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Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

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The current World Series baseball matchup features two teams that haven’t won a championship in decades. The Cleveland Indians’ last title came in 1948, while the Chicago Cubs, in case anyone hasn’t heard, previously claimed baseball’s top prize in 1908. Let’s take a look at the way things were the last time each of these teams won the World Series.

In 1948, the Indians’ Leroy “Satchel” Paige made his debut on July 9, becoming the first African-American pitcher in the American League. He went 6-1 for the Indians that season, although he pitched to only two batters in the World Series, retiring them both.

The cost of everything was considerably lower, before inflation kicked in. The price for a grandstand ticket at Braves Field, Boston, for the clinching sixth game when the Indians beat the local Braves, 4-2, was $6. The Braves moved later to Milwaukee and then Atlanta.

The cost of a gallon of gas to drive to Braves Field, which is now Nickerson Field on the campus of Boston University, was about 16 cents.

Also in the world of sports, the Olympics returned to the world stage after the 1940 and 1944 games were canceled during World War II. Remarkably, London — the target of repeated bombings during the war, which had ended only three years earlier — hosted the 1948 Olympics.

In other international events, Israel was created, with David Ben-Gurion serving as the first prime minister. In Berlin, after the Soviet Union blocked all ground traffic into West Berlin, the airlift started on June 26, 1948, and didn’t end until Sept. 30, 1949, providing enough supplies to enable West Berlin to remain under the control of the British, French and American governments.

Back on the home front, President Harry Truman dedicated New York International Airport, commonly known as Idlewild Airport and, now, JFK. He hailed the new airport as “the front door” of the United Nations, which was under construction in Manhattan and would be completed in 1952.

Truman, who had become president after FDR died, ran for election against Republican Thomas Dewey. The day after the election, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a banner headline that read, “Dewey defeats Truman.” A beaming Truman held up the paper after he won the election.

Back in 1908, the last year the Cubs won the World Series, the Olympics were held in London for the first time. The games were originally scheduled for Rome, but a Mount Vesuvius eruption in 1906 made a new venue necessary.

The cost of a grandstand ticket at West Side Park, where the Cubs played, was $1.50. The Chicago team wouldn’t move to Wrigley Field until 1916.

A loaf of bread cost about 5 cents, while a gallon of gas, for those who had cars, was some 20 cents. Ford started producing the Model T car that year. The average worker made $200 to $400 per year.

In Europe, Wilbur Wright was dazzling French spectators with demonstrations of his ability to bank turns and fly in circles in an airplane.

The president of the United States was Theodore Roosevelt. He had already indicated he wouldn’t run for re-election after two terms. His successor, William Taft, defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan to win the 1908 election. Women would still have to wait to vote until the 19th Amendment passed on Aug. 18, 1920.

In 1908, the country celebrated its first Mother’s Day on May 10, and in early November the Brooklyn Academy of Music opened.

And those are just some of the highlights of the last years the Cubs and Indians won the World Series.

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From left, Robert Catell, chairman of the board, Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center; Vyacheslov Solovyov; Sergey Gelman, a Stony Brook engineering student; and Yacov Shamash, vice president for economic development at Stony Brook University. Photo from Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

It’s lighter, cheaper and just as strong. In the age of manufacturing the latest and greatest high-technology parts, that is a compelling combination. Indeed, the Department of Energy recently awarded the Brookhaven Technology Group, a business incubator tenant of the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook University, $1.15 million to develop a high-temperature superconductor cable with a new architecture. The grant supports the research of Vyacheslav Solovyov, an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at SBU and the principal investigator at Brookhaven Technology Group.

“Very few projects are funded, so we’re very excited that ours was chosen,” said Paul Farrell, the president at BTG. The potential applications for Solovyov’s Exocable, as the new architecture is called, span a wide range of uses, including in high field magnets for a new breed of accelerator. The work entails creating a high-temperature superconducting cable that is an integral ingredient in creating the superconducting machinery. The BTG process produces a high-temperature superconducting cable after removing the substrate, which is a single-crystal-like material. Solovyov transfers the superconducting layer to a supporting tape that can be engineered for strength and not for crystallinity.

This work reduces the weight of the tape by as much as 70 percent per unit length for the same current capacity. The potential for this new cable is that it can contribute to the growing field of research at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory on superconductivity, said Jim Smith, assistant vice president of economic development at Stony Brook. “Maybe this is the next industry that replaces the Grummans and the aerospaces that have left,” he said. Semiconductors are of particular interest to manufacturers because they transmit energy with no resistance. Right now, about 6.5 percent of energy transmitted around the United States is lost in distribution wires, Smith said. Maintaining the energy that’s lost in the wires would have “tremendous benefits.”

