Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Storm Warning

February 4, 2019 by Ramin Skibba Comments Off

Photo-illustration combining a photo the R/V Roger Revelle at sea and a photo of Roger Revelle ’29 at work on another research vessel many years before.

Calm seas and sunny weather greeted the R/V Roger Revelle’s maiden voyage in July 1996 as it traveled south from Mississippi, through the Panama Canal and then to San Diego. On board the 273-foot research vessel—the namesake of climate scientist Roger Revelle ’29—were his wife, Ellen Clark Revelle, and their daughter Mary Ellen Revelle Paci ’57, who shared a cabin and relished the chance to experience firsthand the ship’s first passage.

Revelle collects mud from the bottom of the ocean floor for his research as a Ph.D. student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“It was just a remarkable adventure, and we were both very proud of my dad. Really, it was an honor that I was on that ship,” Revelle Paci says.

Revelle died 27 years ago, but his legacy lives on—and not only in the ship that bears his name. A major figure in the early years of climate science and oceanography, he helped establish both fields and elevated them to the international stage. As the director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (not affiliated with Pomona’s sister institution, Scripps College), he drew attention to growing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would produce a global warming trend and encouraged other scientists to join him in studying the problem. He also served as science advisor to President Kennedy’s Department of the Interior, testified before congressional committees and was a professor and mentor for future vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore.

The R/V Revelle today continues to enable the research of climate scientists following in Revelle’s footsteps. The scientists who use it are typically supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Naval Research and even NASA. Owned by the Navy and operated by Scripps, the research vessel spends some 300 days per year at sea, facilitating a wide range of physics, chemistry, biology and ecology involving the oceans and atmosphere.

“The less I see my ship at port, the better,” says Bruce Appelgate, director of ship operations at Scripps. “We hopscotch all over the world,” he says, with brief stops as one researcher unloads their gear, equipment and people and another loads theirs, finally getting a chance for some field research they may have waited years for.

Like the Hubble Space Telescope, the R/V Revelle is popular with scientists. For example, Scripps oceanographer Andrew Lucas ’98 has been on the Revelle many times, and like Revelle himself, he’s a Pomona College grad.

R/V Roger Revelle by the Numbers

BUILT: 1996

LENGTH (FEET): 273

TOP SPEED (KNOTS): 15

DRAFT (FEET): 17

TONNAGE: 3,180

FUEL CAPACITY (GALLONS): 227,500

RANGE (NAUTICAL MILES): 15,000

CREW: 21

SCIENCE BERTHS: 37

LAB AREA (SQUARE FEET): 4,000

“I’ve been studying the southwest monsoon in Southeast Asia,” Lucas says. “Something like 75% of the annual moisture in that region comes from this monsoon weather pattern. It couldn’t get any more important—it allows people to grow food. Failure of the monsoon, such as starting later or not as much rain, means people will starve to death.”

Lucas and his colleagues developed and built technologies to use on the Revelle to map the upper ocean and lower atmosphere at high resolution. They drive the ship to a particular location, such as the Bay of Bengal, and then use scientific equipment on board—especially the ship’s meteorological instruments and the onboard hydrographic Doppler sonar system, which maps ocean velocities up to 1,000 meters below the ship—while deploying dozens of autonomous vehicles, like drone gliders and floaters that move up and down in the seawater.

Such technologies weren’t available, however, when Revelle and his fellow researchers were just getting started, trying to probe the subtlest signatures of climate change decades before its effects could be clearly felt.

“He’d probably be amazed at how much we’re able to simulate now compared to what people were trying back in the 1950s. When you don’t have those kinds of tools, you have to be cleverer to find the measurements that are really going to tell you something important,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York. “That generation was exceptional at doing that—pulling things together for relatively simple measurements of a complex system. That’s a real gift.”

Revelle’s scientific talents weren’t evident early on. “He was not a stellar student at Pomona. He was almost kicked out,” says his son, William Revelle ’65, a psychologist at Northwestern University. He spent lots of time working as editor of the Pomona Student Life newspaper at the expense of schoolwork. But then the geologist Alfred “Woody” Woodford saw his potential and encouraged him.

Revelle (right) aboard a research vessel with Harold Sverdrop (center), then director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Revelle eventually got through and graduated. He pursued research at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Scripps, analyzing Pacific Ocean deep-sea sediments. Revelle went on to serve during World War II as an oceanographer in the Navy, where he helped establish the Office of Naval Research, and then he continued his leadership at Scripps. He also helped found the University of California, San Diego, served a term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and became the founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean.

While at home, he often talked about oceanography, carbon dioxide levels, population-related issues and science in general. “Our dinner table was like a seminar. My father spoke slowly and thoughtfully,” says Carolyn Revelle, his youngest daughter. Revelle and his wife entertained lots of guests, including scientists from around the world and Nobel Prize winners he was recruiting to UC San Diego.

He also sometimes spoke about nuclear war, including the environmental impacts of radiation, which he had learned about from measurements taken during the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Revelle and his colleagues were concerned about how contamination from plutonium and its fission would harm fisheries in the region. Then in the 1950s, he wrote a paper about the ecological effects of atomic wastes at sea — which is again a concern with rising sea levels causing erosion near the coastal San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station north of San Diego.

