Bonobo Business

Do you know what a bonobo is?

Only about 10% of people do, according to Duke evolutionary anthropology professor Brian Hare. By comparison, roughly 90% of people know what a gorilla is.

Bonobos have many remarkable qualities, including the fact they “are the only really peaceful ape,” according to Hare. “They don’t kill each other.” Bonobos are more closely related to humans than any other kind of ape or monkey. However, bonobos are frequently hunted for pets and for bushmeat.

Hare gave the bonobo primer to introduce renowned conservationist Claudine Andre, widely known as the Jane Goodall for bonobos. Andre spoke as part of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology's Lemur Center's Primate Palooza event.

“Let me bring you in my country,” Andre began. She then described the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the only country bonobos call home.

When Andre and her husband lived in the Congo in the early 90s, their town was looted. Many shops and homes were destroyed, but Andre decided to stay. Someone asked her to visit the local zoo and, says Andre, “I opened the door and my life changed.” She found over 200 animals -- lions, bears, chimps. And no food. “I said to my husband, we have to do something. I have to try to save the zoo.”

Andre managed to find food for the animals and she saved the zoo animals, including a baby bonobo named Mikeno. Eventually, more and more bonobos found their way into her care, and Andre expanded her efforts to protect them.

She discovered that education was her most effective tool. At first, poor orphans who lived in the zoo were very rude to the animals. But with Andre’s positive example, the children grew to respect the animals. Andre has built a bonobo sanctuary, Lola ya Bonobo, which is visited by 30,000 children a year.

Bonobos are only found in the Congo, and Andre has successfully established this as a national point of pride. Awareness about the importance of bonobos is spreading; this year, Andre received 50 bonobos from people who bought them as pets and were convinced by area children that they had made a mistake.

“The education is worth it. I’m sure of this.”

Caring for so many animals is not an easy task. Andre has returned some to the wild, and says that it is very difficult to do. Certain guidelines must be followed, and she wants to make sure that the animals are happy in their new surroundings. She maintains that communication with surrounding people is critical.

“It is 25% about the animal and 75% about contact with the local population.” Andre had to meet with traditional chiefs and ask them not to hunt in the areas where bonobos are reintroduced, in return for help for their villages.

Andre described how it felt to return one of her bonobos to the wild: “It was a fantastic moment for me. So many emotions.” She likened it to a father walking his daughter down the aisle.

Andre and her organization decided not to use collars to track the released bonobos because they are heavy and can get caught on branches. Instead, trackers sit below the nests night and day and monitor the bonobos’ movements from tree to tree.

Currently, sanctuary visitors do not have many opportunities to observe the animals. Andre eventually hopes to purchase a small island, “a new sanctuary where people can go around and see the bonobos.” Bonobos are becoming recognized as an important part of Congolese culture and biodiversity, and it is in large part because of Andre’s efforts.

“I’m so proud to be a symbol of peace for the people,” Andre said.

Hide and Seek in the Open Sea

Duke biologist Sonke Johnson has made many trips underwater to study aquatic organisms. The direct observations enable his research, but he laments that any observation - whether via submersible, diving, or otherwise - causes some disturbance that impedes observation of normal behavior. At worst, with a schoolbus-sized submersible, “you film responses of stark terror,” Johnsen said.

Johnsen’s lecture, April 2, was given in memoriam of Dr. Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, the pioneering physiologist who discovered, among other things, the function of a camel’s hump for storing water and energy. (You may have seen the statue of him with a camel near Bio Sci.)

Johnsen equated trawling, another research method, to “flying over London with a grappling hook and trying to determine the behavior of a London gentleman from what you catch. You can get some information from this, but it’s very limited.”

Blue water diving, sans submersible, is less disruptive, but “you’re left studying the slow and the dumb.”

Johnsen has also spent time researching the ecological pressures (namely predators) that cause ocean organisms to look one way or another. These organisms live in an environment where there is nowhere to hide, and where successful camouflage ensures survival.

“Predation in the open ocean is, even by predation standards, pretty brutal,” Johnsen said.

Johnsen described four modes of camouflage used by ocean organisms:

1. transparency


2. cryptic coloration


3. mirroring


4. counterillumination (“hiding yourself with lights”)

Transparency
Transparency is a very common adaptation in the ocean, Johnsen said, but there are strings attached. “The fundamental trick these animals have to solve is how not to scatter light.” Transparent organisms must be extremely flat, because if their bodies give light a chance to scatter (even at a cellular level), they will appear opaque-- and thus vulnerable to predators.