To be sure, while the research at BTG could contribute to lower cost and improved efficiency in high-temperature superconductivity, there are hurdles to making this process and the applications of it work. For starters, the company needs to produce kilometers of ExoCable. “The challenge is to demonstrate that the properties will be as uniform as they were before the substrate removal,” explained Solovyov, who has been working in superconductivity since 1986.

Recently, Smith said he, Farrell and Solovyov met to discuss the wiring for their facility. “A lot of power and wiring will be installed in the next four to five weeks,” Smith said. Scientists who worked with Solovyov expressed admiration for his work and optimism about his results. Solovyov’s “new activity will definitely advance the long-promised practical application of superconductivity electrical power transmission, as well as in the development of high-field magnets for both industrial and scientific application,” David Welch, a former collaborator and retired senior materials scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, wrote in an email. Welch explained that Solovyov focused on methods for making composites of superconducting material with normally conducting metals in the form of wires, tapes and cables necessary for their practical application. “Such a combination of talents is unusual,” Welch continued. Early on, it was clear “that [Solovyov] was going to become an important member of the scientific staff at BNL.”

Solovyov started working on this process with BTG about a year and a half ago. When he first started collaborating with BTG, the company was working on a superconducting project funded by the army. When that work ended, Solovyov and BTG worked together to submit new proposals to the DOE. According to Solovyov, Stony Brook has been “very helpful in terms of providing facilities and lab space.” Stony Brook’s goal, Smith said, is to help companies like BTG succeed and measures that success in the number of new jobs created in the energy field.

Solovyov, who grew up in the Ukraine, said he has had several breakthroughs in his career. He helped develop a patented technology that can speed up the processing of superconducting materials by a factor of 10. “That has been used in production and I’m very proud of it,” Solovyov said. The professor lives in Rocky Point with his wife Olena Rybak and their two children, Natasha, 19, who attends Suffolk County Community College, and Dennis, 14, who is in high school. Solovyov said he enjoys Long Island, where he can fish for striped bass and bluefish. He pan fries what he catches.

As for his work, Solovyov has four patents and applications for three more. He and Farrell said the company is looking for opportunities for expansion. He is exploring ways to work with large-scale generators and wind turbines. Farrell explained that BTG has ambitions to become a larger company. BTG would “like to become a major contributor in this field,” Farrell said. That could include adding staff and developing more products that can be sold and used worldwide. “If our product is successful, in the sense that it improves the capability of superconductors to be used commercially, we’ll be adding people.” This work will need more funding, which the company plans to get either from the Department of Energy, from private investors or both.

“If you can improve the usefulness of superconductors and reduce the cost of the wire, there’ll be wider use than there is right now,” Farrell said.

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On your mark, get set … Wait! I know we’ve never seen an Olympic sprinter or swimmer take off his goggles, stand up from the starter’s block, scratch his chin, shrug his shoulders and walk away. After all, these athletes have spent years preparing for races that sometimes last less time than it takes us to order lunch.

Like it or not, most of us are in races of all kinds. Some of them are positive and can even be necessary, while others may not be as productive. We race against the bully in the playground to prove that we can cross the lawn faster than he can, we race against the car at the other end of the parking lot so we can get the closest spot — and we race to our seats in a movie theater so we don’t miss the previews.

Some of these races clearly offer us an incentive to improve our lives, the lives of those around us or just to make us feel better. Beating the fastest kid on the block may not be something we put on our resumé, but it can give us confidence in other arenas.

Races can be inspirational. Watch any Olympic Games and every media outlet is in search of an incredible story. Witness Wilma Rudolph. She had polio when she was 4, which caused her to have infantile paralysis. Through her recovery, she wore a brace on her leg until she was 9. She went on to become an Olympic track star in 1956 and 1960.

Races can also encourage people to climb out of bed each morning, recognizing the urgency to do important work. Scientists, for example, frequently describe the race to cure cancer and to provide relief from other diseases that destroy our friends and relatives quickly, or slowly take them away from us. The scientific researchers know, without looking at a clock, that people are suffering day and night with limited treatment, which also motivates them to work late at night or through weekends.

