Fiscal Impasse and Europe Woes Weigh on Markets

Henny Ray Abrams/Associated Press

A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. A day after the election, the outlook of continued divided government in Washington and little prospect for compromise unnerved traders.

Business leaders and investors on Wall Street reacted nervously to President Obama’s re-election Wednesday, as the focus shifted quickly from electoral politics to the looming fiscal uncertainty in Washington. A gloomy economic outlook in Europe also prompted selling in markets worldwide.

Stocks were sharply lower in afternoon trading in New York, with both the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average down 2.2 percent, as European shares sank and Asian stocks were mixed. While many executives on Wall Street and in other industries favored Mitt Romney, many had already factored in the likelihood of Mr. Obama winning a second term.

Still, continued divided government in Washington and little prospect for compromise unnerved traders.

“The bottom line is that this looks like a status quo election,” said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays. “The problem with that is that it doesn’t resolve some of the main sources of uncertainty that are hanging over the economy.”

Companies in some sectors, like hospitals and technology, could see a short-term pop, said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist with Citi. Other areas, like financial services as well as coal and mining, could be hurt as investors contemplate a tougher regulatory environment.

Shares of Alpha Natural Resources, a coal giant, were down 11.8 percent, while Arch Coal was off 11 percent. But HCA Holdings, a hospital operator, was up 8 percent, to $33.39 a share. As a result of Mr. Obama’s victory, Goldman Sachs said it upgraded its rating on HCA to buy from neutral, and raised its price target to $39 from $31. It also raised price targets for Tenet Healthcare and Community Health Systems, although both are still rated neutral.

Goldman downgraded shares of Humana, a leading managed care company, to sell, and its shares fell 9.9 percent. Goldman warned that Humana and other managed care providers could be hurt as health care reform moves forward, especially new rules for health insurers that become effective in 2014.

Mr. Levkovich predicted that the market would remain volatile between now and mid-January. If Congress and the president cannot come up with a plan to cut the deficit, hundreds of billions in Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the beginning of 2013 while automatic spending cuts will sharply cut the defense budget and other programs.

Known as the fiscal cliff, this simultaneous combination of dramatic reductions in government spending and tax increases could push the economy into recession in 2013, economists fear.

But it was not just the election results driving shares lower — there was more gloomy economic news out of Europe.

The European Union will experience only a very weak economic recovery during 2013 while unemployment will remain at “very high” levels, according to a set of forecasts issued Wednesday by the European Commission.

This year, gross domestic product will shrink by 0.3 percent for the 27 members of the union as a whole and by 0.4 percent for the 17 European Union countries that use the euro, the commission predicted. Growth in 2013 will be a meager 0.4 percent across the union and only 0.1 percent in the euro area, it said.

Not only is that level of growth far slower than even the tepid pace of the recovery in the United States, it also makes it more difficult for debt-burdened European economies to get their financial house in order. As markets neared the close in Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, fell 2.2 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in London was 1.5 percent lower.

The S.&P./ASX 200 in Australia closed up 0.7 percent, as did the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong. The Nikkei 225 stock average in Japan ended trading little changed.

“There’s a huge question mark hanging over what happens in the next few weeks,” said Aric Newhouse, senior vice-president of policy and government relations at the National Association of Manufacturers. “The fiscal cliff is the 800-pound gorilla out there.”

“We can’t wait,” he said. “We think the idea of going over the cliff has to be taken off the table. We’ve got to get to the middle ground.”

For all the anticipation, some observers said the election still left plenty of unanswered questions.

“While we have clarity on the players now, we don’t have any more clarity on what will happen in terms of the fiscal cliff,” Mr. Maki said. “We still have a divided government and they haven’t been able to agree on what to do.”

If the full package of tax increases and spending cuts go into effect, that would equal a $650 billion blow to the economy, Mr. Maki said, equivalent to 4 percent of the gross domestic product.

Mr. Maki envisions a partial compromise, with $200 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. Partly because of that, he estimates, the annual rate of economic growth will dip to 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013 from 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter. He predicted that if the full fiscal cliff were to hit, the economy would contract in the first half of 2013.

James Kanter contributed reporting.

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Presidential Campaign Over, Voters Take to the Polls

Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

Ralph Raymond, a polling station volunteer, held a curtain open for a voter at the Talbot Gym in Exeter, N.H.

Americans went to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to give President Obama a second term or to replace him with Mitt Romney after a long, hard-fought campaign that centered on who would heal the battered economy and what role government should play in the 21st century.

From makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy to the more typical voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and town halls across the rest of the country, people began lining up before dawn to cast their ballots — collectively writing the ending to a bitter, expensive presidential campaign in which the candidates, parties, and well-heeled outside groups were on pace to spend some $2.6 billion.

In hotly contested areas like Milwaukee, Fairfax, Va., and Central Florida, there were reports of long lines at polling sites. There were also long lines to vote in states that were not on anyone’s list of battlegrounds, including New York.

Mr. Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts, cast his vote Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Mass. When a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Mr. Romney replied, “I think you know.” Mr. Obama voted Oct. 25 in Chicago — becoming one of more than 31 million people who voted early this year.

The president visited a campaign office in Chicago on Tuesday morning, where he called and thanked several startled volunteers in Wisconsin and then spoke briefly to the reporters who were traveling with him, congratulating Mr. Romney for having run a “spirited campaign.”

