When Koji Nakanishi retired six years ago, the chemistry department threw a party for him, complete with a cake

that said, “Happy Retirement, Koji. See you to-morrow!” Sure enough, he was back in his Chan-dler Hall office the next day, where he continues to work six days a week. “I’m 87 years old, but I still work Saturdays until at least 8 o’clock,” says Nakanishi, the Centennial Professor Emeritus of Chemistry. “It’s an addiction.”

Nakanishi studies biologically active com-pounds—substances from living organisms that have a pharmacological use. He developed new methods of spectroscopy, the study of com-pounds using light and radiated energy, and iso-lated for the first time the chemical structures of more than 200 compounds, including wasp and snake venoms, pigment from the human eye and extract from the gingko tree.

One focus of his research is age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in older people. His lab is working on using blueberry extract to prevent and treat the disease, as well as continuing to research uses for other natural products.

Born in Hong Kong in 1925, Nakanishi lived in France, England and Egypt until he was 10, when his father, employed by what is now the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, was transferred back to Japan. He did his undergraduate work at Nagoya University. majoring in chemistry. “I liked science,” he says. “I wasn’t mathematically

oriented, so I became an organic chemist.” After graduating in 1947, Nakanishi says he

was the first Japanese student to study in the U.S. after World War II under a program that pro-vided relief to occupied countries. He studied at Harvard for two years and returned to Japan to receive his Ph.D. from his alma mater. He taught at three universities in Japan before arriving at Columbia in 1969.

Nakanishi began studying the gingko tree while still in Japan, drawn to its longevity. “The gingko tree is from the era of dinosaurs, but while the dinosaur has been extinguished, the modern gingko has not changed,” he says. “After

C olumbia University Medical Center has launched a new med-ical practice near Rockefeller

Center, giving the commuters and visi-tors who stream into midtown Manhat-tan easy access to some of the city’s top practitioners.

ColumbiaDoctors Midtown compris-es faculty of Columbia’s College of Phy-sicians and Surgeons, College of Dental Medicine and School of Nursing. More than 225 physicians, dentists and nurse pract it ioners of fer comprehensive medical services, including cardiology, executive health, pre- and post-surgical care, psychiatry, radiology, travel medi-cine and women’s health, as well as laboratory services.

“People come from throughout the tri-state area, and even beyond, to see Columbia doctors,” said Dr. Lee Gold-

man, executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Jan. 24. “The new Co-lumbiaDoctors Midtown makes it even easier—for both our existing patients and our new ones—to be cared for by our renowned experts.”

Officials from both Columbia Uni-versity and NewYork-Presbyterian Hos-pital were on hand as Dr. Louis Bigliani, an orthopedic surgeon and president of ColumbiaDoctors, and Dr. Robin Gmyrek, a dermatologist and chair of the board of the midtown practice, cut the ceremonial ribbon.

The opening of the 125,000-square foot outpatient practice, which replac-es the ColumbiaDoctors Eastside office on East 60th St., marks a highly visible return to midtown Manhattan for Co-lumbia, which used to own 11.7 acres of land underneath Rockefeller Center.

In 1985, the University sold the valu-able real estate—a gift from the State of New York in 1814—to the Rockefeller Group for $400 million. The new facility, at 51 West 51st St., is also just blocks from the Madison Avenue campus where Co-

continued on page 4continued on page 8

eile

en b

arro

so

ColumbiaDoctors Opens New Midtown Center

Blood BankColumbia Medical

Pioneer Charles Drew | 2

new york squaredThe Man Who

Mapped Manhattan | 8

targeting als$25 Million Gift for Research | 3

By Georgette JasenBy Anna Spinner

What Makes a Great teacher? Lenfest Winners refLectLiving

Language

continued on page 8

Prof. Nakanishi: Hard at Work at 87

Koji nakanishi was awarded Japan's “Person of Cultural Merit” prize in 1999.

By Beth Kwon

G reat teachers are always learn-ing, from their peers, students, teaching assistants and families.

Just ask the 10 winners of this year’s Distinguished Columbia Faculty Awards.

“I worked as a teaching assistant for a professor who, after 30 years of teaching, spent hours to prepare for every single class,” said Music Professor Giuseppe Ger-bino. “He taught generations of students that teaching is a lifelong learning process.”

Political Science Professor Melissa Schwartzberg learned from one of her teaching assistants, Kevin Elliott, “who persuaded me to be more creative in my pedagogy” and incorporate a mock con-stitutional assembly in her Problems in Democratic Theory class.

Don J. Melnick, professor of ecology, evolution and environmental biology, as well as anthropology and biological sciences, found inspiration in his family.

“My grandmother and great aunts and uncles came to this country at the turn of the last century. They had amaz-ing stories, all of them captivating,” he said. “My parents instilled in us a thirst

for knowledge and a desire to learn as much as we could about the things that interested us. The thirst for knowledge we were given, the commitment to education we were indoctrinated into, and the telling and retelling of stories throughout our childhood were the greatest influences on my teaching.”

These three professors, and seven others, will be honored this month for outstanding scholarship, teaching and service. Some have been at Columbia for decades; others joined the faculty as re-cently as 2006.

The awards were established in 2005 with a $12 million gift from University Trustee Gerry Lenfest (’58 LAW, ’09 HON) and carry a $25,000 stipend for each of three years. The ceremony will take place Feb. 27 at the Italian Academy.

Here is a look at this year’s winners, and some of their views on what makes a great teacher:

Frances A. Champagne, associate professor of psychology, is a pioneer in the field of behavioral epigenetics, the branch of molecular biology that probes the impact of the environment on the expression of genes. Since coming to Columbia in 2006, she started a lecture course called “The Developing Brain” and established a multidisciplinary re-search training group that explores the

“Teaching is not a simple transfer of knowledge but

an act of sharing.”

linguist John McWhorter joined Columbia’s full-time faculty last year as an associate professor in english and Comparative literature after four years as a lecturer. an expert in pidgin and creole languages, McWhorter is known beyond academia for his popular writing on race in america and the evolution of american popular culture and language. see page 7 for Q&a.

NEWS AND IDEAS FOR THE COLUMBIA COMMUNITYvol. 38, no. 07 february 2013

www.columbia.edu/news

Dear Alma,Why is this month’s campus blood drive named for Charles Drew?

—A blood donor

Dear Donor,It is fitting that this blood drive takes

place during Black History Month. As unimaginable as it is today, before World War II many people believed that differ-ent races had different blood types and blood donations should be segregated by race. The research that Dr. Charles R. Drew (P&S ’40) did at Columbia on blood transfusions and plasma chal-lenged those beliefs as having no basis in science.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1904, Drew received a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, but racial segregation in the pre-Civil Rights era limited Afri-can Americans’ medical school options. Drew earned his M.D. at McGill Univer-sity in Montreal. After an internship and surgical residency at Montreal General Hospital and further training at Howard University in Washington, he got a fel-lowship to study in New York at what was then called Presbyterian Hospital, while earning a Ph.D. in medical science at Columbia.

Drew developed a method for pro-cessing and preserving blood plasma, so it lasts much longer than blood, making it possible to bank it for long periods of time. The plasma could then be reconstituted when needed. His research served as the basis of his thesis, “Banked Blood,” and he re-ceived his doctorate in 1940.

He was named director of the Blood for Britain program at Columbia the fol-lowing year, when Britain was under at-tack by Germany and desperately needed

blood and plasma to treat military and civilian casualties. Drew improved tech-niques for storing blood and helped es-tablish the first large-scale blood banks, saving many lives during World War II. Another of his innovations were “blood-mobiles”—mobile, refrigerated blood do-nation trucks.

Later, Drew worked on similar blood bank projects at the American Red Cross and the National Blood Donor Service but left in frustration over the then-widespread practice of segregating blood donated by African Americans.

