On the left is Viviana Cueva Gomez and Brian Cueva with their son Mattias. On the right is Byron and Anita Gomez with their second son Thiago. Viviana and Byron are siblings. Photo courtesy St. Charles Hospital
It started on Friday, Oct. 13, and concluded with a near photo finish the next day.
Viviana Cueva Gomez, who was getting close to her due date, went to St. Charles Hospital with her husband Bryan at around 7 p.m., when she started to feel discomfort.
The medical staff admitted her to the hospital, where she and Bryan anticipated the delivery of their first child.
Around 3 a.m. on the 14th, Anita Gomez, who is married to Viviana’s brother and was also pregnant, began to experience contractions, which sent her to Port Jefferson-based St. Charles Hospital as well.
At one point during the night, Viviana suspected that her sister-in-law was at the hospital.
Viviana asked the hospital staff if they could confirm that Anita was on the same floor.
The hospital, however, couldn’t give her that information because of confidentiality rules.
At some point during the next day, Viviana’s husband Bryan bumped into his brother-in-law Byron.
“I didn’t know my sister was there,” said Byron. “When I saw Bryan, we were joking” about how their sons were coming on the same day.
Indeed, as that Saturday wore on, Dr. Sarah Karalitzky performed C sections on both women.
Despite coming to the hospital second, Anita won the birth race, delivering her son Thiago at 4:26 p.m., while Viviana gave birth to Mattias soon thereafter, at 5:45 pm.
Separated by just over an hour with their birth times, the cousins were also just over half a pound different in weight: Thiago weighed in at 8 pounds, one ounce, while Mattias was 7 pounds, 10 ounces.
Anita Gomez holds her son Thiago. Photo from Byron Gomez
Big announcements
The extended family work in the same business, towing and fixing cars at S&B Auto Repair in Middle Island.
Viviana recalls the moment her brother shared the big news with their father Secundo at work.
Byron “started to tell my dad,” she said. “Everyone asks him what happened, is someone here [having] a baby?”
The family looked at Anita, who also works at S&B.
“Yes,” Byron said, “but someone else is, too.”
Their father looked at his daughter.
“Viviana, you?” he asked.
When she nodded, he jumped up and clapped for the impending arrival of two grandchildren.
“We didn’t believe we would deliver the same day, but things happen,” Viviana said.
Viviana, 31, and Byron, 29, have two other siblings, neither of whom is married and has children.
In addition to this momentous day, the extended Gomez family, who are originally from Ecuador, is having a memorable year, with a cousin giving birth this past June while another cousin is expecting a child in January.
“My family is growing a lot this year,” said Viviana, who lives in Medford.
Viviana Cueva Gomez and husband Bryan pose with their son Mattias. Photo from Viviana Cueva Gomez
Expectations for the cousins
Byron and Viviana anticipate that the two cousins, who were born one room apart at St. Charles Hospital and who each left the hospital the following Tuesday, Oct. 17, will be close.
“They’re going to be like brothers,” predicted Byron, who lives in Coram.
The two families haven’t yet decided whether they would consider having joint birthday parties for the Libras, whose Zodiac sign is, perhaps fittingly, represented by two equal parts of a scale.
A friend suggested the two cousins “don’t have to share the same day” for future birthday celebrations, said Viviana. Their friend wants to “go to two different parties” to celebrate each of their births.
Newborn Thiago with his older brother Dereck, who is five. Photo from Byron Gomez
A beaming brother
Thiago’s brother Dereck, who just turned five, is already fond of his younger sibling.
“He says he’s going to share TV and toys with him,” said his father Byron. “All the time, he’s kissing him. He really loves him.”
Indeed, Dereck used to play with a friend, but he only wants to be with his younger brother. When Dereck speaks to Thiago, he tells him he loves him and asks his father to translate his newborn brother’s movements and sounds.
“I say that he loves you, too,” said Byron.
Karalitzky, who delivered both babies, said staff members were caught up in the excitement.
An OB-GYN, Karalitzky feels “lucky to be in a field where the vast majority of the time, she’s able to be a part of good news and a happy day” in people’s lives. For the extended family, the shared birthday ensures that people “will always remember your birthday.”
Karalitzky, who has been at St. Charles Hospital for 10 years, should know: she was born on her mother’s birthday.
Her mom “always made it a special day,” Karalitzky said. “Every year, she’d say, ‘This is the best birthday present ever.’”
Christopher Vakoc with graduate student Junwei Shi. Photo by Gina Motisi/ CSHL.
By Daniel Dunaief
It is the type of miraculous conversion that doesn’t involve religion, and yet it may one day lead to the answer to passionate prayers from a group of people on a mission to help sick children.
Researchers in the lab of Professor Christopher Vakoc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have been working tirelessly to understand the fundamental biology of Rhabdomyosarcoma, or RMS, which is a type of connective tissue cancer that afflicts between 400 and 500 people each year in the United States, with more than half receiving the diagnosis before they turn 10 years old.
As a part of her PhD research, Martyna Sroka searched for a way to convert the processes involved in this cancer into something benign.
Using a gene editing tool enhanced by another former member of Vakoc’s lab, Sroka disrupted a signal she had spent years trying to find in a protein called NF-Y, causing cancerous cells in a dish to differentiate into normal muscle cells, a conversion that offers future promise for treatment.
Sroka, who is now working as a scientist in a biotechnology company focused on the development of oncology drugs, described how RMS cells look small and round in a microscope. After disrupting this protein, the “differentiated cells become elongated and spindle-like, forming those long tubular structures,” she explained.
She often grew cells on plastic dishes and the differentiated RMS cells spanned the entire diameter of a 15 centimeter plate, providing a striking visual change that highlighted that conversion.
