WPI Daily Herd: France's Let's Pix to investigate Robert Harvey's "Miralin"

French TV at Library
Posted April 21, 2015 in "Gordon Library"

French television visits Gordon Library, shoots segment on Robert Harvey Collection

Producer Julia Montfort and journalist Guy Lagache of Paris-based production company Let’s Pix speak with Jess Colati (center) at the Gordon Library about WPI’s extensive Robert J. Harvey collection.

“Success” and “failure” are two labels we often hear in various contexts. Both are loaded terms, intensely subjective, and, very often, interdependent.

Serial entrepreneur and WPI alum Robert Harvey (PhD ’70) experienced both—and, more important, learned from both.

One of his deemed “failures,” an artificial sweetener called Miralin that he attempted to bring to market in the 1970s is to be the subject of an upcoming French investigative documentary.

Earlier this month, a film crew from the Paris-based production company Let’s Pix spent a day at the Gordon Library, culling through WPI’s extensive Robert J. Harvey collection and shooting segments for the film.

“They were so excited when we opened the boxes—’This is what we’ve been looking for!’” recalls Jess Colati, the library’s assistant director of curation, preservation, and archives.

The roughly 45-minute documentary, hosted by French journalist Guy Lagache, is still in production and is expected to air as part of a larger 90-minute piece later this year, according to Colati. The core focus will be on Harvey’s development and marketing of Miralin, what he deemed a “miracle fruit” natural sweetener, which never came to market because it was ultimately denied FDA approval.

Harvey, a Pittsburgh native, West Point graduate, and Korean War veteran, received his PhD in biomedical engineering from WPI in 1970 (WPI boasted one of the few biomedical programs in the country at the time). Beyond his development of Miralin—the subject of his thesis—he also designed the first nuclear-powered artificial heart, which he received a patent for in 1968. The latter took up the bulk of his career; he co-founded the Thoratec Corp. in California, whose Ventricular Assist Device was implanted in patients awaiting heart transplants.

After his retirement in 1996, Harvey returned to WPI to serve as an entrepreneur-in-residence, teaching a course in business that dissected his successful and not-so-successful endeavors. “He had a lot of connections to WPI over a 40-year period,” Colati says.

Harvey’s collection, which was donated after his death in 2012 by his son, Brian D. Harvey, and is permanently organized and housed in the library’s Fellman Dickens Reading Room, is partly digitized and includes extensive records of his entrepreneurial pursuits, papers, theses, lab reports, company records, promotional materials, articles, correspondence, and photographs. According to Colati, it is one of roughly 70 personal papers collections at the library.

“It’s a trove of records related to really what we’d call ‘startups’ today,” she says. “Here was a man who was successful and at times unsuccessful in business. He clearly had some interesting ideas and innovations.”

Colati says she first received contact from Let’s Pix’s researcher-producer Julia Montfort last fall. She was told they were looking for locations that were “key to the Miralin story.”

They arranged to arrive on campus on April 6, and spent about 12 hours in the archives, poring over and filming digitized and as-yet-to-be digitized materials, including Harvey’s papers, FDA reports, early promotional paraphernalia, lab reports, and photographs of greenhouses where the actual “miracle fruit” was being grown.

The goal was to have host Lagache “discover the records, get those moments on film,” Colati explains. “It was a dual purpose of filming and discovering additional information.”

The intrigue is ultimately in Miralin’s demise. Harvey founded the Miralin company to test and market the product, and initially it was supported by the FDA because it was all-natural, says Colati. However, as it proved to be more and more successful, the process lagged; the FDA began to require significantly more testing than it initially indicated would be required, indicating that there might have been some backdoor lobbying or pressure from other artificial sweetener and sugar industry interests, she says.

Before folding the company, Harvey wrote in correspondence about how he was feeling pressured and being “unduly targeted,” says Colati. “He was suggesting that there’s something amiss at the FDA.”

After their visit to WPI, the Let’s Pix crew headed to Washington, D.C., to speak with FDA representatives, and planned to make a few other stops in the states for interviews and research. In the meantime, until the documentary airs, the collection is open to anyone looking to find out more about this unique and innovative WPI alum.

“He had some interesting vision, and he was able to act on it,” says Colati. “He was clearly a very dedicated person—he clearly wanted to help people.”

- BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link. 

WPI Daily Herd: Restoring a Masterpiece

Restoration of Adam
Posted on March 26, 2015 in "Students"

WPI student and professor assist Metropolitan Museum of Art in restoration of 500-year-old sculpture of Adam

It seemed a catastrophe. A classic, priceless piece of art and history nearly demolished.

A little after closing time on a Sunday in October 2002, a plywood pedestal supporting a life-size Renaissance-era marble statue of Adam collapsed, toppling the sculpture by Tullio Lombardo. It shattered into hundreds of fragments, an essential 500-year-old crime scene scattering the floor of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But hope, patience and meticulous contemplation eventually prevailed.

Dozens of experts from a variety of disciplines came together to accomplish the painstaking, 12-year-long task of literally piecing the artwork back together.

Among them was WPI civil engineering graduate student Jessica Rosewitz, under the tutelage of her thesis advisor, assistant professor Nima Rahbar.

“The great part of engineering,” Rosewitz says, “is the combination of mechanics of materials and design theory, and the ability to adapt these sciences to any situation.”

In her case, that meant performing what’s known as finite element analysis. The computational method simulated physical load tests (that is, applying pressure, observing, and measuring response) on 8-inch-tall, 6-inch-diameter marble cores. The cores had been cut at 45-degree angles, drilled and then pinned back together, with a half-dozen different pinning materials assessed.

The simulations used the same dimensions as physical tests, whose results were used to validate Rosewitz’s results.

But beyond matching simulations to physical tests, she explained, the goal was to gain a deeper understanding of failure mechanisms inherent in using a pin to secure two halves of stone together, and to answer the question of whether different pins would cause damage to marble when placed under pressure.

Ultimately, researchers came to the conclusion that fiberglass pins caused the least damage; in the end they were used in both of the statue’s ankles and its left knee, according to materials from the Met, whose conservators documented the entire process.

As Rosewitz notes, using engineering helped develop a deeper understanding of this particular project’s failure mechanisms. That is, “internal densification damage by compression and splitting by tension in the marble around the pin hole,” she explains, “and that a weaker pin such as fiberglass is a better choice than the traditional steel pin.”

The statue depicts “the first man,” as described in the Bible, naked but for a fig leaf, left arm holding aloft an apple, right arm subtly rested on a tree trunk. It was crafted by Lombardo for the tomb of Andrea Vendramin, who served as doge, or chief magistrate, of Venice in the 1470s.

In its unfortunate collapse, it split into 28 larger fragments and hundreds of smaller bits and shards; according to the Met, those were plotted on a grid and photographed, then the statue was reconstructed from the bottom up using 3-D imaging, pins, and specially designed, reversible adhesives. Once assembled, it was cleared of built-up dirt and cosmetically fixed, then returned to public view on Nov. 11.

“It was impressive to say the least,” Rosewitz says of the rehabilitated sculpture, which she viewed in person along with Rahbar in December. During that trip, she also presented her preliminary results to lead members of the restoration team, who, she says, were pleased with her work.

She began working on the project in the summer of 2014, following her first semester back to school after seven years working in consultant bridge design. She is basing her master of science thesis on the project.

In addition to learning that simulations are highly dependent on many variables, Rosewitz says that she also recognized there’s a strong need for more engineers in historic preservation.

“The conservators have taught me that it is worth asking the question ‘What was the artist’s intent?’ she says. “In their case it was used to decide whether to restore the statue or leave it broken. I believe this question can be applied to an engineering situation, and especially can assist architects and engineers to work better together.”

- BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link.

Photo credits:

Preparing to attach the head to the torso, (Left to right) Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas P. Campbell with Conservators Michael Morris, Carolyn Riccardelli, and Lawrence Becker. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph Studio/Christopher Heins.

Tullio Lombardo (1455-1532) marble sculpture of Adam 1490-95, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph Studio/Joseph Coscia, Jr.

WPI Daily Herd: Dr. Who, Upstream Color and Doing the Right Thing

Budding Journalists
Posted April 2, 2015 in "Students"

Two WPI students among Worcester’s budding writers published in The Worcester Journal

Alexandra D’Ordine ’17 is an unabashed, self-described “Whovian”–that is, she “absolutely loves” the enduring television show “Doctor Who.”