Drew returned to Howard in 1941 and became chair of the Department of Surgery as well as chief of surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital, where he trained hundreds of African-American physi-cians. He also campaigned against the exclusion of black physicians from local medical societies and other professional organizations. Drew died in 1950 from injuries sustained in a car crash.

— Georgette Jasen

Send your questions for Alma’s Owl to curecord@columbia.edu

TheRecord2 february 2013

off c ampus

grants & g if ts

miLestones

Jazz: CaTalysT for CreaTiviTyChris Washburne, an associate professor of music, often brings his Latin Jazz band, SYOTOS, with him when he lectures. A trombonist who directs Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program, Washburne wants attendees to experience music firsthand and see what he calls the “fluidity of leadership”—allowing your team to take risks and create something new. In January, SYOTOS performed at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and Washburne also led a discussion on how jazz musicians take mistakes and turn them into opportunities to innovate. Performing with him here are, from left: Kenny Wessel on guitar; Per Mathisen on bass; Ole Mathisen, a music associate in the Louis Armstrong program, on saxophone; Washburne; and Vince Cherico, a music associate in the Louis Armstrong program, on drums.

The World's First Blood Bank

Hans

PeTe

r Hä

nni

asK aLma’s oWL

Emily BEll, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, was named to the National Advisory Board of the Poynter Institute, which is dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and me-dia leaders.

Two professors were presented with the French Légion d’Honneur: Dr. StEphEn EmErSon, the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Immunology (in Medicine) and director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center; and JoSEph Stiglitz, University Professor and co-chair of the University’s Committee on Global Thought. France’s highest award is given to foreign na-tionals who have served France or the ideals it upholds.

Eight Columbia and Barnard professors were named to the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. The mathematics professors are Joan Birman (Emeritus, Barnard), Dorian golD-fElD, hErvé JacquEt (Emeritus, Columbia), chiu-chu (mEliSSa) liu, DuSa mcDuff, WaltEr nEumann and mu-tao Wang; and JoSEph f. trauB, the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia. The fellows program recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field.

arnolD l. gorDon, associate director of the Division of Ocean and Climate Physics at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, received the 2013 Prince Albert I Medal for outstanding contributions to oceanography. Gor-don was recognized for his pioneering work on global ocean currents.

Computer Science Assistant Pro-fessor martha Kim won a Nation-al Science Foundation CAREER award to support her research into developing energy tracking and monitoring techniques for auditing and controlling software energy consumption. The NSF’s

CAREER awards honor exceptional junior faculty.

gorDana vunJaK-novaKovic, Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of Medical Sciences, is one of the first seven members to be selected to the board of directors of the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. In this role she will help direct the nonprofit organization, which promotes and manages research on board the Interna-tional Space Station U.S. National Laboratory.

Who gavE it: Andrew W. Mellon FoundationhoW much: $550,000Who got it: Columbia University LibrariesWhat for: To pursue collaborative initiatives for the development of software applications that will advance web archiving and the use of archived content.

Who gavE it: Old Castle Building EnvelopehoW much: $1 millionWho got it: Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and PreservationWhat for: For the study of energy efficient building techniques.

Who gavE it: Robin Hood FoundationhoW much: $152,000Who got it: Irwin Garfinkel, Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in the Faculty of Social WorkWhat for: To create one or more new methods for measuring poverty in New York City.

Who gavE it: The Louis and Rachel Rudin FoundationhoW much: $160,000Who got it: School of NursingWhat for: The gift is comprised of $80,000 for the Rudin Foundation Graduate Studies in Oncology Scholarship, $40,000 for the Undergraduate Nurs-ing Scholarship in Memory of Dean Helen Pettit and $40,000 for the Undergraduate Nursing Schol-arship in Memory of Philanthropist May Rudin.

naTio

nal M

useu

M o

f aM

eriC

an H

isTo

ry, s

MiTH

soni

an in

sTiTu

Tion

Dr. Charles R. Drew, blood research pioneer.

vol. 38, no. 07, february 2013

Published by the Office of Communications and

Public Affairs

david M. stoneexecutive vice President

for Communications

TheRecord staff:

Editorial Director: Bridget o’BrianManaging Editor: wilson Valentin

Staff Writer: gary shapiroArt Director: nicoletta Barolini

University Photographer: eileen Barroso

Contact The record: t: 212-854-2391 f: 212-678-4817

e: curecord@columbia.edu

The Record is published monthly between september and June.

Correspondence/subscriptionsanyone may subscribe to The record for $27 per year. The amount is payable in advance to Columbia university, at the ad-dress below. allow 6 to 8 weeks for address changes.

Postmaster/address ChangesPeriodicals postage paid at new york, ny and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to the record, 535 W. 116th st., 402 low library, Mail Code 4321, new york, ny 10027.

for the latest on upcoming Columbia events, performances, seminars and lectures, go to

calendar.columbia.edu

TheRecord february 2013 3

A After watching his father and uncle die of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Bloomberg LP chief executive Daniel L. Doctoroff vowed to

streamline research on new treatments for the usually fatal neurological disease.

Doctoroff, a private equity investor and former deputy mayor of New York City, enlisted his former boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and another private equity inves-tor and philanthropist, David M. Rubenstein, to help fund a $25 million gift to Columbia University Medical Center for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the formal name of the disease.

Dubbed Target ALS, it is the second phase of an accelerated research program launched in 2010 by the New York-based foundation Project A.L.S. and the Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins University, the mayor’s alma mater.

“Finding a cure for ALS requires that we think differently about how to tackle this de-bilitating disease,” Doctoroff said. “Target ALS will provide an organizational framework for the world’s leading ALS researchers to share and coordinate their findings so that we can make progress toward therapies and a cure.”

Chr i stopher E . Henderson , co-director of the Motor Neuron Center and the Project A.L.S./Jenifer Estess Laboratory for Stem Cell Research at CUMC, will serve as scientific di-rector for the initiative. Doctoroff visited Hen-derson’s lab on Feb. 7 to mark the launch of the initiative.

“Target ALS will generate a pipeline of can-didate therapeutic targets that will provide a common language for Target ALS and pharma and biotech companies, with whom we have initiated a dialogue to define their needs and expectations,” Henderson said.

ALS is a rare degenerative disease that over time affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. As the nerve cells that control muscles die, patients lose their ability to initiate and control movement and often become totally paralyzed. Two people in 100,000 are diag-nosed with ALS each year, and life expectancy from the time of diagnosis averages between two and five years.

The immediate goal of Target ALS is to seed an array of drug-development programs at pharmaceutical and biotech companies based on data generated by the consortium’s scien-

tists. The program will focus on therapeutic targets—the biological changes that occur in ALS patients that, when blocked, can slow or arrest disease progression. The long-term goal is to find effective therapies for ALS.

The consortium will provide ALS investiga-tors with access to key technologies that are too complex or costly to set up in each individ-ual laboratory. Its strategic goals will be over-seen by a research advisory board, and funding will be conditional on positive evaluation by an independent review committee.

“Collaboration is essential to build on the real progress that’s being made in the field of ALS research,” said Bloomberg, a philanthro-pist who has donated more than $2.4 billion to a wide variety of causes and organizations

on exhib i tattituDES anD latituDES

continued on page 8

The Miriam and ira D. Wallach art Gallery has mounted a new show that aims to expand the public’s understanding of the challenging terrain of conceptual art.

Conceptual Geographies: Frames and Docu-ments, Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection presents 22 works and series created since 1967 that invoke geography to question re-lationships of power and to analyze the systems in which art is displayed.