Rescue workers, including the police, firefighters and the Coast Guard, race into storms or treacherous conditions to help people. Seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

With everyone racing to something every day, it’s easy to see how some of those races, particularly the ones with little at stake, seem more like a battle of wills than a race. Do I need to race to the shortest line in the supermarket before that other person, with the same intent look in his eyes? What happens if I lose that race? Am I stuck in this other line for an extra 20 seconds or, gasp, even a minute or more?

When we’re driving, we recognize that an ambulance racing past requires us to get out of the way. That’s not only the law, but it’s also the way we help our society function. When confronted with someone in a spectacular hurry, it’s possible and even likely that the person may be racing against or toward something we can’t see or understand.

And then there are the times when we are racing out to do something that may not, on second thought, be important or even all that helpful. Yes, movement might be positive and, yes, we might benefit from cutting down the time to accomplish something, but might we have found a shorter route or even a different path without all that running around?

If we see our lives as a series of races, maybe we can pick the ones we truly want to run, while also recognizing that we can define a successful race for ourselves.

Many years ago, I attended a press conference before the New York City Marathon. One of the reporters asked a Kenyan athlete, who was likely to finish in the top 10, about winning. The runner, whose pace per mile for more than 26 miles is faster than most people can sprint for a single mile, took his time to answer.

“To finish the race is to win the race,” he said grinning, taking much more time between words than he would between strides the next day.

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Alfredo Fontanini in front of a poster of a neuron in his office. Photo from Alfredo Fontanini

By Daniel Dunaief

Pull into the parking lot of your favorite restaurant and you can almost taste the onion rings, the fresh baked bread or the steamed clams. The combination of the sign, the smell of the food piped out of the familiar building, and even the familiar voice of the restaurant owner welcoming you back is a hint of the experience of eating. Indeed, when these anticipatory stimuli are a part of the dining experience, they contribute to forming flavor.

Alfredo Fontanini, an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook University, recently conducted research on rodents in which he explored how other senses — touch, taste, smell and sight — contributed to the part of the brain responsible for taste, the gustatory cortex.

In work published recently in the journal eLife, Fontanini demonstrated that rats who heard particular sounds, smelled odors, felt a puff of air against their whiskers, or saw the flash of an LED light before they ate showed increased activity in the gustatory cortex even before they started eating. If this experiment sounds familiar, it’s because Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated the anticipation of food in conditioning experiments with dogs, showing that their digestive systems became active when they heard a tone before they ate, associating the sound with the presentation of food.

Dr. Alfredo Fontanini looks at slides of the gustatory cortex, the part of the brain that mediates the perception of taste. Photo from Stony Brook University
Dr. Alfredo Fontanini looks at slides of the gustatory cortex, the part of the brain that mediates the perception of taste. Photo from Stony Brook University

Fontanini took this research further, however, showing that the brain regions responsible for taste can, and did, show activity prior to eating. “As we paired the stimuli in a Pavlovian task, the animal would produce mouth movements and licks in response,” Fontanini said. These movements were not there right away, but developed after three to seven days of training, suggesting that the animal could infer taste. He recorded the responses of single neurons in the gustatory cortex. Before conditioning, the neuronal response in the gustatory cortex varied according to the sense stimulated. Prior to training, neurons in the gustatory cortex showed a 16 percent response, while that went up to 33 percent after learning. “This suggested that the stimulation was predictive of taste,” Fontanini said. “More neurons were integrating between all the stimuli.”

Donald Katz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University who oversaw Fontanini’s graduate research for five years, suggested that his former student was one of a few neuroscientists studying how anticipation of an experience, knowing what’s coming, impacts how the brain handles that experience. This study, he explained in an email, “makes perfect sense — while few researchers study how different sensory systems work together, it is well-known that taste is linked to all of the other senses. It is of great evolutionary import that this be so,” because the animal that can recognize something good to eat at the greatest distance will be the one that eats.

Katz described Fontanini’s recent work as a “wonderful finding in that it provides a substantial, natural extension” to work completed in his lab, Katz’s lab and those of other scientists. In exploring which specific senses are most important to the gustatory reflex, Fontanini said olfaction and touch are considered more relevant for food-related decisions. “These are animals that use these senses to navigate their world and explore food,” he said.

In the bigger picture, Fontanini would like to understand how the brain integrates and fuses sensory perceptions with emotions. He explained that one of the tests in animal models of depression is to look at how much a test subject still likes something sweet. “Studying taste allows us to understand how the brain creates pleasure or creates aversion that negates emotions,” he said.

