Author: Harvard Gazette Online

A crowd packed the Memorial Church at Harvard on Saturday (March 6) to hear Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and activist Noam Chomsky question U.S. foreign policy during the first year of the Obama administration, including its dogged opposition to Iran’s efforts to harness nuclear energy.

Sponsored by the Harvard Extension School’s International Relations Club, the discussion also featured investigative journalist and author Amy Goodman, host of public radio’s “Democracy Now!”

Qualifying Goodman’s introduction of him, Chomsky began by saying he was mentioned in a recent New York Times op-ed piece as “one of the last stale holdovers” of the 1960s. But his discussion points were decidedly topical.

Comparing President Barack Obama with President George H.W. Bush, Chomsky noted that while Bush was criticized because he lacked “the vision thing,” Obama “is sort of the opposite — grand vision, real vision of what should be done, but he hasn’t succeeded much in practice.”

On Iran, for example, he said that Brazil’s failure to go along with the United States in supporting harsher sanctions has been called a refusal to “go along” with the international community. But Chomsky called this “a reflection of the depth of cultural imperialism. Who is the international community?” he asked. “It’s Washington, and whoever happens to agree with them.” The “rest of the world,” he maintained, has supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, as did the majority of the American people before the “huge mass of propaganda” that has been promulgated on the topic since 2007.

“Obama’s vision is to reduce or remove nuclear weapons,” Chomsky said. “That’s the vision. What’s the practice?”

A U.N. Security Council resolution called on all states to join the nonproliferation treaty “without any threat of force,” Chomsky said. But, he added, two countries — the United States and Israel — said they wanted to “keep all options open. That’s a threat of force,” particularly considering that the two countries have been carrying out field operations “plainly aimed at Iran.”

These threats, Chomsky said, “have the effect of inducing Iran to develop a deterrent,” though he said Iran is not interested in beginning a nuclear war, because it “would be vaporized in five minutes.”

But Iran is far from the only international issue that Obama has to contend with, of course. Chomsky also discussed India and Pakistan, saying that President Ronald Reagan’s support of Pakistani dictators during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped to spread Saudi-funded “madrassas,” or Islamic schools, in Pakistan. “A strong jihadi tendency developed in Pakistan,” he said, “and that’s part of what the world is facing today.”

The Obama administration, he said, has “informed India the resolution didn’t apply to them. The more India increases its nuclear capacity, the more Pakistan does, and the threat of nuclear war has been quite close a couple of times.” In refusing to join the nonproliferation treaty, Pakistan, India, and Israel acted with U.S. support, he said.

When asked by Goodman about today’s antiwar movement, Chomsky said it is stronger than the anti-Vietnam War movement was in the early 1960s. In 1962, when President John Kennedy “sent the Air Force to start bombing” South Vietnam, causing a flood of refugees, he said, “protest was zero, literally. It was years before there was any sign of protest.”

Finally, he said, “after years, 1967-68 got a substantial antiwar movement. By then, South Vietnam was gone. Compare that to Iraq. There were huge protests before the war was actually launched. We now know [that President George W.] Bush and British Prime Minister Tony] Blair were just lying [in saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction], but I think demonstrations had an effect … I think [the Iraq war] was retarded by the antiwar movement.”

Chomsky also discussed the war in Afghanistan, the need for civilian trials for war criminals, the keeping of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, a multistate solution for Israel and Pakistan, and his belief that “international affairs are run like the Mafia … Send in your goons to beat them to a pulp so everyone else gets the idea.”

His passion apparent, Chomsky concluded by discussing his own path toward activism. “You can’t become involved part time,” he said. “Go to a demonstration and go home, nothing happens. Only by dedicated, diligent work” can protesters’ voices be heard.

Common wisdom says that domestic partners shouldn’t go to bed angry if they want to foster successful relationships. But new research from a psychologist at Harvard University suggests that brain activity — specifically in the region called the lateral prefrontal cortex — is a far better indicator of how someone will feel in the days following a fight with a partner.

Individuals who show more neural activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex are less likely to be upset the day after fighting with partners, according to a study in this month’s Biological Psychiatry. The findings point to the brain area’s role in regulating emotions, and suggest that improved function within this region also may improve day-to-day mood.

“What we found, as you might expect, was that everybody felt badly on the day of the conflict with their partner,” said lead author Christine Hooker, assistant professor of psychology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “But the day after, people who had high lateral prefrontal cortex activity felt better, and the people who had low lateral prefrontal cortex activity continued to feel badly.”

Hooker’s co-authors are Özlem Ayduk, Anett Gyurak, Sara Verosky, and Asako Miyakawa, all of the University of California, Berkeley.

Research has previously shown that the lateral prefrontal cortex is associated with emotion regulation in laboratory tests, but the effect has never been proven connected to experiences in day-to-day life.

This study involved healthy couples who have been in relationships for longer than three months. While in an fMRI scanner, participants viewed pictures of their partners with positive, negative, or neutral facial expressions, and their neural activity was recorded while reacting to the images. While in the lab, participants were also tested for their broader cognitive control skills, such as their ability to manage impulses and the shift and focus of attention.

For three weeks, the couples also recorded in an online diary their daily emotional states and whether they had had fights with their partners.

Hooker found that participants who displayed greater activity in their lateral prefrontal cortex while viewing their partner’s negative facial expressions in the scanner were less likely to report a negative mood the day after a fight, indicating they were better able to “bounce back” emotionally after the conflict.

She also found that those who had more activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and greater emotional regulation after a fight displayed more cognitive control in laboratory tests, indicating a link between emotion regulation and broader cognitive control skills.

