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Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

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From left, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya in a scene from ‘Get Out,’ now playing at local theaters. Photo courtesy of Universal

By Daniel Dunaief

Race permeates Jordan Peele’s directorial debut “Get Out” so thoroughly that the film is like a battery, with the white people on one side and the African-Americans on the other. Between them, the electricity of an unusual horror film flows with a shocking effect.

The film starts off with the feel of Sidney Poitier’s masterpiece, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” with Rose Armitage, played by Allison Williams, bringing her African-American boyfriend Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) home to meet her parents. Even though she says he’s the only African-American man she’s dated, she makes it clear that her parents will be totally cool with her choice and that they’ll support the biracial couple. And yet, the film quickly disposes of any notion of a simple meeting between an African-American man and potentially liberal white America.

Daniel Kaluuya in a hypnotic scene from ‘Get Out’. Photo courtesy of Universal

While Chris meets several African-American people around his girlfriend’s parents’ house, each encounter has a Hitchcock quality, with an eerie disconnect that suggests an unexplained distance.

On the other hand, Rose’s parents and her over-the-top creepy brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), who wants to fight with Chris at dinner, introduce a terrifying blend of personalities. Catherine Keener is at her creepy best, playing Rose’s hypnotist mother Missy while Bradley Whitford as Rose’s father Dean seems on the verge of supporting and attacking Chris at the same time.

Chris’s best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who spends much of the movie talking to Chris by cell phone, threatens to steal the movie. A TSA agent, Rod provides comic relief, infusing the movie with humorous lines that seem straight out of a paranoid playbook, until he seems like the only one who might have a clue about what could be going on at Rose’s house.

The movie is a true horror film, which means there’s gore and an undercurrent of violence. Each scene, which occurs in upstate New York, could easily have been filmed in Salem, Massachusetts, home of mass hysteria and witch trials.

As the movie progresses, Peele gradually reviews details about the Armitage family, and the people who share the upstate neighborhood, that blur the line between mundane and creepy. When the plot unfolds, all the details about how Chris and the audience got there become clear.

The final 20 minutes of the film blend horror, gore, comedy and social satire. Some of the particular details of the plot reside in the willing suspension of disbelief. Thinking through the specifics detracts from the film’s value as entertainment and social commentary.

The audience in the packed theater reacted to the climactic scenes of “Get Out” in a way that would likely please Peele, as they shared the drama of a gruesome experience that strays from customary plot points to shocking drama and horror.

While the film offers a disturbing take on race, it also tells a dramatic story that drives the viewer through to the chilling end. While it’s not Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” it does reveal a captivating, literally at times, story that keeps the audience guessing and at times horrified.

The best element of “Get Out” is the balance between horror and comedy, provided primarily by Rod, whose fast-talking, high-pitched responses to situations he senses aren’t what they seem are endearing and amusing.

While “Get Out” offers the audience plenty to ponder after the movie ends, the action and the plot won’t appeal to everyone. It earns its R rating with violence, horror, foul language and dangerous, suspenseful situations. Still, the movie exposes a fresh look at the races, albeit with novel plot devices, and it seemed to satisfy its viewers with unexpected and jarring visuals, music and close-ups.

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Above, members of the New York Chapter of The Children’s Heart Foundation present CSHL Research Assistant Professor Michael Ronemus with a $50,000 check from The Children’s Heart Foundation for his recently funded research grant on Feb. 23. Photo courtesy of ©C. Brukin, 2017/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

By Daniel Dunaief

Just before he took a holiday break in December, Michael Ronemus received a welcome surprise. “In the last afternoon before the holidays, I got a call from William Foley. He said, ‘Congratulations,’” recalled Ronemus, a research assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “I submitted the application in May and I didn’t know what to expect.”

Foley, the executive director at the Children’s Heart Foundation, was reaching out to Ronemus to let him know he was one of seven researchers — six in North America and one in Europe — to receive funding for his research. Ronemus received a check for $50,000 at a presentation ceremony on Feb. 23.

Scientists are seeking out private foundations more as they search for sources of funding, said Ronemus. The funds will help Ronemus use next-generation sequencing to look closely at 120 families for evidence of copy number variation in their genes.

 

When a person has a different number of copies of a part of a specific gene, that can be a positive, neutral or negative event, depending on the consequence for the individual. Most copy number variations are neutral, which is why people have hundreds of them in their genes. Copy number variations can contribute, however, to de novo mutations, presenting changes in a genetic code that can make the genes of an offspring different from those of his or her parents. If these mutations damage a gene that’s essential for normal development of the heart, they can contribute to congenital heart defects.

