BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Opening thedoors of

UNLOCKING MYSTERIES

THROUGH RESEARCH

AND CREATIVITY

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discovery

Research is the leading edge of educational and economicdevelopment. It helps define the need for new pathways andthen forges vision into reality, for the University and thecommunity in which it thrives.

When I look at the scope of research and scholarshippresented in this report, I see an “engagedUniversity,” consistently bringing itscommitment to excellence in research andscholarly pursuits to the larger community.This is research for the public good:visionary academic projects across thedisciplines, carried out by an entrepreneur-ial faculty, that effect positive changes inour world and produce solutions to theimportant issues facing us all.

The success of the engaged univer-sity evolves from sustained commitment —

commitment to providing rigorous educational and trainingopportunities, as well as to addressing urgent societal needsthrough discovery and partnership.

This year we established four new organized researchcenters — bringing the total number of University researchcenters to 19 — to enhance opportunities for collaborationand outreach. The newly formed Institute of BiomedicalTechnology, Center on Democratic Performance, Center for theHistorical Study of Women and Gender and Roger L. andMary F. Kresge Center for Nursing Research will enhanceBinghamton’s profile as a research institution. These centerswill help us to continue to develop pioneering partnershipsand attract federal, state and private funds to support thegrowth and vitality of the region.

We are especially pleased to acknowledge that ourfaculty received a total of 305 new awards this year, an8 percent increase over last year. Further, our external fundingis now in excess of $20 million, marking an all-time Universityhigh. Such success translates into a direct economic benefit tothe community. Not only does research activity benefit areacompanies, healthcare providers and schools, it is also key tothe creation and retention of jobs in the region.

Overall, Binghamton University has benefited from theinherent and remarkable synergy between research andgraduate studies. Not only do our researchers conductgroundbreaking research in University laboratories andlibraries, they also enhance public life by helping to educate anew generation of scholars. Ultimately, these students are ourfuture: They are the promising new teachers, scholars,scientists, critics and thinkers of the next millennium.

Frances CarrVice President for Research

Education is about discovery — for students, for facultyand for our society. Some might say not much is left to know.That has been said during every period in history, but it isnever true. We are proud of the many discoveries that occur atBinghamton University, and through this publication we will

illustrate some of them.For example, in the tiniest environ-

ment, chemist Wayne Jones is seeking tobuild electronics on a molecular level.In the expanse of evolution, paleoanthro-pologist G. Philip Rightmire is searchingfor the origins of humans.

We plan to open the arena ofdiscovery in the next year and beyond.Within the past few months we havecreated a new Division of Research, led byVice President Frances E. Carr, formerly

vice provost for research and graduate studies. This reorgani-zation confirms the University’s commitment to enhancingresearch and scholarship.

But research itself is not enough. It goes hand-in-glovewith teaching. At Binghamton, the enhancement ofour graduate studies and research enriches our excellentundergraduate program. We must, after all, depend on thosein the next generation to take these discoveries to the nextstage of development.

Another important aspect of our work at Binghamtonis applying research to real-life solutions. For example, theUniversity’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center isworking with local company Rainbow Displays Inc. todevelop flat-panel technology that will revolutionize TVs andcomputer monitors. Within a few years, discoveries andassistance that Binghamton provides to Rainbow and othercompanies will help inform and entertain people through awide, thin screen that hangs on their walls.

At Binghamton, we have discoveries in all fields ofstudy, as illustrated in English Professor John Vernon’sscholarship. His study of his brother’s life sheds light on howobjects relate to the way people live.

I hope you enjoy learning about these findings in thefollowing accounts of some of our projects. We appreciateyour joining us in opening the doors to discovery.

Lois B. DeFleurPresident

2 BriefsUpdates on new grants, programs and awards

4 Opening the doors of discoveryUniversity, community reap benefits of innovative research

6 Rainbow’s endUniversity’s role crucial to company’s flat-panel display success

8 Concealed weaponsTiny tools may help fight disease

10 An intellectual capitalistProfessor’s connections link University to advanced laser equipment

12 Surreal estateMolecular architecture creates designs for a nanomaterial world

14 Brain foodResearcher links glucose and mental function

16 Challenging preconceptionsDoes “teacher thinking” result in biased classrooms?

18 Tracking human evolutionAnthropologist travels the world to unravel clues

20 How children survive sexual abuseMultiple factors may define individual’s trauma

22 The first millenniumIn the year 1000, the world was smaller, simpler — and smellier

24 Getting to the core of substance abusePsychologist seeks adolescent addiction links

26 Edifice complexDivining culture from society’s structures

28 ProfileAuthor searches for brother in memoir

I N S I D E R E S E A R C H

Binghamton University

Lois B. DeFleurPresident, Binghamton UniversityState University of New York

Frances CarrVice President for Research

John HachtelAssociate Vice President forUniversity Relations

Denise CzuprynskiDirector of Publications

E D I T O R I A L S T A F F

Steve MorelliEditor

Susan E. BarkerWriter/EditorDirector of Communications for Research

Trudi MarrapodiCopy Editor

Evangelos DousmanisPhotographer

David SkyrcaDesigner

Inside Research is published annually asa joint project by the Office of UniversityRelations and the Office of Research andSponsored Programs.

POSTMASTER: Send address changesto Inside Research, Office of UniversityRelations, Binghamton University,PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York13902-6000.

Bulletin of the State University of New Yorkat Binghamton

1999-2000Volume 53, Number 4 2000Publication # 886-280

The Binghamton University Bulletin ispublished four times a year in March, June,August and September by the State Universityof New York at Binghamton, PO Box 6000,Binghamton, New York 13902-6000. Periodi-cals postage paid at Binghamton, New York.

Binghamton University is strongly committedto affirmative action. We offer access toservices and recruit students and employeeswithout regard to race, color, gender, religion,age,disability, marital status, sexual orienta-tion or national origin.

WWW. BINGHAMTON. EDU

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CONTENTS

UNIVERSITY ESTABLISHES FOUR

NEW RESEARCH CENTERS

Binghamton University has establishedfour new research centers: the Institute forBiomedical Technology, the Center on Demo-cratic Performance, the Center for the His-torical Study of Women and Gender and theRoger L. and Mary F. Kresge Center forNursing Research.

The new centers are expected to enhanceBinghamton’s profile as a research institu-tion, leverage increased federal support,garner national recognition and propel inno-vative graduate and undergraduate educa-tion programs, said Frances Carr, vice presi-dent for research.

The new centers bring to 19 the numberof organized research centers.

The point is not to promote a prolifera-tion of research centers, but to encouragecoalitions that build on the University’sstrengths, energize the natural evolution offaculty research, and unify approaches thatamplify available resources, Carr said.

“I feel very strongly that scholarly pur-suits are the leading edge for our graduateeducation and undergraduate programs,”Carr said. “It’s an integrated paradigm.”

BINGHAMTON WINS NSF NOD

FOR HIGH-SPEED INTERNET 2

Binghamton University will receive a$350,000 grant over the next two years tosupport access to the next generation ofInternet services — the high-bandwidth,high-performance Internet 2.

In making the award, the National Sci-ence Foundation recognized thatBinghamton researchers have “meritoriousscientific applications” that warrant accessto the Internet 2, which connects some 160research universities.

Most of these universities are members ofthe University Consortium for AdvancedInternet Development. The consortium isoverseeing the development of the technol-ogy used in the “very-high-speed band-width network services” (vBNS) offeredthrough Internet 2 and in the Abilene Net-work, which will offer even more capabili-ties and provide a research test board fornew technology.

Binghamton applied for the grant as partof a group of six New York universities andwas one of two to receive the maximumamount awarded by NSF.

FULL-SIZED RIG DRILLS FOR

WATER KNOWLEDGE

It’s not every day that you see a full-sizeddrill rig on a university campus. But forstudents of Karen Salvage and JosephGraney, assistant professors of geological

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NEW LABS SUPPORT HIGHERLEVEL OF RESEARCH

With the completion this year of a special suite of laboratories in Science

III, Binghamton University has joined the ranks of major research institutions

working to halt the spread of deadly pathogens.

The laboratories — Biosafety Level 2 and 3 facilities — provide a

research home to a team led by Ralph Garruto, research professor of anthro-

pology and neurosciences and a supervisory research biologist with the Na-

tional Institutes of Health. Garruto is an internationally recognized authority

on the study of natural experimental models of disease among isolated and

modernizing non-Western populations.

The new labs will support research on a wide range of diseases and, in

particular, the rapid spread of emerging and re-emerging pathogens, agents

such as AIDS that create a global threat because of the movement of indi-

viduals and groups that accompanies modernization.

“These new directions of faculty research reflect the intensification and

evolution of research at Binghamton University,” said Frances Carr, vice presi-

dent for research.

BRIEFS

2

KUDOSHistory professor Thomas Dublin has been awarded two

prestigious fellowships that he plans to fulfill back-to-back across the

2000-01 and 2001-02 academic years.

Dublin, who has taught at Binghamton since 1988, was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion

at Yale Fellowship. He plans to take the Yale fellowship in 2000-01 and the

Guggenheim in 2001-02.

Dublin was one of 182 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,900 appli-

cants for the Guggenheim awards. Dublin won the Yale residential fellowship competing in a field

of 150 applicants. The institute’s theme for next year is “American Religion, Race and Ethnicity.”

He will write and revise a book manuscript, “Facing Economic Decline: The Pennsylvania

Anthracite Region, 1920-1990,” during the fellowships. Based on research completed in collabo-

ration with Walter Licht of the University of Pennsylvania, Dublin’s book will examine the history

of the decline of the anthracite coal industry.

Naomi E. Ervin, Decker Chair in Community Health Nursing at

the Decker School of Nursing, was one of 65 new fellows inducted into the

American Academy of Nursing for 1999.

The academy is an organization of 1,300 distinguished leaders in nursing

who have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to the profes-

sion of nursing and to health care.

Ervin’s contributions have spanned 35 years as a public health nurse, administrator, educator

and researcher. She contributed to the development of the role of the clinical specialist in

community health nursing and has worked to develop and evaluate effective methods for

delivering nursing care in the community.

James E. Morris, a professor of electrical engineering at

Binghamton since 1989, has been elected a fellow of the Institute of Electri-

cal and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in recognition of his “leadership in the

development of electronics packaging.”

The IEEE elects less than 1 percent of its members to become fellows and

less than a 10th of a percent in any given year. Morris was recognized in the

electronics packaging community for his work with electrically conductive adhesives, a

no-Pb technology with the potential to replace solder in microelectronics applications.

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

sciences and environmental studies, the rigis just phase one of a project to establish areadily accessible field station for students togather hydrologic and environmental data.

“The immediate goal of this project is theaddition of a field laboratory for severalundergraduate geology and environmentalstudies courses,” Graney said. “The long-term goal is not only to enhance students’lecture-based learning with field experi-ences, but ultimately to enable them todevelop and conduct meaningful ‘capstone’scientific projects at the undergraduatelevel.”

A National Science Foundation grant paidfor the purchase and installation of thehydrologic and environmental monitoringequipment.

The complete project will include thewell field for monitoring groundwater levelsand quality, a station on Fuller Hollow Creekfor monitoring stream flow and samplingsurface water quality, and a meteorologicaland atmospheric monitoring station capableof sampling air and rainwater for chemicalanalysis.

PROGRAM USES COSMETICS AS

LURE TO THE SCIENCES

A $99,993 National Science Foundationgrant is supporting an innovative programthat uses creams, lotions, shampoos andshower gels to interest girls in the physicalsciences.

The program teams the University withthe Lander Company, a Binghamton-basedpersonal care product manufacturer; theUnion-Endicott School District; and theRoberson Museum and Science Center.

It attempts to reverse a trend that seessignificantly fewer students, particularlygirls, in Broome and five surrounding coun-ties enroll in physical science classes thanelsewhere in upstate New York, said biologyprofessor Anna Tan-Wilson, director of theprogram.

In 1997-98, the State Department ofEducation said only 51.2 percent of highschool students in Broome, Chenango, Dela-ware, Otsego, Tioga and Tompkins countiesenrolled in chemistry, compared to 69.8percent of students in the rest of upstateNew York. When it came to physics, the gapbetween local counties and the region greweven wider — 29.5 percent to 43.1 percent.

The program attempts to make chemistryand physics more relevant, first to girls and

later to all students, by showing them howthe subjects relate to aspects of everyday life.

In the first phase of the program, 120middle school girls took tours of the LanderCompany and spent Saturday morningsand a week in the summer learning to makecosmetics.

In the second component, 24 teachersfrom districts within a 100-mile radius par-ticipated in a workshop learning classroomexperiments. The workshop will be followed

by the distribution of classroom kits to localschools and on-site assistance from graduateand undergraduate volunteers, in an effortthat is expected to reach an additional 2,000students.

Tan-Wilson said she isn’t concerned thatthe program reinforces gender stereotypes.