“The key factor is that the brain activity in the scanner predicted their experience in life,” said Hooker. “Scientists believe that what we are looking at in the scanner has relevance to daily life, but obviously we don’t live our lives in a scanner. If we can connect what we see in the scanner to somebody’s day-to-day emotion regulation capacity, it could help psychologists predict how well people will respond to stressful events in their lives.”

While Hooker acknowledges that more work must be done to develop clinical applications for the research, it may be that lateral prefrontal cortex function provides information about a person’s vulnerability to develop mood problems after a stressful event. This raises the question as to whether increasing lateral prefrontal cortex function will improve emotion regulation capacity.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.

Not so long ago it appeared that a U.S. cap-and-trade bill was well on its way to becoming reality. But then came the “climategate” emails and increased political opposition, particularly in the Senate, to taking action. While public worries over the impacts of climate change had once been climbing, they’ve since fallen to levels lower than they were 20 years ago.

This was the context of “Climate Policy and Politics: Covering Conflict in the Capital, Copenhagen and Beyond,” a discussion panel featuring Eric Pooley, a former Shorenstein Fellow and current deputy editor of Bloomberg.com’s BusinessWeek and Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post. Other participants included Cristine Russell and Henry Lee of the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and Alex S. Jones of the Shorenstein Center.

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A new study from current and former researchers at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs finds that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation will be a much bigger challenge than conventional wisdom assumes – requiring substantially higher fuel prices combined with more stringent regulation.

The study finds that reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the transportation sector 14% below 2005 levels by 2020 may require gas prices greater than $7/gallon by 2020 and $8/gallon by 2030. It also finds that, while relying on subsidies for electric or hybrid vehicles is politically seductive, it is extremely expensive and an ineffective way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near term.

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Rosalie Silberman Abella, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer who survived the Auschwitz slaughter, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1946. A few weeks before, the first Nuremberg trials had begun prosecuting alleged Nazi war criminals on a world stage.

Abella, who spoke at Harvard on Monday (March 1), is now a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada, the first Jewish woman to attain that post. But her memories of a darker time have never left her. Her mother also was an Auschwitz survivor, and her older brother died in a concentration camp. He was 2 years old.

Discussing the importance of human rights, she said, “To me, this is not just theory.”

Holding back tears, Abella shared memories of her father’s postwar letters, her childhood in a ruined Germany, and her father’s salvation by Allied mentors. “These Americans believed in him,” she said, “and they gave him back the belief that justice was possible.”

When Abella was 2, her father introduced human rights champion Eleanor Roosevelt at the camp, apologizing for having so little to provide. “The best we are able to produce are these few children,” he said. “They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future.”

The postwar years provided a shining example of American justice that Abella said propelled her along an ascendant path in jurisprudence, and fired her passions. “My life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, and no justice,” she said. “It created an unquenchable thirst in me for all three.”

Along with democracy, rights, and justice, said Abella, comes the freedom to embrace an identity “with pride, dignity, and peace.”

Identity — how to preserve it, when to modify it for the common good — was at the heart of Abella’s hour-long lecture, “Identity, Diversity, and Human Rights.” It was part of the 2009-10 Dean’s Lecture Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Early on, Abella was a family court judge, “the youngest and the first pregnant judge in history,” said Harvard Law School Professor Frank I. Michelman, who warmly introduced his longtime friend.

Michelman, the Robert Walmsley University Professor, described Abella’s passion for human rights law, labor relations, law reform, and breaking employment barriers for women and “visible minorities.”

Abella has 27 honorary degrees, and a degree in classical piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music. Radcliffe Dean Barbara J. Grosz shared a friend’s description of Abella as “spellbinding, brave, and a breath of fresh air.”

Canada’s foremost legal authority on human rights used her Radcliffe lecture to call for a reconsideration of the rule of law. This venerable concept has sometimes given legal cover to human rights abuses, she said, including South African apartheid, Jim Crow segregation, and Nazi Germany’s genocide.

“We need the rule of justice,” said Abella, “not the rule of law.”

Arriving at a rule of justice requires the world to embrace “core democratic values,” what she called “the instruments of justice.” These include due process, a free press, the right of association, and protections for minorities.

But a universal rule of justice seems further away now than it did in 1946, said Abella. In the postwar period, the world awakened to something beyond the individual rights touted for centuries, thanks to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and other sweeping thinkers. World War II introduced the idea of “the rights of the group,” she said, a guarantee not just of civil liberties, but of human rights.

Abella longed for the “luminous world vision” of the aftermath of World War II. That vision prompted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on Genocide (1948), and the 13 Nuremberg trials (1945-1949), the “phoenixes that rose from the ashes of Auschwitz and roared their outrage.”

Over the following few decades, that outrage yielded “the most sophisticated array of laws, treaties, and conventions the international community has ever known,” said Abella, “all stating that rights abuses will not be tolerated.”

Yet, she said, the world has since failed to embrace the three lessons that emerged from World War II: that indifference is the incubator of injustice; that it’s not what you stand for, it’s what you stand up for; and that people must never forget how the world looks to the vulnerable.

Abella recapped this recent backsliding on human rights with a list of nearly 20 examples of genocide, flagrant rights abuses, and outlaw nations.

By the 1980s, human rights advances had stalled worldwide, said Abella, in part because of widespread opposition to “the diversity theory of rights” and its association with the notion of “political correctness.” By the 1990s, she added, the world was in the throes of a “rights distress,” as instances of genocide and abuse picked up in speed and numbers.

To this day, on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, “We still haven’t learned the most important justice lesson of all,” said Abella, that there is a need to close the gap between the values we articulate and the values we enforce. The result is “an inexplicable international tentativeness” over human rights issues, she said. “We need more than the rhetoric of justice.”

