Class Notes - June 9, 1999

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Class notes features



Music man
For Karlos Moser '50, the baton never stops beating

Karlos Moser '50 has stepped down from the podium -- briefly. Artistic director and principal conductor of the Opera of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and its Opera Workshop since 1961, he retired from the faculty last year. His baton presided over more than 100 musical productions, from the grand operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, to entertainments such as Lehar's The Merry Widow and Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum -- not to mention his own group for early popular American music, The Original Hyperion Oriental Fox Trot Orchestra.

Moser's musical career began early, with piano lessons at the age of four. "My parents were Presbyterian missionaries in Brazil; I was born in Mato Grosso, the geographical center of the continent," he says. The family moved between Brazil and Colorado several times, but Moser remained in Denver, attending school and studying piano. "If you have to ask whether you should go into music, you shouldn't go into music," he says. "I simply spent all my spare time during high school doing music. It ruined my social life, but it certainly improved my piano technique."

While his parents returned to their missionary work, the 16-year-old Moser set off for his first semester at Princeton in 1946. "I thought Princeton was magnificent," he recalls. "I was comforted by the wonderful Chapel, where, because of my missionary background, I felt at home. I sang in the choir, directed by Carl Weinrich, and in the Glee Club, directed by J. Merrill Knapp."

As a music major, Moser received free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. There, "I heard many great singers -- Leonard Warren, Zinka Milanov, Lauritz Melchior, Bidu Sayao. I knew I wanted opera to continue to be a part of my life." Moser also studied piano, "though we couldn't get credit for 'applied music' in those days. Still, I was allowed to practice in the basement crypt of the Chapel, and studied privately with Princeton resident Gaby Casadesus."

After graduation and a stint in a lumber camp in Washington State followed by one in the U.S. Army in Washington, D.C., Moser earned his master's degree in composition at the University of Colorado.

He began to focus more intently on opera when he met impresario and teacher Boris Goldovsky in New York City. "Goldovsky," says Moser, "was the commentator on the regular Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. He helped me get work, and also convinced me that opera, even when not perfect, is the most wonderful thing in the world."

Though retired from the University of Wisconsin podium, Moser is currently artistic director of a new opera by David Bishop "based on a movie from the '50s called Salt of the Earth. It was considered Communist at the time," says Moser, "but now we can see it simply deals with the grand themes of gender, labor, and race. It will be called Esperanza, after the main female character." The project is sponsored by the Wisconsin Labor History Society and the AFL-CIO of Wisconsin.

Moser is grateful for such support, because "foundations that give to liberal causes don't usually give to opera, and foundations that give to opera don't usually give to liberal causes." Moser plans "to tour with the opera in labor-friendly cities throughout Wisconsin, and hope for other opera companies to pick it up."

-- Caroline Moseley



Exploring the mysteries of consciousness in ancient religions

David Ulansey '72 *84 wears an intriguing timepiece, a clear-faced "skeleton" watch that reveals the intricate mechanics inside.

"I like to see into the secrets of things," Ulansey says, smiling.

His comment on the watch applies equally to his scholastic pursuits as a professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. His focus on ancient mystery religions and astrology, Gnosticism, and early Christianity immerses him in matters that are both hidden from modern view and compellingly relevant. For example, Mithraism, an ancient Roman religion, was based on speculation about cycles of time and their importance. Christianity, which arose in the same era, focused on "radically transformative events in the future."

What lay behind those religions "may unconsciously lie beneath our current millennial sensitivities," he says. "Around the millennial date will crystallize unconscious tendencies that were also active long ago. One can see it as a New Year's celebration on a larger scale. In the ancient world, New Year's was always patterned on death, rebirth, and celebration. The myth of the millennium could likewise be seen as a product of our longing for transformation." By understanding the evolution of ancient cosmology and the rise of Christianity, Ulansey gains insights into the current dynamics of consciousness.

Making such connections comes naturally to Ulansey. After he earned his Ph.D. in religion at Princeton, he published The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (1989), which had originated from an insight Ulansey -- an amateur astronomer -- had during a 1977 graduate class on mystery religions with Professor of Religion John Gager. Gager asked his students to brainstorm on a picture of the central myth of Mithraism, the slaying of a bull.

"I immediately knew what it was," Ulansey says. "It had nothing to do with the recognized scholarship," which viewed it as a scene from Persian mythology. Using his knowledge of the zodiac, Ulansey realized he was looking at a star map. "I had the fresh eyes because my interests were so broad and seemingly unrelated," he recalls. His passion for mystery religions continues with his book-in-progress on Mithraism and Christianity.