While this research represents an important step and has created considerable excitement in the scientific community and among families whose philanthropic and fundraising efforts made such a discovery possible, this finding is a long way from creating a new treatment.
Other research has indicated that disrupting NF-Y could harm normal cells. A potential therapeutic alteration in NF-Y could be transient and would likely include follow ups such as a surgical, radiation or biological approach to remove the converted RMS cells, Vakoc explained.
Nonetheless, the research, which was published in August in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a potential roadmap for future discoveries.
“It was a long journey and being able to put the pieces of the puzzle together into a satisfying mechanism, which might have broader implications not only for our basic understanding of the biology of the disease but also for potential novel therapeutic approaches, was extremely exciting and rewarding,” said Sroka.
“It’s great to see so much excitement in the pediatric cancer field, and I am hoping that with time it will translate to much-needed novel therapeutic options for pediatric patients.”
The search
Cancer signals typically involve rewiring a cell’s genetic material, turning it into a factory that creates numerous, unchecked copies of itself.
Sroka and Vakoc were searching for the kind of signal that might force those cells down what they hope is a one-way differentiation path, turning those otherwise dangerous cells into more normal muscle cells that contract.
To find this NF-Y gene and the protein it creates, Sroka, who started working in Vakoc’s lab in the summer of 2017, screened over a 1,000 genes, which Vakoc described as a “heroic effort.”
Encouraged by this discovery and as eager to find new clinical solutions as the families who helped support his research, Vakoc recognizes he needs to strike a balance between trumpeting this development and managing expectations.
Interactions with the public, including families who have or are confronting this health threat, “comes with a lot of responsibility to make sure we’re being as clear as possible about what we’ve done and what have yet to do,” said Vakoc. “It’s going to be a long and uncertain road” to come up with new approaches to this cancer.
Funding families
Some of the families who provided the necessary funding for this work shared their appreciation for the commitment that Vakoc, Sroka and others have made.
“We are very excited about the newest paper [Vakoc and Sroka] published,” said Phil Renna, the Senior Director of Communications at CSHL and Director of the Christina Renna Foundation, which he and his wife Rene formed when their daughter Christina, who passed away at the age of 16, battled the disease. The Christina Renna Foundation has contributed $478,300 to Vakoc’s lab since 2007.
“In just a few short years, he has made a major leap forward. This lights the path of hope for us and our cause,” said Renna.
Renna explained that the lab has had numerous inquiries about this research. He and others recognize that the search for a cure or treatment involves “tough, grinding work” and that considerable basic research is necessary before the research can lead to clinical trials or new therapeutics.
Paul Paternoster, whose wife Michelle succumbed to the disease and who has raised funds, called Vakoc and Sroka “brilliant and incredibly hard working,” and suggested the exciting results “came as no surprise.”
He is “extremely pleased” with the discovery from the “standpoint of what it can lead to, and how quickly it was discovered.”
Paternoster, President of Selectrode Industries Inc., which manufactures welding products and has two factories in Pittsburgh, suggested that this strategy can have implications for other soft tissue sarcomas as well.
The next steps
To build on the discoveries Sroka made in his lab, Vakoc plans to continue to use a technique Junwei Shi, another former member of his lab, developed after he left CSHL and joined the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now a tenured professor.
Shi, whom Vakoc called a “legend” at CSHL for honing the gene editing technique called CRISPR for just this kind of study, is also a co author in this paper.
In future research, Vakoc’s lab plans to take the screens Sroka used to find NF-Y to search to the entire human genome.
“That’s how the family tree of science operates,” said Vakoc. Shi “made a big discovery of CRISPR and has since continued to create new technology and that he is now sharing back” with his lab and applying it to RMS. Additionally, Vakoc plans to expand the testing of this cellular conversion from plastic dishes to animal models
Shi, who worked in Vakoc’s lab from 2009 to 2016 while he earned his PhD at Stony Brook University, expressed satisfaction that his work is paying dividends for Vakoc and others.
“It just feels great that [Vakoc] is still using a tool that I developed,” said Shi in an interview. Many scientists in the field are using it, he added.
For Shi, who was born and raised in southern China, working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory fulfilled a lifelong dream.
He recalled how he retrieved data one Saturday morning that indicated an interesting pattern that might reveal the power of a new methodology to improve CRISPR screening.
When Vakoc came to the lab that morning, Shi shared the data, which was a “whole turning point,” Shi said.
Shi said he appreciates how CSHL has been “a home for me,” where he learned modern molecular biology and genetics.
When he encounters a problem in his lab, he often thinks about how Vakoc would approach it. Similarly, Vakoc suggested he also reflects on how his mentor Gerd Blobel, who is a co-author on the recent paper and is at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, would respond to challenges.
As for the family members of those eager to support Vakoc, these kinds of scientific advances offer hope.
When he started this journey, Renna suggested he would feel satisfied if researchers developed a cure in his lifetime. This paper is the “next step in a marathon, but it makes us very excited,” he said.
To share the encouraging results from Vakoc’s lab with his daughter, Renna tacked up the PNAS paper to the wall in Christina’s bedroom.
Heather Lynch, above, is the inaugural director of the Collaborative for the Earth at Stony Brook University. File photo courtesy Rolf Sjogren/National Geographic
Heather Lynch is hoping to take a few pages out of the Coke and Pepsi playbook, which is rarely, if ever, used in the fields where she works.
A penguin expert who has traveled more than 9,000 miles to Antarctica to monitor populations of these flightless water foul, Lynch, who is the IACS Endowed Chair of Ecology & Evolution, plans to use her new role as the inaugural director of the Collaborative for the Earth at Stony Brook University to accomplish several tasks, including shaping the way people think about environmental issues like climate change.
“Coke and Pepsi understand the importance of psychological research and persuasion,” Lynch said. “The environmental community has not used any of the tools to get at the hearts and minds” of the public.