Michael Ronemus explains the relevance of his research to the community at the check presentation event on Feb. 23. Photo courtesy of ©C. Brukin, 2017/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Indeed, the Children’s Heart Foundation has contributed $8.7 million to research, hoping to improve the ability to prevent, diagnose and treat the 40,000 people born each year in the United States with a heart defect. Of the children born with a heart defect, about one in four, has a form of critical congenital heart disease, said Jon Kaltman, the chief in the Heart Development and Structures Diseases Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. That means he or she will most likely require surgery within the first year of life, although most have it within the first month.

At this point, doctors and researchers understand the genetic cause of congenital heart disease for a small percent of people. The work of the Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium hopes to make this true for a larger number of people with a congenital heart defect, Kaltman said.

Knowing the genetics of a patient and his or her family could be “helpful for that family to understand what might have caused the congenital heart disease” said Kaltman, who has been a pediatric cardiologist since 2005. “If that family were to have another child” the genetics could help assess the “risk that a second child will also have a congenital heart defect.”

A greater awareness of the genes involved in heart disease could also provide a guide for the way the defect might react to treatment. “We see patients with identical looking hearts [on an echocardiogram] from different families in which they undergo surgery” and have different reactions, Kaltman said. “One does well and has few complications and the other develops arrhythmias at 15 and heart failure at 25.”

The differences in respones to treatment for those patients may be genetic. “For the patient with the genetic signal for the complicated course, we can do more interventions early on,” Kaltman said, which could include earlier valve replacements or more aggressive arrhythmia surveillance.

Working with Bruce Gelb, a professor in pediatrics and cardiology at Mount Sinai Hospital, Ronemus is focusing on a group of patients with a condition called tetralogy of Fallot. Children with this defect develop a bluish color in their skin and can have trouble breathing when they exercise.

New York Chapter president of the Children’s Heart Foundation Jackie Pecora speaks at the check presentation event. Photo courtesy of ©C. Brukin, 2017/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Doctors treat people with this condition with open heart surgery, which fixes a hole between the ventricles and opens up a narrowed right ventricular outflow tract. “Early diagnosis can lead to a straightforward procedure and good outcome,” Ronemus said. “If there is any reason to suspect [that a developing fetus has this condition], we’d like to know.”

By studying copy number variation, Gelb and Ronemus can search for signatures or markers in prenatal screening, which doctors can do through amniocentesis or cell-free fetal DNA analysis, which is a noninvasive form of prenatal testing. A definitive diagnosis even before birth could help doctors prepare for quick intervention that could be more effective, Ronemus said. If not diagnosed, a third of the children with the condition die within the first year and 50 percent in the first three years, Ronemus explained. If doctors know a child has the condition, they can take precautions, like have supplementary oxygen or drugs nearby.

Ronemus, who started his career in plant genetics and then became involved in the study of autism, is applying a genetic technique he co-developed at CSHL for copy number variation detection called SMASH. He applied for the Children’s Heart Foundation grant because of a meeting at CSHL with Jackie Pecora, a resident of East Northport, who is New York Chapter president of the Children’s Heart Foundation. The foundation has 11 chapters throughout the country and raises funds through events like the Long Island Congenital Heart Walk, which will take place on May 21 in Sunken Meadow State Park. Ronemus will be an honorary co-chair for the walk.

Foley said Ronemus’ approach is a “unique way” of looking at congenital heart defects. During the medical advisory board’s discussion of which projects to fund “there was a lot of enthusiasm” for this project. Ronemus is the first New York researcher to receive CHF funds since 2009.

A resident of East Meadow, Ronemus lives with his wife Ana Rodriguez-Fernandez, who is an associate professor of microbiology at the NYU School of Medicine. The couple has three children, Martin, 14, Silvia, 12, and Daniel, 11.

Pecora has family experience with congenital heart disease. After she gave birth to twins 18 years ago, doctors discovered that her daughter Chloe had a heart defect that required surgery. Nine days after she was born, Chloe died from an infection. Pecora got involved because of a bumper sticker for another grassroots fundraiser for a baby with the same heart condition as Chloe. That led her to the Children’s Heart Foundation. While the awareness among the public is improving, there’s still a way to go to combat a prevalent condition, Pecora said. “Look at the clock: Every 15 minutes a baby is born with congenital heart disease. People don’t realize the magnitude.”

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Remember those punching dummies from years ago? They were like Weebles wobbles, where you could smack them as hard as you wanted and they would come popping up for more.

I think we need some kind of equivalent device for modern technology. Sure, cellphones allow us to talk to each other from anywhere in the world, see each other’s faces and share pictures on our way to school, to restaurants or to the most mundane places, but they and their cousins, the computers, can also be like sand in the bottom of our socks.