A portrait of Roger Revelle ’29

Revelle invited Charles David Keeling to Scripps and supported his work on carefully measuring carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with an infrared gas analyzer at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. At the same time, Revelle helped create the International Geophysical Year to promote East-West collaboration on Earth science research, including Keeling’s program. This research led to a record of atmospheric measurements now known as the Keeling Curve (see “Revelle & the Curve” on opposite page), a graph that depicts the relentless rise of carbon dioxide concentrations beyond natural seasonal variation—the “breathing” of the Earth. The measurements showed the concentration to be about 310 parts per million in 1958 and then 320 a few years late; now it’s up to about 410, making the trend a clearly upward curve with teeth.

“Given how important that has become—iconic, even—his role in producing it is really very significant,” Schmidt says. Gore included it in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

In 1957, Revelle and physicist Hans Suess published a seminal study arguing that growing carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities — namely, burning fossil fuels — could create a greenhouse effect, gradually warming the planet. They also were the first to show that the ocean surface increasingly resists absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Revelle and Suess calculated a quantity now referred to as the Revelle factor, which is the change in carbon dioxide in the seawater relative to that of dissolved inorganic carbon. They found it to be about 10, and more recent measurements show that it’s rising, especially at high latitudes such as those in the Southern Ocean, where less carbon can be absorbed and therefore future climate change cannot be so efficiently mitigated.

Revelle’s work on oceans acting as “carbon sinks” also has inspired current debates about geoengineering and climate interventions, including controversial proposals like spraying material into clouds to reflect sunlight into space, or pumping nutrients into oceans to encourage carbon-consuming photosynthesis of marine algae.

Revelle & the Curve

Engraved on the wall of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, alongside such images as Darwin’s finches and DNA’s double helix, is a steeply curved graph depicting the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. It’s there because the discovery of the rising tide of atmospheric CO2 is considered one of the most important discoveries of our time.

The numbers that generated that graph were produced at a rate of one per hour by a type of infrared spectrophotometer known as a nondispersive infrared sensor, installed at Mauna Loa Observatory, two miles above sea level on the big island of Hawai‘i in 1958. Put in place by a scientist named Charles Keeling, that instrument and others that later replaced it have been cranking out those numbers, hour by hour, right up until today. The graph that they produced is now famous as the Keeling Curve.

As a young chemist at Caltech, Keeling had developed the first reliably precise method of measuring levels of carbon dioxide in atmospheric samples. That brought him to the attention of Roger Revelle ’29, then director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who persuaded him to continue his work at Scripps under Revelle’s mentorship.

As one of the founders of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), Revelle also helped arrange for an IGY grant for Keeling to establish a base at Mauna Loa where he could continue his measurements, beginning in 1958. In 1961, Keeling first produced his famous graph.

One of the first to recognize the importance of that curve, Revelle brought it into the classroom when he left Scripps to teach at Harvard. There it first came to the attention of another of his mentees, Al Gore, who would eventually bring the dire significance of that curve to a wider public in his documentary film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Later, while teaching at Harvard, Revelle raised concerns about issues involving what’s called “climate adaptation” today. Poorer countries, such as Pacific island nations with indigenous populations, don’t have the resources to adapt to climate change the way that wealthy countries like the United States do, yet they are feeling the effects first.

In the final year of his life, however, REVELLE became perhaps the first high-profile victim of vocal climate deniers. Physicist Fred Singer, already notorious for his skepticism about acid rain and ozone depletion, managed to manipulate the 81-year-old Revelle—his family and colleagues argue—into adding his name to a paper playing up uncertainties in climate change science and arguing against taking “drastic action.”

While talking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science about atmospheric and oceanic warming and efforts to reduce them, Revelle noted the wide range in the possible extent of warming in the next century. Afterward, Singer spoke to him about working on an article together, but then Revelle had a heart attack while returning to San Diego. As chronicled in the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Singer wrote a draft with a similar title to one he had already published, “What to Do About Greenhouse Warming,” but the ailing Revelle was not particularly interested in it. When he read it he crossed out “less than one degree” Celsius of warming, and wrote in the margins “one to three degrees”—clearly beyond natural climate variability—but this was never incorporated in the published paper, which came out with his and Singer’s names on it after Revelle died.

Carolyn Revelle wrote an opinion piece on behalf of the family in The Washington Post, saying her father had not changed his views. There were significant uncertainties at the time, and like most scientists, he didn’t want to overstate the threat of global warming. But he clearly considered the warming trend to be a dangerous one.

“He was dying of heart failure, and I feel that he was vulnerable. It was a very unfortunate experience, but I do not think it indicates that he changed his mind on global warming, which was what the climate change deniers were saying,” she says.

Revelle’s secretary Christa Beran, his graduate student and teaching assistant Justin Lancaster and colleagues like oceanographer Walter Munk also sought to defend him.

“You had what was an insidious example of what I would call a lack of ethics in science and the use of scientists as hired guns by the industry,” Lancaster says. “It was very cleverly done; they pulled the wool over Roger’s eyes. I discovered it too late to intercede. I didn’t have the clout to get the right attention to this, and Roger had died. All I could do was make it as public as possible.”

