Legacies of slavery move into the light

One hundred and fifty years after the U.S. Civil War started, the impact of slavery in institutions of higher education remains largely unexamined. As part of the movement to change that, hundreds of scholars came together for Emory’s “Slavery and the University” conference Feb. 3 to 6.

“We learned a lot about the political and economic connections. So many major universities, both north and south, were funded by the Atlantic slave trade,” says anthropologist Mark Auslander of Brandeis University. “And we learned about how violent the slavery system had been, even at colleges.”

Auslander, who formerly taught at Emory’s Oxford College campus, is working on a book about Catherine “Miss Kitty” Boyd, a well-known, yet mysterious, historical figure in the Oxford community. Miss Kitty was an enslaved woman owned by Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, the first president of Emory’s board of trustees. Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty helped triggered the 1844 schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which is considered one of the templates in the forming of the confederacy.

While trying to sort fact from myth in her complicated life story, Auslander tracked down Miss Kitty’s descendants.

“I’m still grasping with the reality of it all,” says Darcel Caldwell, who learned that she was Miss Kitty’s great-great-great granddaughter when she got a phone call from Auslander.

“I had no idea that I had ancestors that had such an impact on this country,” she said. “It helps me figure out where I fit in, and I think that’s one great advantage that a lot of black Americans don’t have.”

Caldwell was among those who gathered at Emory’s Old Church in Oxford, built in 1841, for the concluding ceremony of the conference, and to honor Miss Kitty’s legacy.

“By focusing on institutions of higher education as one critical place where enslaved labor played an important role, and where arguments for and against African slavery were developed, discussed and debated, we begin to understand how central slavery was to society as a whole,” says Emory history professor Leslie Harris. “By knowing these histories we can better address the issues with us today.”

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Slavery, power and the myth of Miss Kitty

Students tackle tough bioethics questions

Should scientists be allowed to cultivate custom cellular machines? Students (left to right) Sarah Chambers, April Dworetz, and Maryam Daroudi present their findings. Their answer: Yes, but carefully. Photo by Ann Borden.


Paige Parvin writes in Emory Magazine:

What if scientists could create a real, live Neanderthal person, using knowledge of a genome sequenced from prehistoric DNA?

That might seem like something from a Michael Crichton novel, but there is evidence that it’s closer than you might think. That’s why it was the first test problem put to students in a new, experimental course on bioethics—specifically, what Roberta Berry, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, calls “ethically fractious problems.”

Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the course brings together students from Emory, Georgia Tech, Georgia State University College of Law and Morehouse School of Medicine. Berry, director of Georgia Tech’s Law, Science, and Technology Program, conceived of the course to address emerging problems that meet five criteria: They are novel, complex, ethically fraught, divisive, and unavoidably of public concern.

“The point of the grant proposal is that these problems will keep coming up, and we need to find ways to deal with them,” Berry says. “What caught the interest of the NSF was the idea of future scientists and engineers developing a particular set of skills necessary to deal with these issues at a policy level. The NSF also found the diverse mix of students very promising.”

The students are placed on teams of five to six members, with representatives from the biosciences, public policy, law, engineering, and even the humanities. There are no textbooks or assigned readings. The teams are given a series of three problems and set loose (guided by a faculty facilitator) to develop policy recommendations, which they ultimately present to invited stakeholders and policymakers including scientists and engineers, patent attorneys, law professors, judges, legislators, and legislative staffers.

"It’s a fascinating way to learn, and much truer to the way the students will work in the realms they are moving into,” says Kathy Kinlaw, associate director of Emory's Center for Ethics and a facilitator for the course.

Tara Wabbersen is an Emory graduate student working in cell and developmental biology. Faced with the first question of the course, she says it was fairly easy for her team to come up with the answer: No, scientists should not create a Neanderthal man. The challenge, though, was explaining why. “There were too many big questions,” she says. “Would it be defined as a person? Would there be social and class issues? The law student wanted to know what its rights would be.”

This year’s teams were assigned final problems with a focus on synthetic biology, so their work resonated with many of the key issues discussed by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which met at Emory in November.

One team analyzed the potential impact of cultivating emergent behaviors of differentiating cells, basically the production of biological “machines” through steering the differentiation of interacting stem cells. The second team worked on a real-life project that is actually in development, led by a Harvard researcher—the creation of a cellular system designed to detect glucose levels in the blood and then instruct other systems to produce and secrete insulin, to be used in treating type I diabetes patients.

Both teams drew on the highly controversial use of human embryonic stem cells to illustrate their points, noting the ongoing debate over the definition of life and when it begins. They covered religious and ethical implications, the need for balance between private innovation and public interest, the possibility for dual use if the advances fall into the wrong hands, and the importance of public perception in the success of new biological technologies. Ultimately, the teams found that researchers in these areas should be encouraged to proceed—but with caution, and overseen by regulatory agencies and clear, restrictive policies. Still, the potential for health benefits far outweighs the risks, the teams said.

Melissa Creary, an Emory graduate student of public health, ethics, and history, has worked in the Division of Blood Disorders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the past six years. “In my work, ethics comes up all the time,” she says. “If I were to rely on what I knew before this class, it was basically gut reaction and instinct. I was not really looking at the problem in a systematic way, which is what this class teaches.”

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Disease trackers take aim at dengue fever

Click on the animated map above to watch how a dengue epidemic spread to 390 confirmed cases over 25 weeks. New cases are shown in red, and previous cases in blue.

In late January of 2003, a woman returned from an extended holiday in Papua, New Guinea, to her home in Cairns, Australia, a tropical town in northeastern Queensland. The woman was sick with a fever and went to a clinic, which gave her pills to treat malaria.