Fontanini plans to extend this study to additional research. He would like to know the neurological pathways that link the visual, auditory, somatosensory and olfaction senses that contribute to forming an expectation about taste. He is also eager to understand how the anticipatory activation influences the way taste is perceived. This, he explained, would be a way to explore how expectations shape perception.

Fontanini, who grew up in the town of Brescia, Italy, which is near Milan, arrived at this particular field of research because of his interest in understanding perception and emotion. He would like to explore how the brain creates emotions. Recognizing the multisensory element to taste and eating, Fontanini suggests that understanding how olfaction and taste can interact may lead to eating sweets where the smell enhances the flavor and taste, even of a lower-calorie dessert, like a piece of chocolate cake. “If you can leverage more of the odor and less” of the taste, “you can find a way of having that richness without the need for overwhelming sweetness.”

A resident of Setauket, Fontanini lives with his wife Arianna Maffei, who is an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook and their 11-year-old son Carlo. Relying on vocabulary of the gustatory cortex, Fontanini suggested Long Island has a “soothing sweetness” that springs from the quaint and beautiful setting his family enjoys.

As for his work, Fontanini said studying taste in the brain is challenging. “What happens when you taste chocolate: are you activating chocolate neurons or are you activating a complex pattern of activity?” The answer, he said, describing taste while borrowing from another sense, is much more like a musical ensemble during a symphonic experience than like a solo. “Understanding how taste is represented in the cortex is incredibly complex,” he said.

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Where can we turn when the dialogue from, or about, our presidents seems to fall short? Fortunately, we can look to the imperfect presidents of the past, whose ideas and inspiration have, for years, proved much more than “just words,” and whose notions about who — and what — we can or should be has helped provide a compass for the country.

James Garfield might be a good place to start: “We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government.”

Garfield also proferred, “If wrinkles must be written on our brow, let them not be written on our heart. The spirit should never grow old.”

Thomas Jefferson suggested a way to deal with growing personal frustration: “When angry, count 10, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.”

How about a few words from Rutherford B. Hayes who said, “He serves his party best who serves the country best.”

Martin Van Buren advised, “It’s easier to do a job right, than to explain why you didn’t.”

How about a quote from Honest Abe?

“My dream,” Lincoln said, “is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last, best hope on Earth.”

Or this one: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Here’s another Lincoln quote: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

Turning to the other side of the Civil War conflict that threatened to tear the nation apart, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, said, “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.”

John Quincy Adams’ inspirational suggestion was, “Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.”

Chester A. Arthur said, “Men may die, but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken.”

Harry S. Truman indicated, “No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking … is freedom.”

Describing a country whose ancestors came from so many other nations, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

FDR’s cousin Theodore Roosevelt said, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” Teddy also suggested, “Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.”

John F. Kennedy, who saw his fair share of crises during a presidency cut short, said, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger — but recognize the opportunity.”

John Tyler offered these amusing and humbling words: “Here lies the body of my good horse, The General. For 20 years he bore me around the circuit of my practice, and in all that time he never made a blunder. Would that his master could say the same.”

William Howard Taft pointedly said, “Politics, when I am in it, makes me sick.”

An Eisenhower quote might be a fitting way to end: “America is best described by one word, freedom.”

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Front row, from left, Liliana Dávalos, Heather Lynch and Christine O’Connell; back row, from left, Robert Harrison, IACS director and STRIDE PI, Arie Kaufman, and Janet Nye. Photo from Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

If Stony Brook University has its way, the university will stand out not only for the quality of the research its graduate students produce but also for the way those budding scientists present, explain and interpret their results to the public and to policy makers.

Pulling together faculty from numerous departments across the campus, Robert Harrison, the director of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, created a program that will teach graduate students how to use big data sets to inform difficult decisions.

The institute recently received a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship for this effort, called Science Training & Research to Inform DEcisions, or STRIDE. The grant will be used for students in the departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, Ecology and Evolution and the schools of Journalism and Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

“This is unique,” said Arie Kaufman, a distinguished professor and chair of the Department Computer Science at Stony Brook. “It’s a new kind of approach to training and adding value to Ph.D. students.” Indeed, the students who complete the STRIDE training will earn their doctorates and will also receive a certificate for their participation in this program. Students in the participating departments will need to apply for one of the 10 positions available in the program next year. The partners involved in this program expect it to expand to 30 students within five years.

Kaufman said what enabled this collaboration was the range of skill sets across Stony Brook, including the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which is a growing program that already offers the type of training more typical for an actor studying improvisation techniques than for a scientist studying neurotransmitters or DNA.

