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Tommy the chimp looks through his cage upstate. Photo from Nonhuman Rights Project

The two chimpanzees housed at Stony Brook University will not be granted the personhood necessary to allow them to challenge their captivity, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in an animal rights advocacy group’s lawsuit against the school.

Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled in her July 30 decision that Hercules and Leo, the two male chimps used for research at Stony Brook University’s Department of Anatomical Sciences, would not be granted a “writ of habeas corpus,” as petitioned for in the Nonhuman Rights Project’s suit against the university. The animal rights group had petitioned the judge with hopes of forcing the university to move the chimps to the Florida-based Save the Chimps animal sanctuary.

“The similarities between chimpanzees and humans inspire the empathy felt for a beloved pet,” Jaffe said in her decision. “Efforts to extend legal rights to chimpanzees are thus understandable; someday they may even succeed. For now, however, given the precedent to which I am bound it is hereby ordered that the petition for a writ of habeas corpus is denied.”

Jaffe cited previous suits the Nonhuman Rights Project had headed up, including one referencing a chimpanzee named Tommy who was being held through Circle L Trailers in Gloversville, NY. In that case, the Fulton County Supreme Court dismissed the Nonhuman Rights Project’s appeal to have the chimp released.

Steven Wise, president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, said his group was still looking forward to appealing Jaffe’s decision to the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division’s first judicial department.

“Unlike Justice Jaffe, [the first judicial department] is not bound by the decision of the Third Department in Tommy’s case,” Wise said in a statement.

Despite the judge’s ruling, Susan Larson, an anatomical sciences professor at SBU, previously said both Hercules and Leo will retire from the facility’s research center and be gone by September. Larson did not return requests for comment.

The Nonhuman Rights Project, however, said it would work to ensure the chimps are released to a sanctuary nevertheless.

“We applaud Stony Brook for finally doing the right thing,” Lauren Choplin of the Nonhuman Rights Project wrote on the group’s website. “We have made it clear that we remain willing to assist Stony Brook in sending Hercules and Leo to Save the Chimps in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where we have arranged for them to be transferred, or to have an appropriate member sanctuary of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance, as we did in Tommy’s case. We have made it equally clear that, if Stony Brook attempts to move Hercules and Leo to any other place, we will immediately seek a preliminary injunction to prevent this move pending the outcome of all appeals, as we succeeded in doing in Tommy’s case last year.”

New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana owns the chimps, and their next destination was not clear.

The court first ordered the school to show cause and writ of habeas corpus — a command to produce the captive person and justify their detention — but struck out the latter on April 21, one day after releasing the initial order, making it a more administrative move simply prompting the university to defend why it detains the animals.

In an earlier press release from 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project said the chimpanzee plaintiffs are “self-aware” and “autonomous” and therefore should have the same rights as humans. Hercules and Leo are currently being used in a locomotion research experiment in SBU’s Department of Anatomical Sciences.

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Town board, hospital ink helipad agreement

The SkyHealth team. Photo from Huntington Hospital

Huntington Hospital is flying high.

The town board on Tuesday approved a license agreement with the hospital to use a portion of the town’s parking facility adjoining Mill Dam Park as a helipad. The agreement spans from August to July 31, 2017.

With the helipad, the hospital will be air-transporting, via helicopter, patients in need of urgent or emergent care to the most appropriate health care facility to address their needs. The hospital will also transport “harvested organs to and from the Huntington Hospital,” according to the town board resolution.

“North Shore – LIJ Health System has developed a new air medical service program called SkyHealth, which is staffed by highly skilled medical professionals,” Randolph Howard, vice president of operations at Huntington Hospital said in a statement through a hospital spokeswoman. “Developing a heliport in Huntington provides a key location from which SkyHealth can transport critically ill patients who require immediate medical transportation. Through this heliport, SkyHealth will provide a vital service to the residents of the greater Huntington area.”