“We are just trying to find other angles— as many angles as one can — to attractstudents to science,” she said.

3

atco had problems — good problems.The Binghamton technology companywas trying to solve difficulties a po-tential client was having with a circuitboard. The right answers could lead to a production contract worth more

than $1 million. But first things first — Matcohad to figure out what was wrong with theexisting design. So the company did whatmany high-tech operations do in BroomeCounty: It turned to Binghamton University.

The University’s Integrated ElectronicsEngineering Center examined the product, aprinted circuit board to go into a faucet, andenumerated the flaws. The center and Matcothen found the appropriate coating, tested itand discovered components in the circuitboard that should not be in a moist environ-ment. Matco fulfilled the reliability contractand parlayed it into a production contract.Now, 35 new employees are building the prod-uct in Broome County, making good moneyand putting it back into the community.

“Without a doubt they won us that con-tract,” said Richard Welch, Matco technologyteam member.

That was just the end result in the commu-

Historical Study of Women and Gender andRoger L. Kresge Center for Nursing Researchbring to 19 the total of University researchcenters.

The Institute for Biomedical Technology, forexample, will expand on the IEEC model toenhance the relationship between disciplinesand maximize resources. One of its initiativesis a cryosurgical probe that will freeze cancertissue, allowing it to be harmlessly absorbedby the body, said John Baust, institutedirector.

Frances Carr, vice president for research,said it is an exciting time to be part of a bur-geoning research institution.

“The new millennium finds Binghamtonstepping to the fore as an engaged researchinstitution, actively involved in sharing thefruits of discovery with local, state, nationaland international communities — from thedefinition of new and exciting research ques-tions to the development of innovative solu-tions that promise to help improve the worldand our place in it,” Carr said.

The University recognizes its stake in thecommunity, where the school is already thesecond largest employer during the academic

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nity. On the way to those solutions, studentslearned how to conduct research, internsgained valuable real-world experience and newtechnology was developed.

Matco benefited not only from theUniversity’s keen interest in helping developtechnology in its Southern Tier home, but alsofrom its ability to bridge disciplines in searchof new combinations that open doors to dis-covery all over the world. In one look, it isdifficult to absorb the myriad contributionsfrom all of the different fields. Areas of studyfrom engineering to chemistry, from nursingto pre-law, are all involved in expanding on-and off-campus partnerships with area schools,municipalities, clinics and businesses.

In the case of the Integrated ElectronicsEngineering Center, the IEEC mixes mechani-cal, industrial and chemical engineering withphysics and computer science to concoct a newelixir for an emerging millennium’s sophisti-cated demands.

Building on the University’s success withmultidisciplinary approaches, BU establishedfour new centers for research this year. Thenew Institute for Biomedical Technology, Cen-ter on Democratic Performance, Center for the

Opening thedoors of

discoveryUniversity, community reap benefits of innovative research

M

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year, with more than 4,000 work-ers. In addition to bringing researchacumen, scholarly creativity andstudents’ vitality to the region, theUniversity also pumps more than $400 milliona year into the economy, according to conser-vative estimates.

The commitment to putting research andscholarship to work for the public good is ahallmark of Binghamton University and speaksto the changing role of higher education, saidChristopher Fynsk, chair of the ComparativeLiterature Department.

Fynsk is quick to point out that research isnot just learning to build better widgets. It isalso contributing to the great issues of our time.

“If you look at the public debate going onright now around human rights, gay rights orabortion, those discussions happening at theWashington level are deeply marked by dis-cussions going on in the academy,” Fynsk said.

Likewise, perceived divisions between thehumanities and the “hard” sciences are moreand more being seen as contrived, inaccurateand counterproductive, he said.

“All of the world’s major physicists havebeen deeply involved in philosophy,” he noted.“It’s not just, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we comple-mented the sciences with the humanities?’ Ithink the sciences need the humanities inorder to work through some of their basic theo-retical paradigms.”

Francis Yammarino, a professor inBinghamton’s School of Management andco-director of the University’s internationallyacclaimed Center for Leadership Studies,agrees. Breaking down barriers and sharingknowledge is important for the University andits larger communities as well, he said.

“Even basic or fundamental research hasto get out to the world, and I think that’s theuniversity’s job,” he said. “I also think the

model that will work is integration and cross-fertilization. The model that will work is gov-ernment-university-industry partnerships.”

The Center for Leadership Studies is usingthat model to apply research and scholarlypursuits to a statewide problem. New York isdealing with a serious shortage of public-school administrators — a situation that, with-out intervention, could worsen. A 75 percentturnover in superintendent positions is pre-

receives NSF money. Instead, it is fullypartnered with New York state as a Center forAdvanced Technology and has eight full-time,10 participating and 40 to 50 associate mem-ber businesses, said IEEC Director BahgatSammakia. Member businesses benefit fromthe work of 12 faculty members and 50 gradu-ate students in disciplines ranging from engi-neering and computer science to biology, phys-ics and chemistry. In many cases, the Univer-

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

dicted within the next five years.“These are $100,000-a-year-plus jobs, and

they can’t get anybody to apply for them,”Yammarino said.

Partnering with 15 area school districts, thecenter is identifying and developing 25 to 50high-potential teachers from a pool of morethan 100 candidates.

“We’ll give them the skills and show themhow exciting it is to lead a system. Our solu-tion is, we’ll grow our own,” Yammarino said.The program is similar to an effort several yearsago to train 400 community leaders in skillsthey could take back to non-profit and phil-anthropic organizations, as well as to businessand government offices.

Richard D’Attilio, executive director of theBroome County Industrial DevelopmentAgency and director of economic developmentfor Broome County, said the healthy and grow-ing symbiotic relationship between the Uni-versity and community strengthens both.

“We — Broome County, Binghamton, NewYork — are not Cleveland or Phoenix. We don’tnecessarily compete in the broader scope,”D’Attilio said. “But we need to get more so-phisticated about how we grow our commu-nity. It seems to me that we can best do thatby developing a better understanding of theUniversity asset, by taking advantage of ad-vice and counsel from the University abouthow to take that to the market, and by capi-talizing on the investment opportunities itpresents.”

To accomplish this, the University stretchespublic funding to fit new needs. For example,the IEEC was founded with National ScienceFoundation funding in 1992. But it no longer

sity becomes the de facto research and devel-opment arm of companies that might other-wise founder for lack of access to the innova-tions and improvements.

Matco, for instance, is an IEEC membercompany and a contract assembler of electronicPC boards. The company’s Binghamton tech-nology center reviews customer board designswith an emphasis on improving them throughmodifications in components or manufactur-ing processes. Help from the IEEC providesMatco easy access to cutting-edge diagnosticprocesses and equipment, as well as invalu-able research and development support. Thattranslates to significant new contract awardsand new hires, said Welch of Matco.

Without the University, the companywould be forced to turn to distant, costly andpotentially less reliable commercial testing, headded. Private testing companies have beenknown to sacrifice accuracy in the name ofprofit margins, he said. But because the Uni-versity is a public institution and because itsmotive is not to turn a profit, its reliability test-ing services are seen as, and have proven tobe, more dependable than those of some pri-vate enterprises, Welch said.

Yammarino of the School of Managementsaid he is proud of the University’s innova-tion in helping the community.

“Think about it,” he said. “It’s going to begovernment money, put together with Univer-sity personnel in a way that will eventuallyproduce start-up businesses offering productsand services that will improve the quality oflife and eventually generate new areas of re-search. I think it’s a great model. This is pub-lic money invested for the public good.”

“THE NEW MILLENNIUM FINDS Binghamton STEPPING

TO THE FORE AS AN ENGAGED RESEARCH INSTITUTION,

ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN SHARING THE FRUITS OF DISCOVERY . . . ”

— Frances Carr, vice president for research

5

Aing on the development of displays 36 inchesand larger. This is a market the company ex-pects to hit $5 billion within the next fewyears, and industry experts have conjecturedthat RDI’s “tiling” technology may cut the costof such large -screen displays from $15,000 toabout $4,000, making the displays affordableto retail consumers.

Seraphim agrees.“These are perfect for the home entertain-

ment market,” he said of the displays, whichalready blend amorphous silicon technology,fluorescent lights and fine-tuned mechanical,electrical and computer software technologiesto produce images of eye-popping clarity on ascreen less than four inches deep.

Enhancements are expected to make thedisplays even brighter, clearer and more vis-ible from every corner of a room by the timethey hit the retail market in a few years, Sera-phim said.

While the prototype is worth about $1 mil-lion, the cost of producing the displays for saleis much lower and will decline at a rate of about15 to 20 percent per year, he said, making itlikely that the first home units will sell forbetween $3,000 and $6,000. They will also lastindefinitely, as opposed to today’s plasma-technology big-screen televisions, which tendto see deterioration in picture quality withinfive to 10 years.

Cathode-ray tubes found in today’s televi-sions and monitors won’t be of consequencein the large-display market. Cathode-ray tubescannot be manufactured larger than 36 inches.Moreover, a cathode-ray tube television of thatsize weighs more than 200 pounds and is about3 feet deep. RDI’s flat-panel prototype weighsless than 50 pounds and is less than 4 inchesdeep.

In addition, the company’s proprietarytechnology, covered by 29 patents, is scalablewell beyond the size of the prototype and iscapable of achieving much larger display sizes,higher resolutions and multiple “tiling” con-figurations for use in applications like outdooradvertising.

Supported by a $200,000 National ScienceFoundation grant, IEEC researchers James Con-

Rainbow’s end

University’s

role crucial

to company’s

flat-panel

display success

t Rainbow Displays Inc. in the Glen-dale Technology Park, the handwrit-ing is on the wall — displayed on a36-inch prototype flat-panel displaythat seems likely within the next few

years to forever change home entertainment,electronic advertising and computer displays.

What the handwriting spells out is “suc-cess.” Like a little- known and heretofore over-looked mountain climber, RDI, with the helpof many base-camp team members fromBinghamton University, has managed to scaleto heights where the rarefied air of techno-logical innovation has dropped bigger namesto their knees. And the company — small butgrowing by geometric proportion — is poisedto plant its flag near the summit of the $60billion worldwide flat-panel display market.

Key to the company’s success, says DonaldSeraphim, the company’s senior vice presidentand chief technical officer, have been ongoingalliances between RDI and BinghamtonUniversity’s Integrated Electronics Engineer-ing Center and Thomas J. Watson School ofEngineering and Applied Science. The IEEC’swork with RDI has been supported by theNational Science Foundation, said BaghatSammakia, director of the consortium.

All of this helped RDI finalize a deal withPhilips Electronics, a multinational companythat last year boasted $34 billion in sales. Theagreement is expected to speed the develop-ment and marketing of large flat-panel dis-plays, which RDI expects to begin manufac-turing at a rate of about 100 per month by themiddle of next year, Seraphim said.

Under the agreement, Philips will make anequity investment in RDI and provide 16 en-gineers in exchange for access to its technol-ogy and products. RDI will retain the rightsto all intellectual property, including its pat-ents, which now number 29 and counting. Thecompany will also retain the right to manufac-ture the displays, which will be sold under thePhilips name.

Using unique technologies that make pos-sible the seamless “tiling” of smaller LCD pan-els into one large display, RDI has targeted oneaspect of the flat-panel display market, focus-

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stable, professor of electrical engineering, andGary Lehmann and James Pitarresi, both as-sociate professors of mechanical engineering,last year began a two-year project workingwith RDI. They have been successfully collabo-rating with RDI engineers to develop a way toeffectively bond circuitry to glass panels thatcan perform in the temperature range gener-ated by large-display panels, and to determinehow to best place flexible glass over the as-semblies.

“This is a sophisticated process that reallyneeds a significant amount of analytical con-firmation that the mechanisms are workingproperly,” Seraphim said. “RDI, being small,just does not have that kind of analytical ca-pability, or the skilled people to do thosethings.”

Binghamton University has been key to theprocess of developing RDI’s new display sincethe beginning, he added. Company and Uni-versity engineers used specialized laser equip-ment on initial design analysis, he said.

In fact, Seraphim pointed out, the linesbetween RDI engineers and University engi-neers and students are not as clearly drawn asone might think.

Two of RDI’s key team members areBinghamton alumni — engineering programmanager Dean Skinner, PhD ’91, and softwaredevelopment engineer Benjamin Bristoll ’97.

Skinner is responsible for mechanicaldesign, mechanical analysis and light-sourcedevelopment at RDI. He has more than 30years’ experience in the development of high-technology printer systems and electronicpackaging components. He holds 10 U.S. pat-ents, has 18 published inventions and has pub-lished 29 technical papers. He earned his PhDin mechanical engineering through the IBMResident Study Program.

