Every serious movie buff who loved Drishyam has heard the rumor: its plot echoes The Devotion of Suspect X. To my mind, the more interesting question is what Jeethu Joseph did with that inspiration.

The book, on which the movie was based, was written by Japanese author Keigo Higashino. It features Detective Galileo, a physicist‑sleuth who teaches at a fictional elite university in Tokyo and occasionally consults for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police when cases involve scientific puzzles or anything requiring deep analytical reasoning.  Most importantly he can read people. He is to the Tokyo police force what Sherlock Holmes was to Scotland Yard.

Science‑history buffs will recognize that the sleuth’s name is a nod to theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel laureate in 1949. There is even a Chennai connection — there always is in most things I write — the creation of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences was inspired by the Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics in Japan. It’s a reminder of how ideas travel across borders long before films do.

Anyway, who is Detective Galileo up against in this particular case? Tetsuya Ishigami, a high‑school mathematics teacher, is the worthiest of adversaries. A veritable monk, he is moved to help his neighbor, who has accidentally killed her abusive ex‑husband—a newly released convict who was harassing her and her teen daughter. Ishigami gives them ironclad alibis so they can escape any further investigation by the police. Higashino sketches the neighbor lightly, but we sense her desperation; Ishigami fills in the rest with his devotion.

Ishigami, it turns out, is Galileo’s classmate from college. Back then, he was known as Ishigami the Buddha, destined for glory in mathematical research. His professors had said that Ishigami had the kind of first‑rate mind that comes along maybe once in a century—a Srinivasa Ramanujan‑like figure. His mind is wasted; it is wasted in obscurity. The man is also physically strong and practices martial arts at the dojo, a detail that underscores his discipline rather than his aggression.

In Drishyam, the protagonist George Kutty is a self‑made man, an orphan who has not even had a chance to complete primary school. As the owner of a small cable‑television business, he watches movies at work nearly all day. The movie buff has also picked up plenty of practical information from the films. Thanks to all this, and his street smarts, he manages to devise the perfect cover‑up for the inadvertent killing of a voyeuristic teen at the hands of his older daughter. George Kutty’s education is entirely cinematic; if that isn’t a tribute to Indian films, what is?

Unlike Detective Galileo, Ishigami never had time for art—perhaps he has never even been inside a cinema hall. Ishigami the Buddha had planned to devote his life to mathematics, but due to family circumstances, he could not complete his Ph.D. Now he is stuck teaching mathematics at a school where his students couldn’t care less about the subject. The school board wants every student to pass, and so he has to dumb everything down. There was no point in even teaching math at this low level, he thinks. Wasn’t it enough to let the students know “there was this incomprehensible thing out there called mathematics and leave it at that?”

Ishigami has no one in his life. The neighbor, a woman he had come to care about, turns out to be in love with someone else. Ishigami turns himself in so the woman can be free even of the suspicion of guilt. She and her daughter can have a shot at happiness. For a moment, you even feel Ishigami might be better off in jail—freed from that terrible job, alone with his pencil and paper, with time to return to the mathematics he loves deeply.But the neighbor’s teenaged daughter cannot get over the trauma of the murder. The mother too breaks down when she realizes what her benefactor has done and confesses to the police.

Higashino denies his characters even the small mercy of a perfect crime. In the end, the devotion of the mathematician comes to nothing. Both the prodigy and his neighbor go to jail. The book ends with a primal sob of the brilliant man who realizes he had turned into a murderer for nothing.

It is all over, finished. There is no scope for anything more. Nobody is saved.

It is a great novel, but if the writer‑director of Drishyam had stuck to that plot, all we would be left with is an “award‑padam,” as we folks in Madras used to call it back in the day when Doordarshan screened such movies on Sunday afternoons—slow‑moving films critics love but the rest of us would happily avoid. Instead, Jeethu Joseph has given us a Malayalam thriller where the hero and his family kill someone, do the cover‑up, escape legal punishment, and we still root for them. This moral alignment—rooting for the transgressor—is rare in Indian cinema, and Joseph pulls it off with astonishing confidence. The film was remade in four other Indian languages and was a hit in every one of them.

Now Drishyam has spawned an organic sequel. And this may just be the beginning of something, a character says in the movie. The writer says in an interview that he has even thought of the climax of Drishyam 3. But I am not that greedy. Like many others in Madras, I will be happy if Papanasam 2 gets made.

Enough ink has been spilled over Drishyam vs The Devotion of Suspect X. Higashino builds a perfect crime that destroys everyone it touches; Joseph builds a perfect cover‑up that saves the people who matter. One story treats genius as a curse. The other insists it can be a lifeline. That difference — not the plot — is the real leap of imagination.

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The sun can set as late as 8.26 PM in the Boston summer.

That evening my mind refused to wind down well after the darkness had set in. The pandemic had upended so many lives in so many ways – a slightly disrupted circadian rhythm was the very least of it. Perhaps YouTube would do the needful? A thumbnail with a familiar face appeared in the sidebar: Bharathy Bhaskar. Recognizing the ever smiling, sharp‑tongued debater of Tamil network television, I clicked that link.

