Archive for May 6th, 2010
Taking the Lead: A medical reporter doesn’t let a cancer diagnosis stand in her way
By Pamela Ferdinand | Spring-Summer 2010 for CR Magazine
It’s time to tango and the competition is hot at the 2008 “Dancing With Chicago Celebrities”—an annual charity ball to benefit breast cancer research. As the beat begins, a professional dance instructor, his black shirt unbuttoned, emerges from the wings. With a dramatic flourish, he pulls a scarlet cloth up and away from a mysterious figure crouched on the dance floor, revealing a woman in a shiny silver halter top, strappy high heels, and a thigh-baring, flouncy red skirt. Dina Bair—an award-winning broadcast journalist at WGN-TV News in Chicago, who is familiar to viewers more for her health care reporting than her boleo—stands up and clasps her partner’s hand. She twirls into his arms. Together they dance with swiveling hips and high kicks, taking the championship.
Few in the crowd could have guessed that prior to the competition, Bair didn’t even know how to dance. But undoubtedly many did know that she has a reputation for not shying away from a challenge. She learned how to swim so that she could enter a triathlon. She shared with television viewers her thrilling rides in an F-16 fighter jet (for a story on the physical demands of pilots) and in a V-22 Osprey Hybrid military troop transport aircraft (for a story on how Marines get supplies in combat zones). She ran up 94 floors of the John Hancock Center in less than 19 minutes during an event to benefit the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago. And last year for the same charity, she took a skyline plunge off the roof of a city hotel and rappelled down 27 stories.
Added to that, this mom of four—who also gives Sunday communion as a Eucharistic minister—runs, boxes, lifts weights, and kayaks.
“She doesn’t feel like there’s anything that she can’t conquer or be,” says Lou Kleinberg, Bair’s husband of 16 years. “She is one of the strongest and smartest people I know.”
Katharin Czink, a medical producer at WGN-TV News, who has been Bair’s friend and colleague for nearly a decade, agrees.
“There is no doubt Dina is and always has been driven. But when it comes to physical tests of endurance, strength and speed, she is off the charts,” Czink says. “Would I say Dina is fearless? No. Because I think fear is an emotion that motivates her. She’s acutely aware of her own mortality, which is why she doesn’t let much stand in her way.”
Her spirit and determination have made Bair, 42, a success. She is a dogged, compassionate reporter (and principal back-up anchor) known for the thoroughness and accuracy of her “Medical Watch” segments on WGN-TV News. She has won five Emmy Awards, a Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and multiple Associated Press awards, among others. And, as she has let her audience know, she is a cancer survivor.
Slender with fine features and straight polished hair, Bair is stylish at work on a weekday in November in shiny patent brown high heels and a brown fitted jacket with a brocade pattern. She is generous with her smile, warmly calling people “honey” and is clearly well-liked. She has more than 2,000 “friends” on her Facebook page and laughs when asked about fans who consider her “hot.”
“It’s hysterical to me. I’m an old mom,” Bair says. “It’s not like I don’t try to look good, but it always cracks me up because if people could see me on the weekends, it’s totally different. I’m not this glam TV lady.”
Growing up outside Philadelphia as one of two children, Bair had an early inkling that she was destined for journalism. At age 10, while shopping for groceries with her mother, Bair would report from the aisles, making up stories about how, for example, the police had just apprehended a robbery suspect, much to the relief of worried shoppers. As a teenager, she aired daily news announcements on her high school TV station’s morning program, “Wake Up O’Hara,” which was also broadcast on a local cable channel.
She went on to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., earning a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film in 1989 in just three years. In lieu of her senior year, the 21-year-old Bair lined up an internship with Joan Esposito, who was a well-known anchor at the ABC affiliate in Chicago. When Esposito moved to NBC’s WMAQ-TV, she hired Bair as a field producer to assist with interviews, log tapes and write scripts.
It didn’t take long for Bair to establish herself as an on-air talent. After stints as a producer, anchor and reporter at other stations, she joined WGN as a full-time general assignment reporter in September 1994. She anchored the weekend morning news for five years until she became pregnant with twins in 1998 and her doctor cautioned her to take it easy. The station assigned her short medical stories instead of news reporting during the week, and the pieces were a hit. Given her interest in science and health, she became the resident medical reporter and over the past 11 years has transformed “Medical Watch” into a ratings and revenue success.
“Just as she is quick on her feet in a physical sense, Dina is equally so as a reporter and writer,” says Czink. “She is whip smart. She simply does not miss a beat.”
Jennifer Lyons, WGN’s assistant news director and Bair’s close friend, agrees. They became friends in 1998 when they were assigned to cover the elevation of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago to cardinal, and instantly clicked on the flight to Rome.
“We’re both tenacious, we’re both dedicated, we’re both a little bit on the perfectionist side,” Lyons says.
In what she considers the most rewarding project of her career to date, Bair spent a month reporting inside the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Her four-part series “Intensive Caring” won a regional Emmy award in the 2000-2001 hard news feature series category. In one segment, Bair profiled two sisters, both younger than 2, with the same kind of rare and deadly brain tumor. In another, she showed a physician telling the parents of a young boy, on Christmas Day, that their son was not going to live. She says she would come home at night to her own children, sit on the edge of their beds, watch them sleep and cry in gratitude.
“By far, that series exceeds anything else I’ve done,” she says. “I felt like I had put something on television that made people think and made them talk to one another as a family about life issues.”
Bair knows a thing or two about life issues. Five years ago, her brother died suddenly at age 33 due to a blood clot, devastating their mother and changing the way Bair approached her own life. “Always in control, I began to appreciate and enjoy so much more,” she says.
It wasn’t her first brush with illness. Sixteen years earlier, when she was 21, Bair had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, an unusual occurrence in a woman so young. Away from her parents and alone at college, she was misdiagnosed for about four months by doctors who thought her abdominal pain was due to menstrual cramps.
She had surgery to remove one ovary and radiation therapy. The treatments rendered the cancer undetectable, but her future fertility remained uncertain. “I was told then that my fertility was in question,” Bair recalls. “Because of the radiation, the only way to know would be to try to have kids. I was 21—that wasn’t an option.”
Five years later, she met her husband, who is now a news photographer for the local CBS station, when both worked the nightshift at an ABC television station in Peoria, Ill. When they began discussing marriage, Bair told Kleinberg she might not be able to have children. She reiterated it the day he proposed.
“When my husband asked me to marry him, one of the first things I said to him was, ‘I might not be able to have children with you. Are you sure you want to marry me?’ ” she recalls.
Ultimately, her worries proved groundless, though fertility drugs were necessary for the couple to conceive their first three children: Max, 13, and twins Ben and Cameron, 11. Their youngest, Gianna, 4, however, was a welcome surprise.
But then came another, far-less-welcome discovery. About four years ago, while nursing her baby daughter, Bair noticed for the first time a nearly black spot on her chest that resembled a crawling ant. She called her dermatologist. Learning he was booked solid for the next month, she pressed for an appointment, describing how the spot, which was not a raised mole, still met suspicious criteria: irregular in shape and color, rapidly growing. “I said, ‘I think I might have skin cancer,’ and then I felt foolish even saying it,” she says.