He points out the ways Singer and a handful of other scientists have been supported by the fossil fuel industry, noting that Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project, a research and advocacy group, was financed by ExxonMobil and other private sources. Singer had also earlier consulted for ExxonMobil and other major oil companies.

Even decades later, Singer and a few other figures remained “contrarians for hire,” Schmidt says. Documents leaked to DeSmogBlog in 2012 showed that Singer and a few others had been receiving monthly funding from the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank financed by billionaire Charles Koch that has promoted climate skepticism. The Heartland Institute continues to try to influence climate policy through connections to President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The real purpose of Singer’s paper, Lancaster believes, was to undercut Al Gore while he was running for president in 1992. Revelle had taught Gore at Harvard and had introduced him to the scientific and political challenges of climate change. Gore’s campaign focused on environmental and climate issues, and Singer’s paper came up in a question at the vice presidential debate.

Singer, now 94, responded in an email, saying that ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute do not support him and have not influenced the positions he has taken. He also prefers to call himself a climate skeptic, not a denier.

Since Revelle’s death, climate change has arguably become even more politicized in the U.S. According to Pew and Gallup polls, over the past decade, the chasm between the views of Republicans and Democrats has widened: There is now at least a 30 percent gap between members of the two parties on whether climate change is occurring, whether it’s driven by human activities and whether addressing it should be a top priority of policymakers. That gap has kept growing even as the consensus among climate scientists that global warming is real and anthropogenic has topped 97 percent. And climate change has yet to make another appearance at a presidential (or vice presidential) debate.

The U.S. and the international community have made limited progress in mitigating climate change, and climate deniers remain as vociferous and influential as before. While it’s easy to despair at the thought of possible climate disasters to come if we reach an average warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more, Revelle likely would emphasize hope about humans’ abilities to adapt. “I know exactly what Roger would say: ‘There’s no future in pessimism.’ This was his whole viewpoint on the climate change problem,” Lancaster says.

In the meantime, scientists continue to collect data and conduct research about climate change and its myriad effects around the world. The Revelle just completed a trip to Tahiti and New Zealand, with scientists on board probing ocean chemistry, including spotting trace amounts of metals and isotopes in seawater. It’s due for its mid-life service and maintenance in dry dock this year, after which the research ship will continue its scientific journeys for two decades or more.

The Revelle clan in 1964: Front row: Christopher Paci, Ellen Clark Revelle, Roger Revelle ’29, Holly Shumway and Carolyn Shumway. Back row: Stefano Paci in the arms of his father Dr. Piero Paci, Mary Paci ’57 with young Mark Roger Shumway in front of her, George Shumway, Anne Revelle Shumway, Bill Revelle ’65, Eleanor McNown ’64 (later Revelle), Gary Hufbauer, Carolyn Revelle Hufbauer and Loren Shumway.

New Album of Organ Music at Pomona Released

November 28, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Professor Emeritus of Music Bill Peterson

A new album of organ music performed by Professor Emeritus of Music Bill Peterson, titled “Recital at Bridges Hall, Pomona College,” has been released on CD by Loft Recordings. The album was recorded last March and features music performed on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music.

“The CD is based on a concert that I presented in February of 2018,” Peterson explains, “and there are really four areas of organ repertoire represented.” These, he said, were the music of J.S. Bach; the music of A. Guilmant, which are organ pieces from the 19th century based on vocal-music styles; three compositions published after World War I from an anthology dedicated to the “Heroes of the Great War,” and several compositions by composers with Pomona connections, including John Cage, who attended Pomona from 1928 to 1930; Professor Emeritus of Music Karl Kohn and Professor of Music Tom Flaherty.

Peterson began planning the project in May 2017, working with Roger Sherman of The Gothic Catalog. In summer of the same year, he received a Sontag Fellowship, making the project possible.

The album is available for purchase as CD or download on The Gothic Catalog website.

Peterson retired this year as the Harry S. and Madge Rice Thatcher Professor of Music after a 39-year career at Pomona. A noted organist, he has performed in venues across the United States.

The Hill Memorial Organ was designed and built by C.B. Fisk of Gloucester, Mass., and carries the designation of Fisk Op. 117. The three-manual organ was installed in the then-newly renovated Bridges Hall of Music in 2002.

Bookmarks Summer/Fall 2018

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Presenting for Humans

Insights for Speakers on Ditching Perfection and Creating Connection

Lisa Braithwaite ’87 challenges preconceived notions about public speaking and guides the creation of meaningful and memorable presentations.

Fascinating New Yorkers

Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies

Clifford Browder ’50 profiles the famous and forgotten, from J.P. Morgan’s nose to a pioneer in female erotica.

Aldo

In this mystery/thriller /love story by Betty Jean Craige ’68, a university president is held hostage when a dangerous ideologue tries to eradicate the school’s genetics institute.

Everyday Creatures

A Naturalist on the Surprising Beauty of Ordinary Life in Wild Places

George James Kenagy ’67 offers13 personal essays on nature, gleaned from observations, discoveries and experiences of deserts, mountains, forests and the sea.

Come West and See

This debut collection of short stories by Maxim Loskutoff ’07 describes a violent separatist movement, with tales of love and heartbreak.

