​

Edgar Degas, Sur la scène (On Stage III), 1877. Etching, 3 3/4 x 4 7/8". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Yalem Fund, 2005.

This fall, four Washington University cultural areas have banded together to create Arts First, a multidisciplinary, campus-wide subscription package.

It works like this: For $40, students, faculty and staff may purchase an Arts First card, which provides admittance to four campus events over the next year.

Che Malambo brings Argentine dance to Edison Nov. 22.

These include a special, members-only tour at the Mildred Kemper Art Museum, on Oct. 11, as well as one event of their choice from Edison Theatre, one event from the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences and one event from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.

Arts First cards can be purchased at the Edison Theatre Box Office or through the First Year Center website. For more information or a list of eligible events, visit the Arts First website or call (314) 935-6543.

Actor and playwright Stephen Lang—perhaps best known for his role as Colonel Quaritch in Avatar—brings Beyond Glory, an unflinching portrait of the real lives behind stories of military heroism, to Edison Nov. 16.

In a few days, a balloon-borne telescope sensitive to the polarization of high-energy “hard” X-rays will ascend to the edge of the atmosphere above Fort Sumner, N.M., to stare fixedly at black holes and other exotic astronomical objects. 

When X-Calibur, as the polarimeter is called, looks to the skies, it will see things that have never been seen before because it is looking at characteristics of high-energy light that astronomers are just beginning to explore.

X-Calibur differs from other instruments in that it can measure the polarization degree and direction of X-rays, which provide information not available in other ways. For example, when it looks at black holes and their plasma outflows, it will be able to tell how fast the black holes are spinning.

“Whenever you look at the sky at a different wavelength, you see something completely different,” said Henric Krawczynski, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and principal investigator of the X-Calibur experiment.

The beauty of balloon flights is that they can be used to test new instruments like X-Calibur at very low cost, but the drama of them is that the experiment flies at the mercy of the wind.

X-Calibur, like other experiments flown from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, has to catch a ride on what is called a stratospheric turnaround event. 

At mid-latitudes, stratospheric winds reverse direction twice each year: in the early spring and in late summer. If the winds are favorable, the balloon will travel west in the morning and return east in the evening.

“This way you can put it in the air for 30 hours, if you’re lucky,” Krawczynski said. If the wind doesn’t turn around, the balloon  flight will be short. When balloons drift outside the allowed operational area, flight safety officers fire guillotines that separate the parachute from the balloon, dropping the payload.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

The X-ray telescope InFOCuS in the NASA hangar at the Fort Sumner Municipal Airport. An X-ray mirror (the object in the background, left, that looks like a jet engine intake) concentrates X-rays onto the WUSTL polarimeter, situated directly behind Matthias Beilicke (left) and Fabian Kislat.

The WUSTL polarimeter will be carried aloft by an X-ray pointing telescope, called InFOCuS, that was designed and built by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

A team of 15 people is working 12-hour days — essentially living in the NASA hangar at Fort Sumner — to make sure the telescope will be ready on time to catch the favorable winds.

One crucial task is to make sure the X-rays are concentrated on the center of the polarimeter, which is 8 meters from the mirror. The two components have to be aligned within one-sixtieth of a degree or the X-rays either won’t hit the collimator at the center of the polarimeter or they’ll hit it off-axis, both of which are bad, Krawczynski said.

“The X-rays are hitting the collimator but a bit off to one side. We still need to tilt the mirror by half an arc-minute or so to focus the beam on the center of the collimator,” he said. 

Everything else has to be carefully checked out as well. A reaction wheel that has worked for 25 years has suddenly started to wobble and must be replaced. And difficulties arose when the telescope was rotated through 90 degrees in the NASA hangar that hadn’t been apparent when it was rotated through 30 degrees in the lab.

But in fact, Krawczynski isn’t so much worried as excited. “When something doesn’t work, we have to troubleshoot and try to figure out what to do. It’s detective work, which is fun,” he said.

“I’m pretty confident we’ll make the window for these turnaround flights,” he said during a brief return to St. Louis. “It looks like we’ll be ready in the middle of the window, but maybe we can make up a few days' time.”

Armchair observers can watch near-real-time video of the launch at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility. While the balloon is aloft, it will be tracked on a Google Earth map​.

Photo Courtesty of Joan Strassmann

Research scientist Debra Brock collecting soil samples that might contain wild D. discoideum clones at the biological field station in Mountain Lake, Va. It turns out that each pinch of soil hosts an ongoing psychodrama that pits farmers and their hired guns against crop thieves.

Model organisms, brought into labs because they are easy to work with, adapt to the lab, often shedding characteristics that allowed them to survive in the wild. Scientists who work with model organisms rarely look at the wild strains, but when they do, they can be surprised by what they find.

This is what happened with the soil-living social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, or Dicty. The single-celled amoebas crawl through the soil eating bacteria until food becomes scarce. Then the amoebas gather by the tens of thousands to form a multicellular slug, which transforms itself into a fruiting body: a sterile stalk that holds aloft a sorus, a tiny sphere that releases spores that become single amoebae again.

Isolated from decaying leaves collected in a hardwood forest in North Carolina in the summer of 1933, Dicty have been used for years to study development and, more recently, conflict and cooperation. 

Over the years, the model organism had adapted to growing in shaking flasks of liquid, a far cry from the soil, which Washington University in St. Louis biologist Joan Strassmann characterizes as “a noxious and terrifying environment for the little things that live there.”

In 1998, David Queller and Strassmann, both then on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, began isolating and working with wild clones of Dicty from soil collected at a field station in Virginia and various other locations around the U.S. When these clones were examined closely, they revealed a whole new world.

All Dicty eat bacteria, but some clones (genetically identical amoebas) also farm them — or at any rate, they gather up the bacteria, carry them to new sites and harvest them prudently. 

The farmer clones also carry bacteria that secrete chemicals to fend off amoebae that don’t bother to do their own farming. Not only do these defensive companions inhibit the growth of nonfarmers, they somehow stimulate the growth of the farmers.

The scientists, who have since moved to Washington University in St. Louis, describe this miniature ecosystem and its players in the Sept. 13, 2013, online edition of Nature Communications.

“Our results suggest that successful farming is a complex evolutionary adaptation because it requires additional strategies, such as recruiting third parties, to effectively defend and privatize the crops,” the scientists wrote. 

Amoebas carrying seed corn
“A lot of work has been done on this organism,” said Debra Brock, a research scientist in the Queller/Strassmann lab. “But the model organism is descended from a wild clone that was probably a nonfarmer.

“I had worked for years with the axenic clone (the model organism adapted to grow in liquid) when I joined the Queller/Strassmann lab as a graduate student. They had a large collection of wild discoideum clones, which I had never studied.

“When I looked at these clones under the microscope, I saw that some of them carried bacteria in their sorae, which were supposed to be sterile. A simple assay confirmed that the sorae from these clones seeded new patches of bacterial growth while those from clones that did not have bacteria did not.”

It looked like the amoebas were carrying the bacteria around to make sure they would always have food. But other scientists weren’t convinced. 

After all, the amoebas are grown on bacteria in the lab; perhaps they had just picked up these bacteria by accident.

“At first it was an uphill battle,” Brock said. But by isolating new clones from the wild that also carried edible bacteria in their sorae and running the clones through assays that showed, for example, that farmers cleansed of bacteria would pick them up again, the scientists eventually made their case.

As the researchers said in a Nature paper published in 2011, about a third of the wild clones carry, seed and prudently harvest edible bacteria, qualifying as farmers, albeit primitive ones. 

Courtesy of Debra Brock

A wild clone of social amoeba (white dots) that practice farming and the bacteria they farm (yellow plaques).

Amoebas carrying chemical weapons
But the situation was actually more complex than this. Brock quickly realized that some of the bacteria found in association with the Dicty weren’t edible. “I was sending the bacterial DNA out to be sequenced and looking up the sequence when it came back. Sometimes the bacteria were similar to human pathogens.

“Again it wasn’t clear what was going on,” Brock said. “Were these bacteria parasites on the amoebas? Were they free riders the amoebas picked up accidentally when they picked up the food bacteria? Were they pathogens that were making the amoebas sick? “

But the amoebas carrying these bacteria seemed to be thriving rather than sick. And she also knew that in other systems, farmers carry defensive symbionts. Leafcutter ants, for example, carry bacteria that help prevent other fungi from contaminating their fungal gardens. Could the inedible bacteria on the Dicty be defensive symbionts?