What I heard was not the voice of rhetoric flourishes and clever takedowns. In a quieter, but no less authoritative voice, she read a short story by Sujatha Rangarajan, a prolific writer whose name is practically a genre in Tamil. The title of that story was Oru Sikkal Illadha Kadhal (An Uncomplicated Romance). The plot involved two friends, residents of a medical college hostel: one, a confident, good-looking woman; the other, a good student who has not yet developed a sense of self-worth.

Immediately, I was transported to Sarayu, the only ladies’ hostel on campus during my college years in IIT, Madras. The incredulity of the less sought-after girl when the watchman announces that she has a visitor, her loneliness, or the fact that she feels like an orphan simply because she is away from home – all of it felt so real. At the height of her despair — almost at the verge of suicide — the budding physician saves another life even with her limited experience. Immediately, she finds her purpose. She has begun to love herself, which Oscar Wilde would have told her is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Sujatha’s addition is that it is the most uncomplicated romance there is.

Somewhere between the watchman announcing a visitor and the plain-looking protagonist realizing that she really did not need the attention of feckless young men – I understood that something unusual was happening.  What had appealed to me was not the bland nostalgia of it. It wasn’t even just the pleasure of hearing, in my mother tongue, a contemporary story I could relate to though yes, there was some of that. Here was the feeling of being read to by someone who took both you and the story seriously.

The Bharathy Bhaskar who appeared in those online storytelling sessions, was quieter, more deliberate, and, to my mind, far more radical than her television debater persona. Then format was deceptively simple. Each session began with a brief author introduction. No long‑winded biography. Just enough context to place the writer in time and space: T. Janakiraman, known as Thi. Ja, English teacher turned All India Radio employee, would have been a hundred that year. R. Chudamani, a pioneering feminist voice, had lived largely as a recluse because of a medical condition. Sujatha Rangarajan, a scriptwriter for Tamil hit films, needed no introduction, but she gave him one anyway, as if to say: even the familiar deserved to be properly seen.

And then she would read. She did not “perform” the story. No exaggerated voices, no theatrical sobs, no winks at the camera. Her laughter was there, but it never drowned out the joke. Her voice tightened at moments of tension, but it did not crack. She refused to compete with the text. Instead, she did something rarer: she trusted the power of literature. That trust was contagious. Listening to her, you began to trust the story too — to stay with it through a meandering opening, to follow it into a small town along the Cauvery, into a second‑class train compartment, into a cramped city hostel. You began to trust yourself as a reader again — even if you could read Tamil prose only haltingly, even though you spoke the language well enough. To me the script itself had become — oh, I will say it — mini jalebis intricate enough to bring on a headache!

Week after week, Bharathy Bhaskar came back with some of the best that Tamil literature had to offer.

One evening, it was Thi. Ja’s Silirpu (Goosebumps) 1953, set in a second‑class compartment on a long‑distance train. A young domestic worker, barely ten, was on her way to Calcutta to care for a judge’s children. The world had not been kind to this girl, a wage earner for her family. But her fellow passengers — strangers bound together for a few hours in that shared space — feel a tug of sympathy. A little boy shyly offers her his prized orange as a parting gift. His father, watching this small act of grace, is moved. When they step off the train, he picks up his son and hugs him close. Listening, I felt my eyes moisten. Didn’t we all, at some level, long for our parents to recognize our hidden — or apparent — good qualities and celebrate us?

Then there was R. Chudamani. The first story of hers that I heard through Bhaskar had all the melodrama of a black‑and‑white Tamil film from the 1960s: two brothers estranged by class, income, and the influence of their wives are reunited by a crisis. Annanin Azhaipu (The older brother’s invite) was a satisfying weepie — the kind of story that leaves you wrung out and oddly cleansed. But the next Chudamani story was something different. Its ending was so out of step with the era in which it was written, I found myself sitting up in bed. In fact, I had to replay the ending a couple of times to make sure I had heard correctly. I was in the presence of a woman who wrote without flinching, and another was unafraid to read a radical story out loud.

What made this a master class in Tamil literary appreciation, for me was this: The woman never told you what to think of a story. Instead, she offered one or two observations — a non‑obvious structural choice, a line of dialogue that revealed more than it said — a quiet act of rebellion tucked into a domestic scene — and then she stepped aside. The story continued to work on you long after the video ended. You found yourself thinking about a ten‑year‑old girl on a train, the contaminated pot of sambar, about two brothers who finally remembered how to be brothers. She was lending her powerful voice to the greats.

Contemporary Tamil literature has sometimes reached the mainstream through cinema. We knew the names of some writers because their stories became films, their dialogues became punchlines, their characters became archetypes. But the work that made them worth adapting to screen or won them invitations to scriptwriting — the short stories, the quiet novels, the experiments that never made it to the screen — could remain scattered, inaccessible, or simply overshadowed. She was leading some of us back to the source. In some cases, like that of Chudamani’s, you do have to wonder why the author’s stories never got a screen adaptation.

For someone like me, whose relationship with Tamil had been shaped by distance — geographical, linguistic, emotional — the reading meant more than I could admit. With Bharathy Bhaskar’s help, I could inhabit Tamil stories as a listener first, and later as a reader.  Moved by her reading, I even began my first translation.

Sometimes, I imagined her in the moment before she hit “record”: a stack of books nearby, a story chosen, a few notes scribbled about the author. The stage lights were off. The auditorium and live applause both absent. All she had was a camera lens and the faith that somewhere, on the other side of it, there were people who wanted to be read to in their own language.

