Women can lower their stroke risk by lacing up their sneakers and walking, a new study suggests…
‘This certainly speaks to walking for a certain amount of time and walking briskly as well,” said Jacob Sattelmair, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston…
NEW YORK — Women’s risk of developing breast cancer may increase as much as 20-fold if they were treated with chest radiation for malignancies as children or young adults, according to an analysis of studies…
In the second study on lifespan, Jennifer Yeh, a research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health, developed a mathematical model to predict the longevity of survivors of childhood cancers, including leukemia, brain and bone tumors, and lymphoma…
What is the media’s role in covering health care reform properly? A panel at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) suggested that, even though Congress finally has passed overhaul legislation, there is a continuing need to cut through political spin to explain to the public how the new system will work.
“Covering Health Care Reform in the Digital Age,” an April 5 discussion co-sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, featured perspectives from Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at HKS and the Harvard School of Public Health; Timothy Johnson, physician and medical editor at ABC News; Ezra Klein, blogger on economic and domestic policy for Washingtonpost.com and columnist for Newsweek magazine; and Julie Rovner, health policy correspondent for National Public Radio.
Blendon emphasized the importance of the media in the health care debate, and said that journalism is “crucial to the nation’s understanding how this policy works.”
Rovner agreed that although the “horse race is over” and the health care bill has been passed, there is still an “interim step” before implementation, which is to “explain to the confused public what’s in the law and how they might be affected by it.” She explained that in reporting on the health care debate, there was a “struggle to put policy above politics.” Johnson agreed that the policy vs. politics debate was difficult, and while ABC News had chosen to focus on the political aspect of the story, he believed the focus should have been on policy.
The “bad news,” Klein said, is that “the media is terrible at doing what it needs to do,” but the good news is that “it doesn’t really matter.” He saw the political structure that existed prior to the bill’s passage as having the greatest influence on its success, and he expressed skepticism about how large a role health reform will play in the mid-term elections.
But Blendon said the wide political gaps between the parties will force health care to remain the key election issue.
To illustrate the complications of the health care bill, Klein said he has “made charts and graphs — we’ve made so many graphs,” yet the public still seems vastly unaware of the bill’s complexities.
While new media technology provides “more resources than ever” for citizens to get information about health care legislation, politics, rather than education, still drives the debate. Johnson said he was appalled at the lack of knowledge among intelligent citizens on aspects of the reform legislation. Rovner cited an example of a colleague reporting on a Tea Party protest meeting who called her to verify what turned out to be wildly inaccurate rumors being passed around as truth.
Johnson said he sees “battles yet to come” that will deal with the unavoidable issue of controlling costs. “But no one wants to talk about that aspect of it,” he said.
The event was co-sponsored by the Health Policy Professional Interest Council and the Communications & Media Professional Interest Council as part of the Kennedy School’s Public Service Week.
“We will either settle down as a species or completely wreck the planet.”
That grim prognostication from esteemed biologist and longtime Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson kicked off his assessment of the problems and possible solutions facing humanity and the many species with which we share planet Earth.
Wilson described several problems that collectively result in extinction rates today that are 1,000 times the natural background rate. Overpopulation, overharvesting, habitat destruction, invasive species, and pollution are all taking their toll. With human populations continuing to climb, pressures promise to increase. At the root of those problems is our inability to master our own urges and moderate our grasping for the resources of the natural world. Wilson said humanity is ruled by Paleolithic emotions, is guided by medieval institutions, and is wielding godlike power over the natural world, which he termed a dangerous combination.
“The radical reduction in the world’s biodiversity is a folly our descendants will never forgive us for,” Wilson said.
Wilson spoke Monday evening (April 5) in Sanders Theatre in the first of three John M. Prather Lectures in Biology, “Biodiversity and the Future of Biology.” The lectures are sponsored by the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Delivered on consecutive days, they are the most distinguished lectures at Harvard in the biological sciences. The final two are at 4 p.m. in the Science Center and will address “The Superorganism” and “Consilience.”
With climate change pointing so much scientific attention toward the planet’s physical world, Wilson cautioned it’s important that the biological world and biodiversity not be forgotten.
It’s striking, he said, just how little is actually known about life on Earth. He directed students in the audience toward mycology, the study of fungi, as a field in which they’d be able to make great progress, since so little is known. The world’s roughly 60,000 known fungal species are just a fraction of the estimated 1.5 million. Similarly, he described the study of microscopic life as a veritable “black hole” because so little is known.
Life exists from the deepest oceanic depths to the highest mountains, in superheated water from undersea vents and in corrosive runoff from abandoned mines. Life is possible wherever there is water, he said, and so could exist in the buried frosts of Mars, in the suspected oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Wilson highlighted several efforts to promote biodiversity and knowledge of life on Earth, including the online Encyclopedia of Life, which seeks to document life in a way accessible to all, and a new online library that seeks to make accessible biodiversity-related works in several major libraries.
Wilson said he believes that the 21st century will be known as the Century of the Environment and that, despite the ongoing destruction, many people are working to preserve the world’s biodiversity.
He promoted a plan to use just one-thousandth of the gross domestic product of all nations to conserve global biodiversity hotspots and large chunks of rainforest. That one-time payment would save half the planet’s species, he suggested.
“This is a problem that can be solved,” Wilson said.
Carbon nanotubes, long touted for applications in electronics and in materials, may also be the stuff of atomic-scale black holes.
Physicists at Harvard University have found that a high-voltage nanotube (a tiny tubelike structure) can cause cold atoms to spiral inward under dramatic acceleration before disintegrating violently. The physicists’ experiments, which are the first to demonstrate something akin to a black hole at atomic scale, are described in the current issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
“On a scale of nanometers, we create an inexorable and destructive pull similar to what black holes exert on matter at cosmic scales,” said Lene Vestergaard Hau, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard. “As importantly for scientists, this is the first merging of cold atom and nanoscale science, and it opens the door to a new generation of cold atom experiments and nanoscale devices.”