The 16 international artists represented in the show, from different generations and latitudes, work in a wide variety of media including photography, video, film, drawing, printmaking, mail art and art-ist’s books. among the best-known are ed ruscha, sophie Calle, ana Mendieta, Gordon Matta-Clark and louise lawler.

Conceptual Geographies is on view until March 23. for a video on the exhibit, visit news .columbia.edu/geographies.

I f Itsik Pe’er had a time machine, he would probably beam himself into the 11th century and collect DNA samples

from the small community of Ashkenazi Jews living in Eastern Europe. That would be the easiest way to identify the genetic mutations that predispose their millions of descendants to maladies like Tay-Sachs, Crohn’s and Parkinson’s disease.

But until time travel is possible, Pe’er, an associate professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, will rely on compu-tational genetics.

Using mathematics and computer analyt-ics, Pe’er is identifying the genetic makeup

of the founding Ashkenazi Jews by analyz-ing the full DNA sequences of hundreds of their descendants in the New York City area.

“All the Ashkenazis living today are es-sentially mixes of a small number of indi-viduals who lived hundreds of years ago,” explains Pe’er. “Because the population has been relatively isolated, the gene pool is relatively small, which makes it possible to catalog an entire population.”

Doing so will allow Pe’er to compare these genomes to reference sets of non-Ash-kenazi DNA—collected through the Human Genome Project and other initiatives—and

zero in on Ashkenazi-specific genetic muta-tions associated with different diseases.

Pe’er, who arrived at Columbia in 2006, is taking advantage of a flood of new data unleashed by technological advances that allow scientists to read the entire 3-billion-nucleotide sequence of individual genomes at high speed and low cost.

By examining similarities in DNA seg-ments shared by large numbers of related individuals, his lab developed statistical models that allow him to make generaliza-tions about entire populations. The mix of genes that every child inherits from each parent travels in long sequences of code that remain together and are remarkably consistent from one generation to the next.

The size of the gene chunks gets smaller

with each generation, but they diminish at a consistent and predictable rate. As a result, Pe’er can use his models to determine dis-tant relationships shared by two individuals by measuring the length of their common DNA segments. First cousins, for example, are likely to share 12.5 percent of a grand-parent’s genome, while second cousins have a mere three percent in common.

Pe’er published a groundbreaking study in the November issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics analyzing the migratory and population patterns of Ash-kenazi Jews and the Masai people of Kenya.

He showed that the Masai, who are semi-no-madic and marry across village boundaries, descend from a wide genetic ancestry fed by migrations and intermingling between a large number of tribesmen.

The Ashkenazi, by contrast, descend from a small number of founders—per-

haps only hundreds of individuals in late medieval times—and have remained largely genetically isolated since, even as their de-scendants now number several million.

Pe’er earned his Ph.D. in computer sci-ence at Tel Aviv University in 2002 and then worked at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

Genetics offered an opportunity to use computer science to affect the real world, “as opposed to more theoretical computer

science,” he said. He graduated just as a ge-netics revolution had begun.

Only a dozen years ago it was possible to look at a limited number, perhaps 20,000, of genetic markers called microsatellites. Two individuals usually needed to have at least one million base pairs of DNA in common for the shared segment to be identifiable us-ing microsatellites. Around 2005, scientists could narrow down similarities between two individuals to segments of 10,000 base pairs in size.

Over the last year it has become possible to sequence an individual’s entire genome for about $3,000, which makes it affordable for researchers like Pe’er to use the tech-nique on a large scale.

In the case of the Ashkenazi, Pe’er and colleagues have sequenced genomes from 140 subjects with four Ashkenazi grand-parents and are aiming for a total of 500 to provide a “good representation of the gene pool of the entire set of founders of the population,” he said.

The project provides a peek at a new kind of genetic analysis that many believe will revolutionize how doctors treat pa-tients. In 10 years, Pe’er predicts, sequenc-ing an entire genome will be so inexpensive that everyone could know his or her genetic makeup.

That information will help doctors predict which medications will most likely work effec-tively for a particular individual by examining how others with similar genetic characteristics have responded in the past.

“Ten years from now, personalized ge-netics is going to be ubiquitous,” Pe’er said. “Should they choose to, everybody’s genome is going to be part of records that physicians use when prescribing drugs, so that treatments will be optimally targeted to your genome in terms of dosage, desired re-sponses and minimal adverse side effects.”

By Adam Piore

at the Vanguard of a reVolution in Computational genetiCs

itsik Pe’er can use his models to determine distant relationships shared by two individuals.

“everybody’s genome is going to be part of records that

physicians use when prescribing drugs, so that treatments will

be optimally targeted to your genome in terms of dosage,

desired responses and minimal adverse side effects.”

$25 million gift to enhanCe als researCh CollaborationBy Record Staff

“finding a cure for als

requires that we think

differently about how to tackle

this debilitating disease.”

TheRecord4 february 2013

origins and inheritance of behav-ior. She also teaches a course in the neurobiology of reproductive be-havior. “There are many approaches to being a good teacher but a com-mon theme is a feeling of enthusi-asm for what you are teaching and a feeling of satisfaction at being able to communicate that excitement to the stu-

dents,” she said.

Jean Cohen, the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought and Contemporary Civilization, has been at Columbia for nearly 30 years. She has organized six international political science conferences and had visiting professorships around the world. Her current research involves the revival of “po-litical religion” across the globe and the risks it poses for de-mocracy, constitutionalism, human rights and gender justice. “A good teacher is someone who can present a coherent class lecture, who cares about the topic, who is open to discussion and debate and different points of view, is not authoritarian or dogmatic but willing also to learn from students while being rigorous and demanding. The point is not to be ‘relevant’ but to be excellent,” she said, adding that her teaching style was partly influenced by different teaching methods she observed in the U.S. and abroad. While it varies with the size and level of the

class, she is always open to students’ questions.

Giuseppe Gerbino, associate professor of music and chair of the Music Department, is an authority on Italian Renaissance music. He has explored the relationship be-tween music and language and the concepts of perception and cogni-

tion in the early modern period. “Teaching is not a simple transfer of knowledge but an act of sharing,” he said. “For me, it is important to communicate to students how deeply a book or a musical work has changed me over the years. Shar-ing this experience is one of the most rewarding aspects of what we do as teachers.” And, he added, “A little bit of humor also goes a long way.” His book Music and Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, published by Cambridge University Press, received the 2010 Lewis Lockwood Award from the Ameri-can Musicological Society.

Don J. Melnick is the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Conserva-tion Biology in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. He created the blueprint for the department known informally as E3B, which has grown in faculty size, student enrollments and degree candi-dates since it was established in 2001. He developed a bio-anthropology sub-specialty that is now a standalone major and was one of the first to teach Frontiers of Science, a Core Curriculum science course.

His research has taken him all over the world, from the mountains of the Himalayas to the jungles of Sumatra. “I have had to explain what I do to many different types of people, in different cultures, in different languages, and this has helped me immensely in my teaching,” he said. He sees every lecture as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. “I have found this to be the best way to draw students into a lecture or a course—take them on a journey from

a place they know to one never dreamed of before.”

Rosalind C. Morris, professor of anthropology, works across a variety of disciplines besides her own specialty, including literature, philosophy and media studies. For the last 15 years she has been doing ethnography research in South Africa’s gold mining region, and

thinking about how people learn to change. “Students must learn to assume the burden of critical thought, for there is no hope for the future without the commitment and the capacity to remedy what ails the present,” she said. When she teaches the core ethnog-raphy course for undergraduate anthropology majors, students read fiction, drama, journalism, history and social theory. “I aim to help students understand how knowledge is shaped by the dis-courses and the aesthetic traditions within which they are framed,” she said. “My objective is to help students to learn on their own.”

