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Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

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Doug Fearon. Photo from CSHL

Determined to help develop better treatments and, perhaps even a cure, Douglas Fearon, a medical doctor, decided to conduct research instead of turning to existing remedies. More than two decades later, Fearon joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and is working on ways to help bodies afflicted with cancer heal themselves.

Fearon is focusing on the battle cancer wages with the T lymphocytes cells of human immune systems. Typically, these cells recognize threats to human health and destroy them. The pancreatic cancer cells he’s studying, however, have a protective mechanism that is almost like a shield. “The cancer is killing the T cells before the T cells can kill the cancer,” said Fearon.

The T cells have a complex signaling pathway on their surface that allows them to link up with other objects to determine whether these cells are friend or foe. In pancreatic cancer, Fearon has focused on a receptor that, when attached to the deadly disease, may disarm the T cell.

Researchers had already developed a small molecule that blocks the receptor on the T lymphocytes from linking up with this protein for another disease: the human immunodeficiency virus. When Fearon applied this molecule to a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, the therapy showed promise. “Within 24 hours, T cells were infiltrating the cancer cells,” he said. “Within 48 hours, the tumors had shrunk by 15 percent. This drug overcame the means by which cancer cells were escaping.”

This month, doctors at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, where Fearon worked for 20 years, plan to begin Phase I human trials of this treatment for pancreatic cancer. Later this year, doctors at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, where Fearon has a joint appointment, will begin a similar effort.

Scientists are encouraged by the early results from Fearon’s treatment. The Lustgarten Foundation named Fearon one of three inaugural “Distinguished Scholars” last year, awarding him $5 million for his research over the next five years.

The scientific advisory board at the Foundation “expects distinguished scholars to be on the leading edge of breakthrough therapies and understanding for this disease,” said David Tuveson, a professor and director of the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Center Research Laboratory at CSHL.

During the early stage trials, doctors will increase the dosage to a level HIV patients had received during early experiments with the drug, called AMD 3100 or Plerixafor.

While Fearon is cautiously optimistic about this approach, he recognizes that there are many unknowns in developing this type of therapy. For starters, even if the treatment is effective, he doesn’t know whether the cancer may recur and, if it does, whether it might adapt some way to foil the immune system’s attempt to eradicate it.

Additionally, the receptor the doctors are blocking is required for many other functions in humans and mice. In mice, for example, the receptor on the T cell has a role in the developing nervous system and it also plays a part in a process called chemotaxis, which directs the migration of a cell.

“After giving this drug to HIV patients for 10 days, there were no long-term effects,” Fearon said. Researchers and doctors don’t “know for sure if you continued blocking this receptor what the long-term effects” would be.

Fearon and his wife Clare are renting a cottage in Lloyd Neck and have an apartment on the Upper East Side. Their daughter Elizabeth recently earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology in Cambridge, England while their son Tom, who is working toward a graduate degree in psychology, is interested in a career in counseling.

A native of Park Slope, Brooklyn who was the starting quarterback for Williams College in Massachusetts in his junior and senior years, Fearon feels it’s a “privilege to do something that may have a positive effect” on people’s lives.

Fearon is especially pleased to work at CSHL, where he said he can collaborate with colleagues who often immediately see the benefits of such a partnership. He has worked with Mikala Egeblad on intravital imaging, which is a type of microscope that allows him to look at living tissue. They are sharing the cost of buying a new instrument. Working with her “facilitated my ability to start up a project in my lab using a similar technique,” Fearon said.

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Bruce Stillman is still very determined even if he sounds frustrated. I interviewed the CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week when the research institution released, for the first time, a set of numbers indicating the positive economic impact of CSHL on Long Island.

While proud of an institution that has produced eight Nobel Prize winners, Stillman sounded a theme I hear regularly when I interview scientists at CSHL, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University: The country isn’t investing enough in research.

“The reduction in federal funding means we do have to support the institution through philanthropy more than we’ve been doing in the past,” Stillman said. “Hopefully, Congress will realize they should reverse the dramatic reduction in funding in the federal budgets. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Indeed, investments in research around the country make sense on many levels. For starters, many of us have unfortunate direct experience with a deadly disease like cancer, which slowly tears through a person’s body. We have also witnessed friends who have demonstrated spectacular courage and determination in the face of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Inspired by our friends and neighbors, we walk, run or do triathlons and we spend time in church, synagogues and mosques praying for them and for strangers battling the same affliction.