 

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Yesterday, I ran into my professor and we talked about what else but the local IgNobel ceremony — an annual event for us here in Cambridge, MA for 34 years — which will be moving to Europe this fall. My professor mentioned that her husband’s cousin had won the IgNobel in Physics for their paper on Why Pregnant Women Don’t Fall Over.

Immediately, I burst out laughing. Then, I had to go find the Nature research paper where this result had been published. This research is a good example of what the Igs were all about. The committee honored the research because it revealed something quietly profound: pregnancy isn’t just a biological process. It’s a physics problem — and evolution answered it with a cleverly tuned spine. The study is the first of its kind to examine the evolutionary mechanisms that allow women to carry a baby to term, and the way that women’s bodies compensate for increased weight in the abdomen during pregnancy.

—

Pregnancy, for a creature that walks upright, is a physics problem.

Charles Darwin suspected as much when he argued that bipedalism was the defining trait of early humans. Stand on two legs long enough and you begin to appreciate the delicate engineering involved: the elongated lower back, the stack of lumbar vertebrae, the graceful inward curve that keeps the torso balanced over the hips. That curve — the lumbar lordosis — is what lets us move through the world without pitching forward.

But pregnancy threatens to upend that balance. As the fetus grows, the abdomen swells and the body’s center of mass creeps forward, pulling the trunk toward the ground like a weight on a lever. For a biped, that shift is destabilizing. For a pregnant biped, it could be disastrous. And yet human mothers‑to‑be do not topple over. They walk, work, and carry on, often with surprising ease. The question is: how?

A team of researchers — Katherine Whitcome, Liza Shapiro, and Daniel Lieberman — found the answer lay in the design of the spine. After studying 19 pregnant subjects, Whitcome found that the lumbar, or lower back, curve in women extends across three vertebrae, as opposed to just two in men. Their lumbar vertebrae are shaped and angled to create a deeper, more flexible curve — one that increases as pregnancy advances. This extra curvature acts like a counterweight, shifting the upper body back over the hips, neutralizing the forward pull of the fetus. Reinforced joints help distribute the load, sparing the spine from dangerous torque.

The adaptation is not just modern. When the researchers examined fossil vertebrae from Australopithecus, a hominin that lived more than two million years ago, they found the same pattern of female‑specific spinal features. Long before the genus Homo emerged, early bipeds were already solving the mechanical challenge of carrying a pregnancy upright.

It’s a story that begins with Darwin, detours through biomechanics, and ends with a quiet evolutionary triumph: the human spine, tuned over millennia to keep mothers on their feet.

A woman’s body knows how to make room for new life without losing its balance — and there’s a quiet poetry in the fact that a woman scientist uncovered the mechanism behind it.

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April 3, 2004

Fending off annoying birds

Asami Nagai / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

When Kanazawa University chemist Yukio Hirose accepted the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry at Harvard in 2003, he surprised the audience by thanking the pigeons and crows of his hometown. His joke landed beautifully, but the backstory is earnest: decades earlier, he’d wondered why a particular bronze statue in Kanazawa never attracted birds. That old curiosity eventually led him to develop a bird‑repellent bronze alloy, a discovery that became unexpectedly relevant as urban bird problems—and later bird flu—intensified.

Media coverage of his alloy brought a flood of inquiries, including one asking if he’d like to be nominated for the Ig Nobel, a prize that celebrates research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think.” Initially skeptical, Hirose came to appreciate that the award honors practical, public‑minded ingenuity, even when wrapped in humor. His one-minute acceptance speech—complete with a planned $1 tip to the timekeeper—won over the crowd, who laughed at nearly everything he said.

Since winning, Hirose has been inundated with requests from people desperate for ways to keep birds away. He jokes that this sudden fame is the most exhausting part of the honor, but the underlying truth is clear: his quirky line of inquiry turned out to be unexpectedly useful.

Tenacity leads to development

Hirose is not an ornithologist but a material scientist. At age 18, while studying engineering as a first-year student at Kanazawa University, he began wondering how a statue in Kenrokuen, a park near the university back then, managed to remain completely clean of pigeons’ droppings, while nearby trees and other statues were usually painted white with them.

Visiting the park frequently for various reasons, Hirose came to realize that this statue of Prince Yamato Takeru, built in 1880, attracted few, if any, birds. “I used to come to the park to party or nap, and found there were lots of birds perched around there,” Hirose said. “But they always seemed to prefer tree branches to the statue’s head and shoulders, which I found very strange.”

At that time, he did not try to investigate the cause. But he unexpectedly returned to the problem when, as a metal fatigue expert, he was given an opportunity to study the statue’s materials when it was pulled down for repair work in 1989. On the 5.5-meter bronze statue, Hirose found no white splotches, again making him ponder why.

As he investigated the composition of the material, he recalled a statement in the book, Studies in Ancient Technology, by R.J. Forbes. Hirose was responsible for translating Chapter 5, which deals with elements that include antimony and arsenic. The statement he read was about how arsenic is lethal to birds.

The moment Hirose discovered the high content of arsenic in the statue, he was almost positive that this was what was driving the pigeons away.

