Among my recent stories, I’m probably most proud of this one. I’m fairly certain Louisville Magazine Editor Bruce Allar had no idea how complex this topic would prove to be when he assigned it. But every new document I read, every new interview I conducted, every new research paper I tackled, opened up something else to explore. It was utterly nerve-wracking, completely engrossing, and entirely rewarding.
I think it’s a pretty good read as well.
Clean Coal? You’re Kidding, right?
Photograph by John Nation
Mike McInnis wears a blue cable-knit sweater zipped to his chin. It’s cold outside The Summit office building on Brownsboro Road, and snow has been falling all day. McInnis looks like he’s trying to warm up after skiing to work.
He will warm up. Get him talking about American energy policy, and he sounds frustrated, incredulous, sarcastic, heated. But we don’t get to that large subject until more than an hour into our conversation. With an air of mild frustration, he explains the intricacies of his business, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rulings, fluctuations in natural gas prices, the unsteady state of the credit markets. All those complexities, intimately bound up in a project he and his partners at The Erora Group have shepherded for 10 years, fail to raise his ire. But the big picture? It gets him steamed.
At the center of the debate is the question: How are we going to get to the middle of this century? How are we going to turn on our lights, make our coffee, watch Real Housewives on big, energy-sucking flatscreen TVs, kill Nazi zombies on our computers, run our air conditioners, freeze our food and thaw it later in the microwave, and, eventually, charge our cars? Where will the energy come from?
For McInnis, and many others, the answer is coal. Forget the green future you’ve been waiting for, where windmills turn sedately against a clear blue sky. Oh, windmills have a role to play, as has solar and geothermal and even nuclear and hydroelectric and algae and weeds. And all those things will probably constitute the full mix of our energy needs sometime in the future. But for the next half-century, many believe, wind turbines, solar panels and other “renewables” won’t even make a dent.
Only coal can carry us to a green future.
Coal, the least green of all fuels, famous for despoiling landscapes, blackening lungs, increasing death rates wherever it’s burned, putting mercury in our fish, acid in our rain and nitrogen oxides in our skies. Coal, a leading culprit in global climate change, spewing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other fuel, where its accumulation triggers ocean acidification, rising sea levels, chaotic weather systems, melting ice caps and a warming planet. Coal: That’s the stuff of our salvation.
Really?
Yeah, really.
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Not everything I write gets a byline. Stories I’ve written for Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for instance, generally aren’t bylined. But a story HHMI published
in the HHMI Bulletin did get a byline. It’s a different kind of piece. I worked with researcher Evan Eichler of the University of Washington to create his first-person story. So I interpret, and then I try to write in his voice. It helps to be the voice of someone who’s very articulate. And his work is utterly cool. I also enjoyed the fact that it was a challenge to explain. His lab is reading the parts of our genome researchers couldn’t get to before. What he’s finding … well, read the story.
Crucibles of Dynamism
We’re accustomed to thinking of evolution moving forward one base pair at a time: A single nucleotide is replaced in the ribbon of our DNA and a gene is gradually transformed from one function to another, or a disease emerges as the gene’s function is perturbed by these small stepwise changes. But there is another, parallel story unfolding within our genes, which, until recently, no one was able to easily read.
To all appearances, it’s a more dramatic tale, with big events and rapid cataclysmic change.
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When all the fighting was over, it seemed most people forgot that the University of Louisville was building a laboratory for some of the world’s most dangerous germs in the middle of suburbia. I took a look at the NIH BioSafety Level 3 laboratory just before it opened, explaining what was going on in the nondescript building on the university’s satellite campus.
Biology’s Bad Boys
Her eyes are hazel. They open doors.
The iris scanning camera doesn’t actually see their color; rather, it compares the unique angles within to a database. Only then can Colleen Jonsson activate the electronic access that lets her inside.
There are five doors, each with special security requirement, between the entrance to the University of Louisville’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory and the room where she leaves street clothes behind in favor of surgical scrubs. She tops the scrubs with a white Tyvek coverall and dons an air-purifying respirator, a hood, double gloves, and special shoes and socks. If the experiment under way is particularly risk, even underwear stays behind. After years of working in such laboratories, Jonsson, director of the Center for Predictive Medicine for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases — of which the laboratory is the major part — rarely wears jewelry. Why put on something you’re only going to take off again in a little while?
This is biology’s inner sanctum, soon to be home to Louisville’s most dangerous inhabitants, lined up in tiny tubes inside locked freezers. There will be bubonic plague, and hantavirus — the respiratory infection that swept through the Four Corners region of the United States in 1993, killing 13. There will be commoners, such as influenza, and exotics, such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which killed nearly 10 percent of its victims in 2003. The number of frozen criminals could increase as new infectious disease emerge, or as their danger as instruments of terror rises.
