Animal Magnetism | AUTISTIC PROFESSOR SEES THE WORLD FROM THE COW'S POINT OF VIEW

tHE FIRST SLIDE IN TEMPLE GRANdin's lecture on farm animal behavior featured a meatpacking plant with a problem: cattle refused to enter the building. "The owners were ready to tear down this facility and totally change it," the Colorado State University animal scientist recounted, until they called on her for help. Grandin took one look at the site and identified the problem. It wasn't the building--it was the American flag that fluttered nearby. Cattle have acute senses of sight and hearing that alert them to potential predators, and the flag frightened them. "There's rapid movement, it's high-contrast,"Grandin told her undergraduate audience, "and it makes a really scary sound--almost like fire."

Grandin, a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of '56 professor, has reshaped livestock handling facilities worldwide; half of all cattle in North America are slaughtered in plants she designed, including ones that supply McDonald's, America's largest buyer of beef. Her insight into animal behavior is thanks to, not despite, having been born with autism, and she's written several books about her experiences, including the 2005 best-seller Animals in Translation, co-authored with Catherine Johnson. During a week on campus in February, Grandin spoke about subjects from career options for people with autism to animal welfare. She'll return annually for the next four years of her five-year professorship.

Grandin's work springs from the idea that people with autism think the way animals do--using images and other sensory information, not language. "My mind is like Google for images," she says. "You put in a key word and it brings up pictures." Autism is a neurological disorder that affects, among other things, the functioning of the brain's frontal lobes, where abstract thought takes place. For Grandin, the condition manifested by age two in a violent temper and delayed speech and social skills. "I'd rip wallpaper off the wall and eat it," she wrote in the London Sunday Times in 2005.

Grandin is also sensitive to sound and touch--a common characteristic of autism. In grade school, class bells sounded "like a dentist's drill," she says, and today she prefers soft clothing such as her signature satin Western shirts. Her sensory amplification resulted in constant anxiety, which she diminished later in life with antidepressants. Like most people with autism, she has trouble navigating social cues; she was fifty when she discovered that people communicate with their eyes.

Grandin overcame these difficulties, she says, thanks to educational intervention. A nanny taught her to enunciate and take turns when she was a child, and in high school a science teacher encouraged her interest in engineering. Given the proper mentoring, children with highfunctioning autism can translate their specialized interests and abilities into successful careers, she says. Grandin's capacity to visualize in three dimensions, for example, helps her to test-run new equipment designs in her mind's eye. Some animals have similar "savant" skills, such as carrier pigeons that return home based on sensory memories of things they see and smell along the way, Grandin says. "Animals notice details that people don't."

Thanks to her unusual insight, she developed livestock equipment that controls animals by triggering their natural behaviors. In conventional facilities, workers often have to force cattle to move by shouting at them or shocking them with electric prods. But most cattle walk quickly and calmly through Grandin's curved chutes, which take advantage of the animals' tendency to move in a circle when they graze. She's proudest of her design for a high-speed conveyor belt, called a center-track restrainer. It transports live animals faster and with less stress than conventional methods, such as shackling them by the back hooves and hanging them upside down or dragging them across the slaughterhouse floor.

Some small-scale facilities resist Grandin's innovations. But the larger meat producers have embraced her work, because gentle handling in well-designed facilities improves efficiency and maintains good meat quality. Stressed animals pose a greater threat to livestock workers and fall more frequently. That means bruised beef that can't be sold at top dollar, and stress hormones that turn pork pale and mushy. "She basically took what was an inefficient plant in the old days and helped create the equipment that allows the well-run large meat plants as we know them today," says Joe Regenstein '65, MS '66, a food science professor who has collaborated with Grandin.

Her more humane facilities have also helped the meat industry respond to the concerns inherent in animal slaughter. This has been true especially since 1999, when McDonald's, under pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, hired Grandin to audit the welfare of the animals slaughtered in its suppliers' facilities. She came up with a simple scoring system that has since become the industry standard. While some animalrights groups laud her work, others point out its paradox: her efficiencies have enabled the meat industry to kill more animals than ever before. "She is working with the animals' natures," says Gene Bauston, MPS '96, president and cofounder of Farm Sanctuary, a farm animal protection organization based in Watkins Glen,New York. "But slaughtering animals and treating them as commodities denies them their most fundamental nature: their desire to live."

