At the end of World War I, Spanish Influenza caused the world to focus on the same kinds of measures that people have been using to protect themselves, including wearing masks and social distancing.
Back then, pharmaceutical companies couldn’t produce vaccines and boosters for the H1N1 flu virus which killed 50 million people worldwide, including 650,000 people in the United States.
A family and their cat during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. Public domain photo
History professors at Stony Brook University described a decidedly different period over 100 years ago and the reaction by the American people to the public health crisis.
The armistice to end the war was signed in the middle of the pandemic, said Nancy Tomes, distinguished professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University.
“Our noble dough boys were coming back after having saved Western Civilization,” Tomes said. There was no finger to point to blame someone for the coming hardship. The American public recognized that this was an “ailment our brave boys brought home. It’s your obligation to take care of these soldiers.”
People who didn’t do their part to help heal members of the military and reduce the threat were considered “slackers.” When public health officials in New York asked workers to stagger the times they took the subway, people “were not supposed to kick up a fuss because this is war,” Tomes said.
During the Spanish Influenza, people didn’t express partisan politics about public health issues.“The idea was that there’s an epidemic and it’s all hands-on deck,” she added.
Contrast that with modern times, when an anti-federal government ideology has been developing for decades, said Paul Kelton, professor and Gardiner chair in American History at Stony Brook.
“That’s been brewing since the 1980s,” Kelton said. The COVID pandemic happened at a time when this distrust toward the federal government “reached its peak.” Today, “we have a national media culture where we focus on the federal government” and, at the same time, the country has an anti-federal government ideology that’s animating a large portion of the American population,” he said.
Kelton, whose expertise includes the study of Native American history, suggested that several tribes have embraced the opportunity to get the vaccine, in part because of the encouraging response among tribe leaders.
The Navajo, for example, who have a well-earned skepticism toward the federal government, have a high rate of vaccination because the tribal government has taken charge of this public health effort.
“When people are empowered at the state and local level, rather than the federal government coming in and doing it, it makes a difference,” Kelton said.
Indeed, the communities that have resisted vaccines and public health measures during the current COVID crisis include areas with high rural white populations.
To be sure, historians recognize that the specifics of each pandemic, from the source of the public health threat to the political and cultural backdrop against which the threat occurs, vary widely.
Recalling a saying in the field of public health, Kelton said, “if you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen one pandemic.” That suggests that the lessons or experiences amid any single public health threat don’t necessarily apply to another, particularly if the mode of transmission, the symptoms or the severity of the threat are all different.
“The lesson from history is to expect the unexpected when you’re dealing with germs,” said Kelton. “Novel germs are hitting populations in different circumstances. We are living in different conditions than in the past.”
What pandemics generally do, Kelton said, is expose fissures in society.
Part of what the study of other pandemics suggests is the need for opportunities to live healthier lives among those who are impoverished or are feeling disenfranchised.
“If nothing changes and health care access [remains as it is],we are going to repeat that again,” Kelton said.
Basic access to better nutrition can help fight the next pandemic, reducing the disproportionate toll some people face amid a public health threat, he said.
“Things like making sure that homeless people can get into a homeless shelter and not infect each other, the nuts and bolts of keeping people healthy, we neglected,” added Tomes.
The hours a few meteorology professors and some of their students spent in driving snow and whipping wind this past weekend amid the nor’easter may improve the accuracy of future weather forecasts.
Samantha Lankowicz, above, a sophomore at SBU, takes a photo of the multi-angle snowflake camera, which is the equipment mounted on the black tripod. It captures photos of the snowflakes as they fall from three angles in real time. Photo by Brian Colle, Stony Brook University
Even as other Long Island residents were hunkered indoors, Stony Brook University Professors Brian Colle and Pavlos Kollias were teaming up with scientists from several institutions as a part of a three-year NASA-led study called IMPACTS, for The Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms.
The researchers and a group of their students launched weather balloons and gathered radar data from last Friday evening through Saturday night, as the nor’easter named Kenan dumped well over two feet of snow through parts of Long Island.
Stony Brook students helped launch weather balloons every few hours, while NASA sent an ER-2 high altitude airborne plane and a Lockheed P-3 Orion plane into the storm.
“Everyone brings their tools to the sandbox with respect to looking at these storms,” said Colle, who collected data and managed students for over 24 hours.
At 4 a.m., Colle was driving on a road where the lanes and other traffic had disappeared.
“I kind of enjoyed it,” Colle admitted, as he maneuvered along the snow-covered roadway where the lanes completely disappeared.
Colle is in the second year of an IMPACT operation that started in 2020 and was put on pause last year amid the pandemic.
The purpose of the study is to improve forecasting in a one-to-two-day time horizon.
An improvement in the accuracy of localized forecasts over a shorter time can help municipal authorities determine when to send out plows.
“The models can hone in on those features and provide what we refer to as ‘nowcasting’ or short term forecasting,” Colle said. “There’s a big emphasis within the National Weather Service of providing decision support to emergency managers.”
Part of what makes forecasting these storms so challenging is the difficulty in predicting the timing and location of snow bands, which drop large amounts of snow in short periods of time.
In addition to information from the weather balloons, scientists throughout the area gathered temperature, wind and moisture data in places like Brookhaven and Albany.
Researchers ran a few different radar systems probing into the clouds to get more details about how these precipitation bands formed.