Bristoll is responsible for creating softwaretools that support image quality in the devel-opment of large flat-panel displays. Ultimately,it’s his job to calibrate software in each dis-play to match brightness and color across tilesand to get rid of seams in the picture. His ini-tial involvement with RDI was as a part-timeconsultant while still an undergraduate in com-

RDI MANAGING ENGINEER DEAN

SKINNER, PHD ’91, PROFESSOR

JAMES CONSTABLE, UNDER-

GRADUATE JAIME WEIDLER AND

RDI TECHNICIAN SEAN MURPHY

CHECK EQUIPMENT USED TO CALI-

BRATE AND TEST THE FLAT-PANEL

DISPLAYS BEING DEVELOPED AT

RDI. THE LCD DISPLAYS ARE

SCHEDULED TO GO INTO PRODUC-

TION AT RDI NEXT SPRING. THE

DISPLAYS ARE MADE WITH A

“TILING” TECHNOLOGY THAT

COMBINES FOUR IMAGES INTO

A SINGLE SEAMLESS ONE.

puter science at Binghamton. He joined thecompany full time upon graduation.

RDI also has links with many Binghamtonundergraduates, Seraphim said.

Watson School senior projects involve stu-dents in testing the reliability of componentsused by RDI and in developing quality mea-surement systems to establish the criteria formatching colors, brightness and image qual-ity across the tiles. “We love your engineers,”he said. “Binghamton is producing really ex-cellent engineers.”

This is not Seraphim’s first alliance withBinghamton University. An IBM retiree, heworked as a consultant for the IEEC beforegoing to work with RDI. While at IBM, he con-trolled a significant amount of money thatwent to joint University programs, he said.

“I’ve always realized the benefits that canaccrue from such relationships. And it’s provenagain now, for sure,” he said.

As RDI moves into larger quarters at theGlendale Technology Park, Seraphim said heexpects the company’s growth will make evenmore room for Binghamton graduates.

“Success,” he said, with a smile, “lasts oneminute. Then it’s on to the next problem.”

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B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

Using technology to help identify anderadicate cancers that the body fails to recog-nize and respond to is high on the list of pri-orities for researchers at BinghamtonUniversity’s Institute of Biomedical Technology.

The IBT was recently tapped for a New YorkState Urban Development Corporation grantthat will help move Binghamton to the nationalforefront of research institutions working toimprove the diagnosis and treatment of dis-eases such as cancer, diabetes andAlzheimer’s, said John Baust, IBT director.The $82,441 grant will go toward the pur-

chase of a $150,000 protein chip microarrayprocessor. The equipment uses biological prin-ciples and computer and laser technology to

Concealed weaponsTINY TOOLS MAY HELP FIGHT DISEASE

ou and everyone around you will probably develop cancer several times

today. During the time it takes to read this article, in fact, your body will

likely develop, recognize and eradicate at least one and possibly more

cancer cells. It’s standard operating procedure for the healthy immune system.

Cancer, after all, isn’t the problem. The problem is that some immune systems,

compromised by age or genetic or environmental factors,

fail to detect and exterminate certain types of cancer

cells, allowing the cancer to grow unchecked and

invade otherwise healthy tissues and organs.

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OTO:

VAN

ZAN

DBER

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PHOT

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PHY

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY MOLECULAR CELL BIOLOGIST

ROBERT VAN BUSKIRK (LEFT) AND CRYOBIOLOGIST

JOHN BAUST COLLABORATE TO IMPROVE THE DIAGNOSIS

AND TREATMENT OF DISEASES AND TO EXTEND THE

LIFE OF ENGINEERED HUMAN TISSUES AND ORGANS

FOR TRANSPLANTATION.

they take up residence and begin producinginsulin, Baust said.

“This is a leading-edge approach to treat-ment of diabetes and transplant science,”he added.

Matching funds for the equipment pur-chase will come from BioLife Solutions, Inc.,the University’s first incubator. Baust and hisresearch partner, biologist Robert Van Buskirk,are principals in the company, which was in-corporated in 1998.

Acquisition of the microarray processorwill position the University to more completelyrealize its vision in regard to biomedical tech-nology, Baust said. Faculty from the life sci-ences and engineering for several years havebeen establishing rewarding cross-disciplinarypartnerships, working with each other andwith off-campus associates, always with an eyetoward economic development in the region,he said.

“We’re trying to do something different,”said Baust. “We’re not trying to simply get thiskind of technology here so that we can do ba-sic research, although basic research is ofcourse important. We’re trying to bring thetechnology in so that it forms a building blockor magnet to attract other biotech industry tothe area.”

More than 37 University faculty membersfrom fields as diverse as math, biology, phys-ics, engineering, chemistry, nursing and psy-chology are working on biomedical applica-tions and issues, with a particular focus on life

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

Through off-campus partnerships

with business and industry,

University researchers are

increasing their efforts to see

that basic science is more quickly

used to improve the quality of

daily life in the larger community.

screen small-volume fluid or tis-sue samples for disease bytracking the protein “finger-print” of cellular activity at themolecular level. This affords re-searchers a “ground zero” lookat disease processes. The tech-nology is so new that the equip-ment could not have been pur-chased at any price just lastyear, Baust said. Only a limitednumber of processors are in op-eration in the United States to-day, he added.

From fraction-of-a-dropblood or tissue samples, re-searchers using microarraytechnology will be able to identify differenttypes of cancer based on the inevitable pro-tein fingerprint left by cellular interactions.Postage-stamp-sized protein chips that matchthe protein profile of different kinds of pros-tate and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s diseasehave already been developed, Baust said.

“When we talk about prostate or breastcancer, we often talk about them generically,“Baust noted. “But it’s not just one cancer. It’sclasses of cancer — many dozens of classes, insome cases — and not all cancers respond tocertain therapies. You can treat cancer muchmore effectively if you know what kind it is.”

Using the protein chip microarray proces-sor, Binghamton researchers will be some ofthe first in the country to begin isolating andidentifying other protein fingerprints that willspeed the development of protein chips to beused in the diagnosis of specific types of can-cer and other major diseases, he said.

Another important use of the equipmentwill be to improve preservation of human cells,tissues and organs for transplantation, Baustnoted. In partnership with the Diabetes Re-search Institute of the University of Miami,Binghamton researchers are specifically look-ing for ways to improve the preservation ofpancreatic islets. The islets are clusters of cellsthat produce insulin and control glucose me-tabolism. In what amounts to a minimally in-vasive organ transplant, islets are harvestedfrom a donor, isolated from the pancreas andinjected into the liver of the recipient, where

processes, human and artificialtissues and the ways that tech-nology can support the life sci-ences, said Vice President for Re-search Frances Carr.

In the past three years,Binghamton faculty have beenawarded more than $11 millionin grants related to biotechnol-ogy and have submitted an ad-ditional $36 million in pendingapplications, she added.

Richard D’Attilio, executivedirector of the Broome CountyIndustrial Development Agencyand director of economic devel-opment for Broome County, said

he is excited about the promise inherent inUniversity efforts to help develop a regionalbiotechnology industry.

“One of the big challenges is always thedifficult stage of development when venturecapital and seed capital is required,” D’Attiliosaid. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Wecould probably attract venture capital into thiscommunity if we had enough opportunities topursue.”

Provost Mary Ann Swain said acquisitionof the protein chip microarray processor is ex-citing and in keeping with the University’s ex-panding role in biotechnology and in technol-ogy transfer as a whole. Through off-campuspartnerships with business and industry, Uni-versity researchers are increasing their effortsto see that basic science is more quickly usedto improve the quality of daily life in the largercommunity, she said. At the same time, accessto equipment like the microarray processor willgive students unparalleled educational oppor-tunities and enhance Binghamton’s recruit-ment of the best and brightest students, shenoted.

Baust and Van Buskirk expect to acquire aDNA microarray processor for the IBT by year’send. Theoretically, DNA processors will allowscientists not only to see what is going on inthe body in the present day, but also to deter-mine from infinitesimal tissue samples whatdiseases infants could be troubled by 60 ormore years into their lives, making possibleearly and lifelong interventions.

9

The entrepreneurial spirit of a professor who came to

PROFESSOR’S CONNECTIONSLINK UNIVERSITY WITH ADVANCEDLASER EQUIPMENT

Chatterjee, associate professor of electrical en-gineering who specializes in electro-optics, isthe co-director of that project.

Lasers come in two types: power lasers andcommunications lasers. The lasers commonlyportrayed in movies cutting through doors ofsolid steel are power lasers. Communicationslasers use much less power — just enough tocarry the ones and zeros that constitute thecoded message. They do no physical damagebut must be very accurately aimed to do theirjob, which is where Skormin comes in.

His areas of expertise include modern con-trol theory and applications, process control,adaptive control, optimization techniques,mathematical modeling and computer simula-tion.

That makes the Skormin-Chatterjee alliancean ideal match for the new curriculum.Skormin can teach students how to control la-sers and oversee research aimed at finding newways to point them with the accuracy neces-sary to transmit data to a moving target like asatellite or jet airplane across a thousand ormore miles. Chatterjee can teach students aboutthe electro-optical properties of lasers.

One such property is that communicationslasers stay within a very narrow angle acrossmany miles and never diverge or divert, mak-ing the information they carry very secure andmaking laser communication particularly in-teresting to the military, Skormin said. Satel-lite communications, particularly free-spacelaser communications, is the only technologycapable of meeting the demands of today’s com-munications revolution, he explained. That’sbecause laser communication allows for thesecure transmission of 2.2 gigabytes of data persecond — essentially the contents of a com-plete hard drive — in the blink of an eye.

“When a military airplane is flying towardthe target, it wants, every 30 minutes, andsometimes every 15 minutes, to get a completeupdate on weather, targets, support andchanges in assignment,” he said. “With lasercommunication, they will be able to shoot a

the United States 20 years ago as a politicalrefugee from communist Russia is at the heartof a deal in which the U.S. Air Force is lendingabout $1 million in laser communicationsequipment to Binghamton University’s Re-search Foundation.

Though the terms of that agreement call forthe University to move the equipment to cam-pus only when space and funding allow, itseems clear that if Victor Skormin has anythingto say about it, that will happen sooner, notlater. Talks are already under way that couldsee the equipment permanently donated to theUniversity.

Skormin, a professor in Thomas J. WatsonSchool of Engineering and Applied Science’sDepartment of Electrical Engineering, has al-ready secured a $400,000 National ScienceFoundation grant to develop satellite commu-nications as a supplement to the school’s elec-trical engineering curriculum. Monish

An intellectual capitalist

VICTOR SKORMIN, ELECTRICAL

ENGINEERING PROFESSOR, HAS

ALREADY SECURED A $400,000

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

GRANT TO DEVELOP SATELLITE

COMMUNICATIONS. NOW HE HAS THE

U.S. AIR FORCE AGREEING TO LEND

$1 MILLION IN LASER COMMUNICA-

TIONS EQUIPMENT TO THE UNIVERSITY.

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10

‘bullet’ — a burst of la-ser energy that willcarry enough informa-tion for a complete up-date for the pilot, andwill be virtually impos-sible to intercept. Then,for the next 15 minutes,there will be nothing,and then they will sendanother pulse.”

Skormin holds an MS in electrical engineer-ing from State Polytechnic Institute, Alma-Ata,USSR, and a PhD in control engineering fromthe Institute of Steel in Moscow. Since his ar-rival in the United States on January 23, 1980— a day he refers to as his personal “Colum-bus Day” — he has regained both his profes-sion and his son, who now owns a successfuldental practice in Buffalo.

When Skormin left Russia in 1979, his sonwas 9, and Soviet authorities claimed that hewould never see the boy again. But timeschanged, and his son came to the United Statesat the age of 18. He then “put a lot of effortinto turning him into a nice American gentle-man,” a goal Skormin is proud to say his sonhas achieved.

Before coming to Binghamton, Skorminworked as an associate professor at RochesterInstitute of Technology and as a consultant toEastman Kodak and Milton Roy companies inRochester. In November 1999, his last em-ployer in the USSR, Kazak National TechnicalUniversity, awarded him the title of honoraryprofessor.

Lately, Skormin’s efforts have focused onbringing the loaned satellite communicationsequipment to the University. Due to his efforts,some of it has already been moved and is be-ing used by a handful of graduate students.

But Skormin knows it’s going to take moremoney and more space to provide a home forthe rest of the equipment.

“Eventually, I plan to bring all this equip-ment to Binghamton,” he said, “so we’re writ-

ing more proposals.”His recent negotia-

tion with the Jet Propul-sion Lab of NASA has re-sulted in the lab’s com-mitment to contribute$50,000 in researchfunding to Skormin andChatterjee. He has alsosecured an additional$50,000 from the Air

Force and expects another $100,000 to$200,000 from the same source in “the nearestfuture,” he said.

“Also, on the back burner I have anothercall for proposals from NSF on the develop-ment of new educational technologies,”Skormin added. “By fall we should be able tooffer someone in Australia or any place in theworld the opportunity to access our very ex-pensive laser communications equipment —which they would never get a hold of on theirown — through the Internet,” he said. “Andif this is not a new educational technology, Idon’t know what else is. It would not even bea ‘virtual’ lab, because they will be drivingand tracking the actual physical equipmentacross the Internet.”