Scientists have been trying to reach people in their heads when they also need to “reach them in their hearts,” she added.
Lynch hopes to figure out ways to bring in people who are experts in psychology and persuasion instead of adding another model of climate change consistent with so many others that have made similar predictions.
Lynch, whom a steering committee chose from among several qualified tenured faculty at SBU to take on this new role, will also help organize forums in which researchers and participants worldwide discuss pressing environmental issues.
In the forums, Lynch plans to encourage debate about challenging topics on which researchers disagree, such as the role of nuclear power in achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. She also hopes to address the concept and moral hazard of geoengineering.
In recent years, scientists have debated whether geoengineering, in which scientists use chemical means to cool the atmosphere, could exacerbate the problem or give people false hope that taking steps to reduce emissions or mitigate climate change may not be necessary.
Lynch also suggested other “third-rail topics” as population control may be fodder for future Stony Brook forums.
Scientists “don’t discuss controversial things,” said Lynch. “There tends to be an echo chamber in the scientific community. The forum will help us air these issues.”
To be sure, Lynch believes the issue of climate change and the urgency of the climate crisis is well established. The differences she hopes to discuss relate to various potential solutions.
“I’m hoping to focus on things where we disagree,” she said. “We need to get at the root of that.”
SBU Provost Carl Lejuez, to whom Lynch is reporting in this role. File photo
The right candidate
As a candidate, Lynch met numerous criteria for the search committee and for Provost Carl Lejuez, to whom Lynch is reporting in this role.
“Her research is and has been squarely placed to understand climate change and the climate crisis and how we try to move forward toward a healthier planet,” said Lejuez.
Lynch is also a “creative, entrepreneurial thinker” who has an “exciting vision for what the Collaborative can be,” Lejuez said. “She has a real strength in leadership and is very good at bringing people together.”
Lejuez has several goals for the Collaborative in its first year. He would like Lynch to start creating forums that can “live up to the potential of being a leader in creating that academic conference that brings rigor to real-world problems” and is connected to policy, industry and politics and that has clear deliverables.
Additionally, Lejuez would like the Collaborative to move toward an understanding of Stony Brook’s role in the future of climate science, climate justice and sustainability.
New podcasts
Lynch plans to dedicate considerable energy to this effort, cutting back on some of her teaching time. She plans to conduct podcasts with people on campus, speaking with them about their work, what keeps them up at night, what technologies excite them and a host of other topics.
She also hopes to bring in the “brightest lights” to big-stage events at Governors Island and on Long Island.
She is pondering the possibility of creating a competition akin to the entrepreneurial TV show “Shark Tank.” At Stony Brook University, faculty judges could evaluate ideas and advance some of them.
The Shark Tank could give students an opportunity to propose ways to create a greener Stony Brook campus.
As for the psychology and social science of environmental efforts, Lynch plans to work with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science to explore ways to understand how people think about these issues.
The evidence and impact of climate change increases the urgency of this work and the potential contribution of the university to debating, addressing and proposing solutions.
Earlier this year, Hurricane Otis intensified within 12 hours from a tropical storm to a deadly Category 5 hurricane, slamming into Mexico.
The potential for future storms with intensification that occurs so rapidly that forecasts might not provide warnings with sufficient time to take emergency measures should ring alarm bells for area residents.
Hurricane Otis, whose intensification was the second-fastest recorded in modern times, “should scare everybody on Long Island,” said Lynch. “People think toddling along with business as usual is an option. That is not an option.”
We are on the precipice of a few social evenings. As such, I have prepared the internal and external dialog of one such potential interaction. Yes, some of it reflects my performance in previous gatherings, while other elements are exaggerated versions of what may happen. And away we go:
“Hi Pat, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Dan.”
“Good to meet you, too, Dan.”
Ow, did you have to squeeze my hand that hard? Were you trying to prove something? I get it. You’re bigger and stronger than I am. You probably lift weights and stare at yourself in the mirror at the gym while you listen to Annie’s “Tomorrow.” No, I know you don’t listen to Annie. At least, not in public..
Not that you asked, but I like to sweat in the gym, too. I use the elliptical machine, the bike and the treadmill.
“So, did Maria tell you about me?”
Wait, who’s Maria? Oh, right, your wife, the woman standing next to you. She’s the reason we’re here. Our wives worked together a few years ago and now the four of us are going out to dinner.
Pat is talking about how great he is at bowling.
He wants me to smile, so I’m smiling, but I’m not sure what he said. Maybe it was self deprecating? Nope, doesn’t seem likely. He’s talking about how much his average has gone up since he joined the Thursday night league.
“Good for you,” I say.
He nods appreciatively. Whew! I said the right thing. Go me!
Oh, cool, now he’s talking about how great his son is at tennis. I’m picturing myself scuba diving. I’m looking at him, but I’m imaging fish around me, the warm water, and the bubbles that expand as they head to the surface. Nice! Life is good down here. Oh, wait, he just touched my shoulder. He wants me to say something. Staring into space isn’t enough.
“You know what I’m saying?” he asked.
I’m sorry, no. I don’t know, but I’m going to nod and hope that’s enough. Nope, clearly not.
“Tell me more about your son,” I say.
That’s enough. He’s off to the races with another story about some incredible app his son is working on that already has over 1,000 subscribers. My wife seems to be enjoying Maria’s company. Wait, no, she wrinkled her eyes subtly at me. Uh oh! She knows I’m not paying attention to John. No, that’s not his name. It begins with a P. No, hold on. I’ll get it. It’s Paul.
“So, Dan,” she says, “did Pat tell you about their plans to go to Alaska this summer?”
Pat! Duh. How easy was that? I would have gotten it eventually. No, I wouldn’t. Who am I kidding?