Scientists aren’t just looking for ways to lessen the symptoms or ease the pain — they’re also working to find signs of the disease before they appear. Angelina Jolie raised awareness of the potential benefits of preventing problems when she elected to have several surgeries.

As their doctors would rush to tell them, people shouldn’t have surgeries just because a famous actress did. Places like CSHL can provide the kind of knowledge that provides information that empowers informed decisions.

“There’s a lot of misinformation on the Internet,” Stillman said. “What the scientific community is trying to do is to make sure the information about genomics and medicine is correct and [people aren’t relying on information] out there that is misleading.”

Beyond the applied science part, however, researchers who are doing basic science often wind up making critical discoveries. By only funding those projects that might have a direct impact on human health, can and will be too self-limiting. What we learn can and often does help us. On the other side of that scale, what we don’t know can’t have any impact.

And then there’s the financial benefit. Research often has a multiplier effect, creating jobs, bringing in revenue and supporting the local economy.

“Everybody knows, including politicians, that science is an economic driver,” Stillman said. “If you take away public research funding, you’re basically giving up.”

Stillman said that what’s gone on in the last 15 years in the United States “bucks the trend since World War II, when the U.S. was invested and was a world leader in research.”

Stillman himself, who was born in Australia, has won numerous awards and runs his own DNA lab, said he came to this country because of American leadership in research, but now “things are changing rapidly. People like me will not come to this country because there’ll be opportunities elsewhere.”

CSHL, BNL, Stony Brook and LIJ are all huge economic benefits for Long Island, Stillman said.

“Unless this gets reversed,” he warned, “we’ll be in trouble.”

So, what will turn the tide?

“There’ll come a time when one can’t ignore the government role in economic development,” he said. It’s happened before, he argues, as investments in research after World War II helped bring the U.S. out of debt.

As a result future generations benefited enormously — and will do so again.

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Shawn Serbin. Photo by Bethany Helzer

While judging a book by its cover may be misleading, judging a forest by looking at the top of the canopy can be informative. What’s more, that can be true even from satellite images.

An expert in a field called “remote sensing,” Shawn Serbin, an assistant scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, takes a close look at the spectral qualities of trees, gathering information that generates a better understanding of how an area responds to different precipitation, temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Serbin is “on the cutting edge” of this kind of analysis, said Alistair Rogers, a scientist at BNL who collaborates with and supervises Serbin. “He’s taking this to a new level.” Serbin and Rogers are a part of the BNL team working on a new, decade-long project funded by the Department of Energy called Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments — Tropics.

The multinational study will develop a forest ecosystem model that goes from the bedrock to the top of the forest canopy and aims to include soil and vegetation processes at a considerably stronger resolution than current models.

The NGEE Tropics study follows a similar decade-long, DOE-funded effort called NGEE-Arctic, which is another important biological area. Serbin is also working on that arctic study and ventured to Barrow, Alaska, last summer to collect field data.

Shawn Serbin. Photo by Bethany Helzer
Shawn Serbin. Photo by Bethany Helzer

Working with Rogers, Serbin, who joined BNL last March, said his group will try to understand the controls on tropical photosynthesis, respiration and allocation of carbon.

Serbin uses field spectrometers and a range of airborne and satellite sensors that measure nitrogen, water, pigment content and the structural compound of leaves to get at a chemical fingerprint. The spectroscopic data works on the idea that the biochemistry, shape and other properties of leaves and plant canopies determine how light energy is absorbed, transmitted and reflected. As the energies and biochemistry of leaves changes, so do their optical properties, Serbin explained.

“Our work is showing that spectroscopic data can detect and quantify the metabolic properties of plants and help us to understand the photosynthetic functioning of plants, remotely, with the ultimate goal to be able to monitor photosynthesis directly from space,” Serbin said.