Gerard Parkin, professor of chem-istry, says he tries to present material with enthusiasm—and sometimes hu-mor. “It is most important to engage the students, ask them questions and make them think about what is be-ing discussed,” he said. Students in his general chemistry classes use handheld

clickers during lectures to give him feedback in real time, which he said helps him determine if they understand the materials. He also often corrects what he called “significant conceptual errors” in textbooks, which, he said, “instills in the students the notion that they need to be critical of what they read.” Parkin joined the Columbia faculty in 1988 and in 2008 received the Univer-sity President’s Award for Outstanding Teaching. He also is a re-cent recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, presented at the White House.

Caterina Pizzigoni, an associate professor of Latin American history, arrived at Columbia in 2006. “I think of teaching as an interaction with the students,” she said. “I try to involve them first of all through images and primary sources we can work on together in class and through ques-tions, in a seminar but also in a lec-ture format.” An expert on the indig-enous people of central Mexico during the colonial period, her work reconstructs and analyzes their society and culture using documents in their native language, Nahuatl, as well as sources in Spanish. “Reading between the lines and the passion to dis-cover anything about the individuals behind these documents have informed my teaching,” she said. Pizzigoni says the students at Columbia “inspire me every day, even when I think I am too tired to step into the classroom.” In 2008 she won the Columbia Mentoring Initiative Award, which recognizes faculty who men-

tor first-year students.

Ovidiu Savin, professor of math-ematics, enjoys “explaining math-ematics to students of all levels, inter-acting with them, stimulating them and helping them to gain confidence in their math abilities.” His research involves partial differential equations, which appear in all areas of math-

ematics and science. “They are relevant, for example, in traffic network planning in cities, Internet traffic optimization and fluid dynamics,” he said. “This gives me the opportunity to provide my students with concrete examples of applications of math.” Besides the courses he teaches, Savin prepares students for the Putnam Competition, an annual undergraduate math contest. The top scorer in the 1997 competition when he was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, he has helped make the Columbia team among the perennial favorites. Last year, the Italian Math-ematical Union awarded him the Stampacchia Gold Medal, an international prize that is considered one of the highest honors in mathematics.

Melissa Schwartzberg, as-sociate professor of political sci-ence, is a political theorist whose research centers on the history of democratic institutions and the rules for and consequences of democratic decision making. “One of the most rewarding ele-ments of teaching undergraduates in particular is the oppor-tunity to help them critically assess institutions they know quite well—the use of elections, the secret ballot, majority rule etc.,” she said. When teaching the history of political thought, she said she emphasizes arguments that might question students’ assumptions and tries to make a case for them. “I dislike lecturing and tend to turn even my lecture courses into seminars.” Schwartzberg teaches the Contem-porary Civilization course in the Core Curriculum, as well as other undergraduate and graduate level courses. A part-time scholar of ancient Greek institutions, she is also an associate member of the Department of Classics.

Joseph Slaughter, associate professor of English and compara-tive literature, teaches African, Latin American and Caribbean literatures, postcolonial and narrative theory, and human rights. Since many of the texts he teaches aren’t familiar to the students, he said, he empha-sizes the importance of cultural and historical context in all literature.

“Ideally, being literate means also being aware of the ways in which reading is inflected by larger socio-historical and cultural dynamics,” he said. “I try to be attentive to the class dynamics, to the disparities in student preparation, and to learn from the students the ways in which we can best learn together.” His teaching style depends on the size of the class and the topic, he said. “One of the shared qualities between a good teacher and a good student is being humble about what one knows—never being overly confident that one’s knowl-edge is correct or represents the only or best answer to any question or problem.” His first book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Lit-erature Association in 2008.

The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office

ray fisManTwelve

Fisman, the Business School’s Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise, and Tim Sulli-van, editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press, look at why organizations are central to human achievement. Using case studies that include McDonald’s, Procter and Gamble, Google and even al-Qaeda, they explain the tradeoffs that every or-ganization faces, arguing that everyday dysfunction is actually inherent to the very nature of an organization. The Org diagnoses the root causes of this dysfunction, beginning with the economic logic of why organizations exist in the first place and then explaining their structure from the lowly cubicle to the executive suite.

Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence

bruCe W. robbins Duke university Press books

In his new book, Robbins takes stock of the “new cosmopoli-tanism,” a movement that em-phasizes allegiance to the good of humanity as a whole, even if it conflicts with loyalty to the interests of one’s country. Rob-bins, the Old Dominion Founda-tion Professor in the Humanities, rethinks his own commitment to the movement and reflects on the responsibilities of American

intellectuals today. By engaging with thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and W. G. Sebald, he explores the paradoxes of detaching and belonging that they embody. Robbins contends that in this era of seemingly endless U.S. warfare, cosmopolitanism is a necessary resource in the struggle against military ag-gression.

The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power

ParTHa CHaTTerJeePrinceton university Press

When Siraj, the ruler of Ben-gal, overran the British settle-ment of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners in a cramped prison, and 123 died of suffocation. While never independently confirmed, the story of “the black hole of Calcutta” was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. Chatterjee, a profes-sor of anthropology, explores how this supposed trag-edy was central to the belief in the “civilizing” force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. In a challenge to conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship and liberal views of globaliza-tion, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

barbara J. fielDs verso

Fields, a professor of history, and her co-author sociologist Karen E. Fields, tackle the myth of a postracial society. They ar-gue that the assumption that racism grows from a perception of human difference is incor-rect. In reality, they say, the practice of racism produces the illusion of race through a process they call “racecraft.”

This phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life and so pervasive in American history, economics, politics, and every-day life that it goes unnoticed. The authors argue that the promised postracial age has not dawned because Americans have failed to develop an appropriate lan-guage for thinking about and discussing inequality.

Lenfest Winnerscontinued from page1

columBia inK New Books by Faculty

Frances A. Champagne

Caterina Pizzigoni

Melissa Schwartzberg

Jean Cohen

Giuseppe Gerbino Ovidiu Savin

Don J. Melnick

Rosalind C. Morris

Joseph Slaughter

Gerard Parkin

S uppose you’re in an elevator standing next to someone with a million dol-lars in grant money to fund your re-

search, if only you can convince her in the brief span of an elevator ride. You’re in need of the proverbial elevator pitch.

Columbia and Barnard undergraduate sum-mer students engage in such role-playing as part of a summer research program funded by the Amgen Foundation, the main philanthrop-ic arm of the biotech company Amgen. The Amgen Scholars Program, now entering its seventh year in the U.S., is one of many initia-tives aimed at strengthening science education and exciting students about scientific careers.

Program administrators emphasize the importance of oral skills because even the best science cannot often succeed with-out the ability to communicate one’s research goals to founda-tions, sponsors and grant makers.

In 2006, the Amgen Foundation awarded Columbia and Bar-nard a four-year grant to support the program, which offers students invaluable laboratory experience. In 2010, the founda-tion renewed its grant for another four years.

“Exposure to all aspects of research is crucial to training the next generation of American scientists,” said Alice Heicklen, a senior lecturer in Columbia’s biological sciences department and program director of the Amgen Scholars Program. “Here, we can offer a stellar research program in cutting-edge labs to a group of promising students from around the country.”

Columbia and Barnard are among 10 academic institutions nationally and three abroad to receive such funding from Am-gen. There are about 25 to 29 Amgen Scholars on the campus each summer. The students come from Columbia, Barnard and universities like Harvard and Duke as well as smaller colleges like Carleton and Lafayette. They arrive after Memorial Day for a 10-week stay and engage in independent projects mentored by scientists from the University community.

In her sophomore year, Georgia Squyres (CC’13) was so ea-ger to work in a lab that she scrolled through the alphabetical list of biology professors and emailed every one whose research looked interesting. Her search stopped after hearing from Lars Dietrich, an assistant professor in biological sciences.