Part of the problem today is a dithering United Nations, said Abella, who recalled the specter of a failed League of Nations following World War I. The world has reached a similar turning point with the United Nations, she said, since its inaction has failed its great ideals. So it is time, said Abella, for “that most difficult of global conversations: Is the United Nations the best we can do?”

The United States made dramatic health gains during the 20th century, as shown by average life expectancy rocketing from age 48 in 1900 to 77.7 in 2006. Similarly, infant mortality dropped from 47 per 1,000 births in 1940 to 6.7 deaths in 2006.

But as those health gains have shifted the health care landscape, a host of new — or newly revealed — issues have emerged concerning the health of the nation’s children. Addressing those issues will require a systematic, system-wide approach, according to José Cordero, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Puerto Rico.

Cordero, who spoke Thursday (March 4) at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), delivered this year’s Yerby Diversity in Public Health Lecture, which brings minority scientists and scholars to Harvard to address health topics. Cordero was introduced by HSPH Dean Julio Frenk and by Alissa Myrick, a research fellow in the HSPH Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases.

In his talk, “Children’s Health: Learning from the Consequences of our Success,” Cordero said that today’s leading cause of child mortality is birth defects, making that area a prime target for intervention.

He used the example of neural tube disorders such as spina bifida, where a portion of the spine doesn’t close during development, leaving the spinal cord exposed, and anencephaly, a condition where the brain, skull, and scalp don’t fully form. Research in the 1990s, he said, showed that folic acid given during pregnancy effectively lowered the risk of neural tube disorders. In response, the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 required cereal grain products, such as bread, rolls, rice, and pasta, that are labeled “enriched” to include a minimum level of folic acid.

In the years since, he said, neural tube disorders have fallen, but not uniformly among ethnic groups. Hispanic rates, though lower, remain above those for whites and blacks, something traced to the high use of corn flour in Hispanic households. Corn flour in the United States is not typically enriched and so does not include folic acid supplements.

While public health officials work with industry and regulators to change that, Cordero said there are other interventions that could help. One is to have providers recommend that pregnant women take folic acid supplements. He cited a survey exploring public knowledge versus action with relation to folic acid and said surveys showed that knowledge of the potential beneficial effects of folic acid rose considerably between 1997 and 2006, but that public action, such as taking supplements, increased only slightly.

In exploring that discrepancy, researchers found that many said they would take folic acid if recommended by their doctors, but only 30 to 40 percent of providers actually make that recommendation. Cordero said that points to more interventions with physicians, reminding them to recommend it to pregnant women.

Such system-wide interventions are also seen in other conditions of childhood. Cordero said that children born with Down syndrome present another instance where system-wide changes are needed. As recently as the 1970s, he said, children born with the syndrome weren’t expected to live past their teens. Advances since then have pushed life expectancy of Down syndrome babies into their 50s. While that is a health care success, he said, it also presents problems, as providers aren’t typically educated about the health needs of mature and older adults with Down syndrome.

That highlights a need for education and training that was less pressing decades ago because of the rarity of people with the condition living so long. Care for older people living with Down syndrome now needs to be front and center because decades ago they typically didn’t outlive their care-giving parents.

“This is not a child with special needs. This is a person who will have special needs through their lifetime,” Cordero said.

Cordero said it makes sense to aim interventions at women of reproductive age to lower rates of a variety of birth defects. The list of potential conditions that could harm a developing fetus is long. He said interventions should seek to curb smoking and alcohol use, to control diabetes and obesity, to be mindful of the effects of prescribed medications, and to take steps to avoid transmission of HIV to babies from their mothers.

“Success in the 21st century will require a systems approach … to meet the new needs of the population,” Cordero said. “Sometimes there are consequences of success that are unexpected. We need to monitor them to ensure that [past] success will lead to greater success.”

The Fine Arts Library in Littauer Hall seems pleasant, neat, and — in the best sense — ordinary. Upstairs, three book-lined rooms gleam in the daylight. Downstairs, two levels of utilitarian stacks, painted muted colors, have lights that snap on when you enter.

But in fact this corner of the Depression-era granite building is not ordinary at all. It is a model of sustainability for libraries. The wood trim is from sustainable forests, the lighting is energy-efficient, and recycled material is in the wallboard, carpets, and even the furniture.

“The reuse of furniture is hugely important. It’s enormous,” said Paul Bellenoit, discussing the savings in costs and materials. He is director of operations and security for Harvard College Library (HCL). Some tables and all study carrels had to be refinished, fitted with power sources, or trimmed to fit new spaces.

All of the furniture moved with the Fine Arts Library, which was housed in the Fogg Museum on Quincy Street until the museum closed for renovation and expansion. For the next five to eight years, the library will be housed in Littauer, a grand-columned, granite building built in 1931.

Indoor air quality was part of the Fine Arts Library project too. Workers applied paint, adhesives, and sealants that emit very low levels of VOCs, the volatile organic compounds associated with some manufactured products.

“You don’t have that new-building sort of smell,” said Andrea Ruedy Trimble, manager of green building services for Harvard’s Office for Sustainability. Bellenoit added that low levels of such vapors — less than 1 percent of standard materials — also protect vulnerable printed materials.

Energy savings were a big part of the design. Conservation measures and efficient fixtures have reduced lighting power density, a way of rating energy use by watts per square foot, by 15 percent, said Trimble.

There are both practical and aesthetic considerations to another environmental positive for the renovated space that used to house the Littauer Library: daylight. Trimble said that 90 percent of library seating has access to exterior views. Green building guidelines have been in place for all Harvard projects since 2007. But the Fine Arts Library work went a step further by earning project LEED Gold status, the only Harvard library so far to be LEED-certified.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a set of exacting codes from the U.S. Green Building Council. Projects are ranked like precious metals, with platinum the highest and gold and silver the next in order. LEED scorecards rate site placement, water efficiency, energy use, materials, indoor air quality, and innovation. The Fine Arts Library garnered 40 points, just shy of the 42 required for the platinum rating.