During the storm, Colle said the wind shear or the change in wind speed at different altitudes was dramatic, with 10- to 20-knot winds near the ground and 50-knot winds only 500 meters above.
“I was surprised by how strong those winds were, right above our heads,” Colle said.
Colle suggested that the students who participated in gathering data amid a driving snowstorm had the opportunity to apply their textbook learning to a real-world situation.
“The students learn about these measurement approaches in class” but they truly understand it differently when they gather the data themselves, he said.
Student experience
A second-year student in the PhD program at Stony Brook, Erin Leghart, who lives in Farmingdale, worked from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., which included launching six balloons in about six to eight hours.
Leghart said this was the first time she experienced winds like this in a winter storm.
She was well-dressed for the weather, as she invested in an ankle-length winter coat, snow boots, thermal long johns, Patagonia under armor and ski goggles.
Leghart said the excitement about the storm built about five days before it arrived, as it presented an opportunity to “do a live experiment.”
A sophomore at Stony Brook, Samantha Lankowicz, meanwhile, was excited to join her shift from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
“I got to do hands-on science with other students,” she said.
Lankowicz, who loves snow and was hoping for a chance to study a nor’easter this year, was pleased that one of the balloons made it all the way to the stratosphere.
Lankowicz has been to other balloon launches where a snow band turned into rain, which was “not as fun, standing in pouring rain when it’s 34 degrees.”
The only time she felt cold was when she had to take off her ski gloves and put on thinner gloves to handle the balloons.
Also a sophomore, John Tafe, who is from Salem, New York, was fascinated by weather early in life. When he was four years old, he saw clouds on the horizon and predicted a thunderstorm, which not only came later that day, but also knocked out power.
Tafe, whose hands also got cold from handling the balloons, was excited to contribute to the effort.
“To be in such a major storm that hopefully will provide valuable data is exciting,” Tafe said. “I hope that the data we collected will help advance the science.”
We are stuck in a headline and news cycle rut. Please find below some fantasy headlines, and the sources or unlikeliest of sources, for those news flashes.
— “Kardashian women decide not to show any more skin” – People Magazine. In the interests of encouraging people to dress appropriately for winter weather and to draw attention to their ideas rather than their bodies, the Kardashians decide that revealing less of their over-exposed bodies will aid society.
— “President Biden had a great day” –The New York Post. Granted, President Biden hasn’t exactly created a stellar track record in his first year in office – the withdrawal from Afghanistan clearly could have gone better – but the The New York Postseems intent on providing a steady stream of stories excoriating him for everything.
— “Former President Trump tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – The Washington Post. Fond of fact checking the former president, the Washington Post would certainly attract attention with a fact check that suggests the former leader of the free world was being honest.
— “Senator McConnell itching to approve Biden’s Supreme Court pick” – The New York Times. Using unnamed sources, of course, the Times could break one of the biggest stories of the decade if McConnell somehow signaled that he was eager to give a liberal Supreme Court nominee the benefit of the doubt and his full support.
— “Giants and Jets get A’s for effort” – New York Daily News. It seems obvious and easy to pick on losing sports teams, particularly those that haven’t delivered for rabid fans for years. Hometown papers could recognize the effort, even if the results aren’t there.
— “We don’t really know, but look out your window” – the Weather Channel. I give weather.com credit for calling last weekend’s nor’easter well. About five days before a single flake fell, they knew that a big storm had the potential to form and dump tons of snow in the area. They were right. Then again, all of that technology doesn’t always play out scenarios accurately. It’d be funny and fitting if they said on the air, “big storm could be coming our way. Or not.”
— “Inflation totally under control” – CNBC. Despite evidence to the contrary at the gas pump, in the supermarket and just about anywhere people have to pay for goods or services, wouldn’t it be great if inflation somehow, magically, came under control, giving the Fed the chance to stay on the sidelines for an economy still recovering from the pandemic?
— “Fauci appreciates the respect and support of Senator Rand Paul” — Reuters. Okay, so, this may be among the least likely of the headlines, but, wouldn’t it be nice/ shocking if the two doctors somehow were on the same page?
— “Spirit of bipartisanship sweeps through Washington” – Politico. Yeah, sure, we can dream. Dems and Repubs aren’t seeing eye to eye on anything. In fact, they seem to be energizing their bases by attacking the other side. Still, the day such a report came out would indeed be a chance to celebrate.
— “Children rediscover books” – Apple News Spotlight. Disenchanted with electronics, children around the world left social media for a day and enjoyed interacting with characters like Horton, Mr. Tumnus, Meg Murry, Alec Ramsey and Emma Woodhouse.
— “Hero scientists behind life saving vaccines” – Fox News. Despite some members of conservative media taking vaccines to protect themselves and their families, they and their guests sometimes praise those who resist vaccines and question the legitimacy of the vaccines for others.
Even when I’m squinting through a deluge that floods my front windshield, I can see sprinklers on timers, throwing water on lawns drenched with rain.
That image captures the sometimes feckless nature of the routine and periodic token efforts we engage in and that reflect our modern reality.
To that end, I thought I’d share similar similes and phrases to capture the moment.
Like a pencil on an airplane. Sure, pencils are helpful when doing crossword puzzles. On a plane on the way to another country, though, pencils serve no purpose in filling out the necessary paperwork to enter customs. When my family travels, I pack black and blue pens in my carry-on bag.