“Unlike the Yamato Takeru statue, Takamori Saigo’s statue in Ueno Park, Tokyo, is stained badly with droppings,” Hirose said. “The arsenic content in the Saigo statue is 2 percent to 3 percent, while the alloy used in the Yamato Takeru statue contains more than 10 percent arsenic.” In fact, the content is not even. It is 2 percent at the head but reaches as much as 15 percent at the feet. Further research showed that that the high arsenic content helped the bronze alloy melt at 1,000 C, compared to the 1,300 C needed to melt bronze with a 2 percent arsenic content. When the Kanazawa statue was built, around 1880, artisans who had access to only relatively primitive furnaces had no choice but to mix a lot of arsenic with the bronze to be able to create a bronze statue.

Nearly 10 years after making the connection between birds and arsenic, Hirose finally had a chance to implement his theory. About a year ago, Hirose, then the director of his alma mater’s Cooperative Research Center, met with a local businessman who came to see Hirose to ask whether he knew of an effective way to remove sticky flyers from walls and phone booths.

As this businessman turned his back, Hirose saw that his shoulders were dotted with a white substance, which turned out to be bird droppings. As it happened, the man was having a hard time with pigeons that congregated near his office.

By this time, many people had brought the issue of bird droppings to the center, hoping Hirose could offer a solution.

In response, he created copper alloy pieces that had a 10 percent arsenic content that also contained lead and tin as well as other elements. As a solid object, this alloy is perfectly safe. But if burned at higher than 1,000 C, a vapor containing arsenic–lethal, of course–is emitted. In other words, people who happen to inhale the vapor will instantly, in Hirose’s words, “be sent to the next world.” This discourages many town officials who are desperately seeking antibird measures.

“I was approached by Tokyo metropolitan government officials,” Hirose said. “When they learned that a fatal vapor could be created if there was a fire, they became hesitant about using the alloy. They said they couldn’t use it in any populated area, where fires very well could occur.”

Hirose risked his life in attempting to create the alloy. Assisted by one of his former students, he worked in a private lab he built on the land lot he owned, wearing a protective mask and a suit.

Even this precautionary measure, however, didn’t prevent Hirose from sometimes feeling a little queasy.

Having created the bronze, he placed pieces of it in a circle in front of JR Kanazawa Station, where pigeons usually flock.

Hirose videotaped the area around the circle for six hours a day. Not a single pigeon dared to come within a meter of the circle, despite their favorite food being scattered on the ground.

“It was amazing,” he said. “Pigeons squawked at the bronze, kind of like how a woman sniffs at a man she doesn’t like.” After he removed the plates, the birds came back to eat the food.

Next, he placed the bronze on the roofs of factories where numerous crows often gather, as well as in garbage piles and a cowshed. Crows chose to stay away from the metal plates.

Still, he needed to prove the bronze could be used safely. To do so, he chose several goldfish to be his guinea pigs. He left a piece of the bronze in a water tank for a month and kept several goldfish in it for a few more months. The fish all survived.

“The amount of toxic substance that escaped into the water from the bronze was 0.014 milligrams for every liter,” Hirose said. “This figure is far below the nation’s environmental standard of 0.3 milligrams. Even hot water at a nearby spa has a higher arsenic content.” But just to be on the safe side, he tested its safety one more time. “I rubbed the alloy onto some candy and ate it. But nothing serious has happened to me,” Hirose said matter-of-factly.

Arsenic

Although arsenic’s toxicity looms over the story, Hirose insists the alloy’s bird‑repelling power likely comes from subtler forces: its smell, its electromagnetic behavior, or the negative ions it emits. With its unusually high arsenic content plus elements like lead and silicon, the bronze behaves like a semiconductor. When light strikes it, Hirose explains, it generates a faint electric current—something he suspects birds can sense and instinctively avoid.

He also measured roughly 1,000 negative ions per square meter emanating from the alloy. While small amounts of negative ions are often touted as beneficial, Hirose believes the high concentration around the bronze may be aversive to birds.

His curiosity didn’t stop at metals. He requested four captured crows from city workers and spent months experimenting with them in a cage. One unexpected finding: crows dislike blue LED light. When he shone blue light on them, they tried to flee. That observation nudged him toward safer, non‑arsenic bird‑repellent technologies, including a net woven with materials that generate large amounts of negative ions.

Hirose jokes that even with an Ig Nobel Prize, he hasn’t given up on the “real” Nobel. He’s already eyeing other universal human problems—athlete’s foot and balding—with mock confidence. “Whoever finds the ultimate cure will win a Nobel Prize,” he says. “And I’m very close.”

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Assistant Metro Editor, Boston Globe

A live music and cheap beer kind of summer Thursday.

It was after dark and I was standing in a packed Cambridge dive bar. Not any dive bar, mind you. It was the Cantab Lounge, an 87-year-old establishment beloved for its live music and cheap booze.

Last week, surrounded by scores of people waiting for a concert to start, I was trying to get a read on the owner of the place. Why, when COVID shut this dingy bar down, did a successful private equity guy from Concord buy it? What, exactly, was Tim Dibble (below) up to?

The Cantab is not the oldest bar in Cambridge, but it’s old enough that you or someone you know almost certainly has a story about it. A great concert, a drunken night, reading a poem on an open mic.