On the air for more than five decades in numerous iterations, she acknowledges its “endearing cheesiness,” but also points out how universal and influential it is.

“The stories have a deeper meaning if you’re willing to look for it, yet it’s entertaining on the surface,” she says.

The 19-year-old biochemistry and professional writing major expounds on the show’s history, impact on popular culture, and universality at length in her well-researched article “The Doctor Is In” in the latest edition of the online literary magazine, The Worcester Journal. Launched in September by WPI instructor and prolific writer James Dempsey, it provides a showcase for budding young writers from greater Worcester.

D’Ordine and Warren “Michael” Singh ’17 represent WPI’s writing talent in the magazine’s second edition.

Singh, a chemical engineering major, contributed two critical essays to the Journal–one a review of the complex and existential 2013 film Upstream Color, the other an analysis of James Stein’s The Right Decision, a self-help book of sorts based on decision theory.
“Really, what appealed to me was that it seemed like an outlet for writing that didn’t fit into what is usually accessible to students on campus,” Singh, who enjoys writing but acknowledges that he doesn’t always have the “focus or intellectual impetus” to sit down and do so, says of contributing to the Journal. “That is, it wasn’t campus newspaper writing, which didn’t interest me in the slightest—and it wasn’t classroom writing, which meant that I could think about things to write about and just go for them at my own pace.”

D’Ordine, meanwhile, who has taken Dempsey’s Introduction to Journalism course, applauded the Journal’s diverse nature.

“I thought it was a good idea to represent college writers from Worcester in general, instead of one particular university,” she says.

With an emphasis on creative nonfiction, the magazine presents a menagerie of memoirs, poems, essays on history and pop culture, book and movie reviews, and photos and illustrations from local high school and college students.

In D’Ordine’s piece, she dissects the recent popularity of the reinvigorated “Doctor Who” franchise, which chronicles the exploits of a “Time Lord” and his living time machine, Time and Relative Dimension in Space (or, more popularly, T.A.R.D.I.S., housed in a telephone callbox).

“I enjoy writing because, even though I’m personally not a public speaker, I can organize my thoughts in writing and communicate with many others,” says D’Ordine, who plans to continue study of molecular biology and biochemistry in graduate school. “I want to use the writing skills I’m learning in conjunction with research to facilitate scientific communication among scientists and with the general public.”

Meanwhile, in his review of the high-concept, not-easily-defined “Upstream Color,” Singh describes the movie by Shane Carruth as “rife with alternative approaches to direction, narrative, writing, and sound,” and “definitely a film that is on the outer side of the artistic envelope.

His review of The Right Decision came about as part of a larger contemplative process. A bibliophile who describes bookstores as his “Kryptonite catnip,” Singh had been mulling the process of decision making, odds, and outcomes after reading a number of books and articles.

“The book was really fun and helpful in that it took techniques and analytical approaches from a quantitative field of study—game theory—and applied it to real life,” he explaines, noting the commonalities of both, including incomplete information and nebulously defined probabilities. “It was fantastic to have this concrete methodology with which to approach making good decisions.”

However, he says, it was also a reality check, because in life, outcomes are uncertain, “correct” actions aren’t guaranteed to lead to good results, and good things can happen to bad people (and vice versa).

“A’s (and success) really aren’t awarded for effort,” says Singh. “But knowing how to make good decisions makes it much more comforting. You’re able to say to yourself, ‘even if things turned out badly, I did everything I could with what I had at the time.’”

Dempsey was integral to the pre-writing process, he says—a trusted mentor to bounce ideas off of.

D’Ordine, meanwhile, says that she applied feedback learned throughout Dempsey’s journalism class to her revision process. “By the end of the class I felt like I was on my way to developing a more journalistic voice to use in the future.”

A copy editor for The Towers, she says she generally likes to write about campus events, particularly those related to music. She also tutors at WPI’s Writing Center with a goal to “help others discover not only the practicality of writing, but how it can be a great way to find their voice,” she says. “Everyone has their own nuances and style.”

D’Ordine’s "The Doctor Is In."

Singh’s Doing the Right Thing. 

Singh’s Upstream Color. 

BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link.