James Margolin, an attorney with the firm Margolin & Margolin, said the helipad already exists, but it is in need of an upgrade — one that the hospital will undertake.

“We thank the town board for its continuing commitment to getting the lifesaving community service into effect,” he said.

SkyHealth is a partnership with Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut and the North Shore- LIJ Health System. Patients of both health systems in need of lifesaving care for major traumas, heart attack, stroke and other life-threatening brain injuries will receive emergency medical care by helicopter and be quickly flown to the most appropriate hospital, according to the North Shore-LIJ Health System’s website.

The helicopter would be staffed with a nurse, a critical care paramedic, all certified in New York and Connecticut, and a pilot. That would be the “standard crew,” according to Gene Tangney, senior vice president and chief administrative officer of North Shore-LIJ in a SkyHealth promotional video.

Huntington Hospital will pay the town $14,062 upon the execution of the license agreement, and another $14,062 at the end of the agreement, according to the resolution.

Councilwoman Tracey Edwards (D) requested quarterly reports from the hospital to ensure the volume is “consistent with what we agreed upon.” Margolin agreed to the request.

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Cliff Swezey joins Huntington school district, along with others

Huntington High School. File photo

Huntington schools will see plenty of new faces this September, and not all of them will belong to students.

The school board approved a number of teaching appointments on Monday as well as the hiring of Cliff Swezey, the district’s new chairman of mathematics and sciences for grades 7 through 12. Swezey is the latest addition to fleet of new administrators at the district, particularly the high school level — joining Huntington High School Principal Brenden Cusack and two new assistant principals Joseph DeTroia and Gamal Smith.

School district officials reviewed 66 applications, pre-screened 20 candidates and conducted 12 personal and extensive interviews prior to recommending Swezey, according to a statement from the school.

Cliff Swezey was appointed as the new math and sciences chairman of grades 7 through 12 at a school board meeting on Monday. Photo by Jim Hoops
Cliff Swezey was appointed as the new math and sciences chairman of grades 7 through 12 at a school board meeting on Monday. Photo by Jim Hoops

Swezey, who hails from the Uniondale school district and served there as director of math and computer science for grades K to 12 for the last two years, said he’s excited to join Huntington. He said he developed a four-year computer science sequence for high school students in Uniondale, and would be excited to tackle a similar initiative in Huntington – something school board member Bill Dwyer has said he’d like done at the district.

Swezey replaces the district’s former chairman Blaine Weisman. He said he is an advocate of Singapore math learning techniques — the country boasts high math success rates — and the new chairman said the Common Core Learning Standards math curriculum utilizes those learning techniques. He also said one of his responsibilities at Huntington would be to help parents understand Common Core math.

“The Common Core is really an adaptation, an adoption, of Singapore mathematics,” he said. “So I’m passionate about that because it’s about thinking. It’s not about rote memorization. It’s not about learning procedures and rules in math, which turns kids off. It’s about critical thinking. It’s about problem solving. It’s about alternative strategies and getting kids to build numeracy.”

Swezey earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at SUNY New Paltz in 1984 and a master’s degree in education in mathematics at St. John’s University in 1995. He earned a doctor of education in educational leadership at St. John’s in 2004.

Superintendent Jim Polansky said the district’s still looking to fill a handful of positions. Many of the new hires follow retirements from earlier this year. Polansky said he’s excited about the new team at the high school.

“I have a principal in place that has vision that connects with students like no other and I think we have a team of individuals that are ready to build on momentum that is building at the high school in a positive way for a long time.”

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Daniel Madigan with a yellowfin tuna. Photo by Maile Madigan

When Daniel Madigan is out working, he sometimes has no access to a computer, an iPhone or email and that’s just fine by him. Instead of searching for parking spaces, waiting for traffic lights and standing in line at a grocery store, he rocks back and forth on the ocean, seeking answers to questions deep below the surface.

An NSF postdoctoral fellow at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, Madigan said the typical month he has spent over the last four years on the Pacific Ocean has given him a “sense that this is where I want to be. You see something you’ve never seen before, every time.”

