Say the phrase "risk management" on this campus, and most folks are going to think fence, ID badge, flashing lights and security guards. The more mortgage-minded among us might conjure up images of accountants in green eyeshades, poring over the books, or bankers, worried about overextending their loans.

But risk management — now ascendant as NIH initiates a Risk Management Program that is one of five main elements of the President's management agenda — is actually a bit of both of these. Like a guarded fence, it tries to keep bad things from happening, and like an army of CPAs, it aims to keep those 28 billion bucks in our yearly budget flowing in the proper direction.
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Twin volunteers relax in the NIDCD sign-up booth before having their hearing tested.

The line-up of volunteers looked like a Hollywood casting call for colorful character actors. There were bead-bedecked cowgirls, whiskered men in sailor hats and 84-year-old Southern belles toting lavender lace parasols. And everyone — everyone — showed up with his or her own double.

But this was no casting call. For a fifth consecutive year, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders took part in the world's largest annual gathering of twins, this time to learn more about the genetics behind age-related hearing loss, or presbycusis.Nearly 2,000 sets of twins, triplets and perhaps higher multiples attended the legendary Twinsburg, Ohio, festival — Twins Days — which celebrated its 31st anniversary this past August. The study is the first to definitively address an observation that most hearing health professionals and researchers have made but have yet to prove: that people tend to lose their hearing as they age and that this type of hearing loss seems to run in families.
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