Grandin, who eats meat, contends that livestock wouldn't exist if humans hadn't bred them, so we bear responsibility for their welfare. And Nature isn't as kind. "I've gone out to ranches and seen cattle that have had big patches of hide stripped off by coyotes, and they were still alive," she says. "I feel very strongly that we've got to give them a decent life."

-- Susan Kelley

Tall Order | "PEAK BAGGER" KEVIN FLYNN '81, MS '85, SEEKS OUT THE WORLD'S HIGHEST POINTS

kEVIN FLYNN '81, MS '85, HAS HAD a couple of Mount Everests in his life. One, metaphorically, was the notion of him ever attending an Ivy League school after graduating in the bottom 20 percent of his high school class in Rochester, New York. But after straightening himself out at Finger Lakes Community College, he earned a degree in environmental education (and later a master's in communication) on the Hill. "That was a big deal," he says, "and I felt really good about doing that."

Same goes for his conquest of the other Everest.

Come mid-November, when he plans to make his way up Australia's Mount Kosciuszko, Flynn will own a place among an elite list of mountaineers who have climbed each of the Seven Summits (the highest point on each continent). But his trek toward the top of the world began with a much easier ascension, a scramble to the top of 4,960-foot Mount Haystack in the Adirondacks when he was eighteen. "My parents were never outdoorsy--they were Holiday Inn types--so that was an entirely new experience," says the fortynine- year-old Flynn, who is part owner of Martino Flynn, an integrated marketing communications firm outside of Rochester. "From then on, I was hooked."

There followed a series of greater hills to climb. First, he became an Adirondack Forty-Sixer, climbing each of the region's 4,000-foot-plus peaks. Then he trekked to the top of windy Mount Washington in New Hampshire, his first experience with crampons and an ice axe and the thrill of a wintry ascent to an inhospitable summit. Finally, there came an assault on Alaska's 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in 1992, an attempt that proved unsuccessful when the weather didn't cooperate. The following year, he tried again, this time summiting North America's highest mountain.

Fewer than 120 people have managed the Seven Summits feat since 1985, when Texas businessman Dick Bass became the first to do it. Although Flynn gradually began crossing the fabled seven off his todo list--19,340-foot Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 1998; 22,831-foot Aconcagua in Argentina in 2001; 18,513-foot Elbrus in Russia in 2003--he never expected to complete the task. "It always seemed too audacious," he explains, "just because there was Everest, and I never thought I could do that."

Until he did--barely. After an unsuccessful attempt two years earlier, Flynn reached the rooftop of the world, 29,035 feet up, on May 15, 2004. It was the payoff for months of training and more than fifty days of climbing from camp to camp to acclimatize to the altitude. During the grueling thirteen-hour "summit run," he came within a whisker of being forced to turn back. And when he finally reached the peak, he stayed for just ten minutes.

"I would have liked to have spent more time, but I wasn't feeling great, and it was late in the day," Flynn recalls. "I knew I had to get down, so there was no joy for me." As he wrote in his self-published memoir, Mt. Everest: Confessions of an Amateur Peak Bagger, "People would ask me, ‘What's it like to stand on the summit of Everest?' I wouldn't know. When I got to the top, I sat down." And for good reason. Flynn's health declined rapidly during the slow, perilous descent. By the time he arrived at his base camp two days later, doctors told him that he had a fever, pneumonia, and possibly a dash of HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema). He was eventually evacuated by helicopter to Kathmandu.

The possibility of death is unavoidable when tackling the world's most imposing peaks. Flynn's first attempt at McKinley came just a month after eleven people had died on the mountain. Near the top of Aconcagua, he found a frozen body while digging around for his gear cache. And during his first attempt of Everest, he descended the hazardous Lhotse Face minutes after a British climber had plummeted to his death there. But according to Flynn, the fear keeps him alert--and safe. "I think you have to have your eyes open," he says. "It's easy to say, ‘Oh, it could never happen to me.' But I think it just helps you to make better, smarter decisions."