Skormin is a senior member of the Insti-tute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers anda member of the American Society of Electron-ics Engineers. He is a 1999-2000 senior re-searcher at the Air Force, appointed by theNational Research Council.

Skormin has collaborated with the Air ForceResearch Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., on lasercommunications research since 1992. Duringthat time he has graduated two doctoral stu-dents who specialize in satellite communica-tions and who also worked with him at theRome lab for a time.

“This is how I became known at Rome Lab,”he said. “Because this particular line of re-search was closing at Rome and because theyhad this very sophisticated equipment andwanted to see the research continue, they

loaned it to me under this special agreement.“My dean told me in order to bring the

equipment here, I would have to get a sizablegrant which would allow him to make modifi-cations in the Watson School and give me thepersonnel and so on,” Skormin said.

Watson Dean Lyle Feisel, who calledSkormin a well-trained engineer and a creativeand imaginative researcher, isn’t surprised thatSkormin took his challenge so seriously.

“When Victor decides he’s going to dosomething, he just goes out and does it,” Feiselsaid. “In fact, the only thing that would sur-prise me about Victor is if he didn’t surpriseme from time to time.

“He’s a jewel,” Feisel added. “If he were inRussia today and was not honest, he’d be amillionaire.”

In addition to the other grant proposals hehas in the works, Skormin expects to team withJose Delgado-Frias, associate professor of elec-trical engineering, and Dennis McGee, associ-ate professor of biology, on a project that standsan excellent chance of securing $450,000 inAir Force funding. That project, titled Biologi-cal Approach to System Information Security(BASIS), would explore a new paradigm forprotecting communications systems, includingthe Internet, Skormin said.

“Just like biological systems, communica-tions systems are highly interconnected andhave many entry points,” he said. “Because ofthis it is really easy to put a maliciousprogram in the system or destroy the wholesystem through some kind of unauthorizedaccess.”

Skormin’s proposal is to work withDelgado-Frias and McGee to develop an artifi-cial immune system capable of evolving inresponse to exposure to “pathogens” like com-puter viruses and hacker attacks, in much thesame way that biological immune systemsdevelop immunity to viruses and bacteria. Thisapproach would attempt to use “natural”defense strategies developed in biologicalsystems over millions of years of evolution.

11

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

Satellite communications,particularly free-space lasercommunications, is the onlytechnology capable of meet-ing the demands of today’scommunications revolution.

IMAGINE a house that builds itself toyour design specifications. Imagine, too, thatits self-erecting walls come replete with elec-trical wires and switches and that the circuitsare all completed as soon as the building,which boasts as many rooms and floors as youdesire, finishes assembling itself.

Finally, imagine that this “house” is so smallthat it can’t be seen, even with the aid of ahigh-powered microscope, and you will havesome idea of what chemist Wayne Jones andhis Binghamton University research group areup to.

Though neither Jones nor his students arearchitects by training, they are working on thedesign of an edifice that, despite its infinitesi-mal size, could change the face of the modernlandscape more dramatically than any of theworld’s tallest buildings.

Like players in a high-stakes, three-dimen-sional Tetris game, Jones and his research teamare using their knowledge of molecular bondsto devise self-assembling molecular architec-tures that will ultimately afford them controlover the physical and electronic properties ofthe materials that result.

Once the process is refined, probablywithin the next three to five years, it will re-quire only a small step to build the aforemen-tioned molecular house. And because the self-assembling walls of that “house” will containall the necessary molecular wires and switchesto conduct and control the flow of electricalcurrent through the material, its potential usesare mind-boggling.

When it is honed, in fact, the process andthe materials that result from Jones’ researchcould spur quantum leaps in the electronicsindustry — from previously impossible break-throughs in biosensors to an unprecedentedwave of miniaturization in microelectronics.

Exactly how “micro” could microelectron-ics become if Jones and other researchers inhis field are successful in developing and re-fining nanomaterials of this ilk?

“The current PC would fit on the tip of afinger,” Jones said.

Jones and his group are working to opti-mize specific molecular interactions so thatlarger molecules will bind together in orderedgroups with desired properties, eventuallyforming a complete material built “from theground up” according to the researchers’ plans.

Their work falls under the heading ofnanotechnology or nanomaterials research.That means it involves molecular componentsof one billionth of a meter or less. The process

Surrealestate

MOLECULAR ARCHITECTURECREATES DESIGNS FOR ANANOMATERIAL WORLD

12

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tegr

ated

ele

ctro

nics

eng

inee

ring

cent

erd

oors

of

dis

cove

ry

but if Wayne Jones’ current research project

is any indication, serendipity is the midwife.

After all, it was an experiment by an

undergraduate student — an experiment that

Jones thought had no hope of succeeding —

that turned his research team down the

promising path of molecular architecture it is

currently exploring.

“It was luck that this experiment worked

when statistics said it wouldn’t work,” Jones

said. “Even the materials [the student] was

using said it wouldn’t work. And I certainly

said it shouldn’t work.”

The Binghamton researchers are now

convinced that the student’s initial experiment

in multi-layer molecular architecture suc-

ceeded only because he happened to conduct

it during the dead of a Binghamton winter,

they are working with is aptly known as “dipchemistry.”

“Our approach is actually to start with abare silicon surface or a metal surface and then,on a molecular level, to begin building on thatsurface,” Jones said. “In essence, we’re justdipping the substrate into solutions that con-tain the molecules, and the molecules linethemselves up and build one layer at a time —binding layer, spacer layer, floor layer — allbuilt on top of each other to create an archi-tecture.”

Working on such a small scale is nothingnew to chemists, Jones noted. Molecular bondsgenerally are on the order of one-tenth to two-tenths of a nanometer.

“Every chemist studies things innanoscale,” he said. “It’s funny. Everyone elseis trying to go smaller, but I think what is re-ally exciting for chemists is to take what weknow about small interactions and to get themto go bigger. We understand how Atom A andAtom B come together. Now we’re trying toget thousands of them to come together in anorganized three-dimensional technology.”

Among other things, Jones’ group is work-ing with polymer materials that will self-as-semble into an adhesive that could eventuallyeliminate the need for lead solder in circuitboard assembly.

“What we’re doing is completely and radi-cally different from all the production pro-cesses in industry today,” said David Sarno,who has worked with Jones on the projectsince the spring of 1998.

Local industry has been supporting Jones’current project through a collaborative grantfrom the Integrated Electronics Engineering

Center (IEEC) for the past year. Working withBiological Sciences Professor R. StimsonWilcox, Jones is exploring application of self-assembly involving biological adhesive modelsystems. The IEEC receives funding from theNew York State Science and Technology Foun-dation, the National Science Foundation anda consortium of industrial members.

when the humidity was extremely low. All

attempts to replicate the experiment failed

for the next nine months, until researchers

decided to try conducting it in humidity-

controlled conditions.

“Basically it worked in the middle of

winter, and if he had done the same experi-

ment in the middle of the summer, it almost

certainly would not have worked and we

would not be talking about this stuff today,”

Jones noted.

An initial failure in the experiment would

have surprised no one and, probably, no further

thought would have been given to the matter.

Instead, researchers were confronted with the

one-time success of the experiment and the

hunt was on to explain it and replicate it.

Because the process Jones is using to as-semble molecular architectures begins with asilicon substrate, the task at hand could be lik-ened to building a tiny house on a bed of sand.And though traditional allegories suggest thefoolhardiness of such an undertaking, Jonesand his associates have no worries about thestability of their substrate because of the smallscale of their work.

“What makes sand seem loose to us is thatthere are lots and lots and lots of grains in asand pile or on a beach, where we typicallyexperience sand,” Jones noted. “In our case,the sand is stable because, in essence, we’rebuilding on a single grain, which, given therelative dimensions, might be the equivalentof saying we’re building on the state of NewYork.”

PHD CANDIDATE DAVID SARNO, RIGHT, AND

CHEMIST WAYNE JONES WORK ON A

MOLECULAR ARCHITECTURE EXPERIMENT

IN JONES’ LAB IN THE SCIENCE II BUILDING.

ULTIMATELY, THE WORK COULD SPUR A

NEW WAVE OF MINIATURIZATION IN THE

FIELD OF MICROELECTRONICS.

Necessity may be the mother of invention . . .

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

13

kind of information. Because similar and si-multaneous changes do not occur elsewherein the brain, it is safe to say that the brain canno longer be accurately viewed as a single com-partment, he said.

“The brain can, in fact, use up glucose in aregion-specific manner, depending on thebrain activity of the moment,” he noted.

A new analogy suggested by Gold’s re-search is that of the brain as a complex land-scape of plateaus and enclosed basins, or sinks.While a steady “rain” of glucose keeps thebasins generally full, complex tasks that callupon a specific region of the brain seem to“pull the plug” on that basin and allow its re-sources to drain away. Once the cognitive de-mand eases, the plug drops back into the drainand the basin refills.

What Gold’s research shows is that supple-menting systemic glucose reserves with addi-tional glucose is like pumping water into anemptying basin with a fire hose. Glucose deple-tion and its negative effects on cognition canbe mitigated, even during times of ongoingcognitive demand.

These recent findings substantiate Gold’spast results, which showed that glucose en-hances learning and memory not only in ratsbut also in many populations of humans, in-cluding healthy elderly subjects and subjectswith Alzheimer’s disease.

“This research may lead to changes in viewsabout nutrition and education,” Gold said.“One implication is that the cognitive effectsof the content of meals might become a con-sideration important in designing schoolbreakfasts and lunches.”

Glucose levels in the brain fluctuate after ameal. Initially, they rise, but then, particularlyif the meal contained a high sugar content, theydip into the hypoglycemic range. Parents andschool officials may want to take into accountthe timing of classes relative to meals whenplanning children’s class schedules, Gold said.

“Do you want your child going hypogly-cemic in terms of brain function just beforealgebra, or do you want it just before gym? Ithink those are questions individual families

PSYCHOLOGIST PAUL GOLD’S

RESEARCH PROVES THAT

A 50-YEAR-OLD THEORY

ABOUT THE BRAIN’S USE

OF GLUCOSE IS WRONG.

BECAUSE OF HIS WORK,

STUDENTS COULD SOON

BE EATING THEIR WAY

TO BETTER

GRADES OR

IMPROVED

MOTOR SKILLS,

AND THE ELD-

ERLY COULD BE OFFSETTING

AGE-RELATED COGNITIVE

DEFICITS OR MEDIATING

THE EFFECTS OF DEMENTIA

WITH A PILL.

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BrainResearcher links glucose and mental function

hough his image is unlikely ever to gracethe front of a Wheaties box, Paul Gold’swork brings researchers that much closerto devising a real “breakfast of champi-ons,” and promises to alter significantlythe way we think about nutrition and its

relation to cognitive functions.More than that, as a result of his research,

students could soon be eating their way tobetter grades or improved motor skills, andthe elderly could be improving age-relatedcognitive deficits or mediating the effects ofdementia with a pill.

By working with rats in a maze, Gold, aBinghamton University psychology professor,recently showed that a 50-year-old theoryabout the brain’s use of glucose, a simple sugarthat is the brain’s primary energy source, iswrong.

An article based on Gold’s research, whichwas performed with two students, EwanMcKay and Thomas Fries, recently appearedin the Proceedings of the National Academy ofScience, a prestigious journal.

Unlike traditional views that suggest thebrain can be seen as a single compartment thatalways has supplies of glucose adequate to itsneeds, Gold’s work shows that at least one areaof the brain — the hippocampus — experi-ences a depletion of glucose supplies duringthe performance of complex cognitive tasks.

His research also shows that the extent ofthe drain is proportional to the complexity ofthe task as experienced by the individual. Inother words, while it might take somethingakin to a complex calculus problem to causesignificant glucose drain in the brain of a col-lege student, an Alzheimer’s patient mightexperience the same effect while trying to opena carton of milk.

“In fact, while it certainly is true that it’spossible to improve cognitive function inhealthy people,” Gold said, “it could be thatdysfunction actually generates the best con-ditions for significant improvement.”

The changes Gold sees during the trainingof rats on a maze are localized to brain areasthat are involved in processing that particular

T

14

would have to decide,” hesaid.

Some families might actu-ally prefer to send their chil-dren to gym at their peak cog-nitive state because theymight value the motor skill

learning that goes on there more highly thanalgebra, he added.

Even though Gold isn’t sure what the“breakfast of champions” will look like, heknows it will not be chocolate, or any othersource of glucose that contains or is accompa-nied by the ingestion of a lot of fat. Fat, whichis common to the traditional American “bigbreakfast,” blunts the glucose response,thereby negating the cognitive benefits of themeal, he said.

