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Upcoming Events
Lunch Colloquium
Maryn McKenna TUESDAY
October 8, 2019
Lunch Colloquium
Ren Davis
MONDAY
October 21, 2019
WEBCAST ONLY
Ren Davis
October 21, 2019
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Greetings!
You are receiving this issue of our newsletter as a member or friend of the Emory University Emeritus College (EUEC). I hope the newsletter will 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. Please note: Some email programs do not work well with the links in our newsletters. If you try a "Click here" link and it does not work correctly, follow the directions at the very top of this email. You will see a statement "Having trouble viewing this email? Click here to view in your web browser." If you click on that link, the newsletter will open in your browser and should work as intended.
With best wishes, Gray Gray F. Crouse Director, EUEC
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 Message from the Director
We had another great Lunch Colloquium last week, thanks to our own Jag Sheth. Who knew that to learn about the (bad) side effects of the Internet Age could be so entertaining? Thanks to Jan Pratt's article below, if you were not able to be present, you can read about this very serious subject. When Jag's book comes out, you will also be able to read more about it.
We continue with another, very different, but very important topic: antibiotic resistance. When you read below about Maryn McKenna I think you will be both amazed and pleased that we were able to get so experienced and knowledgeable an expert as Maryn to talk to us. Antibiotic resistance is a topic that should be of great concern to all of us and the problem is by no means limited to over-prescription to patients.
We also celebrate the publication of the final volume of Ron Schuchard's masterful edition of the complete prose of T. S. Eliot. Much of his work has been done in retirement--a clear example of the continued life of the mind in retirement.
EUEC was also a co-host of a program last week called "Reimagining Retirement" presented in collaboration with CFDE. Many thanks are due to Allison Adams of CFDE who was the main organizer of this event. Two of our members, Denise Raynor and Patrick Noonan, along with two future members (!), Ann Rogers and Tom Flynn, were panelists in the program. I always invite faculty who attend such events to join EUEC before retirement, as a way of easing the transition into retirement. It is a tribute to the vitality of EUEC that many faculty accept that invitation. We celebrate the six faculty who attended and who joined. If you know any of them, please extend a welcome; no one understands the emotions of faculty contemplating retirement better than faculty who have made that transition!
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, October 8
Agriculture, Antibiotics,
and the Future of Meat
The Luce Center
Room 130
11:30-1:00
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, September 23
The Seven Side Effects of the Internet Age
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Faculty Activities
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New Members
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
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Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, October 8
Agriculture, Antibiotics, and the Future of Meat
Maryn McKenna, Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Human Health, TED speaker and author of Big Chicken (2017) and Superbug (2010)
The development of antibiotics in the 1940s changed medicine forever--first by saving lives that otherwise would have been lost to infectious diseases, and then by introducing the menace of antibiotic resistance, which undermined generations of the miracle drugs. But it's little known that agriculture adopted antibiotics as soon as they debuted, adding small doses to the diets of livestock - not to cure diseases, but to protect against them and to cause animals to put on weight more quickly. Those uses laid the foundation for modern intensive meat production, but they also fostered the emergence of additional resistant bacteria that moved through the food chain and the environment to further threaten human health. Reversing that historic mistake took decades of research and policy maneuvering, but what really turned the tide was neither better science nor tougher regulations: It was the power of consumer coalitions forcing the meat industry to change.
About Maryn McKenna
Maryn McKenna joined Emory College's Center for the Study of Human Health as a senior fellow in 2019. The announcement of her hire stated: "This new position will allow her to bring her expertise in health narrative and media to enrich the experience of undergraduates in the Center and throughout the college and university." A partial listing of her accomplishments from her website follows:
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist and author who specializes in public health, global health and food policy. She is a columnist for WIRED, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, and the author of the 2017 bestseller Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (National Geographic Books, Sept. 2017), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that prize. Big Chicken was named a Best Book of 2017 by Amazon, Science News, Smithsonian Magazine, Civil Eats, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Toronto Globe and Mail; an Essential Science Read by WIRED; and a 2018 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her 2015 TED Talk, " What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?", has been viewed 1.7 million times and translated into 34 languages.