Not only is climbing dangerous, it can get expensive. The tab for Flynn's two Everest treks came to nearly $40,000 each (one-fourth of which went to the Nepalese government). And last December, it cost him about $30,000 (most of it airfare from Chile) to reach his sixth summit: 16,067- foot Vinson Massif in Antarctica, where the temperature dipped to forty below zero and the environment was, Flynn says, "as close as you can come to leaving the planet without leaving the planet."

Flynn is grateful that his advertising firm is successful enough to give him the financial means to pursue his passion, and that his wife, Maggie (an Adirondack Forty-Sixer herself), has been steadfast in her emotional support--FWA (Full Wife Approval), he calls it. Indeed, Flynn revels in the fact that the seventh of his seven summits, Australia's Kosciuszko, is a relatively simple 7,310-foot day hike--a pleasant change from his other death-defying ascents into thin air. That means this time he can take Maggie with him.

He figures he owes her.

--Brad Herzog '90

Face Value | FOR TODAY'S STUDENTS--AND A FEW OTHERS--FACEBOOK HAS CHANGED THE WAY TO KEEP IN TOUCH

oN OCTOBER 25, 2005, JOSH KIEM '78 went where few men and women of his generation have gone before: Facebook.com, the online social networking website that is now a fixture of American college life. Kiem created a simple autobiographical profile, listing essentials like his hometown (Park Ridge, Illinois) and major (operations research and engineering) and including a recent photo. But unlike the undergrads who use Facebook to post snapshots, see what their friends are doing tonight, and generally procrastinate, Kiem joined to keep track of his daughter, Maddie, who went off to the University of Illinois this past fall. "I wanted to see what she was up to and have another connection with her," he says.

Kiem, a program manager at Motorola, may be the rare middle-ager on the Facebook rolls, but he is not alone. The college phenomenon that is Facebook also includes recent grads who keep their accounts active after graduation and older alumni who are discovering that its value as a social networking tool extends offcampus. Some faculty and staff hold Facebook accounts as well, among them Cornell's new president, David Skorton, who joined as University of Iowa president (and has more than 4,000 names on his friends list).

Launched by a Harvard student in the spring of 2004, Facebook quickly spread throughout the Ivy League and beyond; the service now boasts more than 6 million members, many of whom check the site several times a day. Like the paper "pig books" once handed out to incoming freshmen, it was originally designed to help introduce classmates to each other. Members create a profile by posting photos of themselves and filling in information on their major, hometown, and favorite music and movies. But unlike the facebooks of old, the site can be updated regularly, and users can also view entries at other schools, essentially creating a vast inter- and intra-college network that allows friends to keep track of one another effortlessly.

Perhaps a little too effortlessly: many parents and administrators worry that users are unwittingly opening themselves up to a host of security issues by revealing their personal lives online. The online social networking site MySpace.com, which boasts more than 60 million mostly younger users and is one of the most popular sites on the Web, has been a focus of such concerns since last March, when a thirty-nine-year-old man was arrested for having sexual relations with a fourteenyear- old girl he met via the site.

But Facebook's college-based audience is much smaller than that of MySpace, and it offers a number of privacy features that might deter online predators. To join, members are required to have a working dot-edu e-mail address and their profiles can initially be fully viewed only by other students at their school. Students from other colleges must ask to be added to the friends list of a person who attends elsewhere before being granted access, so a Columbia student would have to be accepted as a friend by a Cornell student before being able to see that student's profile. Additionally,members can (but rarely do) choose not to reveal their profiles to anyone they haven't identified as a friend, essentially blocking strangers from viewing their information.

For alumni, many of whom move to different states or lose touch with classmates after graduation, reuniting online via Facebook can make more sense than plying the deeper waters of the larger networking sites. "I saw the potential it gave me to keep in contact with people I met at Cornell," says Andy Goldin '03, "and I discovered that I could also find people from my past who had been long lost." Lauren Moran Matzke '98 had a similar motivation when she decided to join last summer. While few of her classmates are on Facebook, Matzke still finds the site a "great way to keep people up to date, communicate in a fun way, and just know what is going on with people that you may not necessarily keep in frequent contact with over time."