Unfortunately, a flat body is not the only problem transparent animals have to solve. In order for eyes to work, they must have pigment to absorb light. Thus, they must be visible-- unless the organism can find another solution. Some organisms spread out the eye to present less of a target to predators and others compact their retinas (at a great cost to function).

Transparent stomachs also can be troublesome, Johnsen said. Even transparent animals will become opaque when chewed, and perhaps colorful. “You’ll need an opaque gut, otherwise you’ll light up like a Christmas tree when you’re digesting your food.” Some organisms address this problem by making their gut as small as possible, or by resorting to a liquid diet.

Cryptic Coloration
According to Johnsen, “something that is ridiculously colorful on land could actually be ridiculously cryptic underwater.” Organisms’ coloring also depends greatly on where they live in the water column. “As you go deeper, some of the blue light is actually converted into red light,” due to Raman scattering. For that reason, many abyssal creatures are either transparent, red, or both.

Mirroring
“The oceanic light field is fairly symmetrical. Turn around, and you’ll see the same amount of light.” Mirroring takes advantage of this, and works by effectively showing a representation of what should be at a particular spot (if the organism were not). “It’s not lost on nature that this works really well.”

Johnsen tried to evaluate whether mirroring or coloration was a better protection from predators, depending on the effectiveness of each in different environments (coastal vs. oceanic water, noon vs. sunset, different depths). He found that in general, mirroring was more successful because it was more robust, but that coloring was fine if the organism tended to stay in the same spot.

Counterillumination
Some deep-sea organisms hide themselves from predators below with bioluminescence (creating their own light). These organisms can replicate light that is the same intensity of daylight, and thus trick predators into thinking they aren’t there.

Mining On a Whole New Level

When one normally pictures wildlife conservation, protection of tigers, pandas and gorillas may come to mind. But what about alviniconcha, or “hairy snails”?

Alvinicocha live near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, where temperatures can range from 300-400 C over the course of a few meters. Hot water flowing from the vents contains high levels of dissolved minerals, which precipitate out when exposed to cold sea floor temperatures. Some companies are seeking to mine these deposits, raising brand new environmental concerns: What kind of life exists at hydrothermal vents? And how would these organisms and population structures be affected by mining?

Tom Schultz, Marine Lab professor and director of the Marine Conservation Molecular Facility, has been investigating these questions with his research team, comprised of Cindy Van Dover, Jens Carlsson, Andrew Thaler, Kevin Zelnio, Rebecca Jones and Pen Hsing.

“Hydrothermal vents are teeming oases of life,” Schultz said at a Genomes@4 lecture last Wednesday, sponsored by the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.

Far out of reach of sunlight, organisms living in and around hydrothermal vents rely on chemosynthesis (energy from chemicals) rather than photosynthesis (energy from sunlight). Hairy snails, shrimp, crabs, tubeworms and many many kinds of bacteria call this extreme environment home.

Shultz’ team collected water samples to determine the microbial water diversity and found an astonishing 18,000 species of bacteria-- and that’s a conservative estimate. “We probably got about half of what species were present,” Schultz said. “It’s amazing to me.”

There are some difficulties involved in sampling because, as Schultz put it, “you can’t just go in your backyard to collect data.”

Schultz’ team worked with Nautilus Minerals, Inc. to gather the data. Complex robotics are used to collect samples from the sea floor. According to Schultz, the costs of operating underwater are made up for by a higher concentration of minerals: 10x higher than typical land deposits.

From the data, Schultz was able to conclude that populations living on or in hydrothermal vents do not seem small or fragmented (and thus vulnerable to extinction if mining were to occur). Furthermore, hydrothermal vents are prone to sudden eruption events that would disrupt the population as much as mining; organisms living near vents must necessarily be adaptable to perturbation.

But one major concern is the threat to biodiversity and the loss of undiscovered species. Schultz’ team happened upon several new species during the course of their research, and untold more remain undiscovered. Hopefully future research will reveal some of the secrets kept by the deep blue sea.

What Are Scientists Made Of?