“I also want to make sure that no one thinksI am suggesting that they just feed their chil-dren glucose for breakfast,” he said. “That’snot what I’m saying.”

Like almost every drug that improves cog-nitive function, glucose has an “inverted-U”dose curve, he said. That means that as thedose increases, cognition gets better and bet-ter, until it reaches a peak and begins gettingworse and worse. The inverted-U curve is em-pirical proof of what most people learn fairly

problem solving, Gold’s research shows thatwhen glucose levels are replenished in partsof the brain that are involved in cognition, theperformance of cognitive tasks is significantlyenhanced.

In studies with healthy elderly and collegestudents, when their baseline morning glucoselevel was supplemented with glucose prior totesting, participants in both groups showed anaverage 30 to 40 percent improvement in indi-vidual performance on standardized memorytests modified to an appropriate level of com-plexity for each group.

In similar research, Alzheimer’s patientswere tested with a much simpler version ofthe standardized memory test, and scores as

much as doubled whenthe patients were givenglucose, Gold said.

“Of course, to keepthat in perspective,these were Alzheimer’spatients who were per-forming at 20 percentand who improved to

40 percent,” Gold noted. “There’s a long waybetween that and normal.”

Nevertheless, Gold admits that he sees themost likely and immediate implication of hiswork as the probable development of a drugstrategy that will either mimic the effects ofglucose or act at the same level to control glu-cose depletion.

“I personally think that there is a promisefor change in the quality of life for Alzheimer’spatients. Given the robust enhancement ofmemory we and others have seen in experi-mental settings with humans, an understand-ing of the cellular mechanisms by which glu-cose acts to modulate brain functions may leadto new classes of treatments for memory prob-lems that plague seniors,” he said.

Gold doesn’t think glucose will be the treat-ment of choice because it would require com-plex coordination of the entire lifestyle of de-mentia patients, he said.

“That’s too complicated. The more likelyproduct of this research is the development ofpharmacological strategies,” he added.

A whole class of drugs was developed forthe treatment of diabetes, for instance. Thosedrugs act on the pancreas, which regulates therelease of insulin based on available glucose.A similar pharmacological approach could con-ceivably work on the brain, he said.

“I don’t know if that’s the right model ornot. But I think it’s safe to say that cell biologyis the real key.”

early in life: You can definitely get too muchof a good thing.

So, while Snickers bars or Oreos will cer-tainly not meet the definition of a properbreakfast, and while Gold thinks that defini-tion still needs a lot more work, he is confi-dent that guidelines will be discovered andquantified eventually.

“One of the first constraints could be tothink of a proper breakfast not only in termsof overall health, but also in terms of cogni-tive functions,” he said. “And I don’t thinkthose will prove to be mutually exclusive. Ithink you can probably do both at once.”

As they attempt to derive the formula for aproper breakfast, Gold said researchers willalso have to take into account individual dif-ferences in biochemistry and meal-to-meal in-teractions. That’s because what you had forbreakfast will determine your glycemic re-sponse to lunch more than what you eat forlunch, he said.

As a result, if the goal is to maintain theoptimal level of glucose to support cognitivefunctioning throughout the school day, whole-day meal plans will likely be needed, Gold said.

In addition to showing that the hippocam-pus, a brain area that controls and affects learn-ing and memory, is depleted during complex

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

15

In teaching at public schools straddling anurban-suburban border, she came face to facewith systemic inequities in educators’ treat-ment of children and found herself more andmore troubled by what she saw. Thoughcharged with teaching such principles as de-mocracy and justice, the schools did not ap-pear to practice what they preached.

For instance, one of the schools in whichshe taught included very few black students

in its gifted educationprogram, even thoughthe student popula-tion was 70 percentAfrican American.

“When I walkedinto my gifted educa-tion class and saw somany white faces, Ithought, ‘I cannot ac-

cept this,’” Miller Marsh said. “‘I cannot ac-cept that there are so few African Americankids, whom I know are articulate and bright,in this program.’”

Miller Marsh found the administrators ofthe schools closed to change. But that didn’tkeep her from becoming a staunch advocate

for anti-bias curriculum — a curricular ap-proach created by Louise Derman Sparks in1989 to address issues of race, class gender,physical ability, sexual orientation and reli-gious diversity with young children.

Even as a kindergarten teacher, MillerMarsh embraced Sparks’ approach because itchallenged two preconceived notions that shethinks still keep too many teachers from talk-ing to children about these important issues.

“Some people think that children are in-nocent and color blind and too young for this,”she said. “Teachers are also sometimes afraidto talk about issues of race, class and genderbecause they don’t know how to talk aboutthem. It’s not something we talk about, evenas adults.”

Miller Marsh knows firsthand that the pre-conceptions of classroom teachers can under-mine the implementation and success of anycurriculum, no matter how needed or welldeveloped. She has been researching the im-pact of teacher choices on students for a num-ber of years.

As a result, though still a vocal championof anti-bias curriculum, Miller Marsh hasturned her more immediate attention and re-search to the seemingly mercurial issue of“teacher thinking.”

Today, when Miller Marsh expresses con-cern about the biases that teachers bring topublic school classrooms, she isn’t talkingabout individuals acting out biases they ob-tained from processing family and general lifeexperiences — people with their own ax togrind. Instead, she forwards the more contro-versial postulate that teacher thinking is notby and large defined at the level of the indi-vidual at all. Although much of traditionalteacher education research has focused on in-dividual teachers, she claims, teacher think-ing is more clearly shaped and defined by thediscourses inherent in teacher education itself.

“I don’t think teacher thinking is indi-vidual,” she said. “I believe that it’s social. Ibelieve that teachers use the language and theactions that are based in the history of earlychildhood education — say, the discourse ofchild-centeredness.”

MONICA MILLER MARSH BELIEVES

“TEACHER THINKING” IS SOCIAL, NOT

INDIVIDUAL, AND THAT PHILOSOPHICAL

PARADIGMS COMMON TO THE PROFES-

SION NEED TO BE EXPLORED BEFORE

TEACHERS CAN EFFECTIVELY SUPPORT

ANTI-BIAS CLASSROOMS.

Before embarking on her career in higher education, MonicaMiller Marsh, an assistant professor and supervisor of student

teachers in the School of Education and Human Development,

spent six years teaching in elementary school classrooms.

Does “teacher thinking”

result in biased classrooms?

Challenging preconceptions

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That discourse, which may be one amonghundreds, is still the prevalent discourse inearly childhood education today, and providesa very solid history that tells us how we shouldspeak and act with young children, MillerMarsh said.

“It’s a history that is embedded in the pro-fession of teaching and the whole teacher edu-cation process. And in order to become a mem-ber of the teacher education community or theearly childhood education community, youhave to take that language on. You have to takethat discourse on.”

That’s a problem, Miller Marsh suggests,unless teachers are aware that they havebought into such discourses and are alert forthe ways in which those discourses are affect-ing their choices.

One example of this, Miller Marsh said, isthe concept of “readiness.” On one hand,teachers educated to primarily favor the dis-

course of child-centeredness will resist intro-ducing a child to new challenges until theythink the child is “ready.” This discourse pre-sumes that development precedes learning,and that indeed children cannot learn untilthey have reached an appropriate level of de-velopment.

“Now, if you’re a middle-class student andyou come to school and you’ve had a lot ofadvantages at home, you’re obviously going tobe ‘ready’ for a lot more than some of yourlower-income counterparts who don’t have thesame resources,” Miller Marsh said.

On the other hand, teachers trained pre-dominantly in a socio-cultural discourse, basedon the principles of collaboration and rootedin the idea that development and learning canhappen in tandem or that learning can hap-pen in advance of development, will alwaysbe more comfortable presenting children withslightly challenging information to “push”

them along, she noted.“If I’m coming from this approach,” Miller

Marsh said, “I don’t say to my class or to par-ticular students in my class, ‘You can’t readyet because you’re not ready.’ I say, ‘Here’s abook; let’s stretch you.’ And the more advancedstudents and the teacher work to support theless advanced, which benefits all.

“My feeling is that we need to produceteachers who are multi-discoursal, who canpick up all these different discourses and usethem to create possibilities for themselves andfor children and families,” she said. “No mat-ter what curriculum is available, if a teacherhas preconceived notions against it, you canbe sure the curriculum won’t be implementedas it was meant to be.”

When teaching prospective teachers, MillerMarsh often resorts to children’s books to illu-minate the issues, she said. A book calledYolanda’s Genius, for instance, is a poignantstory about a fifth-grade African American girlwho thinks her younger brother is a genius,even though his teachers have labeled him aslearning disabled.

“We look at him through the various dis-courses and talk about how different possibili-ties open up or close down for Yolanda’sbrother based on which discourse we are us-ing,” Miller Marsh said. “We talk about thepossibility that he could be both learning dis-abled and a genius, and see how different dis-courses support these conclusions.”

What Miller Marsh is committed to doing,both in the classroom and in her writing, is toprovide opportunities for prospective andpracticing teachers to look at how their think-ing affects the lives of the students entrustedto their care and guidance.

“My hope would be that people becomeaware of the discourses and the ways they openthings up or close them down, and then thatthat awareness leads to responsible choices,”Miller Marsh said. “I don’t want teachers go-ing into the classroom blind to these influ-ences. I want them to think more deeply aboutwhat kinds of identities they’re making avail-able for kids based on the discourse they areteaching from.”

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17

Anthropologisttravels theworld tounravel clues

Ethiopia, a Los Angeles Times science writerlet his fingers do the walking directly toBinghamton to see what Rightmire made of thewhole thing.

Last fall, when an unidentified man sold aHomo erectus skull to a scientific curiositiesshop in New York City, the proprietor fortu-nately recognized the skull as important,which was validated by the American Museumof Natural History. Rightmire, however, wasthe expert The New York Times contacted toconfirm the identity of the skull as one of ahandful of Java Man skulls excavated in Indo-nesia. As a result, “the skull was very quicklyreturned to Java where it belongs,” Rightmirerecalled.

These incidents were far from the first andhardly the last of their kind for Rightmire. Forthe past 20 years, almost any time an impor-tant new human or pre-human fossil has beendiscovered, he has been asked by newspapersthe world over to comment on the discovery.

“It’s exciting,” Rightmire said of his work.“I don’t tend to read a lot into it in terms ofphilosophy. I don’t think that knowing aboutour prehistoric past is going to help us directour future more intelligently, for instance. Therules of the game are a heck of a lot differentnow than they were 400,000 or 500,000 years

Until then, Rightmire intends to “chip awayat this Homo heidelbergensis business,” thelatest focus in his career-long exploration ofhuman evolution and prehistory.

His is a passion that has taken him toAfrica and back more than 20 times, and toFrance, Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Japan andChina on more than a few occasions. His repu-tation is as international as his travels, and hisexpertise has made him one of the “go-to” guyswhenever a new Pleistocene fossil or Homoskull is found.

Last spring, for instance, when Science pub-lished an article on the discovery of fossils ofa previously unknown pre-human species in

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or the past 31 years, G. Philip Rightmire has been chipping

away at mysteries as old as time, studying people as old as dirt.

A Binghamton University paleoanthropologist and one of

the world’s foremost experts on Homo erectus and the Middle

Pleistocene era, Rightmire makes no bones about the fact that

he doesn’t plan to give it up anytime soon.

“I expect I have at least another decade in me,” he said. “There will

always be more questions, more fossils, so there’s no end to it, really.

I’ll just have to quit eventually, and probably without much resolution

of the big problems.”

F

Tracking human evolution

ago. But it’s an area of science I find intriguing.”One of the biggest ways in which the rules

of the game have changed, according toRightmire, is that speciation can no longer beexpected to decide our communal destiny.

“We’re not going to evolve anymore in theway humans and other animals have donethrough the ages and in the way that otheranimals will continue to do,” he said. “Thereisn’t the scope for speciation among humansany longer. It’s not possible in this age of glo-balization for a group of people to become iso-lated from all the rest over the long term and

spurts.” He rejects the traditional model ofstraightforward progression that suggests onespecies followed immediately on the heels ofanother, with each successive species enjoy-ing increases in brain size, reduction in themassiveness of the facial skeleton, shorteningof the tooth row, smaller teeth and similar re-finements.

“I’d argue that that’s just the sort of thingthat did not happen,” Rightmire said.

Careful not to take credit for the bush-building idea, he is quick to make it clear thathe wasn’t the first to think of evolution in thisway. “But I’ve been happy with that perspec-tive for about as long as anyone active in thesame area,” he admits.

Homo heidelbergensis, Rightmire believes,is the species that gave rise to Homo sapiens— people more or less like us — 100,000 to200,000 years ago in Africa. Evolving fromHomo erectus about 600,000 to 700,000 yearsago in Africa, Homo heidelbergensis followedHomo erectus out of Africa and, with a bettercommand of fire and tools, spread into Europe,where glaciation made the landscape and cli-

mans, Rightmire said. There was almost cer-tainly a period during which the two speciesmight have come into contact with one an-other. And while debate rages about whetherinterbreeding took place, DNA testing on theremains of the first Neanderthal discovered inthe Neander Valley of Germany in 1998 seemsto suggest that Neanderthals were “specificallydistinct from us,” Rightmire said. Similar DNAresults announced earlier this year corrobo-rated the earlier results.

