College Talk

Article on the life and work of geneticist Krista Dobi

“When I was in third grade, a parent of one of the other students brought a number of cats to the library on a Saturday and talked about how there are all these different hereditary patterns that contribute to their coat colors and appearance, like spots, stripes, and white paws. I was just hooked because I loved cats, and I said this is what I want to do.”

That’s how Dr. Krista Dobi explains why she became a geneticist. A native of North Brunswick, New Jersey, Dobi received a bachelor of arts from Princeton University and a doctorate in genetics from Harvard. Today she is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Sciences in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College/CUNY.

Despite having had her interest in genetics awakened by cats, the organisms that Dobi studies are fruit flies. “Fruit flies have a really quick life-cycle. Within ten days you can get a new generation. They only have four chromosomes, and that makes them easy to study. My work is on muscle development, so I can see through the embryo and the larvae, and I can get really gorgeous pictures of the development of these organisms,” she explains.

But fruit flies are not the only organism she studies. She also uses yeasts for her research. “My graduate advisor used to say that yeasts are a lot like people in their basic cellular pr

ocesses, how cells make the decision to divide and how they then go on to divide. These are things that yeast cells and our cells share.”

Not long ago people used to talk about “the gene for this or that,” like “the gene for alcoholism,” but things are not so simple. “The gene that is implicated in cystic fibrosis encodes a transporter in the lung that helps to regulate fluid in and out of the lung. So it’s a gene for a transporter, but it’s a mutant version of that gene or what we call an allele (a different form of the same gene) that causes cystic fibrosis,” says Dobi.

Now that we see a number of companies offering to analyze your DNA, one wonders to what extent it makes sense to subject your children to those analyses. “This is something that each family has to decide for themselves, consulting with their physicians. I think going and signing up for a service without having a medical or scientific person to walk you through the data you get back is pret

ty challenging. But I do think it can be a helpful thing to do, particularly if you know that there’s a history of something in your family.”

But it’s not all about genes. The environment also plays a role. “The classic example that we have in fruit flies is the gene for curly. In its wild-type form, you have straight wings, and when it’s mutated, you have curly wings. But even when you have the curly-wing allele, if I keep those flies at a colder temperature, the wings will look straight. The degree to which we see the curly, what we call the “expressivity” of that phenotype or appearance, is completely dependent on temperature.”

When asked why she has concentrated on studying the muscles of fruit flies, she has a very interesting explanation. “What makes the fly great to study is that, in your body, every muscle is a bundle to generate force, but in fruit flies one muscle is one cell. So when we make a genetic change and then look under the microscope and examine those flies on the cellular level, we can see a single cell and really understand the properties of that single cell in a very clear way.”

And fruit flies and humans have more in common than most people think. “One of the genes that my students look at is a gene called runt. In vertebrates, it’s called runx, and runx mutations in people lead to a syndrome called cleidocranial dysplasia, a condition that primarily affects the development of the bones and teeth. These genes are controlled by the same genes that regulate muscle patterning in the fly, and the process that leads to the specification of the muscles in your head and neck area is very similar to the genes that do this in flies,” says Dobi.

But genetics as a science is not the only area of interest for Dobi. Women in science is another of her passions, and the science of heredity has many outstanding examples. “Barbara McClintock made a lot of discoveries, like the ‘jumping genes’ in corn that can move from one part of the DNA to another. This movement can change how the gene is expressed—turned on or off, or expressed high or low. That discovery was originally made in corn, because the kernels are such

a great visual genetic organism to look at.”

Another giant figure was Rosalind Franklin, whose photographs of DNA made a big difference in our understanding of its structure. Yet her contributions were partly dismissed just because she was a woman.

Dobi is working with her students to analyze the mutations that lead to the development of the head in fruit files. “For reasons that I don’t understand, no one has looked at how these genetic factors pattern the head, even though they are shared with the human face and neck. My students and I are characterizing mutations that lead to head formation, and we are taking a real look at how changes in gene expression lead to cellular changes.”

https://aromerojr.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1074.Dobi_.pdf

Dobi Studies, Teaches the Marvels of Genetics

Kang Teaches the Political Economics of the Far East

“All my life North and South Korea have been a divided country. Almost all young people in South Korea have to serve in the military. I felt that I needed to understand what is going on in the world—not only international relations, but political economy and social relations. I tried to figure it out, and that was the motivation. Another thing was my ignorance of international relations, especially political economy.”