Her instinct was correct. When she finally saw a doctor weeks later, he looked at the spot and said, “You need to come back tomorrow and have that taken out,” Bair recalls. Pathology results showed it was melanoma. Subsequent surgery was required to remove a golf ball–size mass where the melanoma had invaded her breast; she then had radiation. In 2008, Bair learned that the melanoma had metastasized to her liver, and she had surgery to remove the part of the liver that was affected.
These days, Bair says she doesn’t shy away from occasional bouts of self-pity—“You need to let it out and acknowledge the fact that cancer stinks,” she says—but she has channeled her personal experience with cancer into public service through her work and numerous charity appearances, including the American Cancer Society’s Black and White Ball, the March on Melanoma and the LUNGevity Foundation Fundraiser.
A decade ago, Bair spoke for the first time about having ovarian cancer at a local fundraiser for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, and the warm reception was a revelation. She went public with her melanoma diagnosis and treatment during a May 2007 “Medical Watch” segment on sun protection and skin cancer.
Lyons, the assistant news director, says the challenges Bair has faced have given her a powerful ability to translate medical news for the average person.
“She can walk with the patients, and she can walk with the doctors, and really tell a good story,” says Lyons.
Bair doesn’t claim to know it all. Nor does she pretend to. Journalism allows her to tell stories, to share her interest in science, and to help other survivors—regardless of their condition—know they are not alone.
“I have enough of a healthy curiosity where I ask the questions people at home would be asking,” she says. “That’s one of the things I love the most—being able to communicate things about health and wellness in a way people understand. They call me all the time, saying, ‘I didn’t know about this or that but because of your story, I went to the doctor.’ I really do have the ability to touch people’s lives in a way that makes me feel really good.”
Close to Home: A young woman searches for answers about the disease that took her parents’ lives
By Pamela Ferdinand | Summer 2008 for CR Magazine
Stephanie Kinkel moved across the country last year from California to pursue biology research as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Peers and faculty members ask her, like other newcomers, the usual questions: Do her parents still live in San Diego? When are they going to visit? And will she spend the holidays with them?
Depending on the person, she either smiles and politely changes the subject or tells them the truth. The truth is that Kinkel, 27, is an orphan. But more than that, she is an aspiring cancer researcher orphaned by that very disease: Her father died in 1993 from liver cancer. Less than three years later, metastatic breast cancer took her mother’s life.
“There was nothing she could do about her parents, but there was something she could do about other peoples’ parents,” says Wahl, a past president of the AACR.
Thinking back to her childhood, Kinkel recalls an idyllic time: A nice home in a suburban community. A stay-at-home mom. A father who worked at home as a mechanical engineer and took karate lessons with her on Saturdays. Television was restricted to PBS, and video games were off-limits for Kinkel and her older sister, Jennifer. Instead, Kinkel’s father gave her a microscope, which she used to analyze houseplants and leaves from the backyard. “I was very convinced that there was a specific tree … that had a disease, and I was going to cure it,” she says.
Had it been only the tree that needed curing, things might have turned out very differently. In 1989, Kinkel’s mother, Carolyn, was diagnosed with breast cancer and recovered well after chemotherapy and a mastectomy. Cancer, it seemed to her and her sister, was not life-threatening.
But two years later, it became clear something was wrong with her father, who returned from a business trip looking jaundiced and worn down. He was diagnosed with liver cancer and began chemotherapy. After he had an experimental treatment on the day he was supposed to be discharged from the hospital, a blood clot traveled to his brain and killed him. Kinkel and her sister suspected the worst when their mother returned home alone. It was June 1993, and John Kinkel was 64.
Six months later, the girls learned their mother’s cancer had metastasized to her brain and bones. After months of therapy, and a difficult emotional time at home, she died at age 54—a week before Kinkel’s 15th birthday. Kinkel and her sister stayed with their aunt in Los Angeles, then briefly moved back into their own home. The drama of their childhood made it difficult for the sisters to remain consistently close as they embarked on their own paths, Kinkel says. Her sister lived with a cousin until her early 20s, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in child development. Meanwhile, after graduating from Irvine High School, Kinkel moved into her own apartment at age 18, ready for independence.
“I was a little bit young and a little bit stubborn,” she says. “The one adjective to describe me is ‘determined.’ ”
Her father had emphasized the importance of higher education, but Kinkel faltered and failed out of a first semester at Orange Coast College, a community college in Costa Mesa. Without her parents, she lacked focus and self-confidence, she says. She eventually returned to the school a year and a half later, excited about the challenge of unraveling scientific mysteries and making an impact on the world—particularly in cancer research. Encouraged by several professors and the dean, she worked as a teaching assistant, tutoring, lecturing for anatomy and physiology classes, and running labs. She also won scholarships, edited textbooks and took leadership roles in science-associated organizations, including chapter president of the Association for Women in Science.
“When you don’t have the unconditional love of parents, when people really believe in you no matter what you do, you don’t want to lose that,” Kinkel says, explaining how motivated she became. “There are times in science when things don’t give you the answers you expect or want, and you go through periods where you just rely on your drive, so it’s important to have those people.”
“Even as a 14-year-old, I knew these events were likely to shape my life, but I could not predict how they would shape my academic career,” wrote Kinkel in her application to MIT.
Months later in Cambridge, Mass., Kinkel reflects on her career during a break from research in the lab of biologist Tyler Jacks, the president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), whose team is examining the genetic events that contribute to cancer. On a campus notable for its unfashionable overachievers, she appears poised and stylish with a diamond stud in her pierced nose and silver hoop earrings dangling below short brown hair, long bangs brushed to the side. She seems warm, approachable, and well-rounded, passionate about cutting loose on the dance floor one moment and enthralled with her scientific research the next.
“I am very focused on cancer because I feel the most invested in it,” Kinkel says. “But really the problem solving … is what drives me, because I’m not sure if it was just the emotional component that I would make it very far.”
That thoughtfulness and determination, coupled with her intellectual prowess, led to a remarkable transition for Kinkel in the years since her parents’ deaths. From a high school cheerleader who floundered scholastically and worked as a Sizzler restaurant waitress, Kinkel went on to become a research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. She was accepted everywhere she applied to graduate school, including Princeton and Harvard universities.
Her upward trajectory comes as no surprise to mentor Geoffrey M. Wahl of the Salk Institute. Articulate and mature, she listens and quietly figures out ways around research problems that others consider insurmountable obstacles, he says, adding that her personal losses have given her an “incredible motivation” to succeed.
She transferred from the community college to the University of California–San Diego in 2003 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology two years later. A summer internship at the pharmaceutical company Merck was followed by a two-year stint in Wahl’s lab, which focuses on the genetic basis of cancer and drug-resistant tumors. Kinkel says she could not resist the opportunity to work with Wahl when she learned his research included studying the disease that took her mother.
“When I was really young, I thought [cancer] was one disease that could just be cured with one single medication, and I was going to find it,” says Kinkel, whose work in the lab focused on identifying and characterizing mammary stem cells. “As I got older, I realized it wasn’t going to be so simple, but I still had that desire to find more beneficial medications.”