Like a mask worn around the chin. Exhausted from wearing masks, people have dropped these potentially protective pieces of equipment to their chins, even after they are done eating or drinking. These masks, while visible, are only effective at hiding double chins.
Like a concerned automated voice on a customer service line. I have been on far too many calls where it’s clear the company has no interest in allowing me to speak to an actual person. After pushing 18 buttons and waiting through music that makes Kenny G sound like a symphony, a sickly sweet voice tells me how important my call is to “us,” which sounds suspiciously like a corporate version of a dystopian leadership. If my call were truly important, I wouldn’t have to wait over an hour for someone to pick up the phone, tell me she can’t hear me, and suggest I call back later.
Like an expired coupon. Sometimes, I think the coupons I get in the mail have either expired before they arrive or, like a message to Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, will self destruct in five seconds. That way, I’ll get the offer for something that piques my interest, like half off a turkey sandwich, and then I’ll have to pay full price as sympathetic store clerks tell me they’d be happy to throw the expired discount in the garbage, which is really the most they can do.
Like another set of incomprehensible instructions. Do you ever struggle with the directions to assemble something, staring at pictures of objects that often look nothing like the assortment of pieces assembled in front of you? These instructions use vocabulary that doesn’t make sense for objects that aren’t in the packaging.
Like someone else’s garbage when I’m carrying dog poop. My big dog makes huge poops that rival the stink of a train or airport bathroom amid extensive weather delays. While holding my nose, I pass my neighbors’ garbage cans on the street. Tempted as I might be to drop the double-knotted bag into their can, I carry the prized stink bomb back to my own garbage can.
Like a phone going off in a forest. Unlike the question of whether a proverbial tree makes a sound if no one in a forest hears it fall, I’m convinced I would hear a phone going off in a forest, especially if I were in the middle of a nap or about to write the best phrase of my life that the electroshock sound would delete from my rattled brain.
Like another chat with “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings. Is it me or does Jennings seem anxious Amy Schneider may threaten to eclipse his record win streak on the show? His conversations with the contestants seem especially stilted and awkward. In an answer that borrows from the game’s format: the adjective Jennings most often uses when he doesn’t know what else to say and he’s run out of forced laughter. The answer: What is “fantastic?”
Pregnancy and lactation can alter genes in specific mammary cells, which may have implications in a defense against cancer.
In mouse models, mice that became pregnant at a young age have so-called epigenetic changes that survive for the animal life span and some of those are linked to a decrease in breast cancer.
In a recent study published in Cell Reports, Cold Spring Harbor Associate Professor Camila dos Santos and her graduate student Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara found that a protein involved in mammary cells in mice, called CD1d, boosts the immune system after a full pregnancy cycle, protecting it against breast cancer.
“Our research demonstrated that increased levels of CD1d in breast cells serve as a signal to recruit higher numbers of specialized immune cells” called natural killer T-cells, or NKT, “to come and reside within the breast tissue after pregnancy,” dos Santos explained in an email. These NKTs are part of mechanisms that reduce breast cancer risk after pregnancy.
Dos Santos would like to understand the molecular changes that occur from pregnancy and hopes one day to adapt them in the form of a vaccination or pill to decrease the risk of breast cancer.
To be sure, numerous questions about the process of using the immune system to prevent cancer remain, which means that the development of such a preventive pill requires considerable additional research.
Dos Santos has spent the last eight years developing model systems that allow her to discover pregnancy-induced changes that could lead to preventive strategies.
Enhancing the communication between epithelial and immune cells could represent a way to decrease breast cancer development and even treat cases of developed cancer.
To get to that point, dos Santos, the members of her lab, and her collaborators plan to make discoveries like this one to understand the dynamic interaction between the cascade of molecular interactions from pregnancy and the genetic and immunological reactions.
Humans have four CD1 genes, which all play a similar role in immunity. Additionally, there are several types of NKT cells, and each of them has a different immunological function, which means that any prevention or treatment that tapped into this system would need to bring the right CD1 molecule and the right NKT cells.
It is not yet clear whether enhancing CD1 signals protect women who might have a predisposition to breast cancer. Dos Santos is currently exploring this question in animals.
While dos Santos is focusing specifically on pregnancy-driven changes in the mammary gland, she acknowledged that altering CD1d levels in other organs might also decrease other types of cancer.
Dos Santos described pregnancy as being akin to turning on a light. First, during the course of gestation, pregnancy brightens that light to the top. After birth, the dimmer goes to the middle, leaving the system in a different state, which is not only more prepared for the next pregnancy but also to defend itself against alterations like cancer.
In most pregnancy mammary cells in mice, the scientists found a 10-fold increase in the abundance of NKT cells when compared to cells from an individual who had never been pregnant.
When the researchers removed the CD1d protein in mice, they found an association between the absence or low expression and the development of tumors in the breast.
Dos Santos and Hanasoge hypothesize that this protein is recruiting immune cells to monitor breast cells after pregnancy. If the epithelial cells develop cancer, the NKT cells may kill them, preventing the development and advancement of cancer.
In addition to working with mouse models of pregnancy, dos Santos is collaborating with Northwell Health to study cells from healthy women who are undergoing cosmetic surgery. They are analyzing that data, which wasn’t in this paper.