The Alda Center is “creating a new course,” said Christine O’Connell, an associate director at the center and assistant professor in the School of Journalism. She is currently working on developing the course description, which will include communicating to decision makers. O’Connell, who has a doctorate in marine and atmospheric sciences, sees her work with the Alda Center and with STRIDE as the “perfect combination in bringing the decision making piece to work with scientists to help them talk about their research.”

Scientists who take courses at the Alda Center with STRIDE learn how to understand their audience through various role-playing scenarios. They will also develop their abilities to present their goals or messages in a visual way and not just talk about their work.

Heather Lynch, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution who is also a co-principal investigator on the STRIDE grant, will help design the program, mentor students and develop courses. She’s been involved with this proposal since its inception, over three years ago. “In many ways,” she explained in an email, “my interest stems from my own difficulties communicating effectively with policy makers, and finding tools and visualizations that are compelling to a non-scientist.” Lynch recounted her frustration with presenting science to help a policy making body, such as a committee, with the kind of analysis she believed they were seeking. After she did her best to answer the question, the committee sometimes dismissed her work as not being what they wanted. “That’s frustrating because that means I failed at the outset to define the science question and that’s what I hope we can teach students to do better,” Lynch explained.

Lynch said she wishes she had the training these students will be getting. For scientists, computers are an invaluable tool that can help delve into greater breadth and depth in analyzing, interpreting and collecting information. The STRIDE effort includes a greater awareness of the way computers can inform political or social science. Researchers generate “tremendous amounts of data that can be used to analyze trends or detect diseases,” Kaufman said. “The data science is tremendous in every discipline.”

The faculty who are a part of this program said they have already benefited from the interactions they’ve had with each other as they’ve developed the curriculum. “I know a few people in Ecology and Evolution and I know more people in Marine Sciences, but these particular individuals were new to me,” said Kaufman. “We have already been communicating about ideas for how to use the Reality Deck for other projects.”

Completed in late 2012, the Reality Deck is a $2 million rectangular room in the Center of Excellence in Information Technology building. The room has hundreds of monitors that cover the wall from floor to ceiling and provides a way for researchers to study images in exquisite detail.

Other scientists in the program include Liliano Dávalos, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Janet Nye, an assistant professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Joel Saltz, the founding chair of the Depatment of Biomedical Informatics, Erez Zadok, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Mighua Zhang, a professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

Lynch said the program will bring in people who are working on real-world problems, including those in government, industry and nongovernmental organizations who are “in a position to take science and use it for practical purposes.” As a part of the program, the scientists will monitor the progress of the STRIDE candidates, O’Connell said.

The evaluations will check to see if “they become better communicators and better at interpreting their data for different audiences,” O’Connell said. “The evaluation piece built in will help us assess the program.”

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From left, Lorne Golub, Joseph Scaduto, Francis Johnson, Ying Gu, Hsi-Ming Lee and Maria Ryan. Photo courtesy of Stony Brook Medicine

By Daniel Dunaief

You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks for a variety of reasons, including that your old dog might be suffering from periodontal disease. An inflammatory condition of the mouth that affects about 80 percent of dogs by the age of three, periodontal disease often starts out as gingivitis, a swelling or reddening of the gums, and then proceeds to affect the soft and hard tissues that support teeth.

Scientists and dentists at Stony Brook have developed a new treatment for periodontal disease for dogs, and, they hope, eventually for humans. The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, a unit of the National Institutes of Health, recently awarded Stony Brook University’s School of Dental Medicine and Traverse Biosciences Inc., a Long Island research company, a $1.3 million award to continue to evaluate the preclinical safety and effectiveness of TRB-NO224 to treat periodontal disease.

“The grant was approved for funding because a panel of nationally prominent dental and medical scientists agreed that our grant proposal, and our qualifications and academic records were exemplary,” Lorne Golub, a distinguished professor in the Department of Oral Biology and Pathology explained in an email. Golub, who holds 55 patents and developed Periostat and Oracea, will lead the research, along with Ying Gu, an associate professor in the Department of General Dentistry at SBU.

While periodontal disease affects dogs, it is also widely prevalent among humans, with Golub calling it the “most common chronic inflammatory disease known to mankind.” Indeed, developing effective treatments is important not only for oral health, but it has implications for other conditions that are complicated or exacerbated by the collagenase enzyme prevalent in periodontal disease.