“The Neanderthal DNA turned out to bequite different from average human DNA,” hesaid. “A lot more than you would expect tosee between Eskimos and Europeans or Aus-tralians and Africans, and more on the orderof difference between humans and chimps.”

Rightmire’s work is in large part “a histori-cal exercise . . . a matter of trying to work outall this complicated evolutionary history,” hesaid.

He believes, for instance, whether or notNeanderthals are considered a distinct species,that they died out and were never significantcompetitors for the evolutionary success en-joyed by more anatomically modern humans.

Still, despite its often sweeping historicalscope, Rightmire’s work begins with andprogresses by means of minute details: the mea-surement of the contours of the skull, the shapeof the orbit, the slant of the cheek and the con-figuration of the teeth, palate and jaw.

Like a forensic pathologist attempting toidentify a victim based on dental records andskeletal clues, Rightmire relies on calipers, tapemeasures, x-rays and CAT scans to learn moreabout the fossils that are his stock in trade.The approach is the same, but the goal is dis-tinctly different.

“My interest isn’t in how old the individualwas when it died or what sorts of damage itmight have suffered in the process of dying orgetting fossilized,” he said. “I’m interested inhow these fossils relate to one another, howthey compare to one another and others fromthe same time period and the same place.”

He’s also interested in broader comparisons,and uses fossilized bone to expand hisworldview, just as some of the early humanshe studies relied on tools fashioned of bone toexpand their range.

“My work is about weaving together thehard evidence for evolution, weaving from theanatomical evidence in context a sort of storyabout how these populations were related toeach other and how they changed throughtime,” Rightmire said. “And then on a largerscale, how one of these species might havegiven rise to later species, or, if it didn’t dothat, just noting the fact that it died out.”

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B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

BINGHAMTON PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST

G. PHILIP RIGHTMIRE IS AN INTERNATION-

ALLY RECOGNIZED EXPERT ON HOMO

ERECTUS AND THE MIDDLE PLEISTOCENE

ERA. HIS WORK INVOLVES MEASURING

THE CONTOURS OF FOSSILIZED SKULLS

AND WEAVING TOGETHER, FROM AVAIL-

ABLE ANATOMICAL EVIDENCE, STORIES

ABOUT HOW VARIOUS POPULATIONS ARE

RELATED TO ONE ANOTHER.

to evolve new characters and thus speciate.”While the specific implications of this are

unclear, it seems certain that from here on,humans will have to cope with environmentalchanges like global warming not by evolvingbiologically, but through technological devel-opment, he said.

Rightmire talks about evolution in generalas a “bush-building” process in which manypotential ancestors of modern humans failedto make the evolutionary grade and died off,some after producing “daughter lineages” thatwere more or less successful.

As he sees it, evolution was a process ofexperiments that progressed “in fits and

mate untenable for Homo erectus, who did nothave control of fire.

In Europe, Rightmire conjectures, onebranch of Homo heidelbergensis became iso-lated or semi-isolated as a consequence of cy-clical glacial encroachment and retreat. Thepopulation that was essentially trapped inEurope for the long term evolved more in thedirection of the Neanderthals, as evidenced by“a pretty good progression of fossils” foundin Europe, he said. That fossil record showsthe presence of Neanderthals about 100,000to 200,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, during the same time frame,another branch of Homo heidelbergensis in Af-rica, not subjected to the cold conditions thatprevailed in Europe, seems to have evolved inanother direction and given rise to Homo sa-piens.

Neanderthals probably co-existed in at leastsome parts of Europe with more modern hu-

fter exploring issues of childhoodsexual abuse for nearly 25 years,first as a therapist and more re-cently as an academician andresearcher, M. Sue Crowley is sureof just one thing: Sexual abuse is nota uniform experience.

As a result, no single factor — not the se-verity of abuse or its duration, nor the close-ness of a child’s relationship with the abuser,nor the child’s age at the onset of the abuse,nor even the number of abusers — is predic-tive of the long-term effects of the experienceon individuals.

Her most recent study suggests that look-ing at the combination of those factors through“cluster samples” may allow prediction oflong-term effects. Crowley, an associate pro-fessor of human development, gathered quan-titative and qualitative data from a clinicalsample of 88 adult women who reported hav-ing been sexually abused as children andwhose lives are, to one degree or another, stillaffected by symptoms of trauma.

In Crowley’s study, background informa-tion was gathered from women who voluntar-ily filled out questionnaires left at women’scenters and shelters, rape crisis centers, pri-vate therapists and community mental healthagencies in central New York and Pennsylva-nia. The data was sorted into four groups basedon weighted scores on five variables: closenessof relationship between victim and abuser,duration of abuse, number of abusers, age ofonset and severity of abuse.

The study shows that the group of womenwho had the most severe and persistent symp-toms of trauma were those whose experiencesranked highest on all of the criteria. They werethe youngest when the abuse began, closest totheir abusers, and were abused the most se-verely for the longest period of time by thegreatest number of abusers. It also shows thatwomen in the groups that ranked progressivelylower on those criteria also reported progres-sively fewer and less severe symptoms.

“I don’t think it’s surprising news,”Crowley said. “In a way, it’s the sort of thingmy grandmother could have told you.

“But what my grandmother wouldn’t have

been able to tell you is howcomplex the picturelooked,” she added. “Iwasn’t expecting theamount of variability Ifound. It’s really no won-der that we can’t find veryclear relationships be-tween characteristics ofabuse and outcomes, be-cause the degree of vari-ability in terms of howchildren are abused, whoabuses them, for how longand to what purpose, is in-credibly complex.”

Abuse, for instance,might be fairly severe andpersistent, Crowley said,but if victims do not feelparticularly close to theperpetrator, that givesthem an emotional bufferof sorts.

“So it’s really how all ofthese elements combinethat might influence theeffect long term,” she said.

The multiplicity ofabuse, Crowley said, fliesin the face of common con-ceptions. Even researchersoften think of abuse as asingle event or relation-ship in a child’s life, she said. But her studypoints to the fact that for many women, par-ticularly those who seek therapy as adults, thismay not be an accurate picture.

For instance, 57 women in Crowley’s sur-vey said they were sexually abused as childrenby two or more people. Thirty-eight reportedbeing sexually abused by three or more per-petrators.

Although this may seem surprising,Crowley noted that in the 30 interviews sheconducted, “almost every narrative describesdeeply troubled families” in which multipleforms of abuse were reported.

“These are precisely the kinds of family cir-cumstances where you would expect to find,

at least some of the time, sexual abuse as anextension of the physical, emotional and alco-hol abuse,” she said.

In her study, the average age at onset ofabuse was 5. The average duration of abuse wasmore than seven years. And on a scale of 1-12,the average severity of abuse was 10, meaningpenetration of some form. Fewer than 9 per-cent of the women reported being abused bystrangers.

Across the board, Crowley said her studyrevealed more severe abuse than is generallyreported even in other clinical samples. As aresult, she thinks some people will challengeher findings by claiming she sampled only a“fringe group” of women. In response,

M. SUE CROWLEY, AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HUMAN

DEVELOPMENT, HAS SPENT NEARLY 25 YEARS EXPLORING

ISSUES OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE, FIRST AS A THERAPIST

AND MORE RECENTLY AS AN ACADEMICIAN AND RESEARCHER.

HER WORK HELPS SHED LIGHT ON HOW WOMEN MAKE

MEANING OF TRAUMATIC CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES.

How children survive sexual abuseMultiple factors may define individual’s trauma

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M. Sue Crowley hopes the data she collected ina recent study of childhood sexual abuse survivorswill shed light on how women make meaning of trau-matic childhood experiences.

Additionally, she hopes to learn more about howwomen come to believe they were sexually abusedas children after adult experiences including anxi-ety attacks, flash images, and sensations like soundsand smells that tend to accompany flashbacks in“bits and pieces,” she said.

“‘Bits and pieces’ was a phrase used by manyof the women I interviewed as they offered up veryrich descriptions of the phenomena that they call‘flashbacks,’” she said.

Crowley said she chose the approach to side-step the controversy of “recovered memories” andinstead respect the importance, the power and thedefining nature of individual life narratives.

“I’m not interested in verifying recovered memo-ries, because I consider it a virtual impossibility,”Crowley acknowledged. “As it stands, we know twothings about recovered memories: One, that someof them are false, and two, that some of them aretrue. Actually, the third thing we know, and perhapsthe most important thing, is that at this point, nomatter what side the competing experts are on,nobody knows how to distinguish one from theother.”

In her study of 88 women who reported beingsexually abused as children, 27 said they had al-ways remembered the abuse, 20 reported that theyhad always remembered but recovered more memo-ries in later life, and 41 said they had only recov-ered memories.

Rather than getting involved in the controversyover recovered memories that has “whipped up ra-bid debate and name calling” among researchers,Crowley said the key question for her was, “What

do people mean when they say they have ‘recov-ered memories’ of sexual abuse?”

To get at that issue, she changed her approach.“I began by not referring to them as memories,”

she said. “I began by using the word experiences.‘When did you start having these experiences thatyou came to believe were memories of abuse?’”

Crowley collected her data by means of ques-tionnaires completed by all the women and personalinterviews with a subset of 30 women.

“What’s interesting is that how people in thesample define ‘recovered memories’ is very differ-ent from [how] either the clinical or the scientificresearch community defines it,” she said.

The recovered-memory debate tends to focus onpsychoanalytic concepts of repression, trauma andrecovery, she said.

“Some of these folks talk in ways that wouldsupport that conceptualization, but others talk interms of ‘I didn’t know it was called sexual abuseuntil I became a teenager.’ Or ‘I didn’t call it sexualabuse,’” she added.

In other words, many women are not “recover-ing” memories, but reframing and relabeling previ-ous memories.

“When people reframe what they call it, theystart remembering other things. Their whole story,the whole narrative history of their childhood be-gins to change.”

The qualitative portion of Crowley’s study, then,is really about narrative history, which is often con-tested history, she said.

“I don’t think we can afford to dismiss womenwho have these experiences as fools or as crazy,”she said. “One of the very interesting things to meduring the interviews was how remarkably func-tional these women are and the kinds of lives theyhave made for themselves.”

As far as the recovered-memory debate itselfgoes, Crowley said she thinks it’s time both sidesstepped back and accepted with greater humilitywhat is not known.

“I think, especially when you start asking ques-tions of history and memory, that these can’t beadequately addressed in a laboratory setting be-cause of the methodological constraints,” she said.

Yet without the methodological constraints,many researchers are ready to throw out results fromstudies that include participants reporting contro-versial “recovered memories,” she added.

“When this debate first started, I was a littleconfused,” Crowley noted. “Nobody ever asks a Viet-nam veteran if his recovered memories are true, ifthey are ‘real’ memories. If we think that recoveredmemory as a phenomenon can exist as a result oftrauma, how can we disbelieve its existence only inthe case of sexual abuse?”

On the other hand, Crowley acknowledges thatissues of sexual abuse tend to touch on very pro-found fears that can “take fire in unpredictableways,” undoubtedly including some false claims ofchild sexual abuse.

The rash of day-care cases that swept the coun-try in the 1980s could be an example of that, shesuggested.

“I think that had much to do with our fears ofwhat was happening with women going back towork, and trusting our children to agencies, ratherthan to families, and our fears about what that couldmean,” she said.

“There was almost a hysteria that surroundedthose cases, and I think innocent people were sentto prison. I also think a lot of people would be sur-prised to hear me say that.”

Crowley said, “You could very well be right. Ithink because of the way I collected thesample, I got people who have been more se-verely abused.

“But for a long time, using random com-munity samples, we might also have been sam-pling just a part of the picture,” she added.

Studies that compare women who were notsexually abused as children to those who weredo nothing to help us understand why 75 per-cent of women who were abused seem to goon to experience long-term problems while 25percent do not, she said. Insight into that ques-tion is most likely to be found in studies likehers, where meaningful comparisons may be

drawn between those who were severelyabused and those who were less severelyabused, she said.

In addition, Crowley said the small percent-age of reports of stranger abuse in her study isconsistent with other samples, regardless oftheir source.

“The fact is,” Crowley said, “children areseldom sexually abused by strangers. We lovethings like Megan’s Law, where we think ofthat evil stranger stalking our children. Butthe ugly truth is that consistently, and acrossall samples, sexual abuse is a family affair.”

In the qualitative phase of her study,Crowley said that among other things, she

Research targets “flashback” abuse experiences

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

found a need to own up to and let go of herpreconceived notions and stereotypes aboutthe women she interviewed.