My daughter sends pictures of herself from the car to her friends. Why? What do they see in these pictures? In many of them, she doesn’t even seem to be centered and her eyes are closed — maybe that’s a generational complaint. Anyway, if these friends were in the car with her, they wouldn’t be looking at each other. Rather, they would be sending pictures of themselves to other people in other cars. Modern technology has encouraged parallel play to such an extent that phone users prefer to interact from afar. When I see my daughter smiling at these ridiculous pictures while mumbling something incoherent to me, I’d like to remove the phone from her hand and toss it out the window.

It would cost way too much money to do that every time she annoyed me and, worse, I might hit someone with her phone.

That’s where the new device comes in. I’d like to have some version of her phone that I could pretend-smash into a thousand pieces.

That frustration doesn’t just involve technology with my children. I have had numerous problems with my computer when I’m on deadline and I can’t afford to stare at a colorful circle that’s freezing my system or a cursor that refuses to respond to my movements across the page.

Sometimes, I feel as if technology is experimenting with me. There’s someone sitting behind a monitor, using my phone or computer’s camera and is waiting for just the moment when I have no extra time and is sending a “kill” signal to my computer.

“Wait, no, no, no!” I shout at the disobedient machine. “Please, please, please, I have to send this now.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” a mischievous elf who decidedly does not work for Santa Claus is thinking as he watches my panicked face.

Instead of pushing the same unresponsive button a thousand times, I’d like an inflatable computer that I can throw across a room, kick as hard as I can or punch without injury. I’d also like to hear the sound of breaking glass as I’m doing it, as if the destructive force I’m applying is somehow damaging the computer as much as it’s upsetting my psyche.

I know breaking real glass and destroying real technology would not only be bad for me and my bank account, but it would also create waste and pollute the environment. I need something that can give me the faux satisfaction of my caveman instinct to strike back at something that’s bothering me.

I can type pretty quickly on my computer, but my thick fingers and the small keyboard on a smartphone, coupled with a spell-checker that hates the last names of my contacts, are a combustible mix. Maybe the next time the computer autocorrects something and then adds an error, I can hit a button that can give me a virtual sledgehammer so that I can virtually shatter my screen into a million pieces. Of course, I’d need the phone to work almost immediately after that because someone, somewhere needs me to send a “LOL” to their mistyped text message.

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Joseph Schwartz, right, with a collaborator, Daichi Shimbo, the director of the Translational Lab at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center, in front of a poster they presented at an annual meeting of the American Society of Hypertension in New York City in 2013.Photo by John Booth, III

By Daniel Dunaief

The cardiovascular skies may be clear and sunny, but there could also be a storm lurking behind them. About one in eight people who get a normal reading for their blood pressure have what’s called masked hypertension.

That’s the finding in a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology led by Joseph Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry and sociology at Stony Brook University and a lecturer of medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center. Schwartz said his research suggests that some people may need closer monitoring to pick up the kinds of warning signs that might lead to serious conditions.

“The literature clearly shows that those with masked hypertension are more likely to have subclinical disease and are at an increased risk of a future heart attack or stroke,” Schwartz explained in an email.

Tyla Yurgel, Schwartz’s lab manager from 2005 to 2016 who is now working in the Department of Psychiatry, wears the ambulatory blood pressure cuff that was a part of the study. Photo by Arthur Stone

Schwartz and his colleagues measured ambulatory blood pressure, in which test subjects wore a device that records blood pressure about every half hour, collecting a set of readings as a person goes about the ordinary tasks involved in his or her life. Through this reading, he was able, with some statistical monitoring, to determine that about 17 million Americans have masked hypertension, a term he coined in 2002.

Schwartz, who started studying ambulatory blood pressure in the late 1980s, has been actively exploring masked hypertension for over a decade. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is more effective at predicting subclinical disease such as left ventricular hypertrophy and the risk of future cardiovascular events, said Schwartz. “There was some rapidly growing evidence it was a better predictor of who would have a heart attack or stroke than in the clinic, even when the blood pressure in the clinic was properly measured,” he said.

To be sure, the expense of 24-hour monitoring of ambulatory blood pressure for everyone is unwieldy and unrealistic, Schwartz said. The list price for having an ambulatory blood pressure recording is $200 to $400, he said. Wearing the device is also a nuisance, which most people wouldn’t accept unless it was likely to be clinically useful or, as he suggested, they were paid as a research participant.

Schwartz said he used a model similar to one an economist might employ. Economists, he said, develop simulation models all the time. He said over 900 people visited the clinic three times as a part of the study. The researchers took three blood pressure readings at each visit. The average of those readings was more reliable than a single reading.

The study participants then provided 30 to 40 blood pressure readings in a day and averaged those numbers. He collected separate data for periods when people were awake or asleep. A patient close to the line for hypertension in the clinical setting was the most likely to cross the boundaries that define hypertension. “You don’t have that far to go to cross that boundary,” Schwartz said.

After analyzing the information, he came up with a rate of about 12.3 percent for masked hypertension of those with a normal clinic blood pressure. The rate was even higher, at 15.7 percent, when the researchers used an average of the nine readings taken during the patient’s first three study visits.

