My grandfather had the disease," says Chris Moen '98 quietly, "so when my brother Pat was hit in the eye, the doctor suggested that we both be tested, even though I was only two. Pat was fine, but I tested positive for retinitis pigmentosa."
Moen's parents waited to inform him of his burden. When he was 12, he finally learned that he was subject to a disease that would gradually turn the back of his retina black with dead cells until he was completely blind. First, he would lose night vision, then peripheral sight, and then the ability to see at all. Vitamin-A pills slow the development of the disease, giving a young person who takes them an extra five or 10 years of sight. There is no cure.
Retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, is genetic and sex-linked; Moen's mother is the carrier in his family. There are many varieties that progress at different rates; sometimes the disease is linked with deafness and called Usher's syndrome. An estimated one million people in the United States alone suffer from one form or another of RP.
For most victims of the disease, life becomes a matter of preparing to cope with the loss of sight, which is slow but inexorable. Moen has already had to give up sports-in high school he played varsity football and baseball. Although he can still see well enough in daylight, he has started to lose peripheral vision and night vision. Given the normal progression of RP, he can expect to be legally blind (barely able to make out shapes) by his 30s. But Moen is determined to beat the disease before it beats him. And while the outcome is by no means certain, it's possible that he just may win.
How did Moen become part of the high-stakes race against this merciless disease? When he was a sophomore at Gannet Valley High School, in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, the national RP foundation wanted to start a chapter in his area. As Moen tells it, "My mother attended the organizational meeting and came home the president."
Also at that meeting, he met Dr. Jean Bennett, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on developing successful gene therapy for RP. Bennett saw Moen's interest in science, and invited him to work in her lab the next summer as an unpaid intern. "It was an unbelievable experience," recalls Moen. "I was in awe of the machinery. I wasn't much help, but I learned a tremendous amount." Moen, a premed at Princeton, has since been back to work in Bennett's lab, now as a paid assistant. The research he has done is the basis of his independent work in the laboratory of Laura Landweber, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who uses genetic techniques to study evolution.
Victims of RP suffer from a defective gene. In its healthy form, the gene produces a protein that scientists assume is important in some way to normal retinal function. But as Moen explains, the defective gene produces an incomplete or "truncated" protein, which builds up on the retina and kills its cells. "The specific mutation for RP in my family has been identified," he says. "So with gene therapy, we have a good chance of controlling the disease. We use the common-cold virus as a vector. We modify its DNA by inserting a healthy gene. Then we inject copies of the modified virus into the eye. The healthy genes become incorporated into the host and stop the development of RP for about 120 days."
The good news is that the part of the retina where this occurs is immune-suppressed, so the eye does not appear to reject the virus. But because the treatment only lasts 120 days, it must be repeated regularly. Why the treatment eventually becomes ineffective remains a mystery, says Moen, but Bennett's laboratory is seeking ways to extend its viability. Moen is encouraged by the success the lab has had with tests on laboratory mice, and he believes that tests on humans will start within a year or two.
Other researchers are seeking a cure for RP by developing techniques to transplant retinal cells, but according to Moen, their research has further to go to practical application.
Moen's personal race against time has attracted broad attention. He has told his story at RP conferences and to Connie Chung of CBS-TV. He serves as the vice-president for public awareness of the Philadelphia chapter of the Foundation Fighting Blindness. Meanwhile, Moen gets on with his life at Princeton. Although he can no longer compete on the playing field, he is a sports broadcaster for WPRB.
"I expect a cure in five years," says Moen, and his quiet determination is a measure both of his faith in the science that has become his life's work, and of his need.
-Nicholas Morgan '75

Actor
John Griffin '99 Does a Turn in a Woody Allen Movie-the First of Many Roles He Expects to Play

Most college students wait until they have sheepskin in hand before launching their careers. But not John Griffin '99. The 19-year-old professional actor doesn't turn heads on Nassau Street the way Brooke Shields '87 did during her Princeton years, but he expects that someday he will.
Griffin recently made his movie debut in Woody Allen's latest film, Everyone Says I Love You. In what amounts to about a minute of screen time, the sophomore plays Jeffrey Vandermost, the New York City neighbor of Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda and the romantic interest of two of their two daughters, played by Gaby Hoffman and Natalie Portman. Griffin took part in the filming of Allen's first musical comedy in New York during the summer of 1995, before he entered Princeton, and in Paris later that year, during winter break.