Now at MIT, she’s one of 30 students in her biology graduate program. It wasn’t an easy move to Cambridge: She was diagnosed with pancreatitis soon after her arrival and had her gall bladder removed. Immersing herself in the college environment, she lives on campus with a roommate for the first time and studies in coffee shops over soy vanilla lattes, listening to music like Dave Matthews and David Gray (“Stuff that’s sort of mellow and heart-wrenching,” she says).
Despite hours stooped over a microscope, she retains the graceful posture of a longtime dancer—who even now does hip-hop at the Cambridge Dance Complex as part of an effort to keep a well-balanced life outside the lab. In fact, she is such a talented dancer that it could have been an alternate career, says her childhood friend, Kesila Childers.
“Dancing with Stephanie is ridiculous. People form circles around her,” says Childers, 28, who lives in Los Angeles and works for the company that produces MTV’s reality show Real World. “People say, ‘You dance next to Stephanie, you don’t dance with Stephanie.’ ”
Those like Childers who know Kinkel best think it must be very difficult for her to work in cancer research, Kinkel says, and she acknowledges that sometimes they are right. One time, she had to walk out of a conference session on inheritable breast cancer because it hit too close to home: Her mother, her mother’s cousin, and her mother’s mother all had the disease. Even now, she says she’s going to wait a few years to undergo screening for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene abnormalities, which are associated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer. So is her sister, now 28 and a preschool teacher who recently wrote a master’s thesis on bereavement.
Looking at where they are now, it feels like there was a reason for what happened in the sisters’ lives, and they are proud of each other’s accomplishments, Kinkel says.
“It’s funny how different our directions are, but how similar: One more brain heavy,” she says, and “one more heart heavy.”
Taking the Needles out of TB Vaccination
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 19, 2007 for Nature.com
Nearly two million people around the world die of tuberculosis each year, most of whom live in the developing world. A vaccine exists but is difficult to distribute and administer in countries lacking an advanced health care system. A Cambridge-based nonprofit, Medicine in Need (MEND), led by Harvard University bioengineering professor David Edwards, aims to change that.
Edwards has developed a new method of vaccination using a powdered, inhalable form of the TB vaccine. Patients could essentially vaccinate themselves using a simple handheld inhaler instead of relying on trained personnel to give needle injections. And the powdered form would not require refrigeration, in contrast to the current Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, or BCG,vaccine.
“The idea of having a new approach that broadens therapy and increases the likelihood of success is important,” Edwards says.
Not for profit
Rather than struggle to find investors for a company devoted to problems of the developing world, Edwards decided to create a nonprofit in 2003 with colleagues and students to bring technology from his lab into the field. Harvard licensed Edward’s technology to MEND but has pledged to forego royalties earned from the technology in developing countries and a major share of royalties earned elsewhere.
MEND manages a $10 million grant that Edwards received in 2005 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is working with the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation to develop the new form of the BCG vaccine. It is also planning a manufacturing facility in Cape Town, South Africa, which aims to begin producing powdered forms of standard and recombinant BCG vaccine by late 2008.
To convert the BCG vaccine into an inhalable powder, Edwards and his colleagues developed a spray-drying method that does not kill the live bacterial cells in the vaccine but creates particles tiny enough to be inhaled.
In a paper published in February, the researchers showed that the spray-dried vaccine maintained its activity at room temperature for up to four months.
And preliminary animal data show that vaccination with aerosolized BCG is more protective than injections, likely because it’s delivered directly to the lungs, the main site of TB infection. Tests in humans could begin in late 2008, Edwards says.
Spray drug
MEND also plans to begin clinical testing of an inhalable form of the antibiotic capreomycin used to treat drug-resistant forms of the disease, which kills 500,000 people worldwide each year. Although effective, this drug is expensive, with treatment costing $3,000 per person and requiring daily injections and oral medications.
Sending powdered capreomycin directly into the lungs via an inhaler could reduce doses by up to 50 percent, potentially lowering the cost and lessening severe and painful side effects for patients, many of whom also have HIV, says Alexis Wallace, executive director ofMEND.
The FDA last year approved inhaled insulin for diabetes, but sales have reportedly lagged due to questions about its safety, cost, and convenience. Whether an inhaled TB vaccine or antibiotic proves effective compared to existing treatments remains to be seen, but an aerosolized drug that achieves the desired effect would be “fantastic,” says Kenneth Castro, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Tuberculosis Elimination.
“The big question is, ‘Will a drug delivered by the lungs act better than [injected drugs]?” he says. “We would need to see evidence. The facts should speak for themselves.”
When The Brain Goes Under
By Pamela Ferdinand | November 15, 2006 for Nature.com
If you have ever experienced general anesthesia, you may recall feeling as if your brain was temporarily switched off. You plunged into unconsciousness and woke up, seemingly seconds later, without any memories of having undergone a painful procedure.
What changes happen in the brain during general anesthesia have long been a mystery. But preliminary results from an ongoing study at Massachusetts General Hospital—where anesthesia was first successfully demonstrated 160 years ago—suggest that the neurophysiological process of “going under” is more nuanced than simply a shutdown of the brain.
Emery Brown, a professor of computational neuroscience and anesthesia at Harvard and MITand director of MGH’s neuroscience statistics research laboratory, is using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture how a commonly used general anesthetic called propofol produces loss of consciousness in the human brain.
Other researchers have studied the brains of patients after the drug has taken effect and have suggested various mechanisms of anesthesia across multiple brain regions.
Brown and his multidisciplinary team, however, are watching the human brain as it transitions from the awake, conscious state to the anesthetized, unconsciousness state. With this approach, “we can look to see when we have a certain drug level, what patterns we see on the EEG, and how the activity in the relevant brain regions change,” says Brown.
This way, researchers may be able to correlate drug levels with brain activity, which could lead to the development of target-specific anesthetic agents and more fine-tuned delivery methods that minimize the side effects and lower the risk of complications of general anesthesia. While it’s a routine and generally safe procedure, general anesthesia can have side effects, from nausea and anxiety to rare complications such as cardiac arrthymias and brain damage.
The study of anesthesia could also help researchers learn more about pain processing, memory formation, and the neuroscience of sleep, not to mention the larger question of consciousness itself.
“By studying anesthesia, we’ll learn as much about how the brain works as we will about how to make better anesthetics,” says Bruce MacIver, a professor of anesthesia at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Selective effects
So far, four subjects have undergone Brown’s experiment. The researchers obtain EEGrecordings and do fMRI scans on the subjects as they are slowly injected with increasing doses of propofol. As the drug takes effect, the researchers monitor the subjects’ level of consciousness by asking them to perform simple tasks in response to auditory sounds. They continue to probe for activity in the brain’s auditory pathways even after the subject has stopped responding to the sounds.
According to Brown, his early results suggest that propofol is selective in stopping, dampening, or scrambling specific signals in certain parts of the brain. The findings so far are consistent with previous positron emission tomography (PET) studies of human subjects under general anesthesia, he says. These studies showed that the subjects had less communication between the cerebral cortex and thalamocortical systems in the brain, which are considered critical to maintaining consciousness.
“We don’t have to necessarily have things shut down. All you have to do is just change the way regions [of the brain] communicate,” Brown says. “And it doesn’t have to be the same way all the time. It may be just altering pathways and turning off some key areas that have to do with the integration of information.”