Ulansey is a professor in CIIS's Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Program, which he helped start in 1994. It's an ideal forum for his wide-ranging professional and personal interests. Earlier positions at Boston University and elsewhere -- "the mainstream" -- left him profoundly discomfited. He explains, "Everywhere I felt the same sense of an unwillingness to ask the fundamental questions of meaning. Now I can bring my whole self to my teaching, with none of the reticence I had previously."

Ulansey's Website, www.well.com/user/davidu, displays his fascination with the connection between technology and spirituality. "Cyberspace is a place for people who previously had no voice," notes Ulansey, an Internet enthusiast since the days of the very earliest Websites. "The current moment in evolution is seeing a quantum leap in consciousness itself, and a major factor of that leap is through the technology of communications." For example, the site includes his multipage artwork "Gnostalgia," with the suggestion to "meditate on the picture a while, then click on the image to go deeper."

A new link goes to the site of the Planetwork conference that Ulansey is co-organizing. To be held next month in San Francisco, its theme is "Information Technology and Planetary Survival." Seeking insights into modern secrets -- environmental troubles -- circles back to his academic concerns. "Our current moment seems to be as apocalyptic as the moment when Christianity came into being," observes Ulansey. "I hope the conference will catalyze a sense of the magnitude of the problem and the presence of possible solutions."

-- Van Wallach '80



A fly like thee
Studying the fruit fly, Nancy Bonini '81 unravels causes of neurodegenerative diseases

Some people see a world in a grain of sand; Nancy Bonini '81 sees a cure for diseases in the eye of a fly.

A bug seems an unlikely place to look for remedies to human illnesses, unless you study the molecular architecture in the cells of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Bonini is a research scientist and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She became interested in D. melanogaster as a Princeton biology major doing undergraduate research. "I wanted to study an organism that has a brain and engages in complex behavior," she explains, "but is simple enough that you could apply the power of molecular biology and genetics to it." (Her father is William Bonini '48 *49, professor of geology, emeritus, of Princeton.) Since her appointment at Penn in 1994, Bonini has conducted pioneering genetic research that promises to accelerate our understanding of how certain fatal neurodegenerative diseases afflict the brain, bringing closer the day when a cure can be found.

Fruit flies are geneticists' experimental animal of choice. Researchers can "knock out" or implant genes and then breed hordes of these insects, tracking mutant genes across generations in just weeks. What's more, flies possess many of the same genes as humans. In fact, researchers are finding that many of the same genes are present across species despite half a billion years of independent evolution, leading many scientists to speculate that the diversity of life evolved from a common ancestor. "The more they sequence the human genome and the fly genome," notes Bonini, "the more it becomes apparent how amazingly fundamental that similarity is." Her words are delivered in sober and measured tones, but the adverbs have exclamation points. "Genes are so fundamentally conserved that we can really use the fly as a model for the human system." It's also easier to track the cascade of biochemical events unleashed by genes in the far simpler anatomy of Drosophila than in the neural labyrinth of Homo sapiens.

In her early research, at California Institute of Technology and at Penn, Bonini studied the role of the "eyes absent" gene in the survival of "progenitor" eye cells, which lay the foundation for the growth of countless and intricately configured cells that make up the fly's large compound eyes. That research into how neural structures are formed was later extended to probe genetic mechanisms that lead healthy brain structures to degenerate.

Recently, scientists identified "trinucleotide repeat expansion" as the genetic flaw responsible for a growing number of progressive, late-onset, neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington's. Nucleotides are the rungs that hold together the two sides of the DNA molecule's twisting-ladder structure, or double helix. In these disorders, a repeating sequence of three nucleotides -- cytosine, adenine, and guanine (CAG) -- multiplies beyond the normal 15 to 20 repeats in the coding region of the DNA. Working with researchers from Penn's medical school, Bonini bred mutant strains of fruit flies implanted with the gene that causes Machado-Joseph disease (MJD). In victims of this disease, when the CAG repeats that code for the production of glutamine -- one of 20 amino acids that go into making protein molecules -- increase abnormally, globs of protein form in the cell nuclei of the brain. The nuclei get "blown out and the cells die -- probably a slow and painful death," explains Bonini. As the disease takes hold, the protein agglomerations take over more and more space in the nuclei of certain brain cells and at some point begin to shut down nuclear processes critical to cell survival. The body count of degenerated neurons increases; the characteristic symptoms of palsy and paralysis become more acute; eventually the MJD sufferer dies.