Hau and co-authors Anne Goodsell, Trygve Ristroph, and Jene A. Golovchenko laser-cooled clouds of 1 million rubidium atoms to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The physicists then launched this millimeter-long atomic cloud toward a suspended carbon nanotube, located some two centimeters away and charged to hundreds of volts.
The vast majority of the atoms passed right by the wire, but those that came within a micron of it — roughly 10 atoms in every million-atom cloud — were inescapably attracted, reaching high speeds as they spiraled toward the nanotube.
“From a start at about 5 meters per second, the cold atoms reach speeds of roughly 1,200 meters per second, or more than 2,700 miles per hour, as they circle the nanotube,” said Goodsell, a graduate student on the project and now a postdoctoral researcher in physics at Harvard. “As part of this tremendous acceleration, the temperature corresponding to the atoms’ kinetic energy increases from 0.1 degrees Kelvin to thousands of degrees Kelvin in less than a microsecond.”
At this point, the speeding atoms separate into an electron and an ion rotating in parallel around the nanowire, completing each orbit in just a few trillionths of a second. The electron eventually gets sucked into the nanotube via quantum tunneling, causing its companion ion to shoot away — repelled by the strong charge of the 300-volt nanotube — at a speed of roughly 26 kilometers per second, or 59,000 miles per hour.
The experiment was conducted with great precision, allowing the scientists unprecedented access to both cold atom and nanoscale processes.
“Cold atom and nanoscale science have each provided exciting new systems for study and applications,” said Golovchenko, Rumford Professor of Physics and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. “This is the first experimental realization of a combined cold atom-nanostructure system. Our system demonstrates sensitive probing of atom, electron, and ion dynamics at the nanoscale.”
The single-walled carbon nanotube used in these researchers’ successful experiment was dubbed “Lucy,” and its contributions are acknowledged in the Physical Review Letters paper. The nanotube was grown by chemical vapor deposition across a 10-micron gap in a silicon chip that provides the nanowire with both mechanical support and electrical contact.
“From the atom’s point of view, the nanotube is infinitely long and thin, creating a singular effect on the atom,” Hau said.
The work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
Could life exist beyond our own blue planet? According to scientist Carolyn Porco, it’s certainly possible.
Porco is the director of flight operations and imaging team leader for the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Her work involves taking detailed pictures in space, shots that offer insights into the nature of the universe, and signs of life elsewhere in the solar system.
“Gorgeous” was how she described the Cassini images to a crowd at the Radcliffe Gymnasium in a talk on April 1. Her listeners agreed.
There was a collective gasp from the student-filled audience as she showed a photo of Saturn taken during an eclipse of the sun. The negative-looking image revealed a sharp outline of the planet and its surrounding rings.
Porco spoke as part of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Dean’s Lecture Series. The lectures are part of the institute’s Academic Engagement Programs (AEP), which sponsor projects with Harvard faculty, Radcliffe Institute fellows, and Harvard students in scholarly and research endeavors.
The Cassini mission, which began in 1997, has been studying Saturn and its diverse system of moons, sending back stunning images and even evidence that life could exist 932 million miles from Earth.
Some of the mission’s highlights involve analysis of Saturn’s rings, their makeup, the gaps between them, and little “moonlettes.” The study of such moonlettes and the gaps they influence provides a “giant touchstone” for understanding how planets are formed, noted the scientist, who also discussed two of the planet’s moons in detail, Titan and its much smaller counterpart, Enceladus.
With Titan having an atmosphere vaguely similar to the Earth’s, including the presence of molecular nitrogen, as well as a troposphere and stratosphere, researchers were eager to get a closer look at the large moon in orbit around Saturn. They did, with the help of Huygens, a European-designed probe that landed on Titan’s surface in 2005. The event was worthy of a ticker tape parade, said an emotional Porco, who recalled seeing grown men brought to tears when the probe landed.
“This was like a Jules Verne adventure come true,” said Porco. “It was the day humanity landed a device of our making in the outer solar system.”
The images sent back from the probe were “outrageously easy to interpret,” said Porco, and included shots of a branching “dendritic drainage pattern” on the moon’s surface, one that only could have been formed by the flow of liquids. There also were photos of mountainous regions and a series of dunes.
The data revealed that Titan “was alien and exotic and yet strangely Earth-like” in its geological and geographical complexity.
On the small, icy moon Enceladus, “the mother lode of all discoveries was discovered at the South Pole,” said Porco. She described Cassini’s findings of elevated temperatures in the moon’s polar region, as well as an enormous plume of icy particles shooting tens of thousands of kilometers into space.
Analysis of the icy trail, which includes water vapor and trace amounts of organic materials such as methane, carbon dioxide, and propane, suggests it is fueled by geysers erupting from a pocket of salt water within the moon.
The findings, noted Porco, point to the possibility of “an environment where life itself might be stirring.”
“Should we ever discover that a second genesis had occurred in our solar system, independently outside the Earth,” she added, “then I think at that point the spell is broken. The existence theorem has been proven, and we could safely infer from it that life was not a bug but a feature of the universe in which we live, that it’s commonplace and has occurred a staggering number of times.”
Morning Exercises
To accommodate the increasing number of those wishing to attend Harvard’s Commencement Exercises, the following guidelines are proposed to facilitate admission into Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement Morning (May 27):
Degree candidates will receive a limited number of tickets to Commencement. Parents and guests of degree candidates must have tickets, which they will be required to show at the gates in order to enter Tercentenary Theatre. Seating capacity is limited; however, there is standing room on the Widener steps and at the rear and sides of the theater for viewing the exercises.
Note: A ticket allows admission into the theater, but does not guarantee a seat. Seats are on a first-come basis and cannot be reserved. The sale of Commencement tickets is prohibited.
Alumni/ae attending their reunions (25th, 35th, 50th) will receive tickets at their reunions. Alumni/ae in classes beyond the 50th may obtain tickets from the College Alumni Programs Office, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, sixth floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, 617.495.2555, or through the annual Treespread mailing sent out in March.
Alumni/ae from nonreunion years and their spouses are requested to view the Morning Exercises over large-screen televisions in the Science Center, and at designated locations in most of the undergraduate Houses and graduate and professional Schools. These locations provide ample seating, and tickets are not required.