“I really didn’t get too far down the list—as you can see, his last name starts with D,” said Squyres. “I went in for a really fun interview with him—we talked about our favorite bands, like Radiohead.”

She studied how bacteria cooperate successfully with one

another to survive in challenging environments. “It was exactly what I needed at that point in my career,” Squyres said.

Approximately 120 faculty members, who can be drawn upon as mentors, are essential to the program. Anita Burgos was in the Amgen program in 2009 while she was at NYU and worked with Sarah M.N. Woolley, associate professor of psy-chology. Now a graduate student studying neuroscience at Co-lumbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, Burgos said of fac-ulty mentors like Woolley: “They are invested in your success.”

Amber Miller, a physics professor and dean of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said, “Doing research in a laborato-ry is like an apprenticeship. You learn by doing, and the stron-ger the mentor, the more a student will grow as a scientist.”

Besides the elevator pitch, students practice an oral exer-cise in which one student explains his research to another, who in turn describes it to a group. “It’s valuable for the students to listen to how jargon has been cut out in the retelling,” said Heicklen.

Summer students receive guidance in developing their writ-ing skills as well. Burgos recalled reading an article about olfac-tory neurons by University Professor Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2004. She said learning how a scientific article was structured proved helpful in composing her own.

The students get to know one another by living together and participating in social outings such as a field trip to the bio-pharmaceutical company, Regeneron, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

In July, Columbia’s Amgen Scholars head to California to at-tend a symposium where they meet Amgen Scholars from other universities and hear from academic and industry leaders.

“We couldn’t add some of the components that make this program so stellar without outside funding,” said Heicklen.

Amgen Scholars Program Helps Science Students Learn By DoingBy Gary Shapiro

TheRecord february 2013 5

H istory Professor Carl Wennerlind’s most recent book focuses on a finan-cial system come undone, a public

looking to its government for answers, and a monetary system badly in need of trust and transparency.

No, it’s not about the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2008 fiscal meltdown. Rather, its topic is the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 and the events leading to its founding.

Wennerlind, an associate professor of his-tory at Barnard, sees parallels between then and now, chief among them how deeply credit is embedded in our culture. “Credit is a remarkable human accomplishment that sets us apart from prior ages,” he said at a recent discussion at Café Columbia, an informal dis-cussion series by University professors. “You can’t have a thriving, rapidly growing society without credit.”

Without access to extensive borrowing, people, companies and governments cannot operate properly. A big debt burden seems pos-sible when there is optimism about the avail-ability of revenue to service the debt. In times of crisis, any debt burden looks imposing.

That was the situation in which England found itself in the late 17th century, after de-cades of political upheaval that included the beheading of one king, a civil war, the restora-tion of another king and the Glorious Revolu-tion, during which a Dutch regent was invited to take the English throne.

As if that weren’t enough, England was enmeshed in a bitter war against France that it couldn’t afford and desperately needed to boost its economy to grow itself out of the cri-sis. But there simply was not enough money, or “coin,” for people to conduct transactions and for commerce to expand.

Counterfeiters abounded, and coin clip-pers shaved off the edges of silver coins and melted them down to sell as bullion, under-mining public confidence in the integrity of the monetary system. The philosopher John Locke warned that the counterfeiters con-stituted a greater threat to England’s safety than Louis XIV’s army.

There were mass hangings in central Lon-don to show the public that the government was serious about supporting the currency. As warden of the mint, Sir Isaac Newton investi-gated and prosecuted wrongdoers.

The government sought to resolve the cri-sis by establishing a national bank and the first generally circulating paper currency. The Bank of England issued capital stock and made a 1.2 million pound loan to the government, in paper money backed by a reserve of silver coin. At the same time, sophisticated stock and bond markets emerged in London. “England was thus arguably the place where modern fi-nancial capitalism arose,” Wennerlind said.

Wennerlind’s analysis of the crisis, Casu-alties of Credit: the English Financial Revo-lution, 1620-1720, was published in 2011 after six years of research that included trips to England to study original docu-ments in the British Library.

His research got easier when Columbia Libraries acquired a database with electronic versions of tens of thousands of pamphlets written at the time by such authors as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren.

The modern era of financial capitalism ushered in bubbles and bailouts. In the early 18th century, when the English govern-ment faced limits on what it could borrow, the South Sea Company sold stock in return for government bonds–and was given a monopoly on the slave trade from Africa to South America.

Soon the stock price began to soar. But when war broke out be-tween England and Spain and trad-ing to South America became impossi-ble, the company had to look for other ways to boost its stock price.

A complicated mix of fraud and finan-cial euphoria sparked a rapid stock market boom and subsequent bust—the infamous South Sea Bubble. The government’s efforts to save the nascent financial system involved a bailout of the Bank of England.

Not unlike some present-day fraudsters, Wennerlind said, those responsible for his-tory’s first stock market crash, in which an enormous amount of financial assets went up in smoke, largely avoided serious legal repercussions.

Wennerlind, who was born in Sweden and came to the U.S. at 18 to attend the University of South Florida on a tennis scholarship, says

he became interested in economics and the origins

of capitalism when he saw poverty, racism and a crumbling infrastructure while

traveling in the American South. “What economists were offering wasn’t

helping,” said Wennerlind, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. “I became interested in examining how, where and for what reasons economics originated and evolved.”

Wennerlind started out in the economics department at Barnard but for the past eight years has been part of the history department, teaching students at Barnard and Columbia economic history with colorfully titled courses like “Filthy Lucre: A History of Money.”

MailMan School Study FindS old age oFFerS no Protection FroM obeSity riSkS

It is widely accepted that obesity is dangerous, contribut-ing to a host of fatal diseases. When it comes to seniors, how-ever, leading researchers have reported an “obesity paradox” —that at age 65 and older, having an elevated BMI won’t shorten your lifespan and may even extend it.

A new study from the Mailman School of Public Health re-examines this research and finds that the earlier studies were flawed. Its conclusion: As obese Americans grow older, their heightened risk of death actually increases.

Bruce Link, a professor of epidemiology and sociomedi-cal sciences, and demography researcher Ryan Masters argue that past studies of longevity and obesity were biased and failed to include individuals in hospitals and nursing homes.

For the recent analysis, published in the online edition of the American Journal of Epidemiology, Masters matched National Health Interview Survey data on obesity with corre-sponding records in the National Death Index. He used data from close to 800,000 adults surveyed between 1986 and 2004. He then made statistical adjustments to account for the survey selection bias.

Link, a research scientist at the medical center’s New York State Psychiatric Institute and senior author on the paper, finds the results impressive. “This study should put to rest the notion that it’s possible to ‘age out’ of obesity risk,” he says.

“FlyWalker” MeaSureS Fruit Fly’S Strut, Potentially aiding ParkinSon’S reSearch

Fruit flies are a standard animal model for the study of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, but their small size has made it difficult to measure physical motion and motor defects.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have now developed FlyWalker, a software program that can mea-sure a wide range of fruit fly motions.

Quantifying the insect’s walking speed, distance walked and gait pattern should help scientists to achieve a basic un-derstanding of animal locomotion. It should also help them to discover subtle changes as Parkinson’s and other diseases progress over time.

Cesar Mendes, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Richard Mann, Higgins Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, collaborated with Imre Bartos and Sz-abolcs Márka in the physics department to develop an opti-cal touch sensor.

The device works by emitting bursts of light when an object such as a fly’s foot touches a surface. These bursts of light are captured in real time with high-speed video imaging

By CUMC News

continued on page 6

anita burgos stands inside an enclosure with zebra finches in sarah Woolley's lab during the summer of 2009. she is studying the effects of developmental experience on song preference.

expert in 17th century english economic history sees Parallels to today’s fiscal crisisBy Georgette Jasen

MeDicAL center reSeArcH BriefS

The University Senate heard reports at its Feb. 1 meeting on Columbia’s global initiatives and a stu-

dent proposal to conduct quality-of-life sur-veys. Senators also approved a new master’s in global thought and began final delibera-tions on a smoking policy for the Morning-side campus—the subject also of a Senate town hall meeting the week before.

