A Brief History of the Magazine
[Taken from the Winter 1994 (tenth anniversary) issue.]Vertices is ten years old this winter. Or maybe it's this spring, or next fall. It depends on how you start counting.
This issue marks the tenth year of publication for the Duke University Magazine of Science, Technology, and Medicine. So, if Vertices was born in October of 1984 when the first issue was distributed, its tenth birthday really isn't until next fall. But everyone knows magazines aren't born; they're created. Slowly. Anyway, it would be just a tad absurd to print a tenth anniversary issue in the magazine's eleventh volume. So we'll celebrate ten years of Vertices now, a decade after preparation began on Volume I, Number 1.
Actually, things aren't even that simple. Steven White, Trinity `85, definitely began to lay concrete plans for the publication of an undergraduate science magazine at Duke as early as February 1984, but probably only he knows how long before that the concept for such a magazine was formed. In an interview with The Chronicle on 22 February 1984, White explained that he got the idea for the publication after seeing a copy of the University of Virginia's undergraduate science magazine. "It was kind of ridiculous that Duke didn't have something like that," he remarked, noting that "it was a void on campus, so we just tried to fill it."
White tried to do more than that, giving the magazine a title which refers to the Research Triangle, touting it as "The Duke University/Triangle Area Science Magazine," and distributing about 30% of the copies of the first issue on the campuses of North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his introduction to that issue, White placed the magazine in regional perspective:
North Carolina's past claims to fame (or infamy, depending on your point of
view) have been cigarettes and Jesse Helms. Most New Jersey student immigrants
have seen the RDU airport terminal, I-95 and the campus that they call home for
four years before returning to the civilized northeast....
While these northeasterners blinked, though, the reality that fostered such a
[limited] view of North Carolina was partially replaced.... Now, down the road
from Antioch Baptist Church you'll find Mitsubishi Semiconductor America.
Nestled in forested seclusion are IBM, Burroughs Wellcome and other corporate
and research giants....
You have in your hands the first issue of Vertices, quite a natural
creature to have evolved in the Triangle's forests. Surrounded on all sides
by much-lauded research facilities, some of us Duke students wondered what
these facilities were being lauded for.
White's vision was an admirable one, but not the easiest to implement. Between attempts to get funded by the student government, solicit advertisements, and recruit staff, little time was left to maintain the magazine's original Triangle-wide perspective. By the time the Spring 1986 issue -- the first after Steve's graduation -- was published, Vertices' subtitle had been changed to "The Duke University Science and Technology Magazine." It remained so until 1991 when James Kittock, known for his trend-setting initiatives, modified the title to acknowledge the Medical Center more explicitly.
Throughout the years, the style of the magazine has evolved along with its name. The initial emphasis on feature articles was expanded to include a number of regular departments. The existence of Undergraduate Research Summaries is a reflection of one of the primary aims of Vertices to provide a forum for the scientific pursuits of undergraduates and professors. While this department has been around since the beginning in various manifestations including "Abstracts," "Summaries," and "Research Summaries," the Duke Discovery section was not introduced until the Fall 1987 issue. Since its inception, though, it has presented the research interests of 96 faculty members from 22 departments in Trinity College, the School of Engineering, and the School of Medicine. In the Spring 1991 issue a new department, LifeLines, was introduced to provide an overview of the immense amount of research being conducted in and around the Medical Center.
Over the years, numerous other features appeared and then disappeared, among them the Guest Paper, the Viewpoints section, and Cutting Edge -- a series of science-related news briefs for those with short attention spans. Despite these superficial changes, though, the focus of Vertices has remained remarkably constant: to inform and educate students about current scientific pursuits at Duke, and to give them some interesting things to think about. In retrospect, it has done a fairly good job.