That’s how Dr. Myung-koo Kang explains why he became the political economist he is today. After studying international relations at Seoul National University, he received a master’s and a doctoral degree in political science from the University of California at Berkley. Today he is an assistant professor of political science in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences of Baruch College/CUNY.

His three-year military experience at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas was quite dramatic for him. “We had to be on alert 24/7, worried about any kind of sudden attack from the North. Ultimately, you develop a psychological defense mechanism. Anytime something happened in the DMZ, my mother called me and asked, ‘Are you okay?’”

Sometimes it’s all about distance and perceptions. “Seoul is only thirty miles away from the DMZ. The security perception of people living in Seoul is very different from that of the soldiers deployed in the DMZ. Likewise, I see a huge perception gap between the ways people in the United States and in South Korea understand the North Korean missile threat. For people in the United States, it’s quite serious, but among the people of South Korea, the attitude is kind of ‘It’s not a big deal,’” says he.

Kang has studied the economic bubbles that occurred in Japan and China, and one wonders how they compare with each other. “The 1980s Japanese bubble was huge, but they thought it was going to continue forever because their corporate governance, labor relations, and political system are different from those of the U.S., and that created a sense of complacency.”

He believes Chinese policy makers are falling into a similar error and thinks the rise of Chinese debt is alarming. “China is building more debt, but history has shown us that this is not sustainable at all. My biggest concern is that the triggering moment will be when China fully internationalizes its own currency. Because the U.S. dollar is so crucial, they want to catch up to the U.S. dollar or replace U.S. dollar power in the near future. That’s the essence of the Chinese economy’s becoming large: it is mostly through inflation. For that, of course, the Chinese government has to deregulate capital flow. That moment will trigger the popping of the bubble.”

But how about the trade tensions between China and the U.S. that the Trump administration has initiated? Kang is emphatic about it. “I don’t think the current level of the trade conflict between the United States and China will escalate into a full-blown trade war, vested interest between the two is already pretty huge. It’s kind of like a mutual hostage situation. I think the Chinese economy is more volatile, but it is still a mutual hostage situation. If a full-blown trade war does happen, Chinese companies and the Chinese economy will lose a lot. But here in the United States, I think we will lose a lot as well.”

Other issues that affect the region are related to the relations among Asian countries due to history. After all, Korea was colonized—and in many ways brutalized—by Japan for 35 years, a fact that Japan tries to conceal to this day. “I tried to figure out why Japanese leaders don’t apologize for their wrongdoings in the past. If you compare the Japanese case with Germany and its Nazi past, we can observe a huge difference between the two countries. There has not been a significant change in approaches by the leadership in Japan, unfortunately for neighboring countries,” observes Kang.

Part of the problem may be cultural: the Japanese seem to have two different narratives, depending on whether the audience is internal or external. “There is a specific term in Japanese ‘honne,’ which means genuine heart and genuine opinion, while ‘tatemae’ is just a superficial public opinion. In most cases, the Japanese do not reveal their ‘honne,’ their real heart or real intentions or real opinion. In public communications, they just use their ‘tatemae.’ The nuances of the cultural understanding are very complicated because it depends on the context, and it also depends on the interpretation. How to interpret the context differs from one person to another,” says Kang.

Given that the issues of the Korean peninsula and China are today front and center in the news, one wonders how Kang’s students at Baruch College respond to his teachings. “They seem to like the fact that I am from that area, and that I have some specific local knowledge. The students are really inquisitive about my military service. When I’ve taught political economy, I’ve shared my own ignorance when the financial crises happened in 1997. I had absolutely no idea. So, I tried to encourage my students to see that this is fine, that they are still college students, and that you cannot understand the whole world. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed. In a sense, your ignorance is a foundation and a motivation to study further or harder. They are quite inquisitive, for instance, about why I became interested in the financial area or financial crises. I love that in students— that they want to learn more about me and about all sorts of things.”