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I suppose it’s inevitable: Move to Louisville, take an interest in horse racing. These are my first stories on the sport. One makes fun of my ignorance about the Kentucky Derby and is preoccupied with horse sex. The other looks at the perilous economics of thoroughbred racing in the Bluegrass and the policy debate in the state capital of Frankfort.
Take Me Out to the Derby
By Jenni Laidman | May 2010
This horse is known as a Teaser, and that apron isn't for barbecue. It prevents the Teaser from ever satisfying his mounting lust.
Here is what I knew about Thoroughbred racing when I moved to Louisville a little more than two years ago:
It involved horses.
But I’m a Louisvillian now, and I need to get serious. I need to elevate my game if I’m to understand my adopted home, to be one of the people whose eyes fill with tears when the University of Louisville Marching Band strikes up “My Old Kentucky Home,” to develop a taste for bourbon and to acquire a big hat. I want to be one with the Kentucky Derby.
But how?
I cannot put enough emphasis on my ignorance. I did not clearly understand what the word “handicap” meant if it did not pertain to the Americans with Disabilities Act. I was not sure what color “bay” might be, or “chestnut.” Don’t even ask me to find the cannon bone. Or the fetlock. I was clueless, uncertain even of where to begin. So I began at the beginning, so to speak, arriving at Darley America in Lexington before dawn one Wednesday to visit the breeding shed.
Did you know that horses roar? They do.
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Playing for High Stakes
By Jenni Laidman | January 2010
It was the second time Craig Bandoroff felt pummeled by Frankfort. The first was more than 30 years earlier. He was a top jockey in New Jersey when a colt named Old Frankfort tried to jump the inside rail, flipping Bandoroff into the air like an unwilling acrobat,t hen falling atop the young jockey. Bandoroff would never use his right arm again.
Today, Bandoroff is the 54-year-old owner of Denali Stud near Paris, Ky., and he’s worried that his latest blow from Frankfort could be mortal. As he watched on June 22, members of the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee voted 10 to 5 against slot machines for Kentucky racetracks. In a few short minutes, everything he had hoped for withered and died. He was devastated. To his mind, this had been the legislature’s best chance to rescue what he saw as a deeply threatened industry. The Senate left the future of Kentucky horse racing in grave peril, he believed.
He walked to his car alone.
“I don’t think anybody saw me,” he says, “But I was in tears.”
His voice grows sandy with the retelling.
“To think that’s how government works.”
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I often write about plastic surgery for HerScene magazine. This year, I followed a woman through her breast implant surgery.
Diary of a Breast Augmentation
By Jenni Laidman | June 11, 2010
7:20 a.m. Friday, April 2 Imaage Medical Spa
Shay Perna hadn’t slept much last night. Instead, her mind raced. For weeks she’d wondered what if, just moments after the anesthetic took hold, she change her mind but was too doped up to say anything?
But now, walking into the surgery center on New LaGrange Road, groggy and nervous, the 29-year-old Brandenburg, Ky., woman has no doubts. Her heart races, but she is ready. She has thought about this since she was about 20. A petite 5-foot-2 and 103 pounds, Shay has a doll’s proportions — just not a Barbie doll’s. Her flat stomach and trim waist and hips aren’t accompanied by Barbie’s voluptuousness.
That’s about to change.
READ DIARY OF A BREAST AUGMENTATION
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For the second year, HerScene magazine wanted to present a compendium of services of interest to women in Louisville’s sprawling, competitive hospital market. I confess that I sometimes refer to this as the wall-color guide to hospitals, since it’s heavy on aesthetics. The challenge is to blend the superficial assessments with substantive summaries of medical service. This comprehensive review ran in June of 2010.
A Women’s Guide to Louisville Hospitals
Women are the primary decision makers when it comes to health care, and Louisville hospitals are surely keeping us in mind as they give our local health-care market a makeover.
Today, health care is pretty. The dowdy hospital with that odd perfume of humanity and antiseptic cleaners is no more. Even the lobby floor are works of art, to say nothing of the actual art on the walls. And, in Louisville at least, health care is increasingly convenient.
Odds are, skilled medical care is closer to you than ever — especially if you’re in a fast-growing ZIP code where income is higher. But the upgrades are more than window dressing. While conveniences abound, there are also important developments in research and patient care that will affect you and your family for years to come.
What’s Best for Scotty?
