interdisciplinary collaboration—a partnership that culminated this year in the creation of Binghamton University’s first incubator company, BioLife Technologies, Inc.—was laid during that walk.

Baust and VanBuskirk share a strong commitment to applied biology—that is, to addressing biological problems rather than describing them—but the two are from distinctly different fields. Baust is a cryobiologist whose work focuses on how life systems are affected by low temperatures.

VanBuskirk is a molecular cell biologist, whose specific area of interest is engineered human tissues.

“We have very different backgrounds and expertise,” Baust said. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be nearly as productive as we are.”

At most other universities, faculty working in specialized disciplines like cryobiol-

ogy and molecular cell biology would be affiliated with different departments that would probably be housed in separate buildings, Baust said.

But at Binghamton, where all biologists are members of the same department, and Baust and Van Buskirk have offices at separate ends of the same hall, making a connection was fairly easy. In fact, the conversation that brought the two together, first as research partners and more recently as business partners, took place almost as a matter of course.

As they walked that day from an on-campus seminar back to their offices in the Science III building, Baust casually mentioned that a doctor using a new cryosurgical technique Baust developed for the treatment of prostate cancer had reported back an interesting and unexplained bit of information.

As a rule, the men being treated with Baust’s cryosurgery technique were requiring only 10 percent as much radiation during their follow-up care as those being treated with conventional surgical techniques.

Cryosurgery involves the application of freezing temperatures as a means of eliminating unwanted growths, malignant or benign, in body tissues. Though the technique has been commonly used to remove warts and other external growths for years, only recent technological advances and the pairing of cryosurgery with ultrasound imaging have made it practical to treat internal conditions like cataracts and liver and prostate cancers.

Listening to Baust talk about his conversation with the doctor, VanBuskirk’s pulse and interest perceptibly quickened. He recalled later that he felt certain that the anomaly was somehow related to his own research in the area of gene-activated cell death.

Cells, VanBuskirk noted, die in two ways: murder or suicide—or in scientific terms, necrosis or apoptosis. In other words, cells die as a result of external forces or they die as a result of a “suicide” process activated by their own genes. As later research confirmed, cells directly exposed to freezing temperatures die by necrosis or “murder.”

But cells peripherally exposed to the extremely low temperatures often “commit suicide,” or die by apoptosis, leaving, as in the case of the prostate patients, lesser need for “hired assassins” like radiation.

Since their first energizing connection, VanBuskirk and Baust have been seriously

Two Binghamton University professors will play a key role in a newly established biotech incubator that is exploring new methods to extend the length of time human cells, tissues and organs can be preserved.

Biology professors John Baust and Robert VanBuskirk initiated and will manage BioLife Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Cryomedical Sciences, Inc. (CMSI), of Rockville, Maryland. The two have developed technology that promises to extend the window for organ transplantation, accelerate the growth of the tissue-engineering field, improve patient outcome following openheart surgery and, in the distant future, reduce mortality associated with trauma.

The incubator expects to collaborate with a consortia of commercial and academic institutions and eventually the organ transplant field.

The incubator, a first for Binghamton, has benefits for faculty and students, according to Provost Mary Ann Swain.

“This incubator in biology will enable Binghamton to build upon its academic 16

exploring many issues, including the role apoptosis plays in the storage and ultimately in the management and availability of donor organs. Such organs are routinely harvested from donors and then kept “on ice” at very low temperatures until they are used or discarded.

In fact, while about a dozen or more people die each day waiting for organ transplants, 20 to 40 percent of certain healthy donor organs end up being discarded because transporting them in a timely manner is such a problem, Baust said.

Most donor organs remain viable for less

BIOLOGY PROFESSORS JOHN BAUST AND ROBERT VANBUSKIRK BRING BACKGROUNDS IN CRYOBIOLOGY AND MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGY TO THEIR COLLABORATION IN BIOLIFE TECHNOLOGIES, THE UNIVERSITY’S FIRST INCUBATOR. THE TWO ARE SEEKING WAYS TO EXTEND THE LENGTH OF TIME HUMAN CELLS, TISSUES AND ORGANS REMAIN VIABLE FOR TRANSPLANTS.

strengths,” she said. “Through this faculty initiative, we will both advance research and development for the biotechnology industry and also offer additional significant educational opportunities for our students.”

Baust said another very important goal of the effort is to grow the incubator beyond a single company. “The University and BioLife will work to extend this first step into a significant, regional biotechnology industry,” he said.

than a day. Hearts, for instance, have a life of just a few hours, in part because of apoptosis, VanBuskirk said.

“It’s as if, when organs are stored so long at 4 degrees centigrade, the cells get so unhappy that they say, ‘It’s not worth it any longer,’ and initiate gene-activated cell death,” he added.

How and why the cells in donor organs die is important information to have because it will help researchers understand how to prevent cell death and extend the life of organs. That’s an accomplishment that would immediately improve the lives of hundreds and thousands of transplant candidates, Baust said.

“Today most transplant recipients have to move to the city in which they will receive their transplant,” he said.

“They have to have a pager on at all times and be no more than 45 minutes from the hospital at any given point in their life, which is pretty tough to do for one, two and three years while waiting for an organ.”

Within five to 10 years, “neo-organs” or artificial human organs made entirely in the laboratory will also likely be commonly available to expand the options and enhance the lives of people in need of organ transplants, VanBuskirk said.

He should know. His first claim to fame came in the early 1990s when he co-developed an artificial human skin or, as scientists prefer to call it, engineered human epidermis. Though not designed for clinical application, VanBuskirk’s skin is commonly used by major U.S. cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies for product safety testing.

But his interest in engineered human tissues didn’t stop there. He continues to work in engineered human tissues research and notes that the expansion in his field will only increase the demand for new and more effective storage solutions and cryopreservation technologies, which is Baust’s area of expertise.

“Tissue engineering in the last two years has become a discipline in its own right,” said Van Buskirk. “The question now becomes how will we ship or store these tissues. It’s not like ordering a pair of shorts

from L. L. Bean, where it doesn’t matter whether it takes two days or a week to get there.”

By collaborating, Baust and VanBuskirk have each made major strides in their own research, as well as seeing advances in their combined effort to find and develop new ways to control cell death and to improve the shelf-life of engineered human tissues and transplant organs.

“Before I met John,” VanBuskirk says of the synergy between them, “my productivity rate, which is based on the number of grants applied for, number of grants funded, publications, typical academia kind of things, was ‘x,’ and John’s was ‘y. ’ “Together you might think we end up with a productivity rate of x + y. But we actually end up closer to 3x + 5y. We’ve sent out $18 million worth of grant applications in the last year alone. And while just three have been approved so far, none has been rejected.”

A single BioLife Technologies, Inc. grant application currently under consideration by the Department of Commerce could mean $13 million to the new company and the University.

While Baust and VanBuskirk are committed to expanding opportunities for their students and the University, an even more basic goal is to use biotechnology to improve human life, they said.

“Our goal is to move technology to the point where tissues and organs can be stored for many days to many weeks,” VanBuskirk said. “The solutions we have been developing are already better than anything currently on the market.”

BioLife Technologies, Inc. already has solutions that increase by two- to threefold the maximum storage time for many human tissues, Baust added.

“The viability of hearts is extended from two hours to almost a day with our solution,” he said. “We can store human skin for a week, in a state of near-suspended animation, instead of for just a day.”

Both men see their success as only a hint of things still to come from their research and their partnership.