Win

The Atlantis Grail (Book Three)

In this fantasy novel by Vera Nazarian ’88, nerdy Gwen Lark must fight her way through a difficult contest as the fate of two worlds, Earth and Atlantis, hangs in the balance.

The Big Note

A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa

Charles Ulrich ’79 offers a guide to Frank Zappa’s music composed from hundreds of interviews, letters and email correspondences spanning 35 years.

Woodswork

New and Selected Stories of the American West

Miles Wilson ’66 offers a collection of short stories set in the American West—geographically, culturally and psychologically—ranging from fable to realism and ranchers to fathers.

Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution

Thomas C. Wright ’63 offers an interpretation of the Cuban Revolution era, synthesizing its trends, phases, impact and influence on Latin America.

Understanding Nanomaterials

Professor of Chemistry Malkiat Johal and his former student, Lewis Johnson ’07, co-wrote this second-edition textbook, providing a comprehensive introduction to the field of nanomaterials as well as an easy read.

The AI Delusion

Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith argues that our faith in artificial intelligence is misplaced and makes the case for human judgment.

Suits, Shorts and the Working World

September 5, 2018 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

Suits, Shorts and the Working World At Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, the ambience was formal and there were plenty of suits. At the consulting firm Accenture, one of the leaders wore jeans and sneakers but kept a blazer handy. At another company across the bay, the highest-paid employees wore shorts. (That would be the Golden State Warriors.)

In the working world, clothes are a clue, but they might not tell the whole story. That’s just one of the lessons 12 Pomona College sophomores who identify as low-income or first-generation college students learned last fall in an innovative new program. Smart Start Career Fellows is designed to teach students about a working world unfamiliar to many of them. The program concluded in January with a three-day trip to the offices of seven Bay Area businesses.

One of the things Smart Start taught Leisan Garifullina ’20, an economics major from Russia, was the difference between business casual and business formal.

“I had this awkward situation last semester where I went to an information session—I think it was Citibank. I showed up in shorts and the nicest, nicest T-shirt that I had,” she says. Now, with the help of a stipend from the program, “I have business casual,” Garifullina says.

On the Bay Area trip, the students connected with new contacts as well as Pomona College alumni, visiting the offices of Kate Walker Brown ’07, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law; Natalie Casey ’17, a software engineer at Salesforce; and Adam Rogers ’92, deputy editor at Wired magazine. The group also went to LumiGrow, a startup company that offers high-tech, energy-efficient horticultural lighting solutions, in addition to Goldman Sachs, Accenture and both the business offices of the NBA’s Warriors and a game that night against the Los Angeles Clippers.

Created with grants from Accenture and John Gingrich ’91, a managing director at the firm, the Smart Start program began last fall with a series of two-hour Friday night dinner sessions where the students took part in self-assessment exercises and various networking, résumé and career-coaching sessions.

“Every single place we went to in San Francisco, you could ask yourself, ‘OK, could I see myself coming in here every single day for a long period of time, maybe two, three or 10 years?’” mused Shy Lavasani ’20, an economics major from Millbrae, California, whose family emigrated from Iran. “Could I see myself really enjoying this job? It just really helped me thinking about that at every single location, what I really want, what I really need. It gave me a clear direction in terms of what I want to do.”

No job seemed out of reach, except maybe one. “I don’t think any of us were considering pro basketball,” he says. “It’s always nice to dream.”

Who’s the Most?

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

“The Most,” a SoundCloud podcast Rosalind Faulkner ‘19 is podcasting superlatives.

Earlier this year, Faulkner launched “The Most,” a SoundCloud podcast in which she interviews Pomona students who embody a particular characteristic the most of anyone on campus—the most quirky, the most flirty, the most existential. Students nominate potential interviewees on Faulkner’s Facebook page, and whoever receives the most votes joins her in her KSPC studio for a 15-minute breakdown of the chosen adjective and what it means to them.

Faulkner, who has been interested in podcasting since she created her first podcast during her study abroad in Morocco last year, wanted to use an interview format to explore the idea of social reputation. “So many people here have really big personalities or things that distinguish them in different ways,” Faulkner says, and boiling that nuanced personality down to a single label—like “the most existential”—seems limiting.

But though she expected many people to resist being defined by a lone adjective, most students have embraced their superlatives. “My original intention was to subvert it, but some people do genuinely think of themselves in these big ways,” Faulkner says. “At least two of the three were so thrilled to be chosen for these adjectives. They were so happy.”

On-The-Job Training

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Noor Dhingra ’20 & Tulika Mohan ’20

Noor Dhingra ’20 likes to start her Fridays with a cup of coffee in the Claremont Village before wandering over to Claremont Depot, the gorgeous 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival train station where she catches the 8:42 Metrolink to Los Angeles.

Her roommate, Tulika Mohan ’20 takes a different approach. “I should be getting up at 7:45. I don’t,” Mohan laughs. “I usually end up getting up at 8:10, and then I run.”

Together, with headphones on or book in hand, they ride to one-day-a-week internships in L.A. subsidized by the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), a program that provides a stipend that turns an unpaid internship into a paid one, along with an allowance for transportation—in this case, train tickets for Dhingra and Mohan.

Taking the train to L.A. for an internship during the school year takes time—students often start work at 10 to allow for the commute—but many say the train beats fighting traffic even if someone has access to a car.