William White, a professor of medicine at the Calhoun Cardiology Center at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington was a reviewer for one of these major studies. “They are excellent,” said White, who has known Schwartz for about a decade. “We should be monitoring blood pressure more outside of the clinical environment.”

Indeed, patients have become increasingly interested in checking their blood pressure outside of the doctor’s offices. “We have a 200 to 300 percent increase in requests for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring from our clinical lab during the last five to ten years — in all age groups, genders and ethnicities,” explained White.

The challenge, however, is that tracking hypertension closely for every possible patient is difficult clinically and financially. “There are no obvious clinical markers for masked hypertension other than unexpectedly high self-blood pressure or unexplained hypertensive target organ damage,” White added.

Schwartz himself has a family history that includes cardiovascular challenges. His father, Richard Schwartz, who conducted nonmedical research, has a long history of cardiovascular disease and had a heart attack at the age of 53. His grandfather had a fatal heart attack at the same age. When Schwartz reached 53, he said he had “second thoughts,” and wanted to get through that year without having a heart attack. He’s monitoring his own health carefully and is the first one in his family to take blood pressure medication.

Schwartz, who grew up in Ithaca, New York, came to Stony Brook University in 1987. He called his upbringing a “nonstressful place to grow up.” He now lives in East Setauket with his wife Madeline Taylor, who is a retired school teacher from the Middle Country school district. The couple has two children. Lia lives in Westchester and works at Graham Windham School and Jeremy lives in Chelsea and works for Credit Suisse.

As for his work, Schwartz said the current study on masked hypertension was a part of a broader effort to categorize and understand pre-clinical indications of heart problems and to track the development of hypertension.

Now that he has an estimate of how many people might have masked hypertension, he plans to explore the data further. That analysis will examine whether having masked hypertension puts a patient at risk of having cardiovascular disease or other circulatory challenges. “We are very interested in whether certain personality characteristics and/or circumstances (stressful work situation) makes it more likely that one will have masked hypertension,” he explained.

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My son and I love the odometer. He probably appreciates it because I talk about it so often and focus on repeating numbers, patterns in the numbers or milestones.

We are approaching another landmark as our odometer edges upward from a volleyball practice, to a concert, to a visit with friends in upstate New York, to a trip to Bronx Zoo or a ride to the airport — 100,000 miles.

Where will we be when we hit that magic mark? Chances are we’ll be close to home, perhaps on our way to or from school, to the train station or to a restaurant to celebrate another birthday.

Those repeating numbers, the 99,488 or the 99,699, may bring back horrible memories of childhood, when we had to come up with a formula to describe the nth term in a sequence. The numbers also may be reminders of when we need to change the oil, rotate the tires, check the brakes or give the car the equivalent of a well visit to the doctor.

Our country has spent decades shortening the distance between two points by car. Along the way, we eat in them, change the radio station, pull off the road for a nap or park near a favorite place to commune with nature from our moving couch.

All that time in the car is what made McDonald’s possible, giving people who travel over great distances the reliability and predictability of the same meal regardless of the state.

We throw ourselves and all manner of accoutrements into our cars, including baseball bags, suitcases, or — with my father — holiday presents. Then we pile ourselves into the seats, buckle ourselves in and hope for an open road along the 3,000 miles from New York to California.

We don’t often think about each of the miles, because we’d clog our minds with useless and forgettable information, particularly during those times when a mile becomes a measure of an interminable length of time on a stopped Long Island Expressway.

Then there are those miles when we feel as if the road disappeared below us and we are floating home, singing a song that makes the whole family laugh, especially when we share voices that are off-key, or celebrating a triumphant play or an enthralling concert. It’s why road trip movies, even poor ones, are so common.

These travel experiences offer a physical journey to match an emotional, spiritual or personal quest, giving us a chance to wake up to an ocean and go to sleep under the shadow of a mountain. Even when we no longer want to contemplate literary devices, we may see symbols in our travels that are hard to ignore, such as the dawn of a new day, soaring birds taking flight together, a fork in the road or a lightning bolt crashing down in the distance.

While the odometer doesn’t take pictures, have Instagram or Facebook accounts, and doesn’t store information in the cloud, it does give us a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and who has shared the ride. When the odometer was still in the double digits, we looked at the backs of our small children’s heads at rear-facing car seats. As the numbers on the car, and our children’s ages and heights increased, we heard their voices drop as they described a movie they watched with friends, a visit with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or a project they planned to complete as soon as they returned home.

I’m hoping my family is in the car together when the odometer breaks into six figures, because it seems fitting to share that milestone since the four of us journeyed through those miles of life together to get there.