 

 

PDF Version:

Kang Teaches the Political Economics of the Far East

 

 

Seid Studies Issues of Chinese Culture and Gender

“I am a child of an immigrant from Hong Kong. My grandparents were also Chinese immigrants to the U.S. It is common for the second or third generation to return to the culture, to study the language. I wanted to understand Chinese immigration to the US, and that has always been a very important topic to me as a scholar. Later, I found that I could study literature, film, and media and look at AsianAmerican representation and at the history of how the Chinese immigrated to the U.S.”

That is how Dr. Danielle Seid explains why she has such a diverse academic background. This native of San Diego, California received her bachelor’s in humanities and Chinese from San Diego State University, her master’s in English and Cultural Studies from the University of Hawaii, Mānoa, and her doctorate in English from the University of Oregon. Today she is an assistant professor in the Department of English of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

For Seid, the interest in film and media in general comes from her family roots. “I approach film and media from a cultural studies perspective. For me, film and media are in my DNA. My grandparents spent probably three or four years in the 1950s filming a feature-length documentary entitled ‘Forever Chinatown.’ The film documented ChineseAmerican life in this really important period when the Chinese were finally able to naturalize and actually become citizens. I grew up with that film. That archive, I feel, lives inside of me.”

Seid would also have other experiences as time went by. “When I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, at that time my grandfather had turned to importing films. I would go with my mom to the airport, and we would get the big films, which were very heavy in the big canisters. They were imported from Hong Kong, and they were mostly martial arts films but also melodramas. My grandfather would screen these films for the Chinese-American community in Southern California. As a film scholar, I look back at that. It really taught me how important film is to communities, how it builds communities. People would come, mainly Chinese-Americans, from all over the region to see these films but also to be together. I would spend most of my weekends in the projector’s booth watching these films.”

One wonders whether Chinese-Americans really understand the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S. “In many cases, younger people don’t know about that history. My grandparents immigrated during the time of Chinese exclusion, which began in the 1880s and was extended well into the twentieth century. There were small numbers of a certain class of immigrants who were allowed. My grandparents were filmmakers, so they were very much interested in the Chinese experience. Chinatowns were relatively safe places for Chinese-Americans to live. It was also in response to the pressure that they were kept in one space and confined in one space. That began to shift somewhat in the 1950s and 60s, and the documentary that my grandparents made was from that time period.”

Seid has also studied the cultural aspects of Chinese chefs in this country. “In the last few years, Asian-American male chefs have styled themselves as Asian-American hipsters. My interest in AsianAmerican women performers led me to the corners of the internet, like YouTube and food blogs, where I found these Asian-American anti-hipsters. They are older Asian-American women, who are creating their own cooking shows. They have been kept out of the formal media TV industry. They produce their own content, and they create their own fan bases. They are actually reaching millions of viewers, but they’ve done it in kind of a subversive way.”

On the topic of food and cooking, to what extent have non-Chinese preferences influenced the way Chinese food is prepared in the U.S.? “In the early twentieth century in New York, you could come from uptown and take a tour bus through Chinatown. Chinese food developed to American taste. ChineseAmerican food is not the same thing as Chinese food. In the early twentieth century, the most famous dish was chop-suey. Chop-suey is not a Chinese dish; it was something that was invented in the United States largely to appease the non-Chinese tourists to Chinatown,” says she.

In 2014, Seid published a work of fiction entitled “Suay.” Why would someone who publishes mostly non-fiction venture into fiction? “I actually started as a fiction writer. I considered doing an MFA, but I found that actually I was interested in studying culture, and English allows you to write in different ways. In academic writing, we have disciplinary boundaries. I have been experimenting in my scholarship with some elements of fiction and creative non-fiction, elements of memoir. I’ve incorporated thinking about cultural-memory, personal and family memory, into a piece that I’m working on.”

As a student of sexuality in society, Seid has been watching societal acceptance of rapid changes in that area, particularly when it comes to trans people. “We have gotten to a point where there has been more media attention, more visibility. That can be a little frustrating for trans people, who realize that of course trans people were around before ten years ago, and now we have so much more visibility around the issues. But we still have a very long way to go. With that visibility, one thing that concerns me is we might sort of rest with ‘Okay, we have this visibility, and we have attention on the surface of the issues,’ when underneath there are some serious issues that trans people face simply living and maintaining themselves.”