“I just find it fun. You don’t feel like a student when you’re on the train, which is a really good feeling to have once a week,” Dhingra says. “You’re so used to seeing professors or students on campus, so it’s just nice being with people of different ages. I always hear conversations, and sometimes it turns into a story I write.”

Zero-Waste Commencement

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Just before her own senior year arrived, Abby Lewis ’19 was working to send off Pomona’s 2018 graduates in the most environmentally-responsible way possible—with a zero-waste commencement.

Armed with information and data from the Office of Sustainability, where she works during the year, Lewis noticed a significant spike in the College’s waste production during the month of May, when thousands come to campus for the annual Commencement ceremony. Working closely with Alexis Reyes, assistant director of sustainability, she started working on a zero-waste event model.

An event is deemed ‘zero-waste’ when organizers plan ahead to reduce solid waste, reuse some event elements in future years and set up compost and recycling stations in order to divert at least 90 percent of waste from landfills. For Pomona’s 2018 Commencement Weekend, Lewis focused, among other things, on the catered food and products served at the reception on Commencement Day.

Backed by a President’s Sustainability Fund grant, Lewis worked with Pomona’s catering management on details ranging from the type of wax paper used to wrap food, to proposing utensils that are compostable and the use of reusable sugar containers instead of sugar packets.

Instead of trash bins, Commencement attendees found recycling and composting stations where they could sort their waste. Nearly all food waste generated, such as plates, cups and napkins, was diverted to either compost or recycling. The disposable products used at Commencement were made from either corn starch or recycled paper.

Another key partnership that Lewis secured with the help of the Office of the President’s Christina Ciambriello and Reyes was a deal with Burrtec, the College’s disposal contractor. Lewis and her allies were able to convince the company to collect and process ‘industrially-compostable’ items such as specially labeled plates and napkins—something they usually don’t do as part of their service to the College.

Fulbright Fellows Criss-cross the Globe

September 5, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Fulbrights Twelve Pomona College recipients of the prestigious Fulbright fellowships are criss-crossing the globe this fall, doing research on independent projects or teaching English. Here’s a brief description of their plans:

Audrey DePaepe, a neuroscience major from Tualatin, Ore., takes her Fulbright to the Cognition & Brain Plasticity Unit of Barcelona in Spain and focuses her research on Huntington’s disease.

Jack Gomberg, a neuroscience major from Chicago, Ill., travels to Israel to explore the biopsychological effects of medical clowning on patient outcomes.

Laurel Hilliker, an Asian studies and history double major, from Pittsburgh, Penn., goes to Japan, intending to uncover the history of Zainichi Korean political activism within Osaka and Tokyo in the aftermath of the Pacific War.

Emily Rockhill, a biology major from Redmond, Wash., conducts research in southern Brazil, assisting on a project at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul to identify and describe new species of crayfish of the genus Parastacus.

Elizabeth Sun ’17, a French major from Albuquerque, N.M., is studying the teaching of English and French in Saarland, a region in western Germany that has historically been a space of French-German interactions.

Rory Taylor, an international relations major from Minneapolis, Minn., travels to New Zealand to examine how the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples acts as a tool of legal advocacy for indigenous groups.

Victoria Vardanega, an economics and Asian studies double major from Fair Oaks, Calif., goes to South Korea to research the relationship between the press and government.

Don Chen, an international relations major from Normal, Ill., is teaching in Taiwan. He plans to focus on storytelling by hosting exhibitions of family history projects by students and an oral history event featuring local elders.

Lauren Callans, a neuroscience major from Ardmore, Penn., is teaching in Estonia. In addition to her love for teaching, she wants to explore her heritage as a third-generation Estonian and share her American culture.

Minah Choi, an environmental analysis major from Olympia, Wash., is teaching in Argentina. She hopes to contribute to the existing literature on Asian communities in Latin America.

Rhiannon Moore, a music major from South Pasadena, Calif., is teaching in Malaysia. Her interest in that country is rooted in her love for Southeast Asian music and desire to explore Malaysian music.

Inga Van Buren, a molecular biology major from Portland, Ore., is teaching in Taiwan. Drawing from her own multilingual background, she hopes to convey to her students the usefulness of being bilingual.

The Shadow of Korematsu

September 5, 2018 by Jonathan Van Harmelen ’17 Comments Off

Of the many divisive cases in U.S. legal history, few are as haunting as Korematsu v. United States (1944). In the ruling, the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Hugo Black argued that national security took precedence over individual liberties. And they maintained the legality of the infamous Executive Order 9066—which ordered the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This decision has remained a stain on civil liberties ever since, and the June 26, 2018, Supreme Court’s reversal of Korematsu represents the first major victory since 1988 related to rectifying Japanese-American incarceration. However, by overruling Korematsu while approving President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the court has simply appropriated one tragedy to justify another. While Chief Justice John Roberts argued that President Donald Trump’s travel ban is legally different—and constitutional—in comparison to the Korematsu case, they both have the purpose of unjustly singling out individuals based on race. And although the subject of Japanese- American incarceration focuses on racial injustice towards U.S. citizens, it is also a story of immigration and how the U.S. government has employed racialized immigration policies under the vague guise of “national security.”