Sure enough, assays showed that when farmers carried certain nonedible strains, nonfarmer spore production was reduced, in some cases by more than half. Supernatants (washings) from bacterial cultures had similar effects, suggesting that the bacteria were secreting biomolecules that poisoned nonfarmers, preventing them from eating the farmers’ crops.

Courtesy of Debra Brock

Petri dishes containing some of the many bacterial symbionts carried by social amoeba farmers.

But that wasn’t the end of the surprises. The defensive symbionts don’t just squash nonfarmers, they seem also to help the farmers thrive. Brock suspects the amoebas and the bacteria are cross feeding. “They’re probably providing something for those bacteria and the bacteria are providing something for them. I’m currently trying to figure that out,” she said.

Does it pay to farm?
The big question for the team, all evolutionary biologists, was why is farming evolutionarily stable among Dicty? Why does this adaptation persist and, conversely why doesn’t it take over the entire population? The answer is that the value of farming as a strategy depends on the circumstances.

Farming, by itself, does not confer a selection advantage on the Dicty clones. If food is abundant, nonfarmers alone produce more spores than farmers alone. The reason is that farming is costly. Farmers save roughly half the bacteria available to them, forgoing considerable food to save some for dispersal at a new site. Like human farmers, they try never to touch their “seed corn.”

The tables are turned, however, if food is scarce — if the amoebas are dispersed to a site without a good source — farmers produce more spores than nonfarmers because they are able to make their new site productive.

What happens when farmers and nonfarmers are in direct competition? The farmers produce a valuable crop that could be eaten by nonfarmer clones that do not pay the costs of farming, making farming a losing strategy again.

That’s where the defensive symbionts come in. In the Nature Communications’ article, the scientists describe assays where they mixed farmers and nonfarmers in different proportions to see how they would do in direct competition with one another.

As the percentage of farmers in the mix increased, nonfarmers produced far fewer spores, and the spore production of farmers was unchanged. 

These results suggest that social amoebas make farming pay much as human farmers all over the world have done, by privatizing their crops. Without the benefit of human institutions that guarantee property rights or a just division of goods, they enforce their rights through chemical warfare.

“This is a neat example that shows that when you start looking at the natural history of things, even microbes, which people don’t study very much, you discover that amazing things are going on,” Queller said.

“It’s also about being open-minded,” Strassmann said. “When you see things that don’t quite fit the standard story, a good scientist will not try to jam them into the story, but instead recognize something different is going on and try to figure it out.”

 

This fall, Hold That Thought, a weekly podcast series from Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will continue to delve into current academic research by teaming up with WUSTL’s American Culture Studies program.

Together, they are exploring the question of what it means to be an American, today and throughout the country’s history.

“American identity is both a complicated and ever-evolving concept,” said Claire Navarro, producer of Hold That Thought. “In the American Identities series, I wanted to delve into questions about how — within a country with such a dramatic history and huge range of diversity — different groups and individuals define and express their unique identities,” she said.

As essayist Eula Biss notes in an upcoming episode, “This country is often spoken of as a young country, though we’re not all that young anymore. I think we’ve reached a point where we need to look back on the mistakes of our youth and decide where we want to take ourselves in the future. That’s the process of becoming an adult.”

That line of thought is especially relevant in 2013, Navarro said. “A quick overview of recent headlines — the Trayvon Martin case, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, the ongoing debate on immigration — reveals the ongoing turmoil within the nation,” she said.

“Washington University is fortunate to have a stellar group of scholars exploring the most urgent and vexing dimensions of the problem ‘What does it mean/has it meant to be an American?’” said Iver Bernstein, PhD, professor and director of American Culture Studies.

It’s a problem of particular resonance on an American college campus, Bernstein said, as “one of the hallmarks of a great American university must be its ability to provide intellectual leadership on the great questions of American culture and identity.”

The first episode of the series, “Stripes and Scars,” was released last month and featured Bernstein discussing the Civil War draft riots. Each Wednesday through November, new episodes will address topics as far-ranging as American art and 1960s experimental rock music to the song “Ol’ Man River” and the horrors of slave ships.

Bernstein is thrilled that Hold That Thought will bring these big questions to a wider audience, which is the series’ main objective. 

“The series on American Identities allows listeners to share the excitement of scholars’ journeys of discovery in an accessible, indeed, intimate way — you feel like you are right there at the moment of knowledge creation,” said Bernstein, who is also a professor of history and of African and African-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences.

Navarro also is excited about the partnership.

“As a multidisciplinary program, American Culture Studies was an ideal fit for Hold That Thought,” Navarro said. “Each professor I’ve had the opportunity to meet has offered a nuanced and distinct take on the idea of American identities.”

The Hold That Thought media project started a year ago, tackling complex topics such as memory and cities. Running between 10 and 15 minutes, the episodes are concise and engaging, similar to programming on Radiolab, NPR or TED Talks.

“Every podcast highlights the fascinating scholarship of individual professors,” Navarro said. “But within each series, I also try to reveal how disciplines across Arts & Sciences provide distinct perspectives on complex topics.”

To listen to the series and to keep up with the new episodes each Wednesday, visit the Hold That Thought website here.

Alfredo Palacio, MD, former president of Ecuador, will present three talks at Washington University as part of WUSTL's Global Health Week Sept. 23-27.

Palacio was educated as a cardiologist in Ecuador, then came to the United States to complete his residency at Case Western Reserve University. That was followed by a two-year fellowship at Washington University’s School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

After returning to his country and serving in a number of official positions, including vice president and minister of health, Palacio assumed the presidency in 2005.

Under his leadership, Palacio initiated important reforms, especially in the area of health care, to launch the social, economic and political transformation of his country. His reforms included universal health coverage for all Ecuadorians.

Graduate student Allyson Mayer visits with Carlos Bernal-Mizrachi, MD, assistant professor of medicine and of cell biology and physiology, at the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences poster presentation event in August.

Allyson Mayer walked from poster to poster, weighing considerations that will help shape her next few years at Washington University in St. Louis and her career as a biological scientist. Her mission: to pick at least three laboratories for rotations before committing to the one where she will complete her PhD thesis research.

Mayer mulled over her choices as more than 90 faculty members who had gathered last month at the Eric P. Newman Education Center on the Medical Campus manned posters highlighting their research findings. They were vying for Mayer’s attention, as well as the attention of other graduate students in need of laboratory experience to earn their PhDs or MD/PhDs through the Medical Scientist Training Program.

Joseph C. Corbo, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pathology and immunology, genetics and of opthalmology and visual sciences, summed up the faculty's mission to students who approached his poster: “We’re here to show you our lab does exciting work that might interest you,” he said.

The scientific speed-dating/job-fair hybrid is an annual poster presentation hosted by Washington University’s Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences. DBBS is a unique part of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences that offers 12 interdisciplinary doctoral training programs led by faculty researchers from more than 37 schools and departments, including the School of Medicine.

Allison Braun

From the left, Stacey L. Rentschler, MD, PhD, discusses her laboratory's research with first-year graduate students Catherine Lipovsky, Cheng Cheng and Jeanette Gehrig.

Some students try to choose their rotations by visiting the DBBS faculty website and reading up on professors’ projects, but meeting those professors can bring a lab to life.

“It’s one thing to read about the labs, but it’s another to meet someone who’s really excited about their work and be able to ask them questions,” explained Stacey L. Rentschler, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine and of developmental biology, who presented her work at the event.

Susan Shen, a fourth-year student in the Medical Scientist Training Program, is working on her thesis research in Corbo’s laboratory. She came to the poster presentation to help recruit students and offer her perspective on choosing a laboratory. 

“For me, the most important criteria were the lab's dynamics, research interest, and the principal investigator’s commitment to training,” Shen said. "Each student's criteria for labs vary substantially."

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) has announced the six winners of the 2013 University Research Strategic Alliance (URSA) grants. 

URSA grants provide one-year, $25,000 seed funding to full-time WUSTL faculty members. The URSA program aims to encourage the formation and efforts of new groups of investigators working on new research or using new approaches to solve problems. The program strives to foster collaborations across disciplines, departments and schools. Interdisciplinary teams must work collaboratively to approach a research question in a novel way that cannot be accomplished by either discipline alone. In addition to such research efforts' inherent intellectual value, the hope is the seed funds will enable new research applications that can compete for outside support.

Vice Chancellor for Research Evan D. Kharasch, PhD, MD, initiated the URSA program in 2011. With that initial investment of $150,000 in URSA funds awarded to six research teams, those awardees have gone on to secure $2.4 million in external funding.