If that’s the case, anesthetic agents could be designed to disconnect only specific regions of the brain that allow you to, for example, sense pain or to be aware, says Warren Zapol, chief of anesthesia and critical care at MGH. “Why treat the whole body if you could focus on the place in the brain where the key wires for consciousness are?”
A Flexible, 9-Ft. Whale Tooth with Super-Sensing Power?
By Pamela Ferdinand | December 13, 2005 for National Geographic News
| For centuries observers have been fascinated and mystified by the majestic spiral tusk grown by the small Arctic whale known as the narwhal. The extraordinary tooth—extending up to 9 feet (2.7 meters) and textured like a seashell—long evoked the horn of the mythical unicorn and was once sought by royalty as a magical antidote to poison. Science shed little light on the narwhal tusk, however, and its purpose remained elusive. That is until now. Martin Nweeia, a Connecticut-based dentist, is expected today to announce two key discoveries that reveal the tusk’s unique structure and provide significant clues to its function. The findings may further explain whale species behavior and recast thinking on other mammalian teeth. Using cutting-edge technology, Nweeia and his colleagues learned that the narwhal’s oversize tooth possesses a rare combination of extraordinary strength and extreme flexibility. It turns out that an 8-foot (2.4-meter) tusk, seemingly rigid, can bend 1 foot (30 centimeters) in any direction. The team also found compelling evidence that the tusk may be a hydrodynamic sensory organ that contains an extensive nerve system and gathers valuable information for survival in Arctic waters. Researchers say the tusk’s nerve system could detect temperature, pressure, motion, and chemical-solution gradients, such as differences in salinity and water particles that would indicate the presence of certain fish prey. Tactile Tooth The tusk also may possess tactile abilities, perhaps allowing narwhals to identify and communicate with one another through tapping. “There isn’t any other tooth like this, not even remotely close,” said Nweeia, the research team’s principal investigator and a Harvard School of Dental Medicine clinical instructor. The Connecticut-based dentist is scheduled to announce the findings today at the 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in San Diego. Nweeia, whose latest research was sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society’s Expeditions Council, has studied narwhals on four trips to the Canadian high Arctic. He founded the Narwhal Tooth Expeditions and Research Investigation in 2000, bringing together both scientific experts from a variety of disciplines and members of the region’s indigenous Inuit population. The new findings, which have not been published, are based on analyses of at least six Canadian male narwhal tusks, Nweeia said. One of a Kind The narwhal, whose Latin name Monodon Monoceros translates as “one tooth, one horn,” typically grows 13 to 15 feet (4 to 4.5 meters) long, not counting its tusk, and weighs about 2,200 to 3,500 pounds (1,000 to 1,600 kilograms). A protected Arctic species, narwhals are social animals that mostly live in the Atlantic portion of the Arctic Ocean and are found in fewer numbers in the Greenland Sea. They are hunted by the Inuit for their tusks, meat, and skin. The whales have been known to dive nearly vertically as deep as 3,000 feet (about 900 meters) multiple times per day. (They dive when scared and presumably to feed.) The mammal’s tusk has baffled scientists because it defies known principles and properties of teeth. It is slightly longer than half the animal’s length and typically protrudes through the left side of a male’s upper jaw plate and lip. (For comparison, consider a six-foot-tall [two-meter-tall] person with a three-foot-tall [meter-long] incisor jutting straight up into the air.) Furthermore, unlike the curved teeth of elephants and warthogs, the narwhal tooth is nature’s only straight tusk. It consistently spirals on a left-handed, single axis. Scientists speculate the spiral may minimize tusk fractures, and prior research suggests it may aid the tusk’s relatively straight growth during development. Adding to the tusk’s uniqueness is its odd gender distribution. The teeth are common in males but not females. Female tusks, when they do appear, tend to be shorter and cleaner with more tightly wound spiral patterns. Inside Out The latest findings, researchers say, only add to the narwhal’s singularity. Generally, mammalian teeth are softer on the inside and tougher on the outside to resist wear and abrasion. But when Naomi Eidelman, an infrared microscopy expert at the Paffenbarger Research Center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, used a special technique to map cross-sections of a tusk cell by cell, she reported something dramatically different. While the tusk contains some materials similar to other mammalian teeth—dentin, pulp, and cementum—it is constructed “inside out,” said Frederick Eichmiller, who directs the research center. A highly mineralized layer surrounds the pulp on the inside, like a steel rod. The outside of the tooth, which resembles enamel at the tip, is actually less mineral and more protein. Cementum is usually the layer that bonds the tooth to the bone in other mammalian teeth. But in this case, the cementum is “just sticking out into the ocean,” Eichmiller said. “This tooth was different from what we’ve seen before,” he said. “Ever.” Scientists theorize the reverse architecture endows the tusk with flexibility, possibly helping it to absorb shock and resist extreme water pressures during deep dives. The tusk does not appear able to lay down another form of dentin to heal cracks, and perhaps it does not need to, Nweeia says. The researcher adds that the tusk’s unusual qualities could have profound implications for modern dentistry and biomaterials science. “Everything about this tusk is built not to break,” he said. “To find a material that is flexible and strong—that is kind of the grail for restorative materials. This guy’s got it.” Sensing the Environment The new findings also provide significant clues to tusk function, a puzzle that has generated conflicting theories, from displaying aggression to breaking ice. Using scanning electron microscopy, researchers uncovered evidence of dentinal tubules, basic structures that exist in almost all teeth, including humans. The tubules are remnants of a cell process in which millions of tiny nerve connections tunnel their way from the central nerve of a tooth to its outer surface. Tubules in human mouths are sensitive to cold and are normally covered by enamel. We experience discomfort and pain only when they are inadvertently exposed, through cavities, for example. Narwhal tubules, however, penetrate the outermost layer of the tooth, directly exposing sensory connections to the Arctic environment. The result is that the tusk—despite its inanimate appearance—actually serves as a kind of membrane with an extremely sensitive surface, researchers say. Tubules are known to allow for specific sensory functions in mammals, such as gauging air temperature and barometric pressure. But it remains to be seen what they are used for by the narwhal, whose tubules contain a solution similar to blood plasma, Nweeia says. Sensing salinity is one possible answer; Nweeia and his colleagues have developed customized equipment to test this theory that measures narwhal brain activity when saline solution is introduced to the tusk. Narwhal migration is tied to ice formation, which affects saline concentrations, and narwhals may be able to detect subtle changes in the environment from miles away, Nweeia said. Human teeth have evolved so that “we go out of our way not to have cold things against a tubule,” he said. “Why does an Arctic whale, who is in frigid waters and incredible pressures all of his life, go out of his way to have open tubules?” “If you are going to develop something like this, from an evolutionary standpoint it has to be about survival. There are a lot better ways to get a female than growing one of these,” he added. Solving the Puzzle Future field expeditions are expected to focus on anatomical studies and sensory research. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, are conducting CT and MRI scans on two narwhal heads, one male and one female. And a dissection team, led by James Mead of the Smithsonian Institution, will convene in January. Still unanswered, researchers say, are fundamental questions about how and why the tusk evolved. “There’s a difference, but why is there a difference?” Eichmiller said. “That’s the part that is the most intriguing.” |
‘We Commit Their Elements’; Ashes of JFK Jr., Bessettes Scattered Near Crash Site; Kennedy, Bessettes Given Shipboard Rites
By Barton Gellman and Pamela Ferdinand | July 23, 1999 for The Washington Post
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass.–In an ancient naval ritual adapted to private grief, the Kennedys and Bessettes entombed three loved ones today in the plot of sea that swallowed their fallen aircraft six nights ago.