He’s watched a killer whale feeding on tuna and has witnessed a school of yellowtail jack beating with their tails on a blue shark. Fin whales, killer whales and blue whales have dotted the landscape on his research trips.

Recently, Madigan completed work on a study of tuna. Knowing that the bluefin tuna has a metabolism that enables it to remain warmer in colder waters than the albacore and yellowfin tuna, Madigan explored whether the bluefin’s greater range gave it a more varied diet.

It turns out that the bluefin is more selective than its more temperature-limited tuna cousins. “We expected a broader habitat use would lead to more access to more food,” Madigan said. “That would be a straightforward benefit to the expansion they get” from being warm-bodied.

In a way, this finding also “makes sense,” he said, because fish that can “access more space can also pick the best thing to specialize in.” The bluefin can not only dive deeper but it can also travel further north to colder waters.

Bluefin tuna face considerable competition for sardines, a primary food source. Humans also consume this fish, and it is a staple of aquaculture-raised fish. Competition for sardines leads to questions about ecosystem-based management.

“When people form policies, they want to know things like, ‘If we limit the sardines in the ocean, how many metric tons of bluefin tuna will that save us?” Madigan asked. “If you can’t give those answers, it becomes more difficult to make concrete estimates.”

At this point, Madigan and other scientists are still in the recognition rather than the implementation stage, which means researchers are developing a greater awareness of the dynamic between the preferred foods for bluefin and measures such as the fish’s fertility and growth rates.

To be sure, Madigan said the population of these warmer-bodied tuna were unlikely to go into deep decline amid a drop in the number of sardines because the bluefin can feed on whatever is abundant to survive.

Still, understanding the life history of these fish with different habitat ranges can enable scientists and policy makers to recognize the complexity of interactions in the marine ecosystem, as well as any possible effect of fisheries policies.

Sardines, anchovy and herring are considered forage fish, which are used in aquaculture and are also popular with sharks, seabirds and marine mammals.

To track the fish in the study, Madigan and his colleagues collected all three types of tuna, put tags on them, sent them back in the ocean and retrieved and downloaded the information from the tags.

Heidi Dewar, a fisheries research biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California who has worked with Madigan for six years, described her colleague as an “innovator.” She praised Madigan’s work with chemical tracers to understand large-scale migrations. Madigan has used the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, to quantify the migration of bluefin tuna from west to east. His work can have a “long-term application,” she added.

Dewar agreed that working on and in the ocean provides opportunities to make new discoveries. “There is nothing like getting up close and personal with sharks, giant bluefin tuna, manta rays or opah,” Dewar described. “Unlocking the mysteries of their various adaptations either using electronic tags or by examining their physiology and morphology makes me feel like an early explorer mapping new territory.”

Madigan, who grew up in Garden City, lives in Port Jefferson with his wife Maile, who is a school administrator for a charter school in Riverhead.

Madigan said the broader goal for his research is that “these animals will still be here in 100, 200 years” and will be in “even greater numbers and surviving to even greater sizes.”

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By Elof Carlson

Fossils are relatively rare because most of the animals and plants that have died in nature have been eaten or decomposed. Fossils are often found in sedimentary rocks, and those dead organisms were buried after drowning, caught by volcanic ash, buried in a mudslide or sucked down by quicksand or some other event less likely than falling on a field or in the underbrush of a forest, or left as scattered bones by hungry predators. Only in the past few ten thousand years have humans buried their dead, improving the chances that their remains will someday be unearthed and studied by paleontologists.

DNAUntil the last half of the twentieth century, the only way to use human fossils to work out a historical association was through comparative anatomy and a variety of chemical and physical tools to determine the age of the sediments in which they were unearthed. The idea of a paleogenetics arose in 1963, with the use of that term by Linus Pauling and his colleagues, who studied the amino acid sequences in hemoglobin molecules of numerous organisms, from sipunculoid worms to humans, that use hemoglobin to carry oxygen to body tissues.