“Some studies indicate that chronic periodontitis can increase the risk for pancreatic cancer, head and neck cancer, cardiovascular disease and others,” Golub wrote in an email. “All of these diseases result in an increase in collagenase.”

A challenge in treating periodontitis is that the enzyme that is a part of the inflammatory response, collagenase, is present, and necessary, in normal metabolism. Ridding the body of the enzyme would cause harm. Golub worked with Francis Johnson, a professor of chemistry and pharmacological sciences at Stony Brook, to develop a new treatment using a modified form of curcumin, which is a bright yellow chemical that is a member of the ginger family. Naturally occurring curcumin does provide some benefit for periodontal diseases, Golub said, although the modified version Johnson helped create is more effective. “Very little” curcumin is absorbed from the gut into the blood stream after oral administration, Golub said.

The modification Johnson and Golub made was to make their variant triketonic. With the extra ketone, which has a negative charge, the attraction for zinc and calcium, which are a part of collagenase and have positive charges, is stronger, Golub said.

In dividing the work, Gu explained that Golub will supervise personnel, coordinate and oversee all experiments and provide technical oversight for the animal experiments and biochemical analysis. Gu will work with Hsi-Ming Lee, a research assistant professor in oral biology and pathology, to perform in vivo animal experiments and the biochemical analyses of pro-inflammatory mediator levels on blood, gingival fluid and gingival tissue samples. He and Golub will perform data analysis and prepare publications together. The scientific team involved in the study of TRB-NO224, which includes Maria Ryan, the chair of the Department of Oral Biology and Pathology, intends to develop this treatment for pets first. This, Golub suggested, was in part because the approval process for pet treatments is quicker to market.

The group hopes additional research, including safety and efficacy studies, will lead them to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for human uses. Ryan, who worked as a graduate student in Golub’s lab before she became the head of the department, is pleased with the process and the track record of a department Golub helped start in 1973.

“I am proud to say that this is Department of Oral Biology and Pathology’s fourth NIDCR grant for the development of new therapeutics for the management of periodontal diseases within the past four years,” Ryan wrote in an email. “The aim of this funding mechanism is to move these novel compounds further along in the FDA drug development process.” Ryan added that the benefits of TRB-NO224 extended to other medical arenas and has led to collaborations with additional scientists. TRB-NO224 not only impacts enzymes such as collagenase, but also affects pro-inflammatory mediators, she said.

“This new compound may be useful at preventing and/or treating numerous chronic conditions,” Ryan said. Studies are currently funded to investigate indications for osteoarthritis with the director of Orthopaedic Research, Daniel Grande, at the Feinstein Institute and for acute respiratory distress syndrome with Gary Nieman at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. Golub has worked with international collaborators for decades. Some of them praised his legacy and the work he’s continuing to do.

Golub’s patents reflect his “everlasting translational mission from molecular and biotechnological medical/dental research to doctors’ daily and every-day practice,” wrote Timo Sorsa, the Chief Dental Officer in Periodontology at the University of Helsinki Central Hospital in Finland in an email. Golub received an honorary M.D. from the University of Helsinki in 2000.

A resident of Smithtown, Golub lives with his wife Bonny, who is a travel agent. They have two children, Marlo and Michael, and four grandchildren. Golub and his wife were among the first to see a showing at the New Community Cinema in Huntington, now the Cinema Arts Centre, in their own folding chairs. They watched one of Golub’s favorite films, “Henry V,” with Sir Laurence Olivier.

Golub is optimistic about the prospects and progress on TRB-NO224. “We are beginning to see evidence of efficacy in a variety of diseases,” he offered. He also believes the treatment may have rapid acceptance because natural curcumin has been used for decades in a number of populations and is “believed to be safe and effective.”

The content in this version has been updated from the original.

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It’s time to raise the bar on communication skills for teachers. I realize there are sensational educators who inspire a cadre of young minds each year. There are also plenty of teachers who are weak communicators, whose work wouldn’t stand up to their own liberal use of the red pen and who have their own rules of grammar that defy any style book.

That seems especially problematic, particularly for language arts teachers who are, presumably, not only educating our sons and daughters about how to read and analyze text, but are also helping them develop their writing style and voice.

The do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do approach may, unwittingly, be preparing students for the unfair world where merit doesn’t count as much as other factors, like connections.

I’m not sure that’s really the lesson we want to teach or the subtext we want to share during these formative years.