With this year’s group of investigators, URSA grants now have been awarded to 18 interdisciplinary teams since the program’s inception. The next call for applications will be in early spring 2014.

“We continue to be enthusiastic about the vigorous response from faculty," said Kharasch, also the Russell and Mary Sheldon Professor of Anesthesiology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. “The proposals submitted this year represent 47 new collaborations involving faculty from six schools across the university. Five of the six new teams awarded an URSA grant include investigators from different WUSTL schools, and on different campuses, and all grants include faculty from different departments. There were far more meritorious applications than we were able to fund, but we hope that those new teams whose proposals we could not fund will continue their collaborative research efforts.”

Winners of the 2013 URSA awards are:

Dennis Barbour, MD, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Nancy Tye Murray, PhD, Department of Otolaryngology, for research titled “A Novel Tool for Improving Auditory Training in Large Populations.”

Anne Drewry, MD, Department of Anesthesiology, and Yixin Chen, PhD, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, for research titled “The Use of Temperature Patterns to Predict Sepsis in Adult Intensive Care Unit Patients.”

Joshua Jackson, PhD, Department of Psychology, and Charles Kurth, PhD, Department of Philosophy, both in Arts & Sciences, for research titled “Reason, Emotion and the Good Life.”

Sharon Celeste Morley, MD, PhD, Department of Pediatrics, and Guy Genin, PhD, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, for research titled “Using Traction Force Microscopy to Probe the Molecular Regulation of Innate Immunity.”

Yan Mei Wang, PhD, Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences, and Susan K. Dutcher, PhD, Department of Genetics, for research titled “Genetics and Single-molecule Imaging: a Combined Method to Dissect Flagellar Signaling Pathways."

“Mystics, Cranks, and William James”

Where to begin with the thank yous? Thank you, first of all, to Chancellor Mark Wrighton and Dean Barbara Schaal—for their leadership, including for their leading roles in the ceremonies today and tomorrow. Thank you as well to Shelly Milligan, Kelly Sartorius, Jennifer Gibbs, Deborah Stine, and Debra Kennard for all they have done to put this solemn liturgy together. I study ritual for a living; I know events like this do not happen effortlessly. Thank you also to my dear colleagues and friends from around the country who have taken time out of their busy schedules to be part of these proceedings: Mark Valeri, Eric Gregory, Sally Promey, Paul Gutjahr, Anthea Butler, Sally Gordon, Chris Garces, and Robert Wuthnow. Thank you to my colleagues closer at hand at the Danforth Center, which has become in a mere two years quite a thriving community: Darren Dochuk, Mark Jordan, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Rachel Lindsey, Anne Blankenship, Lerone Martin, Rachel Gross, Emily Johnson, Hannah Hofheinz, and, of course, Marie Griffith. You all, orchestrating an event like this, being part of an event like this, really have bested my abilities at self-deflection. I owe thanks especially to the Mallinckrodt family whose generous support of Washington University and Harvard University is well known throughout the academy. One of the Edward Mallinckrodt chairs at Harvard was long held by the distinguished scholar of religion Gordon Kaufman, and I feel especially honored to be the occasion for having that field of study likewise recognized here at Washington University.

Taking another look now at Santayana’s lecture, I find less consolation in the philosopher’s remarks on a fellow philosopher. For one thing, Santayana did not think it necessary to name any of the spiritualists and mystics whom James had engaged; they were as anonymous as ever. In taking notice of them, Santayana suggested, James had become their comforter and narrator, their dignity and voice. That such “a famous professor”—Santayana’s phrase—would take seriously these homegrown sibyls redounded entirely to James’s credit. It brightened the aura of his own creativity and originality; it imparted a romantic glow to his philosophical work. Even as he praised James for his quirky curiosity, Santayana knew who really deserved the scholar’s attention. Like Richardson, Santayana kept his eyes riveted on the leading lights: William James and Walt Whitman especially. He had not a word of recollection for the specific metaphysical adventurers whom James had shown favor—say, Lenora Piper, Sarah Farmer, Swami Vivekananda, Ralph Waldo Trine, or Richard Maurice Bucke. Perversely enough, James’s sympathies felt, as Santayana depicted them, almost vampirish rather than subversive. The honor roll of worthies seemed remarkably self-sustaining: James is James, and the bit players—the mystics and cranks—well, it looked like they had interchangeable parts in a sideshow.

Biography as a genre is peculiarly encumbered with this question of worthiness. (Its very advent in seventeenth-century Britain centered on relating the lives of English “worthies.”) I never resolved the issue in working on Craddock: No matter what sleights I performed she was not going to be a Jonathan Edwards or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but I nonetheless found myself wanting to make the case for her importance in rather conventional terms. Had not Emma Goldman recalled Craddock as “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation,” placing her among a small cadre of heroes and pioneers who presaged the activism of Margaret Sanger and Goldman herself? Had not the Free Speech League, a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union, been inaugurated out of indignation over Craddock’s arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment in 1902? Had not the circumstances of her death later that year thrown Comstock completely off his game and put his anti-vice campaign against obscene literature under portentous strain? Craddock deserved the attention of historians, I often liked to think, precisely because of the tangible impact of her life, work, and death. She was a worthy, after all.

I also found myself, though, drawn to her very marginality—the politics of her exclusion and inconsequence. Craddock’s insignificance was forced upon her. She struggled for several years to compel the University of Pennsylvania to admit women into its undergraduate college; she passed the entrance exams, won a narrow faculty vote of approval, only to have the trustees slam the door on her. Despite those thwarted ambitions, she continued to imagine herself as a scholar of comparative religion and mythology, writing on an anthropological subject—“Sex Worship”—that absorbed many erudite Victorian ethnologists and folklorists. She produced a 350-page-plus manuscript on the topic, self-consciously placing herself in a long-running conversation about religion’s sexual history that had unfolded in the Enlightenment’s wake. Her manuscript had no chance of getting published. The combined politics of gender, sexuality, obscenity, and academic professionalization made that a foregone conclusion, even though Craddock often wanted nothing quite so much as to occupy an intellectual place akin to the scholars who were then pioneering the scientific study of religion in European and American universities. It was the subterranean, suppressed qualities of Craddock’s life that drew me to her story. It was not her historical consequence then, but her losing struggle against inconsequence that mattered. Worthiness be damned—Craddock was a spiritualist outlier, a would-be scholar who became a psychically tormented medium with a celestial bridegroom, a marriage advisor who could not circulate her guidebooks for fear of arrest and who was thus left with a clandestine ministry to the religiously and sexually bewildered. Hers was a shadowy and idiosyncratic life—a mystic and a crank who had the misfortune of being embraced not by William James but by Theodore Schroeder, one of America’s earliest and most devoted Freudians.

I never resolved the worthiness question when working on Heaven’s Bride—other than to try to have it both ways. There were many other knots left untangled, of course. Working on a lone mystic and crank ran at a slant to my prior commitments to social and cultural history. Social history might talk in the singular about the man or woman in the street, but its chief concern is with aggregates—with classes, households, political parties, or religious movements. Cultural history might make much of the quotidian and the popular, but its sights are regularly set on collective rituals and social dramas—on parades, street festivals, and carnivals. Religious history, drawing on rich traditions of hagiography and individual spiritual narratives, is more immediately at home with biography—as if the exemplary life is exactly what history is, at the end of the day, all about. Indeed, if anything, religious history (especially of the Protestant variety) is likely all too comfortable with the notion that the distinct experiences of a single saint or sinner will get us to the heart of the matter. Social and cultural historians are far less likely to find that proposition serviceable. Since I see myself as taking my methodological bearings primarily from cultural history, I wanted to construct a biographical narrative that was recognizably part of what we used to call (a couple of decades or so ago) the “new cultural history.”

I decided that meant the story could not be told chronologically, that in order for it to be credible as a cultural biography it would have to be strongly thematic. Craddock was, after all, a shape-shifter. She tried out different personas—liberal freethinker, amateur scholar, spiritualist medium, yoga-instructing pastor, marriage reformer, sexologist, and civil-liberties activist. And other identities she had foisted upon her: theomaniac, erotomaniac, nymphomaniac, Freudian analysand. In attending carefully to these shifting roles—their social construction and cultural performance—I hoped to efface the very expectations of a coherent life story and to offer instead an appropriately protean cultural history. Of what exactly? The study of religion in its amateur and professional phases, the multiple affinities between religious and secular liberalism, the legal machinery surrounding blasphemy and obscenity, the duress of Protestant Christian America in the face of its post-Christian dissolution, and the impact of psychology and psychoanalysis on modern understandings of mysticism. That’s to make a partial catalog.