I’m going to focus closely on his story. He’s talking about how much he enjoys vacations. I like vacations.
“Alaska was pretty amazing,” I say, hoping I shared the right sentiment. “We saw whales, drove a dog sled, and ate fresh fish.”
He’s always wanted to go to Alaska. He can’t wait to see the wide open terrain. He wonders whether it’ll be the same 500 years from now.
Assuming the Earth is still here and is habitable, what will humans be talking about and thinking about in 500 years? Will a potentially longer life span mean that future humans will be more patient? Will they think about what our life was like today? They’re as likely to think about us as we are to think about the people who shared the world of 1523.
The evening is almost over. We pay the check and talk about how wonderful it is to to go out together.
“Yes, we should do this again some time,” I say as we head towards the car. Maria and my wife give each other a professional hug – not too long and not too close – while Pat and I share a manly handshake. Pat seems to appreciate the firmer grip.
“Something wrong with your hand?” my wife asks as we walk towards the car.
“Nope, all good,” I say, as I try to bring the circulation back to my fingers.
A Jamaican fruit bat, one of two bat species Scheben studied as a part of his comparative genomic work. Photo by Brock & Sherri Fenton
By Daniel Dunaief
Popular in late October as Halloween props and the answer to trivia questions about the only flying mammals, bats may also provide clues about something far more significant.
Despite their long lives and a lifestyle that includes living in close social groups, bats tend to be resistant to viruses and cancer, which is a disease that can and does affect other mammals with a longer life span.
Armin Scheben
In recent work published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, scientists including postdoctoral researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and first author Armin Scheben, CSHL Professor and Chair of the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology Adam Siepel, and CSHL Professor W. Richard McCombie explored the genetics of the Jamaican fruit bat and the Mesoamerican mustached bat.
By comparing the complete genomes for these bats and 13 others to other mammals, including mice, dogs, horses, pigs and humans, these scientists discovered key differences in several genes.
The lower copy number of interferon alpha and higher number of interferon omega, which are inflammatory protein-coding genes, may explain a bat’s resistance to viruses. As for cancer, they discovered that bat genomes have six DNA repair and 33 tumor suppressor genes that show signs of genetic changes.
These differences offer potential future targets for research and, down the road, therapeutic work.
“In the case of bats, we were really interested in the immune system and cancer resistance traits,” said Scheben. “We lined up those genomes with other mammals that didn’t have these traits” to compare them.
Scheben described the work as a “jumping off point for experimental validation that can test whether what we think is true: that having more omega than alpha will develop a more potent anti-viral response.”
Follow up studies
This study provides valuable potential targets that could help explain a bat’s immunological superpowers that will require further studies.
“This work gives us strong hints as to which genes are involved, but fully understanding the molecular biology will require more work” explained Siepel.
In Siepel’s lab, where Scheben has been conducting his postdoctoral research since 2019, he is using human cell lines to see whether adding genetic bat elements makes them more effective in fighting off viral infections and cancer. He plans to do more of this work with mice, testing whether these bat variants help convey the same advantages in live mice.
Armin Scheben won the German Academic International Network Science Slam competition with his presentation on bat genomics.
Siepel and Scheben have discussed improving the comparative analysis by collecting information across bats and other mammals of tissue-specific gene expression and epigenetic marks which would help reveal changes not only in the content of DNA, but also in how genes are being turned on and off in different cell types and tissues. That could allow them to focus more directly on key genes to test in mice or other systems.
Scheben has been collaborating with CSHL Professor Alea Mills, whose lab has “excellent capabilities for doing genome editing in mice,” Scheben said.
Scheben’s PhD thesis advisor at the University of Western Australia, Dave Edwards described his former lab member’s work as “exciting.”
Edwards, who is Director of the UWA Centre for Applied Bioinformatics in the School of Biological Sciences, suggested that Scheben stood out for his “ability to strike up successful collaborations” as well as his willingness to mentor other trainees.
Other possible explanations
While these genetic differences could reveal a molecular biological mechanism that explains the bat’s enviable ability to stave off infections and cancer, researchers have proposed other ways the bat might have developed these virus and cancer fighting assets.
When a bat flies, it raises its body temperature. Viruses likely prefer a normal body temperature to operate optimally.
Bats are “getting fevers without getting infections,” Scheben said.
Additionally, flight increases the creation of reactive oxygen species, which the bat needs to control on an ongoing basis.
At the same time, bats produce fewer inflammatory cytokines, which helps prevent them from having a runaway immune reaction. Some researchers have hypothesized that bats clear reactive oxygen species more effectively than humans.
A ‘eureka’ moment
The process of puzzling together all the pieces of DNA into individual chromosomes took considerable time and effort.
A Mesoamerican mustached bat, one of two bat species Scheben studied as a part of his comparative genomic work. Photo by Brock & Sherri Fenton
Scheben spent over 280,000 CPU hours chewing through thousands of genes in dozens of species on the CSHL supercomputer called Elzar, named for the chef from the cartoon “Futurama.” Such an effort would have taken eight years on a modern day personal computer.
During this effort, Scheben saw this “stark effect,” he said. “We had known that bats had lost some interferon alpha. What astounded me was that some bats had lost all alpha” while they had also raised interferon omega. That was the moment when he realized he found something novel and bat specific.
Scheben recognized that this finding could be one of many that lead to a better understanding of the processes that lead to cancer.
“We know that it’s unlikely that a single set of genes or a small set of genes such as we identified can fully explain the diversity of outcomes when it comes to a complex disease like cancer,” said Scheben.
A long journey
A resident of Northport, Scheben grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. He moved to London for several years, which explains his use of words like “chuffed” to describe the excitement he felt when he received a postdoctoral research offer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
When he was young, Scheben was interested in science despite the fact that classes were challenging for him.