It was a misdiagnosis. She actually had dengue fever, another vector-borne disease spread by mosquitoes. Global trends in population growth and travel have expanded the range of dengue transmission risk, and yet little is known about dengue epidemics in an urban environment.

In this case, the woman lived in an older neighborhood of Queenslander-style homes that have lots of unscreened windows with wooden shutters, kept open to let in the breezes. It was the steamy wet season. Within a few weeks, mosquito bites had spread the dengue virus within the neighborhood and beyond.

“It was a perfect storm for an outbreak,” says Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, an Emory disease ecologist.

The dengue virus was soon confirmed as the culprit, and Queensland health authorities began aggressive intervention measures. By the time the outbreak ended several months later, there were 390 confirmed cases among Cairns residents, and one death.

Vazquez-Prokopec and Uriel Kitron, chair of environmental studies at Emory, conducted a statistical analysis of the Cairns outbreak, recently published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. They combined detailed data gathered by Queensland health authorities with geographic information system (GIS) technology and space-time analysis to plot the interventions alongside the spread of the virus. Click on the animated map above to watch the progression from the first to last case, during the course of the outbreak.

When a disease breaks out in an urban area, health officials must act fast, but they often have limited resources. The analysis honed in on key transmission patterns. The results showed that spraying 60 percent of the homes in close proximity to a home with a confirmed case of dengue was effective in reducing transmission.

"A big problem with mosquito control is there is not enough personnel to spray everywhere, so you need to strategically choose your targets during an outbreak. It's like fighting a forest fire," Vazquez-Prokopec says. "Our goal is to use spatial analysis as another tool to improve disease control and prevention where resources are limited."

New methods of dengue control are desperately needed, Vazquez-Prokopec says. An editorial he wrote on the rising threat of dengue epidemics will appear in the March issue of Future Microbiology.

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Slavery, power and the myth of Miss Kitty

Like many anthropologists, Mark Auslander began his career working in a distant, exotic place. In his case, it was Zambia. But it was the experience of teaching at Emory’s original campus, in Oxford, Georgia, that “really shook things up for me,” he says.

He and his students took two tours of the town’s historic cemetery, where some of the early leaders of Emory are buried. One visit was guided by a conservative white member of the community, another by a local African-American.

“They gave us totally different tours,” Auslander says. “One guide emphasized the glories of Emory, by which he meant the white Emory. The other emphasized the long history of racial discrimination, that was visible in the cemetery.”

In a segregated area lay the grave of Catherine “Miss Kitty” Boyd, an enslaved woman who was owned by Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, the first president of Emory’s board of trustees. Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty and other enslaved persons triggered the 1844 national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presaging the Civil War.

“Everybody in Oxford had an opinion about Miss Kitty,” Auslander says. Bishop Andrew used to claim he was only an accidental slave owner, since all of his slaves had been inherited or acquired through his three marriages. Some conservative whites sympathized with Andrew’s view, and contended that Andrew offered Miss Kitty her freedom but she refused to accept it. But the term “accidental” rankled some members of the African-American community, who believed that Miss Kitty was the bishop’s mistress, and that she had no control over that fate.

“My students and I began to realize that we were in the middle of a very complex and exciting window to an important chapter in American history," Auslander says.

What was the truth behind conflicting versions of the story of Miss Kitty, that had been passed through families in Oxford for 160 years? Where did she come from, and what happened to her descendants?

The search for answers led to Auslander’s forthcoming book, “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of the American South.” He will give a public talk on the book at Emory's Oxford College on Wednesday, Feb. 2.

Auslander, who is now with Brandeis University, helped organized Emory’s upcoming conference, “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies,” which begins on Thursday, Feb. 3. The first conference of its kind, it will examine the impact of the enslavement of people of African descent on institutions of higher education.

Visit Emory Report, to hear the podcast of an interview of Auslander by Dana Goldman.

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A suprise dimension to adding and counting

The new finite formula for partition numbers is revealed beginning at 0:25:00 in the video. The explanation of how partition numbers are fractal begins at about 0:47:00.

Mathematician Ken Ono recently presented new breakthroughs in number theory that were centuries in the making. In the above video, you can watch Ono explain the first finite formula to calculate any partition number, and the discovery that partition numbers behave like fractals.

Ono gave the special hour-long lecture for a general audience at Emory on Jan. 21. Although the talk begins with the Count from Sesame Street, it quickly escalates to complex formulas, demonstrating why the simplest problems to state in number theory can be the hardest to solve.

Related: New theories reveal the nature of numbers

How do you count a number’s partitions, or the sequences of positive integers that add up to that number? It sounds easy, until you realize that the number 100 has more than 190,000,000 partitions.

If you were to try to write down all the partitions of the number 200, then add up how many there were, you would never finish. It would take you several lifetimes, and you probably wouldn’t arrive at the correct answer anyway.

The Mandelbrot set, above, is the most famous fractal of them all, and demonstrates the endlessly repeating patterns of forms in nature. Ono and his colleagues discovered a new class of fractals, one that reveals the endlessly repeating superstructure of partition numbers. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Wolfgang Beyer.

Theories for partition numbers may seem esoteric, but they have many real world applications. “The rules of partition function played a role in the early development of computers,” Ono says. “The security of your emails and of your bank card also depend on partition function.”

Ono led a team of researchers to make the recent breakthroughs, including Jan Bruinier of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Amanda Folsom of Yale and Zach Kent of Emory. Their work was funded by the American Institute of Mathematics and the National Science Foundation.

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