Dos Santos is investigating several questions, including how the age at pregnancy influences breast tissue. She is creating organoids, which are three-dimensional models of breast cells that react to change in their environment
Joining a family
From left, Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara and Camila dos Santos
Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara, who has been a part of dos Santos’s lab for over two years, explained that she felt comfortable and supported instantly when she arrived. She described the atmosphere as extremely collegial and felt as if she were included in a scientific family.
Joining dos Santos’s group was “possibly the best decision I’ve ever made,” said Hanasoge. Dos Santos’s lab is a “really special place” where lab members often have lunch together and support each other’s research.
Hanasoge was drawn to Dos Santos’s mentorship and the overall lab dynamic. Scientifically, she was also interested in the immunology project, exploring NKT cells. Her main project has involved trying to characterize NKT cells further.
Hanasoge sees plenty of opportunities to address additional questions in this field. “We don’t know if the process of lactation is causing more CD1d and increasing expression,” she said. “We are still trying to characterize what T-cell receptors are being expressed after pregnancy.”
A resident of Syosset, Hanasoge enjoys reading and said she was fascinated by science when she was growing up in Mysore, Kamataka in India. She asked her parents for a microscope when she was around seven and used it to looked at flower petals and leaves. That toy microscope, which her parents purchased from a science museum in Mumbai, is still in her parent’s house.
Hanasoge is eager to combine basic and translational work and hopes her research has a clinical benefit. She is looking forward to the next steps in her research in dos Santos’s lab.
“I learn from her every day by watching how she interacts with people she mentors, both inside the lab and out,” Hanasoge explained in an email. “Her passion and commitment to being a good mentor and her drive to ask the right questions in our research are inspiring.”
Chart shows COVID-19 hospitalizations during the three waves. Image from the New York State Department of Health website
Phew!
The dramatic and steep rise in positive infections caused by the ubiquitous omicron mutant of the original COVID-19 strain is declining almost as rapidly as it climbed.
As of Tuesday, Jan. 25, the seven-day average for the percentage of people who tested positive for COVID in Suffolk County stood at 12%, which is well below the 25.9% for the same seven-day average who tested positive just two weeks earlier, according to figures from the New York State Department of Health.
Those numbers, which have been declining on a daily basis, are likely to fall even further, experts said.
“The omicron wave appears to have crested in Suffolk County and New York State, but not in other parts of the country,” Dr. Gregson Pigott, commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, wrote in an email.
Public health officials attribute the welcome decline to several factors, including the increasing use of boosters, the adherence to mask guidelines and the reduction in travel and group gatherings.
“The numbers will decline slowly and steadily from the teens to single digits,” said Dr. Sunil Dhuper, chief medical officer at Port Jefferson’s St. Charles Hospital.
Sean Clouston, associate professor in the Program in Public Health and the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, added in an email that the “decline appears real and the timing suggest that the holiday period was, again, the main driving factor in the higher rates. We are likely on the other side of this wave.”
The omicron variant, which has involved milder symptoms for many of those infected, has also resulted in fewer hospitalizations.
The increase in hospitalizations is “not proportionate to the rise in cases” Pigott explained. “Our hospitals were overwhelmed when SARS-CoV-2 first hit our area [in 2020]. That has not been the case for the delta wave or the omicron wave.”
Indeed, the increase in the percentage of people who are vaccinated and boosted has helped reduce the need for emergency medical services at hospitals.
Among fully vaccinated people in the state of New York, 0.23% of the population 12 and over has been hospitalized, according to the New York State Department of Health.
That trend also holds true in Suffolk County area hospitals, public health officials said.
“We are seeing significantly reduced number of adults admitted with COVID who have had vaccines and especially those who had vaccines plus boosters,” Dr. Sharon Nachman, chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, explained in an email. “We suspect that the booster augments your initial immune response, lasting at least six months.”
While vaccines and boosters help prevent hospitalizations, they do not ward off all potential upper respiratory infections, Nachman added. Getting a primary series and a booster is “critical” to reducing the risk of more significant health effects from any potential infection.
The age range of people who are hospitalized has decreased, particularly during the third wave. In the first exposure to the Wuhan strain, a majority of those who needed critical medical care were over 65, particularly before the vaccine was available.
During the omicron wave, however, there is a “noticeable shift between the ages of 18 to 49,” Dhuper said. While the proportion of people as a whole in this group may be lower, in part because people in this age range may not have as many underlying medical conditions, the total number hospitalized is still higher because of the broader spread of the virus.
People in that younger age bracket are “the major shift,” Dhuper said.
The infectiousness of omicron also created a strain on hospitals, as health care workers, even those who were asymptomatic or had minor symptoms, were testing positive.
“We had never seen the number of staff members that were out during the first or second wave,” Dhuper said. Even though the number of people hospitalized wasn’t as high, the overall health care workers available to help care for the population “really stressed our system.”
In the prior waves of the pandemic, the Catholic hospitals were able to do load balancing, in which they shifted patients to hospitals that had the bed space and health care workers.
Toward the latter half of the omicron wave, such maneuvers weren’t as easy to manage in part because of the staff shortages caused by positive tests.
Discharging people earlier and using effective but limited supply monoclonal antibody treatments for eligible patients that reduce the severity of symptoms helped reduce the strain on the system, Dhuper added.
