James Allaway is a senior planner 
with the Land and Resource Plan- 
ning Section of the Alaska Depart- 
ment of Natural Resources. Prior to 
this line of employment, he studied 
elephants in the lower Tana River 
region of Kenya. He writes that 
“there’s a joy and exhilaration you 
get from elephants.” He doesn’t ex- 
plain what he gets from working 
in the far north. Allaway earned 
his Ph.D in natural resources from 
Cornell University and has worked 
as a Peace Corps volunteer in So- 
malia. 
As a doctoral candidate in clinical 
psychology at Harvard University, 
Kirk Felsman is seeking to under- 
stand how some children make 
healthy adaptations to conditions of 
severe environmental stress. His 
studies grew out of clinical work with 
children from low-income welfare 
families in the Boston area during 
which he was taken with the chil- 
dren’s “repeated displays of strength, 
courage, and resiliency.” Two films 
that deal with children who survive 
on the streets of major cities in Latin 
America led Felsman to spend a year 
in Colombia learning about the 
“gamins.” The article in this issue 
of Natural History is based on that 
field research. 
John A. Wood is a staff scientist 
at the Smithsonian Astrophysical 
Observatory in Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts. His work on meteorites is 
focused on “the form and sources 
of the earthy materials that came 
to be incorporated in the solar system 
and the way these materials were 
processed and rearranged as they 
were bein'g assembled into planets.” 
Wood has also studied lunar rock 
samples to learn “how the materials 
of a small new planet first sorted 
themselves out into layers that are 
characteristic of the structure of 
planets.” 
4 