“I was pretty poor in math and biology, but I liked doing it,” he said.
Outside of work, Scheben enjoys baking dense, whole wheat German-style bread, which he consumes with cheese or with apple, pear and nuts, and also hiking.
As for his work, which includes collaborating with CSHL Professor Rob Martienssen to study the genomes of plants like maize that make them resilient amid challenging environmental conditions, Scheben suggested it was the “best time to be alive and be a biologist” because of the combination of new data and the computational ability to study and analyze it.
Scheben recognized that graduate students in the future may scoff at this study, as they might be able to compare a wider range of mammalian genomes in a shorter amount of time.
Such a study could include mammals like naked mole rats, whales and elephants, which also have low cancer incidence and long lifespans.
My wife and I used to say “the recording is always on.”
It was our code words to each other to be careful about what we said and did in front of our children, particularly when, as many parents know, we might not want our children to act or speak in the same way we might be tempted to in the moment.
Our children have an incredible ability to monitor everything we do, even when they don’t appear to be paying any attention to us. Sometimes, they actively choose the opposite because our choices annoyed or frustrated them.
If, as many of us say and believe, we want our children to be better than we are, we wish them well, wait and watch, hoping their happiness, success and achievements far exceed our own.
Perhaps such reaction formation is what brings grandparents and grandchildren together, causing various characteristics to skip a generation, as two opposites create the same.
Aside from things like weekly routines, an emphasis (or not) on achievements like community service, or performance in sports or music, parents recognize that we are role models.
In the movie “42” about trailblazer Jackie Robinson, the first African-American man to play in Major League Baseball, a father shouts racial epithets at Robinson, leading his conflicted son to ponder how to behave. The son echoes what his father shouts.
In that moment, Peewee Reese puts his arm around Robinson, offering his public support and quieting the hostile crowd. Reese even suggests, as a nod to the realities of today, that “Maybe tomorrow we’ll all wear number 42. That way they won’t tell us apart.”
Films are great, but we don’t live in a world where supportive music and smiling heroes remind us who we are or how we should act.
It’s up to us to decide how to be better for ourselves and for our children.
A friend recently shared a story about his daughter. A college student, she was working at an ice cream store during a fall break. A few customers came in and a man in the group asked her where she attended college.
When she told him, the man suggested that there were Muslims who attended that college and it would be easy enough to take a few of them behind the shed and get rid of them.
The man who made a joke about murder at a time of violent conflict in the Middle East and ongoing and hostile disagreements among Americans probably wasn’t thinking about his children, about my friend’s daughter, or anyone else.
Maybe he was repeating the words his father or mother said at the dinner table, after an evening of drinking or within minutes of leaving a house of worship.
Is that the person he wants to be? Is that what he would encourage his own children to believe, that people who practice other religions or have other beliefs are somehow such enemies that it’s okay to make such a comment?
We have to be better than that. Maybe the guy didn’t mean it, but even saying it suggests that he not only thought it, but that he also likely shared that idea in some context in front of his children.
Killing and hatred won’t end if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for our actions and words.
We identify ourselves in particular ways, by such factors as nationality, religion, race, among many other labels.
Those identifiers, many of which we didn’t choose but are an accident of our birth, mean that others around us are on the outside, associating with a different group.
We owe it to our children to imagine and create a better world. That starts by serving as role models and not as reflexive perpetuators of anger, hatred, or prejudice towards those we consider others.
With the world echoing the conditions from the 20th century, we should speak and act in ways that bring people together and that would make us proud if and when we heard our children making those same, or perhaps better, remarks.
Joseph Pierce, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the inaugural director of Stony Brook University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies program. Photo courtesy Stony Brook University
Stony Brook University named Joseph Pierce, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, the inaugural director of a Native American and Indigenous Studies effort as the university plans to hire three new faculty in this nascent undertaking.
Next year, the southern flagship school of the State University of New York plans to add staff in the English Department, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Anthropology.
“I have been eager for this to start,” said Pierce, a member of the Cherokee Nation who has been at the university for a decade. “We have so much to contribute to broader discussions that are happening around the world. The university is better by including Native American studies.”
Andrew Newman, professor and chair of the Department of English at SBU. Photo courtesy Stony Brook University
Andrew Newman, professor and current chair of the Department of English, who is also chair of a committee advising Axel Drees, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, described Pierce as having a “real national profile,” adding that he was the “right person to be the founding director.”
Starting next fall, students at the university can minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies, where they can study the history, art, social and political interests, languages and cultures of Indigenous peoples.
The focus on Native American Studies will emphasize transdisciplinary topics such as environmental justice and sustainability.
Indigenous scholars should have a “seat at the table,” said Newman, “as they are globally one of the demographics most impacted by climate change.”
Islands in the Pacific are disappearing, Guam is undergoing “significant environmental degradation,” and fires in the Pacific Northwest and leaking pipelines in the United States and Canada are “disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples,” Pierce added.
Indigenous groups relate to the land in a way that’s different from others, approaching it as stewards and caretakers, Pierce said.
“We see land as a relative,” he noted. “We’re asking very different questions about what it means to care for a place and to care for the environment and to care for the life that sustains it.”
The New York City government proposed plans for flood relief on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the event of future storms like Hurricane Sandy. The proposals included building massive walls and raising elevated platforms, including clearing thousands of trees.
Numerous indigenous groups objected and protested against such plans, Pierce said.
In an email, Carl Lejuez, Stony Brook University’s provost, suggested that a significant piece of Governors Island is climate justice, so the link between the Governors Island effort and indigenous peoples “fits naturally with the goals of the New York Climate Exchange.”
Axel Drees, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SBU. Photo courtesy Stony Brook University
Lejuez credited Drees as a “driver of this in collaboration with Professor Pierce.” Lejuez added that his office is “definitely providing support to see it come to fruition.”