The call to join Allen's cast came on Griffin's 18th birthday, as he was ending his stage debut in Tom Stoppard's Tony Award-nominated play Arcadia, directed by Trevor Nunn of Cats and Sunset Boulevard fame. The play's venue was the Vivian Beaumont Theater, at Lincoln Center in New York City. Griffin, who at the time was a senior at Hackley High School in suburban Tarrytown, New York, would leave classes early and commute into Manhattan for evening performances.
The young actor has reason to be confident about his career. His boy-next-door looks translate well on stage and film. He carries membership cards in both Actors Equity and the Screen Actors Guild. His agent tips him off to possible roles in television, stage, and film, leading to frequent casting calls in New York. To Griffin, it's not a matter of "if" he becomes a star, but when.
While waiting for fame to find him, Griffin takes courses in English, which he expects to declare as his major. He's been active in dramatics on campus, researching musical pieces for The Great Magoo, a play about Coney Island culture performed at 185 Nassau Street, home of the university's Program in Theater and Dance; playing Lieutenant Brannigan in Guys and Dolls; and working as sound designer for Theater Intime's one-act productions of The Golden Spy and Chowder, She Wrote.
He also finds time to tutor in the Student Volunteers Council's Springboard Homework Helpers program at the Princeton Public Library, and he has applied to become a resident adviser for his junior year. A member of Tower Club and a music buff, he claims his room in Lourie-Love Hall is actually a "stereo system with a room built around it." To relax, he indulges in playing electric saxophone and some piano.
If Griffin has learned one thing in his brief professional career, he says, it's to expect the unexpected. He went armed to meet Woody Allen dressed "to the nines" and toting a résumé, only to have the director take one look at him and nod that he'd do for the part. His audition consisted of a two-line exchange with the casting director, and he recalls being "practically frisked" for the script page before he left.
Allen's hands-off directing style left Griffin feeling a bit adrift, he admits. The actors are given only their lines, and just for the scene about to be shot. "It's all unrehearsed. He [Allen] rarely does more than two takes." He recalls a scene (left on the cutting-room floor) shot outside the Ritz Hotel, in Paris. About 20 members of the cast were waiting for a ride to the airport when three Mercedes pulled up. Suddenly Allen called out, "Let's shoot!" Griffin remembers arms waving and bodies squeezing into cars. "It felt surreal because I thought everything in the movies was planned perfectly." On film, he adds, the scene appeared "completely realistic."
The actor's one disappointment with Everyone Says I Love You is that Allen didn't give him a chance to sing, but he's not complaining. He enjoyed the experience and expects to do more work in film, but 205 appearances as Gus and Lord Augustus in Stoppard's Arcadia gave him a particular appreciation for the stage. "True interaction is in the theater," he says. "Acting is more natural in front of an audience. In film the audience is a passive observer, but in the theater the audience is an active participant, a part of the show."
Griffin grew up exposed to show business, and he has long had stars in his eyes. His mother is a model, and his father heads the East Coast television department of William Morris, the international talent agency. He remembers musing on theater jaunts to Manhattan, "What if that applause was for me?"
As a youngster he did some commercials, and as a seventh grader he played the lead in his school's production of Oliver!. A summer job in the mail room of the William Morris Agency led to his first acting break. He recorded some lines as an off-screen partner for auditioning actors, and a casting director liked what he heard. Over the years, he has learned to approach the process with a Zen-like detachment. "The odds are so against you-it's really not worth getting horribly excited about going for a part," he says. What's needed is "putting yourself in the right opportunity. . . . The stuff of life is in making a living, in making a name for yourself. I believe I can do anything if I try. I have a lot to give the world. I can be a star whose face and name is universally known, who represents something that means quality."
-Maria LoBiondo

Imagineer
Bevin Barberich '97's Senior Project Leads to a Dream Job
With Walt Disney

Come June, Bevin Barberich '97 will be an Imagineer. Thanks to winning Walt Disney's 1996 "Imaginations" contest, which solicited designs for innovative theme-park rides, she has been hired as an associate mechanical engineer in the Show/Ride Division of Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, California.
Barberich, a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Virginia Beach, Virginia, has been a fan of amusement-park rides since the first of many childhood visits to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia. She is also a long-time fan of Mary Poppins, the 1964 film adapted from P. L. Travers's series about an English governess with magical powers. The two interests coalesced when Barberich spied a notice posted by the campus chapter of the Society of Women Engineers announcing the Disney contest, which is open to members of six engineering associations. The first thing that went through her mind, Barberich says, was, "Why not a Mary Poppins ride? For a long time I had thought designing rides would be a great way to apply my engineering interests, and here was an opportunity."