I remember going there in my mid-20s, listening to wonderfully upbeat, loud brass, my feet sticking to the gross floor. My parents remember going there, too, many decades earlier.

For Dibble, the important part of his Cantab story started in the 1980s, when he was living on Fenno Street in Cambridge, not far from Paddy’s Lunch. He met a woman named Maureen. Their first date was at what’s now called the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. Their next several dates were at the Cantab.

It became their place. They loved listening to musician Little Joe Cook (below), an anchoring Cantab presence, who played several times a week. Sometimes they’d go two nights in a row, hearing him croon the same songs with the same joy.

Time marches on. Tim and Maureen got married, had kids, moved to Concord. Decades passed. And then, during COVID, they saw a story in the Globe: the Cantab was up for sale. Owner Richard “Fitzy” Fitzgerald was selling it. “We’re very much hoping that someone will come forward and keep the place going,” his daughter told the paper in 2020.

Tim and Maureen talked. They had the desire and the means, so they went for it. “It was a really special place for us and we wanted to keep it going,” Tim told me. The trick was doing it in a way that people still felt it was the Cantab, still felt it had the spark that’s carried it through the years.

The process of bringing a dingy dive bar, beloved but not well maintained, into modernity without killing its spirit was no small feat.

Before reopening, they fixed up some essentials, like putting in new floors, connecting the sewage line to the street (it had been linked to the pizza place next door), putting in a modern keg system, and adding in accessible bathrooms and credit card readers. But they left the Christmas lights and Budweiser light fixtures along the bar in the 137-person capacity space upstairs, and the underground nightclub vibe remains in the 100-person space downstairs.

There were inevitable troubles post-COVID shutdown, but by the end of 2021, they got the Cantab back in action. Now, a few years later, it’s humming with a wide variety of music, from country to jazz to dancehall, seven days a week. Poetry readings continue, too.

Kylie Connors, the general manager, told me her bar still has the cheapest beer around, and a great, eclectic variety of musicians coming through, for whom the space isn’t too small or too big.

I pressed Tim on how his private equity experience translates to owning a dive bar. He demurred at first. But eventually he said there’s one striking similarity, and it has to do with Connors: “Hire really good people, and then once you know and trust them, stay out of their way.”

Connors does all the hard stuff, he told me, laughing. He and his wife just come for some shows, like the one I was at last week, where musician Michael Marcagi was playing.

For more than 40 years, Maureen Dibble has loved the Cantab. “I’ve never had a bad night here,” she told me. A bad dive bar beer, yes. But never a bad night.

She reminisced about the late Little Joe Cook, and told me his music was an important enough part of their life that she and Tim have a painting of Cook in their house in Concord.

“Music is good for the soul,” Maureen said, as Marcagi came to the stage.

I stood in the back, feet wonderfully not sticking to the floor, and listened to a band I had never heard of. What a joy to be lost in some great new-to-me tunes.

Marcagi said he felt lucky to be ending pretty much a year and half on tour at the Cantab. “It feels right,” he said, “to be at a sweaty dive bar.”

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“In the 1960s, just as the civil rights movement stepped up its fight for equal rights and turmoil rocked the South, a young physics professor made his own mark on a rapidly changing, yet still stubbornly segregated, part of the nation. Dave Teal ‘S9 did not join the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama, or participate in the first lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Yet, he too heeded the call for equality.

Armed with a Cal tech education, fortified by classes taught by the likes of Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman, Teal embraced a quieter date with destiny, opting to teach physics at a small, historically black college in racially divided Mississippi. “I remember saying to my wife, Nancy, ‘let’s go to Tougaloo,’” a private school located on the 500-acre site of a former plantation in Jackson, the state capital, says Teal. “Maybe we’ll stay five years.” As it turned out, this Caltech- and Harvard-educated physicist would stay on the job for the next 37 years.

Today, as Cal tech and peer institutions struggle to attract more underrepresented minorities into science and engineering, they might gain some insight from the experience of teachers like Teal, who have made it their life’s work to educate minority students for productive careers in those fields. Teal estimates that since the late ’60s when he and a colleague put together Tougaloo’s first stand-alone physics major, the college has graduated about three physics majors most years. Many went on to careers in some aspect of science or engineering, at least 10 of them earning PhDs in physics or related fields.

“So many of our students have been told their whole lives, ‘Well, you’re not going to make it so you might as well not try,’” says Richard McGinnis, a Tougaloo chemistry professor and chair of the college’s natural sciences division. Tougaloo attracted many faculty, Teal notable among them, who were committed to telling students that they could succeed, McGinnis says. “You don’t often see people with his combination of competence and commitment.”

Manifestly modest, Teal doesn’t consider himself a trailblazer. His Tougaloo students confirm that he never acted the part of the crusading educator, either. They describe him as a dedicated teacher whose easygoing demeanor went hand in hand with a love of his subject. “He always seemed to be upbeat. He seemed to get pleasure our of his job and to really care about his students,” says his former student Antonio Oliver, who went on from Tougaloo to earn his doctorate at Cornell and is today a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. “This was a guy who seemed genuinely concerned when his students did not do well on an exam or a homework problem and took a real interest in their welfare outside the classroom. “

Oliver, who took many courses from Teal, recalls how a fellow physics student struggled to attend classes during the day while working nights at a local grocery store. The overscheduled undergrad confided to Oliver that their professor went out of his way to visit him on the job and to ask if there was anything he could do to help lighten his load. Teal’s background, when he found out about it, came as a surprise to Oliver, who grew up in an impoverished Delta region of Mississippi without the benefit of sparkling educational opportunities. “I personally thought it was quite remarkable that someone with Caltech and Harvard on his CV would come to a small HBCU [historically black college or university] in Mississippi and make it home for an entire career. And we all knew that teaching at Tougaloo was no way to become rich, so money was definitely not the motivation.”