Last Thursday, the Duke Career Center, the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & and Policy (IGSP) and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) sponsored a screening of the documentary “Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist,” the story of three PHD candidates working to establish their careers in a Columbia University lab. The students are working to isolate proteins and determine their structures using X-ray crystallography, a difficult technique that requires a lot of luck.

The documentary, filmed over the course of three years, captures the heartbreaking failure that can follow months of work, as well as the surprising triumph that can result from a breakthrough. Each of the three students has their own reason for being there, and each approach their research in a different way. (Click here to read a review)

At the beginning of the movie, lab director Larry Shapiro somewhat controversially says that “one of the best things you can do as a scientist is suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). You become obsessed with a problem and can’t stop working on it until you find your answer.”

However, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, director of Duke’s Center for Science Education, argues that “you don’t have to be OCD or obsessed to love what you’re doing, you just have to have passion for it.”

Schwartz-Bloom was one of six panelists who shared their thoughts with the audience after the movie.

Grad student Vincent Chen was impressed with the film’s accuracy “in terms of the ups and downs in science. You have a lot of failures, and very few successes.”

Grad student Cynthia Tedore disagreed. “I didn’t see the repeated failure as accurate from my point of view. In any field, it’s bad to pursue one project with a small chance of succeeding. It’s better to pursue several.”

A member of the audience commented that, based on her experience in an X-ray crystallography lab, she thought the filmmakers did a good job. “I was touched by everything that happened. There are upsides and downsides. X-ray crystallography is very different from other fields, so [the movie] might not reflect what happens in other labs.”

Schwartz-Bloom said that the movie made her nervous with its emphasis on hard labor with a small chance of success. “A lot of kids today don’t go into science because they think it’s ‘too hard.’ Even people with some passion for it decide that they don’t want to do it.” She worried that the movie would only encourage this sentiment.

Fortunately, not everyone was so discouraged. My bio major friend told me that, despite the grim portrayal, she had not been dissuaded from her goal to be a scientist.

At the end of the discussion, the panelists offered their advice for aspiring researchers like my friend.

“Sometimes it is important to know when to quit, when a problem is impossible to solve. Otherwise, you can trash your entire career.” -- post-doc Rebekah Fleming

“Be a sponge. Take in everything you can, because you don’t know when you’ll need it in the future.” -- Schwartz-Bloom

“Don’t be afraid to find out what your weaknesses are, and how to fix them.” -- Tedore

“Science should be fun. If you’re doing it for your boyfriend or for your parents, you can do it for a while, but eventually it’ll break your heart.” -- panel moderator, professor Mohamed Noor of the Biology Department

Blogging from Antarctica (we wish!)

What if you lost the roof over your head? It'd probably be a pretty significant change in your lifestyle.

If you were an organism living on the bottom of the sea under the massive Larsen Ice Shelf of Antarctica, this would be more than a rhetorical question.

Duke Graduate Student David Honig is on a ship just off the ice shelf right now with a team that is exploring those questions.

All sorts of critters have lived in the lightless environment below the shelf for millennia, if not eons, making their living on energy sources other than sunlight, namely methane that seeps from the ocean floor. But the Larsen shelf is breaking apart and calving like crazy, exposing huge new areas of this delicate ecosystem to sunlight for the first time in a very long time.

What happens next?

Tune in to the Deep Sea News blog and follow along with David for the next two months as the team tries to find out.

Conservation Research Explores Uncharted Territory

Five to seven hours by bus, and up to three days by canoe. Not your average commute, but that’s how long it took for Duke undergraduate Varsha Vijay to reach the site of her research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, January through August of this year. Vijay would stay with the Waorani people in that region for one to three weeks at a time.

“They’re known as the fiercest tribe of the Amazon. It’s not hard to believe. But to me, they were very welcoming,” Vijay said.

Her research culminated with a co-authored paper released a few weeks ago: Ecuador's Yasuní Biosphere Reserve: a brief modern history and conservation challenges (Finer, Vijay, Ponce, Jenkins, & Kahn, 2009). The paper brings together a wealth of information about biological, social, and political issues pertaining to the area.

Vijay’s route to this village and research subject started with an interest in the relationship between the environment and health. After taking professor Stuart Pimm’s class sophomore year (Preserving the Diversity of Life), she asked him to be her advisor.

“I was pretty certain I wanted to visit these interesting places, but I didn’t know how to get there,” Vijay said.