A very limited supply of tickets will be made available to all other alumni/ae on a first-come, first-served basis through the Harvard Alumni Association, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, sixth floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Afternoon Exercises
The annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association convenes in Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement afternoon. All alumni and alumnae, faculty, students, parents, and guests are invited to attend and hear Harvard President Drew Faust and featured Commencement Day speaker David H. Souter deliver their addresses. Tickets for the afternoon ceremony will be available through the Harvard Alumni Association, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, sixth floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.
— Jacqueline A. O’Neill
University Marshal
During his freshman year at Harvard, Christian Starling ’10 had a panicky moment. An art project was due. What now?
He found the answer under his bed — in bits of trash, paper, and random materials. Voila, he had an art installation.
The experience also gave the anthropology concentrator a theme that has lasted four years. Starling began collecting found objects in Cambridge and Boston, and on sojourns to Mississippi and New Orleans. He recorded what he found and where (including an Old Thompson whiskey bottle, from in front of the Memorial Church, that was empty.)
For a new show of student art, “Invisible Cities,” Starling took images of three months of objects and arranged them chronologically in a tiny diary. The images and entries resonate with a strange power and read like a poem of consumer culture: belt buckle, hoop earring, Ph paper, hair piece, flattened fork, bent spoon, fragment of licorice rope, cell phone antenna. (Earth to civilization: Is that you?)
The strange power of cities, real and imagined, is the theme of “Invisible Cities,” where a visitor will find Starling’s “The Book of Found Objects,” along with the work of 14 other Harvard students. The show runs through April 20 at the Center for Government and International Studies, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St. It was co-curated by Nancy Lin ’11 and Anne Sawyier ’12, both history of art and architecture concentrators.
Included in the show at the building’s Concourse Gallery are photographs, paintings, drawings, miniature sculptures, and five films running in a continuous loop.
“Invisible Cities” is more about the emotional response to places than it is about travel itself, said Lin.
“We thought about how you experience travel, how you experience new places,” she said. “It was more of an internal experience, as opposed to ‘Here’s a photo of the Eiffel Tower.’ It has less to do with the city than it does about yourself.”
Fun was part of the equation too, and inclusion. “We wanted to reach out to as many students as possible,” said Sawyier. “We wanted the artists to have fun with it, and to share their internal experiences of places.”
The students represent a clash and clamor of disciplines: economics, biology, art, literature, and the social sciences. A budding economist, Jieliang Hao ’11 made her “White Series” from daily photo studies of the same corner of Dunster House.
“That’s not like a travel-abroad photo,” said Lin, who called the Hao series “her own poem,” and a kind of internal journey. “You don’t need to travel abroad to have journeys. You can have them inside of you.”
Kayla Escobedo ’12, a Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) concentrator, displayed a few panels from MONTY, a graphic novel in progress.
And neurobiology student Natasha Coleman ’10 co-created “Moving Through the City,” a mixed media/video exploration of New York, with Andrés Castro Samayoa ’10, a concentrator in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
“If medical school doesn’t work out,” her artist statement says, she’ll “try her hand at fashion photography.”
“Invisible Cities” — taken from the title of a 1972 novel by Italo Calvino — seems to say that art has a place in every academic discipline.
Anh-Thu Ngo, a second-year doctoral student in anthropology, is one of two Harvard graduate students in the show. She used her film “Shadow of Echoes” to explore the sensory experiences of place.
Ngo recently spent 10 weeks in her native Vietnam, in the city of Hue, employing what she called “the camera’s amble and resting gaze” to give the viewer a lush sense of place that words alone cannot create. “Childhood and motherland loom in these dreams,” wrote Ngo, in the film’s minimal and poetic text.
There are caged birds in an outdoor market, men lounging at a tree-shaded café, a gray bridge fluid with the traffic of motorbikes, ancient stone walls, a shaded walk, and a vendor crouching on a sidewalk. She holds up a single flower.
“With this medium I was able to explore more creative aspects of my time there,” said Ngo. Hue is known for its centuries of art as well as for the Vietnam War’s most horrific urban battle, in 1968.
Ngo said Harvard is prominent among universities breaking new ground in “sensory ethnography,” the name of a two-semester class she took last year.
“There’s a lot more evocative power through images and sound,” said Ngo of using film for ethnography. But despite its power, she added, incorporating film into scholarship “is really stretching the boundaries of the discipline.”
Funding for “Invisible Cities” came from Harvard’s Office for the Arts. Guidance came from painter Bettina Burch, the art board associate at CGIS, and from Ruth Lingford, VES professor of the practice of animation.
Helping too was Paula Soares, VES manager of academic programs. “We just threw the ball,” she said of the show’s origin last fall. “Nancy and Anne ran with it.”
Clean, renewable wind and solar power may be the most-preferred fossil fuel alternatives, but their land-hungry collecting requirements make them difficult options for replacing more conventional power sources, according to a British energy expert.
David MacKay, chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom’s Department of Energy and Climate Change and a professor of natural philosophy in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University, crunched the numbers on how much energy some sources can generate per unit area to illustrate that renewable types probably will be part of a future energy mix, rather than the solutions.
MacKay, author of the recent book, “Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air,” said that to generate enough power to replace fossil fuels, some renewable sources would have to cover enormous swaths of territory. Wind farms, for example, would have to cover half of Britain to meet that nation’s energy needs, he said, adding that he has been accused of being anti-wind for pointing this out. He’s actually pro-wind, he said, but quipped that he’s even more “pro-arithmetic.”
“The message about renewables is that, to make a difference, renewable facilities have to be country-sized,” MacKay said, noting that some people are already fighting construction of wind farms in areas they deem inappropriate.
MacKay spoke Friday (April 2) at the Northwest Laboratories as part of the “Future of Energy” lecture series sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE). MacKay was introduced by HUCE director Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering.
Though MacKay said moving to an all-renewable power system would be difficult, he also said the status quo cannot continue. Fossil fuels are not only warming the globe, they are a finite resource. In addition, he said, the need to import fossil fuels creates security and supply concerns. As much as 90 percent of future energy should come from non-fossil fuel sources, he said.