FORCES OF CHANGE

Teal himself is quick to say that his choices weren’t necessarily part of any grand plan. But like many students of his generation he was caught up in the great changes that swept the nation in the 1960s. In his case the catalyst was clearly the civil rights movement. Midway through his graduate studies at Harvard, a small army of activists, many of them college kids like himself, began pushing to register black voters in unprecedented numbers in the Deep South.

“When I was living in Cambridge, I read something just about every day in the New York Times about an incident in the South,” says Teal. Those reports included accounts of beatings and killings, jailings of civil rights demonstrators, and church burnings- all amid mounting demands for equal access to public services and an end to segregation. In 1964 came passage of the Civil Rights Act, followed in 1965 by the Voting Rights Act and Freedom Summer, a bold effort to expand black voter registration across the South. At the height of the turmoil, three young activists disappeared; their mutilated bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

For Teal, quietly pursuing his doctorate in Cambridge, these events struck home in a way his physics studies never did. Entering Harvard, he hadn’t been sure what area of physics to pursue. “All the other students exuded so much more confidence-they had their research plans all laid out.” Eventually he found his niche in experimental elementary-particle physics. Latching on to one of the hot research areas of the day, he joined the bubble chamber research group in the physics department, one of several research teams conducting experiments at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator.

In this joint Harvard-MIT project, researchers probed the interaction of high-energy photons with protons. Even as Teal spent long nights measuring tracks on thousands of bubble chamber photographs, he was drawn to the idea of working with young people. “I came upon the opportunity to get involved in tutoring young people, just 10 or 12 years old. I would hop on my motor scooter” and go work with them in Boston’s racially segregated neighborhoods. “I had really begun to feel that serving one’s fellow man in some way was something I hoped I could do.”

In retrospect, those early tutoring experiences foreshadowed Teal’s long career in Tougaloo. So did his evolving religious faith. Teal doesn’t claim to have the answers to why his belief in God came to play such a large role in his life. “I have a lot of unanswered questions but I guess I grew up going to church because of my parents, and a lot of it stuck with me. “

In Cambridge, he began attending services at University Lutheran Church, a progressive, activist-leaning congregation that drew a large portion of its membership from local colleges and universities. Students looking for a feeling of community found it at the church, affectionately known as UnyLu. It was there that Teal first got the notion that he could make a difference in the South. He recalls listening to a harrowing story from a guest speaker from Mississippi.

The pastor told how one recent Sunday, some black students from Tougaloo had come to worship at his all-white church but were barred from entering by ushers. As the shunned students left, they caught sight of a man outside in his parked car. He held a shotgun on his lap, just in case they didn’t get the message. “Hearing that story made an impact on me I’ll never forget,” Teal says today. “Pastor Koons himself was at a loss as to how to handle the situation. We shared in his dismay.”

Soon afterward Teal met an exchange student from Tougaloo who was attending nearby Wellesley College and learned that another friend was heading south to teach political science at a historically black college. His thinking had begun to coalesce. “I felt drawn to the notion of teaching somewhere I could make a difference.” Teal discovered that the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation helped support historically black colleges and universities by funding 25 percent of a teaching intern’s salary. The idea was to lighten a teacher’s load and free up time for developing new programs. As a prospective physics teacher, Teal applied for and was awarded one of the internships.

In the end his choice came down to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, founded by George Washington Carver, or another historically black school, Tougaloo. “Several factors made it quite clear to me where the need was greater,” he says now. A key consideration: Tougaloo had just one physicist on the faculty, and in fact only offered the field as part of a combined math-physics major. “At Tougaloo I saw an opportunity. I didn’t see it as my life’s work. It was more of a situation where I could help, I could contribute.” And the underlying statistics spoke volumes: Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, where nearly 86 percent of nonwhite families lived below the federal poverty line.

Shortly afterward, he proposed marriage to his future wife, Nancy Hartman, whom he had met at UnyLu. To this day Teal isn’t sure which he said first: “Will you marry me?” or “Will you go to Mississippi with me?”

UNEASY NEIGHBORS

Teal remembers that Nancy’s first impression of Tougaloo was that it resembled a summer camp, with a wrought iron gateway just wide enough to let one car in or out, but not two at the same time. And despite its share of towering oaks and quintessential Southern hanging moss, the campus was far from classically picturesque. “There are campuses with well-manicured lawns and well-manicured hedges and pretty flowers in flower beds nicely trimmed. And then there’s Tougaloo, which is none of the above. Tougaloo was not one of those grand old Southern campuses.” The former plantation did have an elegant antebellum-style mansion, which ended up serving as the administrative building for many years, as well as a historic chapel. Beyond that, the campus consisted mostly of a hodgepodge of buildings, surrounded by a combination of lawn, bare ground, and crumbling pavement. Yet Tougaloo’s appearance didn’t faze Teal or his colleagues. “We said, that’s not the important thing. We wanted to say that what matters is the education that happens here, that the interest the faculty have in the students is more important than what the buildings look like.”