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Benjamin Martin in his lab at Stony Brook University. Photo courtesy of SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Last week, the Times Beacon Record Newspapers profiled the work of David Matus, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Matus and Benjamin Martin, who has the same title in the same department, are working together on a new cancer study.

While neither Matus nor Martin are cancer biologists, these researchers have experience in developmental biology with different organisms that could contribute to insights in cancer. Specifically, they are exploring the processes that lead to cell division or invasion. Matus is working with the transparent roundworm, while Martin is focusing on the zebrafish.

The duo recently won the 2017 Damon Runyon–Rachleff Innovation Award, which includes a grant of $300,000. Martin got involved in the research “based on learning more about [Matus’] work and the general hypothesis” about division and invasion, Martin said. The overall perspective is that the cell doesn’t “invade through tissues and divide at the same time.”

Martin has done innovative work with a neuromesodermal progenitor in the zebrafish. These cells are highly plastic and can give rise to numerous other cell types. Martin is focused on trying to understand the basic biology of these cells.

From left, David Matus and Benjamin Martin in the lab where they investigate metastatic cancer. Photo courtesy of SBU

Martin is known for the “very original discovery that a signaling protein called Wnt can regulate the decision between these progenitor cells becoming muscle or neurons,” explained David Kimelman, a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington who oversaw Martin’s research when he was a postdoctoral student.

“What is very nice is that [Martin’s] discovery in zebrafish has since been replicated in other organisms such as the mouse and even in human stem cells, showing that this is a fundamental property of vertebrates,” Kimelman explained in an email.

Similar to Matus’ work with the worm, Martin has been working with cells that go through invasive behavior and don’t engage in cell proliferative activities. “We already knew that notochord progenitors are not proliferating when they undergo convergence and extension” from other published works, explained Martin in an email. “Since notochord progenitors exist in the tailbud and we were already studying them, it was a natural jumping off point to address the same question.”

Martin is testing a transcription factor, called brachyury, which drives metasasis-like behavior in human cancer cells. He has studied this transcription factor in the context of early zebrafish development and will see if it helps drive metastasis through inhibition of the cell cycle. At this point, Martin said, there is some “evidence that it does arrest the cell cycle” using human cells in another lab.

So far, the work he has done with brachyury and the cell cycle/invasion in zebrafish is preliminary. Their hypothesis is that halting the cell cycle is a prerequisite for invasive behavior. Like the roundworm, the embryonic zebrafish is transparent, which makes it easier to observe cellular changes.

One of the goals of the project is “to observe the cell cycle of human cancer as it invades through tissues in the fish embryo,” Martin said. In the long term, he hopes to see whether the overexpression of a transcription factor Matus has found in the worm is sufficient to drive metastasis in the zebrafish.

Martin described winning the Damon Runyon–Rachleff Award as “exciting,” and suggested that it “pushes back a little bit of the worry phase” of finding funding for compelling scientific projects. Kimelman said Martin is an “exceptional scientist” and one of the “best I have had the privilege to train.”

Kimelman believes the work Martin and Matus are doing has the potential to provide “important insight into the basic changes that occur during cancer as cells become metastatic,” he explained in an email. “While it doesn’t immediately lead to a therapeutic, understanding the basic biology of cancer is the first step to defining new ways of affecting it.”

Kimelman particularly appreciated the way Matus and Martin combined two different model systems, which offers the potential to provide insight into the basic changes that occur during cancer as cells become metastatic.

Martin learned about science and research during his formative years. His father Presley Martin was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore when the younger Martin was born. Presley Martin recently retired from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he studied the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila. “At a young age, I was exposed to a lot of the lab and experiments and it was certainly appealing to me,” said Martin.

Benjamin Martin with his son Calvin. Photo by Richard Row

Martin is married to Jin Bae, whom he met at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was studying the molecular control of how muscle precursor cells move to distant parts of the embryo in frogs and fish. Bae is a registered nurse at Stony Brook Hospital. The couple’s son Calvin, who enjoys visiting the lab, will be four in April.

Matus and Martin are collaborating with Scott Powers, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook, and Eric Brouzes, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook.

Powers said the work Martin and Matus are doing is a “basic discovery but an important one,” he explained in an email. “Conceivably, further research could lead to translation but as of right now, any thoughts along those lines are speculative.”

Martin appreciates the opportunity to work on these cells that are so important in development and that might lead to insights about cancer. “It seems like in the past few years” these discoveries have “opened up a subfield of developmental biology,” he said. “It’s exciting to see.”

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When we were young, we used to think he was hiding under our beds, in our closets or around the corner. Thoughts of this terrifying person kept us up at night, prevented us from closing our eyes and made us insist that our parents search every corner of our room, investigate each sound around us and make sure we were safe.