NGEE-Tropics, which received $100 million in funding from the DOE, brings together an international team of researchers. This project appealed to Serbin when he was seeking an appointment as a postdoctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It’s one of the reasons I was happy to come to BNL,” Serbin said. “To have the opportunity to collaborate closely with so many top-notch researchers on a common goal is incredibly rare.”

The tropics study includes scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories and also includes researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA and numerous groups from other countries.

In the first phase of this 10-year study, scientists will design pilot studies to couple improvements in computer modeling with observations in the tropics. These early experiments will include work in Manaus, Brazil, to see how forests react to less precipitation. In Puerto Rico, researchers will see how soil fertility impacts the regrowth of forests on abandoned agricultural land.

Serbin expects to work in all three regions. He plans to do some pilot work early on to identify how to deal with the logistics of the experiments.

“These are designed to ‘shake out the bugs’ and figure out exactly how we can do what we need to do,” he said.

Serbin lives in Sound Beach with his partner Bethany Helzer, a freelance photographer whose work includes book covers and who has been featured in Elle Girl Korea and Brava Magazine. The couple has two cats, Bear and Rocky, whom they rescued in Wisconsin. Helzer has joined Serbin on his field expeditions and has been a “trooper,” contributing to work in California in which the couple endured 130-degree heat in the Coachella Valley.

“Having her along has indeed shown that when you are in the field and focused on the work, you can miss some of the beauty that surrounds you,” Serbin said.

Serbin said the NGEE-Tropics work, which has involved regular contact through Skype, email and workshops, will offer a better understanding of a biome that is instrumental in the carbon cycle. “Our work will directly impact future global climate modeling projections,” he said.

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A view of the Demerec Laboratory, slated to house a proposed Center for Therapeutics Research. The laboratory, completed in 1953, needs an upgrade. Photo from CSHL

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research center that has produced eight Nobel Prize winners and is stocked with first-class scientists generating reams of data every year, shared some numbers earlier this week on its economic impact on Long Island.

The facility brought in about $140 million in revenue in 2013 to Long Island from federal grants, private philanthropy, numerous scientific educational programs and the commercialization of technology its scientists have developed, according to a report, “Shaping Long Island’s Bioeconomy: The Economic Impact of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,” compiled by Appleseed, a private consulting firm.

At the same time the lab tackles diseases like cancer, autism and Parkinson’s, and employs 1,106 people with 90 percent working full time and 987 living on Long Island.

“We are recognized as being one of the top research institutions throughout the world,” Bruce Stillman, the president and CEO of CSHL said in an interview. The economic impact may help Long Islanders become “aware that such a prestigious institution exists in their backyard.”

Stillman highlighted programs that benefit the community, including public lectures, concerts and the school of education, which includes the DNA Learning Center, a tool to build a greater understanding of genetics.
The financial benefit to the economy extends well beyond Long Island, too.

“The research we do has an enormous impact on the development by others of therapeutics and plant science in agriculture,” Stillman said.

Indeed, Pfizer recently received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for a breast cancer drug called Ibrance that is expected to produce $5 billion in annual sales by 2020. The research that helped lead to that drug was conducted at CSHL in 1994.

In its 125-year history, this is the first time the laboratory has provided a breakdown of its financial benefit.
The impetus for this report occurred a few years ago, when Stillman met with Stony Brook University President Dr. Samuel Stanley Jr. and Sam Aronson, who was then the CEO of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“We were talking about promoting further interactions and seeking state support,” Stillman said.

This year, CSHL will bring online a preclinical experimental therapeutics facility that will build out the nonprofit group’s research capabilities.

At the same time, CSHL is awaiting word on a $25 million grant it is seeking from New York State to support a proposed Center for Therapeutics Research.

The center would cost about $75 million in total, with CSHL raising money through philanthropic donations, partnerships with industry and federal aid. The center would “fit in well with our affiliation with North Shore-LIJ [Health System],” Stillman said.

CSHL plans to create the center in the Demerec Laboratory, which was completed in 1953 and needs an upgrade. Named after Milislav Demerec, a previous director at CSHL who mass-produced penicillin that was shipped overseas to American troops during World War II, the building has been home to four Nobel Prize-winning scientists: Barbara McClintock, Alfred Hershey, Rich Roberts and Carol Greider.