Pimm put her in touch with then-PhD student Luke Dollar, who was doing research in Madagascar. Vijay conducted biological surveys and learned about people’s perceptions of and connections with the environment.

While she enjoyed the experience, “it sparked a wanderlust in me. I wanted to go somewhere else.”

In the summer of 2008, Vijay ventured to Ecuador with a fellow undergraduate. She discovered something surprising about the scientific process there.

“My impression was that a lot of researchers were going for data collection and disappearing. They never asked the natives. Investigating the native community is a really important part of doing scientific research in highly biodiverse areas -- these areas support very unique communities of people, who themselves display an extraordinary knowledge of the environment around them. To study the environment without involving these people is kind of nonsensical.”

Following that experience, Vijay returned to the states and worked for an organization in Washington, Save America's Forests, where she met paper co-author Matt Finer. Both had a common interest in Ecuador and wanted to know more.

Unfortunately, “there wasn’t any resource we could turn to. We needed more background information just to do our own projects,” Vijay said. “We thought, if that background is lacking, let’s just create it ourselves.”

With support from Pimm’s lab and other Duke funding, Vijay went back to Ecuador. She overcame significant linguistic and cultural barriers and created a second family there.

“At one point, I stopped seeing their actions as strange and it became more mundane. I must have really adjusted,” Vijay said. “Ceremonially, they are nude. They eat monkey, tapir and anaconda. I was raised in a vegetarian home, so I eased myself into it.

“There’s a difference between living in an agrarian, sedentary society and a hunter-gatherer society. They can walk forever. Their knowledge of the jungle and their ease within it still amazes me. There’s one type of knowledge that you can gain in school, and there’s a whole other type that they have. They have an innate knowledge of what’s around that no amount of schooling would allow me to gain.”

Vijay believes her immersive experience gave the data another dimension. “To study conservation, you have to put it in the context of health and well-being. In some senses, it’s super multi-disciplinary, going back to anthropology and backing it up with scientific data.”

One of Vijay’s most important discoveries was how the Waorani’s idea of health encompasses the environment. For them, environmental factors such as scarcity of food and water, bad weather or poor hunting exert a sizable influence on everyday well-being.

Vijay has some advice for the idealistic adventurers of the future. “People who are idealistic have a great chance to impact the world, but you have to strike a balance between dreaming and being practical. Don’t be so set in your idea-- you don’t have enough information to make perfect projects.”

“Let your heartstrings be pulled, but don’t lose your focus. Know the things you are good at and passionate about. Foster that in yourself.”

Starvation Induced Arrest in Worms- Interview with an IGSP Fellow

Duke sophomore Ilka Felsen did not want to do summer school, but instead really wanted to put what she learned in class to practical use. "I came into the experience wondering how long does it take to answer a question in science. Like, why do we need 10 weeks to answer a question that doesn't even look that complicated?"

Ilka was one among the 15 students selected as IGSP (Institute of Genome Sciences & Policy) summer fellows. An Evolutionary Anthropology major and a Dance minor, her project involved starving 1 mm worms and seeing what happened over a ten week period.

Her research project was "The role of TGF-beta and insulin pathways in C. elegans L1 arrest and recovery." Her mentor was Dr. Ryan Baugh, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology.

"In simple terms, our research involved looking at C.elegans (nematodes/worms).

We wanted to explore the worms' response to starvation, and control the nutritional factors within the worms to see which genes were involved in the process," explains Ilka. "We wanted to identify which pathways are involved in starvation induced arrest, and to what extent."

Nematodes go into two reversible stages like hibernation if they are starved. If you starve them at an L1 larvae stage, they stop growing and can survive just like that, with an increased resistance to stress.

But the amazing thing is that once you give them food again, they will start again from where they stopped, as if a machine was restarted. "Worms can survive by eating a hard cuticle for almost four months."

"We knew that 2 pathways are involved in starvation induced arrest- the Insulin pathway and the TGF-beta (Transforming Growth Factor-beta) pathway. The main purpose was to understand to what extent the TGF-beta pathway was involved."

"I had seven different strains of worms, where one was the wild type while six had mutations. I starved each worm and analyzed how long they could survive over time. Through a variety of experiments and Micro X-ray experiments we found the TGF-beta pathway is involved."

The interesting part is that this kind of arrest creates hope for age-stagnation in humans too.