Of all the things they have learned from working together, the clearest thing, Baust said, might be this: “When the seeds of cooperation are sown with people of different disciplines, you can move a heck of a lot faster than you can working alone.”

17

Plant Power Tracking the enzymes that make plants tick zymes called proteases (pronounced protea-aces) affect plant development. She is specifically interested in three of the 10 enzymes that make up the class known as aspartic proteases, like the HIV-1 protease.

Proteases generally act on proteins in one of two ways. Proteins “do the work” in all living organisms, and proteases either help cells break down or transform proteins that are no longer needed, or they stimulate precursors or immature forms of protein to mature into a usable form. Gal’s research seeks to establish the link between specific aspartic proteases and their effects.

“As a plant grows,” Gal noted, “it has to change what it can do. It changes from making leaves to making flowers, for instance, and both of these processes involve proteins.”

Since these processes probably involve different proteins, if the plant is growing and making leaves and suddenly has to switch to making The National Science Foundation’s Faculty flowers, it’s got to get rid of the leaf proEarly Career Development program supports teins and produce flower-making projunior faculty and emphasizes the importance teins, Gal said.

The plant has to of “academic careers dedicated to stimulathave the proper proteases to accoming the discovery process in which the explish either of these feats, she added. citement of research is enhanced by inspired While most research in this area teaching and enthusiastic learning,” accordhas been carried out in the test tube, Gal’s ing to an NSF program summary. experiments are designed to allow her to observe the effect The program supports the NSF mission to of aspartic proteases within living plants. sustain and strengthen the nation’s science, Gal said the major benefit of her apmathematics and engineering capabilities proach is that it allows the plant to and to promote the use of those capabilities “tell us what the protease does,” while in service to society. test tube experif Susannah Gal’s main research interest was the subject of a game of 20 Questions, the answer to the first question—animal, vegetable or mineral?—would be an emphatic “vegetable.”

Gal is a Binghamton University plant biologist and one of three National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award winners teaching and conducting research on the University’s sprawling 606acre campus in upstate New York.

Her $438,000, five-year NSF grant is supporting research that could lead to significant advancements in worldwide agribusiness and health care by providing important insights into how genetics and biochemistry can lead to better, stronger plants.

A basic researcher, Gal is attempting to discover how the naturally occurring en-

I

NSF

ments require researchers to tell the plant what they think the protease does.

Over the next few years, Gal hopes her research will improve scientists’ ability to understand and fine tune so-called “designer seeds,” which result from plants that are genetically altered to suit a variety of purposes.

Plants are being bio-engineered, for instance, to be more herbicide and virus resistant, to provide better oils or, in the case of certain fruits and vegetables like bananas and potatoes, to serve as edible vaccines to fight disease in regions of the world where inoculations are impractical.

Gal’s current focus is to discover and refine genetically altered seeds for mutant plants that will lack the proteases she is interested in. By comparing the mutant plants to genetically unaltered plants with all their proteases intact, Gal hopes to map the effect of the aspartic proteases she is most interested in.

In other words, if Gal removes a protease and the plant stops making flowers or makes them more slowly than an unaltered plant, she will have strong evidence that the absent protease is important to the flower phase of plant development. Specific proteases will be eliminated in the mutant plants by altering the gene that would normally serve as the blueprint for production of the protease.

This will be accomplished through the introduction of a common form of bacterium known as agrobacterium that “already knows how to insert DNA into plant genes,” to produce mutations, she said.

“Basically we know enough about what the bacterium needs to do that that we can fool it into transferring our genes instead of its genes,” she added.

A further biochemical analysis of the hypothetical mutant that makes flowers slowly or not at all would likely find that the plant either lacked mature forms of the protein needed to make flowers, had an unusually large amount of immature flower proteins, or had only leaf proteins because they had not been broken down by a protease. Any or all of these conditions would again indicate the importance of the absent protease to the flower-forming process, Gal said.

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BIOLOGIST SUSANNAH GAL IS TRYING TO FIND OUT HOW SPECIFIC ENZYMES PROPEL PLANT DEVELOPMENT, SUCH AS SWITCHING FROM GROWING LEAVES TO MAKING FLOWERS. LIKE MANY PLANT RESEARCHERS, GAL USES

ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA, A MEMBER OF THE MUSTARD FAMILY, IN HER STUDIES.

Gal works with Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family closely related to cauliflower and broccoli. Arabidopsis, which is the equivalent of the “lab rat” in plant research, requires just two months to go through one generation, from seed to seed. It also possesses a small genome, or body of DNA, and produces lots of seeds— all characteristics that make it ideal for genetic experimentation, Gal said.

In fact, because it is so easy to work with, Arabidopsis has been the focus of research in hundreds of laboratories the world over. It is, for example, one of five species chosen by Craig Venter, a pioneer in the sequencing of DNA, for a landmark project to decode or sequence the DNA of a small group of scientifically important species. Besides Arabidopsis, the group includes the fruitfly, mouse, human and rice.

That Arabidopsis has been the focus of so much research is another benefit to working with the plant. As a result of prior research, much is known not only about the plant itself, but also about the best tools and techniques for working with it, Gal said.

“Experimental techniques, seeds that people have isolated, collections of DNA clones, which are called libraries—those are all available to me because I work with this plant,” she said. “There are international meetings just on this plant.”

Gal recalls that she came by her interest in plants early in life and credits her father for helping to develop her inquisitive nature. In the fifth grade, she designed and carried out an experiment in which she planted two batches of bean seeds: one batch with the seed coats intact and the other with them removed. The resulting plants did two things: They looked very different from one another, and they heightened Gal’s scientific curiosity.

“I think life is fascinating,” she said. “I wish I could figure out how it works.

“My idea of nirvana would be to shrink myself down to the size of a molecule and watch it all work inside the cells,” she

added. “That would just be spectacular. We probably have it all wrong. But it would be really neat to be able to see it.”

Gal earned a magna cum laude double major in chemistry and biochemistry as an undergraduate at Smith College in western Massachusetts in 1980. She completed her PhD in biology in 1986 as part of a joint program with Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences and completed post-doctoral fellowships at Michigan State University and at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland.

She came to Binghamton at least in part to work with noted plant biologists Anna Tan-Wilson and Karl Wilson. Like many Binghamton faculty members, however, Gal’s collaborations regularly cross disciplinary boundaries.

At present, for instance, she is collaborating with math professor Thomas Head on his DNA computing research and with chemist Robert Ben on the development of DNA-binding peptides, synthetic molecules that could be used in a variety of applications, including the analysis of drugs.

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A measure of intelligence Researcher quantifies strengths and limitations of artificial neural networks hen Dhananjay Phatak got involved in the nascent field of artificial neural networks (ANNs) as a doctoral student in 1990, excitement about the field was at fever pitch. Articles in respected technical journals took on the flavor of late-night infomercials, propagating exaggerated claims about the capabilities and “unrealized potential” of the networks.

Dubbed “neural” because of their presumed approximation of operations in the human brain, the networks were seen by many as key to creating computational intelligence that could rival or surpass human intelligence.

But Phatak, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Binghamton since 1994, began to question these claims early on.

ANNs are neurally inspired paradigms of information processing, he said. But that’s where any similarity with real, biological neural systems ends.

“My own results during my PhD work were all negative as far as these claims,” he said. “I was mathematically proving some negative results and was wondering more and more why there was so much hype, so many ad hoc claims.”

Today, as one of Binghamton’s three National Science Foundation Early Career Development award winners, Phatak continues the work to develop a balanced and realistic view of neural networks by systematically examining the presumed characteristics of the networks.

