Debate between something and nothing

Thank you for "The Number," by Dale Keiger [February], and thank you for supporting the study that led to this controversy. I am struck by how little money and time went into [Gilbert] Burnham and [Leslie] Roberts' studies [on Iraq casualties]. If the critics are serious, they should conduct their own studies. This is a debate between something and nothing. I'm deeply troubled that my country has carefully avoided any estimate of the true cost of the Iraq War.
Kelly Sanders
Lyons, Oregon

No hesitation

What took you so long? I have been following this research since the release of Burnham and Roberts' first study. When the United States goes to war, we should all be acutely aware of the consequences of putting an army in the field. If you hesitate to publish, as you did, then we are all worse off for the poverty of the debate over the war's conduct.
Patricia Latessa
Cincinnati, Ohio

To quote Bertrand Russell

"The Number" will be recorded as one of history's great tragedies. Words by Bertrand Russell, written in World War II, have lost none of their importance: "If ... war is to be prevented, there must be a clearly expressed willingness to go to war for certain ends but not for any others. These ends should be resistance to aggression anywhere and against anyone, and as soon as possible this purpose should receive its appropriate organization in an international government. Wars will cease when, and only when, it becomes evident beyond reasonable doubt that in any war the aggressor will be defeated." (Bertrand Russell, "The Future of Pacifism," The American Scholar, 1943.)
Eugene Blank, A&S '48
Portland, Oregon

Disgusted

I am so disgusted with this institution. Making an anti-war statement on the cover? Using the institution for a political statement? What in the world are a bunch of epidemiologists doing spending time and resources on this? Did they study how many of the Iraqi people were slaughtered under their ruthless dictator? Did they study how many were gassed? Did they study how many were fed into wood chippers? Did they study how many were uncovered in mass graves? Did they study how many lives have been saved because of our heroes going into Iraq to free the country? How about studying how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda or Somalia? How about studying how many are being slaughtered now in Darfur?

I am sick and tired of this shameless liberal bent and the "I HATE AMERICA" crowd apparently thriving at our own JHU. I am sickened and disgusted.

The only way I know to have an impact on this hijacking of our so-called institution of higher learning — or more accurately, institution of liberal propaganda — is to vote with our donations. Not one more dollar from my family and extended family will go JHU.
Debbie Meagher
Monkton, Maryland

High feelings

This schizophrenic essay opens and closes suggesting that the Geneva Conventions obligate an occupying army to safeguard armed belligerent locals who attack the occupying army, from attacks by that occupying army or from attacks by other armed belligerent locals who, presumably, are also worthy of protection by the same occupying army. The body of the essay consists of equally bizarre disclaimers of motive, justifications of method, and contortions of language.

Clearly, high feelings are enemies of good science and good writing.
Douglas J. Luebehusen, MLA '69
Baltimore, Maryland

A tragedy for Hopkins

In the 5,500-word article by Dale Keiger, at the very end, we find out: "The accuracy of our figures is not the most important aspect of this research." Unintentionally, I suspect, this tells the story of this article.

For example, "As Goldin of STATS points out, the number of clusters has nothing to do with whether a sample is representative; it affects only the size of the confidence interval." Yes, the interval could be between zero and infinity. The goal of "respectable" scientists is to have a meaningful, as-narrow-as-possible interval. However, please do not say at a respectable place like Hopkins there is no one who is not concerned that there could be too few "samples." Imagine one, for example.

From what I read elsewhere about this study, however, the more material criticism is whether the samples taken were "representative." All the interviews were on the main streets of Iraq, or nearby — and this is supposed to be representative? Do samples taken on I-95 represent rural West Virginia? Is there no one at Hopkins who has done any sampling?

This article is a sop to someone's political agenda and is a tragedy for science and for the reputation of Hopkins. If there was an editor, he or she was in over their head.
Bill Bane
Great Falls, Virginia

Savage Saddam

The article didn't mention it, but I wonder if the study took into account the brutality of Saddam's regime when calculating the number of excess Iraqi deaths since the war began. Saddam treated his own people and the Kurds in his country savagely. How many people would have been killed by Saddam and his government had he not been deposed?
D. Sampson, Engr '02
Ft. Mill, South Carolina

Deceived or disingenuous?

Dale Keiger has either been deceived or is as disingenuous as Gilbert Burnham and Leslie Roberts in his description of the study on Iraqi War dead. Burnham and Roberts clearly knew their report would be controversial, and that was part of their intent, as evidenced by their choice of publication dates just before the 2004 and 2006 elections. Keiger reveals his prejudice with the claim that the survey "produced epidemiological evidence that coalition forces have failed to protect Iraqi citizens" followed by the statement from Shannon Doocy that "these are people over there, dying."

What might be worthwhile would be to do epidemiological studies in Syria, Iran, and Jordan for Middle Eastern countries without a war. These would confirm how accurate the prewar estimates of five deaths per 1,000 were. As the article itself indicates, government statistics may not be accurate. And opponents of the war should have no more reason to believe the CIA World Factbook than they believe anything else from the CIA, particularly when it still shows a rate of 5.5 deaths per 1,000 for 2006.
Joseph Coletti
Cary, North Carolina

Needless deaths

Regarding "The Department of Second Chances," [February], over half of the 95,000 Americans on the national transplant waiting list will die before they get a transplant. Most of these deaths are needless. Americans bury or cremate about 20,000 transplantable organs every year. Over 6,000 of our neighbors suffer and die needlessly every year as a result.