From the fantail of the destroyer USS Briscoe, anchored between Martha’s Vineyard and the Kennedy clan’s redoubt at Hyannis Port, an officer in dress whites carried three brass urns of ashes, one by one, down a ladder to the wind-chopped water line. There on a small steel platform, their next of kin scattered the ashes of John F. Kennedy Jr.; his wife, Carolyn Bessette; and her sister Lauren Bessette into the waves.
“We commit their elements to the deep, for we are dust and unto dust we shall return, but the Lord Jesus Christ will change our mortal bodies to be like his in glory, for He is risen the first-born from the dead,” a Navy chaplain prayed, one of five clergymen who took part in the shipboard service. “So let us commend our brother and sisters to the Lord, that the Lord may embrace them in peace and raise them up on the last day.”
No honor guard fired a three-volley salute, and no bugler played “Taps,” as Navy procedure would dictate in a military funeral. The Navy’s permission for burial at sea, granted after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) requested it Tuesday from Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, came under a provision entitling nonveterans who have made notable or outstanding contributions to the United States.
“Clearly we felt that John Kennedy Jr.’s contributions were both notable and outstanding,” said Rear Adm. Tom Jurkowsky, the Navy’s chief spokesman. “He’s obviously spent much of his life working for the disabled and underprivileged. He headed up a nonprofit group providing opportunities for people with disabilities. And he was the son of a former president of the United States, who himself was a World War II hero.”
The choice of venue arose in part from the dead trio’s long delight in the local waters, which link the mainland to the private beach property that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis left her son at Martha’s Vineyard’s Squibnocket Pond. The two families asked that the Briscoe, officials said, steam as close as possible to the spot from which the three bodies and some of the wreckage were pulled Wednesday afternoon.
Perhaps the larger motivation, associates said, was practical. Burial at sea, behind a Navy and Coast Guard picket that kept aircraft and chartered tugs at some remove, afforded what privacy the famous can find in the age of the satellite and telephoto lens.
Only 17 relatives — including Sen. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Richard and Ann Freeman and Lisa Bessette — put aboard the Briscoe at 9:00 this morning, along with a priest identified by the Cape Cod Times as the Rev. Charles J. O’Byrne, who married John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette. Network cameras tracked the 9,200-ton destroyer from port at Woods Hole and then from the island coast where parts of Kennedy’s shattered airplane had washed ashore. All they could see, for hours, was a warship’s stately procession toward the horizon.
NBC’s broadcast overlaid that image with the eerily evocative voice of the dead man’s slain father, recorded as then-President Kennedy toasted the America’s Cup racing crews on Sept. 14, 1962: “It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.”
In New York, with another invitation-only service set for Friday, the city’s Irish Catholic community held a public mass this evening for the three. Thousands of mourners gathered for Irish hymns and eulogies at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in lower Manhattan.
President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton announced plans to attend the private Friday memorial at the St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church. They invited Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and her husband to accompany them there aboard Air Force One.
Preliminary autopsy results, summarized for reporters, found the three travelers died instantly of multiple trauma when their Piper Saratoga struck the water after descending at a rate of more than 5,000 feet per minute. That rate, combined with the plane’s forward speed, would make the ocean as unyielding as concrete.
Divers said the single-engine craft sprawled in pieces on the seabed, 116 feet down, its engine and wings sheared off and passenger compartment broken apart.
Sources close to the investigation said investigators found no apparent defects in their initial examination of the fuselage, the engine and the propellers in a closed hangar at Otis Air National Guard Base. But they cautioned that weeks of detail work lie ahead before they can rule out structural or mechanical causes.
The sources said most, if not all, of the aircraft appears to have been located in the debris field where the fuselage and the bodies were found still strapped in their seats. That includes the wings, the tail section, the engine and the propeller. One of the three metal prop blades was broken off but was near the rest of the prop, indicating it broke on impact with the water or the ocean floor and not in flight.
A number of cockpit navigational instruments were recovered, and may provide valuable clues, the sources said.
If no mechanical or structural defects are found, investigators will be left with the likelihood that Kennedy lost his bearings, and then control of the plane, while flying over a dark ocean in thick haze. Hundreds of pilots have died in similar conditions, without visual cues to up and down.
Dozens of local residents and tourists in shorts and T-shirts lined the narrow streets and bridges of Woods Hole to catch a glimpse of the motorcade as it pulled into the harbor on a windy and overcast day. Like the Kennedys, who have not shed public tears, the people gathered here to remember, not to weep.
Jim Merageas, 62, said this was the first time in days he had managed to pull himself away from the drama unfolding on his television set in a nearby vacation home.
“What did they do to deserve this. . . . I don’t think any of us will come up with an answer,” Merageas said from his perch along the two-lane road crowded with news crews overlooking the harbor. “When we got up this morning and they said what was going on, I said, ‘Hey, let’s see it. We can get down there and really see it for ourselves.’ ”
Family members seen embarking the Coast Guard cutter Sanibel included Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband, Edwin, holding hands; Sen. Kennedy and his two sons; Maria Shriver; and William Kennedy Smith. They were joined by Lisa Ann Bessette, Lauren’s twin sister; her mother, Ann Freeman; and stepfather Richard Freeman. All were dressed in black. The senator waved to a pair of onlookers as if to either acknowledge their presence or kindly shoo them away, but family members otherwise maintained their silence as state police officers guarded the entrance to the dock and buoys clanged in the distance.
Family members’ main concern is keeping the youngest children out of the loop of sadness, and any discussions of the tragedy are usually reserved for after the children have gone to bed, a source close to the family said. “You wouldn’t believe how quiet it is in the compound, except for the children,” the source said. “The tears they shed, they shed alone.”
Four Navy chaplains and Father O’Byrne — all Roman Catholic — presided over a mariners’ service. It lasted 35 minutes.
While cremation and burial at sea are not the usual Catholic funeral practices, the church lifted its absolute ban in 1963. Cremation was once thought by the church to deny Catholic belief in the resurrection of the body on Judgment Day. The church expects cremated remains to be treated much like a whole body, and frowns on the scattering of ashes.
The family chose to do so anyway. As they did a brass quintet from the Newport Naval Base played Christian hymns, in place of the military “Taps.” There were no words, but one participant said the words were well known to the two families of observant Catholics. “Abide with me,” went one of the hymns, “fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide. When other helpers fail and comfort flee, help of the helpless, o abide with me.”
Ferdinand reported from Martha’s Vineyard. Staff writers Don Phillips, Hanna Rosin and Bradley Graham in Washington and researcher Nathan Abse contributed to this report.
After One Cardinal Resigns, Catholics Ask: Who’s Next?; Other Bishops Under Scrutiny for Handling Sex Abuse Cases
By Pamela Ferdinand and Alan Cooperman | December 23, 2002 for The Washington Post
MANCHESTER, N.H.–Within hours of Cardinal Bernard F. Law’s resignation on Dec. 13, an alleged victim of a pedophile priest stepped to the podium at a news conference in Boston and announced a new target.