By Jenni Laidman | May 2009
In late March, several hundred people crowded around the elephant exhibit at the Louisville Zoo to watch Scotty the African elephant celebrate his second birthday. The youngster marched around the yard while the zoo loudspeaker blared an endless loop of “Baby Elephant Walk.” On command he sat upright and raised a chubby leg; he stood on small table in time-honored circus fashion and posed; he lay down and got back up again. Then he followed two adult elephants to his birthday “cake” of straw and vegetables and occasionally dashed beneath his mom’s trunk to grab a morsel and run away. Meanwhile, the two bigger elephants tore the cake to bits and grabbed most of the good stuff.
Little boosts a zoo’s gate receipts like a new baby, especially among the “charismatic megafauna,” the big animals people love to see. Elephants are as mega as they come, and Scotty is nothing if not charismatic. But these days, the birth of an elephant is about more than annual attendance figures, or even the desire by zoos like Louisville’s to increase the number of homegrown animals so visitors can appreciate their wild counterparts. Instead, elephants are emerging as the newest symbol in the ethical battle over animal captivity. As in other fights over keeping wide-roaming species such as polar bears captive, or caging our closest relatives, the great apes, the argument is emotional and difficult. It asks whether any zoo, even the very best with the most dedicated staff, is capable of raising and providing a proper environment for Scotty and elephants like him. It points to mistakes in the past and problems in the present.
It can make a guy like Dave Campbell, the Louisville Zoo’s elephant-area supervisor, seem like he’s operating int he eye of a hurricane.
READ “WHAT’S BEST FOR SCOTTY?”
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Louisville Magazine decided to publish its first sex issue, and the editor asked me to write about sex toy parties, which are apparently wildly popular in Louisville. What a fun story.
(Sex) Toy Stories
By Jenni Laidman | October 2009
Nicole Cissell draws the curtains in the small but elegant living room. Moments later, through the sheers, I see two police officers approach the front door. I knew this was a little naughty, but really, the police?
It’s a Friday night in late summer, and Cissell had just emptied a gun case onto a table in the living room of a Smoketown home. What in the world will the police think when the door opens? I’m not the only one wondering this, and laughter grows raucous among the women in the room.
Beneath a dazzling chandelier are a dozen festively colored vibrators and dildos that Cissell toted here in her gun case. It’s not illegal. (We’re not in Alabama, for pity sake; it is illegal there.) It’s just a bunch of women attending a version of a Tupperware party that the inventors of multi-level marketing schemes probably didn’t envision.
READ THE REST OF THE (SEX) TOY STORY
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Order From The Court
By Jenni Laidman | March 2009
Frank Mellen climbed into the taxicab in Washington, D.C., and realized he was hearing a familiar voice coming from the radio,
His own.
There was never any question about the importance of what he did that morning. But it took on an air of surreal theater as he settled into the backseat of the cab crawling through the Washington traffic and listened to himself answer questions from justices of the United States Supreme Court.
Kentucky had its share of headline-grabbing lawsuits in the last year, but none drew more attention, or had greater impact, then the one Frank Mellen and Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs colleague Byron Leet pursued for the defense in Washington on Dec. 4, 2006 — the debate over which school Louisvillian Crystal M. Meredith’s son could attend. The question: Could her son, Joshua McDonald, who is white — or any child of any race — be put in a particular school, or kept out of one, because of the color of his skin? Would courts now forbid a practice developed to assure equal education to all children?
That cold and clear-blue morning, Mellen and Leet had their final showdown with another Louisville lawyer, Teddy Gordon — who this time was assisted by counsel from the Bush administration’s solicitor general. Gordon had been picking away at the Jefferson County Public School’s race-conscious student-assignment plan for nearly 10 years.
READ THE REST OF “ORDER FROM THE COURT”
Immune No More
It started with a single case of whooping cough in a student at Freedom Elementary School in Shepherdsville, reported by a doctor to the Bullitt County Health Department in mid-October.
For some it might seem like a call from the past, a sepia-toned dispatch about an antique disease that once felled newsboys in knee britches and girls in sausage curls and pinafores. But to the Bullitt County Health Department and county public schools, a case of pertussis — whooping cough — was anything but quaint.
READ THE REST OF IMMUNE NO MORE
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Before I turned to freelancing, most of my work was as the science writer for the Toledo Blade, writing about a wide variety of issues. What follows are some of the projects I wrote while at the Blade.
The Twilight of the Frogs
The Toledo Blade
EL VALLE DE ANTON, Panama – Kent Bekker of the Toledo Zoo starts his day swinging a makeshift net across damp grass. It’s about 8:30 in the morning, and already, the air is near liquid with humidity.
