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Upcoming Events
Lunch Colloquium
Cynthia Willett
TUESDAY, May 14, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
Cynthia Willett
Lunch Colloquium
Marilynne McKay
TUESDAY, May 28, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
Voracious Readers
BookFest 2019
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Contact Other Members
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find out about a travel destination or find other EUEC members who would like to travel with you, send an email to:
Find other members to get together for shared interests. Send email to the following link to contact members who would like the same activity!
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This issue of our newsletter is sent to members and friends of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will help keep you informed about our activities and help you feel connected with our members throughout the U.S. On the left are links to our website and links to contact either me or the EUEC office.
With best wishes,
Gray
Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
I really regret missing Cassandra Quave's Lunch Colloquium. The room was packed, and by all accounts everyone thoroughly enjoyed her talk. Thanks to Jan Pratt you can read about it below. (I was in Ireland, touring and visiting with my sister-in-law's relatives.) Her talk was a great way to end our spring Lunch Colloquium series.
Our summer series begins next week and has another fascinating lineup. We begin with Cynthia Willett, and you can read about her and her topic below. It should be a lot of fun.
We welcome another group of distinguished new members--all not yet retired, although some will retire at the end of this academic year. Please be sure to speak to any of them that you know and encourage them to attend our events and help us grow and flourish.
There is a reminder announcement of the Bianchi-Bugge Excellence Awards in this issue. We are fortunate to have this source of funding to help support our members' intellectual activities, and due to the recent gifts in memory of John Bugge, we will have an increase in the amount of funds available.
There is also an acknowledgement of two member deaths in this issue. I regret that I could find little information about the members other than what was contained in their obituaries. If any of you would like to contribute additional information, I will be glad to publish it later.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, May 14
The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and Others
The Luce Center
Room 130
11:30 - 1:00
Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 22
Exploring Nature's Bounty: Drug Discovery from Plants used in Traditional Medicine
Cassandra Quave, Assistant Professor of Dermatology and Human Health and Curator of the Emory Herbarium
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New Members
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BIANCHI-BUGGE EXCELLENCE AWARDS ANNOUNCEMENT
It is time for applications for what will be the first Bianchi-Bugge Excellence Awards. The awards are funded through the Bianchi Excellence Fund, named in honor of the co-founder of the Emeritus College, Eugene Bianchi, Professor Emeritus of Religion, which was established largely by his own very generous bequest to Emory, as well as by contributions from many of his retired colleagues. After the death of John Bugge, our other co-founder, gifts in honor of John were made to the Bianchi Excellence Fund, and those gifts have greatly enhanced the fund corpus. With Gene Bianchi's enthusiastic blessing, the awards from this expanded fund will now be named in honor of both of our co-founders.
The Award is meant to advance the interests of the Emeritus College by providing its membership with financial support for ongoing intellectual activities by means of small, strategic grants to cover expenses incurred in pursuit of a broad range of activities, including, among others,research and writing, lecturing, training, development of teaching materials, and presentations at academic conferences. The Award will foster continuing professional development and thus play a significant role in building a vibrant emeritus community at Emory.
In the past two years, the Bianchi Excellence Fund was able to support at least two Awards each year in amounts ranging up to a maximum of $2000 for a twelve-month term starting September 1st - the start of the normal academic and fiscal year.
The application process is open to all retired members of the EUEC.
Applicants should submit the following:
1) A letter of application (limited to 2 pages) that describes in some detail the project to be undertaken - its purpose, the means of achieving that purpose, and its relevance to the applicant's own personal and professional development;
2) a simple budget (1 page) that estimates costs and explains how requested funding would be employed; and
3) an up-to-date curriculum vitae (limited to 2 pages) that specifically highlights activities undertaken since retirement.
The criteria for selection will include:
- The relationship of the proposed project to the applicant's demonstrated qualifications
- The projected value of the project to the applicant's field or discipline
- The feasibility of completing the project within the term of the Award
- The pertinence of the project to resources readily available to the applicant
- The potential the project shows for promoting the public good
Grant recipients will be asked to agree to the following conditions:
- Submission of a written report to the Awards and Honors Committee after completing the term of the Award, but no later than September 30th of the year following the award
- Formal acknowledgment of the Bianchi-Bugge Award and the Emory University Emeritus College in any published work that results
Submissions will be reviewed by the Awards and Honors Committee of the EUEC. Preference will be given to those who have not been previous recipients of the Bianchi Award.
Applications should be mailed to The Awards and Honors Committee of the Emory University Emeritus College at The Luce Center, 825 Houston Mill Road, Atlanta, GA 30329, or sent by email to emeriti@emory.edu.
Applications must be received by May 25, 2019.