The renovated lab would house a broad range of research strengths, with candidates including a number of cancer drugs that are in the early stages of clinical trials; a therapeutic effort for spinal muscular atrophy, which is the leading genetic cause of death among infants; diabetes; and obesity.

The revenue from CSHL, as well as that from BNL, SBU and North Shore-LIJ, Stillman said, all have a “huge economic benefit to the Long Island community.”

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The Lusitania is docked in Liverpool sometime before 1912. Photo from the Michael Poirier Collection

Nancy Dorney will spend several hours at Pier A in New York City on May 7 honoring relatives she never met.

A retired shop owner from Stony Brook, Dorney will join officials from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and other countries to pay tribute to those who took a journey that ended abruptly and in many cases tragically exactly 100 years earlier when a German submarine torpedoed and sank the British ship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland as it was heading for Liverpool.

Among the 1,198 killed that afternoon were 128 Americans, which included 39-year-old pianist Charles Harwood Knight and his 42-year-old sister Elaine. The Knights were Dorney’s great-great-uncle and aunt and, for a time, were also her grandmother Millicent Lawrence’s guardians. After the sinking, which took 18 minutes, the Knights, who were traveling in first class, were never found.

The Knights “disappeared off the face of the Earth because they decided to take the ship that day,” Dorney said.

The sinking of the Lusitania, like the loss of the Titanic three years earlier, raised questions about what actions could have prevented the death of so many at sea. It also triggered active discussion about what role the United States could or should play in World War I.

The German government had warned of an aggressive campaign to sink ships around the British Isles that they believed were carrying munitions and reinforcements for the war. Some thought the Lusitania, which, at 24 knots, was the fastest cruise ship active at the time, could avoid becoming a target. The ship, however, had shut down one of its boilers to keep down costs, bringing its top speed to 21 knots, said Michael Poirier, co-author of the book “Into the Danger Zone: Sea Crossings of the First World War.” In the waters where the Germans had been patrolling, the ship was only going 18 knots, said Poirier.

The Lusitania “was handicapped by not speeding through the danger zone,” Poirier said. There are so many “what ifs,” he added.

In the aftermath of the sinking, opinions in the United States were sharply divided over the proper course of action. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who had run for president three times and was an outspoken member of the Democratic Party, urged the country to steer clear of involvement.

Bryan thought the sinking didn’t immediately require farm boys from the middle of the country to risk being “killed for the rights of wealthy Americans to travel through war zones,” said Michael Barnhart, a distinguished teaching professor in the History Department at Stony Brook.

Even if America didn’t enter the war, Bryan didn’t want the sinking to become “a line in the sand,” where, if the Germans cross that line in the future, America “paints itself into a corner and has no option but to go to war,” Barnhart continued.

Teddy Roosevelt personified the other side of this argument, urging the United States to come to the aid of the British. Roosevelt viewed the sinking of the Lusitania “as an example of barbarism,” Barnhart said.

Political cartoonists at the time described the Germans in terms similar to the way people view ISIS now, Barnhart said.

Sensing that the country wasn’t eager to become involved in war, President Woodrow Wilson demanded that “Germans give the citizens of neutral nations a chance to get away in lifeboats before the ship on which they had been sailing was sunk by a German submarine,” explained Richard Striner, a professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. The Germans told Wilson the British had deck guns on their passenger ships that the British could use if the submarines surfaced. Wilson, Striner continued, suggested the British get rid of these guns but, not surprisingly, the British refused.

Ultimately, however, Wilson did what Bryan feared, indicating that future attacks would bring the country closer to war. In protest of the president’s posturing, Bryan resigned. In 1917, the Germans “realized that turning the U-boats loose would bring the U.S. into the war,” Barnhart said, but, they resumed their attacks anyway amid a shift in political winds in Germany. The United States joined the war on April 6, 1917.

As for Dorney, she has delved deeper into the lives of distant relatives who were important for her grandmother. Charles Knight, who people called by his middle name Harwood, was an accomplished pianist and, as Dorney described, a bit of a character. He forgot the organ music he was supposed to bring to a family funeral and played a somber version of a ragtime song from 1896, called “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

The last anyone heard from the Knights was when they sent a note to Dorney’s grandmother that contained a list of first-class passengers aboard the Lusitania, with names including Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman. A theater producer, Frohman helped develop such stars as Ethel Barrymore and John Drew, relatives of current actress Drew Barrymore.