The most crucial component in the start of this effort is hiring faculty.
“If we build the core faculty across the university, we can definitely consider expanding research and curriculum opportunities,” Lejuez wrote.
Student interest
Students from the Anthropology Department recently invited Pierce to give a talk about some of his current research.
“It was evident that a lot of them have an interest in working toward understanding humanity, what it means to be human,” he said. They also have an understanding of how anthropology as a discipline has sometimes historically “adopted rather unscientific and proto-eugenic methods” in describing and analyzing Indigenous Peoples.
Students are eager for an alternative perspective on the acquisition and acceptance of knowledge.
Pierce believes students have considerable interest in Native American Studies. His courses about Latin American indigenous populations are full.
“There are numerous students who are interested in Native American and Indigenous studies but don’t quite have a cohesive plan of study that’s available to them,” Pierce said. “This is remedying that disconnection.”
Long Island students grow up in numerous towns and communities with Native American names, such as Sachem, Wyandanch, Montauk and Setauket.
Newman added that the staff hopes the new effort can do some “outreach to local schools and provide professional development with kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers. It would be an important mission for the university to educate Long Island as a whole about Native culture.”
The free event will be held on Oct. 30 at 4 p.m.at Stony Brook University’s Staller Center for the Arts, Theater Two, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook.
By Daniel Dunaief
Want to hear characters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein discussing artificial intelligence? Or, perhaps, get an inside look at an interaction between a scientist studying penguins and a potential donor? Maybe you’d like something more abstract, like a thought piece on aspects of memory?
You can get all three at an upcoming Science on Stage performance of three one-act plays written by award-winning playwrights that feature the themes of cutting edge research from Stony Brook University.
Ken Weitzman Photo courtesy of SBU
On October 30th at 4 p.m. at Staller Center for the Arts’ Theater Two, which holds up to 130 people, professional actors will read three 10-minute scripts. Directed by Jackson Gay, topics will include research about artificial intelligence, climate change in Antarctica and collective memory. Audience members can then listen to a discussion hosted by Program Founder and Associate Professor of Theater Ken Weitzman that includes the scientists and the playwrights. The event is free and open to the public.
Funded by a grant from the Office of the Provost at Stony Brook University and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, the performances are an “amuse-bouche,” or an appetizer, about some of the diverse and compelling science that occurs at Stony Brook University, said Weitzman.
“The hope is that [the plays] generate interest and get people to want to ask the next question or that [the plays] stick with audience members emotionally or intellectually and makes them want to discover more.”
The upcoming performance features the writing of two-time Tony Award winning playwright Greg Kotis, who wrote Urinetown; Michele Lowe, whose first play made it to Broadway and around the world; and Rogelio Martinez, whose plays have been produced around the U.S. and internationally.
The short plays will feature the scientific work of Nilanjan Chakraborty, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Heather Lynch, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, and Suparna Rajaram, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science in the Psychology Department.
“It’s a good example of what we are doing and the opportunities for us as we continue to put funding in the arts and the humanities and also in the intersection of that from an interdisciplinary perspective,” said Carl Lejuez, Stony Brook Provost, in an interview. This kind of collaborative effort works best “when it’s truly bi-directional. Both sides benefit.”
Lejuez credits President Maurie McInnis with setting the tone about the importance of learning the humanities and the sciences. Lejuez said McInnis talks during her convocation speech about how she had intended to become a physician when she attended college, but took an art history course that was part of a general education curriculum that changed her life. The sixth president of Stony Brook, McInnis earned her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University.
Lejuez highlighted a number of interdisciplinary efforts at Stony Brook University. Stephanie Dinkins, Professor in the Department of Art, bridges visual art and Artificial Intelligence. She has focused her work on addressing the shortcomings of AI in understanding and depicting black women.
The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has an arts and culture program, while the Collaborative for the Earth has faculty from numerous disciplines. They are starting a new Tiger Teams to develop key areas of study and will offer seed funding for interdisciplinary work to tackle climate change.
Lejuez plans to attend Science on Stage on October 30th.
“I feel an almost desperation to learn as much as I can about all the aspects of the university,” he said. Not only is he there to “show respect for the work and give it gravitas, but it’s the only way [he and others] can do [their job] of representing and supporting faculty and staff” in science and the humanities.
An enjoyable experience
The participants in Science on Stage appreciate the opportunity to collaborate outside their typical working world.
Heather Lynch, who conducts research on penguins in Antarctica and worked with Lowe, described the experience as “immensely enjoyable” and suggested that the “arts can help scientists step out of their own comfort zone to think about where their own work fits into society at large.”
Lynch explained that while the specific conversation in the play is fictionalized, the story reflects “my aggregate angst about our Antarctic field work and, in that sense, is probably more literally true than any conversation or interaction with any real life traveling guest.”
Lynch believes the play on her work is thought provoking. “Science is a tool, what matters is what you do” with that science, she said.
Lynch was thrilled to work with someone new and believes Lowe probably learned about Antarctica and the challenges it faces.
Bringing talent together
The first iteration of Science on Stage occurred in 2020 and was available remotely in the midst of the pandemic. Weitzman had reached out to scientists at Stony Brook to see who might be willing to partner up with playwrights.
Heis eager to share the diverse combination of topics in a live setting from this year’s trio of scientists. “I did some nudging to make sure there were a variety” of grand challenge topics, he said.
Weitzman explained that bringing the humanities and arts together in such an effort generated considerable enthusiasm. “There’s such incredible research being done here,” he said. “I want to engage for this community.”
He hopes such a performance can intrigue people at Stony Brook or in the broader community about science, theater writing or science communication.