Even before camps like Manzanar existed for holding U.S. citizens of Japanese descent against their will, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the forerunner to ICE—had built their own camps to house Japanese citizens, often separating families in the process. Although Japanese immigrants had arrived in this country en masse since the 1870s, they were barred from naturalization. Long before U.S. involvement in World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover drafted extensive lists of so-called “disloyal enemy aliens” because of vague associations with Japan. While Germans and Italians were on this list as well, they numbered far less and always had the option to become U.S. citizens; Japanese immigrants would not share that opportunity until 1952.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI conducted mass arrests of Japanese-American community leaders—sometimes in the middle of the night—and detained them in internment camps across the U.S. from Montana to Louisiana. Families often heard very little from their relatives in these camps, where their detainment lasted anywhere from a few months to several years. By 1943, the U.S. began a policy of deporting Japanese-Americans back to Japan as part of an exchange program with U.S. prisoners of war. On July 14, 1945, less than two months before the war’s end, President Harry Truman signed into effect a proclamation that permitted immigration officials to remove internees from the United States if they were deemed “a danger to the public peace.”

One man who faced such a scenario was Katsuma Mukaeda.

In 1908, he immigrated from Japan to the United States. According to his 1995 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he distinguished himself as a law student at USC and established himself as a successful lettuce grower in Southern California and a prominent figure in L.A.

Despite being unable to practice law because he was Japanese, he worked as a paralegal supporting the Japanese community. He was a champion for improving race relations within the greater Los Angeles community, and in 1935 helped establish the Society of Oriental Studies at The Claremont Colleges. According to scholar Malcolm Douglass, the society was founded with the intention of making the “Claremont Colleges the center of Oriental Culture on the Pacific Coast.” With help from a Rockefeller Grant, scholars at Pomona and Scripps worked alongside Mukaeda to established a strong emphasis on Asian Studies, and provided the foundation to the Asian Studies Library at Honnold-Mudd Library. To many, Mukaeda was an ideal U.S. citizen who advocated greater civic engagement and mending the issues of society.

Yet because of his activism, the FBI decided he was the perfect target. On Dec. 1, 1941, Hoover recommended Mukaeda’s internment “in the event of a national emergency.” Within a week after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents detained him with hundreds of other Japanese merchants, Buddhist priests and community leaders in the Los Angeles County Jail. Although no evidence of treason or sabotage was ever produced, Mukaeda was nonetheless interned for being “a suspect.” For years, he was shipped to various internment camps such as Camp Livingston, Louisiana, and Fort Missoula, Montana. By 1945, he found himself at Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico, where a large number of internees were subjected to abuse by guards and sometimes received poorer treatment than enemy POWs in stateside camps. Following Truman’s proclamation, Mukaeda also found himself facing deportation back to Japan.

All the while, his family was separated from him. While Mukaeda was sent to one internment camp after another, his wife, Minoli, and son, Richard, were incarcerated at Poston Incarceration Camp in Arizona. When Minoli received word of the July 1945 deportation list that included her husband, she pleaded to the U.S. government and others for help, arguing that their only son “needs a father’s care now more than anything.” While researching Mukaeda’s FBI file at the National Archives as a part of my graduate studies in June, I found dozens of letters of recommendation and support written to FBI officials, all testifying to his loyalty and future importance of mending relations between Japan and the U.S. The letter writers—mostly long-term residents of the Los Angeles area—ranged from close friends to L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler and former Pomona College President James Blaisdell.

For President Emeritus Blaisdell, the story of incarceration was clear throughout Southern California. Shortly after the arrest of Mukaeda and the passage of Executive Order 9066, thousands of Japanese-Americans were herded into so-called “assembly centers” at the nearby Los Angeles County Fairgrounds and Santa Anita Racetrack. Three students from Pomona were also forced to leave campus due to the executive order, and were famously given tearful goodbyes by their fellow classmates. While the College itself did what many other universities did at the time—provide students with transfer options to East Coast schools—Blaisdell went further to help out his friend.

Throughout the years of Mukaeda’s internment, Blaisdell wrote multiple letters to the FBI reaffirming both the activist’s loyalty to the U.S. and his importance to the Los Angeles community based on his previous work with Pomona and Scripps, the only Claremont Colleges at that time. Blaisdell’s first letter of May 17, 1944, was sent to help secure Mukaeda a second hearing by the FBI. When the hearing did not clear his name, Mukaeda went back to Blaisdell for help. In a letter to the FBI in November 1945, Blaisdell praised Mukaeda as “a man, I believe, who can be of great usefulness in healing the relations between the two countries and establishing just and honorable relations between the Japanese and Americans in this country.” After a reappraisal of his case, Mukaeda was deemed loyal and freed from the Santa Fe camp in February 1946, after four years in detention separated from his family.

Following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, Japanese nationals were finally able to become United States citizens. A final attestation of their friendship was a letter from Blaisdell to Mukaeda dated June 3, 1953, congratulating him on becoming a citizen and proclaiming,“I only hope that we who have been native born will be worthy of you.” Mukaeda continued to be a champion for the Japanese-American community until his death on November 8, 1995 at the age of 104.