There is a simple way to put a big dent in the organ shortage — give organs first to people who have agreed to donate their own organs when they die. Giving organs first to organ donors will convince more people to register as organ donors. It will also make the organ allocation system fairer. People who aren't willing to share the gift of life should go to the back of the waiting list as long as there is a shortage of organs. Anyone who wants to donate their organs to others who have agreed to donate theirs can join LifeSharers. LifeSharers is a nonprofit network of organ donors who agree to offer their organs first to other organ donors when they die. Membership is free at www.lifesharers.org or by calling 1-888-ORGAN88. LifeSharers has 7,820 members, including over 700 minor children enrolled by their parents.
David J. Undis
Executive Director, LifeSharers
Nashville, Tennessee

A whale of a mistake

Even though I'm clueless about ice hockey, as an alumnus of both Yale and Hopkins, I was glad to see Dale Keiger's item about the recent club hockey game between the two [Wholly Hopkins, "Yale Bests Hopkins in Historic Rematch," February] — that is, until I came across the description of Ingalls Rink as an "old wooden arena."

You're describing some other building than the Yale Whale! It opened in 1958, so some might call it old, but it sure isn't wooden. It's a beautiful swoopy concrete and aluminum building designed by Eero Saarinen. (To be fair, though, Saarinen's Nordic heritage is reflected in a number of wooden accents.) For seven years, I lived in the next block down from it and looked at it virtually every day. It has the drawback in common with much modern architecture that it doesn't relate to the buildings surrounding it. But unlike much modern architecture, it wears well. It's not cliched, and I never tired of seeing it.
Steve Petrica, Yale MDiv '85
Hopkins MPH '00
Bethesda, Maryland

Questionable accommodation

It's nice to see that the Nature Conservancy has become more amenable to conservation as wise use after for so long having been a "top predator" itself through its land acquisition and environmentalist activities in rural America and the cancerous effect they have had on the resource-based economies there ["The Wilderness Campaign," February]. However, given the "let them eat cake" elitism of its leaders and the nature-worshipping zeal of its foot soldiers, it's questionable that the Conservancy's ostensibly more accommodative shift to wildlands and corridors schemes won't ultimately have the same effect, and that it isn't partly just a ploy to earn money from its vast lands and remedy a bad reputation for its past practices and sleazy self-dealings among its fat-cat donors and executives.
Donald R. Spalding, A&S '60 (MA)
Whitefield, New Hampshire

We need to decide

David Dudley has cast our net about future development wide enough to stimulate a critical dialogue for people everywhere ["The Wilderness Campaign"]. Whether our community is an urban area like Baltimore, Maryland, or a gateway-to-wilderness town like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or a coastal village in the Americas, Asia, or Africa, we need to talk. We need to decide, community by community, the answer to three fundamental questions I heard in this article: How should the land be used? What do we care about? Where, if not here, do we use it the way it should be used?

Our kitchens, school reunions, church suppers, and town meetings are all appropriate venues. If all voices are heard, we cannot help but make the right choices.
Marcia B. Kircher, Bus '04
Laytonsville, Maryland

A family connection

The sad news of the death from a meningococcal infection of art historian Nancy Forgione [Wholly Hopkins, "Meningitis Claims the Life of a Beloved Faculty Member," February] brought to mind the developer, in response to a severe 1905 epidemic in New York City, of a vaccine against cerebrospinal meningitis. As a student and colleague of William H. Welch's in the 1890s, Simon Flexner began a family connection with Johns Hopkins Medicine that reportedly endures to this day. His younger brother Abraham, A.B. 1886, would lead vigorously the advance of Hopkins-style medical education and play the central external role in steering to the university Rockefeller philanthropy, yielding, under Dr. Welch's direction, the School of Hygiene and Public Health long before publishing a biography of President Daniel C. Gilman in 1946. Six years earlier, Simon and his son, James Thomas Flexner, had contributed William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine, reprinted for Medicine's 1993 centennial. As is well known, James' aunt Martha Carey Thomas, daughter of 1870-97 trustee Dr. James Carey Thomas, achieved ironic revenge for her gender-based classroom exclusion from graduate work in Greek by joining three friends in funding the opening of the medical school under conditions including gender-neutral admission.
Terry K. Sheldahl, A&S '67 (PhD)
Savannah, Georgia

More on the Wickwire legacy

Thank you for your recent valued articles on Iraq, the Tutorial Project, and Peabody Institute [ "The Number," "The Tutor Period," and "To the Letter: Peabody Turns 150," all February]. Please share with your readers that the Tutorial Project is one of Chester Wickwire's many legacies, along with the Sunday Experience (a Hopkins lecture series by varied experts on a wide range of topics), successful peace efforts in Central America, and recently, co-founding Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (www.FFIPP.org), to name a few.
Hilda Coyne, Peab '77
Baltimore, Maryland

Mistaken identity

I was just enjoying your magazine, when I noticed that the caption at the bottom of page 39 was incorrect. In the article "To the Letter: Peabody Turns 150," the picture caption reads "White Sulphur Springs, 1869, George Peabody sits with the most famous Confederate generals of the day." Probably most importantly, there are no Confederate generals in that picture. If there were, they would be former Confederate generals as the Civil War was over. The picture shows the Peabody Fund Commission, established in 1867. The commission monitored the education fund established to help the post-Civil War American South. Standing from left to right: Admiral David Farragut, Hamilton Fish, Ulysses S. Grant, William Aiken, Episcopal Bishop Charles Petit McIlvaine, and Samuel Wetmore. Seated left to right: Peabody, W. C. Rives, and Robert Winthrop. Both Farragut and Grant served in the U.S. Army, and if this picture was taken in 1869, Grant was serving as United States president at the time. Perhaps the picture was taken in 1867; Peabody died in 1869, and it seems funny that Grant is still wearing his uniform as president.
Clyde Wright, Med '01
Fellow, Division of Neonatology
Joseph Stokes Research Institute
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Editor's note: Dr. Wright is correct, as were several other readers who pointed out this mistake. The magazine apologizes for the error.

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