“I went in thinking I was going to talk tovictims,” she said, “and I discovered remark-able courage. I discovered women who, whilethey still had many serious problems as evi-denced by the trauma checklist, lived withthose problems in lives that were loving, pro-ductive and important in their communities. Ifound women who were teachers and bankersand nurses and therapists and homemakers —women who, I want to say, are contributors infundamental but not flashy ways — womenwho are all a lot more than that history of abuse.”

21

MEDIEVALIST ROBIN

OGGINS LOOKS OVER

EXAMPLES OF ART AND

MANUSCRIPTS FROM

THE MIDDLE AGES,

WHICH PROVIDE CLUES

TO WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE

IN THE YEAR 1000.

The first millennium

ill in the blank: “What a difference a ______ makes.” ✠ If the

word you supplied was “day,” that’s understandable. It’s not only a famil-

iar cliché, but a well-known song title. ✠ But when you get right down to

it, “millennium” is the word that probably best completes the phrase,

according to Robin Oggins, professor of medieval and English history.

In the year 1000,

the world was smaller,

simpler — and smellier

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As we start the third millennium,life in the Western world looks very,very different than it did 1,000 yearsearlier at the end of the first millen-nium, Oggins said. And that’s some-thing for which we can apparently allfeel grateful.

In the year 1000, life was simple,Oggins said, not to mention short. Theconcept of personal happiness was notone to which most people gave muchthought to, he said.

“My guess is that most people prob-ably didn’t think too seriously about thewhole thing,” he said. “At the time, theunderlying justification for everything wasthat you lead a good life and go to heaven.You’re here, you live and die, and you moveon.”

“Moving on” was definitely not somethingmost people did while alive, Oggins said.

Most people — perhaps 90 percent of thepopulation, even two and three centuries af-ter the millennium — lived and died neverhaving traveled more than seven miles fromtheir place of birth. Transportation wasn’t anissue.

“If you were a peasant, you walked. If youwere a knight, you got to ride,” he said.

Longevity wasn’t much of an issue either,Oggins added. Life expectancy in the year 1000probably averaged no more than 30 years, andbecause nothing was known about dental hy-giene or vision care, people who managed tosurvive into their 40s or beyond probably didso with few teeth in their heads or the abilityto see very well.

Of course, even if reading glasses had beenavailable, they almost certainly would not havebeen called “reading” glasses.

“Well over 90 percent of the population wasilliterate,” he said. “And this included in the10th century most of the kings and nobles,who simply couldn’t read.”

The class system was quite strong, Ogginssaid, and about the only people who had anyhope of moving up in society from their sta-tion of birth were men who were fortunateenough either to have exceptional militaryskills during times of unrest or who becameconnected with the church.

Although Christianity was the predomi-

nant religion, there were small Jewish groupsand patches of paganism, as well as belief insuperstitions and myths, throughout Europe,Oggins said.

For most, going to church wasn’t an occa-sion to dig out their “Sunday finest,” becausemost people wore the same clothes all year’round, day and night, Oggins said.

In fact, life wasn’t just short for mostpeople, Oggins said; it was also very smelly.

King John, who is known to have taken 24baths in an 18-month period (his payments forthese baths were recorded), was consideredeffeminate by his contemporaries because hetook too many baths, Oggins said.

“It’s been said that the typical knight tookthree baths in his lifetime: one when he wasborn, one when he was knighted and one whenhe was married. A fourth was given to himafter he died,” Oggins noted.

Meanwhile, peasants, who lived and sleptalongside their animals, probably didn’t no-tice their own stink because everybody andeverything smelled rank, he added. Spiceswere first used in cooking about this time tocover up the rot in the food, Oggins said.

Bad diet and vitamin deficiencies were com-mon, and though women routinely died inchildbirth, men often remarried and had largefamilies, such as the later medieval man whohad three wives — one at a time — and fa-thered 30 children.

“It has been said that when doctors finallystarted washing their hands before attendinga childbirth, the death rate of mothers in child-birth dropped by two-thirds,” Oggins said.“That’s not until the 18th century. And the

germ concept of disease didn’t developuntil the 19th century.”

When they weren’t having chil-dren, peasant women generally workedalongside men in the fields, gatheringcrops, carrying wood or haulingwater.

Education was in most cases avail-able only to the sons of kings andimportant nobles and seldom availableto women, regardless of their station.

Marriages, which usually involvedlittle more than taking an oath or acouple “plighting their troth” beforeGod, often nowhere near a church,

could be just as easily ended — by husbands,that is.

“For women, a husband’s impotence wasthe only valid cause for divorce,” Oggins said.“But there was a lot of repudiation of wivesthat went on well beyond this period forupper-class men. You get the impression that itdidn’t matter what the theory of marriage was;when men grew tired, they found a way out.”

Overall, if someone from the first millen-nium could visit us in the year 2000, the big-gest surprise to that visitor would probablybe our standard and means of living.

“In the year 1000, if you couldn’t make itor grow it, you went without it,” he said.“Ninety-eight percent of the people lived onthe land, and muscle power — human or ani-mal — was the height of technology.

“In the year 1000, Binghamton as it existstoday would have been one of the great citiesof the Western world,” Oggins added.

“And our visitor from the year 1000 wouldbe totally amazed that so many people couldlive together with no one growing any food,”he said.

Talking to people who aren’t there by us-ing the telephone or a computer and seeingthings from a distance by means of televisionwould certainly be a surprise, Oggins conjec-tured.

But none of that would be any more sur-prising to a time traveler from the 10th cen-tury than the fact that in this century, peoplein their 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s remain vig-orous.

“They would be amazed at how good welook,” Oggins said, “and how nice we smell.”

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23

LINDA SPEAR

fter spending years looking at theprenatal effects of cocaine and al-cohol, psychologist Linda Spear’sresearch is taking a dramatic turnthat could uncover a link betweenadolescent brain development andalcohol and drug use.

“I think one of the huge remaining researchissues is ‘What is it that predisposes the ini-tiation of drug and alcohol use?’— virtuallyall of which is initiated in adolescence,” Spearsaid.

Ironically, after more than 23 years of drugand alcohol research, Spear finds herself com-ing full circle, back to a research question thatfirst intrigued her much earlier in her career.

“I did my first adolescent review back in1983,” she said. “I think I knew the questioneven then. I just didn’t have enough pieces ofthe puzzle to even begin putting it together.It was like a 2,000-piece puzzle, and at the timeI had maybe 30 pieces. So I wandered off intoother areas, most notably prenatal research.”

But resolving questions about the linksbetween adolescence and drug and alcohol useis a challenge that has continued to call to Spearthroughout her career. Now, she hopes to lookat those questions and to more broadly exam-ine risk-seeking and novelty-seeking behav-iors that tend, like experimental drinking anddrug use, to accompany the onset of adoles-cence.

Like the rest of the body, the brain under-goes major changes during adolescence. Andwhile some of those changes involve adoles-cent hormones, even more significant is asweeping neurochemical and anatomical re-structuring of certain brain regions during thisstage of development, she said.

“I think what we really need to do is focusin on these brain changes as predisposing fac-tors for the behavioral changes associated withadolescence, which include the initiation ofdrug use,” she added.

Spear will do that by working with ratsbetween 28 and 42 days of age, who are devel-opmentally equivalent to human adolescentsbetween the ages of 12 to 18, she said.

When Spear talks about exploring factorsrelated to alcohol and drug use, one thing is

certain: Funding agencies listen.A distinguished professor of psychology

and a winner of this year’s University Awardfor Excellence in Research, Spear has attractedabout $6 million to the University since com-ing to Binghamton from the University ofFlorida in 1976. The funding for her cocainework has come from the National Institute ofDrug Abuse, while her alcohol research hasbeen regularly funded by the National Insti-tute of Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse.

She recently received approval of two al-cohol grants that propose separate five-yearstudies on alcohol tolerance and stress, andadolescence and stress. These grants accountfor $2.3 million of Spear’s career research fund-ing total.

To the extent that there are connectionsbetween alcohol and stress, “the story is theclearest during adolescence,” according toSpear.

“We always assumed that raging hormoneswere causing all the problems,” she said. “Butclinical studies show that hormones reallydon’t relate very well at all to the behavioralchanges seen during adolescence.”

Spear instead hypothesizes that the mostimportant changes going on during adoles-cence may be the critical shifts taking place inthe brain.

“When adolescence starts to come on,there’s a huge decline in certain kinds of syn-apses and significant increases in others,” shesaid.

Much of the brain restructuring commonto adolescence takes place in the prefrontalcortex and mesolimbic brain regions, the verybrain regions that support and are subject tothe reinforcing effects associated with drugand alcohol use.

Understanding why adolescents initiatedrug and alcohol use is important for a num-ber of reasons, not the least of which is thatthose who don’t start using drugs or alcoholuntil they are 20 or 21 years old are “very un-likely to become an alcoholic or a drug addictin adulthood,” Spear said.

“When we’re talking age of first initiationtoday, we’re usually talking 12- and 13-year-olds,” she added. “One of the strongest pre-

dictors of alcoholism in adulthood is the ageof first initiation. The younger you start, themore likely you are to become an alcoholic.And that goes for other drugs as well.”

That doesn’t mean that all adolescents whoinitiate drug or alcohol use at an early age willbecome alcoholics or addicts, Spear empha-sized. A predictor is only a flag or marker, andcausation really can’t and shouldn’t be as-sumed, she noted.

“Nevertheless, the best predictor ofwhether a person is going to become an alco-holic is not family history,” Spear said. “It’snot current stressors. It’s not gender. You canlook at all the various factors, and the bestpredictor of whether you’re going to be an al-coholic in adulthood is the age of initiation ofuse. So there may be something about earlyuse that itself is changing the propensity tobecome addicted to alcohol or anything else.”

Spear has become one of the nation’s andperhaps one of the world’s leading experts onthe relationship between neurotransmittersand behavior during development, as affectedby drug abuse.

Using rats, she has tested the consequencesof prenatal cocaine in the subsequent devel-opment of brain and behavior in infancy, andhas expanded her research into the use andabuse of alcohol. While Spear’s research showsthat early exposure to cocaine alters the linebetween vulnerability and resiliency in regardto stress, she says that as a drug, alcohol is farmore complicated than cocaine, as evidencedby its impact on the brain.

“When you’re talking cocaine, at leastyou’re talking mainly dopamine systems,”Spear said.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmit-ter in the brain. Though changes in its levelsin the brain and subsequent alteration in itsvarious receptors are implicated in a varietyof commonly occurring neurological disorders,including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease,Huntington’s disease, tardive dyskinesia, co-caine addiction, hypertension and stress,dopamine systems are located only in specificbrain regions.

Cocaine, therefore, affects the brain like aprobe, Spear said. Alcohol, on the other hand,

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Getting to the core of substance abusePsychologist seeks adolescent addiction links

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excellence in research

Effects of cocaineabuse on fetusless than

originally thought

ne of the more surprising findings inLinda Spear’s 23 years of research atBinghamton University is that the ef-fects of prenatal cocaine exposure are

not nearly as dramatic as psychologists hadoriginally presumed they would be.

“Our work has shown that kids who areprenatally exposed to cocaine aren’t neces-sarily doomed,” she said. “The effects arethere, however, and they tend to be broughtout when you challenge the system.”

Spear’s research showed that underminimal-stress circumstances that de-manded little from rats prenatally exposedto cocaine, the rats did well and were notsignificantly distinguishable from normalrats.

They did, however, show subtle deficitscharacterized by increased vulnerability toenvironmental stressors, and similar pat-terns are beginning to show up in more re-cent clinical studies of human offspring ex-posed in utero to cocaine, she said.

“When you challenge the prenatally ex-posed rats with either a complex cognitivetask or a stressor, that’s when you start tosee differences show up. They do not re-spond to stressors like normal animals. Theybehave differently,” Spear said.

Normally when they find themselves ina stressful situation with no hope of escape,rats become immobile and conserve theirenergy.

“Cocaine animals show less of this im-mobility response and are more inclined tocontinue to try over and over again toescape the situation,” she said.

Using this and other measures, Spear’sresearch has shown that the cocaine-ex-posed offspring may show beneficial effectsfrom early experiences, and that under somecircumstances they may be more sensitiveto the beneficial effects of enriching experi-ences early in life than control offspring whowere not exposed prenatally to cocaine.

What this could mean for humans, Spearsaid, is that the outcome for cocaine-ex-posed children is not strictly determined bytheir gestational drug exposure: enrichingearly life experiences could benefit themconsiderably.

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

affects lots of different neurotransmitter sys-tems and, in higher concentrations, affectsmembranes throughout the brain.

“Alcohol is like a sledgehammer on thebrain,” she said.

Spear earned her bachelor’s degree in psy-chology at Western Illinois University and thenwent on to the University of Florida, whereshe earned her master’s and PhD degrees inpsychology, both with minors in neuroscience.