Like Josh Kiem, Syl Tang '94 initially joined to keep in touch with a younger family member--in her case her brother, an active member of the Facebook community who attended Harvard. But while Tang found the site useful for contacting her brother while he was away, she doesn't think that Facebook is an effective replacement for a standard alumni network. "It's missing some of the elements that alumni usually look for," she says. "If it had more professional networking, it would be more interesting." For that, Tang recommends TheSquare.com, another online community that offers membership to students and alumni of selected schools and also provides career and dating networking.

Alumni face a few roadblocks before invading the world of Facebook. Many don't have the requisite cornell.edu e-mail account, although the University will provide one to alumni as a forwarding address. Recent grads can also run into trouble when they go to graduate school and have to set up a new account. "I do wish it had the functionality to add additional schools," says Matzke, who currently attends Florida State University as a graduate student.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle is that alumni who didn't come of age in the Facebook era might not know the site exists. "If Facebook could come to Reunion, that would be great," suggests Tahl Ben-Yehuda Saidel '92, who joined to keep in touch with younger friends but was disappointed to find few of her classmates. (At the moment, only five members of the Class of 1992 are listed.) There are no plans to invite the site or integrate Facebook into the existing alumni infrastructure, according to the Office of Alumni Affairs, but Facebook's effectiveness as a supplement to the University's official efforts is clear, says Goldin. "The ease and availability of information is fantastic, and it's always at your fingertips," he says. "The website is very casual and could potentially foster more networking among alums."

With or without the University's blessing, current students say that they will continue to use the site after they receive their diplomas. "I plan on using Facebook to check on everyone and to keep in contact with people from the other side of the country," says Mary Moore '06, who expects to move to Seattle this May. "You can get updates without even having to speak to the person. It's instant gratification."

--Jill Weiskopf '06

Triple Threat | AN ACADEMIC ALL-STAR FIELDS A NATIONAL SCIENCE MAGAZINE

double-majoring in economics and molecular and cell biology would be enough work for most students, but not Kevin Hwang '07. When he's not studying inflation rates or peering into a microscope, Hwang devotes most of his time to the Triple Helix, the national undergraduate science organization he founded in 2004. The group publishes a bi-annual academic journal, available both in print and online (www.thetriplehelix.org), that focuses on the intersection of science and law, taking an interdisciplinary approach to such topics as medical ethics, college drug use, and evolution. "Scientific issues don't operate in a vacuum anymore," says Hwang. "You can't just do research in a lab, come up with a scientific result, and expect it to make a difference in the world. There are all kinds of things that are going to impact it."

Hwang started the Triple Helix magazine to mend what he saw as a rift between students in the sciences and the humanities. Soon, undergraduates from a wide array of majors--including English, government, business, marketing, and economics-- became involved, and Hwang found that friends at other schools were also interested in the group's interdisciplinary approach to scientific issues. Now, just fifteen months later, the Triple Helix has become a nationwide network with fourteen chapters, each with its own independent publication, at such universities as Penn, Berkeley, and Stanford. "When I first came up with the idea to expand nationally, everyone told me--even my mom told me--that it was impossible," says Hwang. Similar national nonprofits at universities generally have a full-time adult staff to help run the organization, but Hwang thought he could do it just with students. "I'm kind of a dreamer in some sense--I'm kind of an optimist--so I decided to try it out."

Now the Triple Helix is beginning to expand internationally, with chapters forming at Oxford, the University of Singapore, and Australia's Melbourne University. It's a formidable job for founder and CEO Hwang, but one that has not been without its rewards: in February, he was named to the All-USA College Academic Team by USA Today. "Sometimes I have to pry myself away from doing Triple Helix stuff to do my homework," admits Hwang, who also serves as vice president of the Undergraduate Society for Intellectual Property and treasurer of his fraternity, Pi Delta Psi. He doesn't seem to mind having to divide his time. "I really enjoy the research that I'm doing, the activities, and my fraternity," he says. "I think that if you find your real passion and your real interest, you'll find the time to make it happen."

--Matt Berical