Before I was born, the boogie man was the Soviet Union, spying on us from overhead in a satellite launched in October 1957. He was watching us from above, monitoring our trips to the supermarket, listening to our conversations with our neighbors about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles or studying our driving routes to work.

Today, of course, we have plenty of reasons to fear. Terrorists have made death and destruction their business. They appear bent on the idea that killing us somehow helps them.

It’s horrifying and we need to protect ourselves. The manner in which we do that is up for debate, particularly as President Trump and his staff make a point of reminding us of all the events around the world that we should fear.

We need a strong response, a readiness to act and a careful screening process, keeping out the undesirable elements. President Obama seemed intent on protecting the populace, albeit without the same level of directed rhetoric and without policies of exclusion.

No president wants to be in the White House as the griever-in-chief when he knows he could act through policies he has the power to write.

But is there a way to look into the human soul beyond religious stereotypes and beyond geographic boundaries to know what someone may intend to do? Is this boogie man exclusively one religion? Surely, there are plenty of people who grew up in different countries and follow other religions who commit horrible acts.

Do we understand our enemy or do we just want to push those people, whoever they are —  perhaps away?

It’s never been clear to me how we can protect ourselves completely from any motivated aggressor, short of living in a concrete bunker deep in the ground, with admission limited to those with a thorough psychological and DNA profile.

We don’t understand many of the mass murderers in our country. We interview their neighbors, family members and classmates after they’ve committed horrible acts. No one could possibly foresee that this unstable person was capable of these atrocities. And, if their associates could have seen it coming, they are almost admitting culpability. If they say, “Of course, I wrote in my diary two months ago that he might be a killer,” they may feel that they share some responsibility for not preventing these acts.

We need to understand each other and the way the human mind strays off track into a realm of darkness where relief and success are measured in bullets and body counts. We need to know our enemy. I don’t believe we can truly see our enemy in the color of their skin or their passport.

Our mental health system will likely receive fewer dollars in the months and years ahead, so we can focus on building walls and keeping people out. Perhaps a better investment would be to understand the people we fear. Yes, we need to defend ourselves, but we can also build a mental health system that encourages people to find ways to heal instead of hurt. Who knows? Helping the boogie man could turn him into an ally instead of a sworn enemy.

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John Daly, center, smiles on the medal podium. Photo from John Daly.

By Daniel Dunaief

This weekend, Smithtown-native John Daly’s comeback to the fast-paced world of skeleton takes an enormous step forward. He will compete against the best in the world as a member of Team USA in Koeningsee, Germany, at the World Championships.

Daly decided near the beginning of the sliding season to attempt a comeback from a sport that had been a staple of his life from 2001 until 2014.

Just to get back to this point, Daly had to earn enough points in the junior circuit to qualify. He set a goal of collecting medals and earning points. He scored three golds and a silver in North American Cup races and then topped that off with a gold and a silver in the Intercontinental Cup in Lake Placid.

Mission accomplished, so far. If he wins a medal either in Germany or in another race the next week in South Korea, the site of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Daly will continue his ascent toward claiming a spot on his third Olympic team.

Just six months ago, however, a return to a sport he left in disappointment after a difficult ending in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, wasn’t at the top of his mind.

Daly’s father, James Daly, awards his son with a medal. Photo from John Daly.

When he was going out on dates in Washington, D.C., where he got a job in medical sales for Smith & Nephew, he had a hard time answering questions about what he was passionate about outside of work.

“Nothing got my gears going,” he recalled. “That was when I was like, ‘Maybe I do miss it.’”

At first, Daly, who is now 31, dipped his toe in the water, driving up to his home track of Lake Placid and doing a few trial runs before other sliders raced.

“I came back and I felt like I never left,” Daly said. When he asked himself what was holding him back, he didn’t have a good answer.

Getting back into shape and training required extensive driving, as Daly regularly made a nine-hour trek from Washington up to Lake Placid, home of the 1980 Miracle on Ice U.S. Men’s Hockey Team. He was grateful to his family for supporting him and to his bosses at Smith & Nephew.

During those long drives in the car, he listened to music, made phone calls with his Bluetooth and tried to stretch out. Coming back, he knew the level of effort he needed to achieve to be successful.

“No matter what, every week, I had to be faster and stronger,” he told himself. “You have to know the other guys are doing it.”

While he’s found his groove, the return to the sport hasn’t been a picnic.

“Age has kicked in,” he laughed. He takes ice baths to ease the body aches. Those, he said, can be miserable, particularly on his ankles and toes.

Daly’s parents, James and Bennarda, are happy to see their son return to the sport on his terms. In 2014, Daly was in contention for a medal at the Olympics in Sochi. At the start of his final heat, his sled popped out of the ice grooves, robbing him of precious time he couldn’t possibly make up, turning the final run into one of the most emotionally draining trips of his life.

After the Olympics, he retired, leaving the international sports stage.