That listing suggests awkward hesitancy as much as it does overwrought ambition. It implies ambivalence about the very notion of taking so much interest in a lone mystic and crank; it suggests that for James’s sympathies for the personal, odd, and visionary to matter for the historian of American religion and culture—to scholars of religion across the board—that they have to contribute to more encompassing forms of academic work. Aren’t scholars ultimately after a bigger picture than any single figure will allow?

Yet I am drawn back to the cranks and outsiders even now—and away from the stately and authoritative grand narrative, from big history. I am ostensibly working these days on a sweeping history of irreligion from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century blasphemers right on through the worlds of Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow, all before marching forward to the new atheists and the growing number of Americans who profess no religious affiliation at all. In my loftier and more inflated moments I imagine that I am writing the impious counterpart to Sydney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People, Mark Noll’s America’s God, or Brooks Holifield’s Theology in America. The history, so imagined, is vast and compendious; it has heft; the word magisterial unavoidably leaps to mind. There are many reasons it exists so far more as a fancy than a realization, but certainly one of them is the disturbing attraction of another oddball and eccentric.

Ever uneasy about the question of worthiness, I wish I could say that the distracting figure was Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Robert Ingersoll, or Mark Twain. As back-up, I would take Frances Wright, Hubert Harrison, Sinclair Lewis, or Perry Miller. I wish I could say that it was someone you have heard of, but it isn’t. Instead, it is an incorrigible, poor, half-educated, spiritually disinherited artist named Watson Heston, a village atheist from Carthage, Missouri, who (despite having no formal training) wound up providing the visual iconography of the American secular movement in its salad days of the 1880s and 1890s. I have catalogued by now more than 1000 of his cartoons. I have hundreds of letters to the editor commenting on them, why they made a correspondent laugh, why they seemed distasteful or uncivil, why they were just the thing to spite clerics and revivalists. I have tracked any number of episodes in which his images have shown up as provocation—from the blasphemy trial of C. B. Reynolds to the battle over the Sunday opening of Chicago World’s Fair to the research Cecil B. DeMille conducted for his film The Godless Girl. I know the places of Heston’s itinerancy across the Midwest out to California and back again to Tennessee and Missouri. I know the arguments he had with his Christian neighbors and those he had with his fellow freethinkers. I know his intense prejudices and animosities, his fantasies of unfettered mental liberty and a secular golden age in which science had wholly vanquished religion. I know the impoverished circumstances of his death. I know, in short, far too much about Watson Heston, “the artist-hero of [secular] Liberalism.”

It is not, of course, that I hope now to write a biography of Heston any more than I wanted to write a biography of Craddock. For this latest preoccupation to make any sense at all, Heston and his images would have to be taken as a composite, exquisite in all they compact and convey about the emergent culture of unbelief. Somehow something like the whole story of American irreligion would have to be discernible through the close reading of Heston’s minority report—a village atheist’s view of Christian America. He and his pictures would have to make manifest far more than his own angular vision of dissent. Barbed, coarse, glinting with hope and indignation, his cartoons would have to make visible the very contours of liberal secularism, the lineaments of an atheism gone public. “Seeing heaven in a grain of sand is not a trick only poets can accomplish,” the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote famously in one of his essays in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). The same “methodological problem” that Geertz faced with fieldwork—how to get from “a collection of ethnographic miniatures” to “wall-sized culturescapes of the nation, the epoch, the continent, or the civilization”—is much the same one that the cultural historian faces with close-up studies of mystics and cranks. As Geertz reminded those who might forget that an “obsessively fine-combed field study” was not an end unto itself, “Small facts speak to large issues, winks to epistemology, sheep raids to revolution, because they are made to.”

Though I very much share James’s sympathies for the “extremer cases”—in religion (and now irreligion)—I take the measure of my work more from Geertz’s cultural anthropology than James’s romantic psychology. The historian who tracks maverick visionaries and small-town freethinkers confronts, to paraphrase Geertz, the “same grand realities” that scholars of Jefferson or Lincoln, Emerson or Whitman, do: “Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige.” The difference is this: Lives like Craddock’s and Heston’s are sufficiently obscure, as Geertz said of the Moroccan villagers he studied, “to take the capital letters off” such abstruse terms. It is exactly in lowercase instances like these that the cultural historian requires the ethnographer’s knack for turning the mundane, particular, and negligible from miniature to panorama. Whether scholarly projects focused on singular mystics and cranks are worth doing, whether they can ever hope to match wits with more comprehensive projects, comes down to the mastery of this interpretive art. Ida Craddock, Watson Heston, Sarah Farmer, Anna Jarvis, Thomas Kelly, Andrew Croswell, James McGready, Max Ehrmann, Huston Smith—it’s been a long train of wayfarers I have traveled with during my career—a lot of passionate, hungry, and restless souls. This far into the journey I am still counting on those of us in the humanities to accomplish the poet’s trick.

Samer S. Shehata, PhD, a leading expert on Middle East politics, will give the keynote talk at “The Crisis in Egypt” public symposium at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 23, in Umrath Lounge.

The symposium, which will be held in Umrath Lounge, also will feature a roundtable discussion and presentations on the latest developments in Egypt. 

Shehata, an associate professor of Middle East studies in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is a specialist on Egyptian politics and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The title of his address is “Egypt: From Uprising to ‘Coup’ to Democracy?”

Shehata, an Egyptian native, also will participate in the roundtable discussion during the two-hour symposium, which is sponsored by the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (JINELC) and the College of Arts & Sciences.

“Events in Egypt have moved very fast and often in confusing directions over the past several months. A lot is at stake in Egypt and in other countries, including the U.S., in understanding the complexity of these events and the outcomes of current struggles,” said Nancy Y. Reynolds, PhD, an associate professor of JINELC and of history, both in Arts & Sciences.

“We are fortunate to be able to benefit from Dr. Shehata’s tremendous expertise in Egyptian politics, with particular emphasis on the Muslim Brothers, Egyptian elections and Egyptian workers,” said Reynolds, who specializes in the social, cultural and economic history of 20th-century Egypt.

Reynolds, who organized the symposium, will discuss “Women and the Gender Politics of Egypt’s Islamist Movement.”

She is author of A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2012).

The other presenters are:

• Arts & Sciences senior Mahroh Jahangiri, an international and area studies and political science major, who will give “An Egypt Primer for Those Too Embarrassed to Ask.”

Jahangiri received a Social Change Grant from WUSTL’s Gephardt Institute for Public Service in 2012 and spent that summer in Cairo establishing a program at the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt to help child cancer patients continue their education while hospitalized. 

Jahangiri also conducted research on gender violence in Tahrir Square.

• Anne-Marie McManus, PhD, an assistant professor of modern Arabic literature and culture in JINELC, who will discuss “Writers, Intellectuals and the Struggle for Change.” 

McManus, who recently earned a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale University, teaches on 19th- and 20th-century literatures, literary and gender theory, and the history of political thought. One of her areas of research is contemporary Syrian literature and film.

Shehata previously taught at the American University in Cairo, Columbia University, New York University, and Georgetown University. He is the author of Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt (SUNY, 2009 and republished with a new “Afterward” by the American University in Cairo Press in 2010), and editor of Islamist Politics in the Middle East: Movements and Change (Routledge, 2012). 

He is finishing a new book on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s shift from an opposition movement to the dominant political party between 2005 and 2011.

His analysis and op-ed pieces have been published in The New York Times, Boston Globe/International Herald Tribune, Salon, Slate, Arab Reform Bulletin, Al Hayat, Al Ahram Weekly and other publications.

Shehata has provided commentary for a wide range of media, including CNN, BBC, PBS News Hour, NPR, Al Jazeera, Middle East Broadcasting Company, The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, Le Monde and the Sydney Morning Herald.

For more information on the symposium, contact the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at jinelc@wustl.edu.

Holden Thorp, PhD, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, has appointed an eight-member committee to identify candidates for the position of dean of the School of Law.

Kent D. Syverud, JD, dean and the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor, recently was named Syracuse University’s next chancellor. He will begin transitioning to that role Nov. 24.

“We are happy for Kent and proud that he has been selected to lead Syracuse University to greater heights,” Thorp said.

Keating

Daniel Keating, JD, the Tyrrell Williams Professor of Law, will serve as interim dean. At the law school, Keating has served twice as interim dean, as well as vice dean and associate dean.

"Dan Keating has stepped up time and time again to serve his school,” Thorp said. “He enjoys the respect of his colleagues and the confidence of the administration in steering the law school through this interim period."