As the former owner of Pride’s Crossing, a housewares and furniture store in Stony Brook, Dorney said she has an appreciation for what she’s learned about the Lusitania. The woodwork on board was “beautifully made and included interior design and artwork that were magnificently done.”

Dorney and those attending the wreath-laying ceremony in New York will heed the words Poirier said are so often connected with the sinking of the Lusitania: “Lest we forget.”

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A friend recently forwarded an amusing Time Out article that included a list of things you’d never hear a parent say in New York City. I’d like to offer a suburban version, with the qualifying caveat that these are probably things you’d rarely hear a suburban parent say:

“Searching for a parking spot when three of my kids are late for their activities is so much fun. I’m sure one will open up soon and it’ll be incredibly close to where we need to go.”

“Awesome, the price of gas went up again. How about that? That’ll give us a chance to practice our math skills, guessing at the percentage increase in the cost of filling our tank.”

“An away game? Great. That gives us so much quality time to play a real-life version of an arcade game from our generation: Frogger.”

“You told your six friends we’d be driving? Fantastic, but you know our car only fits four, right?”

“Oh, hey, that’s a great idea. I’ll drive and you completely ignore me with a huge grin on your face while you type into your electronics. I thoroughly enjoy talking to myself.”

“You need one purple sock, one red sock and a Dr. Seuss hat in the next 20 minutes? Sure, no problem.”

“Why would my child need to sign up for another activity?”

“You hear that? Ah, yes, the leaf blower and the car alarm. Early morning music for the whole family.”

“Of course we can go to the new frozen yogurt place for breakfast.”

“Hey, I understand. Your son needed to practice his hitting outside at 6 a.m. because he has a big game. Well, good luck to him.”

“I’m sure we can find an art store that’s open at 11 p.m. tonight for a project that’s due tomorrow.”

“I don’t know how they do it. But every year they seem to put together exactly the right combination of kids for each class.”

“The teachers are just getting better and better. I’m sure all the tutors in this town are going to struggle to find students who need any extra help.”

“They have it so much harder than we did when we were young, poor dears.”

“Why, yes, I think we should change everything we do so that we can live like the Jones family. That’s a great idea, staying up until 2 a.m. on Monday nights. I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that sooner.”

“The older generation looks so much better in selfies than the younger one.”

“Fantastic, you’ve signed up for a team with all the same players for another season. That means the same parents will all get to hang out together and watch the same set of neuroses unfold during each quarter of the game.”

“They’ve added more standardized testing? What an incredible opportunity to learn and grow. You’re going to be so much further ahead than children in Japan, who are wasting their time with new material every day.”

“I’d love to answer your question, honey, but I’m not sure if there’s anywhere around here that I can get coffee first.”

“I’m sure there’s a great restaurant open close by at 11 p.m. on a Monday night that’ll be thrilled to have our team of 25 celebrate the end of another great season.”

“Oh, great, here comes Sheila, whose kids are so much better than mine, yours and those of everyone else. I can’t wait to hear about all the awards her kids have won this week.”

“So glad we were able to provide such a complete meal for the raccoons last night.”

“Absolutely. Everything is just perfect in the suburbs.”

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Christopher Fetsch (far left) and Anne Churchland (second from right) with a group of neuroscientists at a conference last month. Photo from Anne Churchland

When she’s having trouble understanding something she’s reading, Anne Churchland will sometimes read the text out loud. Seeing and hearing the words often helps.

An associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Churchland recently published research in the Journal of Neurophysiology in which she explored how people use different senses when thinking about numbers.

She asked nine participants in her study to determine whether something they saw had a larger or smaller number of flashes of light, sequences of sounds or both compared to another number.

To see whether her subjects were using just the visual or auditory stimuli, she varied the  clarity of the signal, making it harder to decide whether a flash of light or a sound counted.