Following an extensive report at its last plenary from Vice President for Global Cen-ters Safwan Masri, the Senate heard this month from its own Task Force on Global Ini-tiatives, chaired by Sharyn O’Halloran (Ten., SIPA), who also chairs the Senate Executive Committee. O’Halloran summarized a 58-page report, of which she was the principal author. The report addressed the question of how Columbia can maintain its “preeminent” global position among American universities at a time when peer institutions are making major efforts to expand their global reach, in some cases by establishing satellite campuses abroad.

The report concluded that the Univer-sity needs to harness its global initiatives more closely to its fundamental research and teaching missions, particularly by con-solidating the management and raising the profile of the newly established Columbia Global Centers. The centers were described as offering an “innovative and cost-effective” alternative to branch campuses, providing the broadest “global coverage” of any Ameri-can university.

The report included an email survey of students and faculty from late last fall, which found that 68 percent of 560 faculty and re-searcher respondents were “largely unfamil-iar” with the CGCs but that a similar frac-tion was “open” to using them. Percentages were comparable for members of student councils. President Lee Bollinger expressed confidence that the recent spate of reports and discussions about the CGCs was already boosting awareness of them.

Reporting for the Student Affairs Commit-tee, Sen. Aly Jiwani (SIPA) outlined a plan to conduct quality-of-life surveys of all Colum-bia students every two years, starting this

spring. With some adjustments, the surveys would be similar every time, providing a comprehensive database over the years. The data would be held in the Senate office and shared with the provost’s Office of Planning and Institutional Research.

A Senate task force presented preliminary recommendations for a new smoking policy for the Morningside campus—the beginning of the end of a lengthy review of the current policy prohibiting smoking within 20 feet of campus buildings, approved by the Senate in December 2010.

Task force spokesman Brendan O’Flaherty (Ten., A&S/SS) called for stepped-up smok-ing cessation programs, a much stronger implementation and publicity effort than the one that followed the adoption of the cur-rent policy, and renewed efforts to identify designated areas for smokers.

The last recommendation, which might replace the current policy without resort-ing to a total smoking ban, calls for a differ-ent version of an idea—former Sen. Michael Adler’s “little huts”—that came up two years ago. O’Flaherty said the task force would of-fer guidelines for identifying locations for the smoking areas, but would leave the details to an administration task force in charge of implementation.

The task force recommendations had a gentler reception at the plenary than at the town hall meeting on Jan. 24, where, along with the now familiar recitation of heartfelt, incompatible views, O’Flaherty encountered specific objections to the idea of designated smoking areas on campus. At the plenary he promised that the task force would finish its work soon.

Its final recommendations may come at the next plenary at 1:15 p.m. March 1 in 107 Jerome Greene Hall. Anyone with CUID is welcome. Most plenary documents are on the Web, at senate.columbia.edu.

Tom Mathewson is manager of the University Senate. His column is editorially independent of The Record. For more information about the Senate, go to www.columbia.edu/cu/senate.

TheRecord6 february 2013

Research Briefscontinued from page 5

Who She IS: Manager, Off-Campus Housing Assistance (OCHA)

YearS at ColumbIa: 13

What She DoeS: Saar helps members of the Columbia community—students, faculty, visiting scholars and alumni—find a place to live off-campus. Her office, which is part of the Facilities Department, maintains an online registry of apartments for rent that anyone with a University Network ID (UNI) can log into. Saar also does what she calls “real estate therapy,” counseling newcom-ers to the city about the fine points of renting in New York, which can include paying a full year’s rent up front for people who don’t meet landlords’ financial qualifica-tions. “I know what brokers can and can’t do,” she says. “I can help people understand the complex rules of the game.” She has negotiated discounted broker fees and often makes phone calls on behalf of a student who is having difficulty communicating with a landlord.

roaD to ColumbIa: Saar had a B.A. degree in sociology and photography from SUNY Purchase and was work-ing as a production manager in television and film in the 1990s, when she and her ex-husband, a licensed real estate broker, opened a small real estate office in their East Village loft. She soon got a real estate license her-self. Later, in SoHo, she helped students from NYU, the New School and the Culinary Institute find apartments. In 2000, with a new baby—and the desire to be at home in the evenings and on weekends—someone told her about an ad in The New York Times for the position at Columbia that she now holds. Saar sent in her resume, was interviewed and hired. Until then, the off-campus housing office had been run by work-study students and

was not open full-time. “It was a perfect fit,” she says, “I had worked with students and I knew the Manhattan rental market.”

beSt Part of the Job: “I get to meet people from all over the world,” she says. “I like to help people succeed in tough situ-ations that at first seem overwhelming.” Some international students have language difficulties, and many don’t fully un-derstand how the U.S. banking system works—for example, that it can take seven to 10 business days for money wired from abroad to clear. She helps them navigate the rental process and often gets thank-you notes and follow-up calls from people she has assisted.

memorable momentS: The launch last June of the new online housing registry (http://facilities.columbia.edu/housing/) “was a great day,” Saar says. The process of replacing the previous registry, which had become ob-solete and was difficult to navigate, began in 2009, she recalls, and it took many proposals and meetings to choose a new provider. The new version is easier to use and students now can create a roommate profile, link it to Facebook and see photos.

In her SPare tIme: Mother of a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, Saar is very involved in her neighbor-hood school, P.S./I.S. 187 in Washington Heights. She has organized free yoga, running and nutrition education programs as well as cooking classes for young children. In 2010, she started an annual wellness fair at the school that is open to the community. This month, she was hon-ored for her community service by Friends of 187, a non-profit group that does fundraising for the school.

—Georgette Jasen

SENATORS REPORT ON GLOBAL INITIATIVES, STUDENT QUALITY-OF-LIFE SURVEY; REVISIT SMOKING POLICY

to monitor the fly’s body and each of its six feet as it walks across the surface. The researchers then use custom software to analyze the data.

The next step is to combine genetic tools with this new method for analyzing locomotion to further explore the role of motor neuron circuitry in walking. The findings were published online in eLife in January.

iS StreSS really bad For your heart?Most people, including cardiologists,

believe that stress is bad for your heart. But what’s the evidence behind that claim?

Donald Edmondson, assistant profes-sor of behavioral medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Cen-ter for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health, decided to review the evidence behind two common beliefs: that long-term stress increases heart disease and that in-tense emotions trigger heart attacks.

What he and his colleagues found was that most studies that claimed to measure stress did not. Instead, they focused on anxiety, depression and other disorders that are well-established risk factors.

Their results showed that people who feel a high degree of stress in their lives are 27 percent more likely to develop heart disease or die from heart disease, making long-term stress a moderate risk factor.

“High stress is not a huge factor in heart disease, but it’s not nothing. Nega-tive emotions accumulate and are cor-rosive over time,” Edmondson says. “The good news is that we know there are things people can do to reduce stress, things such as exercise, yoga and time with good friends.”

Edmondson’s team also found that emotional triggers are not very common. Recall bias—negative emotions that a per-son may experience when recalling the events prior to a heart attack—means that little is actually known about the preva-lence and severity of emotional triggers, although they are unlikely to account for more than 2–3 percent of all heart attacks.

In the meantime, Edmondson says people shouldn’t try to stifle strong emo-

tions. “If you’re really worried about your cardiovascular health, avoiding an-ger would be far down the list,” he says. “Exercise, smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol have much bigger effects on heart health.”