In 1964, the first sequence of fragments of the DNA of an extinct quagga were worked out using the skin of an extinct specimen in a museum. The quagga was an animal that looked like a chimera of giraffe and a zebra.

Once DNA sequencing was worked out, especially by Fred Sanger and his colleagues, viruses, bacteria, single-celled organisms, and then more complex worms and flies were sequenced. By 2000, the human genome was being worked out. Svante Pääbo and his colleagues are leaders in the working out of fossil human DNA.

This is what has been found so far. Four contenders for species status lived about 40,000 years ago. Three populations of humans arose after an initial origin in Africa. Of these three, the Neandertals (Homo neanderthalis) left Africa earlier than our own Homo sapiens. The Neandertals were named for the Neander river valley where they found in Germany. We were named by Linnaeus as Man (Homo) the Thinker (sapiens).

Two additional populations were found, one in western Siberia and the other in Indonesia. The Siberian humans are called Denisovans (Homo denisova). They were named for the Denis cave in which they were found and they also had an exit from Africa. The Indonesian humans are called Homo floresiensis and are named for the island Flores in Indonesia where they were found. Where they came from is not yet known. They are unusual for their small size, a Hobbit-like three- and-a-half feet tall.

The DNAs of three forms of humanity have been sequenced. The complete sequence of DNA of an organism’s cell is called a genome. The Indonesian form went extinct about 12,000 years ago, but no DNA has been extracted from their remains. Neandertals and Denisovans went extinct about 40,000 years ago.

Analysis of the three available genomes shows that most Europeans have about 4 percent Neandertal DNA. Living people in Melanesia and Australian aborigines have about 4 percent H. denisova DNA. About 17 percent of Denisovan DNA is from Neandertals. The human branch Homo bifurcated and one branch split into H. neanderthalis and H. denisova. The other branch from Homo produced us, H. sapiens. We are 99.7 percent alike for H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis.

Since we have 3 billion nucleotides to our genome, there remain 9 million mutations between us, most of it in our junk DNA. There are, nevertheless, hundreds of gene differences between our two species. It also means that where these populations came into contact, fertile matings occurred, and remain in our DNA from our ancestral “kissing cousins.”

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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This view, from 478,000 miles, shows that Pluto is home to huge, 11,000-foot tall mountains, most likely composed of ice and frozen methane and nitrogen. The lack of impact craters suggests that Pluto’s surface is young, probably less than 100 million years old. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI

When Alan Calder was young, his father used to share the world of the planets and stars with him through telescopes in their backyard. Peter Tarr, meanwhile, drew pictures in his teenage notebooks of Saturn and Jupiter and saved enough money to travel to Africa aboard a ship with Neil Armstrong to view a solar eclipse.

This past week, Calder, Tarr, and many others who have craned their necks skyward received the first set of clear images from Pluto, a dwarf planet located more than three billion miles from Earth.

The New Horizons space probe, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration blasted off from Earth in 2006, beamed back the first pictures of a dwarf planet that had, up until recently, been considered something of a gray, icy blob.

Traveling at the speed of light, the images took four and a half hours to reach the eager eyes of astronomers and scientists around the world. Long Islanders shared the excitement surrounding these first close-up views of a planet named, by then 11-year old Venetia Burney, more than eight decades ago.

“Our imaginations tend to fail us” when anticipating what’s around the corner or, more precisely, billions of miles away, said Frederick Walter, a professor of astronomy who specializes in stars and teaches a solar system course at Stony Brook. Pluto “doesn’t look like any of the worlds we know.”

Astronomers have zeroed in on the 11,000 foot high ice mountains, which, NASA scientists said, are likely made of a combination of ice and frozen methane and nitrogen.

The show stopper in these early images, however, was the lack of something many of them were sure would be there: impact craters. These craters are like the ones that riddle the surface of Earth’s moon and that have also affected the geology of our planet.