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We note the recent deaths of two members, Barbara Plauth and Donald Jones
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, May 14
The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro [seen here], Hannah Gadsby, and Others
Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy
The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy isn't clear. Is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Is it simply Nietzschean moments of joyful forgetting and perhaps a measure of transcendence from grief? Mark Twain emphasized the latter when he wrote "the secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow," a view sometimes phrased as "comedy is tragedy plus time." It's assumed we need emotional distance in order to mock or transcend the tragic. But there might be another way that humor can help us deal with suffering, a way Cynthia Willett sees as apparent in our increasingly inclusive comic scene where humorists address audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. She will share insights she and her sister Julie have developed in a book due out in the fall, Uproarious: How Feminist and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth.
About Cynthia Willett (with thanks to Wikipedia): After serving as an assistant professor of philosophy at Le Moyne College from 1988 to 1991, she moved to the University of Kansas (1991-1996) and then to Emory University, first as an assistant professor and then, beginning in 1998, as an associate professor. She was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2004 and received the endowed chair she now holds in 2016. Willett specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and American social thought of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has researched and written about philosophy of music, literature, tragedy, comedy, and interspecies ethics. Her first authored book was Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, published by Routledge in 1995. She then edited Theorizing Multiculturalism for Blackwell in 1998. In 2001 Cornell University Press published her book The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris. Her book Irony in the Age of Empire was published by Indiana University Press in 2008. Her most recent book, Interspecies Ethics, was published by Columbia University Press in August 2014. And Uproarious: How Feminist and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth, the book she has co-authored with her sister (Julie Willett), the basis of the Lunch Colloquium talk she's offering emeriti on Tuesday, May 14, will be published by Minnesota University Press this coming fall.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, April 22
Exploring Nature's Bounty:
Drug Discovery from Plants used in Traditional Medicine OR "Did You Know Your Grandmother Was An Ethnobotanist?" Cassandra Quave, an Assistant Professor in Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health and in the School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology, is so highly qualified and widely recognized an ethnobotanist that her peers have described her as a "rock star" in the field. And she certainly demonstrated her expertise (and charisma) in her talk to the Emeritus College Lunch Colloquium on April 22, a talk she began by explaining that an ethnobotanist studies the interaction of people with local plants and the use of those plants in traditional ways, such as for medicines. As Cassandra put it, ethnobotany studies the science of our survival in our environment. As she talked, I couldn't help thinking about all those "home" remedies I was subjected to as a child for such ailments as colds, coughs, fevers, sore throats, and tummy troubles, remedies derived from plants that had been used for generations in my own family. I bet many of those present thought about their own grandmothers' remedies as Cassandra talked! Cassandra's mission is to "rediscover" such remedies and through them find drugs to address infectious disease in the post-antibiotic era. According to her, 700,000 people around the world die from infections every year, and by 2050 it will be 10 million every year. Cassandra's own story, which she shared with us, is quite remarkable. Skeletal birth defects led to the amputation of her right leg below the knee when she was a young child. After amputation, she suffered a life-threatening staph infection that required further surgery. As she pointed out, infections can be contracted in two ways - after surgery in a hospital or out in the community. In either case, antibiotics are prescribed, but they have become increasingly ineffective. Some infections are already resistant to almost all known antibiotics. Since the 1980s, although small changes have been made to existing drugs, no new antibiotics have been created. Labs are focused on tweaking chemically produced medications and are ignoring the very foundations of medical pharmacology. Poppies give us morphine, foxglove gives us digitalis, mayapple is the basis of some cancer drugs, willows give us aspirin, and these are only a few examples of what we've derived from nature. She demonstrated with a slide showing the cell structures of a wide range of well-known drugs - all derived from plants. There are at least 400,000 known species of plants, and 28,000 of them have long been used in traditional medicine. Those certainly need further study, and so do all the plants whose possible medical usefulness hasn't been studied at all yet. In her work, Cassandra seeks out people with knowledge of plants used for medical remedies. There are 25 global hotspots for plant diversity. Often these are islands or other remote areas where isolation has tended to make the population self-sufficient, treating medical problems with plant-derived means. She is working to establish partnerships with people in those communities to ensure that any benefits derived from her research will be shared equally. Visiting one of these locations, she collects and takes the plants local healers have recommended to one of her labs to prepare extracts. These will be reverse engineered to isolate the chemical properties that make them effective. In her Quave Natural Products Library