Thorp and the search committee will work to have a new law dean in place by July 1.

“This is an important search at a challenging but exciting time in legal education,” Thorp said. “The Washington University School of Law has grown and improved considerably in recent years and is poised for another exciting chapter.”

The committee

Edward F. Lawlor, PhD, dean of the Brown School and the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor, will chair the law dean search committee.

Lawlor

"We are grateful to Eddie Lawlor and the distinguished committee for committing their time and judgment to this most important search,” Thorp said.

“Eddie's vast experience as a dean makes him uniquely qualified to help us find the best leader for our magnificent law school."

In addition to Lawlor, committee members are:

• Howard Cayne, JD, partner at Arnold & Porter, law school alumnus and member of the university’s Board of Trustees;
• Cort VanOstran, third-year law student;
• Peggie Smith, JD, the Charles F. Nagel Professor of Employment and Labor Law;
• Hillary Sale, JD, the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law;
• Pauline Kim, JD, the Charles Nagel Professor of Law;
• John Drobak, JD, the George Alexander Madill Professor of Real Property & Equity Jurisprudence; and
• Matthew Gabel, PhD, professor of political science in Arts & Sciences.

Carter Lewis at the first roundtable reading of The Impossible Adventures of Supernova Jones. Written by 2013 alumnus Aaron Senser, the play is one of three featured in this year's A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival, which takes place Sept. 27 and 28. Photos by Jerry Naunheim Jr./WUSTL Photo Services.

Much of the credit goes to Carter W. Lewis, the PAD’s playwright-in-residence. A two-time nominee for the American Theatre Critics Award, Lewis is author of more than 20 full-length plays and has received over 150 productions from companies around the nation.

Next week, Lewis and visiting dramaturg Marge Betley will lead the PAD’s annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival. Named for alumnus A.E. Hotchner (who famously bested Tennessee Williams in a campus playwriting competition), the festival will feature staged readings of three promising new works.

We sat down with Lewis to discuss the Hotchner Festival, new play development and the difficulties of letting go.

What’s the difference between writing drama and writing prose?

In some ways, that’s the biggest hurdle. It’s the difference between dialogue and narrative. Sometimes writers have great tools, great verbal acumen, but they fail at playwriting because they want to shape the story with descriptive narrative. They want someone to speak their beautiful language out loud. But that’s not a play.

So what is a play?

A play is based in behavior—its not just spoken prose. I always ask students, is a play more like book or symphony? And the answer is, it’s more like a symphony. Because even though it might take the form of a book, a play is really a blueprint that other artists bring to fruition. It’s a collaborative artform.

Aaron Senser listens to the reading of his play. In the foreground is director Annamaria Pileggi, professor of the practice in drama.

Yeah, there is, but it's different for each play. Sometimes it’s very fast and clean—you know the journey of the characters and the play just writes itself. I finished Evie’s Waltz in three weeks. And sometimes you get stuck and everything feels like a mess.

How do you explain the difference?

I don't know! Sometimes the magic is there and sometimes its not. [Laughs.] I have a big file of things I’ve thrown away.

But you go back to the toolbox. What drives a play? It’s the wants and desires of the main characters. If they don't want something specific enough, and they don't want it badly enough, the play doesn't have a motor.

You might start out with an idea: poverty, say, or the destruction of the middle class. But if you don’t embed it in your characters, if you don’t give them a strong or specific enough want, then the play just muddles along. You have a concept but no place to go.

What’s your own process like? How do you begin a new play?

When I start a play I'm always in great danger because I don't have a well-defined arc or journey in mind. I start with a couple of characters in a situation. I don't know where I'm going, I don't know where they've been, but I try to work it out on paper.

People think writers all have book-lined walls and children who’ve read Catcher in the Rye by age four. But I know a lot of writers, and most of them hate what they write each day. They’re tortured, they’re frustrated, they think its never going to be produced. So if a student is struggling, if it feels difficult—that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means that you’re a writer.

Visiting dramaturg Marge Betley with festival assistant Rachel Blumer.

Well, the deadline for submissions is always sometime in January. I then distill a group of 8-12 plays and send them to an adjudication committee, which selects three for development. In the spring, I do some dramaturgical work with the playwrights — what’s working, what’s not — and they do rewrites over the summer. In the fall, we send new drafts to our visiting dramaturg and start working with the directors and talking about casting.

And then we start rehearsals. We sit around the table, read it out loud and talk about it. But it’s a playwright-driven process. The playwright decides what we do, day-to-day based on what the play needs at this point in its development. We might work on one scene, or do a complete run-through. The playwright can continue revising and editing right up until the public reading.

Describe that first reading around the table. What does a playwright learn from hearing the words spoken?

It's terribly frightening. I remember one former student banging his head on the table. “Why don't my characters just shut up?” But it also can be exhilarating. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know, in the early stages, it’s supposed to be less than perfect, or even downright awful. As playwrights, we start by making messes, and then we go about cleaning them up.

In the beginning especially, that must feel very daunting—like the whole show lives or dies by your words alone.

I think that’s right. But once you see it on stage, you realize that it’s not only about you. It’s also about the work of all your collaborators — all the people who have generously given of their time, effort and talent.

The typical metaphor is giving birth to children. You raise them for five or six years, but then you have to start giving them away — to daycare or babysitters, to educational institutions, to spouses and the larger community.

In a production, the playwright begins as Lord God. But by halfway through you’re just a sidekick, and by the time it finally opens you’re getting everyone else coffee.

Senior Micajah Dudley reads a part from The Impossible Adventures of Supernova Jones.

All readings are free and open to the public and take place in The A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd.

For more information, call (314) 935-5858, visit pad.artsci.wustl.edu or follow us on Facebook.

This is the first in a series of articles that describe how scholars at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing their varied skills to bear on the issue of climate change and global warming.

Wikimedia Commons

In this famous image from Très Riches Heures, a book of prayers to be said at canonical hours made for the Duc de Berry between 1412 and 1416, a peasant plows the fields in March, early even for France. The book was created toward the end of the Medieval Warm Period, five centuries of warm, settled weather in Europe. What is the relation between the climate and the settlement of Greenland, the Crusades or even the building of cathedrals? Until recently, these weren’t even “historical” questions.

In the past few years, there has been a noticeable shift in the way people talk about climate change at social events. The argument over the physical science is effectively over; people accept the reality of global warming and would prefer not to debate it anymore. 

Instead, they’d like to move the conversation on, although they’re often not sure just where they want it to go. Yes, there is climate change . . .  and then what?

An innovative course at Washington University in St. Louis offers a way forward by making available the efforts of historians to integrate natural history and human history over the past 40 years. 

Taught by Venus Bivar, PhD, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences, it is an introduction to a discipline called environmental history, with a special focus on climate change.

Bivar’s reading list is an immediate tipoff that this is not just a run-through of climate science. The list includes The Long Thaw, by David Archer, a geophysicist, but that is probably the only text that might be assigned in a science course.

Archer makes a crucial point, however: global warming is not a short-term problem we can simply outwait. It will take hundreds of thousands of years for rock weathering to draw down the carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere, he says.

Courtesy photo

Bivar outside the castle in the city of Angers in northwestern France. Bivar, whose dissertation was about the industrialization of agriculture in France in the 20th century, was in Angers to do research in the archives there.

“Topics in Environmental History: Climate” has two parts, explainedBivar, who plans to teach the course again in the fall of 2015. The first part is an introduction to environmental history and the second consists of readings on global warming to which the class is asked to respond in the light of environmental history.

Environmental history emerged as a sub-discipline in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a general cultural reassessment and a growing awareness of the scope of environmental problems. It was in large part a reaction to the idea that history is the story of the rise of civilization that is marked by continual economic growth and ever-increasing technological mastery.

William Cronon, one of the founders of the field, says that environmental historians are “trying to write histories as much for the earth and the rest of creation as they do for the human past.” 

Arthur Rothstein/Wikimedia Commons

A farmer and his sons take shelter from a dust storm in Oklahoma in 1936. People have told the story of the Dust Bowl in surprisingly different ways.

“We cannot escape the challenge of multiple competing narratives in our efforts to understand both nature and the human past,” Cronon said.

Just realizing that the Dust Bowl story has been told in so many different ways helps us to escape the grip of ghost narratives: old narratives that continue to structure our thinking without our being fully aware of their influence.

In another destabilizing essay, Bivar quotes a French writer on climate change: “We are plagued by drought and science says, we must not accuse nature but man who, by altering the surface of the earth has changed the course of the atmosphere and then the influence of the seasons.”

