Sky Lara Jondahl: Driven to succeed

Sky Lara Jondahl admits it -- she's a type A personality. You know the kind. Driven. Ambitious. Determined.

Type As don't always get good press. They're often characterized as the sort of humourless, arrogant overachievers you would quickly cross a street to avoid encountering.

Jondahl is certainly driven and ambitious, but she also has a healthy sense of humour about herself and the world around her.

A part-time research assistant in the Recruitment and Liaison Office, Jondahl says she didn't exactly cover herself in glory when she worked at RLO over the summer.

"I was in charge of organizing travel schedules for the recruitment officers visiting U.S. schools." Jondahl was a little overly ambitious at the start, booking the recruitment officers on schedules requiring a breakneck pace, until the officers pleaded with her to relax a little. " I might be responsible for the most hellish day of [recruitment officer] Beverly Redmond's life," says Jondahl with a hint of a grimace. "Thankfully, she survived."

Before coming to McGill, Jondahl, a native of Winnipeg, played a key role in organizing a pair of youth summits called Active Voice which attracted student participants from high schools across Manitoba. These conferences spun off into lobbying efforts against the Manitoba government's cuts to education.

One of the areas that got hit the hardest by the cuts -- and one of the areas that Active Voice concentrated on -- was Manitoba's programs for special needs students. For Jondahl, the fight against those cuts was personal.

"I considered myself a special needs student and I had experiences at both ends of the spectrum. When I was younger, I had problems learning how to read and I needed some extra one-on-one attention. Later on, I was enrolled in an advanced program where I worked with some great teachers. The current trend in education is towards de-streaming -- having everybody learn together as much as possible. But my own experience tells me that people have different needs sometimes and they need some special attention to reach their full potential. My own life was radically improved thanks to those programs."

Today, Jondahl is a standout student. Her name appears regularly on the dean's honour roll and she was one of McGill's candidates during the most recent Rhodes Scholarship competitions. She is a finalist for the YWCA's Women of Distinction Award in the young woman of distinction category. The winners will be announced later this month.

As the speaker of the Students' Society, Jondahl plays a role similar to that of the speaker in the House of Commons. She presides over Student Council meetings and keeps the often contentious get-togethers on track. "Things can get pretty heated. I try to minimize the name-calling." She's also chaired the Students' Society's publicity committee.

Her biggest achievement has been in spearheading the drive to create a daycare centre in the new Student Services Building scheduled to open in the fall of 1999. While McGill already has a well-regarded daycare centre that students can use for their children, its hours aren't very flexible -- it's open Monday through Friday, from 8 am to 5:30 pm. Jondahl believed that students, with their erratic and uneven schedules, needed a facility that would be open more often. She proposed the idea, served on the committee that did a needs assessment study and promoted the concept when students recently voted on whether they should support the idea. The proposal won.

Jondahl expects to graduate with an honours BA in political science this June. "It might sound trite, but I've really grown at McGill. I've enjoyed my time thoroughly." Count her among the type-A personalities we'll miss once she's gone.

Daniel McCabe

Pharmacology and therapeutics professor Mark Nickerson died last month at the age of 81. He enjoyed a long and productive career in Canada, but if it hadn't been for U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous witch-hunt of American communists in the 1950s, Nickerson might never have made his way north of the border.

Nickerson grew up poor on an Oregon farm and as a teenager ended up riding the rails with famed folksinger Woodie Guthrie for a while. Working in logging camps as a young man, Nickerson concluded that his fellow workers were being badly treated by their employers. To help organize them, he joined the communist party.

Nickerson went on to study at Johns Hopkins and the University of Utah and joined the University of Michigan as a faculty member in 1951. Three years later, McCarthy's Senate committee sought him out -- it wanted him to testify about his political past and to reveal the names of other communists. Nickerson refused. Amid the anti-communist hysteria of the times, he was fired from the university.

With his career in the U.S. effectively ruined, Nickerson moved to Canada. He built a world-renowned pharmacology program, almost from scratch, at the University of Manitoba. He moved to McGill in 1967 to chair the University's pharmacology department. His research into the effects of drugs on the cardiovascular and nervous systems led to major advances in shock treatment. He earned a host of awards and was named a McGill professor emeritus in 1982.

In 1990, a University of Michigan faculty panel suggested that Nickerson receive an honorary reinstatement, but the school's administration refused. Instead, a lecture series was established to honour him and two other University of Michigan professors who were either fired or censured during the same period under similar circumstances.

In a 1990 interview, Nickerson revealed he was still angry about how his career in the U.S. ended. Instead of the lecture series, he thought the University of Michigan should sponsor an "activist professor in residence."

"That would be someone who is an expert in the field, like the environment, or anything of a contentious nature."

McGill's Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics will be remembering Nickerson in its own fashion -- the department is creating a prestigious speaker series in his name.

Source: Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press

There are two kinds of quacks. The evil kind who sell coloured water, know it's useless and try to extract money from suffering people. Another kind of quack is not telling a lie -- they actually believe they have found a cure for cancer. They just mislead. They're wrong. Dr. Di Bella may be in that latter group.


Oncology and medicine professor Michael Pollack, talking to The Toronto Star about Italian physiologist Luigi Di Bella. Di Bella claims that his hormone and vitamin treatment for cancer patients is curing people of the disease. Di Bella's work is currently being evaluated by a team of Canadian medical experts.

It's almost turtle season in Barbados, which means that Lotus Vermeer and her colleagues at McGill's Bellairs Research Institute are about to get very busy. Vermeer, a research associate at Bellairs who holds two degrees from McGill, heads up the institute's turtle protection program. The project aims to safeguard hawksbill sea turtles -- animals officially listed as "critically endangered" -- from poachers and other dangers.

Between 50 and 70 female hawksbills travel to Barbados each year to lay their eggs on the island's beaches. Two years ago, 40% of the nesting turtles were slaughtered by poachers. Their beautiful amber and brown shells are a popular commodity, used for making jewelry.

Even if the mother safely lays all her eggs and returns to the sea, her hatchlings can still be in danger. The baby turtles instinctively head toward the brightest spot they see. That means that they often start scuttling in the direction of a nearby parking lot or tennis court, attracted by their glaring lights, instead of the ocean.

Vermeer and her team of volunteers -- McGill students pursuing research at Bellairs, as well as local schoolchildren, grandparents, housewives and hotel security guards -- patrol the beaches, keeping a careful eye out for the turtles. Nesting females are monitored to ensure that they're not threatened. Eggs laid in precarious spots are moved to safer areas. Baby turtles whose biological compasses have been thrown out of whack are gently redirected towards the ocean. Vermeer says she's had to confront more than one turtle-poacher in her bid to protect the hawksbills.

Initially, students and staff from McGill pretty much kept the project going by themselves -- Barbadians wondered what all the fuss was about. But as the island's residents learned more about the turtles and realized how endangered the animals were, they've become more involved.