“The last time you compete in the Olympics should be your best part of the Games. No matter what, if you win, lose or draw, you want to take in that last run. This is it, this is forever.”
— John Daly

“His world came crashing down,” Jesse Lichtenberg, Daly’s agent at BDA Sports Management said. Lichtenberg said Daly packed everything up in Lake Placid, put it in a box and threw it in the trunk of his car.

However, Lichtenberg and Daly’s family suspected this wasn’t the last chapter in Daly’s sliding career.

Indeed, Daly’s father, who is a retired EMS worker for the New York City Fire Department, continued to be a racing official for USA Bobsled and Skeleton Federation.

He thought, “Let me wait a couple of years, in case John has second thoughts,” the elder Daly said. “I’m glad I did. It’s so great to officiate a match that my son is in.”

Indeed, when Daly recently won a gold medal, his father got to put the award around his son’s neck.

His father believes Daly benefited from his time away from the sport, especially because it gave him some balance in his life.

“He needed to know he could go out and make a living after skeleton,” he said.

Now that his son is back on the track, he watches and he said his “heart starts to beat faster” as his son waits for a green light that signals the beginning of a race in which he runs for about five seconds before diving, headfirst, onto a sled he steers at over 80 miles an hour around curved, icy tracks.

Bennarda Daly, meanwhile, said she’s “excited and a little anxious” at the same time. “When he returned from Russia, he was different,” she said. “It wasn’t because he didn’t win.” Popping out of the groove kept him from “getting closure.”

Daly’s mom said she noticed that he hadn’t talked about sliding for the last few years, which she said was “odd” for him. “It was like it never happened. He had to close that off.”

Bennarda Daly, who is a nurse, said she doesn’t need her son to win a medal at the World Championships or at the Olympics.

“If he comes out happy and feels like it went well, I’ll be ecstatic,” she said.

As for Daly, he knows, even if he makes the Olympics next year, that he wants to walk away on his own terms.

“The last time you compete in the Olympics should be your best part of the Games,” he said. “No matter what, if you win, lose or draw, you want to take in that last run. This is it, this is forever.”

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I was watching television late at night, after my wife drifted off to sleep, when I first saw him. I don’t tend to stop channel surfing when a comedian appears.

He looked like a friend of mine, he had a devilish smile and he wasn’t shouting or barking obscenities at me. He was balding and overweight and was the definition of unglamorous. He was talking as if I was in the room with him and he was sharing observations with me. I’m going to paraphrase one of the first jokes I heard.

“Getting old sucks,” he began.

“You know, when you’re in your 20s and you come in and tell the doctor your shoulder is bothering you, you have, like a hundred options. The doctor can take a piece of your hip and put it in your shoulder, he can make you a new shoulder, and he can fix you right up so you’re good as new.”

The audience nodded appreciatively.

“But, then, you get older and you go to the same doctor with the same complaint and you wait. The doctor smiles at you and listens to your symptoms but, then, he doesn’t offer any heroic solutions. He gives you that understanding look.”

“So, what can we do about this?” you say.

“Well, you can take some Advil if you want,” he says with a shrug.

“But what about all those other options?” you ask. “What about moving around body parts, building a new shoulder and fixing me up so I’m better than I was?”

“Those are no longer possible,” he says, as he shakes his head slowly.

Getting old is difficult. I know doctors and lifestyle coaches and entire industries are dedicated to reversing the effects of aging. Lines on your face? Hey, no problem, there’s a cure for that. Putting on weight as you age? Sure, we can fix you right up, send you food, cook food for you, or convince you through hypnosis that you, in fact, don’t need food.

If a character Tom Hanks played in “Cast Away” could survive for several years on an island by himself with just a volleyball for his friend and a few fish and coconuts here and there, you can most certainly get through a day without coffee, doughnuts or any of the other bare necessities that call to you from the addicted parts of your bodies.

When our kids were small, we used to pack the back of the car with everything we might need. Pack ‘N Play? Check. Stroller? Check. Diaper bag? Got it.

As they got older, we didn’t have much to bring and just told them to get in the car and buckle themselves in.

Somewhere along the lines, though, as our kids needed less to go from point A to point B, we wanted more. Our conversations before we leave the house go something like this.

“I can’t find my vitamins,” my wife says. “Did I take one this morning?”

“I don’t know, but do you know where my reading glasses are?” I ask.

“No, but when you start looking for your distance glasses, they’re on your forehead,” she smiles, pointing at me.

“Oh, good, thanks. Have you seen my Invisalign braces?” I ask.

“I’m not sure if the ones in the kitchen are your new ones or your old ones, but there’s a set on the counter,” she offers.

As I scoop up my plastic braces, I see something familiar next to them.

“Hey, honey?” I shout. “Your vitamins are on the kitchen table.”