But this sentence was penned in 1800, at a time when there was widespread alarm about the degradation of forests and the effects that was having on climate. 

According to historians Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, people were even entertaining climate-engineering schemes at the time, such as planting large stands of eucalyptus trees that would purify the air and banish ‘miasmas.’

How startling to realize that climate change was a preoccupation of post-Revolutionary France! Locher and Fressoz echo Cronon, saying that “the dominant narratives used to reflect upon the contemporary environmental crisis are too simple” — as demonstrated by our tendency to think our concerns about climate are unprecedented.

 

But the foundational text of environmental history Bivar most enjoyed teaching was The Columbian Exchange, Alfred Crosby’s account of the ecological impact of Columbus’ landing in 1492 on both the New and Old Worlds.

Crosby argued that Europeans dominated the Americans not because of their superior military technology but because they brought with them diseases that swept the country before them, leaving it depopulated and vulnerable.

“When you teach The Columbian Exchange today, students say they already know all this,” she says. But just 40 years ago, Crosby had difficulty finding a publisher for his book and actually gave up looking for a time. 

“It’s fun to teach to remind students how quickly you internalize these intellectual arguments as popular knowledge,” Bivar said. “It took just a few decades for an argument that was so groundbreaking that nobody wanted to touch it to become part of the vernacular.”

And what about climate change?

Her reading selections for the latter half of the course are as interesting and as original. “I chose climate change as a focus for the second half because it is a hot-button issue today, but also because it’s where a lot of the more interesting work is being done,” she says.

 

 

 

One of her selections was In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, by Mark Carey, an account of glacial lake outburst floods that killed 25,000 people in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range in north-central Peru in the second half of the 20th century.

To a reader worried about global warming, the response of local communities to the catastrophes caused by melting mountain glaciers may be discouraging. Even when glacier disasters destroyed their communities, Carey says, urban residents rebuilt in potential flood and avalanche paths, sometimes with fatal consequences. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand what might happen: instead they felt that the national government should drain the glacial lakes rather than restrict where they could live through hazard zoning.

“Carey’s book is a good example of the importance of thinking about the interaction between people and the environment instead of just about the environment as a closed ‘natural’ system,” Bivar said.

“Adaptation to glacier retreat and climate change hinges as much on culture, technological innovation, politics, economics and social relations as it does on science and environmental change — even though societies prioritize science rather than society in their analysis of climate change,” Carey wrote.

By bringing nature into their accounts of human history, historians are preparing the way for a more adequate response to global warming. “The mistaken assumptions and romantic myths that many people bring not just to history but to nature create endless distortions and misreadings,” Cronon wrote. People can only see what they have learned to see.

 

And as Carey implied, it is dangerous for the rest of us to rely on scientists to rescue us. Geophysicist Archer, after all, is at his least credible when he envisions a future with solar arrays on the moon and windmills in the jet stream.

At the end of the course, Bivar does something a bit mischievous. She assigns The Windup Girl, a science fiction novel set in 23rd-century Thailand after fossil fuels have been depleted and biotechnology companies have replaced all seeds with genetically engineered ones that are sterile. 

The book is a challenge to her students: Having learned about environmental history, she is asking, can you imagine your way out of this trap?

Baroque dancers Robin Gilbert-Campos and Carlos Fittante join The Kingsbury Ensemble Sept. 28.

Fast, vigorous and—to some eyes, at least—disconcertingly lustful, the sarabande originated in Mexico or Central America, possibly derived from native dances. Though banned by Phillip II of Spain in 1583, its popularity continued to spread across the continent. Within a few decades, a slowed and somewhat tamed version of the sarabande had emerged as a popular court dance in France and Italy.

At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, The Kingsbury Ensemble, one of the Midwest's premier early music groups, will present Shall We Dance? The concert, which will take place in the 560 Music Center’s Ballroom Theatre, celebrates the sarabande, the gavotte, the minuet and other Baroque forms.

Led by harpsichordist Maryse Carlin, teacher of applied music in Arts & Sciences, The Kingsbury Ensemble includes flutist Douglas Worthen, cellist Ken Kulosa and violinists Rochelle Skolnick and Elizabeth Ramos.

Joining the group will be two visiting dancers, both from New York:

Carlos Fittante is artistic director of BALAM Dance Theatre and a specialist in Balinese and Baroque dance. He has been featured in numerous period operas, including the New York City Opera's production of Rinaldo and Boston Early Music Festival productions of Ariadne and Thésée.

Robin Gilbert-Campos has credits spanning musical theatre, film, television and opera. She also serves as drummer for the rock band The Generators.

The program will feature historical choreography—performed in costume and adapted from reconstructed 18th century ballet notation—as well as works created by Fittante to accompany baroque music in the French and Spanish style. Instrumental pieces will round out the program.

Shall We Dance? Begins at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, in The Ballroom Theater of WUSTL’s 560 Music Center, 560 Trinity Ave. Tickets are $20, or $15 for seniors and WUSTL faculty and staff; and $5 for students.

Tickets are available at the door or by calling (314) 862-2675.

For more information, visit The Kingsbury Ensemble website..

Each year in the St. Louis region, thousands of African American students drop out of high school. According to a newly released policy brief — “How does health influence school dropout?”— health and education are closely related, and there are patterns related to health that increase the risk of high school dropout.

The brief highlights how the health of children and youth influences education, and whether or not they complete high school. Among the findings:

• Early childhood illnesses limit students’ ability to complete their education.
• Mental health problems (often not identified or treated) interfere with school performance and completion.
• Poor school performance increases the likelihood that a student engages in risky behaviors (i.e., early onset of sexual activity and drug use), overall increasing the risk of school dropout.

Tate

Although securing stable funding sources for these effective school health programs is sometimes a challenge, Tate suggests prioritizing health as an important contributor to educational attainment.

“If health is prioritized as a matter of learning and attainment, then a stronger case can be made to use school district revenue sources and infrastructure to further address health,” Tate says.

Support from the St. Louis region’s school systems is also a major factor in increasing health programs.

“The first step is to secure the superintendent’s support at the district level and the principal’s support at the school level,” Tate says. “In addition, incorporating health in the district’s or school’s vision and mission statements, including health goals in the school’s improvement plan, is important.”

The policy brief also encourages building public-private partnerships to support mental health care delivery for youth. “Alignment of district priority, leadership, and human capital are the starting points for reaching outside the school system to engage health and human services providers,” Tate says.

According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, even if only 1,000 of the many students who dropped out of high school had graduated instead, combined, they would have likely made up to $11 million more in additional income and spent up to $21 million more on homes than they would without a high school diploma.

This could have yielded an increased gross regional product by $15 million per year, and overall added up to $1.1 million in new state and local tax revenues per year. Therefore, decreasing high school dropouts serves as a benefit to all.

“For the Sake of All” is funded by the Missouri Foundation for Health and includes faculty from Washington University and Saint Louis University. WUSTL’s Institute for Public Health, the Brown School’s Policy Forum, The St. Louis American newspaper and the online news site St. Louis Beacon are partners as well.

The participating scholars from Washington University, in addition to Tate, are:

• Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School and lead researcher on the project;
• Bettina F. Drake, PhD, assistant professor of surgery in Public Health Sciences at the School of Medicine;
• Melody S. Goodman, PhD, assistant professor of surgery in Public Health Sciences at the School of Medicine;
• Darrell L. Hudson, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School.

• Keith Elder, PhD, associate professor and chair, Department of Health Management & Policy for the College for Public Health & Social Justice; and
• Keon Gilbert, DPhil, assistant professor at the College for Public Health & Social Justice.

To read the full brief, as well as learn more about “For the Sake of All,” visit forthesakeofall.org/.

Simmons

Her talk, “The State of Conscience in University Life Today,” addresses the importance of the liberal arts in higher education, a principle the late, beloved WUSTL teacher and administrator Jim McLeod held dear.

Co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities, Office of the Provost, and the College of Arts & Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Apropos to Jim McLeod’s belief in the power of individual stories, Simmons’ is remarkable and inspiring. The 12th child of Texas sharecroppers, she embarked on an educational journey that led to a doctoral degree in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University and launched her long and distinguished career.

She has held a number of faculty and administrative appointments in some of the leading educational institutions in the country, including the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Spelman College and Smith College.

As president of Smith, Simmons established important initiatives such as an engineering program for the women's college.

As president of Brown University from 2001 to 2012, Simmons became the first African American to hold the highest post at an Ivy League institution. She continues to teach comparative literature and Africana studies at Brown.