“We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it’s not sustainable,” MacKay said.
MacKay broke down current energy demands into simple units and then took a cut-and-paste approach with alternatives, saying he’s not particularly fussy about the exact combination that replaces fossil fuels, as long as it gets done.
The generating capacity per unit area of nuclear power plants is 400 times that of wind farms, making them a potentially useful part of a future mix. Besides wind and solar power, also in the mix could be clean coal plants and hydropower from unconventional sources, such as tides and ocean currents. MacKay also advocated decreasing demand by insulating buildings better, by switching to more efficient building systems such as heat pumps, by turning down thermostats, and by turning off appliances when not in use. Transportation, he said, should be predominantly electric-powered, and solar power generation would be more efficient if plants were built in regions that get lots of sun, such as the Sahara Desert and the American Southwest.
“Getting off fossil fuels will not be easy, but it is possible,” MacKay said.
The Harvard College Library (HCL) and MIT Libraries have launched a pilot program that extends reciprocal borrowing privileges to undergraduates.
“This program offers students the best of both libraries’ collections, with MIT’s rich in science and engineering and HCL’s in humanities and social sciences,” said Marilyn Wood, associate librarian for collection management. “It gives Harvard undergraduates access to an expanded range of materials and supports cross-enrollment programs. Reciprocal privileges also provide an opportunity for students to work collaboratively with their peers at MIT.”
Harvard students can enroll for borrowing privileges at Massachusetts Institute of Technology either online or in person at the Library Privileges Office in Widener Library. A valid Harvard ID is required to enroll. Students will receive an authorization form, which they must complete and take to the Hayden Library at MIT. Once enrolled, students will receive a library pass that will be valid through the spring term. Students can borrow from the Dewey (social sciences and management), Hayden (humanities), Lewis Music, Library Storage Annex (by appointment only), and Rotch (architecture and planning) libraries.
MIT students will have a similar registration process and will be given a borrowing card when they visit the HCL Privileges Office. The card will allow them to borrow from the Cabot, Fine Arts, Harvard-Yenching, Loeb Music, Tozzer, and Widener libraries. They will have in-library privileges at Houghton, the rare books and manuscripts depository, and at Lamont, where the collections support Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum.
Undergraduates aren’t the first to benefit from a reciprocal borrowing program between HCL and MIT. Faculty, staff, and graduate students have had reciprocal borrowing privileges since 1995. The pilot program for undergraduates will be assessed after 14 months.
For Harvard undergrads such as Elizabeth Bloom ’12 and Ana Enriquez ’10, the ability to borrow from MIT libraries opens the door to collections unavailable elsewhere.
“We tend to think of Harvard’s libraries as boundless, but even such a large collection has its limits,” Enriquez said. “I think this program will be a great opportunity for undergraduates, especially students concentrating in the sciences or taking courses at MIT, to access materials not held by Harvard.”
“This program means Harvard undergrads will now have more resources at their fingertips,” Bloom said. “I appreciate that MIT and Harvard are using their proximity to each other for undergraduates’ sake. I can imagine that Harvard thesis writers, especially in math/science, will reap many benefits.”
For additional information about MIT borrowing privileges, visit the HCL Web site, or call 617.495.4166.
Bill Gates will visit Harvard University on April 21 as part of a three-day tour of universities across the United States designed to inspire students and scholars to focus on the biggest problems facing humanity.
At Harvard, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Microsoft will deliver a speech to students, faculty, and staff about the importance of giving back to the community — locally and globally.
He also plans to meet with Harvard students and researchers, some of whom have benefited from generous support by the Gates Foundation, which is devoted to improving education in the United States, and improving health and reducing poverty around the world.
“We are pleased to welcome Bill Gates back to Harvard, where we have placed renewed emphasis on our commitment to public and community service,” said President Drew Faust. “The good work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an inspiration to any student committed to making a difference in the world.”
Gates attended Harvard as an undergraduate and received an honorary degree from the University in 2007, when he delivered the Commencement Day address.
His upcoming public address at Harvard, “Giving Back: Finding the Best Way to Make a Difference,” will be held on April 21 at Sanders Theatre at 3 p.m. Tickets can be requested until noon on April 15 at http://president.harvard.edu/info.
Those receiving tickets will be notified by e-mail on April 19.
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter will deliver official words of wisdom to the Class of 2010 next month at Commencement. Until then, a new “Last Lecture” series organized by the Senior Class Committee is giving College seniors a less formal venue for parting words of inspiration from some favorite professors.
“With just eight semesters here at Harvard, many of us have not had the chance to hear from all the tremendous professors in Harvard’s faculty, or to dig into all the topics we’d hoped to during college,” said senior Ami Nash, a marshal for the Class of 2010. “We hope this series can help in introducing the Class of 2010 to some of Harvard’s most fascinating thinkers.”
The “Last Lecture” series kicked off Thursday (April 1) with a talk by Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and master of Pforzheimer House.
Christakis spoke to a full Lowell Junior Common Room on his study of the spread of behaviors through social networks, framing some of his research themes as advice to the graduating seniors as they prepare to head into the world.
“Your thoughts and your feelings and your body depend on those around you,” he said. “As you better yourself, that betterment can ripple out to hundreds or even thousands of other people.
“Good things are required for social networks to flourish,” he added, referring to his findings that beneficial attributes such as happiness and altruism, as well as positive behaviors such as voting and exercising, can spread through social networks.
Christakis told the assembled students that 70 percent of them will end up marrying someone within three degrees of themselves in their social network.
“Your social network will fold up around you and, like a yenta, introduce you to one another,” he said.
Nash says the “Last Lecture” speakers are faculty identified by graduating seniors as formative in their college careers. More lectures will take place on upcoming Thursdays, and are free and open to the Harvard community.
Speakers in the “Last Lecture” series include:
David Charbonneau, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy, April 8, 5:30 p.m., location to be announced.
Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and Professor of Business Administration and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration, April 15, 5:30 p.m., Lowell Junior Common Room.
Steven Levitsky, professor of government, April 29, 5:30 p.m., Winthrop Junior Common Room.
Judith Palfrey, T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics and master of Adams House, May 6, 5:30 p.m., location to be announced.
Can a man who once refused the gift of a doormat — because, as he wrote, “It’s best to avoid the beginnings of evil” — continue to inspire people in how to live simply?
The answer is yes, but with stipulations, said scholar Lawrence Buell at a Harvard lecture last week (March 25).
Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, explored the continuing significance of Henry David Thoreau’s seminal “Walden,” the 1854 book that chronicles the author’s two-and-a-half year experiment with simple living in the woods of Concord, Mass., near Walden Pond. The discussion was titled “Does Thoreau Have a Future? Reimagining Voluntary Simplicity in the Twenty-First Century.”
Buell referenced examples of literature on voluntary simplicity from the past, including Thoreau contemporary Lydia Maria Child, whose 1829 book “The American Frugal Housewife” promoted “frugal efficiency as moral imperative.”
The scholar also included examples of current authors who promote the simple life, including Duane Elgin and his work “Voluntary Simplicity,” and Colin Beavan, a New York City author who recounted his efforts to limit drastically his environmental impact in the book “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.”
But aspects of voluntary simplicity in a 21st century framework beg certain questions, said Buell, which can be explored with the help of Thoreau’s work, as well as that of contemporary authors.
One challenge to voluntary simplicity’s conventional wisdom, said the Harvard professor, is the notion that it’s mainly a choice left to the privileged rather than the poor.
Recalling a sociologist’s words, Buell said, “Voluntary simplicity is a choice faced by a successful corporate lawyer, not a homeless person.” But Thoreau offers insights in this area, said Buell, noting that his writings in “Walden” are more often than not directed at those “hard-pressed to make ends meet.”
While Thoreau’s work may have promoted individual action versus a united front, the message was inspiring, and continues to inspire, said Buell, despite the fears of those who argue that it will never amount to a critical mass of action.
As a counter to those who worry that voluntary simplicity is too individualistic, Buell offered the words of Beavan, who said that in the aftermath of his own simple-living experiment, “he continues to challenge the people around him” to make changes to save the planet.
Buell’s talk at Harvard Divinity School was part of a lecture series titled “Ecologies of Human Flourishing,” co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of World Religions.
In his final remarks, Buell enlisted the help of theologian and physician Albert Schweitzer, whom he called “a heroic example of voluntary simplicity” who “opted for a life of privation” to serve others. Buell surmised that if he could solicit Schweitzer’s and Thoreau’s opinions on the current importance of voluntary simplicity, they would likely agree that it “is necessary as a precondition for human integrity and flourishing, even if not sufficient to preserve the world from ruin in the long run.”
“If that’s right,” said Buell, “then humankind would be foolish to trust to voluntary simplicity alone, but equally foolish to disown it.”
Diana Eck gave the response to Buell’s lecture and shared her own connections with Thoreau. Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies and director of Harvard’s Pluralism Project, admitted to keeping a copy of the text, which she said came close to the status of scripture, next to her bed.
The work, said Eck, provides not so much a model for replication as a type of provocation or awakening with its nourishing passages “that are wonderful to contemplate.”
“‘Walden’ is an elegant and provocative work, and as long as we are attuned and willing to be provoked by that ornery ancestor … we will find that this kind of inspiration lives on, because it asks the kinds of questions we need to be asking.”
Next in the series is “What’s Enough? A Conversation Between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Divinity School,” featuring Howard Stevenson, the Sarofim-Rock Baker Foundation Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School, 5:15-7 p.m., April 12, Sperry Room, Andover Hall, Harvard Divinity School. Reservations required: Visit the Web site or call 617.495.4476 to register.
Everyone has baggage, but Lalita Booth’s is heavier than most.
Raised in Ashville, N.C., the rebellious teen says her problems all began when her parents divorced and she was sexually abused by a family acquaintance.
“That led to substance abuse, staying out all night long, and running away,” Booth said…
By then, she learned to really dream big and another door opened. Booth was accepted to one of the most elite and the oldest of the Ivy Leagues: Harvard University. The 29-year-old Booth is earning a Master’s degree in business and public policy…
Spring is in the air. Along with that seasonal shift, the Harvard Achievement Support Initiative (HASI) is launching a fresh series of SmartTALK Family Events in the Boston Public Schools. The events help kindergarteners to fifth-graders, their families, school staff, and partners learn more about games and strategies that support academic success during out-of-school time.
The motto on the nearby copies of the trivia-style children’s game “Brain Quest” reflected the program’s goal. “It’s OK to be smart!” captured the essence of the community outreach effort, which recently drew nearly 20 staff members from Harvard Public Affairs and Communications to a warehouse near HASI’s Allston headquarters to turn the stacks of math and language arts games into 1,800 SmartTALK learning kits.
The kits, containing grade-appropriate games and bilingual English-Spanish “how-to” guides, are an essential element of the Family Events. With the next round of 18 sessions kicking off early this month, the staffers were working that day against the clock. The games included “Rattatat Kat,” along with “Blink” and “Fraction Power,” two math-based card games. Some staffers opened the boxes, and others worked on assembling the kits.
The SmartTALK Family Events are part of Harvard’s effort to support out-of-school learning in nine Boston-area Step UP schools. Step UP is a collaboration among local universities and Boston schools that promotes student achievement. Harvard is a founding member of Step UP and has been offering after-school program support, learning materials, and professional development at the schools for the past three years.
“The missing link of our work was connecting back to families,” said Paige Lewin, HASI associate director. According to Lewin, the new SmartTALK Family Events programming also aligns with the work of Karen Mapp, the Harvard Graduate School of Education lecturer who advocates engaging parents in their children’s academic work to support achievement.
“Asking families to come to a bake sale is not as effective as getting families involved in the learning of their children,” said Lewin. “At the Family Events, we’ll give families tools they can use to support ‘quality’ or ‘smart’ talk at home.”