His NSF award, which contains a provision for matching industry funds and onetime equipment purchases, could add up to $420,000 over four years and is dedicated to his neural network research.

So far, Phatak’s findings have led him to this general conclusion: Though neural networks are highly effective in certain applications, particularly in pattern recognition and complex nonlinear control and navigation systems, they bear little resem-

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blance to and share few capabilities with the human brain.

“No matter what their name suggests, they are a very, very crude approximation, not even a step really, in our attempt to mimic biological systems,” he said.

Phatak, however, is far less the naysayer when it comes to computational intelligence in general. He adamantly believes that it’s only a matter of time before humans build machines—hybrids of biology and silicon and technology—that are “like us or better than us.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll live to see it or not, but there is no question that someday we are going to far outperform what evolution has produced,” Phatak said. “We are a product of evolution, but we are also becoming a part of the process, affecting and perhaps accelerating the process itself.

This is positive feedback.

“We are now beginning to tamper with what brought us into being in the first place. Ultimately, if we put enough resources into something—good or bad—it will happen. We are capable of that.”

If Phatak wasn’t born with an abiding interest and faith in technology, he arrived at it at an early age. He says “science” is his religion and jokes that if he had the time he would like to investigate whether “good principles” set forth in many religions can be arrived at based on rigorous statistical thermodynamic, entropic arguments.

“The scientific process of hypothesizing, deducing and of correcting the hypothesis when compelling evidence shows up is the best thing humanity has stumbled on,” he said.

As a young child growing up in Bombay, India, Phatak dreamed of being a “train driver.” That he grew up to be an engineer—albeit of a different sort—is the result of his earlier dream becoming “blurred by the brainwashing of high school,” he jokes.

After completing undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in

Bombay, Phatak’s academic career brought him to the United States where he earned his PhD in computer systems engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He has been working with neural networks ever since, and though, of late, they are as maligned by some as they were idealized 10 years ago, the networks continue to top his list of research interests.

“I have always felt the need to bring some reason and balance to the hype around neural networks,” he said. “I don’t think that I can be expected to be the one to turn around either the hype or the bashing. But I will try to continue doing quality research that generates convincing analytical and experimental evidence.”

Phatak’s research efforts involve the rigorous analysis of three intrinsic neural network properties—fault tolerance, generalization ability and graceful degradation— and the relationship among them.

Each property is clearly inherent to the human brain, Phatak notes.

“Someone said you could shoot every tenth neuron in the brain and not even notice it,” he said. “That’s fault tolerance.

If some parts of the system go wrong, the system is still able to work effectively.”

Generalization ability refers to the brain’s ability to reliably draw general conclusions from situation-specific input— to be able to recognize, for instance, that a banana is a banana, whether it is green or yellow, short or long, growing on a tree or sitting on a grocer’s shelf.

“Because of generalization ability, we can act intelligently when presented with unknown situations,” Phatak said.

Graceful degradation is a term that refers to the brain’s ability to maintain basic life support functions even when other higher functions are impaired or short-circuited, as in the case of stroke victims or those suffering traumatic head injury.

Neural networks, Phatak said, have been assumed since their inception to be fault tolerant. But no efforts had previously been made to quantify that presumption.

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In his research, Phatak said that by using mathematical proofs he “unfortunately” has found that neural networks possess no better fault tolerance than a conventional design technique known as triple modular redundancy (TMR). Basically, TMR involves designing systems in which “yes” or “no” type analyses are completed simultaneously by three separate modules, each assigned to the same task.

This makes it possible to take “the majority word” in cases where the modules disagree.

Human brains, which come with a lot of redundancy built in, evolved over billions of years without the “time” and “cost” constraints typical to engineered systems like ANNs, Phatak said.

“Hence, it’s important to quantify and evaluate what is the intrinsic redundancy required for fault tolerance in a neural network,” he added. “I began my research looking at this key question of proposing metrics to measure fault tolerance of ANNs and the redundancy required to achieve it.”

As it has continued to develop, however, Phatak said his research is also demonstrating how fault tolerance and generalization ability are interrelated and affected by the network’s overall capacity.

“People simply used to believe that if you incorporate fault tolerance in the neural network, a byproduct of that is better generalization ability,” he said. “And what I’m showing is that while that might be true in one domain, there is this other domain where the two properties are conflicting.”

If, for instance, a neural network lacks sufficient capacity in the first place, trying to constrain the system to achieve better fault tolerance will decrease rather than enhance generalization ability and fault tolerance will also suffer, he said.

“It’s like I’m trying to stretch a rubber band too thin and in too many directions,” he said, “and you lose both ways.”

Despite their drawbacks, Phatak said his work and that of others in his

field is demonstrating that neural networks have real application when used “judiciously” in complex, nonlinear systems like those involved in controls, navigation and target tracking.

Besides researching the theory of ANNs, Phatak also plans to explore their real-life applications, including modeling and control of soldering processes, areas he expects will be of significant interest to local companies involved in electronics packaging.

Phatak is also actively pursuing two unrelated and distinct areas of research: wireless mobile Internet protocols and digital computer arithmetic algorithms. He works on the former in collaboration with associates in the University’s Computer Science Department and refers to the latter as his hobby, something that he does for relaxation and personal satisfaction.

“Because arithmetic algorithms are pure mathematics, in a sense it is more satisfying than any other work I do. Paper, pencil and brain—you don’t need too much else,” he said.

But there’s a flip side to that kind of simplicity, Phatak said.

“If it can be done with paper, pencil and some thinking, there are so many good brains working at these problems that they will probably have figured out by now anything that you can figure out.”

Algorithms, which are a completely determined and finite procedure for solving a problem, are used in relation to mathematics and computer science. Phatak’s passion is devising algorithms that lead to efficient VLSI (Very Large Scale Integrated) circuits, which constitute today’s computer chips, and perform arithmetic functions like adding or multiplying. He dreams that someday his VLSI circuits will be incorporated into all Pentium and other types of processor chips, and has recently filed for a patent for an ultrafast algorithm and

VLSI architecture he developed for evaluating trigonometric functions.

That work spurred his travel to Australia this spring, where he presented at an international arithmetic algorithm convention he helped organize. His experiences on that trip reinforced Phatak’s convictions that technology is a huge evolutionary force.

“If you don’t travel now, 50 years from now there will be no other culture. There will only be McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Hollywood and the English language,” he said.

“During my trip to Australia, I had 14- and 18-hour stops in Malaysia, so I sneaked out of the airport to get a glimpse of the country.

“Everyone there speaks and understands English. My tour guide wanted to talk with me about all the minute details of what Rudy Giuliani was doing in New York City.”

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Materials Research Shining a light on mysteries of superconductivity hen Janice Musfeldt talks about shining a little light on materials research, it isn’t just a figure of speech. She means it—literally and figuratively.

Musfeldt’s work, which begins by shining light on single crystal organic and inorganic solids, also holds the promise of helping to illuminate some of the many mysteries that surround such useful electromagnetic states as superconductivity.

Using a series of spectroscopies to measure the electromagnetic response of samples under a variety of conditions, Musfeldt records and studies the results in an attempt to understand several things.

How do the materials dissipate energy?

How do they transport a charge? And, ultimately, how do changes in temperature and magnetic field alter the materials’ electromagnetic responses, especially in states in direct competition with superconductivity?