While the plays are each 10 minutes long and include actors reading scripts, Weitzman said the experience would feel like it’s being performed and not read, particularly because professional actors are participating.
He also hopes one or more of the playwrights sees this interaction as an opportunity to create a longer piece.
“I would love it if [this experience] encourages a playwright to think it justifies a full length” script, Weitzman said.
Lynch wrote a pilot screenplay herself called “Forecast Horizon” that she describes as an intellectual exercise. If Netflix calls, however, she’s “definitely interested in having it live on,” she said. Writing the screenplay gave her a “better appreciation for how much more similar science is to the arts than I would have thought. Both involve solving puzzles.”
As for future funding, Lejuez suggested that the University was still figuring out how to allocate available funds for next year and in future years.
He would like to see how this first time in person goes. Depending on the interest and enthusiasm, he could envision a regular source of funds to support such future similar collaborations.
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Some of the ways SBU combines arts and humanities with science
By Daniel Dunaief
The southern flagship State University of New York facility, Stony Brook University seeks ways to bring the best from the arts and humanities together with science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Provost Carl Lejuez. Photo from SBU
Indeed, the school provides a home for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, where researchers tap into famed actor Alda’s improvisational acting skills, among other techniques, to connect with their audiences and share their cutting-edge work and discoveries.
In addition to the October 30th Science on Stage production at Staller Theater 2, Provost CarlLejuez recently highlighted numerous additional interdisciplinary efforts.
This past spring, the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics presented artwork by Professor of Mathematics Moira Chas. Chas created artwork that combines yarn and wire, clot and zippers to illustrate mathematical objects, questions or theorems.
The Office of the Provost has also provided several grants to support interdisciplinary work. This includes two $25,000 grants that promote the development of new research teams to explore interdisciplinary areas of scholarly work and address challenges such as Digital Futures/ Ethical Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability, Critical health Studies/ Health Disparities, Global Migration, and other areas.
Additionally, the Collaborative for the Earth brings together faculty from the arts, humanities and social sciences with behavioral science and STEM faculty. The university is starting a new Tiger Teams that will develop key areas of study and offer seed funding to tackle climate change. The funding will explore ways to create solutions that policy makers and the public can adopt, as well as ways to address disparities in the impact of climate change and ways to support people who are disproportionately affected by this threat.
SBU added interdisciplinary faculty. Susannah Glickman, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, has interests such as computing, political economy, 20th century US and world history and the history of science.
Matthew Salzano, IDEA Fellow in Ethical AI, Information Systems and Data Science and Literacy, meanwhile, has a joint appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Communication. He studies rhetoric and digital culture, emphasizing how digital technology, including artificial intelligence, impacts and interacts with social justice.
Through course work, members of the university community can also address interdisciplinary questions. Associate Professor in the Department of Art Karen Lloyd teaches an Art and Medicine course, while Adjunct Lecturer Patricia Maudies, also in the Art Department, teaches Art + The Brain. Both of these courses bring in guest lecturers from STEM and medicine.
Stony Brook also hosts centers aimed at interdisciplinary research, such as the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS).
One of the current goals and objectives of the IACS strategic plan is to advance the intellectual foundations of computation and data, with high-impact applications in engineering, in the physical, environmental, life, health and social sciences, and in the arts and humanities.
President Barack Obama said he wanted even more funding for treatment. File photo
By Daniel Dunaief
Daniel Dunaief
Years before he was the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama gave me a call.
I was working at Bloomberg News as a banking reporter and was covering some financial services issue. A source of mine suggested that I chat with this state senator from Illinois, whom he insisted was going places. My source clearly recognized Obama’s potential.
What I recall about a conversation that was akin to getting a rookie card for Derek Jeter was that Obama was erudite, eloquent and halting in his response to my questions. Attuned to the rapid pace of New York conversation, I was unaccustomed to the cadence of his conversation.
When Obama ran for office, I recognized not only his name but also his speech pattern.
I have had brushes with a wide range of people of varying levels of fame, often times in the context of my work as a journalist. Please find below a brief compendium of such interactions.
— Jim Lovell. The commander of Apollo 13, Lovell and his wife Marilyn attended an event in Florida where I was their point of contact. When the cool night breeze gave Marilyn a chill, Lovell jumped up to get her sweater and asked when they could leave. I asked my bosses, who wanted Lovell, who was the honored guest, to stay until after dinner. He was greatly appreciative when I told him he could finally lift off.
— Yogi Berra. I attended an event at Tavern on the Green event, where Berra was a client of the host. Even though I was only five foot, seven inches tall at the time (I’m probably a bit shorter now), I towered over the older and thin former Yankees catcher. When I told him it was an honor to meet him, he took my hand in his and offered a polite smile.
— Eliot Spitzer. Before he was a governor and client 9, Spitzer was a hard-charging New York Attorney General who went after investment banks for inflating stocks to help their business at the potential expense of investors. I spoke regularly with Spitzer, whose energy and intellect made it hard for my fingers to keep up while I was typing notes. I expected the impressive and ambitious Spitzer to ascend to national office.
— Scott Kelly. I interviewed Astronaut Scott Kelly after he set an American record for continuous time in space of 340 days aboard the International Space Station. With his then girlfriend, now wife, Amika Kauderer, in the room, the two of them described his book. She also recounted the second class treatment she received from some of the wives who weren’t impressed with her status as a girlfriend.
— Ed Koch. The former New York mayor was a staple at Bloomberg News, where I worked for several years. At 6 feet, two inches tall, Koch towered over me as he regularly filled his plate with some of the free snacks and sugary treats at the newsroom.
— Hank Paulson. I interviewed the former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Hong Kong. After I asked the first question, Paulson, who would become Treasury Secretary, yanked the microphone out of my hands and spent the rest of the interview holding it up to his mouth. I tried to project my voice into the microphone and above the chatter in a crowded restaurant.