at Emory there are now 1800 botanical and fungal extracts all targeted for treating infections. The strategy for much treatment is "quorum quenching." Bacteria need to communicate to spread infection. The idea is to prevent that communication and therefore prevent that spread. The work is painstaking and slow. One challenge is that in isolation, a plant chemical may not work as it seems to do in its local community. For example, elm leaf-blackberry when mixed with pig fat is used by natives in some locales to treat boils. But when the active ingredient was isolated, it lost its potency. Therefore, finding the active ingredient is often only half the battle. Users may have to be comfortable with using a compound product (even one with pig fat) rather than relying on a product from a single source. Among other discoveries, a chestnut rinse has been shown to be a good wash for people with eczema. And although the Brazilian pepper tree is derided as an invasive weed in the Southern US, its extract is useful in treating wounds. Through her company, Phytotek, Cassandra hopes to market a wound dressing that uses the pepper tree extract (and lemon grass for its pleasant scent) to treat wounds that will not heal well. So, are the Big Pharmaceutical Companies competing to get in the plant-based medicine game? Absolutely not. Development would be too expensive, and the processes involved do not fit their present model for developing antibiotics. Therefore, Cassandra has been turning to the US government for collaboration, and most especially to the US military where people are already concerned about plant-based bio-terrorism, and she has been working well with researchers at Walter Reed Hospital. Cassandra's energy and enthusiasm are infectious (so to speak). She showed us a video of a group of students she took to the Ichauway property in South Georgia, long leaf pine forest belonging to the Woodruff Foundation that is home to the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center. Emory faculty and students are permitted to collect plants there for research on Native American medicinal practices. The students in the video had obviously caught her enthusiasm for this important work, and so did we as we peppered her with questions after her talk. Thank you so much, Cassandra, for what you do and teach others to do and the wonderful talk you gave us. I just wish you had met my grandmother. And she you. --Jan Pratt A FURTHER NOTE: We were not able to do a webcast of Cassandra's presentation-and will therefore not be able to archive it either. But here are links to some sites that might be of interest to those who missed Cassandra's presentation (or, indeed, those who heard it and would like to know more): And Cassandra closed her presentation by sharing a link to a new podcast she is offering on Foodie Pharmacology. Here it is. If you should want updates on the Quave Group's research and posts on herbal medicine:
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New Members
New members are the lifeblood of any organization. Please make a special effort to welcome them to EUEC!
Members in Transition
Robert A. Bray, PhD, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Mark J. Czaja, MD, FAASLD, Professor of Medicine
Marshall Duke, PhD, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology
Anne Hall, MS, Senior Lecturer of Environmental Sciences
Colleen McBride, PhD, Grace Crum Rollins Chair of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education
Susan A. Safley, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery
Paige Tolbert, PhD, Rollins Professor and Chair of Environmental Health
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In Memoriam
Barbara G. Plauth, MD, Professor Emerita of Medicine, passed away on March 25, 2019 after a long illness in Stanford, CA. She is survived by William H Plauth Jr, her husband of 57 years, her children Nancy and Bill III, her grandchildren Grace, Samuel, Christopher, Ella, and Tess, and her sisters Margaret Gaines of Scotia, NY, and Anna Schubert of Richmond, MA.
Dr. J. Donald Jones, Dean Emeritus of Men and Student Activities, 86, of Marietta passed away on March 28, 2019. Survivors include J. Wesley Jones, William C. Jones, Lanier (Edith) Jones, Norris (Sarah) Jones and special nieces, nephews, and cousins. Donald was born in the Mt. Bethel Community, graduated from Berry High School and College, and received advanced degrees in psychology from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and St. George University. He was headmaster at Baylor School (Chattanooga) and Dean of Students at Emory University. He was a member of the American Kennel Club, judging all over the world. He was Best of Show Judge at the 2008 Westminster Dog Show, awarding the top prize to Uno, the first beagle to win. A memorial service was held on May 3 at Mt. Bethel UMC Chapel, 4385 Lower Roswell Rd., Marietta, GA.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
Did anyone figure out where we were on our last walk? If not, one of the most interesting places on campus is....the WaterHub. It's fairly new to campus and quite hidden. It's located on Peavine Creek Drive, which is off Eagle Row and back near the baseball fields. From the outside it merely looks like a large greenhouse, but once you step inside, you realize you are surrounded not only by an abundance of greenery, but also by a countertop full of computers and various other items, as you can see by the additional photos below.
Kean Hamilton, the Director of WaterHub Operations, informed me that if we have a group interested, he will give us a tour of the facility. I think it would be not only quite informative, but fun as well, so if you are up for a campus field trip, send me an email ( dianne.becht@emory.edu) and I'll organize a tour in the near future.
More information on this innovative facility can be found by clicking here.
 For our next walk, let's take a look at a place that is so new it's not officially open yet.
Where will you find this on the Emory campus?
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Emory University Emeritus College The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206 Atlanta, GA 30329 |
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