"I now understand how research in science is conducted at a professional level. It is a lot about taking big risks, as you never know to what extent your research is going to contribute to science."

She notes that research is a lot of thinking, as one needs to correlate a lot of things and scientifically and experimentally prove every single result.

"This was a wonderful experience for me. It was great interacting with my mentor, professors and other scientists who were doing really cool research. However, from this research experience, I also learned that pottery lessons are not science! And flies are really annoying to work with!"

So what are her future plans? "I am pre-health, and I probably want to pursue physical therapy as a career. Apart from many great things I take back from this summer fellowship, I figured out a simple cardinal rule for scientific research-- there is absolutely no room for mistakes!"

Hardware or Software?

Never mind nature versus nurture, the real question we should be asking about human origins is "hardware or software?" argues Duke biologist Greg Wray.

Wray gave a pizza lunch seminar at Sigma Xi's headquarters in the research triangle on Wednesday to share his view that biology's fixation on the "hardware," the coding sequences of DNA that carry blueprints for specific proteins, has obscured the more interesting story, the regulatory sequences, or "software" that tell those coding sequences when, where and how to take action.

"The diversity of life is magical. It's wonderful. It's why I'm a biologist," Wray said. "But we don't really know how it came about."

Recent science on these regulatory regions of the genome is revealing two things: 1. a bewildering complexity of genetic regulators and on-off switches that we never new existed, and 2. quite a bit of evidence that selection acts more strongly on regulatory sequences than on coding sequences.

"The regulatory regions are the fine-tuning dials of evolution," Wray said.

The most obvious example of this is staring us in the face, Wray said. The DNA of humans and chimpanzees is only about 1 - 2 percent different. Granted, 2 percent of 3 billion letters of code can be a lot of information, but aren't the differences between our species more profound than 2 percent?

Wray's cart-tipping act is making some fun waves in the science community. (see Science Magazine, Aug. 8, 2008). And, fresh off the triumphant publication of the complete sea urchin genome (no, really!), watch for Wray soon in landmark papers about malaria resistance and the size of the human brain.

Modeling a B Cell Flash Mob

Thomas Kepler, Director of Duke's Laboratory of Computational Immunology, sure doesn't sound like a physicist, but he is, or rather was. At Friday's Visualization Friday Forum, Kepler shared his group's latest work on modeling immune system behavior in a session called "Vaccines (the Movie)."

It's a collaboration within the Human Vaccine Institute that pulls together statistics and math, computer science, and visualization technology with colleagues from Duke, UC Irvine, Emory and the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease, a part of the NIH.

The immune system might be thought of as an organ, with several types of specialized cells working together -- but it moves. "That's the coolest thing!" Kepler says. Immune cells flow through the body, and aggregate at the scene of trouble as needed, forming "a semi-solid organ."

After walking the group through some immune system 101 (the macrophage's connected to the dendrite; the dendrite's connected to the T cell; the T cell's connected to the B cell…), Kepler narrowed his focus to the flash mob of B cells that gather in the lymph node to educate each other about an invader. The goal is to understand how B cells and T cells get organized into these tight aggregations inside the lymph, called germinal centers, and figure out ways vaccines might optimize their performance.

(SEE MOVIE: from NIAID, showing B Cells (red) moving throughout a lattice of collagen fibers within the lymph tissue.)

Kepler's group is combining the latest cellular imagery with mathematical models of lymph tissue to better understand how these cells become organized to then go out to the site of infection and wage a carefully calibrated battle against the invaders.

The ultimate goal is to develop swift and effective vaccines with minimal side effects.

Science that breaks the pieces down and figures them out individually has brought this far, Kepler says, but now it's time for the modelers and biostatisticians to try to put the pieces back together and figure how they work in a dynamic system. "So far, we still have a long way to go."

While, On The Other Hand...

Many molecules in biology come in either left- or right-handed -- so-called "chiral" -- forms. But scientists were surprised to learn from a 1999 report in the research journal Science that electrons, in special circumstances, might move at different rates through those mirror-image structures.

Those "special circumstances" involve using circularly polarized light to get the electrons moving through chiral molecules via the photoelectric effect. Circularly polarized light can be said to rotate in space something like planets orbiting a sun. But how that made electrons behave unevenly remained "a mystery for nearly a decade," said Duke chemistry professor David Beratan. "Existing theory really wasn't up to the task of explaining this lack of symmetry."

