RE Log - Spring 2020

SPRING 2020 Ransom Everglades LOG 11 When you see these problems in the context of real communities struggling with them – even though there is little scientific debate about the causes of the problems – you realize it’s not an information deficit, it’s a motivation deficit.” – Kenny Broad ’84 “ Kenny Broad, The Academic Even as Broad turned his focus to academia, he never stopped dueling with danger. Before he entered the PhD program at Columbia, he agreed to travel to Jamaica to gain field experience and assist professors there with a major research project on marijuana and crack cocaine use. He spent months in and around Jamaican crack houses, occasionally dodging bullets and witnessing horrific violence he was powerless to stop. When he traveled to Vietnam years later seeking what would prove to be critical research on sea snakes, he spent weeks diving for the highly venomous creatures while studying the illegal wildlife trade. He woke up in his hotel one night and wondered why the floor was wet. Some two dozen deadly snakes that had been locked in a cooler had escaped, and were crawling around his hotel room. (He and his research partner eventually corralled them in a bathtub.) There are so many stories: Broad and his longtime friend from RE, James York, ended up stranded for weeks on the tiny island of Kapingamarangi when the cargo vessel they were counting on failed to show up. During their unintended stay, York battled a debilitating leg infection and Broad accidentally downed a half pint of hydrogen peroxide. There was no available medical care. They suffered but survived. They finally got a lift home from a missionary boat. Many of his explorations scared him. All of them shaped him. Occasionally, they made him laugh. Mostly, they engaged his intellect, awakened his sense of social justice and pushed him to learn more. In Vietnam, he was deeply troubled to discover that most people there had no access to effective anti-venom treatments for snake bites – even though anti-venom had first been developed Broad in Vietnam during a research trip to study sea snakes.