In terms of protecting the population, Dhuper urged residents to consider the benefit of vaccines and boosters.
“The majority of patients hospitalized in the intensive care unit are unvaccinated,” Dhuper said.
The rate of people who were unvaccinated and hospitalized with COVID-19 in the week ending on Dec. 11, which was the highest figure for 2021, was 91.1 per 100,000 people in the population, compared with 4.1 per 100,000 among the vaccinated, according to the New York State Department of Health.
“Those are amazing numbers in terms of the role of vaccines and how it’s protecting people from getting hospitalized and dying,” Dhuper said.
Richard Leakey at the Provost's Lecture Series: "Living Off the Grid with Good Access to Energy and Water". Paleoanthropologist, politician, explorer and environmentalist, Richard Erskine Frere Leakey is chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), and Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University.
Famed paleoanthropologist, conservationist and SBU professor Richard Leakey leaves a lasting legacy
By Daniel Dunaief
A revered scientist, conservationist, Kenyan, and faculty member at Stony Brook University, Richard Leakey died on Jan. 2 at the age of 77.
Leakey made several significant human fossil discoveries, wrote books and ground breaking journal articles, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977, and saved elephants and rhinoceros from poaching.
Leakey, who received honorary degrees from numerous institutions including Stony Brook, was also a professor in SBU’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.
“I considered him my brother,” said former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenny, who had helped recruit Leakey to join the university and developed a close relationship with him over the course of over two decades. When she learned of his death, she was “devastated.”
The Stony Brook connection
Leakey was visiting Manhattan in 2001 when he met with Kenny and Lawrence Martin, who is the director of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). Eager to make a good first impression and “nervous about asking this great, incredible man to come and give a lecture,” Kenny got a manicure before the meal. “He wouldn’t have noticed if I had nails,” she laughed.
When Kenny learned that Leakey was in town to find new leg prosthetics after he lost his legs in a 1993 plane crash, the Stony Brook President asked if he had health insurance, which he didn’t.
Richard Leakey examines fossils at the Turkana Basin Institute.
“Jewish mother that I am, I said, ‘Richard, you have to have medical insurance.’ We arranged for him to be this faculty member at Stony Brook, who came for a certain amount of time each year to give lectures and work with students, to have students work on his digs,” Kenny recalled.
Leakey, who didn’t graduate from college, was proud of his role at Stony Brook and relished the opportunity to teach, several friends and faculty members recalled. Audiences appreciated the opportunity to hear about the most recent discoveries into human origins, especially from someone with Leakey’s world-renowned reputation.
He was just a“spellbinding public speaker,” said Martin, who first met Leakey when Martin was a graduate student in 1979.
“When [Leakey] got an honorary degree, he had two to three minutes to make an acceptance speech,” Martin said. “There was not a sound from the moment he got up. It’s one of only two occasions when the entire student body rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.” The other was when famed physicist C.N. Yang received an honorary degree.
Leakey was such a draw that he gave some of his bigger talks at the Staller Center for the Arts, which had to accommodate overflow space for the audience demand.
Patricia Wright, Distinguished Service Professor and founder of a research station Centre ValBio at Stony Brook, recalled how a primate conservation class responded to him.
In his provocative style, Leakey would come in and say something “totally outrageous,” she recalled. The students, who might have otherwise been starstruck and been inclined to write everything he said, felt compelled to speak and would respond, saying, “Wait a second, it shouldn’t be like that.” The class would then discuss a conservation issue with Leakey, which opened up an effective dialogue.
“They loved him because he was so charming and was able to turn their minds around,” Wright said. “I loved those classes and watching him with my students.”
In the world of conservation, Leakey took unconventional approaches that proved effective. In 1989, five years after the landmark discovery of Turkana Boy, a 1.5-million-year-old fossil of one of the most complete early human skeletons, Leakey arranged the burning of 12 tons of ivory tusks in Kenya, signaling that they belonged on live animals.
“We can absolutely say that there are elephants and rhinoceros that are alive today that wouldn’t have been alive if it weren’t for Richard Leakey,” Wright said.
Words of wisdom
In addition to leading by example, Leakey dispensed valuable advice, often over food he prepared specially (more about that in the None of the Above column in this issue).
Leakey “left me with a huge gift, the gift of being confident in what I’m doing, as long I’m doing it with principles,” said Sonia Harmand, Associate Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook. Leakey urged Harmand not to be “scared of breaking boundaries” and trying something nobody else had tried, she said. “Have faith in what you think you want to do. Never be afraid of being judged.”
Richard Leakey and Joe Biden in 2017 at the Stars of Stony Brook gala at Chelsea Piers. Photo from SBU
Harmand made a significant archaeological discovery, for which she received some skeptical comments. Leakey suggested that she consider such questions a point of pride and a reflection of the value of the work.
“You start to have enemies when you start to be famous and important,” Harmand said Leakey told her. It made her think she should be pleased that people were scrutinizing and criticizing her work.
Wright, meanwhile, appreciated how Leakey gave her the strength to live life the way she wanted. He urged her to put in the time and effort to work on politics and networking.
Several people suggested that Leakey, who battled physical challenges throughout his life without complaint, also inspired them. “He really taught me about courage and strength,” Kenny said. “I had the kind of courage that let me take on paths I didn’t know if I could handle. He taught me physical courage.”