“Bishop McCormack, we’re coming after you,” said Gary Bergeron, 40, referring to New Hampshire Bishop John B. McCormack, who was not present. “For every document I’ve seen with the name Bernard Law, I’ve seen 100 with the name Bishop McCormack.”
Law is the 19th bishop worldwide, and the ninth in the United States, to step down since 1990 in the wake of sex abuse scandals. To many Roman Catholics, a natural question is: Who’s next?
Law’s resignation creates a “massive precedent” that has emboldened sexual abuse victims, their supporters, prosecutors and even priests to push for more resignations, said Philip Jenkins, a professor of religious studies at Penn State University who has written two books about the scandal.
“I think we’re going to see rising tension between the higher and lower clergy as more and more ordinary priests organize, not just in self-defense, but to challenge their bishops,” Jenkins said.
Pressure is mounting quickly on five of Law’s former deputies who have received subpoenas to testify before a Massachusetts grand jury. Chief among them is McCormack, 67, who handled sexual misconduct cases in the Boston archdiocese for a decade before being promoted to bishop of Manchester in 1998. On Dec. 10, he signed an agreement acknowledging that New Hampshire’s attorney general had sufficient evidence to convict his diocese of child endangerment.
But attention also is shifting to the powerful cardinals of Los Angeles and New York and to bishops in other cities, such as Phoenix and Toledo, who are up against aggressive prosecutors, hard-hitting local newspapers and restive clergy.
Some victim activists have misgivings about demanding the resignations of particular bishops. David Clohessy, executive director of the largest victims’ group, the 4,300-member Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said it is “a dangerous strategy” that “could delude people into thinking the problem is a few bad apples.”
Nonetheless, many victims in communities across the country have called on their local bishops to step down. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken Dec. 12-15, also shows rising public dissatisfaction with the hierarchy’s response to the scandal, even among Catholics.
More than three-quarters of the 1,209 adults in the nationwide poll, and 69 percent of the Catholics, said they disapproved of the church’s handling of sexual abuse. Half of all the respondents — and more than a third of the Catholics — said the church “cannot be trusted” to handle the issue properly in the future.
Among the prelates under rising financial and legal pressure is Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger Mahony, who faces an onslaught of civil lawsuits in 2003 because the California legislature has lifted the statute of limitations for one year.
Having spent nearly $ 200 million on a new cathedral, Mahony’s archdiocese now faces budget cuts. A grand jury has subpoenaed its records on 17 priests, and Mahony has been personally implicated in the case of the Rev. Michael Baker, who says he admitted to the archbishop in 1986 that he had molested several boys. Baker was sent for psychological treatment and then transferred to nine different parishes before leaving the priesthood two years ago.
Cardinal Edward Egan of New York also is under intense scrutiny for his past handling of abuse allegations. When he was bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., for example, Egan allegedly gave an accused priest $ 17,000 to settle bank debts and hire an attorney, the Hartford Courant has reported.
Prelates in smaller dioceses who are under pressure to step down include Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien of Phoenix. He faces a grand jury investigation by a prosecutor who has suggested that the bishop’s resignation might help to avert criminal charges against church leaders.
And in the diocese of Toledo, two priests have called for Bishop James R. Hoffman to step down, particularly in light of eight lawsuits accusing the Rev. Dennis Gray of molesting numerous boys before leaving the priesthood in 1987. Although victims say they told church officials about the abuse before 1987, Gray left the priesthood with a clean record and went on to work in the Toledo public schools until this year.
One of the priests urging Hoffman to retire, the Rev. Patrick Rohen, said he is “breaking the code of silence.”
“I will tell you, I fear retaliation,” Rohen said. “But somebody’s got to speak out on this. The whole problem is the world of secrecy and shame. In order to get beyond this denial, in places where cover-ups and incompetence have been demonstrated, those bishops should retire.”
The combination of events that preceded Law’s resignation — including a subpoena for the cardinal to testify before a grand jury, the threat of bankruptcy for the archdiocese and a letter from 58 priests calling for his departure — has not been duplicated elsewhere.
But some victim activists believe the main determinant of future resignations will be whether jurists across the county follow the example of Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney, who granted the Boston Globe’s request for the release of internal church documents on sexual misconduct.
“If in other states, the files are turned over the way they were in Boston, then yeah, there will be a domino effect,” said Mary Grant, head of the Los Angeles chapter of SNAP.
McCormack is on the hot seat partly because his name appears frequently in the Boston files. He served as Law’s secretary for ministerial personnel from 1984 to 1994 and is a defendant in many of the suits against the Boston archdiocese. But he has also run into trouble in Manchester, a diocese that includes all of New Hampshire’s 325,000 Catholics.
As recently as June, McCormack reassigned a priest to a parish even though the priest admitted having sex with a teenage boy in the 1980s and the diocese was arranging a secret financial settlement.
When the settlement was revealed, McCormack bluntly explained that he had decided to keep the Rev. Ronald P. Cote in ministry because “it was not anticipated that this would be public.” Parishioners were outraged, newspapers editorialized for McCormack to resign and protesters who picketed against Law said they would begin demonstrating at St. Joseph Cathedral in Manchester.
“If you got 500 Catholics from all over the state in a room and put the question to them, I bet 400 would vote for new leadership,” said Peter Flood, New Hampshire coordinator for Voice of the Faithful, a lay Catholic group that has called for structural changes in the church.
It has been a deep and sudden spiral for McCormack, who until recently was a national leader in the church’s response to the scandals. He served as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse for two years before stepping down in April, following the disclosure that he failed to investigate complaints against the Rev. Paul R. Shanley in Boston even after Shanley publicly advocated men having sex with boys. Shanley was recently released from jail pending his trial on molestation charges.
McCormack has said he has no plans to resign as bishop. But he alluded to the precariousness of his position in a homily last Sunday, saying, “My past haunts my present and clouds my future with you in New Hampshire.”
McCormack’s defenders say he has dealt compassionately with both victims and perpetrators. Peter E. Hutchins, an attorney who has brought 75 sexual abuse lawsuits against the church, said the Manchester diocese under McCormack has admitted liability, waived a statute of limitations, shared information about its assets and refrained from attacking victims’ truthfulness.
“We don’t know all that’s in the files in Boston, but if you judge him by what he’s done in New Hampshire, he’s been a wonderful leader,” said Donna Sytek, former speaker of the state House of Representatives and head of a diocesan task force on sexual misconduct. “I truly believe he gets it. He may not have gotten it 15 years ago, but he really is committed to change.”
Some victims see McCormack differently: as a bishop who repeatedly accepted the word of accused priests over the complaints of victims and their families.
Bergeron, who warned on the day of Law’s resignation that the New Hampshire bishop would be next, held a news conference Friday with four other men who say they were molested in various Massachusetts parishes by the late Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham.
The men provided reporters with copies of church files showing McCormack was aware of complaints that Birmingham sexually abused children. But Birmingham nevertheless was sent to St. Ann’s Parish in Gloucester in 1985 and promoted to pastor the following year.