The project carries an important message for Harvard, whose classic building stock tends to be on the old side. Said Trimble, “It shows that you can create an efficient space within an existing historic building.”

But the Fine Arts Library is not the only good-news sustainability story, said Beth Brainard, HCL director of communications. In fact, the Harvard College Library has been getting green building makeovers and implementing energy conservation measures for a decade, she said, well before LEED standards were established.

Widener Library, with its 51 miles of shelving and hundreds of light fixtures, underwent changes starting in 1999. Since then, old-fashioned button lights for each stack have been replaced by motion-activated sensors. Corridor lighting (735 fixtures in total) is being retrofitted with motion sensors, a project that is halfway to completion. That change alone will save $30,000 a year in energy and maintenance costs, and will generate $11,000 in utility rebates.

HCL operations manages five free-standing libraries: Widener, Lamont, Pusey, Houghton, and Tozzer. Heating and cooling systems in the five are on stop-start optimization systems now, said Bellenoit, “rather than having it full volume all the time.” (The Harvard College Library system includes eight more libraries and a technical services facility. All are tenants in Faculty of Arts and Sciences buildings.)

Motion sensors are being installed for lights in every library office (340 so far). And all toilets and sinks are now low-flow models to conserve water. Widener’s 25 water coolers are gone, a savings of $8,000 a year in energy and bottled water costs.

The dramatic chandeliers in Widener once required 24 bulbs at 60 watts each. Replacement bulbs, which impart the same sort of lighting, are only 14 watts each. They also have to be replaced only once every four years instead of three times a year. The savings total $3,000 a year in energy alone.

Then there is “delamping” in the HCL libraries, turning off or removing unneeded light fixtures, including redundant lights on 300 Widener study carrels. Reading room spotlights 40 feet in the air have been shut off, saving Harvard $10,000 a year just for bulb changes.

“There’s the headline,” said Bellenoit of the delamping strategy. “Lose nothing, gain a lot.”

Space heaters in the libraries (as many as 30) were rated at a power-draining 1,500 watts per hour of use. Now there are nine space heaters in the building, each rated at a modest 170 watts.

Along with the rest of the buildings associated with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the HCL libraries now have temperature set points for heating and cooling. The highest allowable heat setting is 71 degrees, and the cooling units won’t kick in until a room reaches 75 degrees.

The next LEED project for the library system? A new heating and cooling system for Pusey Library is on the drawing board and is at least two years away.

In the grand scheme of things, the Fine Arts Library is not a special case so much as it is a sign of continued commitment to sustainability at HCL.

A decade or more of experience in making libraries sustainable has put HCL in “a good place” now that energy efficiency and the environment are among Harvard’s highest priorities, said Brainard. “We’ve been able to respond on a variety of fronts.”

A strange thing began happening to Kimberly Theidon awhile back. She started receiving e-mails congratulating her for something. The only problem was that she had no idea what she’d done.

“I was trying to figure out: What did I do?” said Theidon, who is an associate professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Then I looked at the title of this film, and I realized: ‘Here is your book. There has been a film made about it.’”

It turns out that Theidon’s research was the inspiration for a Peruvian film, “The Milk of Sorrow,” or “La Tete Asustada” in Spanish, which had won the prestigious Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. It is now the first Peruvian film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

Her 2004 book “Entre Prójimos,” about women raped by soldiers during Peru’s recent civil war, served as a source for this narrative film.

In the 1980s, guerrilla militants tried to overthrow Peru’s national government. Amidst this upheaval, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women endured rape at the hands of various armed actors, including members of the Peruvian armed forces — creating a legacy of violence that still resonates within the country. That legacy is the subject of Theidon’s book and is thematically addressed in the film.

Theidon, who has worked in Peru since 1995, lived in the Ayacucho region of the country, where she came to know the women who lived in these villages. As she conducted her research, she recorded their stories of violence inflicted by the soldiers. The women also talked about the aftermath of the rapes, including pregnancies.

“There were a number of women who talked about how they worried about their children being born during this time,” said Theidon. “They were concerned about the damage being done to their babies, either in utero or through their breast milk. They were concerned that somehow their children would be damaged as a result of their own sorrow and suffering.”

The film’s title refers to the belief that, after a traumatic event, mothers pass their sorrow to their children when nursing.

“The Milk of Sorrow” is a metaphorical narrative that expounds on that theme. The central character is a young woman named Fausta. Before Fausta was born, her mother was raped during the conflict, and her father was murdered. The story begins as Fausta’s mother is dying, and she sings to her daughter about the horrors she faced many years ago during the war.

Fausta suffers because of la teta asustada, and she fears that she too will meet her mother’s fate. The film uses magical realism to underscore this point, which is a common style in Latin American literature. As the film progresses, Fausta begins to come to terms with the violence her mother experienced, and how she has been affected.

Directed by Claudia Llosa, who is also a young Peruvian woman, “The Milk of Sorrow” is the most critically acclaimed and internationally recognized Peruvian film ever. The attention to the film has provided an opportunity for discussion of sexual violence, which is a difficult topic to address in Peru, as it is in many countries.

“I think that the film opens up a space for dialogue,” said Theidon. “Films are going to reach a broader audience than most books. And I think that is something that is particularly gratifying about the film.”

Theidon says she never imagined that her work would inspire an artist in this way, but she did write a book that she hoped would be readable, accessible, and compelling to a variety of audiences. She wrote a book, she says, that invites readers to want to know more — whether or not they can find Peru on a map.