Superconductivity and the light-modulating properties of materials are key to a number of current applications including medical-imaging systems, magnetic shielding devices, microwave devices, infrared sensors and superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDS. SQUIDS are sensors used to determine magnetic susceptibility. They help define general magnetic characteristics of materials, a process that precedes Musfeldt’s work and affords her a preliminary understanding of the samples she studies.

As Musfeldt and other researchers improve our understanding of superconducting materials, even more sophisticated applications are likely to evolve. Superconductors could change the nature of power transmission and lead to quantum leaps in computing memory storage or to the continued evolution of high-speed trains.

Because the field of electromagnetic

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materials research opens the door to such life-altering possibilities, it is highly competitive. But Musfeldt appears up to the task—driving herself personally and professionally with single-minded determination.

Musfeldt is making a reputation for herself through her work at Binghamton, her international collaborations with researchers in places like Hungary, France and Japan, her work with the Organic Superconductivity Group at Argonne National Labs, and as a visiting scientist at the National High Magnetic Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, and in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Musfeldt visits the Tallahassee lab about eight times a year, always accompanied by a contingent of students.

“It’s a great opportunity for my students to interact with the best scientists in the world,” she said.

As a member of the National Users Committee at the Magnetic Lab, Musfeldt is able to discuss the mission and scientific priorities of the national lab with its board of directors.

She has also worked in close proximity to a Nobel Prize winner during her visits there.

In the face of such celebrity, she is impressed but undaunted.

“I think there are a lot of people who are smarter than me,” she said. “But there’s nobody who is better organized or works harder.”

22

“...THERE’S

Up most mornings at 4 or 5 a.m. so that she can arrive at the University early after an hour drive from her home in Homer, Musfeldt strives to get in a couple of hours of undisturbed proposal or paper writing before her students begin to show up.

“I never do 12-hour days,” she said, timing the punch line perfectly. “A 12-hour day would be a very, very easy day.”

She keeps a detailed and ongoing list of all her short- and long-term goals, and updates the list throughout the day. Projects to finish, equipment to fix, grants to write, samples to acquire, teaching-related tasks to complete, even her personal recreational goals make the all-inclusive list.

“Of course,” Musfeldt admits, “two years ago I had on my list ‘Visit every swimming pool in Binghamton.’ It was the only thing on my list that didn’t get done. So I put in on the list the next summer, and it didn’t get done the next summer either. I just crossed it off the list. Unrealistic goal.”

Musfeldt’s professional aspirations are probably equal to those of most of the important players in her field, and she admits that her commitment to building and maintaining a world-class spectroscopic research program at Binghamton is consuming.

“I’m not highly involved in University affairs because I think you have to play to your strengths,” she said. “Everybody contributes to the University in a different way, and the way I contribute is with a worldclass research program and by doing a lot of good teaching.”

CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR JANICE MUSFELDT IS USING A SERIES OF SPECTROSCOPIES TO MEASURE THE ELECTROMAGNETIC RESPONSES OF SINGLE CRYSTAL ORGANIC AND INORGANIC SOLIDS. MUSFELDT HOPES THE RESEARCH MAY ANSWER SOME OF THE QUESTIONS SURROUNDING SUPERCONDUCTIVITY, WHICH IS KEY TO SUCH THINGS AS MEDICAL IMAGING SYSTEMS, INFRARED SENSORS AND MICROWAVE DEVICES.

Musfeldt’s study of the electromagnetic response of materials in high magnetic fields is facilitated by the fact that magnetism and superconductivity are always in competition. As a result, by carefully observing samples in high magnetic fields, Musfeldt

SOME POINT or more, they take several to and others can begin to IN TIME many months to grow, she understand some of the said. Although far more delidriving mechanisms that WHERE YOU cate, some of the samples also stabilize desirable magnetic HAVE TO look like jewels, so the first states like superconductivSTARE AT THE thing Musfeldt teaches her ity, as well as those mechaDATA, DO A students is to handle them as nisms that suppress superif they were. conductivity.

LOT OF READMeasuring the spectroThat increases the ING, AND scopic response of a single chances that chemists and STARE AT IT sample over the full range of physicists will eventually be possible temperatures and able to “tune” materials to AND STARE AT magnetic field phases often display superconductivity IT AND SAY takes two years from start to under conditions that are ‘WHAT IS finish. And data obtained easily replicated and conIT TELLING during such detailed testing trolled, she said. are not quick to reveal their Unlike ordinary conducME? WHAT secrets. tors, superconductors have HAVE WE “It speaks to you with the ability to conduct elecLEARNED time,” Musfeldt said. “The tricity without resistance. first thing is to get the final Resistance results in the HERE?’” data. Then there’s some point loss of current or energy in in time where you have to the form of heat or light and stare at the data, do a lot of reading, and is necessary in applications like light bulbs stare at it and stare at it and say ‘What is it or heating elements. But because there is no telling me? What have we learned here?’” loss of energy when superconductors carry An assistant professor of chemistry and electricity, relatively narrow wires can be one of three Binghamton faculty members used to carry huge currents, among other whose work is currently being supported by benefits. a National Science Foundation Faculty Early First discovered in 1911 by a Dutch Career Development award, Musfeldt came physicist, superconductivity is referred to as a broken symmetry ground state because it is to Binghamton in 1995 after serving as a postdoctoral research associate at the Univerachieved when carriers that would normally sity of Sherbrooke in Quebec. She is in the repel each other pair up, Musfeldt said. third year of her five-year, $309,450 NSF By forming what are called Cooper pairs, Career grant. the electrons are able to travel through the When Musfeldt isn’t working, she is superconductor without resistance, kind of pursuing another overriding goal, which is like two race cars, with the second car being to get the most out of a lifetime that she attracted and pulled along by the draft knows will be shorter than the list of things created by the lead car. she’d like to do with it.

Under certain conditions such as very “I am single-minded,” she said, “but I low temperatures or high pressure, many have many diverse minds, and I change materials display superconductivity, them.”

Musfeldt said. But she is particularly interMusfeldt loves to travel and hike, is ested in relatively “prototypical samples that keenly interested in Renaissance art and show exotic behavior” because they provide music, and in economics, likes books, literabetter chances for researchers to figure out ture and archaeology, and can discuss “most what is going on with the material and why. museums of the world.”

“Exotic” behaviors like those Musfeldt is “I think I want a career in all these things observing in some low-dimensional molybbefore I’m done and so I don’t have much denum bronzes and spin-Peierls compounds time to do this one,” she said. “So I want to increase the chances that researchers might do well as a chemistry professor while I am find new unknown mechanisms to tune doing it.” materials for specific applications, she said.

As it turns out, another passion calls to The samples Musfeldt and her students Musfeldt from about as far away as you can work with range in size from single crysget from her University laboratory: tals—really no more than flecks of metal—to “I’d like to pursue a career as a scuba samples about the size of a small kernel of diver,” she said. “It’s really my favorite thing corn. The kernel-sized samples are worth in the world.” more than most gemstones. Costing $10,000 23

excellence in research

New ‘wave’ thinker

FRANCIS WU

Geologist challenges theories on mountain making Binghamton University professor who for more than 20 years has been using seismology to study how mountains are formed is proving that many geologists regularly risk making molehills out of mountains by minimizing the forces involved.

Strictly speaking, structural geologists usually study only outcrops on the surface of the Earth and tend to conclude without the benefit of subsurface data, says researcher Francis Wu. But when two plates butt up against each other, the result is not a shallow process. The edges of thick plates deform and many different actions and reactions are triggered inside the earth.