She approached Daniel M. Nosenchuck, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, with her idea, proposing to submit the eventual design as her required departmental independent work. Nosenchuck agreed to advise her on the enterprise.
So, says Barberich, her "entire junior year" was spent designing the ride she calls "A Jolly Holiday: A Physical and Virtual Amusement Experience for Young Children."
Barberich established two goals for her design: that it be appropriate for four-to-eight-year-olds-an age group for whom most current rides are "too confusing and too scary"-and that it involve virtual effects, which she believed would appeal to a public "eager to experience the latest developments in audio and video entertainment."
The results, submitted to Disney as a contest entry and to her department as a thesis, were detailed in a 29-page technical paper that included diagrams of a model for track structure, calculations for an architectural analysis that illustrated the structure's compactness and flexibility, and graphs of the dynamic forces that would act on riders. To present the idea as convincingly as possible, Barberich also submitted an animated video simulating a child's-eye view of the ride.
"A Jolly Holiday" begins by leading children through a replication of London and the Cherry Tree Lane of the story. "This part is real buildings," says Barberich, "because it's important to interest people while they are waiting to enter the ride." Once children walk through a door into this make-believe world, a carousel appears. With children seated on carousel horses, the carousel begins to turn on a circular bi-rail track. As the horses leave the carousel for one of four separate tracks leading away from the carousel, says Barberich, "everything gets very virtual." The horses can take their riders to a race track, a fox hunt, a children's nursery, or the rooftops of London, where chimney sweeps dance.
About 120 people entered the competition, says Barberich, who submitted her design through the Society of Women Engineers. Last June, she was one of three SWE finalists to present her design to Disney officials in Glendale. "For the department, I had emphasized the engineering concepts and technologies and design feasibility," she says. "For Disney, I emphasized the ride's entertainment value."
A member of the campus dance troupe Expressions, Barberich felt comfortable enough as a performer to put on "a little bit of a show" for the assembled Imagineers. Dressed as Mary Poppins and carrying her plans in a "magic" bottomless carpetbag, she described the ride and showed the video. She explained that "A Jolly Holiday" would take little space because the ride is virtual, and it would attract people back to ride each of the four tracks.
The judges were impressed with Barberich's innovative use of virtual reality and with her mastery of several sophisticated computer programs-programs she had taught herself during her year of intensive work on the project. "I used Alias, which is a drawing, rendering, and animating program. And I was probably one of the first students on campus to work with ProEngineer, which is used for modeling parts in 3-D and making accurate drawings of the parts." She also experimented with ProMechanica, using it to apply physical characteristics to the parts and place them in real-world situations. "I wanted to apply a gravitational force, and, constraining the cars to the tracks, to see the reaction forces as the cars moved around the track." She was able to show that "the forces exerted on the children during the ride would be consistent with their comfort and safety."
Winning the award for the Society of Women Engineers, says Barberich, was "wonderful." From Mickey Mouse himself she received "a crystal plaque with Mickey on it," a check for $2,000, and a six-month internship at Walt Disney Imagineering. "I'd assumed the internship could follow graduation," says Barberich, "but it turns out it's supposed to be part of your undergraduate training." Many engineering schools encourage students to spend a semester at work, says Barberich, "but such a concept doesn't fit into Princeton's curriculum." No problem. Disney simply invited her to skip the internship and become a full-time Imagineer after graduation.
"I feel so incredibly lucky," says Barberich, who will head for California in June to begin "the job I always dreamed of but never dreamed I would have."
-Caroline Moseley

Peacemaker
Taleeb Noormohamed '98 Brings Together Palestinians and Israelis

hen the Palestinian woman looked across the table, she could not contain her fury. The young man who had called, Taleeb Noormohamed '98, had not said he was bringing a guest to dinner. Now the woman's eyes fell on two faces-one belonged to Noormohamed, whom she knew only from a telephone conversation. The other face she knew all too well.
It was another woman about her age, an Israeli from a nearby neighborhood.
When Noormohamed traveled in the Middle East last summer, he thought there would be some tension when he arranged this surprise meeting. But he got more than he'd expected.