Folic acid SuPPleMentS linked to reduction in autiSM

Mothers who took folic acid supple-ments in early pregnancy had a dramatic reduction in the risk of having children with autistic disorder, according to a large new study in Norway.

Researchers at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health surveyed 85,176 babies born from 2002–2008 and their parents and found that mothers who took the supplements had a 40 percent lower risk of having a child with autistic disorder (the most severe form of autism spectrum disorders) than those who did not.

The timing of a mother’s intake of folic acid appeared to be a critical factor. Her child’s risk of autism was reduced only when the supplements were taken from four weeks before to eight weeks after the start of pregnancy.

“Our findings raise the possibility of an important and inexpensive public health intervention for reducing the burden of autism spectrum disorders,” said Dr. Ezra Susser, professor of epidemiology at Mail-man and of psychiatry at the New York Psychiatric Institute and senior author of the paper, which appeared in the Feb. 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medi-cal Association.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about 1 in 88 children in the U.S. have been identified with autism spectrum disorder.

Folic acid (vitamin B9) is required for DNA synthesis and repair in the human body. Its naturally occurring form—fo-late—is found in leafy vegetables, peas, len-tils, beans, eggs, yeast and liver.

Taking folic acid supplements dur-ing early pregnancy is known to protect against spina bifida and other neural tube defects in children.

coLumbia peopLe

susan saar

CHri

s le

ary

TheRecord february 2013 7

John McWhorter

facuLtY Q&a

Interviewed By Philip Stevenson eile

en b

arro

so

John McWhorter may be best known for his magazine and newspaper writing about race, but the Philadelphia native is at heart a dyed-in-the-wool academic whose first inkling

that he would spend his life studying languages came when he was still a preschooler and heard someone speaking a foreign language. “The idea that anybody could talk in more than one way was just mesmerizing,” he said.

McWhorter started working at Columbia in 2008 as an ad-junct professor teaching Contemporary Civilization in the Core Curriculum. By then, he had become known for his essays and commentary on race-related issues in media outlets such as The New Republic, The Root.com, The New York Daily News and NPR. In no time McWhorter, who had left a tenured job on the lin-guistics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley to move to New York to join the conservative-leaning Manhattan Insti-tute, was knee-deep in his first love, linguistics, teaching courses, advising students and supervising undergraduate theses.

Last fall, he was appointed associate professor in the Depart-ment of English and Comparative Literature, an “administrative convenience,” as he says, because Columbia does not have a linguistics department. A prolific writer who is equally comfort-able appearing on The Colbert Report as he is publishing schol-arly works on plantation Creoles, McWhorter is thrilled to be back in academia full time. He compares the sensation of writ-ing for the popular press to that of eating “candy or hot dogs”—something pleasurable but also ephemeral. “The academic stuff is more like Scotch or brussels sprouts because it’s eternal,” he reflected. “Which one do I wake up thinking about? The aca-demic, really.”

Q.How did you originally come to the study of linguistics?

A.At the age of 4 I heard someone speaking Hebrew, and I wanted to know Hebrew. At the time I didn’t

know there were 6,000 other languages. I just heard that one. I’ve since learned that it’s a sort of kink, that some people hear someone speaking and want to learn how to do that. Then I taught myself a certain amount of Spanish when I was about 11, nothing close to fluent, but I got as far as I did because I was obsessed with language. I kept doing that as a teenager and once college was over, I knew that I would be a professor of something. I was raised with that, it was my personality. The question was: of what? The thing that I was best at was languages, and I learned that there is something called linguistics.

Q.How do you bridge your academic interests with your popular cultural criticism?

A. They’re two different brains. I started as an academic, and I thought that was all I was ever going to be. As for

the media career, it was all just a complete accident. I was at Berkeley, and there was a fight over the ban of affirmative ac-tion. I thought that affirmative action—the way they had done it—had become obsolete. Not wrong, but enough time had passed and it was time to base affirmative action on socioeco-nomics. Saying that in the late 1990s in Berkeley and Oakland— you were not supposed to say that as a young black professor. I wrote an essay on the website edge.org, and the publisher of my linguistics book suggested that I expand it into a book. At first I said no: Why would anybody care what some linguist thinks about race issues? But I wrote it [Losing the Race] because I felt very passionate about the issue, and I just love writing. I really didn’t expect anybody to care as much as they did and that was

the beginning of the media career. Once it happened, I wasn’t going to say no. I did not become a linguist thinking I was go-ing to parlay it into something else, and I will not be doing any academic work on race questions. My heart still is in dealing with my weird languages.

Q.What impact is globalization having on languages?

A.There are about 20 languages that are slowly eating up the other 6,000. That’s essentially because of how Eng-

land developed a global presence starting in the 1600s, and the language they happened to carry with them was English. What we’re seeing is an increasingly Anglophone world and an in-creasingly oral, rather than written world. So many of the other languages are falling by the wayside that we may lose 90 per-cent of the languages we have now by the year 2100.

Q.How else is language changing?

A.There is an increasing informality in language usage in general, and a lot of that informality is happening

in English. As we lose the very stringent formality of the old-fashioned kind of prose, we’re gaining a much richer acknowl-edgement of the fluorescence of oral language. It’s hard to get a sense of how ordinary people spoke and what their idioms were in, say, 1912. How do we know what people were saying on the street? There are no recordings; film was silent then. To-day we look online and we can see that speech, the way people talk, or when they heighten it with spoken word poetry, rap music, slogans or in well-written TV shows. That is as fascinat-ing as somebody who can write like Milton or like Charles Dick-ens. So, we’re seeing a new side of language, which was mostly under the radar until very recently.

Q.What are you most interested in right now?

A.One of the things I’ve been working on is a theory of what happens when languages come into contact with

each other. Some languages, because they are learned as much by adults as by children, become less complex than most lan-guages are. Vikings learned English in such numbers starting in the 8th century and as a result English is less elaborate than, say, a language like Russian that doesn’t have any event like that in its history. If you find an obscure language spoken in the rain forest for example, it’s going to be complicated to an extent that we, as English speakers, could barely imagine. So I’ve been working on showing how that kind of complexity is normal and that only a few languages are relatively stream-lined: I walk, you walk, he walks, we walk, you walk, they walk—that’s highly unusual for a conjugation. That’s because of English’s unique history. I’m also looking at some languages spoken in Indonesia that are much simpler than they should be and showing how that is connected to social history. My aim is to show that there is a general paradigm of language complexity and language contact that works worldwide and throughout history. It also applies to Creole languages, which is one of my specialties. Most Creole languages are much less forbiddingly complex than a language like Eskimo, and that’s because they were created by adults.

Q.What is your next book about?

A.I ’m working on one for the general public about the idea that your language’s grammar can shape

the way you think. The usual example of this is Russian, which has separate words for “dark blue” and “light blue.” If you’re Russian, do you perceive the difference between those blues more immediately than we do because we use the same word “blue” for both? Chinese is a very telegraphic language in that the typical Chinese sentence doesn’t say as much as in an English sentence; it’s all context. So if in English I say, “Yesterday, I painted the walls when I should have done something else,” in Chinese, roughly, that goes, “Yesterday, I paint walls when must something else do.” My book explains that we have to understand that all human thought processes are the same, but languages are different. So it’s not that each language gives you a different lens on the world. Once again, I’m going to be a little unpopular because most people want you to say: “I speak Italian and that makes me see the world differently than if you speak English.” I don’t think it does.

Q.Are you still writing for the popular media?

A.The last piece I wrote for the Daily News was about the election and the fact that Barack Obama has

now been elected not once, but twice, and how that means that even though there are still racists out there and that racism is not dead, that it’s less than it used to be. And the comparison is not with 1912 or 1952, it’s with 1982. I’m get-ting old enough to remember a different racial America– it’s changing. And I still write for The New Republic and who-ever else asks now and then.