“You put your work out there in the world, and you never know if anyone reads it,” said Theidon. “And when they do, and it leads to something like this, it’s fabulous.”

Organized religion can be an important force for financial reform, according to a group of scholars who took part in a panel at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Wednesday (March 3).

In the discussion “From Wall Street to Main Street: The Search for a New Moral Compass for the New Economy,” the panelists agreed that religious communities need to be actively engaged in shaping both the nation’s economic reform policies and its moral direction.

“The [economic] crisis is structural and spiritual,” said panel member Jim Wallis, “so we have to address both.”

Wallis, an evangelical minister and president and CEO of Sojourners, an evangelical Christian organization, criticized the enormous bonuses paid out by big banks as “a symptom of societal erosion.” He cited the ubiquitous maxims “greed is good” and “I want it now” as evidence of the need for a new national ethic, one that focuses on helping one another and that considers the repercussions of current actions on future generations.

Issues of poverty and homelessness are “directly out of the Bible,” said television journalist and documentary film producer Liz Walker. A 2005 graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Walker, who is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called on religious communities to step away from their comfort zones and “be part of the action that makes things right.”

Interfaith social justice organizations can play a prominent role in pushing for important change, the panelists said. So too can church leaders who can initiate conversations with their congregations about the economy and rally them behind consumer protection reforms and efforts to shift business from banks deemed “too big to fail” to smaller, locally based ones.

“The Catholic Church is fairly institutional,” said the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, and as such is well suited to address “what institutions need to do.” Hehir, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), said people “ought to debate not how big government ought to be or how small government ought to be. We ought to ask, ‘What is the proper function of government?’”

Using that type of institutional framework, people can “then open up into other aspects of civil society,” said Hehir, and explore an institution’s moral responsibility.

Wallis was optimistic about the emergence of a new national tone.

A recent tour for his new book, “Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street,” evolved into a series of informal town meetings, he said, where he learned of grassroots campaigns and discussions taking place in many congregations about the intersection of faith and finance and the vision of a “common, good” economy.

“I think there is a conversation going on now that sees this in a moral framework, that underneath the economic crisis is a values crisis, and we are not going to get to an economic recovery without a moral recovery that shapes it.”

“We as faith communities are going to have to organize,” said Walker, “and step up to the plate and lift up our prophetic voices.”

Richard Parker, HKS lecturer in public policy and senior fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, moderated the session.

The night after Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake, 16-year-old Jeff Berry was sleepless and crying, with no idea where his mother was. His family’s house had collapsed. With death and devastation all around, he feared the worst.

He spent the night with his two brothers and three sisters, whom he thankfully had found unharmed. The next day, Berry set out to search for his 51-year-old mother, Violette Wesh. Around midday he found her, arm and leg broken, sitting in the dirt on the side of the road, crying.

Wesh said later that she was so happy to see her son and the rest of the family, because she didn’t know if they had survived.

With no doctors in their Port-au-Prince neighborhood and no method of transport, Berry waited with Wesh. She said she “lost her mind” three times in the ensuing days, coming back to her senses each time, sitting in the garden near her home.

By Sunday, five days after the quake, Wesh still hadn’t received treatment. Berry met someone who told him he would have to drive her to doctors to get care. “I said, ‘I have no car, I have nothing, I just want to save my mother’s life,’” Berry recalled.

Determined to reach help, he and Wesh set out on foot, with Berry supporting his mother at every step. Kilometers slowly passing, they kept on, even though they didn’t have food. They finally reached some doctors, who sent them to the Dominican border with Haiti, to a hospital at Jimaní.

“We didn’t have anything. There was no food, nothing. We were suffering, [breathing] the smell of the dead people. That was incredible,” Berry said.

Wesh was treated at Jimaní, getting a cast on her arm and going into surgery to repair her leg. Berry passed another sleepless night sitting with her, and then the two were transferred to the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative-led (HHI) field hospital at Fond Parisien, Haiti.

The hospital, constructed after the quake out of tents and the buildings of an orphanage on whose grounds the facility is located, is a rehabilitation unit offering a range of services. Forged out of a partnership involving HHI, the University of Chicago, and the Love A Child Orphanage, teams of volunteer medical personnel from Harvard, its affiliated hospitals, and other facilities provide services ranging from surgery to treatment of infections to physical therapy. Their aim over the next six months to a year is to re-integrate the injured back into their home communities.

The HHI-led effort is just one of the ways that faculty, staff, and students from Harvard and its affiliated hospitals are lending a hand in post-earthquake Haiti.

Another major organization providing relief there is the nonprofit Partners In Health, through which Harvard-affiliated physicians and other medical personnel are pitching in at the organization’s rural clinics, as well as in Port-au-Prince.

Berry and Wesh’s story of post-quake chaos, of injuries untreated for days or weeks, and of personal perseverance are common to many who survived the quake. Lucknerson Shackleton, who worked as a cook at the HHI-led hospital as his daughter recovered from a broken arm, also lost everything. The patients at the hospital, he said, need more than just physical care to get over their trauma.

“When I was in Port-au-Prince … it was like a dream, a bad dream,” Shackleton said. “I still think they need a doctor of psychiatry to walk around here and talk to people, one on one, to see what they need, where do they want to go, how are they going to survive.”

For Berry and Wesh, as of early February, they had spent 20 days at the HHI-led hospital. Wesh was slowly recovering, and Berry, though uninjured, stayed with her in the tents, as part of hospital policy allowing a family member to be with a patient. Wesh still had sleepless nights, but she thanked God she wasn’t killed in the quake, and for the doctors who treated her. Berry said they didn’t know what they would do after they left the hospital.

Shackleton, for his part, is interested in helping others when he leaves, perhaps by starting a nonprofit to provide school lunches — though he doesn’t plan on leaving too soon.