There are two important lessons from Mukaeda’s story. One is that foreign policy dictated by racism and the violent separation of families are both, sadly, a recent chapter in U.S. history. Immigrants of all backgrounds have participated in the building of our nation’s history, and a system focused on exclusion only harms ourselves.

When Mukaeda was being held captive by immigration officials and on the brink of being deported, there were Americans who stood up for him. Pomona’s mission as a college—while constantly evolving—has always focused, in part, on the importance of social justice and activism. Often we think of these stories as being driven by powerful figures that leave everyday people as mere spectators; in reality we all can play a role. Mukaeda’s story, and Blaisdell’s tireless support, remind us of our constant duty to support those victimized by unjust laws or systems such as our current immigration system—and of the ability we have to effect change.

Jonathan van Harmelen ’17 is a graduate student at Georgetown University studying the comparative history of incarceration.

Breakthrough (And Aftermath)

September 5, 2018 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Biochemist and UC Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna ’85 and her team discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a game-changing gene-editing technique with tremendous possibilities for curing diseases of all kinds, thanks to its precision. But with that finding, Doudna (who is also a Pomona trustee) discovered something else—that a great revelation sometimes brings with it a lot of wrestling. In A Crack in Creation, she tells a story that is about both success and struggle. PCM Book Editor Sneha Abraham talked to Doudna about the implications of what might be the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of our time. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Jennifer Doudna ’85

PCM: You say in your book that, as a research scientist, you need adventurousness, curiosity, instinct, grit, practicality. Where do you get these traits from, and who’s your greatest influence?

Doudna: I think it comes from a combination of innate curiosity—I think we all have it, certainly as kids—and appropriate encouragement from family, friends and mentors along the way. That mix gave me an open-mindedness to ideas and a way of figuring out how to ask questions about the natural world.

PCM: Did your Pomona education prepare you for this in some way?

Doudna: I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly, because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come into contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona. Many smart people, lots of really bright students, and not only those interested in chemistry, as I was, but also people thinking about history, French, physics, mathematics and geography. All sorts of topics. It’s a rich intellectual environment that opens one’s mind to the incredibly interesting diversity of the world in terms of cultures, ideas and perspectives.

PCM: Was there a class or professor that really impacted you while you were here?

Doudna: I think [Professor of Chemistry] Fred Grieman. I know he’s retiring soon, but Fred Grieman was a newish professor at the time when I attended Pomona. He was teaching physical chemistry, and he was spectacular. I think he’s a great combination of really deep understanding of the material so that you could teach it in a very clear and comprehensible way—and it’s not an easy topic, as you know—but also somebody who was very human, very funny, great sense of humor, really great at connecting with students. We used to play softball together in the summertime, and he always had students working in his lab over the summer and would have barbecues and things like that. He was very good at teaching us students that you could be a terrific scientist, very smart and intellectual, and still have a life outside of the lab.

PCM: In the book, you talk about that moment of discovery, that moment of pure joy in your kitchen. What was that like for you?

Doudna: Well, I’ve had a few, I would say, such moments in my career, and in this case, it was really one of those rare times in one’s life when the stars align. In our case, the ideas had come together, the data for experiments we were working on in the laboratory had given rise to a really sudden understanding of, not only how the CRISPR bacterial immune system works, but also how it could be used in a really exciting way. And that night, that moment I describe in the book, was really one of just unadulterated joy thinking about how amazing it is to explore science and make a discovery that you realize is going to be really impactful and change the world in certain ways.

PCM: That discovery presents so many amazing possibilities Was there an immediate thought that came to mind?

Doudna: For me, it was probably thinking about opportunities to cure genetic disease. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. It is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then suffer from for many years with progressive loss of neurological function. So, being aware of that gene mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that CRISPR technology, in principle, will allow the correction of that kind of mutation was a really profound thought.

PCM: You’re a research scientist, but with this discovery, you’ve become an ethicist as well, right? Were you expecting that as this was unfolding? How has that unfolding been for you?

Doudna: Not at all. I was absolutely not thinking, originally, about the kinds of ethical challenges that would come up. However, it became clear over the ensuing months that CRISPR was working better than anticipated, opening game-changing opportunities in how we might treat existing patients and how the technology might help future generations. What would be the ethical impact and what would go into making the right society and species-defining decisions needed to be explored and debated. I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because the field of CRISPR was moving so quickly, the ethical discussions needed to catch up.

PCM: This is a big question. Is there an ethical dilemma that you’re most concerned about with genome editing?

Doudna: Well, there are a few that have gotten a lot of media attention. I think I would say that, at least in the near term, what I worry about the most is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might inadvertently harm people. That might be because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that competitive want to move ahead with new ideas can be a very healthy drive in science but it can also lead to problems. In this case, I really hope that there is a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology and the ethical debate.

PCM: It raises a lot of questions about us as a society, right? In the book you write about some of the implications socioeconomically and politically. How do you see this unfolding for the good? What are the dilemmas there?

Doudna: That’s another really big question. The good news is that there are now lots of discussions happening about the ethics and appropriate uses of gene editing technologies. I think that’s great progress but how we ultimately deploy CRISPR is going to come down to the pace at which helpful applications are actually developed and approved for use. For example, one of the most promising applications is called “gene drive.” It is the ability to drive a trait through a population very quickly using gene editing. Gene drive could be a real environmental impact concern due to its potential to wipe out a species of mosquitoes and perhaps cause unknown damage to associated species and ecosystems.