New Horizons captured this stunning image, on July 13, of one of Pluto’s most dominant features, the “heart.” It’s estimated to be 1,000 miles across at its widest point and rests just above the equator. The heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI
New Horizons captured this stunning image, on July 13, of one of Pluto’s most dominant features, the “heart.” It’s estimated to be 1,000 miles across at its widest point and rests just above the equator. The heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI

“Some process has been resurfacing this planet, to smooth it out and get rid of whatever craters it should have,” said Deanne Rogers, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook. “That was a real surprise for me.”

At this point, any explanation of the process that might melt and smooth out the surface of a planet that takes 248 years to orbit the sun is speculation, Rogers added.

One such possibility is the presence of radioactive elements, researchers said.

Calder, who is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook, said he, too, is “intrigued by what seems to be the smooth surface of the planet. That implies an active geology.”

Calder’s research is in the field of star explosions. He said the images and information from Pluto wouldn’t impact his work too directly, unless scientists were able to show an interesting ratio of unexpected isotopes.

Calder said he’s looking forward to watching the textbooks change and seeing an alteration in the curriculum of classes on the solar system in light of the new images from the New Horizons satellite that are returning at such a slow pace that it will take 16 months for NASA to collect them all.

The active geology of this distant dwarf planet suggests that “even a small cold body that far out has activity on it,” Calder said.

For Tarr, a senior science writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his interest in the planets date back to his teens. Traveling aboard a boat toward Africa to observe a solar eclipse, Tarr rubbed elbows with author Isaac Asimov, astronaut Armstrong, thousands of others interested in astronomy and fellow teenager Neil deGrasse Tyson, who would become an astrophysicist, author and director of the Hayden Planetarium.

For Tarr, some of the heroes of the Pluto images are the scientists who figured out, more than a decade ago, how to plot a course from Earth that would take the New Horizons spacecraft within 7,800 miles of Pluto.

“The calculation that goes into the launch is an incredible achievement,” Tarr said.

For Walter, part of the excitement of seeing these images comes from interpreting and understanding the unexpected parts of the picture.

“If you anticipated everything, you’d be doing the wrong thing,” Walter said. “Now that they’ve got these images” some of the old ideas will get “tossed out, and they’ll bring in something new” to explain the lack of craters, he added.

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Kids buddy up at kidOYO camp to learn more about the coding world at a special summer camp workshop hosted at Stony Brook University on Friday afternoon. Photo by Rachel Siford

By Rachel Siford

Stony Brook University is hosting a different type of camp this summer.

kidOYO teaches kids between ages 8 and 15 how to code their own websites and games, using Java, Scratch, Python and HTML.

“Code. Make. Learn.” is kidOYO’s motto — geared to teach kids to code and create on their own.

“The kids learn how to map controls, sense the movements and think about it in a logical way,” co-founder Devon Loffreto said.

Loffreto, a graduate of SBU, and his wife Melora Loffreto founded the camp in 2001 and came to Stony Brook University three years ago because of its position as one of the top computer science schools.

“This area has a huge interest in computer science,” Melora said. “The support of the university has been tremendous.”

Some kids stay just one week, and others participate for the full five weeks. This week, 33 students entered the program along with 10 Stony Brook University computer science student mentors to help them.

Chairman of the Computer Science Department for 17 years Arie Kaufman welcomed the crowd to the newly built computer science building. This group was the first to have a demonstration there.

“I want to move Long Island to the point where everyone from ages 4 to 104 knows how to program,” Kaufman said. “This is a happy occasion for the new computer science building.”

For the first time since the camp was started, participants will be able to continue their websites and work at home. Their profiles will keep track of what they do with badges they get for different accomplishments. There are also challenges and tutorials on the website to keep them engaged.

Students made mods for Minecraft, a popular video game, meaning they wrote code modifications for the educational version of the game Minecraft. One student even made the mod downloadable so anyone can add his mod to his or her own game.