One also observes generational shifts regarding views on sexuality. “I see that in my classes. So that’s very encouraging. The younger generation definitely has taken up the language, the vocabulary, and the concepts. But as a scholar and teacher who works in queer and trans studies, I want my students also to have a foundation in history, an understanding of the historical struggles of trans people. We have progressed and now have advanced ideas about trans people, but it’s important that we actually understand where we’ve been and how we got here and the challenges we still face moving forward.”

 

 

PDF Version:

Seid Studies Issues of Chinese Culture and Gender

 

Hitchcock Studies the Working Class in Literature, Cinema

“While in college I took a class on literary criticism. That persuaded me that I was actually quite good at reading literature, and that I had more to say about it than anything else. Although I had been interested in literature for some time before I went to college, it was really the college itself that influenced me to study it more deeply.”

That’s how Dr. Peter Hitchcock explains why he chose his academic field. A native of the East End of London, he received his bachelor’s in the arts and humanities from the University of Greenwich in London, a master of arts in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his doctorate in English from the City University of New York. Today he is a professor in the Department of English of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

One of the things that many Americans don’t understand about British society is the concept of class, which is so imbedded in the British psyche. In Hitchcock’s last book, entitled “Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s),” he takes on the very timely subject of globalization, which is being challenged in many different countries. But what motivated him write about this subject?

“Because part of what I do is cultural theory, throughout the book I try to come to grips theoretically with the fact that globalization, which should have been a unifying process, has actually created more fragmentation among workers, both politically and socially.”

One wonders whether the effect of globalization on labor can be put in simple terms. Hitchcock does not think so. “What happens if the factory owner, for instance, decides to move the factory for cheaper labor? There are workers in the space or country where the factory will be built who will benefit from the access to labor and the selling of their labor. But what happens to the workers who are left behind? This is also part of that fragmentation I mentioned,” says he.

A book that Hitchcock co-edited is entitled “The New Public Intellectual,” and in this world where anti-intellectualism has taken root, one wonders to what extent we need to explain to the general public not only what it means to be a public intellectual but also why we need them.

“Certainly, anti-intellectualism has quite a long history in the U.S. The idea behind that book was to think of ways in which the intellectual herself might intercede in what we consider to be national or international conversations without seeming to be merely academic in the negative sense. This is crucial in a time when, given the complexity of some of the issues that people are facing globally, the intellectual herself can act as a conduit between how the world is understood in academe and the public perception both of academe and of the world as a whole,” says he.

Does Hitchcock think that because public higher education is under threat by budget cuts, more people in higher education in this country should consider becoming more public? “I think that is precisely the way we should try to shape the form of the argument and engagement. As long as there is an ivory tower image of what folks do in academia, there will be a separation between creating ideas and actually acting out those ideas in the public realm.”

Another of Hitchcock’s books is entitled “Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe” and deals with a writer who denounced the abuse of the working class in capitalist countries but was not afraid to denounce the abuses of the Soviet Union in politics. “Here is a fellow who writes for communist publications but then sees the Soviet Union up close and sees that all is not well in paradise. There were quite a few intellectuals and writers on the left who were rethinking their political affiliation. I think in spirit he remains until the end of his life a person of the left, but not necessarily of particular political parties.”

Hitchcock has also studied how the film industry has portrayed the working class and, in a society like the British, how even accents define class. “When I was growing up, you could tell whether somebody was born south of the river Thames. But that’s not so easy now. Regarding film representation, the examples in American cinema tend not to be labeled ‘class.’ There are obvious substitute terms, like ‘blue collar,’ for instance. John Sayles’ film ‘Matewan,’ which is about mineworkers, has a definite workingclass inflection, but in general people don’t self-identify as that. There’s a theme that runs through America cinema, but I do think it’s about the culture of class too, and about whether class is part of the national conversation. Maybe that’s begun to change, given the last election, but I still feel that the differences in class analysis and class expression are greater than the similarities at this moment.”

This is interesting because, when Margaret Thatcher was elected, many people from the British working-class labeled her as a traitor because she came from a working family, so one wonders if he sees things like that in this country.

“I think Thatcher’s father owned a grocery store. There was a discussion about being a class-traitor but also about the petit bourgeois, the person who wants to get ahead and actually steps up in class. By the time she became a backbencher in the houses of Parliament, she had been thoroughly enculturated into the ruling class, even though there were occasions when she played the ‘class-card’ in her discussions, like ‘I’m the outsider.’