Indeed, Leakey displayed the kind of physical courage and belief in his convictions people typically associate with a character from a Tom Clancy novel.
In 1967, Leakey was on a Kenyan flight that had to divert because of a dust storm. Despite earlier reports that the land in the Lake Turkana region was volcanic, Leakey thought he saw sedimentary rock, which could contain fossils. He rented a helicopter and landed with only seven minutes of extra gas to spare for the return trip. When he got out of the helicopter, he found fossils. He quickly appeared at a National Geographic meeting, where he urged the group to fund the search on the east side of Turkana.
The chairman of the society told him “if you don’t find fossils, don’t bother to come back to National Geographic,” Martin said the chairman told Leakey. The findings were more than enough for the group to continue funding Leakey’s research, including on the west side of Lake Turkana, where he discovered Turkana Boy.
Life-altering contact
For several of those who knew Leakey, the interaction was life-altering.
When he was a high school student in Nairobi, Isaiah Nengo heard a talk Leakey gave about plate tectonics and evolution.
“I was completely blown away,” said Nengo, who is now Associate Director at the Turkana Basin Institute.
As a second-year student at the University of Nairobi, Nengo attended an evolution lecture by Leakey. At that point, he was hooked, deciding to become a paleoanthropologist.
Nengo, whose parents’ education stopped around fourth grade, wrote to Leakey after he graduated from college, not expecting to hear back.
“It goes to tell you what kind of person [Leakey] was,” Nengo said. “This kid from the University of Nairobi out of nowhere writing him a letter, and he wrote back.”
Nengo, who said he heard similar stories from others in Kenya, including some who are currently colleagues at TBI, volunteered for a few months, until he got a fellowship.
He said Leakey helped fund a post-baccalaureate one-year program in the United States.
“The best gift you could get is the gift of knowledge,” Nengo said. “From [Leakey], I got the gift of knowledge, which changed the trajectory of my life.”
Like others who were prepared to change their lives after interacting with Leakey, Harmand had been in a comfortable job at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France when Leakey suggested she join Stony Brook and the Turkana Basin Institute in 2011. “I’m not sure I would have taken” the job, but for Leakey. The work was only supposed to last a couple of years, but she never left.
“He marked my life forever and my career forever,” Harmand said. “We also had a very deep friendship” that extended to the next generation, as her nine-year-old daughter Scarlett has forged a connection with Leakey’s granddaughter Kika, whose mother Samira is the daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey.
With three daughters, including Louise Leakey, who conducts field research at Turkana Basin institute, Leakey was a strong advocate for women.
Women are “equally capable as men and for him, this was not even a question,” Harmand said.
A passion for Kenya
In addition to being pleased with his connection to Stony Brook University, Leakey, who accepted the ceremonial key to a French city in his first language of Swahili, was a proud Kenyan. He set out to employ, train, include and inspire Kenyans in research projects and encouraged the children of staff members to come see the fossils, Martin said.
Leakey also helped raise money from people who traveled to Kenya to support educational fellowships. He contributed to the construction of maternity clinics on either side of Lake Turkana so women could give birth in safe, sterile conditions with electric light, Martin added.
Kenyans recognized Leakey when he traveled and appreciated his contribution to the country.
“We were driving to his farm, when we got stopped,” Martin said. “Everybody knew him and wanted to shake his hand and say hello. He was a local hero who was seen as a Kenyan doing things for his fellow Kenyans,” Martin said.
Harmand recalled one of the last times she spoke with him; he reiterated his passion for his home country.
Leakey made it clear “how important it is to involve Kenyans in what we do,” Harmand said. “We are training the next generation of human origin scientists in Kenya. He is the son of Kenya.”
A passion for science
While Leakey had a genuine interest in a variety of fields, he was, at his core, a scientist. Nengo called him a “polymath” who knew a great deal about a wide range of scientific subjects.
In one of her final conversations with Leakey, Wright said he took her aside after a meal she described as “exquisite” and asked her about bones she’d found in Madagascar.
The conventional wisdom about human origins in the island nation was that humans had come from Borneo 2,000 years ago.
In the middle of Madagascar, however, Wright had found bones from hippos and birds that had cut marks from humans that dated back 10,000 years.
Leakey told her that she “had to find those people,” she recalled. “You will be letting down all of Madagascar if you don’t find their origins.”
Wright said that conversation, which had its intended effect, was “emblematic of his burning desire to know and to learn about hominid history and the burning desire to collect and assemble pieces of history.”
Birthday presents
Leakey, who gave so much of himself to so many people, didn’t like receiving gifts, Martin said, but he welcomed receiving cheese, wine or cooking tools, including pots and pans.
When Leakey reached his 70th birthday, Martin asked him what he planned to do to celebrate. He had scheduled a sailing trip, but he wasn’t sure if he could pull together a crew. Martin offered to be a part of his crew for a journey that lasted over a week aboard a 38-foot catamaran.
Leakey’s daughters Samira and Louise joined Martin as deck hands, giving Richard Leakey the opportunity to take the helm during his journey along the coast of Kenya near his home in Lamu.
“When he was steering the boat, it was the only time he wasn’t challenged by his disabilities,” Martin said. “He didn’t need his feet. Driving wasn’t particularly easy. When he was sitting in the catamaran, it didn’t heel; it went fast, and he could steer the boat. Watching him, I had the sense that he felt completely free.”
