Valerie R. Gregg

Science — Truth in Motion

Sometimes the truth is hard to find.

The pendulum swings back and forth.
Scientists examine genes, blood, and behavior. Papers are published. Academics stake claims in the popular press. Experts weigh in with opinion and anecdote.

Voices clamor for answers. News anchors shout, and shock jockeys rant.

Primary sources. Notarized documents. Official stamps and sealing wax. A spine emerges.

Still, there’s no holy grail. The story’s flesh remains elusive, fluid, dynamic. Ancients whisper on phones long disconnected. Their voices rasp, colliding wisps of fog.

For every action, another is returned. The wheel of time keeps spinning.

(By Valerie Gregg, copyright Nov. 1, 2009)

“Burden of Proof: In medicine, the truth can be hard to find.”  Momentum, 2003. http://www.whsc.emory.edu/_pubs/momentum/2003spring/burden.htm

Great Day for a Comeback

Kingdom

It’s a good day to start fresh. A dome of blue sky arches up and over Pitt Stadium, shutting out the sound and fury of another Oakland rush hour. Track star Roger Kingdom, a student  and athlete at Pitt in the early ’80′s, emerges from the dark portal leading to the football locker rooms. He stands alone a minute, snaps on a 30-pound weight vest, and takes a deep breath. It’s been only six weeks since the World Championship 110-meter hurdle race, but he can’t rest any longer. Fourth in the world isn’t good enough for a man who’s won two gold medals and held a world record. At age 33, time’s running out.  By Valerie Gregg, Pitt Magazine, 1996

— Click on the word “Kingdom,” above for the rest of the story.

Shine a Light, Exile on Main Street

The Ethics of Consulting in the Public Administration Academy: Mapping a Black Hole, By Thomas H. Roback. (Last Lecture, ripples in the pond.)

By Val — My father was a strong swimmer. Language, his ocean; Ticonderoga pencils and yellow legal pads his wetsuit.  His script was short and stocky; some letters especially round,  like the bulb of his nose and his cheeks when he smiled.

Tom Roback was the son of immigrants — his mother, a Scot; his father, a Pole.  His ability to negotiate linguistic dialects — Creole, patois, and pigeon blends — was one of his many gifts. Cultural cross-coding, it’s called.

It stemmed, perhaps, from a neurogenetic predisposition advantageous for life in a place of overlapping languages and cultures.  My grandfather, Ludik Robak, and his forebears were of Russian ethnicity and Polish linguistic heritage.

Borders were always fluid in their corner of Eastern Europe. At times, they were subjects/citizens/POW’s/comrades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Russia, Nazi Germany, and the U.S.S.R.     Before the Great War, Robaks traveled back and forth across the Atlantic — from the Old Country to the United States and back again — for work.  In 1909, an NYC immigration clerk changed Ludik Robak’s name to Louis Roback before he walked off the ship that had carried him and his mother, Anna, across the Atlantic from Hamberg, Germany.   In 1920, Louis lived with his parents, Anna and Franciszek Robak,  and younger brother, Tommy, in a Manhattan tenement. A baby girl named Catherine entered the picture.    After the Great Depression, it may have seemed safe for Anna, Francis, and baby girl, Catherine to return to the Old Country.      But home may never have been truly safe for them. My great grandparents ended up near Grodno — a beautiful, thriving, and somewhat tolerant city at the southeastern tip of Poland sometime before the mid-1930′s.       They had time to set up housekeeping, visit relatives, pick up the threads of their old lives.     They were just in time for the Luftwaffe. Auschwitz. Sobibor. The bombs of the liberating Flyboys in Blue. The black boots of fascism. Then Stalin’s purges.

Forgotten

Can’t get to Linda Galloway’s house by car. Yet the trail there is littered with road trash and oddball junk.  Empty antifreeze jugs, a dead-eye TV, Kenmore washer on its side. A confetti of paper and plastic lines the way around the bend, through a thicket of weeds.

Tucked away, the tarpaper shack slides into view, like a mirage in the south Georgia Pine barrens. A hound droops under a sagging porch propped up with cinder blocks.

The flies are audacious today. They welcome Miguel with maniacal joy as, laughing, he tumbles through the yard and up the steps in time for breakfast.

Hominid: A Powerful Play

Theater review by Valerie Gregg

Power and sex—those eternal instigators of the human drama—intertwine at the center of a bold new theater production based on the book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes,” by Dr. Frans de Waal, world renowned primatologist.

A masterful blend of science, MacBeth, and sheer theater, the play provides a humanistic context for decades of research on primate behavior, informed by de Waal’s landmark studies on empathy, conflict resolution, and hierarchical power structures. Chimps’ social behavior is largely governed by displays of dominance, aggression, and territoriality, resorting to violence occasionally to defuse conflicts. Bonobo apes, however, lean towards more peaceful ways of reconciliation like sex, empathy, and food-sharing.

The actors of Out of Hand Theater expertly used the visual body language and mannerisms of Great Apes, along with smatterings of Shakespeare, to tell the story—an epic of lust, murder, and power reminiscent of The Godfather, Hamlet, and Scarface. I imagine a young Al Pacino or Robert de Niro in a version adapted for screen. But the young actors of Theater Emory give the show its pop. Hominid is hot, relevant, and critically important. And it will sell.

Some in this techno-genomic age might find Charles Darwin and Shakespeare passe, but de Waal finds their power undeniable. “There has always been a denial of power relationships in science and academia,” he said November 15. “A taboo. That’s why Machiavelli has a bad name…. Chimpanzees are most interested in power and sex, just like humans.”

Yet the capacity for cruelty, kindness, sharing, fairness, and, most importantly, reconciliation, are crucial to the plot of “Hominid.” De Waal has never been shy about attributing “humanesque” emotions to animals. Scientists have long considered Great Apes and humans to be closely related, and DNA sequencing shows that chimpanzees and humans share 98.5 percent of the same genome.

Science has communications problems these days, and the general public urgently needs education about basic science and medicine. “There is a hostility towards science out there,” said de Waal  November 15. “Evolution is called the E-word, and climate change is a subject open for debate, even when the data support it overwhelmingly.”

Indeed. Because of a dramatic loss of habitat in Africa and decades of poaching, the primates de Waal studies are some of the most endangered species on earth.

Out of Hand Theater (a group to watch), Frans de Waal, and Emory University pulled off a cooperative coup with this little masterpiece. With courage, conviction, and funding, this kind of work promises to bring science to an apprehensive public. In a time when many Americans deny dinosaurs ever existed, work like this is a moral imperative. With bold production and larger venues, “Hominid” has major international splash potential.

[Out of Hand Theater, writer Ken Weitzman, and Theater Emory brought “Hominid” to the stage at Emory University November, 2009 to small audiences.]

DeWaal’s most recent book is titled “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.”