She has reported from sites of epidemics and disasters and farms and food production sites on most of the continents, including a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a Thai village erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a bird-testing unit on the front lines of West Nile virus, an Arctic graveyard of the victims of the 1918 flu, an AIDS treatment center in Yunnan, a polio-eradication team in India, breweries in France, a "Matrix for chickens" in the Netherlands, and Midwestern farms devastated by the 2015 epidemic of avian flu. She is a columnist for WIRED and writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, NPR, Newsweek, Scientific American, Nature, The Guardian, Eating Well, Eater, and numerous other magazines and venues. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Science Writing Online (2012) and The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2014), and twice in The Dirt: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Food and Farming (2016 and 2018). She is the creator of the site Today in Ebolanoia, documenting public overreaction to disease threats, and her work has also appeared in the Annals of Emergency Medicine and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
She received the 2019 John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, the 2014 Leadership Award from the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, and the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences. Her piece for Modern Farmer on the beyond-organic farm White Oak Pastures received a first-place award from the Association of Food Journalists, and her essay for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, " Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future," was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Media Award and has been republished in Russian, Norwegian and French. She also shared the 2015 AH Boerma Award from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as one of the writers for National Geographic's food-writing site "The Plate," part of the magazine's year-long Future of Food project.
She appears in the 2019 documentary Resistance Fighters and the 2014 documentary Resistance; has presented at the United Nations, U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control about the need to curb antibiotic misuse in medicine and agriculture; and is a frequent public speaker and radio, podcast and television guest. From 2012 to 2019, she was a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. In 2018, she was a TEDxYouth speaker in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and in 2014, she was one of the organizers of the Women in Science Writing Solutions Summit, held at MIT. She currently is the Journalism Advisor to the Logan Science Journalism Program at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, a member of the program committee for the 2019 World Conference of Science Journalists in Lausanne, and a five-term member of the board of the Association of Health Care Journalists.
Her earlier books are Superbug (Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2010), on the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph in hospitals, families and farms, which won the 2013 June Roth Memorial Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the 2011 Science in Society Award given by the National Association of Science Writers; and Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (Free Press/S&S 2004), the first history of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, for which she embedded with the corps for a year. Beating Back the Devil was named one of the Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
She is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and has a master's degree with highest honors from Northwestern University.
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Lunch Colloquium--Monday, September 23
The Seven Side Effects of the Internet Age
Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Emory University
The September 30 issue of the New Yorker magazine contains an article entitled "The Dark Side of the Techno-Utopianism." Members of the Emeritus College who heard last year's presentation by Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt, Professor of Business, on "Genes, Climate, and Consumption Culture" were looking forward to hearing his take on the same subject in his presentation, "Unintended Consequences of the Internet Age: The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution," at the Emeritus College Colloquium on September 23. Professor Sheth did not disappoint.
He began with a historical survey of technology breakthroughs as civilization moved from the agriculture age, to the industrial age, to the services age, and now, to the internet age. Distribution of earlier technologies had been uneven and manifestation of their effects relatively slow over many years. But things have changed such that "internet technology will be more disruptive and transformative than any other previous technology." And it will be so much faster. According to Professor Sheth, there are 4 billion cell phone users. The cell phone and related capacities such as digital storage and innovations such as online education courses are changing all societies and at a very rapid pace. Professor Sheth expects that these new technologies will have a greater impact on societies such as China and India than on the West. People there can skip some of the steps many Westerners took as change began to happen here. For example, it will no longer be necessary for people to move to big cities for opportunities that now can be accessed over the internet at home in small towns and isolated rural locales. Earlier centuries were characterized by advances in product mobility or personal mobility. Our present age will be characterized by knowledge mobility.
Every technological advance has its downside. And a major downside of the advances of the last couple of centuries has been environmental damage. We worry--and should worry--about carbon pollution. And we have tended to focus on how the automobile contributes to carbon pollution. Professor Sheth suggested we should worry, too, about how other modern conveniences such as home fridges and industrial fridges in large grocery stores contribute to carbon pollution. He reminded us how casual use of water enabled by technology wastes a finite resource and how hybrid, high-yielding seeds have led to a loss of biodiversity. Active intervention is required to reverse environmental damage tied to technological advances.
Of course, the benefits of the new technology of the internet age are clear. As digital devices become more affordable, people worldwide have access to huge amounts of information, leading to a democratization of knowledge and influence and the creation of opportunities for entrepreneurs (though widening the gap between the illiterate and literate).