I’d like to ask a favor of teachers: Please read your instructions before you give them to your students. You can shape the assignment the way you’d like: asking questions about identity, seeking to understand the perspective of the author, asking for an analysis of the tone of the piece. But please, please, please read over your directions before printing them out, sending them to students or sharing them with parents. It’s not OK for your writing to read like the assembly instructions for a child’s toy.

I know it will take a few more moments and I know that you’re not particularly well paid, but please remember your mission and the difficulty of a double standard. Children can sense hypocrisy quicker than a shark can smell blood in the water.

I realize these missives filled with misdirections may provide a lesson unto themselves. Students may learn that nobody is perfect. While that may be true, are the teachers — who provide confusing directions, who send out assignments rife with poor grammar and misspellings, or who casually make the kinds of mistakes for which they would take major deductions — comfortable enough with themselves and their position to provide students with the opportunity to correct them?

Ideally, learning isn’t just about hearing things, memorizing them, spitting them back out during a test and forgetting them within a week of an exam. As teachers say so often when they meet parents, they want their students to learn to think for themselves and to question the world around them.

If that’s the case, then let’s not pay lip service to those missions. Let’s add a corollary to that and suggest that how teachers communicate is as important as what they communicate.

Let’s also encourage students to ask teachers why their instructions include particular words or employ specific phrases. I recall, many years ago, the first time one of my more self-assured teachers silenced a room when he said, in his booming baritone, “I stand corrected.” The rest of us didn’t know whether to cheer for the boy who challenged him or to duck, worried that a temper tantrum with flying chalk — remember chalk? — might follow.

Maybe schools should hire an editor who can read the instructions to kids and emails to parents. Or, if the budget doesn’t allow a single extra employee, maybe they can engage in the same kind of peer review they utilize in their classrooms.

Ideally, students and teachers can seize the opportunity to learn and improve every year. Teachers create an assignment and then reuse it the next year. If the assignment is unclear, or the directions flawed, the teacher should do his or her homework and revise it.

All I ask is that teachers lead by example.

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Dave Jackson. Photo courtesy of CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

If we get a text message that our son just gained admission to his first choice for college, we might throw our arms in the air, pick up the phone and call him, or stand on the top of our desk and shout our joy to the room. We might feel, in that instant, as if he can achieve anything and, as a result, so can we.

While plants don’t send and receive text messages, they process and react to a range of signals, some of which can determine how and when they grow, which can be key parts of determining how much food they produce.

Recently, David Jackson, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, explored a mutation that causes corn, or maize, to experience growth that is so out-of-control that the corn becomes a disorganized mess. Jackson wondered what caused this growth and disrupted the creation of succulent rows of juicy, yellow bits ready to explode off the cob.

Stem cells can grow to become any type of cell. In this pathway, which was disrupted in the mutant and caused the uncontrolled growth, Jackson showed that the signal came from the leaves, which is likely responding to its surroundings. He discovered that fine tuning that mutation — or weakening the “grow-out-of-control” signal — was enough to cause a regular ear of corn to include as much as 50 percent more food. “What was surprising about our work is that we found this new stem cell pathway that had not been discovered in Arabidopsis,” which is, as Jackson described, considered the equivalent of the well-studied fruit fly in the plant world. “We had gone on to show that it was also present in Arabidopsis.”

At this point, he’s hoping to introduce these mutations or alleles into breeding lines to try to generate a similar increase in yields that he’s seen in the lab. He’s collaborating with DuPont Pioneer on that testing. “As in all areas of science, we make a basic discovery and hope it’ll be applicable,” he said. “We can’t guarantee it’ll work until” it’s checked in the field. “People cure cancer in mice, but find it’s more complicated in people. We’re hoping cumulative knowledge will lead to breakthroughs,” he added.

Sarah Hake, the director of the USDA Plant Gene Expression Center at the University of California at Berkeley, described the work as “important.” In an email, she suggested that “translation to more corn yield can take time, but this information will be crucial for thinking about breeding.”

Jackson received the mutated maize from a breeder in Russia. He then altered a wild type, or normal plant, to cause a similar mutation that produced more food. Jackson is excited about the potential to use the gene-altering technique called CRISPR, in which researchers can edit a genome, changing one or multiple base pairs at a time.