“This generation is one of the most powerful ever because of the tools they are given,” Loffreto said.

Another student built a script in Python, a general-purpose programming language, to draw a turtle, which took 370 lines of code.

Students made videos, comic strips, games, 3D printed objects and video games. For many of them, this was their first time using code.

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Lee Michel on a Blackhawk helicopter during a training exercise in 2011. Photo by Roger Stoutenburgh

He has been to the Super Bowl, the Boston Marathon, a presidential inauguration, the Baltimore Grand Prix, the Rockefeller Tree Lighting and the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Lee Michel is neither a politician nor an athlete: He is part of a national, first-response team, called the Radiological Assistant Program.

The program is a unit of the Department of Energy, which assists local, state and federal agencies to characterize the environment, assess the impact to the local population and support decision makers on steps to minimize the hazards of a radiological incident.

Michel is the training and outreach coordinator in Region 1 of the program. He works with partner agencies around the country to deal with everything from the discovery of radiological material that someone might have accidentally brought home from a work site to an intentional detonation of a dirty bomb.

His job is a “full soup-to-nuts response to radiological material that shouldn’t be wherever it is,” Michel said.

He trains people at facilities around the country to understand “how to detect [radiation], how to contain it, how to identify it and how to mitigate it,” Michel said.

Kathleen McIntyre, the contractor operations manager for RAP Region 1, said her group is the first on-scene emergency response team representing the Department of Energy. One of nine programs around the country, the BNL team is responsible for a region that stretches from Maine to Maryland and to the Pennsylvania-Ohio border.

In addition to sports events and conventions, the team also assists with other high-profile events. In late September, the BNL RAP team will work with other agencies during Pope Francis’s visit to the United States.

In his job, Michel often travels to ensure he’s appropriately trained so he can teach other first-responder agencies. In the last several months, he’s been to Chicago, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Boston, Connecticut and New Jersey.

These trips are necessary to create effective collaborations with local partners, said McIntyre. “Part of the thing that [Michel] does and does well is coordinate with our first-responder partners,” McIntyre said. The training and outreach ensure “if we are ever in a situation where we need to work together, this isn’t the first time we’ve met each other.”

At left, Lee Michel’s uncle, Morton Rosen, was a photographer at BNL for more than 35 years. At right, his grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during WWI. Photo left from BNL Archives; right from Lee Michel
At left, Lee Michel’s uncle, Morton Rosen, was a photographer at BNL for more than 35 years. At right, his grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during WWI. Photo left from BNL Archives; right from Lee Michel

While the mission hasn’t changed for the five years Michel has been in his role, the mechanisms have evolved.

“The equipment we’re using is much more sophisticated than what we had,” Michel said. “The software that runs the system or is used in conjunction with the system is much more advanced.”

Indeed, McIntyre said Michel regularly has to remain updated on the latest software and equipment, in the same way an owner of a laptop has to remain current on electronic updates.

Michel “has to be conversant with all these” systems, she said. “He has to hit the ground running. We don’t own every piece of radiological equipment out there. He needs to understand whatever he’s going to teach.”

McIntyre gives Michel “great kudos” for “rolling up his sleeves” as he tries to stay abreast of the changing technology.

In addition to training, Michel does exercises and drills with response teams, keeping the groups prepared to react to a wide range of potential radiological problems or events.

While the Radiological Assistance Program only has three full-time employees at BNL, the facility includes 26 volunteers.

Michel has been dealing with radiation for over 30 years, starting with eight years in the navy from 1981 to 1989 when he was a nuclear power operator.

Born and raised on Long Island, Michel is the third generation in his family to work at the Upton facility. His grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during World War I. His uncle, Morton Rosen, took pictures for BNL for over 35 years. Michel, who lives in Holtsville, has two daughters, 26-year old Heather and 22-year old Michelle.

As for a fourth generation at BNL, Michel holds out some hope. “I would love to have one of them work here,” he said. He’s even entertained the idea of his seven-month old granddaughter Jemma one day contributing to BNL.

