Magnify Magazine

Standing in a brightly lit teaching lab in the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Center for Health Education, Leonard White pops the lid off a bucket, reaches in with gloved hands, and carefully pulls out a three-pound human brain, roughly the size of a cantaloupe.

The Duke neurology professor says today is a big day for the 129 first-year medical students in his Brain and Behavior class.

It’s a four-hour drive west across the state of North Carolina from Durham to Bakersville, a small town in Mitchell County.

Most of the drive is on Interstate 40, but the last hour is entirely different. It begins with a sharp turn onto N.C. Highway 226. From there, the country road ambles through rugged communities of farmhouses, antique shops and old drug stores before snaking up the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, switchbacking every 100 feet or so. A look out the window is breathtaking, as the sheer drop-offs are just inches from the road.

What does the rustle of tall grass mean to you? If you live in northwest Alaska, it could well mean your livelihood.

A hundred miles from Russia along the shores of the Bering Sea, the remote region is home to three cultural groups—the Inupiaq, Yup’ik and Siberian Yupik—that depend on hunting, whaling and fishing for survival. The ability to discern that rustle, a ripple, the call of a bird, is essential.

Maya Torain first stepped onto the Duke campus as a medical school student two years ago, but she was no stranger to Durham. As a child, the Baltimore, Maryland, native spent her summers in Durham visiting her father’s family. Years later, even though she was attending medical school right in her father’s hometown, she says she felt as though she were in a bubble, far removed from the town she remembered. She was eager to get out and serve the local community.

“You can go months and months without really even interacting with the Durham community,” she says.