One doesn’t so much move through the day as swim through it. Nothing dries out. Skin glistens with sweat even when the evening’s mountain breezes make light jackets necessary. Car interiors smell of mildew. An abandoned damp towel sprouts a carpet of mold. A climate that allows a gardener’s dream of lush flowers is the perfect breeding ground for fungi.
It is also the ideal home for a fungus few here have heard of. It’s called chytrid (KIT-rid), or formally Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, and it’s completing a deadly sweep through Central America. It threatens to kill nearly all of Panama’s frogs, as it has in Costa Rica and Mexico before this, and as it is doing on every continent on the planet. It’s why the Toledo Zoo sent Mr. Bekker to Panama. He’s part of a team attempting an unprecedented feat: the rescue of dozens of frog species from extinction.
Mr. Bekker snaps his net through the air as though it were a flag, hoping to dry it out just a bit. It’s a cloth bag, and it sticks to itself. He looks in the plastic cup humming with the insects he’s collected so far. There are not enough to feed all the frogs.
Finding enough frog food, it turns out, is just another crisis, faced like any other critical chore in an unusual project where a mistake could contribute to the extinction of a species.
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When a small group of patients agreed to help researchers determine the safety of a cancer drug, they quickly forgot this was their goal, and instead hoped the monoclonal antibody would cure them of late-stage cancers. Following these incredible women on their journey gave me a chance to delve into the often misunderstood arena of cancer and its treatment.
Working on a Cure: Cancer on Trial
The Toledo Blade
Pat Krzeminski marches into her doctor’s office at the Medical College of Ohio.
Secretaries and nurses eddy around her, snickering as they get a good look at the back of her head. She summons her physician.
Pat’s hair is punk short. Her eyes are wide, with carefully arched eyebrows, and dark liner.
Dr. James Fanning, angular, bearded, and just a little confused by the unexpected visit, answers the call.
“I did something, and you need to know what I did,” Pat tells him. Then she pivots…. READ THE REST OF THE STORY
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While none of us were really even paying attention, our relationship to human reproduction changed entirely. A series I wrote in 2004 attempted to survey the vast changes in baby making and scientific progress.
The Embryonic Revolution:Harnessing the Power of Creation
The Toledo Blade
Alana Saarinen is an adorable, curious, shy, clever, devilish, affectionate girl. In short, a normal 3-year-old.
She may also be entirely new to biology. She may carry DNA from three people.
The cheerful girl in pigtails was born of her parents’ fifth attempt at in vitro fertilization – the meeting of sperm and egg in a laboratory dish, the “birthplace” of more than 1 million children worldwide in the last 26 years.
But Alana is more than a much-treasured personal victory over infertility – long and painfully fought – for Paul and Sharon Saarinen of West Bloomfield, Mich.
She represents a revolution born of the human embryo.
The revolution’s advance is often silent, crystallized within the private decisions of desperate couples and inventive fertility doctors. At the same time, it is a scientific revolution of unusual public prominence, the subject of presidential electioneering, Congressional debates, dire predictions, and … READ THE REST OF THE STORY.
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While habitat loss continues to be the No. 1 threat to species the world over, for primates, the bush meat trade — the sales and consumption of wild animals — is proving a bigger threat. I traveled to Africa in 2000 to tell the story of people trying to save infant gorillas rescued from the trade.
Orphans of the Slaughter
The Toledo Blade
MPASSA, Gabon – The toddler wakes with a start and a scream.
His is a panicked, curdling cry, and Linda Percy has no choice but to hold the infant and wait for the moment to pass. The youngster tries to bury himself in her chest. His arms grasping, his legs pushing, he drives his head into her with desperate force. He’s unconscious in terror.
Every night. Night after night. Every few hours. It’s always the same: the same panicked cry, the same rooting for comfort, the same 18-month-old that will not be consoled.
Could it be memory, Linda wonders as she scoops up a bottle she hopes he’ll accept. This can’t be hunger. More often than not he refuses the milk she prepared for him.
She can’t prove it, but she’s convinced the small gorilla holds a nightmare.
Tormenting him is the memory of the slaughter of his family, the days of starvation that followed, the rope that wore infected ruts into his hips.
Ivindo remembers, Linda believes. She holds the sick youngster tighter and waits for exhaustion to quiet him.
In the tradition of the adventure stories that first revealed Africa to westerners, the continent is gripped by a new tale of man against beast. But this is one never imagined by the big game hunters and swashbuckling explorers who saw themselves conquering an untamable wilderness In this battle, gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, and scores of other species are the ones fighting for survival as traditional hunting practices are perverted into a growing commerce known as the bushmeat trade…..READ THE REST OF THE STORY.
