Letters

CHAMPION OF MANUFACTURING

I read Peter Dizikes’s profile of Professor Suzanne Berger (“Standing Up for Manufacturing,” January/February 2012) with deep interest.
I have long argued on similar lines, and it is my conviction that manufacturing skills need to be nurtured, as manufacturing has a profound effect on a country’s economy. I have also argued that it makes not only emotional but also economic sense to avoid mindless outsourcing. And there is hope—with increasing understanding of supply chains, managers will take a more holistic approach in determining the true impacts of their strategic decisions. As a result, such decisions will be put to more rigorous strategic and analytical testing, with possible retention or return of manufacturing jobs.
Professor Berger’s ideas and thinking deserve wide support and admiration.
Atul Agarwal, MEng ‘05
Sutton, England

I would like to remind readers of another facet of the outstanding career of Professor Suzanne Berger not mentioned in your article. To many of us in the “inside the Beltway” crowd, Suzanne, together with Jake Stewart and Mitzi Wertheim, founded MIT’s Seminar XXI, a unique public-­policy program. Seminar XXI brings together senior military officers and civilian executives once a month over an academic year to discuss critical national-security, economic, and public-policy issues, guided by MIT social scientists and those from other institutions. It began in 1986 with a curriculum focusing on alternative analyses of the cultural, economic, and political assumptions behind international discourse and events. None of us who participated in 1988–89 will ever forget the impact of Suzanne and her “paradigms” on our thinking about national-security issues. Suzanne was the MIT program director for Seminar XXI only until 1993, but her influence on the seminar continues to this day.
Frank Tapparo ‘60
Arlington, Virginia

EXERCISE AND ENDURANCE

I found Benjamin Rapoport’s story “Running the Numbers” (November/December 2011) interesting for three reasons: I just began a running routine, I have been looking for an app that logs my progress by various metrics, and I am involved in genome-scale data analysis.
I would like to better understand how available data could provide novel insights into the physiology of endurance using systems-­biology approaches. I have been working with NextBio for a few years, and we’ve processed, curated, and made searchable thousands of public genomic data sets. The system, which is free to academics at www.nextbio.com, includes more than 50 RNA expression and SNP data sets for “exercise.” To me, concepts of endurance also evoke thoughts on discovery of performance biomarkers and cures for muscular dystrophy. Your research has great potential.
James Flynn, husband of Monique
(Gaffney) Flynn, SM ‘90
Lexington, Massachusetts