Wu typically travels more than 100,000 miles a year conducting seismological research all over the world. Using data gathered from remote research stations he established and maintains in China, Taiwan and New Zealand, Wu is demonstrating that mountains are born as a result of complex and dynamic forces at work tens and even hundreds of kilometers below the surface.

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The University Award for Excellence in Research is designed to recognize excellence in research or creative activity of full-time tenured faculty members of any rank. Kathryn Kish Sklar, distinguished professor of history, and Francis Wu, professor of geology, received the award in 1998.

reconsideration of the geological forces at Wu’s work is currently funded by about work. $590,000 in grants from the National SciBy using seismic waves to “x-ray” ence Foundation and the Department of young mountain ranges in Taiwan, Wu has Education. About half of that money— recorded materials being pushed up from combined NSF grants totaling $310,000— depths of 60 kilometers or more below the has been covering research on mountain earth’s surface during the birth and buildranges in Taiwan and New Zealand. The ing of mountains. And it doesn’t stop there, DOE grant of $280,000 supports research on he said. a volcano in northeastern China, where Wu “It goes even deeper because we have uses seismic wave analysis to look for magevidence that crystals down as deep as 100 matic chambers far beneath the earth’s to 200 kilometers under New Zealand and crust in hopes of discerning whether the Taiwan are lined up as the minerals in the volcano is still active. tectonic plates are pushing Wu is waiting on final past each other,” he added. approval on a three-year “PEOPLE SOMETIMES Though his work often $249,310 NSF grant that SPEAK OF SCIENCE keeps him in the field, Wu will support a collaborative AS IF IT’S VERY said his affinity for mounproject with Anne Sheehan ALIEN, BUT IT’S NOT. tains is limited to the faces of the University of Colothat he can walk. rado to establish IT’S REALLY A VERY “None of that rope or seismologic stations in HUMAN ENDEAVOR.” fingernail stuff,” he joked.

Nepal and Tibet near Mt. Wu was born in ShangEverest. The two will hai and raised in Taiwan, which is home to gather data that will help them analyze the a very active, young mountain range. In rate at which the world’s tallest mountain is geology, he said, the word “young” means a getting taller. few million years. Four-million-year-old Like ice cubes that rise higher in the mountains in Taiwan and six-million-yearwater as their exposed surfaces melt, mounold mountains in New Zealand are, theretains continue to rise out of the earth as fore, considered young as compared, for their peaks are eroded, Wu said. But young instance, to the Appalachians, which are mountains rise more quickly than they are about 100 million years old. eroded as powerful forces far beneath the Like children experiencing growing earth’s surface force additional matter up pains, young mountain ranges like those in out of the crust, he said.

Taiwan often “pop,” Wu said.

Wu’s conclusions fly in the face of comThese “pops” are earthquakes, and monly accepted geological theory that Taiwan has about 15,000 a year, Wu said. portrays mountain building as a shallow About 99 percent of those are minor, meanand relatively simple process that begins ing that they measure 4.0 or less on the when two of the earth’s plates collide. AcRichter scale. Quakes measuring 5.0 on the cording to that theory, pressure causes one Richter scale are 10 times more powerful plate to heave atop another and then “bullthan those measuring 4.0 and unless an doze” up the surface of the inferior plate, earthquake measures 5.0 or more, it generforming mountains of scraped-up surface ally causes little destruction, he said. But matter. even a 4.0 earthquake can be a memorable Wu, who uses seismology to see what is experience, Wu said. going on in the earth’s interior in much the “Before I studied earthquakes, experisame way that doctors use CAT scans to see encing them was sometimes kind of alarmwhat is going on inside a person’s head, ing,” he recounted. “You become disorisays the bulldozer explanation is too simented. The ground, if you are close to the plistic. His research is spurring a complete 24

PROFESSOR FRANCIS WU REVIEWS GEOLOGIC DATA OBTAINED FROM RESEARCH STATIONS HE MAINTAINS IN CHINA, TAIWAN AND NEW ZEALAND. WU TYPICALLY TRAVELS MORE THAN 100,000 MILES A YEAR CONDUCTING SEISMOLOGICAL RESEARCH THE WORLD OVER.

epicenter, starts to come at you in waves. If you are indoors, buildings start to creak and moan and make noises that can be very frightening.”

Once Wu began to study earthquakes, his experience of them changed markedly as his natural fear was overcome by intellectual curiosity.

“Now I find myself trying to figure out what’s going on during an earthquake,” he said. “I try to sense and concentrate on the waves that are coming in.”

In science, Wu said he finds a lifestyle and life philosophy that perfectly suits him.

His work has allowed him to balance the joy of uncovering new truths with the humility of knowing that “The Truth” is probably unknowable.

“People sometimes speak of science as if it’s very alien, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s really a very human endeavor.”

While some scientists might portray themselves as the keepers of the truth, Wu said those who choose to promote that image do an injustice to all.

“We’re not off just thinking clear thoughts somewhere,” he said. “It’s a very human process. It’s inspirations, training, the impressions society gives us…We fumble, we learn and gradually we come up with something that is very touched by us as individuals. Our conclusions are not

really impartial or objective from the very start.”

If scientists stop relentlessly testing their hypotheses and decide to rest on their laurels, they cease to be scientists, Wu added.

Wu makes it a part of his mission as a teacher to give students a view of scientific research as “an attitude, a habit, a way of thinking and an unending pursuit.”

“We understand better and better,” he said. “But there is no realistic hope to understand everything in the near future.

This is true in physics where you can isolate things down to a particle. But in geology it’s especially true because the system is so complex. We have to make inferences.

We have to test our hypothesis relentlessly.”

Not just the complexity of the system but also the limited resources that society is willing to commit to learning more about the forces that produce volcanoes, earthquakes and mountain ranges will continue to keep in check our knowledge of and our ability to predict such geological events, Wu said.

“To image the brain we spend perhaps a billion dollars on an instument,” he said.

“We don’t spend that much on seismology, and the Earth is bigger and harder to image than the brain.”

To some extent, Wu thinks the lack of priority placed on studying the powerful natural phenomena that are a part of this “very alive” planet is understandable.

Natural disasters come and go, he said, but we have pressing problems to solve daily.

“Although we know that ‘terra firma’ is not very firm,” he said. “I think it is necessary to human survival to live in some denial of this. If we worry about it every day, we can’t live our lives very well.”

Though many doomsayers point to the dawn of the 21st century as the likely timeframe for the Apocalypse, Wu does not expect the earth to behave too differently at the end of the millennium. As long as the earth is hot and churning inside, he said there will be earthquakes and volcanoes, but there will also likely be life.

“It looks like we have a billion years to go yet, unless a huge, big asteroid comes along,” he said.

Meanwhile, Wu is intent on improving our ability to predict earthquakes, volcanoes and the other violent processes involved in mountain building by increasing our understanding of the dynamics involved.

Still, his most valuable contribution, he said, is to be an advocate for a more systematic and critical approach to research.

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excellence in research

Telling ‘her-story’

KATHRYN KISH SKLAR

Historian helps define women’s voice in history voluntary action research, awarded by the y professional title and selfAssociation for Research on Nonprofit Orgadescription, Kathryn Kish Sklar, nizations and Voluntary Action for her 1995 distinguished professor of history, book, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: is a historian.