The people in her study used a combination of the two signals to determine a number compared to a fixed value, rather than relying only on one type of signal. The subjects didn’t just calculate the average of sight and sound clues but took the reliability of that number into account. That suggests they thought of the numbers with each stimuli within a range of numbers, which could be higher or lower depending on other evidence.

Churchland describes this process as the probabilistic method. It would be the equivalent of finding two sources of information online about Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. In the first one, someone might have posted a brief entry on his personal Web page, offering some potentially interesting information. In the second, a prize-winning biographer might have shared an extensive view of her long life. In a probabilistic strategy, people would weigh the second source more heavily.

Funded by an educational branch of the National Science Foundation, Churchland said this is the kind of study that might help teachers better understand how people’s brains represent numbers.

Young children and people with no formal math training have some ability to estimate numbers, she said. This kind of study might help educators understand how people go from an “innate to the more formalized math.”

This study might have implications for disorders in which people have unusual sensory processing. “By understanding the underlying neural circuitry” doctors can “hopefully develop more effective treatments,” Churchland said.

Churchland is generally interested in neural circuits and in putting together a combination of reliable and unreliable signals. Working with rodents, she is hoping to see a signature of those signals in neural responses.

Churchland runs a blog in which she shares developments at her lab. Last month, she attended a conference in which she and other neuroscientists had a panel discussion of correlation versus causation in experiments.

She cautioned that a correlation — the Knicks lose every time a dog tracks mud in the house — doesn’t imply causation.

The group studied a lighthearted example, viewing the relationship between chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel Prizes in various countries, with Switzerland coming out on top of both categories. “In the chocolate case, correlation does imply causation because I like to eat chocolate and was looking for excuses,” she joked.

Christopher Fetsch, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, worked with Churchland for several months in 2010. In addition to teaching him how to do electrical microstimulation and serving as a “terrific role model,” Fetsch described Churchland as “an innovator with a high degree of technical skill and boundless energy.” Fetsch, who attended the same conference last month, lauded Churchland’s ability to bring together experts with a range of strengths.

Churchland created a website, www.Anneslist.net, which is a compilation of women in neuroscience. She said it began for her own purposes, as part of an effort to find speakers for a computational and systems neuroscience meeting. The majority of professors in computational neuroscience are men, she said. “It is important to have a field that is open to all,” she said. “That way, the best scientists [can] come in and do the best work.” The list has since gone viral and people from all over the world send her emails.

A resident of the housing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Churchland lives with her husband, Michael Brodesky, and their two children.

Churchland has collaborated with her brother Mark, an assistant professor at the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. Her parents, Patricia and Paul, are well-known philosophers. Her mother has appeared on “The Colbert Report.” She said her family members can all be contentious when discussing matters of the mind.

“The dinner table is lively,” she said.

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When you’re meeting deadlines every week, dealing with angry clients, when traffic takes forever for an important meeting or when body parts that all worked together for all those years now seem to be pulling in opposite directions, it’s easy to let the whole notion of romance slip.

Sure, we have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays and Valentine’s Day — well, you have Valentine’s Day.

I’m not a big fan of mass, romantic gestures on cue that support the card and flower industries, when we can make our boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands or wives feel special. But, much of the time, especially when we’ve got kids who have mastered the art of playing on our last nerve with the kinds of conversations that are soaked in sarcasm and disrespect, we might find it a tad challenging to find the time, energy and resources to raise the level of our romantic game.

And yet, one day our children, who just yesterday seemed to have absolutely no use for the opposite sex, have made that remarkable transition from whispering to each other about who they like to mustering the courage to speak to that person.

Recently, our daughter and her friends have been pulled into the whirlwind of an eighth-grade formal.

The communication network is extraordinarily efficient and reliable. Everyone, it seems, knows who is asking everyone else. It’s too bad they can’t add some algebra to the messages they’re all delivering to each other or, perhaps, a few Latin phrases that might be on an AP exam.

As an aside, it’s too bad meteorologists, who still seem to be living with egg on their faces from the big blizzard miss of 2015, can’t develop a forecasting model with the same level of middle school accuracy.

These kids seem to have taken a page from the birds on suburban streets, who sing loudly through the day, calling to their would-be partners to come share some quality time in their cheery, oak, maple and dogwood trees. One boy interrupted everyone’s lunch in the cafeteria, took a microphone and asked a girl to the formal.