In an April 1987 letter, McCormack reassured one parishioner who had heard Birmingham had molested boys in another parish and was worried he might pose a threat to her son, an altar boy. “I contacted Father Birmingham and asked him specifically about the matter you expressed in your letter. He assured me there is absolutely no factual basis to your concern regarding your son and him,” McCormack wrote. A spokesman said the bishop was not available for comment but confirmed that McCormack had agreed to meet with the men after Christmas.
Birmingham “was having a feast on young boys,” one of the alleged victims, Larry Sweeney, told reporters. “The caterers were McCormack and other bishops who knew about him and what he was doing.”
Cooperman reported from Washington.
Boston’s Cardinal Resigns Over Sex Abuse Scandal
By Alan Cooperman and Pamela Ferdinand | December 14, 2002 for The Washington Post
Nearly a year after the scandal over clergy sexual abuse erupted in his archdiocese, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard F. Law resigned yesterday, apologizing for his mistakes and saying he hoped his departure would usher in a period of healing.
Law tendered his resignation in a morning meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, and it was immediately accepted, the Vatican announced. Auxiliary Bishop Richard G. Lennon, a relative newcomer to Boston who is untainted by the scandal, was appointed as a temporary administrator until the pope chooses a new archbishop.
“It is my fervent prayer that this action may help the Archdiocese of Boston to experience the healing, reconciliation and unity which are so desperately needed,” Law said in a written statement. “To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness.”
Law’s resignation came after steadily increasing evidence that he failed to remove sexually abusive priests, and with his archdiocese teetering on bankruptcy under the burden of hundreds of lawsuits by alleged victims.
There was no immediate word on what Law, 71, the most senior Roman Catholic prelate in the United States and the archbishop of Boston since 1984, will do next. But church experts said he would almost certainly remain a cardinal and could be named to a post at the Vatican. His statement said “the particular circumstances of this time suggest a quiet departure.”
Although several U.S. bishops have been forced to retire because of the sexual abuse scandal, Law is the first to resign because of his mishandling of the problem, without being personally implicated in sexual misconduct.
Law’s brief statement did not explain why he was stepping down now, after months of demands by sexual abuse victims for his resignation. He had offered to resign at least once before, in an April visit to the Vatican, but said afterward that the pope had encouraged him to stay on and that he wanted to be “part of the solution” to the scandal.
Since the beginning of December, however, Law’s remaining support among Boston’s 2 million Catholics crumbled as the archdiocese considered filing for bankruptcy, a judge ordered the release of 11,000 pages of church files on sexual misconduct by priests, and prosecutors sent Law a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in a widening criminal investigation of the archdiocese.
Perhaps the most damaging in this “series of final straws,” said the Rev. Robert Bullock, head of the 250-member Boston Priests Forum, was a letter from 58 Boston area priests calling for Law to resign. “The priests and people of Boston have lost confidence in you as their spiritual leader,” it said.
In a week of accelerating events, Law’s subpoena was delivered last Friday. On Saturday, he flew to Rome, canceling his weekend appearances in Boston without explanation.
The priests’ letter arrived at his empty residence Monday. Two days later, leaders of the 25,000-member lay group Voice of the Faithful, which previously had refrained from criticizing Law, voted overwhelmingly to urge for his resignation.
And on Thursday, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly said at a news conference that although it is not yet clear whether prosecutors will be able to bring criminal charges against leaders of the Boston archdiocese, there is abundant evidence that those leaders engaged in a years-long coverup of sexual abuse by priests. “The church cared more about itself than it cared about kids,” said Reilly, a Catholic.
Donna Morrissey, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said yesterday that Law will meet all of his legal obligations, including the subpoena. Holding back tears, Morrissey told reporters that Law was “doing okay. He’s always been steadily concerned with what was in the best interests of the Archdiocese of Boston.”
Boston was in an uproar yesterday over Law’s resignation. Both of the city’s newspapers ran “Extras” and television stations were live with the story all morning. And although the cardinal’s critics — including many alleged victims — were pleased, a tone of subdued sadness permeated the city, one of the nation’s bastions of Catholicism where many residents identify themselves by parish rather than by neighborhood.
Law remains a defendant in the hundreds of civil lawsuits, but it will now be up to Lennon, the temporary administrator, to decide whether the Boston archdiocese should file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to try to force a global settlement of those suits.
Lennon, 55, has been rector of St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Mass., since 1999 and was ordained a bishop last year. He said yesterday he would resign the seminary post and “do all I can with the help of the bishops, priests, deacons, religious and laity of the archdiocese, to work towards healing” the wounds left by the scandal.
James E. Post, president of Voice of the Faithful, noted that Lennon has met several times with abuse victims. “That gives us hope, because if you look at what lies ahead, there’s no quality more important to the healing process than the ability to listen and to have a genuine conversation with people of the archdiocese,” Post said.
As a relatively new bishop, however, Lennon does not appear to be in the running to become Boston’s next cardinal. Among the likely candidates for the post, according to church experts, are Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Ill., the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Archbishop Harry Flynn of St. Paul-Minneapolis, who heads the conference’s Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse; and Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, head of the vicariate of the U.S. Military Services.
Although Vatican officials said Law raised the possibility of bankruptcy during his discussions in Rome this week, it is unclear whether the Vatican gave its approval.
Plaintiffs lawyers have said they believe the talk of Chapter 11 is a bluff intended to pressure victims into accepting smaller settlements and dissuade them from bringing further lawsuits.
Bankruptcy would open the archdiocese’s books, turn over control of its finances to a civil court, bring shame on the church and depart from the Vatican’s worldwide policy of financial independence from governments.
Law’s resignation could help avoid all that, said Patrick Schiltz, an associate dean of the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis who has represented many U.S. dioceses in sexual abuse lawsuits.
“I’ve negotiated hundreds of settlements in clergy misconduct cases, and unlike a typical commercial case, they are emotional events, not just financial events,” Schiltz said. “The victims in Boston just don’t trust Cardinal Law, and many of them have personalized their anger on Cardinal Law. Whether that’s right or wrong, it’s been an obstacle to settlement.”
Several plaintiffs’ lawyers said, however, that they will continue to pursue lawsuits and file new ones.
Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer for scores of alleged victims of the former priest and convicted pedophile John Geoghan, said that “just because Bernard Cardinal Law resigns doesn’t mean everything’s okay now. There’s enormous rot, enormous decay in the archdiocese of Boston. Now it has to cleanse itself.”
Barbara Blaine, founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said she hoped that prosecutors, the news media and the public would now focus on New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan, Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger Mahony and Law’s former deputies — “all of whom have done what Law himself has done, but who have avoided proper scrutiny largely because Law himself has become such a lightning rod.” But she stopped short of calling for those prelates to resign.
One of Geoghan’s alleged victims, Patrick McSorley, said Law’s resignation “is a little too late, but at least now we know we can start anew. I don’t want to hear anymore about anymore little kids being victimized by any more priests.”
Ferdinand reported from Boston.
Recruiting Teachers: Try m-o-n-e-y
By Pamela Ferdinand | July 18-24, 1998 for The Economist
How can you get good teachers in the public schools? Over the past few months. Massachusetts has been wondering. Across the country, demand for new teachers is expected to reach 2m over the next decade, and states are in fierce competition to get the best of the crop. So first Massachusetts has tried tests, and now it is trying bribes. It is not clear that either will work; but in a state that prides itself on a long history of quality education, the debate is raging red-hot.