Beratan teamed up with an international group of scholars, including two Duke colleagues, to answer that question in a December, 2008 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. Those results were also recently reviewed in a Perspective commentary in March 13 issue of Science.

Experimentalists had found uneven results both when either polarization of light or the handedness of molecules were reversed, he noted.

Could all this theorizing lead to practical applications? Perhaps, Beratan said. "All proteins, all DNA, almost all amino acids, and many small natural products produced by biological systems, have this handedness. Maybe biology is using some of these effects as it pushes electrons around. So we may be able to use some of these effects to diagnose or to control reaction mechanisms."

Conference tackles environmental issues

“Global warming was quaint,” according to one speaker at Friday’s “World in Conflict” conference, held at Duke’s French Family Science Center. He meant that global warming was only the start of the various environmental problems that will soon plague our planet.

These problems were the focus of the conference, which dealt with the issues of water, energy, and biodiversity specifically. Each was the subject of separate expert lectures and discussion periods.

The water panel included Dr. Avner Vengosh (Nicholas School), Dr. Martin Doyle (UNC-CH), and Dr. Chris Knightes (EPA), moderated by Dr. Peter G. McCornick (Nicholas School). Each gave a 20-minute talk about subjects ranging from American river management and mercury pollution to water supply disputes in the Gaza strip.

The biodiversity panel included Dr. Wallace J. Nichols (Ocean Revolution), Felipe Carazo (the Nature Conservancy), and Michael Totten (Conservation International) [see his presentation on SlideShare], moderated by Dr. Randall A. Kramer (Nicholas School). These three speakers focused on the current state of the natural world, the success of current conservation efforts, and the way forward.

The energy panel included Bill Powers (Border Power Plant Working Group), Sheri Willoughby (World Wildlife Fund), and Evie Zambetakis (the Brookings Institution), moderated by Dr. Dalia Patino-Echeverri (Nicholas School). This panel discussed local and renewable energy sources, both their benefits and deficits.

The conference also featured keynote speaker Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute and author of several books. Following a short introduction by Dr. Emily Klein, Safina lectured about the immense impact humans have had on the world’s oceans.

“Every place people have gone, they have changed the ocean.”

The problem, Safina says, is that people “don’t think of fish as wildlife.” When the oceans span the majority of our planet, it doesn’t seem like anything could harm them. But the vast interconnectedness of the world’s oceans make them especially vulnerable to change. Today, many ocean organisms are suffering in light of overharvesting, ocean acidification, habitat damage, and invasive species.

Safina grew up by the ocean, and says he witnessed the decline of marine animal populations firsthand. This loss is what drove him to devote his life to ocean conservation.

“It’s okay to use the ocean-- it’s not okay to use it up,” Safina said. “This is not the relationship with the world that we want, but it is the relationship that we have.”



In spite of humanity’s devastating impact, Safina emphasized that the ocean can recover-- if the right actions are taken. This spirit was emblematic of the entire conference.

“Don’t ask yourself whether you should be optimistic or pessimistic. Just be inspired, and ask yourself how can we all use our individual talents to make things better?”

Noor Medals at Evolution Olympiad

Duke's Mohamed Noor, a self-described "evolutionary geneticist" was honored in London yesterday by the Linnean Society with the prestigious and exceedingly rare Darwin-Wallace Medal for his work on speciation.

Noor, 38, was chosen to speak briefly on behalf of the dozen honorees, which included the late Stephen Jay Gould and the late John Maynard-Smith, Rosemary and Peter Grant of Galapagos finch fame, Lynn Margulis, and Noor's friend and collaborator Allen Orr. The last time they handed these out was 1958.

No video is available, but Mohamed did snap off and send a few cell phone pictures for us. He reports that his talk was well-received, in part because he spoke at half the speed of his usual auctioneer delivery.

Monday at 4:30 in BioSci 111, the Biology Department is hosting "Noorfest" to welcome our hero back to Durham.

From Claire Rawlinson's Facebook Page -

Jo Felsenstein, Robert Maynard Smith, Nick Barton, Mohamed Noor (photos), Linda Partridge, Mark Chase, Rosemary Grant, Peter Grant, Lynn Margulis, Allen Orr, James Mallet, Bryan Clarke, David Cutler