The Rise of Women’s Political Culture 1830But she’s an unusual one in many 1900. respects, not the least of which is that her Sklar’s uncommon biographical approach writings have focused on women’s experisubliminally amplifies her overriding mesence and women’s voices in American hissage, which is as simple as it is powerful. tory, looking especially at how women have Sklar wants us to hear that we are all historihelped to shape some of America’s major cal agents, contributing daily to the current social and political transitions. of history by virtue of our personal choices.

Sklar’s formative role in developing the In her writing and teaching, she tells us that field of American women’s history has we matter in the grand scheme and that our brought her international renown. But more individual impressions have the power to than that, Sklar continues to give unique shape the world. Then she uses history to form and voice to a prescient and important prove the point. challenge to traditional Sklar’s research and views of how history is “A GOOD HISTORIAN writing begin with large made, discovered and HAS TO FOLLOW THE questions about historical relayed—because of genEVIDENCE WHEREVER change. der and, at a fundamental IT LEADS, EVEN IF IT “I actually try not to level, regardless of it.

UNDERCUTS THE identify an individual as I While more traditional STORY YOU THOUGHT initially formulate my historians focus on historical questions,” she macrocosmic forces and YOU WERE TELLING.” said. “But in answering events in their attempt to these questions I have understand the past and encountered individuals who refused to go its link to the present and possible commuaway and demanded that they could tell the nal futures, Sklar has repeatedly found story better than any other approach. And I herself turning that approach on end. have, after some struggle, accepted that.”

Instead of beginning with a wide-angle Sklar, whose friends call her “Kitty,” and lens to obtain the broad perspective, she her husband Thomas Dublin, also a begins with the apparently narrow focus of Binghamton University history professor, live an individual life and uses exhaustive archiin a remote Pennsylvania lake community. val research to trace the individual’s footIt’s a lifestyle that not only allows Sklar to steps in such a way that the myriad events indulge her appreciation for natural beauty and forces at work in the protagonist’s life and ecologically attuned political and philoare revealed. In this way, she uses the densophical leanings, but also gives her the space sity of one person’s life to illuminate the and solitude to do the mental and spiritual hidden aspects of historical change. “time travel” her work demands.

This approach has earned her more than “There is something about the ‘beyond20 fellowships and grants, including a myselfness’ that I find in the contact I make $50,000 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in with evidence from other times and places 1992. She is the only scholar to have twice that is really rewarding,” Sklar acknowledges. received the prestigious Berkshire Prize, “That is what historians get to do. They get awarded annually by the Berkshire Conferto live in other times as well as their own, ence of Women Historians to the best book and it’s great fun.” by a woman historian in any field.

But to succeed, historians must combine In 1998, Sklar received the annual prize science and art, she said. for the outstanding book in non-profit and

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“History is a science in the sense that another scholar should be able to duplicate one’s path through the evidence,” Sklar said.

“But it is an art in the sense that one creates a work with one’s own personal imprint.”

The process is further complicated by the recalcitrance of most evidence, she added.

“A good historian has to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it undercuts the story you thought you were telling.”

Sklar’s research has focused on two periods of profound change for women in American society. In her book Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity, she analyzed how women shaped the shift from Calvinism to Victorianism during the decades before the Civil War. Her recent research has explored the Progressive Period, between 1890 and 1920, which is sometimes referred to as “the watershed of American history.”

During the Progressive Period, extremely rapid industrialization and unprecedented immigration and urban development transformed American society. As social and economic paradigms shifted from rural to urban, a new social contract was required to hold society together, Sklar said.

To meet that need, women’s organizations made enormous contributions by fighting the biases of laissez-faire capitalism. Women’s activism contributed to the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which created minimum wage requirements.

Sklar’s work is organized around her study of Florence Kelley, a leading feminist and social activist whose life and times she is documenting in a two-volume biography.

Kelley was a key figure in the struggles of the Progressive Period, but her powerful presence continues even today.

“I’ve written an essay about what it’s like to be writing about her,” Sklar said. “She was an incredibly powerful figure who did not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. I don’t ever imagine I could satisfy her, so I have a humble view of my own efforts in relationship to her.”

Nevertheless, Sklar feels an affinity for what she terms Kelley’s “existential process.”

“I’m interested in how, when she found 26

HISTORIAN KATHRYN KISH SKLAR HAS USED THE COMPLEXITY OF INDIVIDUAL LIVES TO UNDERSTAND HISTORICAL FORCES AT WORK. SKLAR DOES MUCH OF HER RESEARCH AND WRITING FROM A HOME OFFICE OVERLOOKING A LAKE AND SURROUNDED BY WALL-TO-WALL AND FLOOR-TO CEILING BOOK STACKS AND FILE CABINETS.

herself at a dead end, she was able to move on and recreate herself,” Sklar said. “By ‘existential process’ I mean doing things that you never expected you would be doing, that you have no preparation for and that you are not doing by rote. Doing things by living fully in the moment and bringing all of your resources to that moment even though you’re not really sure where you are coming from or going to.”

Historians, Sklar said, can help us appreciate existential process by pointing out that what individuals “bring to the moment” has consequences in the future as well as connections with the past.

From that perspective, and with the help of Kelley, Sklar has come to see how she is cast as both an agent and a product of history by her own existential process.

“I got my job through the women’s movement,” Sklar said. “I started writing women’s history before there was a women’s movement, but I became an employable historian as a result of it.”

Her interest in women’s issues and her unwillingness to do what was expected of her as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s meant that she ended up studying women at a time when the surest consequence of that choice seemed to be unemployment.

“I knew nobody was ever going to hire me anyway,” she said. “I went to historical conferences. I saw that you needed a threepiece suit. The historical profession was closed to women at that time. On top of that I was married to a historian, had two small

lives, their participation in the paid labor force and the social construction of their gendered identity.

Among several reasons for the success of the field is the fact that historians of women have “really delivered excellent history” in response, Sklar said.

Still it is because of women scholars like Sklar, who took risks when the rewards were small and prospects dim, that the discipline of women’s history exists today.

“If I had tried to make myself into someone who was ‘marketable’ in 1965 when I graduated from college, I would not be doing women’s history today,” Sklar said. “I found what I wanted to do and did it, and thanks to the process of historical change, it turned out there was a place for me.”

If Sklar’s life is any indication, it seems that existential process shapes the lives of historians as well as the history they write.

children and was perceived as a person who didn’t need to be taken seriously as a graduate student.”

Despite such grim prospects, Sklar decided to get her PhD on her own terms and proceeded to do that, just four years out from earning her unKathryn Kish Sklar’s fascination with historical dergraduate degree at Harvard. evidence can be seen not only in her large home “By the time I actually got my library and expansive archive, but also in two books degree in 1969,” Sklar said, “lo and of documents she recently edited and in two behold, there was a women’s moveInternet projects. Social Justice Feminists in the ment that was interested in exactly United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Docuthe kind of issues that I had myself ments, 1885-1933, explores a new way of doing been interested in and researching.” comparative history by documenting the dialogue Between 1969 and 1974, the hisbetween women in different political cultures. The torical profession responded to the other, The Nineteenth Century Women’s Rights times and “made space” for people Movement Emerges from Garrisonian Abolitionism, working in women’s history.

1830-1870, uses documents to interpret a key After completing her doctorate, she was invited to stay on at the moment in the history of American feminism.

University of Michigan where she Historical documents have also drawn Sklar to “invented” one of the first women’s the Internet, where she and her husband, Thomas history courses in the country in Dublin, are developing a website on “Women and 1971.

Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930, Shortly thereafter, her dissertation at womhist. binghamton.edu. Funded by a $100,000 was published and in 1974, she acgrant from the National Endowment for the Hucepted a tenured position at UCLA, manities, the site makes documents about women where she taught until moving to in social movements available to college and high Binghamton in 1988. The success of school teachers. women’s history since is nothing Sklar is also co-director of the “Global Network short of phenomenal, Sklar said. on Women’s Advocacy in Civil Society.” Funded by One important reason for its success has been the demand for women’s a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, the site history created by the Women’s will bring together umbrella organizations and Movement. That movement posed researchers on women’s volunteerism worldwide. questions about women’s ability to That site is accessible by invitation only. control the circumstances of their 27

B L E N D I N G

omen struggle to gain ground in sports

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hile on the track team in college, Leslie Heywood developed an immune disorder that spawned 104-degree fevers and swelling in her joints so severe that she could not grip a pencil.

But until she handed her coach and her trainer a doctor’s note with strict instructions forbidding her to run, they claimed she was just whining like a girl and told her she was making up her symptoms.

So she kept trying to run, because it was the only way to prove she was tough enough to be considered a real athlete.

Today Heywood is still making the case on what it means to be a female athlete, but the audience has changed and, slowly too, have the attitudes about women’s sports.

Heywood is an associate professor of English at Binghamton University with a background in creative writing and cultural studies. She teaches contemporary memoir, 20th century literature and theory, and cultural studies courses like “Gender, Activism and Rock Rebellion,” which explores how gender is affected by and affects popular music.

But it is her continuing interest in the perceptions of women athletes that has propelled her into the national and international limelight as a commentator on women’s sports and body images and as an advocate for equality.

Heywood was recently elected to serve on the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) Advisory Board following her nomination

by Professor Don Sabo, veteran sport sociologist and longtime trustee of the foundation, who urged her appointment to the board after reading her work. In July, she presented a report she wrote for the WSF and the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) to the National Athletes Summit on the needs of top professional and amateur female athletes in 12 sports. (See box.)

Within the past year, she has appeared on National Public Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and New York Today, and has been featured in The New York Times, the Italian version of Glamour

and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She regularly gives talks on topics like eating disorders, women’s body images and athletics to audiences ranging from middleschool girls to community groups to fellow scholars.

She has written four books and numerous articles on topics from anorexia to powerlifting to Ally McBeal. Heywood’s most recent book, Pretty Good for a Girl, is the account of her own struggle as a female athlete and argues that girls in sports must be treated seriously as athletes if they are to perform to their full potential. She’s currently at work on a book for the University of Minnesota Press called Built to Win: The Rise of the Female Athlete as Cultural Icon, which will discuss the impact female sport stars have on cultural ideals of femininity.

At Binghamton, Heywood recently received a grant from the Campus Grants Program of United University Professions to help establish the Nell Jackson Center for the Study of Female Athletes, an interdisciplinary research center that will be devoted to exploring the positive effects of sports for girls and women. The center will be

committed to community outreach and education and will serve as a resource center for female athletes and the issues that affect them.

A community action grant from the American Association of University Women will support a National Girls and Women in Sports Day in February that she hopes will attract junior high and high school girls.

Heywood’s struggle for equality for women in athletics has been a blend of personal conviction and scholarly interest.

As a beneficiary of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972, which made it illegal to discriminate against women on the basis of gender in federally funded schools, Heywood experienced both the prejudice and the change in attitude toward women’s sports.

In the 1980s, Heywood ran track and cross country in high school and college in an atmosphere where female athletes often competed in the men’s shadows and were either ignored or openly denigrated for being “wussy girls.”

“There was hostility or just a kind of indifference, but I think that has really

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changed,” says Heywood. “While old stereotypes still linger, most people wouldn’t say them out loud anymore.”

While Heywood was a star on her high school track team—winning the state championship in the 800 and 1,600 meters— the media tended to focus on the way she looked rather than her athletic abilities.

“They had this obsession with my appearance,” Heywood recalls, “always mentioning it, while they only talked about the men’s performances. They never said things like ‘this guy’s hot.’”

Track continued to be Heywood’s top priority as an undergraduate, despite prevailing notions that females weren’t cut out for competitive, grueling sports. “I had to work twice as hard for people to take me seriously,” Heywood said. “Part of how obsessive I got was about the prejudice.”

The experience was sometimes cruel.

Her college track coach weighed every girl on the team weekly in the training room, sometimes “in front of the whole football team to intimidate us.” He required team members to maintain body fat percentages below 10 percent when the normal level is 22 percent for a female.

Those experiences precipitated a battle with eating disorders that took Heywood several years to overcome. Although starving her body of important nutrients and incurring stress fractures and bursitis, she continued to compete and train.

The train-through-the-pain attitude is prevalent among female athletes, Heywood said, because in a context where your abilities are disparaged because of your gender, that’s what you do to prove that you are tough enough.

PROFESSOR LESLIE As she continHEYWOOD HAS USED ued her athletic HER OWN STRUGGLE interests, she reFOR EQUALITY IN ceived her ATHLETIC COMPETIbachelor’s and her TION TO GUIDE HER first master’s in CULTURAL STUDIES creative writing OF WOMEN’S SPORT from the UniverAND BODY IMAGES. sity of Arizona and MEANWHILE, SHE a second master’s SAYS SHE HAS and her PhD in FOUND A BETTER English from the BALANCE IN HER University of CaliOWN APPROACH TO fornia at Irvine.

ATHLETIC COMPETIIn graduate TION, WHICH IS NOW school, Heywood LIMITED TO POWER said she began to LIFTING. conceal her zeal for working out be-

cause sports were seen as almost the opposite of academics. People still hold to the “dumb jock” stereotype, she said.

Despite the negative view, Heywood sought ways to bring the life of the mind and the life of the body together. She did her dissertation on anorexia and traced an anorexic logic in many cultural forms (i.e. philosophy, religion, literature), which resulted in her first book, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, (California, 1996). She continues to write on women’s sports as well as on literature and popular culture.

Today, Heywood has found a balance between being an academic and an athlete.

Though she still runs daily, she’s taken up a new sport: power lifting. Heywood said she really likes power lifting because athletes are supportive of each other and because of the wide range of women who participate and compete.

At one of recent meet, a 13-year-old girl competed along side a 75-year-old woman, and both got great support from the crowd, said Heywood, who is also coaching Broome County Special Olympians in power lifting.

While competition is still a part of Heywood’s life, she said her focus now is on personal satisfaction rather than on proving her value. In a recent competition she benched 230 pounds, winning her weight class and the overall competition. “I do think winning is important,” said Heywood, “but I was so competitive it was self-destructive.

It’s a very fine line—how much is too much?”

Heywood said she is also continuing her efforts to level the playing field for men and women athletes. Although discriminatory attitudes linger, Heywood said, women athletes have gained more respect and credibility in the last decade. While Title IX was passed in 1972, only recently have female athletes been shown respect and treated as real athletes.

The 1996 Summer Olympic Games were the turning point.

“National attention became focused on female athletes like never before,” Heywood said. “Males and females got equal coverage in print and other media.” The accelerated interest in women’s sports led to the formation of professional women’s leagues like the Women’s National Basketball Association.

Heywood gives the media some credit for the headway women’s sports have made, although they helped perpetuate old stereotypes for many years.

“Media hype always helps,” Heywood

As a member of the Research and Education Council of the Women’s Sports Foundation, Leslie Heywood wrote a report for the Council and the U.S. Olympic Committee called “The Women’s Sports Foundation Report: Addressing the Needs of Professional and Amateur Female Athletes.” The report, which was based on focus groups of athletes and surveys of national sports governing bodies, was presented in July at the National Athletes Summit. Among the perceptions, the report found: • Women’s sports and women athletes are underfunded.