By the end of the afternoon, volunteers had converted the pile of boxes that had lined the warehouse into 729 Family Events kits, and had organized the remaining materials for quick assembly.
“That put a dent in it,” said Lewin. “Only 1,000 more kits to go.”
There have been a few times this academic year when I’ve had to choose between finishing a problem set or spending time with my friends. It’s obvious that there is a certain “go, go, go” way of life at a world-class institution such as Harvard College. Because this is a university where top students flock to study because of their potential and accomplishments, it is easy to fill up a schedule with academics, extracurricular meetings, practices, and rehearsals, while at the same time not even realizing what we’re doing it all for.
As students, we share many interests. But as Harvard freshmen, more specifically, there are several high expectations that we set for ourselves. Everything we do, and have already done up until this point, seems only for the future, so that we can live “good lives.” But what exactly does that mean? Are our actions reflective of our values? Do we have certain responsibilities or obligations as Harvard students? When is it time to put that problem set down? These are a few of the big questions that my “Reflecting on Your Life” group discussed.
When I received the e-mail to sign up for the sessions, I was doubtful that a program like this would be successful, because of everyone’s busy schedules. After all, there aren’t even enough hours in the day to get a full night’s sleep, let alone squeeze in a voluntary activity that doesn’t count for anything academically. However, the section, intended especially for freshmen, only met for an hour and a half for three weeks, without any prerequisites or homework, so I decided to keep an open mind and go through with it.
Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman and Jonathan Smart ’12, who had participated in the program last year, made sure our discussion was running smoothly. After the first few minutes of our initial meeting, my classmates and I had found some common ground outside of academics. When asked why we signed up, we gave a variety of responses, from getting away from the traditional classroom setting to meeting new people. I think Shalini Pammal ’13 summed it up best, saying she simply wanted to listen to the perspectives of her classmates because “one of Harvard’s greatest resources is its students.”
While I anticipated awkward silences and blank stares, I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at Dean Dingman’s home with the same 15 classmates each Thursday to sit in a circle and talk about life. My favorite part of this discussion group was that the people represented a cross-section of the Class of 2013; there was no criterion for selection other than what fit our schedules best when we signed up. Essentially, any connections we might have shared were by coincidence, which I enjoyed because our groups of friends here are largely dictated by where we live, those who play the same sport, or maybe those we see in our classes. For me, this means I met most of my friends across the hall in Greenough, on the volleyball team, and in first-semester classes, but none of them were in my “Reflecting on Your Life” section.
It was reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one who was thinking about all the doors that attending Harvard had opened for me, about life back home in Methuen, Mass., or about what I wanted out of my college experience. Ultimately, I was thinking about my entire life.
I would recommend the program to anyone because it helped me to realize that I should seize all that Harvard has to offer, while I can. It solidified opinions of which I was uncertain, and I don’t think I could have articulated or even embraced them without the help of my classmates. But it also raised a new set of questions: Will we actually put the problem set down and go out to gain life experience every time we have the opportunity? Will we sacrifice that “A,” regardless of the fact that it doesn’t really matter 20 years from now? While these questions are up for debate, it’s nice to know that there are people who can agree that reflecting on our time here at Harvard, even if it’s only been a semester and a half, has been both meaningful and worthwhile.
An undergraduate or graduate student with an essay to share about life at Harvard? E-mail [email protected].
Veteran police officials James Claiborne and Michael Giacoppo signed on last fall as deputy chiefs in the Harvard University Police Department. Together, they have 65 years of experience in patrol and supervision.
Claiborne, 57, is a veteran of the Boston Police Department. He is now in charge of policing at Harvard’s Cambridge campus. Giacoppo, 59, served with the Cambridge Police Department. He now oversees the University’s police operations in Boston. It’s a reversal of their geographical orientations. “We’re both learning each other’s back yard,” said Giacoppo.
What does their presence mean for the University’s force of 87 officers and the kind of policing they do? Here is an abbreviated version of a recent question-and-answer session with the veteran officers.
Q. You both served with big-city departments. Is doing police work at Harvard culture shock?
Giacoppo: It’s a lot quieter than where we’re from. I was used to dealing with crisis every day. Coming to Harvard [there] is a different set of issues. You’re not in the maelstrom as often, if at all.
Claiborne: While it’s quieter, the day-to-day tasks have a different complexity. In the city, you’re pretty autonomous. Here you’re in a web of complex relationships between the various parts of the University.
Giacoppo: You’ve got to be very proud to be here. You’re at the world’s greatest university, and you’re the police force for the world’s greatest university. That’s a big ticket.
Q. Community policing has long been part of the Harvard landscape. Any changes ahead?
Claiborne: We’ll broaden and strengthen the community policing program. What I foresee is that every building on this campus will basically be owned by one of the officers. There will be a relationship between those facilities, those residential Houses, and a particular Harvard officer. We’re trying to push a sense of ownership and accountability.
Giacoppo: Community policing is a strategy, it’s a way of doing business, it’s your mindset. The key here is partnerships and outreach and knowing your community and them knowing you. Every day is an opportunity to build those partnerships.
Claiborne: To paraphrase one of our politicians, all politics is local. All policing is local also. Regardless of how large you are, the real work of the police department is starting with where the [officers] meet the citizens.
Q. Any observations about the HUPD force?
Claiborne: One of the things that impressed me most is the quality of the personnel. Without the constraints of civil service, we are able to hire people who are as close to ideal as possible, who fit the needs of the Harvard campus and the Harvard Police Department. Some of the officers in other places we’ve worked wouldn’t fit here. The officers we hire fit.
Giacoppo: I was surprised at the amount of medical assistance that the patrol force offers. They handle medical service calls all the time.
Claiborne: I was impressed by the amount of care the officers render. We are really a full-service social service agency. [The department’s] philosophy is that if you live here, work here, or study here you’re a client of the Harvard University Police Department.
Giacoppo: The officers here, without question, are expert report writers. That’s one of the issues you see with PDs [police departments]. The quality of the reports goes from very, very good to very, very bad. Here, I’ve been very impressed with the way they structure their reports and their oversight.