As a historically black college, Tougaloo, then as now, primarily attracted African American students long with a smattering of white exchange students and international students. The faculty was about half African American, with the remainder made up of white and international faculty.

By the time Teal arrived to start the fall term of 1965, the forces of change had left their unmistakable mark on Jackson and other communities across the “Jim Crow” South. For many of the local whites, the presence of Tougaloo in their midst symbolized everything they hated about the civil rights movement. As Teal ran errands around town he quickly learned just how unpopular the college had become. “Somehow the question of where I worked became an issue, because Tougaloo College was not looked upon very favorably. ‘That’s just a bunch of Communists, isn’t it?’ they were saying.”

Indeed, John Garner, Teal’s longtime Tougaloo physics colleague, recalls tense days living with his young family on the edge of campus. To protect his baby against stray bullets that occasionally peppered campus buildings on alcohol-fueled Friday and Saturday nights, he installed a quarter inch thick steel plate on his crib.

Within a few months of Teal’s arrival, court-ordered integration swept black K-12 students past angry mobs of white parents, into formerly all-white classrooms. Teal spent a couple of nights as a sentry in the living room of a local black family whose children were among the first students to integrate the local schools. He and a Tougaloo colleague took turns staying awake, listening in the darkened living room for the sound of tires on gravel. A gun lay at the ready, which one of them would fire into the night sky, if necessary, in hopes of preventing a Molotov cocktail from crashing through the window. It never came to that, but for Teal, the experience served to underscore the risks faced by courageous local families.

TEACHING: THE ULTIMATE TEST

In this charged climate, Teal soon found that suspicion and mistrust were not limited to white citizens. As he soon learned, not all Tougaloo students welcomed a man they saw as a Northern liberal come to help them get educated. Many were curious, if not downright skeptical, about his motivations. “Sometimes in those early days students or black faculty would raise the question, not necessarily in a mean way, ‘Why are you here, anyway? Are you a missionary on a do-gooding mission. Will you stay here for a year and then go way and write your book about us?”’

For his part, as a white Northerner thrust into the wholly new role of college professor in the Deep South, Teal didn’t know what to expect from the experience either. But he quickly came to see a large part of his mission as helping students stay in school. Some 40 percent of enrolling students stopped or interrupted their studies, due to financial, personal, or family problems.

In some cases, he and his college colleagues ended up doing more remedial work than he would have preferred. “We were trying to make up for problems that existed for all those long years, especially for the African American students who were underserved in a big way. I practically wept for those who really tried but for whom years of inferior education had taken their toll. “

He saw other students push past shortcomings. And he relished the times he could help truly promising students realize the extent of their potential. One of Teal’s students, the physicist formerly known as James Plummer, spent his childhood moving from one ghetto to another throughout the South. He spent much of his time reading. He recalls that he devoured Alex Haley’s Roots at age 9 and discovered Albert Einstein at 11. Now known as Hakeem Oluseyi, he heads up a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory astrophysics facility wherein he oversees the design, development, and testing of research-grade charge coupled devices (CCDs) and carries out research into the spectroscopic characteristics of supernovae.

His high school’s valedictorian, Oluseyi says he pulled a stint in the Navy before settling at Tougaloo in 1986 and starting classes with Professor Teal. “He was so dedicated to the students that if you didn’t show up to class he would show up at your dorm room. He did it to me once when I went an extremely long time without going to class. “So you see, he had a very hands-on approach. In a very real sense, he would grab you by the ear.”

On another occasion, when a scheduling problem prevented Oluseyi from taking a required quantum mechanics course offered only at another college, Teal agreed to teach him one-on-one. This required his professor to pull together a curriculum tailored specially for one student, says Oluseyi. He also recalls how Teal helped him and many others navigate the unfamiliar waters of finding funding support in higher education.

At Teal’s insistence the financially strapped undergrad attended a career fair that led to his being awarded a fellowship from the National Consortium for Educational Access. “He said, ‘You have to come here and talk to these people. They can give you money.’” This financial support was critical in helping pay for graduate school at Stanford, where Oluseyi earned his PhD in 2000.

Carramah Quiett, who was one of Teal’s students during the 1990s, says that Teal’s dedication, patience, and care for his students are qualities that she has tried to emulate as a high school and college physics and math instructor. “Not only did he teach us how to study physics, he also expressed concern about our well-being,” says Quiett, who completed a masters in physics and was working toward her PhD at Hampton University before recently moving to Idaho with her fiancé. She hopes to pursue research interests in the areas of fluid dynamics and optics.

Since Tougaloo is an undergraduate liberal arts school, Teal’s largest classes were invariably those for the uninitiated, the nonscience majors. He tried to make his Physics 101 survey course for nonmajors fun, and over the years had the satisfaction of seeing it draw 50 or more students each time it was offered. Often, he felt that simple demonstrations and follow-up discussions illustrated basic physics concepts best. “In class, I would just ask question after question after question. ‘As this thing falls let’s name the forces acting on this. ‘” One of his favorite experiments involved passing an electric current between the poles of an electromagnet to demonstrate the force on a current carrying conductor in a magnetic field.