Because of Simmons’ leadership on major public policies affecting higher education, she has been a featured speaker at the White House, the World Economic Forum, the Brookings Institution, and the Clinton Global Initiative. She is the recipient of many honors and holds membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations.

McLeod, who came to Washington University in 1974, served as vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences until his death in 2011. He is widely considered one of the university’s greatest leaders whose impact will be felt for generations.

For more information on this and other Assembly Series programs, visit here or call (314) 935-4620. For more information on Center for the Humanities events, visit here. 

Gruber

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and renowned health care expert Jonathan Gruber, PhD, will deliver an Assembly Series lecture on “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works” at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4, in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus.

His talk, which is free, open to the public and includes a booksigning afterward, is the keynote address for WUSTL's GlobeMed conference Oct. 5. GlobeMed's mission is to advance global health equity by empowering students and communities to improve the health of people living in poverty around the world. The WUSTL chapter is one of 50 university-based chapters operating in the U.S.

Additional campus partners are the Gephardt Institute for Public Service, the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy, the Brown School and the School of Law.

Gruber’s research focuses on the areas of public finance and health economics. From 2003-06, he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ health reform effort, and after it was enacted, he joined its main implementing body. During the 2008 presidential election, he served as consultant to the Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Obama campaigns.

During Obama’s first term, Gruber served in his administration as a technical consultant and worked with the president and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare."

A professor of economics at MIT since 1992, Gruber also serves as director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has garnered a number of prestigious awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Gruber was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” in 2011 by Slate magazine.

He is the author of a leading textbook, Public Finance and Public Policy; a graphic novel, Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works, which transforms the more than 1,000-page health-care bill into 140 clever and understandable pages; as well as more than 140 scholarly articles. He is the editor of six research volumes.

Gruber received his bachelor’s degree in economics from MIT and his doctorate from Harvard University.

For more information on this and future Assembly Series events, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.

Travis Mohrman/Tyson Research Center

A green frog, Rana (Lithobates) clamitans, in a pond at Washington University's Tyson Research Center. In Missouri, this frog’s tadpoles are often infected with the amphibian chytrid fungus but rarely sickened by it, creating an opportunity to delve into chytrid’s place in aquatic ecosystems.

The skin fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), also known as amphibian chytrid, first made its presence felt in 1993 when dead and dying frogs began turning up in Queensland, Australia. Since then it has sickened and killed frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians worldwide, driving hundreds of species to extinction.

As a postdoctoral researcher Kevin Smith studied Bd in South Africa, home to the African clawed frog, a suspected vector for the fungus. When he took a position at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is now interim director of the Tyson Research Center and adjunct professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, he worked on other problems. 

But whenever he visited a pond, he collected tadpoles and checked their mouth parts (often a fungal hot spot) under the microscope, just out of curiosity.

He found the fungus in about a third of the ponds whose tadpoles he checked. The obvious questions were: Why only a third? Why didn’t it occur in all amphibian populations in a region where it is found?

The amphibians and the fungus have reached an evolutionary truce in Missouri, where the chytrid is endemic rather than epidemic. Because there was no pressure to rescue an amphibian population, Smith had the time and the opportunity to look more broadly and to study the entire pond ecosystem.

Together with then-undergraduate student Alex Strauss, Smith collected physical and chemical data and surveyed the species living in 29 ponds in east-central Missouri. The results of this study are published in the Sept. 25  edition of PLOS ONE.

Somewhat to Smith’s surprise, it was statistically possible to distinguish infected from noninfected ponds, a finding he likens to being able to predict that influenza will circulate in some cities but not others.

“We don’t know exactly what the key factors are but just knowing that not every pond appears to be suitable for chytrid in a given year is a very big step,” he said.

The study also suggested that patterns of Bd infection might be an indirect effect of variations in invertebrate communities. What this meant was unclear, since chytrid was thought to be an amphibian specialist.

But while the pond study was underway, other researchers announced that crayfish and nematodes can be infected with chytrid, raising the possibility that invertebrates act as alternative hosts or biological reservoirs for the fungus.

“Alternative hosts and reservoirs have been a key missing piece in our understanding of chytrid epidemiology,” Smith said. The fungus, like any pathogen, cannot be effectively controlled unless all its hiding places are known.

An ancient fungus
Chytrid, or more properly amphibian chytrid, since there are about 1,000 species of fungus in the class Chytridiomycetes, specializes on keratin, a structural protein found in the skin, hair, nails and similar tissues of vertebrates. 

“As far as we know, it doesn’t infect any other animal protein,” Smith said. “So that’s one of the most important restrictions on where it lives.”

In amphibians, chytrid infects and damages the skin, which amphibians use to breathe and absorb water. Once the fungus takes hold, it causes a disease called chytridiomycosis, which is usually fatal.

“You can sometimes tell when a frog is infected,” Smith said, “by the way it walks. It is slow and spraddles its legs, as though its skin is painful or chafed. When we grabbed frogs like those in South Africa and took samples, they were always heavily infected with the fungus,” he said.

Unlike more familiar fungi such as mushrooms, which release spores that drift through the air, chytrids, among the earliest fungi to evolve, are aquatic and release flagellated zoospores that swim through the water.

“Laboratory studies suggest the zoospores can live independently only about a day or so. They’re considered to be very fragile,” Smith said. “They get expunged from the fungal cell inside the amphibian skin, they swim around for about a day, and if they don’t infect something with keratin, they’re no longer viable. That’s what’s generally thought.

“That’s why we focused on the aquatic habitat,” Smith said. “Animals may be able to move the fungus from one location to another, but it’s not just drifting in the air. Our question was: If the aquatic habitat is key, why don’t we find chytrid in every aquatic habitat?”

The big picture
As a community and conservation ecologist, Smith suspected the answer couldn’t be found by selectively studying the amphibians dying of chytrid. Scientists racing to save amphibian species from extinction have understandably tended to narrow their focus to the pathogen and its victims.

“It’s the crisis of amphibians dying and going extinct that makes us focus so narrowly,” Smith said.

But Smith has never seen any evidence that chytrid causes mortality in this part of Missouri, although it is one of many factors leading to the decline of hellbenders, a large salamander native to the Ozarks.

Because chytrid is an endemic disease in Missouri, Smith realized he could back up, slow down and study it as an ecologist. “That hasn’t happened as often as it should,” he said. 

Elizabeth Biro/Tyson Research Center

The pond survey crew gets its feet wet. From left, Joseph Mihaljevic, who graduated in 2009; Alex Strauss, the first author on the PLOS ONE paper, who graduated in 2010; Miguel Mattias, then a visiting researcher; and Christina McPike, then a Boston College undergraduate working as an undergraduate fellow.

Wading in
So Smith recruited a team of students to study the ecosystems of 29 ponds in east-central Missouri. The team assayed larval amphibians for chytrid, collected physical and chemical data, and identified amphibian, macroinvertebrate and zooplankton species living in the ponds.

“I was half-expecting it to be just an absolute mess, that there would be no distinguishing characteristic about ponds that have chytrid or ponds that don’t,” he said. “But instead, we found that the ponds that had chytrid were consistently more similar to one another than the ponds that didn’t have chytrid in many different measures.”

“That's a very powerful finding,” he said. “The thinking had been that chytrid required keratin, appropriate temperatures and water — and that was it. That’s what we were stuck with. Now we know that there must be additional constraints because some ponds that meet these criteria don’t harbor the fungus.”

A statistical technique for ferreting out causal relationships suggested that this pattern was an indirect effect mediated by the ponds’ invertebrate communities.

“They may be alternative hosts,” Smith said. “That would be the most parsimonious explanation.” But they might also be reservoirs (sites where the fungus can survive when there is no available host).

“The presence or absence of alternative hosts or reservoirs has a huge effect on the dynamics of the disease, and ultimately on the fate of the amphibians it attacks. If there are reservoirs we need to know about them, because otherwise it will be impossible to interrupt the chain of transmission,” he said.

Tyson Research Center

A central newt, Notophthalmus viridescens makes its home in a Missouri pond. Newts are a common pond amphibian in Missouri and are often infected with the amphibian chytrid fungus.

More evidence has since accumulated against the suspect group that fell out of the statistics of the pond study.

One group, looking for a model organism that could be used to study chytrid, showed that it can infect and kill the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Another team reported that crayfish are able to transmit chytrid, which infects the lining of their gastrointestinal tracts.

“Focusing only on amphibians to understand chytrid is like focusing only on people to understand Lyme disease,” Smith said. “In the case of Lyme disease, we know that mice matter, that deer matter, that oak trees matter. Many different factors lead to there being a lot of Lyme in some cases and not others,” Smith said.

