Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 1999
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APRIL 1999
CONTENTS

O U R    R E A D E R S    W R I T E

Letters


Send your letters via email to
smd@jhu.edu.

A question of status
Worked with no pay
Much more still needs to be done
Disturbed by (mis)quotations
A not so novel view?
The way to Mecca
The "great circle" route
Once fooled...
No room for violence
We want the recipes!


A question of status

I would like to commend Joanne P. Cavanaugh for her accurate description of the struggles of postdoctoral life ["The Postdoc's Plight," February]. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hopkins School of Medicine for three years and could relate to many of the accounts in the article.

I would like to add a couple of comments on topics that were not dealt with: one of them is the different status attained in the lab by postdocs and their fellow medical students. When medical students first come to a lab, they are usually inexperienced with the research methodology and techniques, and the postdocs are the ones who teach them how to do these things. From the start, however, medical students receive preferential treatment, higher pay, more attractive research projects, and the possibility to apply for better grants and fellowships regardless of seniority. All of this results in a vicious cycle because the more attractive the research subject, the better the possibilities of funding. Eventually the medical student will be better qualified when competing for academic positions, a major issue in this tight market. This inevitably creates a fair amount of justified resentment on the part of postdocs.

During my fourth year at Hopkins, earning a salary of a second year [postdoc], having exhausted the avenues available to me at the time for obtaining a salary increase (which created animosity between myself and the PI), I decided to resign. When I applied for unemployment benefits I was told that I didn't qualify. This was a surprise to me based on the fact that I had been paying into the system. The response I got from the Hopkins administration was that I had been a trainee and not a staff member and so I did not qualify for unemployment benefits.

After this extended nightmare I am happy to say that I am presently employed as a science writer for a federal agency. I hope that current postdocs have a better experience than mine, and that further steps and regulations are taken to improve their situation.
Name withheld


Worked with no pay

The article about postdocs in the February 1999 issue ["The Postdoc's Plight"] was right on the mark. It's not a new phenomenon. I was a post-residency fellow at Hopkins and for 18 months I worked with no pay. I was aware of this, and wanted these skills, but my mentor had no funds. I had to pay my own medical insurance and parking. Fortunately I had a husband with a paying job, and no children, so I was able to get by, and I'm not sorry I did it. Yet I never felt Hopkins either understood the problem or cared greatly.

This attitude has ramifications today. I currently have made a commitment to help support my mentor's laboratory, but this is the only pledge I have made, or will make, to Hopkins.
Name withheld


Much more still needs to be done

I was struck by the inconsistency of Levi Watkins Jr.'s remarks concerning postdoctoral fellows; his comments betray the prevailing attitudes of full-fledged members of the academy toward postdoctoral trainees. Watkins asserts, "Postdocs...are the most important element of this academic environment." Yet, those same postdocs are evidently neither important enough to merit equal treatment in all respects, nor are they immune from self-serving double standards perpetuated by the Hopkins administration.

Perhaps the most compelling statement elicited in the story, one which is symbolic of the marginalization of postdoctoral fellows, involved the coffee mug giveaway during staff appreciation day, when the woman working the table said she was "told they weren't supposed to give mugs to postdocs." That decision was not the prerogative of the individual making the statement. It was the Hopkins administration that set that policy.
Steven P. Cercy, PhD ('94-'96)
Philadelphia, PA


Disturbed by (mis)quotations

I was very honored indeed to have so large a space in the last issue devoted to my work on Robert Boyle and alchemy ["All That Glitters..." February]. I was however equally disturbed by one aspect of the article. Namely, the (mis)quotations which were attributed to me in which I appear to make derogatory and callous remarks about a senior colleague's work. I utterly reject such expressions used as they were in the article. Unfortunately, I was not given the opportunity to review these putative remarks prior to publication, or they would have been corrected or expunged. A short verbal digression during the interviews (which was to me no more than an academic exploration of how prevailing historiographies can limit the results of historical investigations) took on in the article an unintended centrality, and was transformed into a vulgar attack on an eminent professional. This not only degrades another scholar's work from which I have in fact benefited, but also besmirches my own character, and I must deplore it.

I readily grant that this misuse was unintentional, and also that I may have expressed myself unclearly in the interviews. I can now only implore the benevolent reader to consult my book--for whose expressions I do take responsibility--where, although I choose to dissent from one part of Professor [Marie Boas] Hall's views, I clearly asserted her work to be "groundbreaking in the truest sense of the word" (p. 22)--an expression sufficiently distant from those found in the article. Of course no one expects journalistic writing within its shorter compass to reproduce the balance and finesse of academic writing; yet it should still represent somewhat more accurately its subject's view of his own position within a community of colleagues . To prevent misunderstandings it might be useful to ensure that the accuracy of direct quotations be checked prior to publication.
Lawrence M. Principe
Assistant professor, history of science and of chemistry


A not so novel view?