Above left, normal corn and, right, corn with a weakened Fea3 mutation. The mutated corn has up to 50 percent more yield. Photo by Byoung Il Je
Above left, normal corn and, right, corn with a weakened Fea3 mutation. The mutated corn has up to 50 percent more yield. Photo by Byoung Il Je

Jackson is not adding new genes but, rather, is “tweaking” the ones that are already there. He said agricultural companies can use CRISPR instead of dumping in a foreign DNA. In past experiments, Jackson has worked to produce a greater number of seeds in his experimental plants. In that work, however, he increased the number of seeds, although the size of the seeds was smaller, so the overall yield didn’t increase. In this study, however, he and his postdoctoral student Byoung Il Je produced more seeds that generated greater yield. The gene involved in this signaling pathway is called Fea3. It is part of the signaling network that tells the plant to pump more into the ear of the corn to produce more yield. Jackson named the gene Fea because of the way the corn looked. Fea stands for fasciated ear. He and the members of his lab had already characterized another gene, called Fea2.

Jackson has been working on this gene for 20 years, although the intensive work occurred more in the last four or five years. He said he’s benefited from the ability to take a mutant and identify the gene. When he started out 25 years ago, a graduate student could take five years to characterize a mutation and find a gene. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. Now, genome sequencing and fast mapping enables researchers to find a gene in as little as a few months. When he first produced the weaker mutation, Jackson wasn’t anticipating a higher yield but, rather, was hoping to prove that this gene was the one responsible for this uncontrolled growth that created a pulpy mess of corn. Jackson said he is “excited about the stem cell pathway” his lab discovered. He hopes this finding can lead to a better understanding of the signals that determine how a plant uses its resources.

A resident of Brooklyn, Jackson lives with his wife Kiyomi Tanigawa, an interior designer, and their eight-year-old son Toma.

Jackson, whose lab has seven postdoctoral researchers and one lab manager, plans to start experiments on tomatoes and rice to see how this gene is involved in similar signals in other food crops. He is also working on similar mutations to other genes like Fea3, which also might affect a plant’s decision to produce more food.

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Monday, we will finally get to see, on the same stage, the presidential candidates who hate each other, find each other unqualified, and who long ago seem to have taken the gloves off in their smackdown.

Here are just a few of the questions I’d ask the man and woman who would like to be our president:

• People don’t like either of you, including politicians in Washington. Secretary Clinton, how will you bring together Democrats and Republicans, when your war with so many Republicans dates back to your years as first lady? And, Mr. Trump, notable Democrats and Republicans seem to find your style and policies confounding. How much can you really accomplish without the broad-based support of Republicans?

• Mr. Trump, you suggested that Congress shouldn’t consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and they haven’t. What would you do if you were President Obama and the Senate openly ignored your choice for Supreme Court?

• Mrs. Clinton, there’s a frequent line from courtroom dramas like Law & Order that goes something like this: “You said X when the detectives spoke to you and now you’re saying Y. Which is it? Were you lying then or are you lying now?” People don’t trust you. You don’t seem completely forthcoming, even about your pneumonia, until we see pictures of you stumbling into your SUV. How do we know when you’re sharing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

• Mr. Trump, are you going to release your tax returns? The longer you go without sharing them, the more people wonder if you’re hiding something. You believe your opponent selectively discloses details about herself all the time, but you’re not sharing something most, if not all, candidates have shared. What gives?

• Mr. Trump, you have suggested on a few occasions that advocates of the second amendment might have something to say about Hillary Clinton’s position on gun control. You claim that people misinterpret what you say because you didn’t mean what you said when you wrote it. Your rhetoric, were you to be president, would mean something far different from what it does when you’re tweeting. If you were president, would you tamp down the bluster that people might misinterpret? Do you feel you can and should be able to shoot from the hip, as it were, whenever it suits your interests?

• Neither of you seems ready to say the kinds of things we would hope to teach our children, such as “I’m sorry,” or “I was wrong.” Can each of you name a situation or circumstance in public life when you made a mistake and you recognize that you could and should have done better?

• Okay, turning away from each other, what policy do each of you guarantee wouldn’t change one iota and for which you would be inflexible or unwilling to compromise if either of you became president? Candidates often make promises they can’t keep when they’re elected. Is there anything you will pursue in its current form from your platforms?

• You both must recognize that your own rhetoric has alienated voters and raised concerns among various groups about your ability to lead and act on their behalf. Mrs. Clinton, how would you reconcile with Trump’s “deplorables,” as you put it, and Mr. Trump, how would you represent Muslim-Americans, Americans of Mexican heritage or any of the other people you’ve alienated if you became president?

• This campaign seems steeped in negativity. What is the most positive message each of you can share? How would that positive message make people feel better about the election and, down the road, the prospects for themselves and for this country? Be as specific as possible.

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