“Without this place, they all would have been dead, with infection, dehydration, and no food,” Shackleton said. “I don’t want to be anywhere else right now. These guys here, they’re making miracles.”

Sometimes, creativity can help to illuminate the world.

Such is the case with the work of Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born American painter, muralist, graphic artist, and photographer.

After studying art abroad early in the 20th century, Shahn found the formalism and rich colors associated with early European modernism no longer appealing when he returned to New York City in the 1930s and saw a “changed economic reality.” Instead, he turned his creative eye to the street.

“What he finds, like so many artists of his generation, is a kind of revived vitality of the sidewalk,” said curator Deborah Martin Kao, who explored Shahn’s life and work during a discussion Tuesday (March 2) at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

Kao’s talk was part of an event titled “Creative Responses to Hard Times,” which explored the ways that some artists responded to economic distress. The afternoon event included a discussion of the Clifford Odets play “Paradise Lost” and a performance by the Living Newspaper company of New York.

The presentations were part of the Harvard Art Museum’s ongoing “Two-Point Perspective Gallery Talks,” a lecture series that offers visitors a chance to explore objects and topics from varied points of view. The talks are given by museum curators, conservators, and educators, Harvard faculty members, and outside scholars. The series, part of the museum’s effort to collaborate with departments from across the University on educational initiatives, was developed to help “stimulate thinking about works of art and encourage participants to explore their own ways of seeing.”

Inspired by newspaper photographs, Shahn took to Manhattan’s streets to capture photos of the era and everyday people. He could employ subterfuge in his quest for authenticity, noted Kao. He used a small, right-angle viewfinder that allowed him to point his camera in one direction while taking pictures of subjects actually off to the side, unaware of the lens.

Kao, head curator and Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the museum, discussed the differences in dress, immigrant status, and ethnicity present in a black-and-white photograph by Shahn from the early 1930s, and his drawing of the same scene. The works depict an African-American laborer leaning against a pilaster, juxtaposed with a seated white man in a suit.

In addition to the image’s gripping subject matter and “complicated structure,” Shahn’s work renders the viewer an active observer, said Kao.

“You are being put directly on the sidewalks of New York, directly on the stage of the living theater that he was interested in displaying. …You are literally being sandwiched into that street scene.”

Shahn’s work, added Kao, was seen as pushing back “against ideas of what high art is, how art should engage the everyday world, and what art can mean in the larger society.”

Next door, amid works of color and cubism by Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso, in the museum’s first-floor gallery, Whitney Eggers, dramaturge for the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), explained the ethos behind “Paradise Lost,” the play by American Clifford Odets.

The work, a vivid depiction of a middle class family’s struggle to survive during the Depression, is part of the A.R.T.’s current schedule. With his true-to-life theme and gritty dialogue, Odets captured the desperation of the times and broke from other plays of the era that betrayed a disconnect between “theater and audience, between the plays and the society in which they were being written,” said Eggers.

In Odets’ works, she noted, “Americans saw their own lives ennobled on the stage.”

According to Eggers, Odets called “Paradise Lost” his favorite play and wrote that the work “contains a depth of perception, a web of sensory impressions, and a level of both personal and social experience not allotted to my other plays.”

With worldwide economic woes again making headlines, the Living Newspaper company added another dimension to the theme with a brief performance that involved members of the A.R.T. and the audience. The company creates work from current news stories and emphasizes a connection “to the human story behind the news.”

In the museum’s lecture hall, the troupe took suggestions from the crowd and quickly created a brief sketch based on Harvard’s and the nation’s financial issues.

Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected of occurring around that time.

Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work in the journal Science (released March 4). The new findings — based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks in remote northwestern Canada — bolster the theory that the planet has, at times in the past, been covered with ice at all latitudes.

“This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation [the name for that ice age] has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a ‘snowball Earth’ event,” said lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. “Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years.”

The survival of eukaryotic life ­­­— organisms composed of one or more cells, each with a nucleus enclosed by a membrane — throughout this period indicates that sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

Even on a snowball Earth, Macdonald said, there would be temperature gradients, and it is likely that ice would be dynamic: flowing, thinning, and forming local patches of open water, providing refuge for life.

“The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation,” Macdonald said. “The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Moreover, did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?”

“From an evolutionary perspective,” he added, “it’s not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.”

The rocks that Macdonald and his colleagues analyzed in Canada’s Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice-rafted debris, and deformation of soft sediments. The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago they were located at sea level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude.

“Because of the high albedo [light reflection] of ice, climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over,” Macdonald said. “So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation.”

Scientists don’t know exactly what caused this glaciation or what ended it, but Macdonald says its age of 716.5 million years closely matches the age of a large igneous province stretching more than 930 miles from Alaska to Ellesmere Island in far northeastern Canada. This coincidence could mean the glaciation was either precipitated or terminated by volcanic activity.

Macdonald’s co-authors on the Science paper are research assistant Phoebe A. Cohen; David T. Johnston, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences; and Daniel P. Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, all of Harvard. Other co-authors are Mark D. Schmitz and James L. Crowley of Boise State University; Charles F. Roots of the Geological Survey of Canada; David S. Jones of Washington University in St. Louis; Adam C. Maloof of Princeton University; and Justin V. Strauss.

The work was supported by the Polar Continental Shelf Project and the National Science Foundation’s Geobiology and Environmental Geochemistry Program.

The camp that houses 35,000 of Haiti’s earthquake homeless is a sprawling mess of tarps and bedsheets, of steamy air and brimming latrines, of people who’ve lost everything — houses, possessions, family members — yet whose first thoughts concern the children.

“No child in Haiti is in school now,” said Jacky Coutia, a member of the camp’s leadership committee. “There are so many children here, they’re just racing around.”