While the work involves traveling to high-profile events, it’s sometimes tough to soak in the atmosphere.

The 2009 inauguration involved working 14-hour shifts in single digits, McIntyre said. After their work, they come back for more assignments. These contractors and volunteers “who serve on the RAP teams are dedicated professionals.”

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The Wardenclyffe site in Shoreham. File photo by Erika Karp

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart,” reads one of many quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Faust” contained in “Tower to the People.” If this is so, Tesla’s heart must have been ablaze with electrical impulses and potential for change.

By Talia Amorosano

On Friday, people of all ages congregated at Shoreham-Wading River High School to celebrate a very special occasion: Nikola Tesla’s 159th birthday.

They came bearing monetary gifts in the form of ticket purchases to see filmmaker Joseph Sikorski’s “Tower to the People” Long Island premiere at the school, which is located a little more than a mile and a half away from Tesla’s Wardenclyffe laboratory. The proceeds from the event will be used to fund the continued restoration of the site — Tesla’s last.

Using bold, mixed media visuals, color saturated re-enactments and original photographs from the early 1900s, the film documents the history of Tesla’s work at Wardenclyffe, a former potato farm, where the inventor planned to complete what he anticipated would be his greatest invention and contribution to mankind — a 187-foot-tall tower capable of transmitting free wireless energy to the entire world.

“A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart,” reads one of many quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Faust” contained in “Tower to the People.” If this is so, Tesla’s heart must have been ablaze with electrical impulses and potential for change. Among the literal highlights of Tesla’s career documented in the film are his successful attempt to wirelessly illuminate incandescent light bulbs from three miles away, creation of the Tesla coil and introduction of alternate current electricity, reception of transmissions from stars and ability to produce artificial lightning that author and Tesla scholar Jack Hitt described as being “so powerful that the thunder of it was heard miles away.”

"Tower to the People" filmmaker Joseph Sikorski speaks at Shoreham-Wading River High School on Friday, July 9. Photo by Talia Amorosano
“Tower to the People” filmmaker Joseph Sikorski speaks at Shoreham-Wading River High School on Friday, July 9. Photo by Talia Amorosano

Unfortunately for Tesla, his brilliant moments are dimmed by disappointment during his later life. The film portrayed Tesla’s persistence when, among other negative events, former funder J.P. Morgan, refused to pay for the completion of the tower and even dissuaded other potential investors from financing him. After writing pleading letters and attempting to come up with the money himself, in an emotion-wrought scene, Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower is destroyed by dynamite explosion, as ordered by the U.S. government.

However, “Tower to the People” does end on an uplifting note with the story of Wardenclyffe’s salvation through Internet crowd-funding; explorations of the modern-day property that is now owned by the nonprofit group, Tesla Science Center; and volunteer efforts to clean up Tesla’s run-down laboratory and turn it into a science center.

“As a kid, my parents could never get me to do yard work, but if you ask me to mow Tesla’s lawn, how awesome is that?” said a volunteer on the cleanup crew in the film.

Throughout the event, the crowd was clearly electrified, erupting into applause several times during key moments of the film, and afterwards honoring Sikorski’s homage to Tesla and Wardenclyffe with a standing ovation.

Most of the audience also stayed for a question and answer session with Sikorski and Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, during which Sikorski expressed his belief that there are tunnels under Wardenclyffe and Alcorn revealed hopes to potentially excavate these tunnels after the primary grounds-cleaning goals are achieved, “as time and money permits.”

Finally, a special guest and distant relative of Tesla, Dusan Stojanovic, of True Global Ventures, took the podium to donate $33,000 to the Wardenclyffe project effort. He also gave money to three young inventors whose innovations were inspired by Tesla; most notably, giving $15,000 to a young man involved with creating clothing with his invention, the Electroloom, a 3-D fabric printer.

