Cancer Crusader
OBG Management hailed Philip DiSaia ’59 as one of two or three modern-day doctors who have had the greatest impact on gynecologic oncology. “Women with one of the gynecologic cancers, as well as physicians who care for them, owe much to Phil DiSaia,” wrote the magazine in November. DiSaia, the Dorothy Marsh Chair in Reproductive Biology at U.C.Irvine, has spent the past thirty years trying to better understand cancers of the female reproductive track.
Conductor Cupid
Cincinnatti Pops conductor Erich Kunzel ’60 A.M. led the Buffalo (N.Y.) Philharmonic Orchestra in a Valentine’s Day concert. The program featured such varied love songs as Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On,” Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” and selections from Verdi’s La Traviata. While pop music can be romantic, he told the Buffalo News in February, opera belongs on every Valentine’s Day program. “Every opera has a love story,” he says.
Staying Alive
Through leukemia and a spinal-cord injury, J. Gibson Henderson ’66 fought to stay alive. Now, he wants a normal life. "I want to go to movies and have a wheelchair-accessible space available where I can sit next to my wife," he wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March. He opposes Congressional and courtroom threats to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Back, Back, Back When
When Chris Berman ’77 quit his job to join a nascent sports cable network, he had nothing to lose: “I was twenty-four, single, with long hair and a Luis Tiant Fu Manchu mustache,” he told the Richmond Times Dispatch in August. “There were about seventy of us, kind of like infantry in a nuclear war wondering if we could make it or whether we would become a parking lot.” That network – ESPN – just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and Berman is still a sportscaster there.
Cultivating Money
In December the New York Times profiled Conrad Herrmann ’82, lead manager of the $1.58 billion Franklin California Growth Fund, which focuses on California companies. “We read local newspapers in California and socialize and interact with people who might be employed in the companies in our universe,” he told the newspaper. The Times wrote that for Herrmann, “cultivating his own backyard has paid off.” The fund has returned 29.2 percent a year, on average, in the past three years, compared with 22.5 percent for its peers.
Marching to a Different Beat
While his high-school friends were playing rock and roll, violinist Scott Metcalfe ’85 fell in love with the music of another era. “I was always drawn to early music, Baroque music, and 17th-century music,” he told the Boston Globe in October. “Those were the days when early music was considered a countercultural thing.” He is now director of three Boston-area music groups: Blue Heron Renaissance Choir, Convivium Musicum, and the Cambridge Bach Ensemble.
Family Values
Julie Warner ’87 is basking in the spotlight of the small screen. She plays Danni Lipton in the new CBS drama Family Law. Speaking to the Gannett News Service in October, she said that when her baby was born two years ago, she thought she would look for comedy acting: a part in a sitcom, she said, has a taping schedule with a rhythm much closer to a “real job, where you get to come home at night.” Then Family Law came along. “The script was so strong that I couldn’t resist,” she said.
Just Like You and Me
For Rory Kennedy ’91, making documentary films is a way to access cultures that feel different from the life most of us are accustomed to. “Then you identify and think, ‘Wow, I’ve been through those – everybody I know has gone through those – the exact same emotions, the exact same things. They’re just like you and me,” she told the New York Times in November. Her documentary American Hollow, a portrait of an Irish-American family in Kentucky, premiered on HBO in November.