Reflecting on her motivations for return-ing to adolescent research this late in her ca-reer, Spear said the choice was clear.

“When you’re an assistant professor youwant to be an associate professor, and whenyou’re an associate professor you want to be afull professor, and when you’re a full profes-sor you want to be a distinguished professor,”she said. “OK, you’re a distinguished profes-sor — and now?”

Now, Spear said, she wants to do somethingof immediate importance and value to her com-munity and to the country.

“I think that alcohol is the biggest prob-lem with adolescents. And at this point, I re-ally want to do work that makes a difference.”

PSYCHOLOGIST LINDA SPEAR, WHO LAST YEAR RECEIVED THE UNIVERSITY’S AWARD

FOR EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH, HAS ATTRACTED ABOUT $6 MILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDS

TO SUPPORT HER RESEARCH ON THE CAUSE AND EFFECTS OF DRUG AND ALCOHOL

ABUSE SINCE COMING TO BINGHAMTON IN 1976.

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ot many scholars can claim thatan airplane is a valuable researchtool. But Anthony King has beenknown to use an airplane’s vantagepoint to ponder aspects of culturethat are often overlooked by re-searchers grounded in more tradi-

tional approaches.King uses aerial photos as one way to evalu-

ate the physical manifestations of cultures andsocieties. By looking at the way towns and cit-ies are built, King makes inferences about thesocieties that built them. In centuries past, forexample, King said, many cities in the Westwere organized around the space of the citysquare. Today, they are increasingly being or-ganized around the airport.

King, a professor of art history and sociol-ogy, studies the social and cultural productionof the built environment. In this multidisci-plinary approach, he uses ideas from historyand sociology to relate what exists in the physi-cal and spatial realm to what is happening onthe social and cultural level.

“You can read and interpret what is goingon socially and culturally by looking at spaceand the built environment,” King said.

The “built environment” includes morethan just architecture, King explained. Theplacement and structure of houses, civic build-ings, office parks, prisons and streets providea more complete picture of society than justthe aesthetic design of buildings.

“Two questions you can ask are: What canyou find out about the built environment byexamining the society in which it exists? andWhat can you find out about the society byexamining the built environment?” King said.“There is an enormous amount you can learnabout what is going on, whether it’s questionsabout power in societies, or authority in soci-eties, or oppression in societies that is mani-fest spatially.”

For example, King said, aerial views ofAmerican cities show an urban sprawl thatseems to bleed into vast suburban develop-ments, while many European cities have moredistinct outer borders, as European govern-ments usually have greater control over landuse.

“There’s a politics of space,” he said. “Youcan see how a political commitment to public,rather than private, transportation modes suchas rail, bus [or] tramways, holds the space of acity together.”

The built environment doesn’t just act as amirror reflecting societal norms, King said, butalso helps to constitute them. Images can alsobe internalized and help create theindividual’s, as well as a nation’s, identity.

How important are built environments increating identity and sense of self?, King asks.“Everybody knows that, especially in termsof the house they live in. How they organizethe space in their house, how they constructenvironments around themselves and makedivisions between their space and somebodyelse’s space, and how they put things aroundthem.”

For example, Americans often place empha-sis on individuality, and this is both reflectedin and reinforced by the seas of single-familyhomes that dominate much of the country, aphenomenon that has immense economic andenvironmental implications.

King says the use of space is similar to dress.“It’s partly how you represent yourself to

others and how you use space in relation toothers,” he said. “So you can think of that on

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ANTHONY KINGexcellence in research

Edifice complexDivining culture from society’s structures

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an individual basis, but you can also think ofhow space is constructed through ethnicity,through race, through class especially, andthrough the nation as well as the reverse —how space and the built environment helps toconstruct these identities.”

If a constructed environment reflects per-sonality and also contributes to identity, itseems appropriate that the office wall behindKing’s desk is filled with books. His long listof journal articles, chapters in edited books,sole authorship of books and editor positionsis as diverse as his background. He has master’sdegrees in history and education and a PhD insocial sciences from Brunel University in Lon-don. He held titles in sociology, history, archi-tecture and development planning depart-ments before coming to the art history depart-ment at Binghamton in 1988.

The latest addition to his curriculum vita isas series editor. He and colleague Tom Markusfrom Strathclyde University in Scotland havespent the past three years soliciting and edit-ing manuscripts for a series published byRoutledge, called “Architext.” The first threetitles in the series have just been published,and another seven books will follow over thenext two years.

“The essence of this is to look at architec-ture and the larger built environment in rela-tion to social and cultural theory,” King said.“I guess the first part of the exercise with thesebooks is to bring the theory from both thesocial sciences and the humanities to the un-derstanding of architecture, which people havedone before. The more innovative part of theproject is to bring architecture and the studyof the built environment more centrally intothe social sciences and the humanities throughthe use of contemporary social and culturaltheory.”

King said that much of the work in culturalstudies, which has blossomed in the last 10 or15 years and generated many valuable theo-retical insights, has somehow bypassed space,the built environment and architecture.

“It is used in relation to every other sphereof human and social practice,” he said, “butrelatively little of it actually addresses ques-tions of architecture and the built environ-

“There’s a politics of space.

You can see how a political

commitment to public, rather

than private, transportation

modes such as rail, bus

[or] tramways, holds the

space of a city together.”

ment. So the idea of this series is to remedythis situation and encourage people who writein social and cultural theory to look more spe-cifically at the social meaning of space and thebuilt environment.”

King will contribute his own work to thisseries in a book, Spaces of Global Cultures. Thesubjects of global culture and global cities aretopics he has written a lot about in past yearsand have been a major emphasis of his work.He has also written extensively about colonialand post-colonial architecture and urbanism,topic that have become of increasing interestand significance in recent years. However, heis increasingly uneasy about the widespreaduse of the term “global.” He says other termssuch as “transnational” or “neo-imperial”might better represent the contemporaryworld.

Because King approaches his research witha historical perspective and incorporates ob-

servations of the often-overlooked built envi-ronment, he does not see that a global eco-nomic system is necessarily leading to a ho-mogenous global environment.

Consciousness of globalization promotesresistance as well as difference, he says. Hemakes the point that even though there maybe an increase in the number of people whoare able to travel and take their culture withthem, they may continue to interpret the en-vironment through their own cultural lenses.

“I remember visiting Taiwan to give somelectures, and I made some comment that thisphenomenon of the monumentally tall build-ing is really a way of expressing identity thathas just been absorbed from the West, not leastthe United States,” he recalled. “I was vigor-ously attacked by two or three Taiwanese inthe audience. Basically their criticism had todo with the meaning of this building to them:‘It is our way of demonstrating our entry into

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

the discourse of modernity. That’s what itmeans to us. It may mean something else toyou, but that’s what it means to us, the peoplewho live here, who don’t travel around andsee that there is one of these tall buildings inevery country in the world.’”

The concern with cultural homogenizationmay also stem from what King calls “selectivevision,” which is based on a cultural appraisal.

“When you travel, what captures your eyeis what is familiar to you and what you canunderstand,” he said. “It took me a long timeto realize that. When I first went to India manyyears ago, all I was seeing were these Euro-pean colonial buildings, and it was becausethey were familiar to me. And the unfamiliarenvironment — the Indian, ‘Hinduized’ envi-ronment — I couldn’t recognize or identifywith, because, initially at least, it didn’t havea meaning to me.”

What is true with his travels, King said, isalso true with his research. He is giving mean-ing to an area of research that is readily avail-able, but not always recognized for its reveal-ing potential.

B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

ART HISTORY PROFESSOR ANTHONY KING, WHO LAST YEAR RECEIVED THE

UNIVERSITY’S AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH, STUDIES HOW CULTURE AND

SOCIETAL VALUES DEFINE THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT OF HOUSES, CIVIC BUILDINGS,

OFFICE PARKS, PRISONS AND STREETS FOR A SOCIETY.

27

As writer John Vernon made his way intothe boarded-up, abandoned house in NewHampshire willed to him by his reclusive olderbrother, Paul, he felt as though he were walk-ing through “a cave, a morgue and a dump —all rolled into one.”

The home had been sitting for years insqualid disrepair. The front steps were gone.The rooms were 5 feet deep in trash, mildewedboxes of bills and correspondence, soda bottlesfilled with cigarette butts, and a collection ofham radio equipment. The house smelled ofurine and cat excrement.

“I did what I suppose most of us wouldhave done, being alone and confronting sucha thing: I tried to detach myself from it,” herecalls. “I tried to emotionally insulate myself.But an hour later I went to a gas station andphoned my wife and broke down crying. Eventhen — when I had no notion of writing a bookabout my brother — it felt volcanic, a sobbingthat came from underground, from centuriesof buried history.”

In his recently published memoir, A Bookof Reasons, Vernon, a professor of English, hasattempted to uncover that history by explor-

ing the ordinary forces that shaped the life ofa brother he barely knew.

Since its publication in 1999 by HoughtonMifflin, the book has been well received andwidely reviewed by such publications as TheNew York Times Book Review, The Washing-ton Post, The Wall Street Journal, The VillageVoice, the New York Observer, the Hungry MindReview and Newsday. Publishers Weekly se-lected it as one of its 50 best books for 1999.

Memoir writing is new territory for Vernon,who wrote poetry and three books of criticismbefore turning to novels 15 years ago. His nov-els (La Salle, Lindbergh’s Son, Peter Doyle, Allfor Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar) havedrawn on historical themes and settings.

Although the novel is still and will con-tinue to be his primary focus, he said his in-terest in historical research sparked a desire towrite a book that stuck to “brutal fact,” thatexplored “how history touches lives in unex-pected ways, a history of ordinary things andeveryday life.”

The death of his brother Paul in 1996 pro-vided the impetus for such an examination.

Paul, who was 15 years older than John,was raised by his grandmother, visiting withhis parents and younger brother only on week-ends. Later, when Vernon was in high schooland his grandmother died, Paul moved backin with the family, and although he came toknow his brother better, the two were neverclose.

As an adult, Paul was an assembly workerin the electronics industry and never married.He rarely visited his family and had few ac-quaintances, except those he made through hisham radio.

Vernon, in contrast, went to Boston Col-lege and earned his PhD at the University ofCalifornia at Davis before taking on a life as ateacher and writer. He married and has twochildren.

Following Paul’s death, as Vernon preparedhis brother’s dilapidated house for sale, hebegan searching for “reasons” why the broth-ers’ lives diverged.

With help from an 80-year-oldEncyclopaedia Britannica and his extensive re-search, Vernon searches for his reasons withexplorations of the history of ordinary things— the thermometer, the evolution of tools, the

history of embalming and burial, the scienceof human conception and gestation and thecentral nervous system.

Drawing on the works of thinkers rangingfrom Galileo, Descartes and Pascal to AbrahamLincoln and Catharine Beecher, the bookweaves personal history with the historical andscientific data that Vernon says create the “in-numerable strands, invisible but unbreakable”that connect us to the past.

“When we cross a street, when we step offthe curb and read the ‘WALK’ sign and walkbetween the lines and make it to the sidewalkon the other side,” Vernon said, “we are walk-ing through ancient Greek geometrical concep-tions of space, through Renaissance ideas aboutcity planning, through the history of cities,the history of dwellings, through the Indus-trial Revolution and its ready-made materials,through the history of architecture. In otherwords, if history has any meaning at all, it islocal and sweeping. It adheres to the dailyminutiae of our lives, to the things we take forgranted.”

Although Vernon did not come away fromhis memoir with all the “reasons” for hisbrother’s behavior, he became reconciled toPaul’s life.

“Maybe it sounds belated and convenient,but writing this book has enabled me to lovehim,” Vernon said. “It’s reconciled me to him.My hope is that the book itself will help re-deem what seems to have been a wasted life.Maybe it will help others, too.”

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JOHN VERNONprofile

ENGLISH PROFESSOR JOHN VERNON’S

RECENTLY PUBLISHED MEMOIR, A BOOK OF

REASONS, ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND HIS

BROTHER’S LIFE IN AN EXPLORATION OF

ORDINARY THINGS.

A Book of ReasonsAuthor searches for brother in memoir

EXCERPT FROM A BOOK OF

REASONS BY JOHN VERNON

“Reasons are not answers. Reasons are recipes

for making sense of the world’s arrangements and

accidents. They are explanations of why things are,

how they work, what they mean, where they came

from, how they began. We need reasons when we

feel dislocated, when ordinary things seem unfamil-

iar and contingent, when there are no easy answers.

Why is that tree there, who invented the nail, how

large is the universe, what happens after death . . .

Reasons may vary from culture to culture and cen-

tury to century, sometimes even from decade to de-

cade — still, they are the lifeblood of cultures. They

enable us to cross the street, read a newspaper, con-

duct a ceremony, name a newborn, and perhaps even

comprehend our suffering or happiness.”

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