Coutia was talking to some visitors to the camp, built on a former military airfield in battered Port-au-Prince. Among them was Louise Ivers, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, physician at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Haiti clinical director of Partners In Health (PIH) , the nonprofit group that runs mobile clinics there. The camp houses about 12,000 children, evidenced by homemade kites fluttering overhead and a pickup basketball game nearby. The camp also has several trained teachers — who could start a school if they could find tents for a classroom.

Coutia and the other survivors of Haiti’s cataclysmic Jan. 12 earthquake are slowly picking up the pieces of their shattered lives and beginning to look ahead. Even as the immediate medical emergency begins to transform into something like a recovery, faculty members and staff from Harvard University and its affiliated hospitals are making plans to “accompany” Haiti into its uncertain future.

That future will include rehabilitation for the thousands injured, including physical therapy and prosthetics for those who’ve lost limbs. It will require procuring food, water, and shelter for the homeless, huddled in camps like Coutia’s. It will mean staving off infection and disease before they pounce on weakened constitutions amid unsanitary conditions. It will mean caring for quake orphans and the psychologically traumatized, who cry out as night falls or refuse shelter for fear that the buildings will collapse. It will mean helping to rebuild hospitals, schools, and governments, the systemic structures that create order and provide framework for Haiti to “build back better.”

Rolling up their sleeves

As the recovery begins, Harvard affiliates will keep their sleeves rolled up. Roles will be played long term by Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) faculty members, including Joia Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine and a Brigham and Women’s physician, and Paul Farmer, who holds appointments at both HMS and HSPH and who is also a physician at the Brigham. Along with Ivers, they work through Partners In Health, which Farmer co-founded decades ago and which has lengthy experience providing health care in rural Haiti.

Roles will be played in the intermediate term by figures such as Hilarie Cranmer and Michael VanRooyen of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), who also have appointments at HMS and HSPH and who willed a field hospital out of the dried grass outside Port-au-Prince in the weeks after the quake. S. Allen Counter, a professor at HMS and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and director of the Harvard Foundation, recently worked on the shelter problem by procuring and distributing 150 tents to homeless families in Port-au-Prince, a follow-up to an earlier relief trip.

Important roles will be played by scores of skilled volunteers from Harvard and its affiliated hospitals — surgeons, nurses, and technicians — who provided vital aid in the initial quake response and in many cases plan to return for the rebuilding ahead.

The shape of that effort is still emerging. Though initial attention focused on those killed and injured, the earthquake destroyed not just buildings, but also much of the infrastructure that makes Haiti’s economy and society function.

“École, église, état — Haitians say it flattened the three E’s: school, church, state. It flattened the things most important to society,” said Natasha Archer, a Haitian-American physician and resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who coordinated medical volunteers for Partners In Health in Port-au-Prince, the capital.

“Things will get better”

Lucknerson Shackleton, a quake survivor who is now a cook at the HHI field hospital in Fond Parisien, can attest to the depths of displacement. He was walking down the road when the quake hit and buildings tumbled around him. Two days later, he found his daughter under the rubble, her arm broken. Three hospitals later, they wound up in Fond Parisien.

“Before the earthquake, I had a restaurant in Port-au-Prince,” Shackleton said. “I lost everything.”

Shackleton praised the international response, saying there would have been many more deaths without it. Though he has work for now as a cook, his own future is uncertain. He hopes to start anew, helping others, perhaps by creating a nonprofit to provide school lunches.

“Now I feel like I’m doing … what I should have been doing a long time ago, helping people out,” Shackleton said. “Eventually, times will turn, things will get better.”

“Building back better” is prominent in Farmer’s mind when he thinks about Haiti — with the emphasis on better, as in better health care, education, jobs, and houses. In the years since Farmer co-founded Partners In Health, the organization has expanded beyond Haiti to other nations. The Haiti operation, Zanmi Lasante, working with the Ministry of Health, has become the country’s largest health care provider.

Farmer predicted there will be some ugliness in the reconstruction, as organizations vie for the projected flood of funds. Universities, he said, should steer clear of that short-term frenzy and instead engage in “accompaniment,” walking the long road forward with Haitians, forming partnerships, building local capacity, always keeping in mind that the best solution for Haiti will be a Haitian one.

“If I were a reconstruction czar, I would say the report card on our endeavors has got to be 500,000 new jobs for Haitians,” Farmer said. “The road ahead is going to be paved with good intentions. But it’s not going to work unless it’s focused on job creation for Haitians.”

Now, country and city

In that rebuilding effort, the path for Partners In Health will shift somewhat. The group has been thrust into disaster relief and had its geographic focus broadened from the countryside to now include Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s biggest city.

When Partners In Health takes inventory, it sees a crying need for health care in the crowded camps that, for better or worse, are now called home by thousands. To help, the organization created mobile health clinics, run by a team of 230, including doctors and other medical staff. They set up operations right in the camps, providing primary care, reproductive health care for women, and HIV/AIDS treatment, while targeting diseases that arise in crowded, unsanitary places: malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, typhoid, dengue fever.

“What we want to avoid now … is just doing first aid — bandaging wounds — and get into primary health care because these people will be here for some time,” Ivers said.

Another focal point for Partners In Health is the capital’s University Hospital. Mukherjee, Partners In Health’s medical director, is amidst discussions with hospital officials about the center’s future. Partners In Health provided critical assistance after the quake, funneling in volunteer U.S. medical personnel to staff the wards. The question now is what the ongoing relationship between the two organizations should be.

Mukherjee said PIH wants to help the hospital rebuild and could play a facilitating role between the hospital and other entities. She said it is imperative to increase its budget, which is less than a hundredth that of a major U.S. hospital. Lack of funding threatens to strangle any advancement in facilities and care.

