We don’t see or hear the border patrol agents until they’re almost on top of us. There are two of them, both white; one older and wiry, the other young and beefy. They are dressed in olive drab uniforms. The wiry one gives our little group of four the once-over. “We thought we might get some action today,” he says, “but you guys look all right.” He sounds just a touch disappointed. “What are you all up to?” the beefy one asks. “We’re out for a hike,” says Jason De León. De León, 34, is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the ... Read More
Profile: Reddy Stayed Steady During Gulf Oil Spill
August 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last November, a half year after the BP oil spill, as Christopher Reddy sat in a Mobile, Ala., restaurant, he overheard a customer at a nearby table ask a friend if he would order fish. "The other customer said, 'No, thanks, I don't like my fish with a side order of cancer.'" Reddy, a marine chemist, pondered telling them that scientific data from the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies indicate that eating fish from the Gulf of Mexico after the April 20, 2010, spill wasn't dangerous. "But I had a failure of nerve. I wish I had spoken to them." He increasingly ... Read More
CSI: Wildlife — Solving Mysterious Animal Deaths
June 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Carol Meteyer unfurled the Sandhill crane's gray wings across the steel examination table, and for a moment, the 4-foot-tall bird regained its former majesty. In that instant, the laboratory's windowless cinderblock walls, cement floor and fluorescent lights disappeared. It was easy to imagine the crane's wings cupping the prairie air as it landed in an Oklahoma field, its long gray neck stretched, its red crown the only bright spot in a dun landscape. FedEx had delivered the crane, along with three others, that morning. The day before, it had stood in a farm field in Oklahoma, its head ... Read More
ARCHIVE Says Home Is Where the Health Is
April 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Peter Williams took for granted the holes in the wood floors of his house — and the rats that crawled through them. But when his father contracted a bacterial infection that left him paralyzed, Williams, a budding architect, began to recognize the connection between shoddy housing and ill health. "The disease was directly attributed to the fact that the house was poorly constructed," says Williams, 35. "I saw firsthand how housing was both responsible for his illness and also incapable of meeting his care needs, given that he was quite immobile." If the ... Read More
Cybercop Fights Organized Internet Crime
March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It was August 2005, and Steve Santorelli had recently left Scotland Yard to join Microsoft's Internet Crimes Investigation Team. He was camping in the forest near Redmond, Wash., with some of his team members, trying to escape their technology-dominated existence, when a call came in from the Microsoft lab. Other team members had just cracked the code to the notorious Zotob computer virus. "At the campsite, I overheard one of the guys mention the nickname C0der, and uniquely spelled C-Zero-D-E-R, being identified as the author of this virus. I almost choked on my coffee," Santorelli says. ... Read More
Cohen’s Nonprofit Helps Hospitals Go Green
December 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Gary Cohen is not a doctor or a nurse. He has never worked in a hospital, and, he admits, he thinks hospitals are kind of scary, in part because both of his parents died in one. But when the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report in the mid-1990s, citing hospital incinerators as the country's No. 1 source of carcinogenic dioxin emissions, Cohen, a longtime environmental activist, simply couldn't abide the irony. How could the industry that existed to heal people be doing so much harm? In 1996, he and colleague Charlotte Brody founded the nonprofit Health Care Without Harm, ... Read More
Kisaalita Engineers Solutions for Africa’s Rural Poor
November 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
For a moment, William Kisaalita is distracted. In a spacious, sunlit office at the University of Georgia, Kisaalita should be focused on the book he just published, or the pile of papers teetering on his desk, or the phone calls and visitors that repeatedly interrupt his afternoon. Instead, Kisaalita, a professor and tissue engineer at the university, leans back in his chair, locking his hands behind his head, his dark eyes narrowing. "When you come here and are successful," he says, gesturing around the large office, "you have this nagging feeling. What have you done for the people at ... Read More
Charles Harvey: Water Detective
August 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When a new U.S. president takes office, the first official announcements often undo policies set under the previous administration. In 2001, for example, President George W. Bush notoriously suspended a new standard for arsenic in drinking water that had been announced late in the Clinton administration. The new rule cut the allowed level of arsenic from 0.05 micrograms per liter of water to 0.01, bringing the U.S. in line with the European Union and the World Health Organization. Arsenic was known to cause cancer, but the earlier limit had been considered safe for decades. Under Clinton, ... Read More
The Value of Dead Bird Watching
June 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In a truly free state, citizens do everything with their own hands... — Rousseau, The Social Contract The smell makes my eyes water, but that doesn't stop Jane Dolliver from plopping down and digging the carcass out of the sand. She is not wearing gloves. Stefanie Porter, who is, stands off to the side, wincing a bit. Slowly, a shape appears: a long bill, a billowy fleshy pouch, thin bedraggled wings, large webbed feet — a juvenile brown pelican. From the general decay and the size of the maggots and, of course, the stink, Dolliver guesses that it has been dead for several days. She ... Read More
The U.N.’s Death Squad Watchdog
June 3, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
In a troubled African nation one morning not long ago, Philip Alston was driven in a convoy of three white SUVs, with armed escorts front and rear, to a town south of the capital. Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, was going to meet with eyewitnesses to, and victims of, a violent crackdown by local police on political opponents of the government. An Australian native who now lives in New York, Alston has spent more than three decades working in human rights and international law. He was in the country (which Alston asked not be ... Read More