On the other hand, if deployed correctly, gene drive could have a hugely positive impact on human health by preventing the spread of mosquito-borne disease, perhaps by adding a trait that made mosquitoes incapable of transmitting a particular disease such as Zika virus. This is the type of cost-benefit calculation that has to be made in each case.

PCM: With CRISPR, when you’re looking ahead, or maybe it’s happening now, what kind of effects do you see on the biomedical industry or pharmaceutical companies, or the health care industry? Because this will change a lot of how we do medicine, right?

Doudna: I think it will in a few ways. One effect is using genome editing to discover genetic causes of disease. I think that’s still a very big data opportunity, to figure out, not only single genes that might cause disease, but also genetic interactions. Where there might be genes that interact with others to create a risk for certain people that bear that particular genetic makeup. I think that’s important, and it leads to opportunities to target those genes with drugs, and drug companies are increasingly using CRISPR technology to do exactly that. We are also trying to mine the human genome for new potential targets and then use genome editing to correct those mutations or create, if not a cure, at least some kind of a palliative approach to genetic disease. I think that will happen increasingly, especially as challenges like how to deliver these molecules into cells are addressed.

I also want to mention the incredible commercial opportunities. I’m seeing a lot of young entrepreneurs starting their own companies focused on making use of CRISPR technologies, investors excited to contribute money, and growing opportunities for companies to partner in different areas ranging from biomedicine to agriculture. It is very exciting and these opportunities are not just for scientists, but also for people that have a variety of backgrounds such as business. It’s really an interesting convergence of young people with a mix of expertise.

PCM: You write a bit about food politics, and the issue of GMOs, and that gap between the scientific community and the public. What do you think is driving the narrative that you say is false, that GMOs are a danger to our health? What’s behind that narrative that’s being pushed by other people?

Doudna: I think it’s a couple of things. Partly, it’s a lack of understanding about what we mean when we say “genetic modification,” and the fact that essentially all the food that we eat is genetically modified, because it’s edited by plant breeders that introduce genetic mutations. You just have to reference back to what tomatoes looked like before plant breeders got involved. They were very different from how they are today but why is that? Well, changes to the DNA, of course, but those changes were introduced, not by a precision genome editing technology like CRISPR. They were introduced by random mutation and then selection for desired traits. So, the unknown that can worry the public is what other genetic changes come along to the ride? We know they do but we just don’t happen to know what they are. I think when people understand that, they start to realize that the whole definition of GMOs is a bit contrived.

Also, I think the public can be suspicious about the intentions of corporations. That perception that corporations do not have our best health interests in mind, that they are out to make money, and that they do not care about potential risks, choosing instead to forge ahead with “Frankenfoods” or whatever you want to call it. We have seen this in the media, and it’s potentially at the expense of people’s health.

It really comes down to those two things then — not understanding what genetic modification really means and how our current food supply was created by plant breeders, and also being suspicious of the real motivations of corporations. We need to take a step back and really ask ourselves, “What makes sense here?” Then, we need to take a thoughtful path forward that allows technology to advance and help us solve important challenges in a way that is responsible. It’s not an easy balance, but I think we have to try to tackle that.

PCM: So who decides how this technology is used? You talk about that being a dilemma, as well, between scientists and the public. How is that dialogue going, currently, and how do you see that developing?

Doudna: Right now, the way that science progresses is largely decided by scientists, and then there are funders. So, if the scientists have an idea, something they want to do in the lab, they have to get money to do it. If they’re getting money from the public, namely from the taxpayers, that involves typically writing a grant, writing a proposal that says, “Here’s the science that I want to do, and here’s why,” and submitting it to a review committee of peers who review and comment on it. For example, they may say, “Well, good idea,” or, “Not a great idea,” and they then make a recommendation to the government about whether that type of science should be funded. That is how it currently works.

Now, if you’re a scientist who has other kinds of resources that are from private money—you have a wealthy donor or a foundation—you have to convince those folks rather than representatives of the government. Either way it usually comes down to an idea on the part of the scientist, and then convincing somebody or some entity to pay the bills. There’s a lot of science that involves things that could cause risk to humans. There are various kinds of regulatory controls that are placed on that work and various kinds of panels or review boards approve those kinds of projects. However, there’s not a broader oversight other than that, and a number of scientists have commented upon the fact that, for example, institutional review boards, or IRBs, have rules for how researchers can do things like work with human subjects or human tissues. The issue is that the rules are different at every institution.

Since the IRB rules at my institution, UC Berkeley, are different than other universities, I could have colleagues working elsewhere that would be under a different set of rules. That’s something that various groups are looking at—ways to try to streamline. As you can imagine, it’s very tough because you have a lot of different people with different opinions about these sorts of things. So, it’s just an ongoing challenge that we have.

PCM: This is half-joking, but I was chatting with a friend about CRISPR, and he asked, “At what point can we clone ourselves, get out of work, and still get paid?”

Doudna: Wow. That sounds very ambitious. It’ll take a lot of work to not have to work. That’s all I can say.

PCM: It’s not in the immediate future?

Doudna: No.

«‹44 454647 48 ›»