Claiborne: Community policing has been in vogue for a while. A lot of departments talk about problem-solving training. These officers put it into practice, probably better than any group of officers I’ve been associated with.
Q. Any final thoughts?
Giacoppo: I haven’t had one single moment or day that I’ve regretted coming here, or that I’ve been frustrated or bored or anything. The lure of Harvard is special for me.
Claiborne: This is a service organization. We’re here to make life better for the people who live here or study here and work here. And we are accessible to them. We’re willing to help, to encourage people to communicate with the HUPD. There are no silly problems. There are no problems that are too small.
Editor’s note: This is the third in an occasional series of stories on the measures individual Schools at Harvard are using to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Every unit, division, and School at Harvard is in a race to meet a pledge: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016, with 2006 as the baseline year.
Harvard Law School (HLS) is gaining ground on its goal. Buildings on its campus now use about 22 percent less energy than four years ago. The result is a 15 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2009.
HLS officials say the first and biggest step to save energy is encouraging people to act differently.
“The first phase was more about people than about building projects,” said John Arciprete, HLS director of facilities management. “The goal was to get people talking about changing their habits, and encourage them to take action.”
The School’s Green Living Program, a partnership with Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS), now in its fifth year, employs five students who educate their peers about energy and water conservation, recycling, and waste reduction. A blog promotes awareness events such as Earth Hour, the annual worldwide campaign that encourages people to turn off their lights for 60 minutes.
Last fall, the program ran an electricity competition. Over four weeks, the initiative helped each HLS dorm to reduce its energy consumption by 1 to 5 percent, simply by encouraging residents to shut off lights and electronic equipment.
Regular audits done by the program show a sharp decrease since 2005 in the percentage of waste that could have been recycled.
Like many other Schools around the University, HLS has a green team, a group of students and staff who meet monthly to improve campus sustainability. The team distributed maps with the locations of tap and filtered water stations on campus. It also coordinates “freecycles,” where offices and individuals can swap materials they no longer need for ones that they do. And it recently developed a composting outreach project at Harkness Commons.
“There are so many gains to be made from working with individuals to change how we use resources,” said Cara Ferrentino, HLS sustainability coordinator. “We are really trying to encourage everyone to take ownership of sustainability and think about their surroundings and what they can do to make a difference.”
Building upgrades and initiatives also have meant significant savings at HLS.
In May 2009, the School adopted a temperature policy to promote energy conservation. During winter, occupied spaces are heated to no more than 70 degrees. During summer, cooling is capped at 74 degrees. Many of the thermostats at HLS are still user-controlled, so outreach plays an important role.
All of the School’s 24 buildings have been fitted with water-saving dual-flush toilets. In the Gropius dormitories (Ames, Dane, Holmes, and Shaw), new front-load washing machines save 650,000 gallons of water a year, worth about $11,500.
At HLS, building projects are saving energy too. Last year, a suite of offices at Griswold Hall was renovated to achieve a Platinum rank, the highest given by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a green building rating system.
Lights at Griswold now automatically dim with the presence of sunlight. Occupancy sensors adjust room temperatures when the offices are not in use. And efficient sink fixtures will save an estimated 39,000 gallons of water annually.
HLS also recently received LEED Silver certification for renovating commercial interiors at 125 Mt. Auburn St. The School is also working with a sustainability consultant for its new Northwest Corner building complex, and officials expect the project will receive a LEED Gold rating. Additionally, almost 95 percent of the construction’s scrap materials will be recycled.
Other Law School buildings have “variable frequency drives” that cool and heat rooms at different rates, depending on occupancy and temperature. At Langdell, Lewis, and Pound halls, the units are expected to save $32,000 a year.
The School’s attempts to save energy even have reached beyond campus.
Its Green Early Interviewing Program (Green EIP) encourages law firms to act sustainably. Students at the School’s Environmental Law Society developed the initiative last year. Helping out were the HLS Office of Career Services and OFS.
Representatives of hundreds of law offices visit the campus each fall, aiming to recruit a talented crop of new graduates. But the visits can harm the environment in two significant ways: greenhouse gases from all the travel, and large amounts of paper waste from recruiters’ printed materials.
Participating firms agree to limit their printed materials to one double-sided sheet; to replace bottled water with pitchers of tap water; and to use reusable cups at hospitality functions and receptions. Above all, the firms must consent to purchase carbon offsets — credits in companies that invest in carbon-reducing projects.
“It’s encouraging to see the progress to date at HLS,” said OFS Director Heather Henriksen. “They’ve taken a holistic approach: energy conservation measures, operational changes, and educational outreach to the community.” She praised its “triumvirate of strategies.”
Next: A look at the Harvard School of Public Health.
On a recent early morning field trip, Kyle Takei appeared surprisingly awake for a typical high school teenager.
Wide-eyed and bouncing in place, the 18-year-old, who had traveled from Vermont to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., was eager to hold something special: a human brain.
After a brief introduction and comments from Tim Wheelock, the center’s assistant director in neuropathology, Takei donned a Tyvek gown and latex gloves and picked up one of several cerebral specimens on the steel table before him.
Without even a hint of irony, the awestruck teen called it “mind-blowing.”
“It’s hard to believe that this 1,400-gram hunk of stuff is what controls everything. At one point, this was some guy’s brain, and he had thoughts and dreams, but now he is being studied by me,” said Takei in amazement as he turned the brain over repeatedly in his hands.
Takei was part of a high school class trip coordinated with the help of Adi Flesher, a master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).
Flesher is pursuing his degree in the School’s Mind, Brain, and Education program, an interdisciplinary, one-year sequence that connects the study of cognition, neuroscience, and educational practice.
“I just really got interested in talking with kids about their minds,” said Flesher, a former assistant director of a summer camp who became increasingly fascinated with how and what his young campers thought after hearing them discuss their own struggles with attention deficit and obsessive compulsive disorders.
“We take 16-year-olds and teach them about a car so that they can drive. There’s driver’s ed, but there’s no brain ed,” said Flesher. “If you think about it, the study of the brain is a much more basic and important part of human life that we don’t really address in any formal way in the education system.”