The rest of Professor Sheth's presentation focused on the unintended and unfortunate side effects of the technology of the "digital revolution": (1) digital addiction; (2) creation of a roommate nation; (3) living in the virtual world rather than the real world; (4) public acrimony; (5) cybercrimes; (6) stranded assets; and (7) jeopardizing the concept of legal jurisdiction. Any one of these topics could have taken the whole session.
Digital addiction is real. Statistics about the use of the internet and social media by teenagers reveal that 92% go online daily. There is a newly named disorder, Internet Gaming Disorder. Scientists are seeing changes in the brains of addicted users similar to those caused by alcohol or cocaine. Advocates of healthy use of the technology suggest that all of us need to be more mindful of the time we (and our kids and grandkids) spend on the internet and to create time and place boundaries for its use, but the most seriously addicted will need to seek psychological counseling and rehabilitation through behavior modification.
The second negative side effect of extensive internet use is the effect on families. As families increasingly become dual career with children super busy, too, the traditional dinner hour has been replaced by casual grazing on individual time schedules, after which "each one goes to his or her room to connect to the outside world." Such "connection" replaces kinship with friendship where friends are more valued than family--even though interaction with them may be more virtual than real. Professor Sheth suggests that work and family must be compartmentalized and that strategies must be adopted to reduce non-work or school activities to allow families to spend more time together.
Living in the virtual world, sometimes referred to as "bowling alone," occurs as virtual communities with digital avatars in online games like Second Life and Farmville increasingly replace activities with real people. Getting out of the house (and away from our devices), developing a hobby, traveling to remote places, or joining social groups are all suggested remedies for the actual alienation from others that virtual connectivity can create.
Professor Sheth spent less time on the remaining side effects--and suggestions for dealing with them. As he noted, we are all aware of the dysfunction in our public dialogue and the rise of extremism stoked by the internet. We are also aware of the rise in cybercrimes. Computer security companies estimate cybercrime costs $400 billion a year. Cyber bullying is increasing. Professor Sheth called for the internet companies to take some responsibility and develop rules of engagement. (Sadly unlikely.)
The side effect he calls "stranded assets" refers to the rise of the sharing economy and the tremendous growth in online shopping that causes brick and mortar stores to lose trade and close. And of course online educational options like MOOCs may lead to closings and overall reduction in post-secondary institutions, too. Finally, he noted side effects impacting matters of jurisdiction; they have always involved laws that are centric in time and place, but internet crime transcends temporal and geographic boundaries. And jurisdiction is now more difficult in matters involving intellectual property and virtual currencies (arising to create a shadow economy), as well.
In sum, internet technology has had an unprecedented impact on our lives, positive and negative. Thanks to Professor Sheth for his thorough review of the issues. It made me remember an interesting and apropos comment from Mark Zuckerberg: "One of the most painful lessons I've learned is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity."
--Jan Pratt
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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
Angelika Bammer, PhD, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Georgia Chen, PhD, Professor, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology Nancy Daspit, JD, Professor of Practice, Emory Law George W. Jones Jr., MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine Patti Owen-Smith, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oxford College Larry Tune, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
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Faculty Activities
Ronald Schuchard
Goodrich C. White Professor of English Emeritus
The latest and final Volume (8) of Ron Schuchard's edition of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, titled Still and Still Moving, 1954-1965, was published on Project Muse earlier this month by Johns Hopkins University Press. All eight volumes are now accessible to members of the University on DiscoverE. The concluding volumes 7 and 8 of the edition were supported by a Heilbrun Research Fellowship, gratefully acknowledged.
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Walking the Campus with Dianne
The window discovered during our last walk can be found over the main campus quad entrance doorway of the Callaway Memorial Center. The building was constructed in 1919 with the southern part of the structure opened as the Physics building. The northern part was originally the Chemistry building, later named the Humanities building. It was renovated and renamed in 1993. Ely Reeves Callaway, Jr. (1940C 1996H), recipient of an Emory Medal, made a gift toward renovating both interiors and connecting them into a single center in memory of his parents.
Fall is officially here, although the temperatures are still feeling very much like the middle of summer! Let's take a stroll in a place that's usually shaded and slightly cooler, as well as being perhaps the only area on campus where graffiti seems to be the norm.
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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