Getting old may be challenging but it can also be comical. Just ask comedian Louis C.K.

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David Matus in his lab at Stony Brook University. Photo courtesy of SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

At first look, the connection between a roundworm, a zebrafish and cancer appears distant. After all, what can a transparent worm or a tropical fish native to India and the surrounding areas reveal about a disease that ravages its victims and devastates their families each year?

Plenty, when talking to David Matus and Benjamin Martin, assistant professors in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University whose labs are next door to each other. The scientific tandem recently received the 2017 Damon Runyon–Rachleff Innovation Award, which includes a two-year grant of $300,000, followed by another renewable grant of $300,000 to continue this work.

In the first of a two-part series, Times Beacon Record Newspapers will profile the work of Matus this week. Next week the Power of Three will feature Martin’s research on zebrafish.

Long ago a scientist studying dolphin cognition in Hawaii, Matus has since delved into the world of genetic development, studying the roundworm, or, as its known by its scientific name, Caenorhabditis elegans. An adult of this worm, which lives in temperate soil environments, measures about 1 millimeter, which means it would take about 70 of them lined up end to end to equal the length of an average earthworm.

From left, David Matus and Benjamin Martin. Photo courtesy of SBU

Matus specifically is interested in exploring how a cell called the anchor cell in a roundworm invades through the basement membrane, initiating a uterine-vulval connection that allows adult roundworms to pass eggs to the outside environment. He is searching for the signals and genetic changes that give the anchor cell its invasive properties.

Indeed, it was through a serendipitous discovery that he observed that the loss of a single gene results in anchor cells that divide but don’t invade. These dividing cells are still anchor cells, but they have lost the capacity to breach the basement membrane. That, Matus said, has led the team to explore the ways cancer has to decide whether to become metastatic and invade other cells or proliferate, producing more copies of itself. In some cancers, their hypothesis suggests, the cells either divide or invade and can’t do both at the same time. It could be a cancer multitasking bottleneck.

Mark Martindale, the director of the Whitney Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was Matus’ doctoral advisor, said a cell’s decision about when to attach to other cells and when to let go involves cell polarity, the energetics of motility and a host of other factors that are impossible to study in a mammal.

The roundworm presents a system “in which it is possible to manipulate gene expression, and their clear optical properties make them ideal for imaging living cell behavior,” Martindale explained in an email. Seeing these developmental steps allows one to “understand a variety of biomedical issues.”

Last year, Matus and Martin were finalists for the Runyon–Rachleff prize. In between almost getting the award and this year, the team conducted imaging experiments in collaboration with Eric Betzig, a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. Betzig not only brings expertise in optical imaging technologies but also has won a Nobel Prize.

“We really appreciate the opportunity to work with [Betzig] and his lab members on this project,” said Matus, who also published a review paper in Trends in Cell Biology that explored the link between cell cycle regulation and invasion. He and his graduate student Abraham Kohrman explored the literature to find cases that showed the same switching that he has been exploring with the roundworm.

Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, said the work is highly relevant to cancer as it explores fundamental issues about how cells behave when they invade, which is a key property of cancer cells. Hannun said the tandem’s hypothesis about division and invasion is “consistent with previous understandings but I believe this is the first time it is proposed formally,” he suggested in an email.

Their work could apply to invasive epithelial cancers, suggested Scott Powers, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook and the director of Clinical Cancer Genomics at the Cancer Center. That could include breast, colon, prostate, lung and pancreatic cancers, noted Powers, who is a recent collaborator with Matus and Martin.

The additional funding allows Matus and Martin to focus more of their time on their research and less on applying for other grants, Matus said.

Back row from left, David Matus and his father in law Doug Killebrew; front row from left, Maile 9, Bria, 7, and Matus’ wife Deirdre Killebrew. Photo by Richard Row

Matus lives in East Setauket with his wife Deirdre Killebrew, who works for Applied DNA Sciences. The couple met when they were working with dolphins in Hawaii. Matus’ first paper was on dolphin cognition, although he switched to evolutionary and developmental biology when he worked in Martindale’s lab at the University of Hawaii.

Martindale described Matus as prolific during his time in his lab, publishing numerous papers that were “profoundly important in our continued understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype and the evolution of biological complexity,” Martindale wrote in an email.

Following in Martindale’s footsteps, Matus replaced his middle name, Samuel, in publications with a Q. Martindale said several of his colleagues adopted the phony Q to pay homage to the attitude that drove them to pursue careers in science. Matus has now passed that Q on to Korhman, who is his first graduate student.

Matus and Killibrew have two daughters, Bria and Maille, who are 7 and 9 years old. Their children have a last name that combines each of their surnames, Matubrew. Matus said he feels “fortunate when I got here three years ago that they had me set up my lab next to [Martin]. That gave us an instantaneous atmosphere for collaboration.”

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