Smith hopes that research in areas where chytrid is endemic may be able to help amphibians in areas where it is epidemic. The only alternative so far is the Amphibian Ark, a global effort to maintain threatened amphibians in captivity until they can be “secured in the wild.”

This is the second in a series of articles that describe how scholars at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing their varied skills to bear on the issue of climate change and global warming.

Courtesy of Lin Padgham

Edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. About 16 stories of ice are visible above the water line. Doug Wiens of Washington University in St. Louis is the principal investigator on a new grant to install seismographs on the shelf to learn more about its likely response to continued warming.

One of the last big unknowns in the global climate equation is Antarctica. How stable is the Antarctic ice sheet? More than a mile thick, on average, it locks up 70 percent of the Earth’s fresh water. 

If it melted entirely, global sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet. So understanding how the ice sheet is affected by global climate change is extremely important.

But it is also very difficult both because the ice’s response to warming is inherently complex and because there is little data to go on. Temperature records exist for only a few locations along the perimeter of the continent, and even those go back only 50 or 60 years.

To reach further back in time and provide a long-term record that can inform global climate models, scientists are turning to other means of measuring ice mass. 

One of these is post-glacial rebound. At the end of the last glacial maximum, when ice sheets reached their maximum extent 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, the ice covering Antarctica was even thicker than it is today. As the cold eased and some of the ice melted, the land mass began to rebound, flexing slowly upward.

The rebound can be used to weigh the ice sheet and determine how much mass it has lost and is currently losing, said Doug Wiens, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. 

He is an investigator on two new National Science Foundation grants that will fund the installation of seismographs to calibrate crucial parts of the Antarctic ice-weighing machine: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Ross Ice Shelf.

Calibrating the ice-mass scale

Courtesy of Mike Beauregard

Terraces on the beach in Bathurst Inlet on the northern coast of Canada were formed as the Earth’s crust rebounded after the ice that covered it during the last glacial maximum melted. Antarctica is expected to respond differently than Canada, however, because of differences in the mantle beneath the crust.

During the last glacial maximum, Wiens explained, the weight of the ice bent the Earth’s crust, forcing the plastic rock in the upper layer of the Earth’s mantle to flow away from the loaded region. 

Once the ice melted, the crust began to slowly rebound and the mantle material to flow back under the now-iceless area. Because the mantle material is viscous, it can take thousands of years for this process to complete itself and for the crust to reach equilibrium. 

Understanding rebound is important not only for measuring past ice-mass changes but also for accurately estimating present-day melting.

The rate of rebound, however, depends on the viscosity of the mantle material, which in turn depends on temperature. It's like the difference between honey stored in the refrigerator and in the cupboard. The cold honey is more viscous and flows more slowly than warm honey.

Listening in on West Antarctica

RACHEL GESSERMAN

The POLENET team buries a seismic station in Antarctica. The tall poles and solar array will help the next team find the station. The orange box holds batteries and the electronic equipment for the instrument. Wiens, shovel in hand, is to the left.

The GPS units, which are of geodetic quality, can measure the rate at which the bedrock rebounds with submillimeter accuracy. The seismographs in turn will determine the nature of the material that lies below the ice, allowing the GPS measurements to be accurately interpreted. 

One of the NSF grants Wiens recently was awarded is a continuation of POLENET that will fund the addition of 13 West Antarctic seismic stations to the 32 already in the POLENET Antarctic network.

The POLENET project is led by Ohio State University, which is responsible for the GPS measurements. WUSTL, the second-largest contributor, is taking a leading role in the seismological studies.

The stations are installed and maintained by WUSTL's Patrick Shore, PhD, a computer specialist and lecturer in earth and planetary sciences; IRIS-PASSCAL, a consortium of research universities interested in seismology; together with Wiens and several graduate students.

Why West Antarctica? Antarctica is split in two dissimilar parts by the Transantarctic Mountains. West Antarctica, much of which lies below sea level, is the more vulnerable of the two. It is warming rapidly, maybe even faster than most places on Earth. 

“We see a lot of melting,” Wiens said, “although it is localized to certain areas.” East Antarctica, in contrast, is an elevated plateau, which seems to be gaining rather than losing ice mass, Wiens said.

“We know the mantle beneath West Antarctica is different from that under Canada or Sweden,” he said. “The ice sheets in the north melted completely about 8,000 years ago and it will take 20,000 years for the crust to rebound. So we know that the mantle there responds over a long period of time.

“In some places in West Antarctica, such as Marie Byrd land, there are volcanoes and high heat flow from below, so it looks to be very different geologically, and that would mean it would respond over a shorter period of time."

To find out how fast West Antarctica is rebounding, Wiens and his fellow scientists are making CT scans of the earth beneath it, using distant earthquakes instead of an X-ray source and seismographs instead of X-ray detectors. The scans create images of seismic-wave velocity, which is largely controlled by temperature.

“We’re building a picture of the temperature structure that will constrain numerical models of how Antarctica responds to changes in ice mass,” Wiens said. This in turn will provide a means to answer critical questions about the ice sheet’s behavior in a warming world.

Wiens is careful not to get out in front of the data, but he does say that over a long period of time, there is a danger the West Antarctic ice sheet will melt. 

“We know it can happen, because it has happened in the geologic past at temperatures not much different from where we are now and certainly where we are headed,” he said.

Listening in on the Ross Ice Shelf

Image courtesy Landsat 7 Science Team and NASA GSFC

Larsen B breaking up in February 2002 as seen by Landsat satellite.

In addition to West Antarctica, Antarctica’s ice shelves are a focus of scientific concern. The shelves are thick platforms of ice that ride on top of the water off some parts of the coastline.

There are many ice shelves but the biggest (about the size of France) is the Ross Ice Shelf, tucked into a deep embayment in West Antarctica. “This is the ice shelf that Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton crossed at the start of their journeys to the Pole,” Wiens said.

People have been a bit jumpy about ice shelves ever since the Larsen Ice Shelf began to break up. The shelf has three parts, called Larsen A, B, and C, in separate embayments along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Larsen A disintegrated in January 1995. Larsen B broke up in February 2002. So far Larsen C is holding on.

The second NSF grant Wiens recently was awarded funds the deployment of 18 seismographs on the Ross Ice Shelf. WUSTL, the lead institution,  is teaming with Pennsylvania State University and Colorado State University on this grant.

The grant has two goals, Wiens said. The first is to constrain structure of the earth beneath the shelf, because there are some indications that Mount Erebus, a volcano north of the shelf, is fed by a mantle plume, or hot spot.

“Stations have been deployed on the land side of Erebus,” Wiens said, “and now we’re deploying them across the shelf on the ocean side.”

The second goal, however, is to learn more about the ice shelf itself, including its response to long-period ocean waves that lift and drop it. How the shelf responds to wave forcing will tell us how strong the ice is, Wiens said.

Long-period waves are thought to have triggered the early stages of the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Sheet, an ice sheet on the southwest side of the Antarctic Peninsula, in 2008. 

The seismographs also will pick up microearthquakes caused by the opening of crevasses. This is important because added pressure from surface water filling crevasses can drive cracks right through the ice sheet.

Again Wiens is careful not to create misconceptions. “I don’t think anyone thinks the Ross Ice Shelf is going to break up right away,” he said. “But other smaller ice shelves have broken up and they seem to break up suddenly, so I think there’s a long-term issue.”

In the meantime, he is just happy to be getting better data. “To see these questions slowly being answered is very exciting to me,” he said. “When we started POLENET six years ago, we had no idea what we would find. 

“Now we’re beginning to fill in the details — and we’ve made some unexpected discoveries.” One of which is a new volcano discovered under the ice by Amanda Lough, a WUSTL doctoral student he advises. 

Editor's note: Due to the federal government shutdown, Secretary Moniz's lecture has been postponed. 

Original news item:

Ernest Moniz, PhD, U.S. energy secretary, will speak about President Barack Obama’s climate action plan at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4, at Washington University in St. Louis' Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 300.

Moniz

In 1941, Kennedy, along with colleagues Arthur C. Wahl and Glenn T. Seaborg, made history with the discovery of the element plutonium. Kennedy was active on the Manhattan project during World War II, leading the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division from 1943-45. For his service to the nation, Kennedy received the National Medal of Merit from President Harry Truman.

For more information, contact Rachel Linck, administrative officer for the Department of Chemistry, at (314) 935-6521 or
linck@wustl.edu.