By 1968, he and his colleague John Garner had created a “bare bones” major in physics, which they taught together until 1982, when Garner changed fields. The curriculum included a year of calculus-based general physics with lab; a year each of mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and “modern” physics; plus a semester each of electronics, junior and senior lab, and quantum mechanics. Occasionally, reading and research on selected topics were offered. On top of this, they taught physics for nonscience majors and a year of trig-based general physics. Long hours in the classroom didn’t leave Teal much time for research. (Not known as a research school, Tougaloo was and remains a teaching-first institution.) But through the years, Teal wrestled with the idea that in order to be a physics professor he ought to be doing research. Speaking today, he sounds a little hard on himself. “If I had really wanted to do some research I could have.”

Yet he admits-and his Tougaloo colleagues and students confirm – there was little time and few facilities for demanding research projects. His teaching, augmented by many related activities outside the classroom, typically worked out to about 60 hours a week. “Dave paid a lot of individual attention to students, including long hours puzzling over how best to evaluate and grade exams,” Garner says. “Even though physics is an exact science, when you are grading papers you have to ask yourself, are you grading on the logical thinking skills or just on the answer? ” He also credits his colleague with supporting physics-related clubs and other activities, and with helping students land summer research opportunities around the country.

“Dave’s long hours and dedication were really stunning,” Garner adds. “Tougaloo, for reasons mysterious and wonderful to me, has been able to attract some very highly educated scientists, such as Dave. It’s just a marvel to me.” Tougaloo College has changed over the years, but its mission remains substantially the same. As for its relations with Jackson, Teal says the community disdain that marked his early years on campus has turned into full-fledged support for the college. Countering those critics who claim that in today’s academic milieu, HBCUs are no longer needed, Teal maintains that they deliver a unique service to their largely black student populations. “From what I have seen, colleges like Tougaloo have played an important role, ” he says.

Students find a place where black culture is embraced, they are nurtured and can receive special tutoring services if they need them. “Some students were able to come out of their shell who were extremely unsure of themselves or didn’t really know what they wanted to do when they started college,” Teal says. “If some of those same students had gone to other institutions, maybe they wouldn’t have gone on to graduate schools.”

In 2002 after his 65th birthday, Teal decided it was time to retire. “I was tired . People will ask me, ‘Do you miss being at the college)’ I say ‘I miss the students and I miss the faculty colleagues. But I don’t miss grading homework papers and exams at three o’clock in the morning.’”

RECRUITMENT CHALLENGES Institutions like Tougaloo reside in a separate universe from the Caltech and MITs of the nation. Nevertheless, despite their outstanding facilities and concerted efforts to diversify their student populations, the nation’s top research universities continue to post only modest gains in recruiting black, Latino, and Native American students. Teal doesn’t believe the solution, to the extent that there is one, lies in a single approach, but rather in a time-consuming process that has less to do with funding and facilities than with building relationships. “I think a very specific, pointed, and personal effort might help. “

Recruiters might work through high school counselors and undergraduate advisors to identify those who are interested in and good at math and science and then cultivate them. In his own case, Teal remembers being paid a visit by two Caltech students while he was still in high school. “That had a significant effect on my interest and decision. So do that too, with a focus on minority prospects. ” He figures schools like Cal tech could also participate in as many conferences and recruiting fairs as possible at target schools. Other possibilities are exchange programs akin to a successful long-running alliance that Tougaloo has with Brown University. In some cases, minority students are admitted to top science and engineering schools, only to later leave because they feel culturally or socially isolated.

Obviously, faculty, graduate assistants, and counselors really need to make the effort to keep them,” Teal says, in addition to study groups, student organizations, and support from family and friends. Although the efforts of Teal and teachers like him have enabled many talented minority students to embrace science and engineering careers, he clearly views his own legacy not through the lens of public policy but in terms of the personal impact he has made on individual students’ lives. He is proud of the many students he has kept in touch with over the years.

Among them is Antonio Oliver, who upon arriving at his new job at Sandia Labs, discovered a fellow Tougaloo physics grad working in the next office. Others among Teal’s former students are reaching out to spark young people’s interest in science. At the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Hakeem Oluseyi has gotten involved in area high schools, talking to students about his astrophysics research and the proposed SNAP (SuperNova/Acceleration Probe) mission to investigate “dark energy” and its possible role in accelerating the expansion of the universe. Looking back on his own time at Tougaloo in the late 1980s, Oluseyi says his peers didn’t always appreciate what their professors hoped to help them achieve, and that their dismissive attitude was not helped by the growing conservative climate in America. “The thinking on campus was often, these white guys are out to get some experience and go write a book.” He figures maybe a handful of students a year fully appreciated what Teal was trying to do. “He was fighting the hard fight and he stuck with it.”

Oluseyi will become a physics professor himself in January at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he also will hold a NASA research appointment at the Marshall Space Flight Center. As he embarks on his own career of educating the next generation of physicists, he says he’ll keep his former professor’s commitment to his students and his science in mind.

“Dave Teal?” says Oluseyi. “I think he accomplished what he set out to do.” ”

From a fantastic piece for the Caltech Alum Magazine by Rhonda Hillbery. HarvardPhysicistHCBU

Percy Julian and Soy Chemistry

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