The trouble began in April, when following the lead of 43 other states who already require such exams, Massachusetts held its first statewide test for nearly 1,800 candidates aspiring to teach in the public pools. To its astonishment, almost 60% of the candidates failed. Around 30% failed a basic reading and writing test, with questions along the lines of “What is a preposition?” and “Define the word ‘abolish’.” Some 63% failed the maths paper. In one section of the reading and writing test, a paragraph from “The Federalist Papers” was read aloud three times as dictation. Among the interesting words thereby introduced to the lexicon were “improbally”, “integraty”, “bodyes” and “relif”.
Confronted with such results, the state Board of Education did what any other self-preserving body would do: it voted to lower the pass-mark. Roughly 260 more of the candidates thereby slid through. Then the board reinstated the original, higher, pass-mark, prompting the interim education commissioner to blame the switch on “political forces”, and immediately resign.
After the test debacle, state officials had a better idea. After all, Massachusetts has a $1 billion budget surplus waiting to be spent: and what better cause could there be than education? A number of school systems in other states have already turned to such incentives to attract qualified candidates. Baltimore offers housing bonuses of $5,000 to new teachers, with a bigger bonus if they are willing to work in rough areas. Detroit offers bonuses of $3,000, and Los Angeles provides a $5,000 salary differential to teachers who are bilingual. New York city is recruiting (with the lure of generous starting salaries) from as far away as Austria, which has a surplus of teachers.
Now Massachusetts may cap the lot by offering teachers the biggest bonus in the country: $20,000 merely for signing the contract. If the law passes, 250 aspiring teachers could receive such a bonus. To put the sum in context, it is not faroff the average starting salary for a teacher in the Massachusetts public schools ($26,540) and $5,000 more than the median signing bonus received by all graduates from Harvard Business School who accepted job offers last year.
This idea is the brainchild of Thomas Birmingham, the president of the state Senate, who unashamedly describes it as “elitist”. There are several more around. Scott Harshbarger, the state attorney-general and the leading Democratic contender for the governor’s seat, has proposed $5,000 bonuses for 200 teachers who accept jobs in the state’s worst schools. Paul Cellucci, the acting governor and the leading Republican contender, would rather use the surplus for tax cuts, but he has also suggested full college scholarships for top high-school students willing to teach for four years in Massachusetts public schools. He has also suggested that all current teachers take the famous test.
Although international studies have shown no connection between education spending and achievement, the states like to think that extra money is at least the key to teacher satisfaction. One national study, by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, has shown that low salaries often deter public school teachers from staying longer than a year in the profession, while others show that up to half America’s teachers leave before their fifth year of service. Bonuses could either be awarded in one lump sum, or spread out over several years to ensure that new teachers stay in their jobs. They could also be targeted and varied to attract teachers with particularly valued expertise–in maths, say, or foreign languages. According to John Silber, the chancellor of Boston University and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, bonuses “certainly can’t hurt, and I suspect they can help a great deal.”
Others, however, believe a more systematic attempt is needed to improve teacher salaries, working conditions and retirement policies. “Attracting teachers is certainly important,” says Kathy Kelley, president of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, one of the state’s two main teachers’ unions. “Retaining them is even more important.” To all those familiar with the intransigence of unionised teachers, those remarks would seem to spell trouble.
Rent Control: The morning after
By Pamela Ferdinand | May 2-8, 1998 for The Economist
All across America, rent control is dying A out Not before time, some would say. What began as an emergency measure, to address housing shortages during the second world war. now looks mostly like a way to prevent landlords realizing the proper value of their properties. In recent years, California’s legislators have diluted restrictions governing how much private landlords may legally charge tenants. Illinois, together with several other states, has banned local governments from imposing rent control. Even in New York, where rent control is sacred in certain parts of the city, lawmakers came close last year to ending the regulated rents of millions of tenants.
In Massachusetts, rent control lasted for nearly 30 years in Boston. Cambridge and the nearby suburb of Brookline. But the frustrations of landlords, together with scandalous stories of well-heeled public servants living in cheap flats, eventually took their toll. Voters eliminated rent control by referendum i n November 1994, and lingering protections for disabled, elderly and low-income tenants finally expired last year.
There were dire predictions of hardship when rent control was abolished. Some of them came to pass- Cambridge (home of Harvard University), which had roughly 16,000 rental units under the strictest regulations in the state, recently reported that nearly 40% of tenants in regulated flats moved out after rent control ended. From a modest survey of 1.000 households, city officials concluded that decontrolled rents overall jumped by more than 50% between 1994 and 1997 (from an average of $504 a month to $775). outpacing market rates. Over the same period, complaints of eviction also rose by 33%.
Amy Fripp, an unemployed 42-year- old, had to leave the Cambridge house in which her family had lived since the 1960s when her landlord put up the rent by $250 a month. Another woman, who is elderly, faced eviction from her home after 50 years. “Rent control may be over, but its effects are far from over.” says Ellen Shachter, a lawyer with Cambridge and Somerville Le- gal Services, which last year represented 100 residents of formerly regulated proper- ties. “It’s clearly contributing to making Cambridge a city of rich and poor.”
It is true that Cambridge, once renowned for its economic and racial diversity, is on its way to becoming not only wealthier, but also more transient New households there are now less likely to include families and elderly people with incomes of less than $40,000, and more likely to include multiple room-mates and full-time college or graduate students.
Similar worries have been voiced in Boston, which had 16,000 strictly regulated units and another 40,000 units under a looser form of rent control known as “vacancy decontrol”. Evictions for non-payment of rent have increased by 20% since rent control was abolished, and more than 7,000 eviction complaints were handled by Boston’s housing court last year, com- pared to 5,000 in 1993 before rent control ended. With a vacancy rate of less than one percent across the city, moderately-priced housing is getting hard to find.
Yet the Cambridge study also showed that, when rent control ended, investment in housing and repairs went up. It showed, too, that although many people left. most stayed put, and that the number of non- white tenants in formerly regulated units has actually doubled. Nor is the end of rent control the only reason for turmoil in the housing market. Turn over in communities with large amounts of rented housing is al- ways high, especially among young people, and cities naturally “change their shape over time,” notes Henry Pollakowski. a housing economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Centre for Real Estate. Harvard Square, for instance, where chain stores like The Gap are thriving and rents climbing, may have lost much of its distinctiveness but remains as vibrant as ever. The strong economy, with a booming property market, may also have contributed to higher rents and higher eviction rates.
In order to soften the end of rent control, Boston secured federal rent subsidies for roughly 400 elderly, disabled and low- income tenants. Others were placed at the bottom of lengthy public-housing waiting lists. Brookline offered one-time relocation stipends to deregulated tenant households, and Cambridge has earmarked more than $i5m in local taxes for affordable housing programs. But many of the displaced tenants of formerly rent-controlled buildings have simply disappeared. Mark Snyder, the deputy administrator of Boston’s Rental Housing Resource Centre, has had a lot of post sent back to him marked “Addressee unknown.” Exactly what has become of these people, he has no idea.