When his brother Amir, a teacher at the Compass School in Vermont, needed to help develop an interdisciplinary elective class, one that could rival the school’s established filmmaking course in popularity, he looked to Adi for inspiration.
In exploring what to study, Amir and fellow teacher Beth White brainstormed with their students on possible topics. In the end, the brain was the top vote getter. With help and suggestions from the students and input from Adi, the teachers combined the science and psychology of the brain into a class they call “The Science of the Mind.” The course is a series of workshops divided into a humanities component — where the teens study such diverse areas as Buddhist psychology, Plato’s “Parable of the Cave,” and the psychological dimensions to the science fiction film “The Matrix” — and a science section, where they study the anatomy and mechanics of the human brain. As a final project, students write an academic article on a mind or brain topic for inclusion in their own scientific journal.
The class culminated in last week’s outing to neuroscience, psychology, and education labs around the University. This is the second trip to Harvard for the high school class. The first group of Compass students visited in 2008 when the course was in its pilot phase. Though Amir and White coordinated the first excursion, they were able to use Adi’s Harvard connections to broaden the scope of this year’s visit.
The students listened intently on March 25 as Joshua Greene explained how the brain engages in moral reasoning. Greene, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology who directs Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab, discussed how he uses neuroimaging to explore how the brain reacts to the “trolley problem,” an ethical dilemma that asks if it is morally acceptable to throw a switch that will guide an errant trolley onto a track, killing one trapped person, but saving five others trapped along the track’s first section.
Ariel Temple, 17, said of Greene’s research, “I just love challenging my mind with those hypotheticals: What would I do, what’s moral, what’s not. All that kind of stuff, I just find it really fun.”
Later that day, the group visited HGSE’s Project Zero, where the students offered themselves up as test subjects for master’s candidates developing experiments around how people think about the concept of emergence, and video games aimed at helping students to learn about science.
For the youngest member of the expedition, handling human brains was challenging.
“The thought that holding somebody’s brain in your hands is [holding] everything that made them who they were, their thoughts, their memories, their life’s story … that is a lot to take in,” said Meghan McGowan.
Still, the 16-year-old was thrilled to meet Greene, the author of a paper on moral reasoning that she read prior to the trip.
“I read it like seven times, and thought ‘this is so cool.’ Come to find out yesterday, the guy who wrote it, we met.”
Flesher and his brother are now exploring ways to bring the brain class to more students, in part through summer camp programs, and by developing a teaching model that can be used by other schools.
“Our ultimate hope,” said Adi, “is to get more kids engaged in this kind of cool learning.”
It is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of emperors. In parts of California’s forests, it is everywhere.
It is the deathcap mushroom, Amanita phalloides, so filled with toxins that a single cap can kill anyone who mistakenly eats it and does not get medical treatment. Because it looks like an edible mushroom, the deathcap is among those most involved in human poisoning, such as one that occurred in Newton, Mass., last fall. Through history, it has been a convenient tool for those interested in regime change, playing a key role in the Europe-spanning War of Austrian Succession in the 1700s, which started when Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died after eating a plate of mushrooms, thought to be deathcaps.
Though much is known about the deathcap’s toxicity — it kills by fostering liver failure — much less is understood about its general biology and its role in the environment. Anne Pringle, associate professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, is out to change that.
Pringle has spent years in California’s forests, researching the deathcaps that in some parts of the state make up as much as 80 percent of the local biomass of mushrooms. Pringle proved first that the California population was not native, but rather an introduced population from Europe.
She’s working now to understand the mushroom’s dispersal across the landscape and its symbiotic partnership with trees. Its widespread presence begs the questions of whether it displaced native symbiotic fungi and whether it spreads more easily as a mutualist (an organism in a relationship beneficial to both partners) than it would as a pathogen, which characterizes most known invasive fungi. She recently concluded that it reproduces more readily through the spread of its spores, which are released from the fleshy gills under its cap, than asexually through fragmentation of its thready subterranean fungal body.
Like most mushroom-producing fungi, much of the deathcap’s body actually lies under the Earth’s surface, and its mushrooms are temporary, sent up from the underground filaments to release spores and then fade. Even with the mushroom gone, the fungus still operates underground, decomposing old plant matter and, in the case of the deathcap, partnering with tree roots, providing nitrogen in exchange for carbon compounds.
Pringle’s work, conducted through a combination of old-fashioned fieldwork and cutting-edge genetic analysis, has shown that the deathcap spreads slowly. It moves through either the slow creep of its underground body or the floating spread of its spores, which do not drift far from their release point.
Humans likely played a big role in the fungus’ spread. Because it lives in association with tree roots, researchers believe it was introduced here from Europe at least twice — once in California and once on the East Coast — by hitching rides on trees transplanted from Europe to America.
On the East Coast, Pringle and researchers from her lab have identified dozens of populations: in Newton, near the New Jersey Pine Barrens, near Rochester, N.Y., and in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Pringle says the populations on the East Coast are isolated, not widespread as in California. Another wrinkle of the East Coast populations is that deathcaps are associated with pine trees, not the oaks that they partner with in California and Europe. Pringle and doctoral student Ben Wolfe said that may be because of a slightly different strain being introduced on the East Coast, or it may be because of ecological constraints put on the population on the East Coast by closely related native species, also from the genus Amanita.
Though the deathcap may be the star of Pringle’s lab, her work includes other fungal species, as well as lichens, a symbiotic association of fungi and algae.
Wolfe, who expects to graduate in December, is working with the U.S. Department of Energy to decode the genome of Amanita species related to the deathcap. He hopes to understand the genetic roots of fungal symbiosis with trees. A bonus of decoding the fungi’s genome, Wolfe said, would be that, in degrading plant material, the fungi produces an enzyme called cellulase, of potential interest in biofuel processing.
In talking about her work, Pringle emphasizes the importance of fungal conservation. Fungi have not received the attention that plants and animals have, so less is known about them. With the planet undergoing an extinction crisis, we may be losing fungal species before we even know they’re here, Pringle said.