Community's Best Friends
Laura Totis, a senior laboratory technician in A&S's Biology Department, remembers that fateful phone call that woke her in the middle of the night last June. From the first ring, Totis suspected the call was for her. As a volunteer for the Mid-Atlantic D.O.G.S. search and rescue team, Totis is always on standby, and she had gotten these early morning calls before. The voice on the other end told her that a 2-year-old child had been reporting missing and that she and Torrie, her trained Rottweiler, were to travel immediately to a remote spot in southern Maryland, not far from the boy's home, where the police had picked up the already massive search.
   The sector chosen was a wooded hill that Totis says "was in the middle of nowhere." Once there, she and Torrie were paired with a police officer and began to search. Five hours later, Torrie, a non-scent-discriminating dog Totis has trained to recognize human smells, began feverishly sniffing a lone tree, and Totis suspected the dog had picked up a human scent. Full story...

Friends and colleagues pay tribute to Daniel Nathans
When Dan Nathans talked, people listened. One way or another, almost every speaker made that point at a Jan. 5 memorial service for the distinguished scientist, beloved teacher and mentor, consummate university citizen and "extraordinarily gentle and modest man."
   Edward D. Miller, now dean and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, remembered the contentious department chiefs' meeting where he first met Nathans. The soft-spoken Nobel laureate, he recalled, injected common sense and humanity into a heated discussion, with an appeal on behalf of Hopkins values and the integrity of the institution.
   "Everyone in the room felt it was almost like Johns Hopkins himself talking," Miller told a Turner Auditorium crowded with Nathans' family, colleagues, friends and former students, who came from across the country and from as far away as Israel. Full story...

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