"Your brother killed my husband!" the Palestinian woman shouted, after her shrieks subsided.
Recounting the incident later, Noormohamed noted ruefully that putting the two people together had "looked good on paper." He had learned a few details of their lives, including that both had lost family members in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he had known nothing of the tragic link between them.
The women argued. Before long, they found a unity of sorts in their shared anger at him. A conversation followed. In time, Noormohamed felt vindicated in his belief that when peace seems impossible, it is the dialogue between ordinary people than can yield the most extraordinary results. As the evening progressed, the tears flowed. And the Palestinian woman said, "I don't want it to be like this for my kids." Says Noormohamed, "They realized that for that hour, they had to coexist. They both saw that the person at the other end of the table was a human being."
What would possess a college student traveling alone to dabble in diplomacy? And what did Noormohamed hope to accomplish with a stunt that seemed more the domain of TV host Jenny Jones than former Secretary of State James Baker '52?
It began with the assassination, in November 1995, of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. Noormohamed, then a sophomore, had begun preparing for a journey the following summer to the Middle East, where he was to take part in an archaeological dig in Syria. He read the papers and listened to news reports. And after hearing from the pundits and the officials, he still wondered, "How is this conflict affecting people on the ground?"
As a student of Islamic culture and a practicing Ismaili Muslim, he had followed the Arab-Israeli conflict for years. In his view, "No one was doing anything at the grassroots." He believed that until that happened, nothing would change. "The only time people's lives become better is when they are personally involved." Noormohamed altered his summer plans: in addition to helping at the archaeological dig, he would spend time with people, acting as a peacemaker. Various university offices agreed to help him with funding.
Noormohamed's opinions were shaped as a child. He grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, but spent several years in Pakistan, where the family lived while his architect father worked on a hospital-design project. Traveling about the Middle East, he became aware that government officials and religious leaders tended to see the region's conflicts in one way, while ordinary citizens saw them another. His first-hand perspective led to his taking some unpopular positions after his family returned to Vancouver. When Western nations bombed Iraq during the Gulf War, he recalls, "I was the only one who thought it was a bad idea."
It was not the last time that Noormohamed went his own way. His personally crafted major, Islamic culture and civilization, involves not only archaeology but an examination of Islam's rise in the United States. Under the direction of Toni Morrison, the Robert F. Goheen ['40 *48] Professor of the Humanities, he's written his junior papers on the impact of Islam on African-Americans.
Noormohamed believes that events like the surprise meeting between the Palestinian and Israeli women, serve a purpose. Peace is possible, he says, but too many people are afraid to try it. Too often, those at war are loath to give up the conflict they know for what is less certain, even though they hope for peace. Noormohamed notes that when the women left the restaurant, they were making plans for their teenage children to meet.
This tentatively happy ending was not the only one on Noormohamed's visit, nor was it the only resolution that followed some tense moments. His nine-week trip took him to Amman, Jordan; to Jerusalem and the West Bank; to Damascus, Syria; and to several Syrian villages and even to a mountain-top resort. In his first border crossing between Jordan and Israel, he was detained for hours by Israeli guards who were convinced he was a Palestinian. They rooted through his bags before confirming his Canadian citizenship with the airline that sold his plane ticket.
Noormohamed arranged several meetings like the one between the two women. As he passed through two checkpoints on his way to one of them, he helped strike up a conversation between two guards, one Israeli and one Palestinian. "They had worked 50 feet apart for months and never spoken!" he said. "When I came out of my meeting, they were having tea."
He stumbled upon a protest march in Ramala, on the West Bank, and departed as shots were ringing out. As he recounted each event during an interview, his eyes grew wide, and at one point, he said, "I'm going to have to tell my mother about some of this before this article appears." As it was, Noormohamed cost his mother plenty of sleep. After arriving for the archaeological dig, he fell ill from eating undercooked chicken. But he could not arrange a flight back to Vancouver for several days and had to stay with a Syrian family. He ventured out for short trips when he felt up to it. "I tasted the sweetest grapes I have ever eaten. I saw vast deserts, and the most beautiful beaches." He thinks most often, however, of the "unspoiled goodness" of the people. "These people were extremely kind. And they had so little. The doctor who treated me refused to be paid."
Noormohamed cannot wait to return. He plans to retrace part of his route and has been invited to hold meetings in Tadzhikistan, one of the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. He's not sure how he'll finance his trip. But given his track record, that's a minor detail.
-Mary Caffrey