A Word from the Editor

The Academic Year Class of 2001 - 2002 has had an unusual time here in the United States. The FORUM, held in Maine from September 5th to the 10th, went very well. We had excellent weather and the program was enhanced by the presence on the Mount Desert Biological Laboratory campus of the IALS faculty and conference participants. We also enjoyed the informative participation of Chris Erb and Cinthia Deye, two MD/Ph.D. candidates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Little did we know, as we were enjoying our lobster dinners on Thurston's Wharf, or touring Acadia National Park, that our world would be thrown into turmoil a short time later.

The students and IALS conference participants left the MDIBL campus on the morning of September 10th, intending to fly from Boston to their final destinations on the evening of the 10th or the morning of the 11th. Dr. Stolte and Svetlana Orlova, along with Lueder Fels and Bjoern Schwer, flew from Boston to Germany on Monday evening. Lorenzo Klein and Stephan Hinze also left Boston on the 10th, bound for Denver, CO and Gainesville, FL. Roman Heuer and Nina Zeh left Boston on separate flights for Stanford and San Diego on the morning of September 11th. The rest of the group, except for those who were to stay in the Boston area, was supposed to fly out of Boston later in the day. We all know how lucky they were not to have been on any of the planes, originally destined from Boston to the West Coast, which were used as the weapons of mass destruction that fateful morning.

It was a frantic few hours, using the telephone and e-mail, before everyone was located and found to be safe. Roman was put down in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Nina at one of the airports outside of Washington, DC. They had to stay there for four or five days, until flights from those airports were resumed. Birgit Heller, Thomas Bierbaum, and Ruediger Fleisch were stranded in Boston for a week, finally flying to Germany on the 18th. The rest of the students gathered in Boston and Cambridge, finding comfort and a feeling of safety by being together.

There were other bad things that happened to various members of the AY 2001-2002 group. Two of the students who arrived in the US after September had experienced the death of a parent in the months before their arrival here. Another student, Anne Barbara Tietz, experienced the sudden death of her mentor, the well-known Tufts University Medical School cardiac research scientist and long-time friend of the BMEP program, Dr. Jeffrey Isner, who, ironically, died of a heart attack in November. On a less tragic note, but still a misfortune, one of the students broke his nose during a pick-up basketball game.

I was beginning to think that there was a hex that had been put on this group. However, the reports that have been submitted by the students for publication in this yearbook have assured me that they were able to enjoy their time in the US despite the terrible early weeks.

Each student has been allowed one page in the yearbook for the report of his or her experience during the past six months. However, I have given two pages to Soenke Bartling, partly because he is first among the students, alphabetically, and partly because he did such an excellent job of conveying the feelings and the experiences of so many of the students during those first terrible days on and after September 11th.

I hope that each of you who reads this book can appreciate, as I have, the wonderful spirit of the students who wrote most of the pages, and rejoice in their happiness that they were able to experience this time in the US, thanks to the BMEP program, now in its twenty-third year.

My thanks go once again to Dr. Stolte, Peg Bailey, Birgit Heller, Anna Reiss and Lueder Fels, for all of the help and friendly encouragement that they have given me this year, my second with the BMEP program.

Laurie B. Williams U.S. Program Coordinator

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