Alix Lassegue, University Hospital’s medical director, said the volunteers from Harvard and other hospitals were critically important following the quake. Going forward, Lassegue identified two major needs: to help clear and rebuild structures destroyed in the quake, and to train Haitian medical personnel, possibly through exchanges with major medical schools, such as Harvard’s.

East of Port-au-Prince, near the Dominican border, is the field hospital established under the leadership of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in Fond Parisien.

Though HHI’s involvement, by design, is expected to be more temporary, officials expect to be in Haiti for six months to a year, long enough to rehabilitate the patients and integrate them back into the community or into local medical facilities. HHI officials also want to leave behind strengthened institutions, from the Love A Child orphanage on whose grounds they’re located, to area medical clinics and other facilities.

The field hospital, an HHI-led collaboration with the University of Chicago, Love A Child, and other partners, provides broad-based care for earthquake victims, including amputations, skin grafts, treatment of infections, and physical therapy. There are special teams for unaccompanied minors and outreach teams to identify those whose medical needs are unmet, and to improve local health care capacity.

Jennifer Scott, an instructor in obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and an obstetrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, worked at Fond Parisien in mid-February, spending half her time at local clinics. The experience helped her to understand how the level of health care was low even before the quake. She found a clinic in Christ Pour Tous that had an operating room but no full-time obstetrician to perform cesarean sections. Scott is exploring ways to fund a full-time doctor there. If successful, that effort would provide some health-care security for women even after the field hospital winds down.

“What makes obstetric care in the field so difficult is the fine line between routine and emergency,” Scott said. “There’s potential there,” at Christ Pour Tous. “That’s the site we’re focusing on.”

As Haiti stabilizes the present, many eyes are now looking to the horizon.

In this annual manifesto of studio work, theses, exhibitions, and conferences, Correa, an assistant professor of urban design, offers a lively look into the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Those who know Harvard women’s hockey coach Katey Stone will tell you what makes her successful: her competitive fire and drive to win.

In 16 seasons at Harvard, that fire has driven Stone to do it all. She has led the Crimson to six ECAC regular season titles, five ECAC tournament championships, five Ivy League Championships, seven NCAA tournament appearances, three NCAA title game appearances, and the American Women Hockey Coaches Association (AWCHA) national championship in 1999. That season she was named AWCHA Women’s Coach of the Year.

Her past awards and accomplishments go on and on, but on Feb. 26 Stone found herself celebrating one more — and it was a big one. With the Crimson’s 5-1 win over Princeton in the ECAC tournament opener, Stone became the women’s college hockey all-time wins leader, surpassing former University of Minnesota and Colby College head coach Laura Halldorson.

A year ago, Stone celebrated the 313th victory of her career, a 4-0 triumph over Brown, to become the all-time wins leader among active coaches, sliding into second place on the all-time list. Now, after the 338th victory of her career, she stands second to no one.

“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t important. I’m a very competitive person. I want to be the best,” Stone said after the win.

And although the ECAC victory is only the start of what Stone and the Crimson hope will be a long postseason run for Harvard, it did allow the legendary coach to reflect on her long tenure.

“I love the fact that I work at Harvard with the highest academic standards in the country, and we can get it done in the hockey rink,” she said. “This is for all the kids who played for me and listened to me rant and rave once in a while.”

Stone’s success has been unquestionable, but extends well past the Harvard gates.

In January 2008, Stone won a gold medal as head coach of the U.S. Women’s Under-18 National Team at the World Championships. At the Four Nations Cup in November of that year, Stone also led the U.S. Women’s Select Team to a gold medal.

And a night before her historic win, she watched five former players — three Americans, two Canadians — skate for an Olympic gold medal in the women’s hockey final. Overall, Stone has coached nine players who have gone on to compete in the Olympics.

“Watching the last couple of weeks of the Olympics, our kids have been in the key situations for their teams, and that makes me so proud, because I know they’re ready,” said Stone. “They’re able to mentally manage games and manage pressure. That’s why they get called upon in tight situations.”

A large part of this preparedness comes from the training and on-ice education Stone gives her players.

“She’s a brilliant coach in terms of the way she sees the game and the way she responds on the bench, and in the moment, throughout the game,” said senior forward Randi Griffin. “Everyone on this team really has a lot of respect for her and has a lot of confidence in her coaching. Every kid on this team really buys into what she’s doing.”

“She’s here to push us as hard as we can go and make us better as players. Coming into college, yeah, you’re all good players in [Division I hockey], but the point is to get better over your four years, and that’s what she does with players here. That is pretty much why I came here,” said junior forward Kate Buesser.

With the NCAA tournament approaching and the fourth-ranked Crimson a strong contender to get back to the national championship game, another title would be the best way to cap off such a historic season.

“We’re not out here screaming and yelling at our kids. Our kids are very self-motivated, and we challenge them to do more than they think they’re capable of. We remind them of that when they want to settle for a little bit less,” said Stone.

János Kornai, Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus in the Department of Economics, was awarded the Leontief Medal, given annually to several Russian economists and one international economist for contributions to the field of economics.

Kornai traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, to receive the Leontief Medal, named after Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, the creator of input-output analysis. At the Feb. 13 ceremony, Kornai was praised for his book “Economics of Shortage” (1980), which “opened the eyes of Russian economists.”

David J. Mooney, the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering and associate dean for chemical/biological sciences and engineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He is among 68 new members and nine foreign associates elected to the NAE in 2010.

Mooney, who is also a core member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, was recognized by the NAE “for contributions to the fields of tissue engineering and regeneration.”

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Mooney joins 14 other elected faculty members who are based at SEAS.

To read the full story, visit the SEAS Web site.