Another suitor, who wanted to go to the dance with a softball player, took softballs and wrote one letter on each ball, to spell out “formal”?

And, speaking of sporting equipment, another courageous boy filled a girl’s locker with ping pong balls, which spilled out on the floor when she opened it. In the back of her locker, he’d put a note saying he finally found enough, uh, balls to ask her to the dance. She said “yes.”

There have been a few broken hearts and a few near misses, with a girl saying “yes” to someone just as another boy approached her with flowers. Those flowers suffered an unfortunate fate in the hands of the tardy suitor.

Learning that a boy she didn’t want to accompany to the dance planned to ask her at an after-school activity, another girl changed her plans and was suddenly missing in action.

Fortunately, it seems that, on balance, the anxiety level and frustration is considerably lower than the amusement these classmates have for this process.

As the boys are finding increasingly clever ways to ask the girls to the dance, I can’t help wondering if adult women and men find a similar satisfaction with a good romantic comedy or chick flick once in a while. The sound of those birds singing outside our homes may be just as recognizable and pleasant as a part of the courtship dance to men as they are to women — or indeed to the growing children.

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Eric Stach, group leader of Electron Microscopy at BNL and Special Assistant for Operando Experimentation for the Energy Sciences Directorate. Photo from BNL

In a carpool, one child might be the slowest to get ready, hunting for his second sneaker, putting the finishing touches on the previous night’s homework, or taming a gravity-defying patch of hair. For that group, the slowest child is the rate-limiting step, dictating when everyone arrives at school.

Similarly, chemical reactions have a rate-limiting step, in which the slower speed of one or more reactions dictates the speed and energy needed for a reaction. Scientists use catalysts to speed up those slower steps.

In the world of energy conversion, where experts turn biomass into alcohol, knowing exactly what happens with these catalysts at the atomic level, can be critical to improving the efficiency of the process. A better and more efficient catalyst can make a reaction more efficient and profitable.

That’s where Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Eric Stach enters the picture. The group leader of Electron Microscopy, Stach said there are several steps that are rate-limiting in converting biomass to ethanol.

By using the electron microscope at Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Stach can get a better structural understanding of how the catalysts work and find ways to make them even more efficient.

“If you could lower the energy cost” of some of the higher-energy steps, “the overall system becomes more efficient,” Stach said.

Studying catalysts as they are reacting, rather than in a static way, provides “tremendous progress that puts BNL and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at the center” of an important emerging ability, said Emilio Mendez, the director of CFN. Looking at individual atoms that might provide insight into ways to improve reactions in energy conversion and energy storage is an example of a real impact Stach has had, Mendez said.

Stach works in a variety of areas, including Earth-abundant solar materials, and battery electrodes, all in an effort to see the structure of materials at an atomic scale.

“I literally take pictures of other people’s materials,” Stach said, although the pictures are of electrons rather than of light.

Stach, who has been working with electron microscopes for 23 years, gathers information from the 10-foot tall microscope, which has 25 primary lenses and numerous smaller lenses that help align the material under exploration.

His work enables him to see how electrons, which are tiny, negatively charged particles, bounce or scatter as they interact with atoms. These interactions reveal the structure of the test materials. When these electrons collide with a gold atom, they bounce strongly, but when they run into a lighter hydrogen or oxygen atom, the effect is smaller.

Since Stach arrived at BNL in 2010, he and his staff have enabled the number of users of the electron microscope facility to triple, estimated Mendez.

“The program has grown because of his leadership,” Mendez said. “He was instrumental in putting the group together and in enlarging the group. Thanks to him, directly or indirectly, the program has thrived.”

Lately, working with experts at the newly-opened National Synchrotron Light Source II, Stach, among other researchers, is looking in real time at changes in the atomic structure of materials like batteries.

In February, Stach was named Special Assistant for Operando Experimentation for the Energy Sciences Directorate.

“The idea is to look at materials while they are performing,” he said. Colleagues at the NSLS-II will shoot a beam of x-rays through the battery to “see where the failure points are,” he said. At the same time, Stach and his team will confirm and explore the atomic-scale structure of materials at Electron Microscopy.