 

Research leads to medication

"Our hope was that by studying the disease in flies, we could speed along the genetic research in humans," says Bonini. "The advantage of the flies is that we can give them polyglutamine-repeat disease in just 10 days and then use the flies to figure out how to treat this class of diseases in humans. A lot of researchers are interested in this, and they're going to forge the link between me and the medication you can take 10 years down the road."

Dr. Randy Pittman, chair of Penn's Graduate Group in Pharmacological Sciences, collaborates with Bonini. He calls her work "a powerful approach for understanding the underlying mechanism of neural degeneration in CAG-repeat diseases. By developing the first model of a human neurodegenerative disease in a genetically powerful organism like Drosophila, the impact of her work goes well beyond the seven to eight known triplet-repeat diseases. It sets the stage for investigators to develop models of other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's."

In her research, Bonini has looked hard and long into the eye of Drosophila melanogaster, noting how distinct the organ's structure is from the eye of Homo sapiens but also how similar it is on the molecular level. "All along we've been praying that the fly would be a good model," she says, "and time is showing that it's a much better one than we ever hoped it would be."

-- Peter Nichols

Peter Nichols is the editor of PENN Arts and Sciences.



Greeting cards, sports equipment, and flowers
For Jared Schutz '96, it's one startup after another

With the internet economy turning the usual rules of commerce and stock valuation upside down, it's not surprising to find that one of the most frequently visited Websites, BlueMountain.com, gives away its product.

"Our secret strategy is to spend no money on public relations and no money on ads," says Jared Schutz '96, who runs the Internet side of Blue Mountain Arts, the Boulder, Colorado-based greeting-card company founded by his parents in 1971. To send a Blue Mountain virtual card, a user selects and customizes a design; the company e-mails the recipient with a Web address where he or she can view the card. "Our goal is to continue to grow the user base," says Schutz, sidestepping questions on how, beyond the limited advertising it now accepts, the company's Internet operations will make money. "We don't worry about that," he says.

The idea of a scrappy young Internet entrepreneur who doesn't worry about turning a profit has already become a cliché. But Schutz, unlike many other Web upstarts, has an impressive track record. In high school in La Jolla, California, he traded surplus scrap metal and sold privatization vouchers on the Russian Commodities Exchange. He decided to attend Princeton, attracted by its size, faculty-student interaction, and strong liberal arts curriculum, and it was there that he was introduced to the Internet. "It was an excellent time to form an Internet business," Schutz says. "You didn't need capital, and you could get in on the ground floor of what we thought would be a big business." He and two partners founded American Information Systems, an Internet service provider, and Schutz began to spend his weekends shuttling back and forth between Princeton and AIS headquarters in Chicago.

His travel time increased after he founded Stardot Consulting in Washington, D.C., which advised candidates and organizations on using the Internet as a campaign tool. Meantime, his academic work in the politics department also built on his interest in the Web. Schutz wrote his senior thesis on the effect of the Internet on politics.

Schutz recently sold AIS, Stardot, and another startup he helped found, Sportscape.com, an athletic-goods retailer. Now he devotes most of his time to Blue Mountain and to his newest e-commerce effort, Proflowers.com. The company connects the flower-buying public directly to growers, bringing consumers fresh-cut flowers at a price between 30 percent and 50 percent less than they'd pay a florist. Launched in July 1998, Proflowers recently saw its first $1-million sales month.

 

On to politics

Schutz eventually wants to bow out of the business world and devote his time to public service, but that may be a few startups away. "The unfortunate reality is that money helps in politics," he says. "To have a successful career as a politician, it's useful to have $100 million at one's disposal." Is he there yet? "That will take a few more years," he says, adding that he's still too young to run for Congress.

So far, his political résumé includes involvement in the Democratic Party, a stint as communications director for the Princeton Undergraduate Student Government, and a successful drive to lower the minimum age from 25 to 21 for Boulder City Council members. He says fighting age discrimination is an issue "dear to my heart."

"Like any element over which people don't have control, there's a whole set of assumptions" tied up with age, he says. "They don't necessarily play to your favor." Though he's used to crusading on behalf of the younger generation, he points out that age discrimination cuts both ways -- particularly in the Internet industry, where, he says, "a 25-year-old is often taken more seriously than a 65-year-old."

For now, Schutz is focused on building Proflowers and working at Blue Mountain. While the company is still privately held, he says that "inexpensive capital can be very attractive in growing a business," but won't directly speculate on when, or if, he'll take the company public. And he refuses to be pinned down on much else about the future, either.

"In the Internet space, it's impossible to have any meaningful expectations," he says. "I have no idea what I'll be doing two, five, or 10 years from now."

-- Katherine Hobson '94


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