— Goldie Hawn. At a lunch at Shun Lee Palace near Lincoln Center with a former banker from the now defunct Lehman Brothers, I spotted the famous actress as I approached her crowded table. Dressed in a sleeveless black dress, she could tell I recognized her. Rather than look away, she gave me a warm and welcoming smile. I wished, even moments later, that I had given her a thumbs up or an appreciative grin.
— Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. When I was at the New York Daily News, I spoke regularly with the Knicks legend for a rookie (Channing Frye) vs. veteran stock picking contest. While he lost the contest, he couldn’t have been friendlier and more receptive during our weekly calls, updating me on his life and sharing his weekly stock picks.
Growing up in Hooper, a small town in the central part of Nebraska, Jon Heusel considered following in his parents’ footsteps.
His father William took him on house calls where he provided for a wide range of medical needs.
Jon Heusel with his father William.
Along the way, however, Heusel, whose mother Mona was also an intensive care unit nurse towards the end of her career, discovered genetics and immunology as he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska and then his MD, PhD at the University of Washington in St. Louis.
Enamored with these sciences and inspired to pursue a path of patient care from a different perspective, Heusel blazed his own trail, albeit one in which health care remained a professional focus.
Indeed, the second-generation doctor, who became Vice Chair for Clinical Pathology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University on October 2nd, has devoted his career to the translation of new technologies into healthcare solutions.
For the past decade, this involved next generation sequencing, but also other new technologies and computerized systems for analyzing the data.
Heusel is inspired by a drive to improve the healthcare at academic medical centers like Stony Brook and Washington University, where new discoveries can affect positive change.
“The more I learned about Stony Brook, which is an up-and-coming university, the more I thought it was a magnificent opportunity for me,” said Heusel, who admired the recent jump Stony Brook University has made in the U.S. News and World Report rankings.
Mandate
Pathology Chair Kenneth Shroyer described Heusel as a “wonderful recruitment” and believes his background makes him especially well suited to his role.
“We want to develop in-house capacity to do advanced molecular testing to find actionable mutations that could inform therapeutic decision making,” said Shroyer. “He’s extremely experienced in that area.”
John Heusel’s medical school graduation with his parents William and Mona Heusel.
Shroyer suggested Stony Brook wants to develop opportunities for advanced sequencing technology within the molecular pathology lab, with a focus on molecular oncology.
Heusel described the development of a comprehensive diagnostic service in cancer as a high priority.
The cost of building new services with new technologies will require significant investment. The Pathology Department will work in partnership with the Cancer Center to build services.
“Ideally, the clinical services we build will also be attractive in supporting research and contract testing from companies in the pharmaceutical and biotech spaces,” Heusel explained.
By using informatics and digital pathology, Stony Brook can become a place where medical students and professionals in related areas including computational biology, genetic counseling and oncology increasingly want to come.
Heusel particularly appreciates the opportunity to translate technology and science into healthcare solutions.
“If you do this correctly, the tests, systems, programs and people you have recruited to run them will extend far into the future,” he said. “When this happens, you leave behind a legacy of excellence.”
Heusel will replace Eric Spitzer, who will retain his role of medical director of labs until Heusel takes over that role in January.
Shroyer described Spitzer’s contributions to the department and hospital as “tremendous,” adding that he has “been outstanding in his position as leader of the hospital laboratory. While we know [Heusel] is going to be extremely successful in part due to [Spitzer’s] help in the transition phase, we’re still going to miss” Spitzer.
Spitzer has been a valuable counselor to Shroyer and a mentor to many and is an “outstanding educator” who has been a “very impactful educator for our residents and medical students,” Shroyer said.
Educational opportunities
Heusel not only has ambitions for the university, but also for himself in his new job.
The new pathology vice chair is looking for opportunities to put his knowledge and instincts to work to make Stony Brook better — even if only in the slightest of ways, he said.
“The tumblers of fate must align themselves to become opportunities for transformational leadership; those are relatively rare,” he explained. “It’s my hope that I am well prepared and can recognize them when they cross my path.”
As for the public, Heusel recognizes that primary school teachers have a tough job in educating the public in general and in sharing the intricacies of science such as genetics. He admires them for their work.
He suggested that primary education could be reimagined amid the exponential growth in knowledge.
“I am hopeful that biology and genetics will be taught in a way that empowers people to understand their bodies and their health or disease better, but I think it is more important to teach our children to think critically,” he explained.
Part of Heusel’s job is to make the results of complex testing accessible to patients and, in many cases, their doctors.
“The growing importance of genetics in our understanding of health and disease means people will, over time, gain new insights simply because they are reading and hearing about these concepts much more often,” he explained. “It also highlights the critical role that well trained genetic counselors have in the healthcare of today and the foreseeable future.”
Jon Heusel with his wife Jean at a Gallery North art show.
Heusel and his wife Jean enjoy living in the Stony Brook area, where they have found the people welcoming. In the past, they have gone scuba diving and sky diving and have also done canoeing, hiking, kayaking and skiing.
As they have gotten older, they have tended towards quieter experiences. They have found the West Meadow Beach sunsets “amazing” and have enjoyed their introduction to shows at the Staller Center for the Arts.
Heusel also appreciates a life outside work that includes working with wood, painting, doing pottery, cooking and making up poems, songs on the ukulele and bad puns.
His parents generated a sense of compassion in Heusel and his sisters, with a “wonder of the human body, and with the ability to find humor in almost anything.”
As for his work, Heusel is thrilled that Shroyer recruited him to join the university. He admits, though, that he has had to adjust to local driving styles.
“I am surprised by the aggressive manner in which people drive inside their cars which is so very opposite from the friendliness they exude outside of them,” he said.
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