Working with batteries, solar cells, and other materials suits Stach, who said he “likes to learn new things frequently.”

Residents of Setauket, Stach and his wife Dana Adamson, who works at North Shore Montessori School, have an 11-year old daughter, Gwyneth, and a nine year-old son, Augustus. The family routinely perambulates around Melville Park with their black lab, Lola.

In his work, Stach said he often has an idea of the structure of a material when he learns about its properties or composition, even before he uses the electron microscope. “The more interesting [moments] are when you get it wrong,” he said. “That’s what indicates something fundamentally new is going on, and that’s what’s exciting.”

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Emily Krainer can hear the excitement in her father’s voice when she calls. After she gets off the phone, she tells her classmates about his work, which, one day, could influence their lives. Like Emily, they attend Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and, once they graduate, may use his work to help their patients.

The younger Krainer has “high hopes” for a promising new treatment her father developed for a potentially fatal disease.

Adrian Krainer, a professor and program chair of Cancer and Molecular Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has developed a drug for a pediatric neurological condition called spinal muscular atrophy, which is the leading genetic case of death among infants and affects about 1 in 6,000 newborns.

The drug, called an antisense oligonucleotide, is in phase III trials, which is the final stage before the Food and Drug Administration considers approving it.

SMA is a genetic disorder caused by a defective SMN1 gene. Patients with SMA rely on the SMN2 gene, which can produce normal survival of motor neuron protein but in low quantities because alternative splicing results in a shorter, unstable form of the protein.

Splicing is the process where important genetic information, exons, are joined together, while less important genetic parts, introns, are removed. The process starts with an RNA that is a copy of the gene, Krainer explained. For the SMN2 RNA, splicing leaves out the next to last exon. Krainer has found a way to encourage the splicing machinery to include exon 7 more efficiently.

These phase III trials involve two separate groups of patients. The first includes infants with type 1 SMA, which is the most severe version and has an average life expectancy of two years. Working with Isis Pharmaceuticals in California, doctors in these clinical trials will determine if the drug increases survival and reduces the need for ventilation.

In the second group, patients who are from two years of age up to 14 with type 2 SMA, which is an intermediate form of the disease, will receive the drug. Doctors will monitor improvements in neuromuscular function, Krainer said.

His Ph.D. advisor at Harvard, Tom Maniatis, praised his former student.

“This is beautiful and highly original work, which has already shown great promise for SMA therapy,” explained Maniatis, who is now chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center.

While Krainer is awaiting results of these trials, he is making new discoveries that may also affect future treatments.

In mouse models of SMA, Krainer has found that injecting the drug under the skin was even more effective than inserting it directly into the spinal chord.

Additionally, neutralizing the drug in the central nervous system didn’t prevent its effectiveness. The drug enabled spinal chord motor neurons to continue to function, even when it wasn’t active in that area.

“Surprisingly, the effect of the drug given that way is still dramatic,” he said.

Krainer cautioned that results in mice may not display a similar pattern in humans.

Still, the mouse data suggest treatment with this drug might be more effective if administered beneath the skin.

If this drug becomes an accepted treatment for SMA, the approach of creating a synthetic antisense oligonucleotide could also become an effective weapon against other diseases, such as familial dysautonomi, in which a mutation causes a reduction in the expression of a protein.

“It is estimated that 10 to 15 percent of all human disease causing mutations affect RNA splicing, so the tool [Krainer] has developed should have wide applications,” Maniatis suggested.

Maniatis has seen firsthand how Krainer has “a deep passion for science and a strong work ethic. More importantly, in my view, he has an incisive critical mind, which leads to the development of novel approaches and rigorous science.”

In addition to Emily, Krainer has two sons: Andrew, 22, who is in his last semester at CUNY-Baruch College, and Brian, 20, who is a junior at Carnegie-Mellon.

When she was young, Emily Krainer said she met children with SMA at conferences. These interactions “shaped my interest.”

Emily said her father is a role model and “hopes whatever I do in the future, I enjoy as much as he enjoys his work.”

As for the drug trials, the younger Krainer said her fellow future doctors want to know how this treatment works. She said her classmates hope he is “going to change the lives of so many patients.”

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