Alcorn hopes the completed science center will be open to the public in a few years, and in the meantime, plans to continue fundraising efforts until the property is fully restored.

If you are interested in donating to the science center, getting involved with grounds cleanup, or learning more about the Wardenclyffe property, check out www.teslasciencecenter.org.

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Justin Kinney on the campus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Photo from Kinney

Justin Kinney is like a supervisor at a factory, except that he doesn’t know what the pieces of equipment do.

The only way he can find out is to modify different parts randomly and see how that affects the final product.

An assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Kinney’s factory isn’t in a sprawling suburban building but, rather, is genetic material. The regulatory sequence of DNA is the assembly line; binding sites, which attach to proteins, are like the individual machines. The final output of the factory is gene expression.

Kinney is working to understand regulatory sequences of DNA and is trying to develop an ability to see where proteins bind to genes, explore the role proteins play, and see how proteins and genes interact.

“If we do an experiment on a regulatory sequence, we can identify where proteins bind and how much that sequence affects expression,” Kinney said. “The ultimate goal is to be able to predict these things from DNA sequence alone, without having to do an experiment on every specific sequence we are interested in.”

A physicist by training, Kinney works in an area called molecular biophysics, where he tries to figure out what causes one set of reactions to start, stop or continue based on the way different parts involved, such as proteins, DNA, transcription factors or immune cells, interact.

His work has implications for everything from basic science, to improving drug therapies. He’s also working on understanding basic aspects of the immune system.

Recently, Kinney, partnering with Christopher Vakoc, an assistant professor at CSHL, developed a way to identify new drug targets for treating cancer. “We reached out to [Kinney] about a year or so ago to get his insight and assistance” on a project with drug target discovery, Vakoc said. Using Kinney’s skills as a computational biologist and expertise in biophysics, the researchers “co-developed a way to study the Achilles heel of a large number of cancer types,” Vakoc said.

Since the scientists published their research in May, Vakoc said it has “generated a lot of excitement in cancer research” with other scientists trying to find the vulnerabilities of different types of cancer.

Vakoc said Kinney “developed theories of elegant computational tools” that allowed the researchers to gain greater insight into a modern gene editing tool called CRISPR.

Kinney also worked with Thierry Mora and Aleksandra Walczak at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris on an immunology project.

“How antibodies recognize their targets is an immensely interesting question,” Kinney said. The strength of binding that the antibody has for its target determines how well it works.

Kinney and his partners are mapping out how an antibody’s affinity for its target depends on its protein sequence. “That basic relationship has enormous consequences for how well your immune system works,” Kinney said. It also has implications for how well a pharmaceutical company can engineer an antibody as a potential drug, he added.

By changing the genetic sequence, these researchers can explore how strongly the slightly altered antibody will bind to whatever it’s targeting.

Researchers can explore how DNA responds to a signal mechanistically.

“Just by looking at which sequences correspond to which level, we can identify where specific proteins bind to DNA, what these proteins are and how strongly they interact with each other,” Kinney said. “It’s kind of like decoding a message, making changes to that code, and watching to see the reaction.”

These types of studies can help provide a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between a gene sequence and a gene’s function, he said. Once scientists have a clearer picture of that connection, they might be able to predict what effect a mutation in a specific region might have on a gene.

Kinney visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory several times before he became a postdoctoral fellow at the lab in 2009. He took courses dating back to 2005.

“I love the environment,” said Kinney. “I fell in love with this place through courses and meetings. It’s an academic resort.”

Kinney met his wife, Antoinette Sutto, when they were in graduate school at Princeton. They lived on the same floor and Sutto was the first person Kinney met in his graduate dorm. Their first date was at a First Chance Dance for graduate students. Sutto is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

A resident of Forest Hills, Kinney enjoys the 45-minute Long Island Railroad commute, where he can read and write without a reliable Internet connection.

As for his work, Kinney said he studies how biological information is encoded in DNA, as well as how this information governs how biological molecules function.

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