Isaiah Nengo recalled a day years ago when he was working in a field station in Kenya, searching for fossils.
A man who had a tremendous influence on his life was on the way to alter his horizons yet again, although this time the visit would have nothing to do with science.
Richard Leakey, the late founder of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) and a famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist, was bringing food from his home on the coast of Kenya in Lamu to the field station.
Leakey “prepared this lobster meal,” said Nengo, who is native of Nairobi, Kenya, and is currently associate director of TBI. “It was my first seafood meal. It was fantastic. I was like, ‘I’m sitting almost 600 miles from the ocean, it’s hot as hell and I’m eating lobster.’ That always stuck in my mind.”
Leakey, who died on Jan. 2 (see a tribute to the Stony Brook legend in this week’s Arts & Lifestyles page B12), left behind a lasting scientific legacy that filled science textbooks of people around the world, while he left an enduring food legacy that filled the stomachs of family, friends, coworkers and colleagues.
People fortunate enough to dine with him shared tales of Leakey’s culinary prowess and refined tastes.
Sonia Harmand, associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook, took a long flight with Leakey to Kenya. Leakey had a salmon meal on the plane that didn’t meet his standards.
“He called the staff, and even the pilot came by to say hi because everybody knows about him,” Harmand said. Amid the introductions, he expressed his displeasure with the salmon.
When he returned to Kenya, he wrote to the airline and complained about the food.
As a host, Leakey went out of his way to make sure all of his guests enjoyed the food he purchased, prepared and served.
Harmand said her daughter Scarlett, who will turn nine in February, enjoyed eating at Leakey’s house because he prepared mussels and oysters he knew appealed to her.
“Every time you had a meal with him, he kept on asking if you liked it,” Harmand said.
Harmand also appreciated the unexpected gifts of incongruous foods at TBI. One day, Leakey arrived with ice cream and fresh strawberries.
“We had to eat it quickly,” she recalled with a laugh.
Another long time friend and colleague, Lawrence Martin, the director of TBI, said Leakey had a fondness for some Long Island foods. He particularly enjoyed ducks, as well as oysters and mussels from Long Island’s waterways.
“He said mussels were never as good in the warm water as they were in Stony Brook,” Martin said.
When he first got to know Leakey, Martin said Leakey cooked all the meals they shared, whether they were in Stony Brook or Kenya.
Martin called Leakey a “great chef” and said his late colleague “loved good food and loved going food shopping.”
While Leakey shared important information with former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenny, he also dined on memorable meals.
When they were on their own on Long Island without their spouses, Kenny invited Leakey over to her home for a meal.
After the dinner, he thanked her and promised he would return, providing she allowed him to do the cooking.
Sharing food with Leakey often meant benefiting from his storytelling prowess and his sense of humor.
Kenny and her family went on a safari with Jim and Marilyn Simons, co-founders of the Simons Foundation and supporters of science throughout Long Island.
“At the end of the day, we would sit in a circle and have drinks and [Leakey] would regale us with stories that were absolutely wonderful,” Kenny said. “You can’t even imagine how they made these [incredible] meals when there’s nothing out there to do it with.”
With hyenas howling at night and hot showers created with water heated by the sun during the day, the entire experience was “so exotic and so elegant at the same time,” Kenny added.
Harmand said Leakey didn’t cook with the goal of winning over people, but, rather, to share a connection.
“I don’t think he needed to impress anyone,” Harmand said. “He wanted to please you through food.”
The same wind that powers sailboats, makes kites dart through the air, and causes flags to flutter can make being outdoors in a group safer, particularly during the pandemic.
While public health officials have suggested that being outdoors with others amid the pandemic is safer than remaining inside, the strength of the wind can affect the level of protection provided by wide open spaces.
That’s the conclusion Sean Clouston, Associate Professor in the Program in Public Health and the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, reached after studying public health data from 96,000 cases of COVID in Suffolk County from March 16, 2020 to December 31, 2020.
By combining public health data with the daily reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Clouston found that days in which the temperature was between 60 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit and in which the wind was about 5 miles per hour or less had higher COVID-19 transmission than those days in which the wind speed was faster.
This kind of study, which was recently published in the journal BMC Infectious Disease, might affect the guidance policy makers provide to reduce the risk of COVID transmission during outdoor gatherings.
“If you’re imaging yourself as a policy maker and you want to contain COVID, what do you do?” Clouston asked rhetorically. Vaccines and masks are established tools. Ensuring airflow is higher might also be important, he suggested.
Indeed, amid the early days of the pandemic in 2020, public officials closed parks in Suffolk County for a while and eventually reopened them.
An alternative could be to provide access to parks where wind speed is also protective, or to reduce the use of parks where social distancing is difficult and where wind speed is lower.
At the same time, residents might want to protect themselves by putting out fans in their backyard or some other airflow devices to keep the flow of air moving during a social gathering, reducing the chance of transmitting the virus. People might want to avoid using tents that reduce the flow of air around them.
Additionally, people could eat out at restaurants where the airflow is stronger.
Diners can search for places where the air “moves around, so the outdoor experience is as protective as possible,” Clouston said. He recognized that the data had some variability between when people who went outside might have contracted COVID. The air flow could increase and then decrease and the average length of time from exposure to symptoms and testing could differ between people.