Q.Longer term, what sorts of projects do you envision?

A.I’m interested in language learning techniques. I’ve always said that in the third act of my life, which I

think I’m about to enter [McWhorter is 47], I would come up with methods of teaching languages that work better than the ones that I was exposed to. I want to learn from people who know how to do this; it’s not that I claim any expertise in it myself, yet. But I think that there are ways to get people speaking a language quickly, beyond what you see in Rosetta Stone and Berlitz, that people maybe haven’t thought of partly because the people who work on this tend not to be linguists. The great teachers are not linguists, and most linguists really aren’t interested. But I came into this wanting to know how I could learn Hebrew. And I’ve always thought there might be something that I could contribute to that—what you would call second-language acquisition techniques. I want to get working on that once I get more settled in here.

Q.You taught linguistics at Cornell and then at Berke-ley. How does it feel to be back at a university full time?

A.I left academe easily in 2002, but I did come to miss it. I like having colleagues around me who are academics

rather than political writers because I do feel a bit more at home in that environment. I love that there is a university library right over there that I can always use. Teaching is a lot different with wireless and Wikipedia, and I’m beginning to realize I have to completely rethink a lot of my approaches. You say something in class and they all have their phones. They can just look it up. All that makes it more fun in many ways. I like giving my lectures about things that I love. When I teach “Introduction to Linguistics,” it’s my passion. The students can feel it. You can’t ask for anything better.

POSITIONassociate Professor, english and Comparative literature Department

JOINED FACULTY2008

HISTORY

lecturer, Columbia university, with appointments in english and Comparative literature, Core Curriculum, slavic Department, 2008-2012

senior fellow, Manhattan institute for Policy research, 2002-2010

associate Professor, university of California, berkeley, with appointment in linguistics, 1999-2004

assistant Professor, uC berkeley, with appointments in linguistics, african-american studies, 1995-1999

assistant Professor, Department of Modern languages and linguistics, Cornell university, 1994-1995

TheRecord8 february 2013

Offi

ce o

f Com

mun

icat

ions

and

Pub

lic A

ffairs

402 L

ow L

ibra

ry, M

C4321

535 W

. 116th

St.

New

Yor

k, N

Y 1

0027

Gift for ALS Researchcontinued from page 3

ColumbiaDoctorscontinued from page 1

Nakanishicontinued from page 1

Dian

e bon

Dare

ff

Dima yudin, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research scientist in the Henderson lab.

through his Bloomberg Philanthropies.Rubenstein, co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, said

he and his co-funders hoped the resources would serve as a “unifying catalyst” for the work being done around the world to prevent and cure ALS. “With fresh resources and determined collabora-tion, we can make steady progress toward a cure for this devastating disease,” he said.

Lee Goldman, dean of the Faculties of Health

Sciences and Medicine and executive vice presi-dent for Health and Biomedical Sciences, ex-pressed his gratitude for the donation.

“We are extremely grateful to Dan, David and Bloomberg Philanthropies for their generosity and for recognizing the great promise of the re-search led by Dr. Henderson and his colleagues both here at Columbia and at our collaborating institutions,” he said.

atmoSphEric ScruBBing

mapping manhattan

in his lab at Columbia’s Engineer-ing School, Klaus Lackner is working

on developing artificial trees that act like giant filters, scrubbing carbon di-oxide from the air and reducing levels of the harmful greenhouse gas, which plays a major role in global warming.

Lackner, director of the Lenfest Cen-ter for Sustainable Energy at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and Allen Wright, senior staff associate at the center, recently demonstrated how the technology can be used to supply carbon dioxide to greenhouses to maintain healthy plant growth. For video on this research, visit news.columbia.edu/carbondioxide.

Marguerite Holloway’s book, The Measure of Manhattan, is the first

biography of John Randel Jr., the man who plotted the island’s street grid. He “wrestled the wildness of the is-land as he imposed his vision upon it: Gone, in his mind’s eye, were the hills and ponds, the towering chestnut

trees, the unruly outcroppings,” Hol-loway wrote in a New York Times piece. In her book the assistant professor of journalism also explores the science of surveying and the modern tech-nologies it created. For video of Hol-loway discussing her book, visit news .columbia.edu/grid.

lumbia was located for some 40 years, from 1857 until its 1897 move to Morningside Heights.

The need to expand prompted the move to 51st Street. The new location is expected to serve at least 20 percent more patients per year. In addition to the health care profession-als who practice at the midtown location, pa-tients have access to the entire 1,200-member ColumbiaDoctors multi-specialty practice and its locations in New York City, Westchester and throughout the tri-state area.

At the opening ceremony, Goldman thanked CUMC Chief Operating Officer Mark McDougle, who led the project from lease negotiation to opening within about 18 months, as well as the CUMC capital projects team, who kept the proj-ect on schedule despite significant disruptions due to Hurricane Sandy.

Dr. Kenneth Forde, a retired surgeon and chair of the health sciences committee of the University Board of Trustees, said the facility design represents the way health care is prac-ticed in the 21st century. The spacious layout, with comfortable waiting areas and ample natural light, will encourage interaction be-tween clinicians in different specialties and let patients seeing multiple specialists coordinate appointments.

“I see us not only keeping up with the times, but being able to anticipate some of the chang-es in health care,” said Forde, who also serves on the board of NewYork-Presbyterian. “We’ve moved away from the siloed, entrepreneurial-type practices—we’re all involved. We’re enjoy-ing more patient participation. We have oppor-tunities for education in everything we do.”

In other design features, specialties with frequent overlap of patients, such as pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology, are located close to each other. “I think it’s special that we have one-stop shopping and coordinated care,” said Gmyrek. “It leads to superior patient care and superior medical results.”

the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the gingko was the first tree that came up. It’s amazing.” More recently, Nakanishi and his colleagues have been studying the use of ginkgo tree extract to slow the effect of amyloid peptides, which are widely believed to cause the brain to degrade in Alzheimer’s patients. Though recent studies have contradicted claims that the ex-tract aids in preventing the onset of Alzheimer’s, Na-kanishi says his work disputes those findings.

Nakanishi’s office is filled with knickknacks and mementos of his 44 years of teaching at Columbia—a miniature gingko tree, tiny origami cranes, models of molecular compounds, and numerous figurines of cows and bulls. (He was born in the year of the ox, according to the Chinese calendar.)

He has written 800 papers and nine books, in-cluding A Wandering Natural Products Chemist, a 1991 autobiography published by the American Chemical Society. The book revealed Nakanishi’s adventurous side, showing him eating raw snake at a specialty snake store in Tokyo in 1960. His wife, Yasuko, also featured prominently, serving as a test audience for his amateur magic tricks, and keeping his ox collection in check. The two were married for 63 years, and she died in 2008. He has two children and three grandchildren.

In 1999 the Emperor and Empress of Japan pre-sented Nakanishi with the “Person of Cultural Mer-it” prize, one of the country’s highest honors. It is among a long list of distinctions he has received from a dozen countries, including the Welch Award in chemistry, the Arthur C. Cope Award of the Amer-ican Chemical Society and the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy. In 1996, a prize was named in his honor, the Nakanishi Prize of the American Chemi-cal Society and the Chemical Society of Japan.

In spite of the accolades and accomplishments from his nearly 70 years of academic research, Nakanishi considers his “pride and honor” to be the numerous students who have worked in his lab, including 200 Ph.D.’s. “Seven hundred Ph.D.’s and post-docs have gone through my lab,” he says. “Three hundred are now professors. I am very lucky and grateful.”

ManH

aTTa

n bo

rouG

H Pr

esiD

enT’s

off

iCe