Our readers can draw their own comparisons with what is going on in this country at the present time.

 

 

PDF Version:

Hitchcock Studies the Working Class in Literature, Cinema

Dr. Swarbrick Works, Studies Environmental Humanities.

“I had the experience of finding a particular professor who really got me to think long and hard about texts like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Those were the experiences that really ignited something for me, and there was no going back. I became really obsessed with literature as a whole. It was much later that I came around to being a specialist in early modern literature.”

That’s the way Dr. Steven Swarbrick explains how he became interested in literature. A native of San Jose, California, he got his bachelor’s from San Francisco State University and his doctorate from Brown University, both in English. Today he is an English professor in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

One of Swarbrick’s latest publications is entitled “What is the Essence of Dust? Climate Tragedy or the Forgetting of Air in Hamlet.” But what is the meaning behind such a title? “I am interested in Hamlet’s obsession with representing earthly matter. Anyone who has taken a high school Shakespeare class knows that Hamlet in that particular play is obsessed with issues of mortality— ‘To be, or not to be?’ A lot of that language is driven by these earthly metaphors, so Hamlet, the speaker, is thinking about the line from Genesis that man is from dust and will return to dust someday. Translating that into Shakespeare’s play, the question becomes: ‘What’s the point of doing anything if man is the quintessence of dust?’ I’m trying to approach this play, which has been written about quite extensively, from the perspective of climate change analysis.”

The power of poetry resides largely in the ability to say many things with few words, and one wonders how long it takes Swarbrick to analyze verses. “In my classes, some of the most successful sessions that we have are when, as a group, we concentrate on just a single passage projected on the board, so that we’re all looking at the same thing. This is to show them that you can derive a lot from very little, and that they need to think not just about what the passage is saying in sum but also about how it’s saying it. That’s when you notice all the differences and nuances in the language. For me, now that I’ve been reading the same text for many years, the fun comes in discovering things that I overlooked the first time around.”

This also means that many people reading the same text can come up with different interpretations, and Swarbrick has seen that happen when teaching John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century epic poem based on the biblical story of the Fall of Man. “In my Milton class, the pleasure and the difficulty of teaching Paradise Lost to a group of students who have never encountered it before is that you want to give them a foundation for understanding the material and a certain coherent sense of some of the arguments and debates surrounding the text. It creates a challenge for a teacher. I imagine this is true for everyone who teaches texts like this one, which seems to generate endless interpretation and analyses,” says Swarbrick.

One also wonders whether his students really have a context that enables them to understand when and why those works of literature were written. “To a certain extent context can limit a student’s (or even a very seasoned scholar’s) engagement with a text, because it prevents you from being open to what is surprising, unconventional, or strange about it. That kind of goes against the context or the cultural norms that you might get from reading the text as well. I try to keep both ends in play when I’m approaching the material and also when I introduce it to students.”

class, geography, and even climate. In ‘Othello,’ you find a consistent dehumanizing language that circles around the character of Othello in particular, in which he is animalized or bestialized throughout the play and to an increasing degree as the tragedy kicks into high gear in that play. I was trying to think about what the relationship is within this period between blackness as it’s conceived in this play and its understanding of human-animal relations.”

So, was Shakespeare humanizing black people or animalizing human beings who happen to have a different skin color? “The argument that I try to put forth in papers is not necessarily a redemptive one. My claim, in other words, is not that Shakespeare the man was out to humanize various individuals, but that what the text itself does is force us to think about the porous relationships between what is considered to be self and other in these plays. For me, that crosses or intersects with racial otherness and human-animal differences as well.”

Some people may ask: What can we really learn by analyzing these texts? What is the practical side of it? Swarbrick has an excellent answer to this question. “That’s a question I think about quite often. I think of my own scholarship as existing within the school that is now called environmental humanities, which, as its title suggests, has an immediate practical element to it. So, for me, what does the study of early-modern literature—not just contemporary literature but these texts that are centuries old now—what do they contribute to an understanding of climate change? Or how do they contribute to questions about sustainability, about what is to be done? I think that what I try to communicate is that studying literature, especially the early-modern period, forces us to think twice and in fact multiple times about what we need, as we do when we talk about nature.”

 

 

 

 

PDF Version:

Swarbrick Works, Studies Environmental Humanities

Load More