• Communication between athletes and national sports governing bodies and leagues needs to be improved.

• Gender inequity remains a problem.

• Women athletes and women’s sports are not receiving adequate publicity and promotion.

• More female coaches are needed.

• Greater representation by women athletes is needed in governance organizations.

• Progress has been made.

said. “The more coverage women’s sports get, the better it is. It gives female athletes more validity.”

While the situation has improved, women’s sports still need to catch up, Heywood says. Women need professional leagues in all sports and should receive equal salaries, she said, but that won’t happen overnight.

For women’s teams to become as popular as men’s will require a fundamental shift in public attitudes. Such a shift would benefit non-athletes as well because it would encourage more social respect for women and their abilities, she said.

“As the growing support for and interest in women’s basketball and other sports on our own campus has shown,” Heywood says, “we’re heading in the right direction.”

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Environmental pragmatism Philosopher urges move to public intellectualism

A

ndrew Light, Binghamton University’s new environmental ethicist, says many of his peers in environmental ethics see him as something of an upstart.

That’s an assessment he doesn’t mind, however, because, precocious or not, his work is turning the heads and earning the respect of some of the most highly regarded thinkers in his field.

Besides, he jokes, “This is not the field to be in if you can’t take criticism.”

Given that the 25-year-old field of environmental philosophy is chronologically six years his junior, Light’s burgeoning reputation as a “young gun” in the field might seem surprising.

But when you’re talking philosophy, a discipline with roots and traditions leading back to ancient Greece, such recent chronology quickly becomes moot.

What really sets Light apart isn’t his age, but his commitment to a philosophical approach he calls “environmental pragmatism.”

Light, who holds dual appointments in philosophy and environmental studies, is convinced that philosophers have something of value to offer when it comes to resolving pressing environmental problems.

“The environmental questions we are faced with are not just questions of resource allocation,” he said. “They are questions about who we are as a people, who we are as a community, a community that extends into the future.”

To help answer those questions, Light thinks environmental philosophers need to refine philosophical concepts and arguments with the power to change attitudes and behavior. And to do that, he argues, they need to do business in the public arena.

“I do think that there’s a strong argument that all philosophy fails to the extent that it’s not public philosophy,” he said. “In Israel, where you see the ongoing debates among academics reported in the daily newspapers, it enriches everyday discussions on the street, and it gives everyday people entrée into those discussions, enriching everyday life.”

Light doesn’t think philosophers need to forsake the “islands of intellectual freedom”

afforded by the academy, but he does think they need to be wary of living their lives BORN THREE YEARS BEFORE WOODSTOCK AND like intellectual agoraFOUR YEARS BEFORE EARTH DAY, ENVIRONMENTAL phobes, afraid to leave ETHICIST ANDREW LIGHT GREW UP ALONGSIDE THE its comparatively safe FIELD OF ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. haven.

“If all we end up as an undergraduate, Light exchanged his doing is talking with each other about the double major in political science and history value of nature in abstract philosophical for an honors course in philosophy. He comterms, we’re painting ourselves into a corner, stuck in conversations on the sidelines, while pleted his master’s and PhD in philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His the real issues of water and air quality and first paper in environmental philosophy was land use and clear-cutting are being decided on the playing field,” Light said. “My contri- published in a national journal when he was still a first-year graduate student. bution is to say that those sideline conversaSince then, and before coming to tions are somewhat silly.”

Binghamton, Light was a lecturer at Texas In his writings and talks, Light calls on A&M, a visiting lecturer at Tel Aviv Univerphilosophers to become active in the real sity, a post-doctoral fellow at the University world by talking to the media, by talking to of Alberta, Canada, and an assistant professor policy makers, and by risking becoming of philosophy at the University of Montana. “public intellectuals.”

A sought-after lecturer and editor, Light Born in Atlanta, Georgia, four years after was recently invited to join the editorial the watershed publication of Rachel Carson’s boards of Environmental Ethics, the premier Silent Spring, Light grew up against a backjournal in his field, and a second publication, drop of dynamic political and social change.

Rethinking Marxism.

The black and women’s liberation moveWhile many of his associates seem stuck ments of the 1960s and 1970s advanced the in philosophical discussions of nature in its idea that equal consideration and fair treat“pristine state,” Light maintains that nature ment of all was a moral imperative. Some needs to be spoken about as it is experiwent further, suggesting those precepts enced—in human terms. should apply not just to humans, but to all “If we’re talking about nature in human nature. terms, we have to talk about that nature For his part, Light said he was always that’s closest to us, and for many people that interested in nature, “but no more so, I means talking about the city as an environthink, than anyone else.” ment.”

In fact, when he was admitted on a deHe will spend the next year at New York bate team scholarship to Mercer University, University on a Rockefeller Fellowship rein Georgia, he planned a law career. searching a book on urban environmental Three years into his undergraduate studethics. ies, however, Light won a fellowship that If we fail to address the environmental took him to Washington, D.C., where he issues closest to us, everyone loses, he said. served as an intern to Georgia Sen. Sam “Even if all you really want is to protect Nunn during the Oliver North hearings. this thing that is pristine or that you think is “I got completely into all that. It was pristine, then you’ve got to make the places really exciting,” he said. “But when I got where people live, places they want to live,” back to Georgia I found that suddenly I’d Light said. “Otherwise, where do you think changed. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be a they are going to go? They’re going to move lawyer, and I didn’t want to work in D.C.” into your pristine preserve.”

Even though it meant an additional year 30

Binghamton University Organized Research Centers CENTER FOR COGNITIVE AND PSYCHOLINGUISTIC SCIENCES

Director: Richard Pastore Est. 1987 orsp1.adm.binghamton.edu/Research_at_Binghamton/Centers/CAPS.html CENTER FOR COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES

Director: Kanad Ghose Est. 1993 watson2.cs.binghamton.edu/cctwww/cct.html CENTER FOR DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY

Director: Linda Spear Est. 1987 psychology.binghamton.edu/bns/cdp.htm CENTER FOR INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

Director: George J. Klir Est. 1995 ssie.binghamton.edu CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP STUDIES

Director: Bruce Avolio Est. 1988 www.cls.binghamton.edu CENTER FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING

Director: Wayne Jones Est. 1996 www.clt.binghamton.edu CENTER FOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES

Director: Charles Burroughs Est. 1966 cemers.binghamton.edu/cemers-hp.html CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN TRANSLATION

Director: Marilyn Gaddis Rose Est. 1987 orsp1.adm.binghamton.edu/Research_at_Binghamton/Centers/CRIT.html CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS

Director: Michael Horowitz Est. 1987 orsp1.adm.binghamton.edu/Research_at_Binghamton/Centers/CORES.html FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF ECONOMIES, HISTORICAL SYSTEMS, AND CIVILIZATIONS

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Director: M. Stanley Whittingham Est. 1988 materials.binghamton.edu INSTITUTE FOR PRIMARY AND PREVENTIVE HEALTH

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Director: Ali Mazrui Est. 1991 igcs.binghamton.edu INTEGRATED ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING CENTER

Director: Bahgot Sammakia Est. 1988 www.ieec.binghamton.edu/ieec PUBLIC ARCHAEOLOGY FACILITY

Director: Nina Versaggi Est. 1972 paf.binghamton.edu

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