“Any time we deal with humans, this is the problem,” Clouston said. Researchers can’t control for everything. Instead, they have to assume people make decisions in a consistent, but variable, way.
The larger data set, with close to 100,000 cases, enabled Clouston and his colleagues to average out the effects of the time when people reported their positive COVID tests.
For numerous cases, people had a good idea where and how they contracted COVID. Even when they were at outdoor events, such as a barbecue, some people had indoor parties where they ate together.
In addition, merely being outdoors didn’t reduce the risk if people were standing in the equivalent of stale air, where wind couldn’t reach them and help carry viral particles away from others who attended these events.
Being outside if the air isn’t moving is similar to being indoors in a space with a very large ceiling and a wide space between walls, he explained. It is safer than a small room, but it is not inherently safe on its own.
As for air circulation indoors, Clouston said people have suggested that moving air in buildings could reduce the spread of the virus.
Testing the effects of having HEPA filters or air filtration systems run continuously in hospitalscompared to areas that don’t have such units could reveal the benefit of having these air flow systems. Some studies have been done on this, although more work is ongoing, he said.
Clouston suggested that other environmental conditions could also impact the transmissibility of the virus. The heat index, for example, might explain why wind speed might be important.
The heat index “might diminish the effect or make it stronger,” Clouston said. “It can push people indoors.”
Clouston worked on this study with Stony Brook colleagues in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine Assistant Professor Olga Morozova and Professor Jaymie Meliker. The team has worked with the Suffolk County Department of Health since 2020 on different aspects of COVID modeling.
Clouston was surprised that the research revealed a threshold model wind speed. He was also surprised to see that the speed was so low. “You only need a little airflow,” he explained.
The Stony Brook scientist looked at where the positive cases were located by zip code. The summer distribution and the spatial distribution was somewhat unclear, he said.
The spread of COVID was distributed by population size and density. Population size and density are likely more important than alterations in microclimate in the summer.
The analysis is important for places when and where outdoor exposures are most common, he explained.
“This may be true in the summer on Long Island or in the winter in southern states like Louisiana when outdoor activities are more comfortable,” he wrote in an email.
Clouston has several ongoing projects. He has papers discussing the role of social inequalities and COVID, a paper looking at clinical risk factors for COVID at Stony Brook Hospital, and one describing the initial wave of COVID in World Trade Center responders.
He would like to look at the effect of outdoor protests during 2020 on the spread of COVID, which would require data on attendance at those events and at the ones in New York City.
I blame John McEnroe, Billy Martin, Lou Piniella, Pete Rose, and a host of politicians who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept defeat.
All of those people hated to lose. McEnroe had temper tantrums that were so epic that he’s spoofed himself many times, complaining in movies that “you can’t be serious” when things don’t go his way.
Frustrated with the umpiring in a game, Martin would kick dirt on home plate or have an epic meltdown in front of over 50,000 people.
I don’t ever remember any of those tirades or temper tantrums when they or their teams were winning.
Being American means winning. To borrow from the cliche, it means giving 110%.
I can’t tolerate losing, just as CEOs, politicians, athletes and sports coaches and managers can’t stand it, either. Many people hate losing as much if not more than they enjoy winning.
The fans who pay to see their teams win, not just to see them play, boo mercilessly when stars like the New York Knicks Julius Randle don’t live up to their contracts and don’t lead the team to more victories than defeats.
Randle recently expressed his frustration in response to the fans’ disappointment by giving them the thumbs down in a game.
Unconditioned positive regard, however, doesn’t come with having your name in lights or being a star on a celebrated team.
We get that from family members, sometimes, and from psychologists or psychiatrists.
As Americans, we have expectations of ourselves that have been set, in some cases, by role models like athletes, politicians and other popular icons.
At the end of the year, sports networks don’t focus on the best concessions speeches and the most gracious losers.
They are much more likely to replay the greatest rants and epic press conferences when athletes or coaches completely lose their composure in response to a question. We watch in rapt fascination as these superstars have a tantrum or glumly express disappointment.
Being a sore loser is also good business. The media empires on the left and the right long ago figured that out. During the Trump administration, nothing the former president said or did was good enough. The outrage factor over his thoughts, actions, gaffes and verbal inadequacies were attacked mercilessly.
Fox, which spent the last four years laughing at the liberal crying machine, has now turned its attention to attacking President Joe Biden (D) in a similar fashion, mocking everything he says or does or doesn’t do.
People in the sports world describe muscle memory. They train their bodies and minds to react to evolving situations instantly, so they know where to go, what to do, and how to advance their cause.
That preparation almost never includes lessons on what to do when you lose or are losing. No one plays to lose, and yet, every game has a loser.
Maybe this year, we should prepare ourselves better for the moment we lose. We don’t have to be miserable, stare out blankly at the field, the way baseball players always do after the last game of the World Series, wishing they could have been that team that’s dogpiling near the pitcher’s mound.
Maybe this year, when people are continuing to struggle with a third year of the pandemic, we can hope for a celebration of great competition from both teams.
We can take comfort and feel joy in the recognition that we brought out the best in each other.
Even when we lose, we can, to borrow from Lou Gehrig, still feel like the “luckiest people on the face of the Earth” for having been a part of something we know is special, regardless of the outcome.
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