I enjoyed the article by Dale Keiger on Robert Boyle as an alchemist. At the time I read the article on Principe I was also reading the History of Magic & Experimental Science by Lynn Thorndike. This work was produced in eight volumes published by the Columbia University Press. The first was published in 1923 and the last in 1958. In chapter 23 of volume eight, Thorndike discusses Boyle's preoccupation with not only the transmutation of metals but also with the influence of angels on the physical condition of man and the the use of witches' concoctions to improve health. Thorndike also quotes a 1944 work by Louis Trenchard More (The Life and Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle, Oxford, 1944, p. 124). "It is generally known that Robert Boyle was an alchemist; that he accepted, theoretically and practically, the doctrine of the transmutation of the elements; and that he was convinced he had solved the problem."

Perhaps the view of Boyle as an alchemist is not so novel. Nevertheless, the article indicates that Principe may have contributed greatly to bolstering this conception of the man.
Paul McElroy
mcelroy@worldnet.att.net


The way to Mecca

Your February 1999 issue mentions "a window facing northeast toward Mecca [Editor's Note]." At about 21 degrees N, Mecca is SOUTH-east of Baltimore.
Dean L. Pendleton
deep.end@jhu.edu


The "great circle" route

When you stated that a window in the Muslim prayer room faced northeast toward Mecca my mind said, "Hey, wait a minute, Baltimore is at 39° north latitude and Mecca is at only 22° north latitude, which makes it further south than Baltimore, so it can't be in a northeasterly direction." Sure enough, my common Mercator projection map supported my hypothesis.

Then I decided to check it out on my globe. Whoa! This demonstrated that an airplane flying the shortest 'great circle' route from Baltimore to Mecca would, in fact, head in a northeasterly direction as it left Baltimore. I'm not sure how the Koran deals with the peculiarities of spherical geometry, but it does make sense that a devout Moslem wishing to face toward Mecca would orient him or herself in the direction of shortest surface travel. This approach seems much more practical than having the floor slope steeply downwards to orient the worshipper in a straight-line direction toward Mecca, which would involve tunneling through the earth.
Ted Moore (MSE'76)
Anchorage, Alaska


Once fooled...

It was with a sense of irony, and some amusement, that I read "R x Against Terror" (February), in which D.A. Henderson soberly describes the threat of biological warfare attacks directed against the U.S. population. I remember filing into the School of Public Health East Wing Auditorium, along with Henderson, on April 14, 1988, to hear an afternoon of presentations by Soviet scientists. For the next several hours, accompanied by slide after slide of gross pathology photographs, the Russians earnestly explained that the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was not caused by an accident at a military bioweapons facility. Instead, they claimed afflicted citizens had purchased contaminated meat on the black market, and subsequently contracted gastrointestinal anthrax. I don't recall any counter-arguments issuing from those listening, and after the session the audience and speakers retired to the ninth floor for a pleasant reception.

If Henderson or any of the other school administrators exhibited reservations about the Soviets' rationale, they didn't express it then, or later.

Now, on the eve of the next millennium, defense against bioweapons has surfaced as an important issue in national security. Large sums of money are being released for use by public health administrators, policy analysts, and pundits, who have undergone rapid conversions to become True Believers. How effective such programs will be remains to be seen. After all, if you're fooled once, who's to say it can't happen again?
James A. Higgins (SHPH '93)
U.S. Department of Agriculture


No room for violence

Melissa Hendricks, in "R x Against Terror," implies a similarity between the terrorist cults of Aum Shinrikyo (Tokyo) and the love cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The basic tenet of the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was that God could be found through love. There were never any thoughts of terrorism or violence in his teachings. I would be very suspicious of any allegations of intentional food poisoning by Rajneeshies.

Moreover, blaming the food poisoning on the Rajneeshies may have caused the true source of the contamination to go undetected. One might also note that salmonella and E. coli bacteria have been found in bean sprouts, a common product in salad bars.
Marshall Nechtow '67
Carrollton, Texas

We want the recipes!

I was delighted to see the cover story about Professor Sidney Mintz in the November issue ["Matters of Taste."] Our family enjoyed reading the article but we have one question. Where are the recipes? We're especially curious about the Avocado Fool. None of us can quite imagine what it tastes like.
Mary Masilamani
Morristown, NJ

Professor Mintz has graciously agreed to share his recipes. For a copy, write to: "Magazine Recipes" Johns Hopkins Magazine, Suite 100, 3003 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Or access them via the magazine's website www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/.


Correction

In the February issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine, we mistakenly reported that Willis Regier, former director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, had been dismissed by the university last May (" The best kind of publishing,"). In fact, Dr. Regier resigned from his post. The magazine regrets the error.


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