“I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited campaign,'’ Mr. Obama said. “I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out. And so I would encourage everybody on all sides just to make sure that you exercise this precious right that you have that people fought so hard for, for us to have.”

Both campaigns continued trying to grind out votes on Tuesday. Mr. Obama planned a round of satellite television interviews with local stations in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin. Mr. Romney planned campaign stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

Given the way both men have sometimes seemed to be campaigning for the presidency of Ohio — given the repeated stops they made there in their efforts to claim the state’s 18 electoral votes — it was perhaps unsurprising that the two campaigns should cross paths there on Election Day. Mr. Romney was waiting in his campaign plane in Cleveland on Tuesday morning for the arrival of his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, when another plane touched down and could be seen taxiing nearby. It was carrying Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

If both campaigns could seem small at times, the issues confronting the nation remained big: how to continue to rebuild after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression; whether to implement Mr. Obama’s health care law to cover the uninsured, or undo it; whether to reshape Medicare for future beneficiaries to try to curb its costs; whether to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit or to rely on spending cuts alone; how to wind down the war in Afghanistan without opening the region to new dangers; and how to navigate the post-Arab Spring world.

On their frenzied final full day of campaigning, the candidates reprised their central arguments before crowds in the same handful of swing states where the campaign has been waged for much of the last year, as both men have battled for the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The campaigns were hoping that huge turnout efforts would tilt contested states their way.

For all the twists and turns that the race has taken since the candidates downed their first greasy pork chops on sticks at the Iowa State Fair, those core, competing messages have remained remarkably consistent.

Mr. Obama reminded a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday how bad things were when he took office, listed his achievements and argued that he has more work to do.

“In 2008, we were in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said. “Today our businesses have created nearly five and a half million new jobs. The American auto industry has come roaring back. Home values are on the rise. We’re less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last 20 years. Because of the service and sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is ending. Al Qaeda’s on the path to defeat. Osama Bin Laden is dead. We’ve made progress these last four years.”

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Exclusive: EU regulators to accept Apple, publishers e-book offer

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ABC raises nearly $17 million for hurricane relief

NEW YORK (AP) — ABC says its national "Day of Giving" raised nearly $17 million for Superstorm Sandy relief.

Throughout its programming Monday, the network urged viewers to contribute to the American Red Cross to help victims of the storm, which affected several Northeastern states, but hit New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area particularly hard.

Appeals were aired all day on ABC programming, on Disney's syndicated shows and across other Disney-owned networks.

Major contributors include ABC personalities Barbara Walters, George Stephanopoulos and Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and star of ABC's "Shark Tank." The Samsung Corp. also made a major gift.

In addition, the Walt Disney Co. made a $1 million contribution to local charities.

NBC held a telethon Friday for storm victims that raised nearly $23 million.

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A Collective Effort to Save Decades of Research at N.Y.U.

The calls started coming in late on Tuesday and early Wednesday: offers of dry ice, freezer space, coolers. By the end of Thursday there were dozens more: A researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College would clear 1,000 tanks to save threatened zebra fish; another, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, promised to replace some genetically altered mice that were lost; and a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia even offered take over entire experiments, to keep them going.

As hurricane-driven waters surged into New York University research buildings in Kips Bay, on the East Side of Manhattan, investigators in New York and around the world jumped on the phone to offer assistance — executing a reverse Noah’s ark operation, to rescue lab animals and other assets from a flooding vessel.

“I’ve had 43 people who have offered to help so far, and some of them are direct competitors,” said Gordon Fishell, associate director of the N.Y.U. Neuroscience Institute, who lost more than 5,000 genetically altered mice when storm waters surged the night of Oct. 30, cutting off power. “It’s just been unbelievable,” he said. “It really buoys my spirits and my lab’s.”

Staff members at N.Y.U. worked around the clock to preserve research materials, running in and out of darkened buildings without elevator service, hauling dry ice and other supplies up anywhere from 2 to more than 15 floors.

The university’s medical center also got instant help, from almost every major research institution in the area.

The response reflects large shifts in the way that science is conducted over the past generation or so. Individual labs always compete to be first, but researchers increasingly share materials that are enormously expensive and time-consuming to reproduce. The loss of a single cell line or genetically altered animal can slow progress for years in some areas of biomedical research.

“We are totally dependent on each other in the life sciences now, for a very large number of cell lines and extracts, research animals and unique chemical tools and antibodies that might not have backup copies anywhere in the world, or in very few places,” said Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. “Losing any of these tools tears a significant hole in the entire field.”

Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry at N.Y.U.’s medical school, has studied genetics for 30 years, accumulating valuable mice strains and stocks of extracts from cell nuclei that would be extremely difficult to replace. The extracts must be stored at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dr. Reinberg said he lost all of his mice: nine strains, including more than 1,000 animals that died in the storm surge. But he managed to save all of the cell extracts by moving some containers into freezers at N.Y.U. labs that weren’t affected and others to the Rockefeller, Columbia and Cornell medical centers, each of which cleared space, he said.

“We were able to save many things; it was just phenomenal to get that kind of help,” said Dr. Reinberg, whose house in New Jersey has had no power.

“Later in the week, at a Starbucks, I could finally download all my e-mail, and there were messages from people at the University of Pennsylvania and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, asking how they could help us re-establish the mouse lines we lost,” he said.

Some scientists have become interdependent because their students, who develop a specialty in specific tissues or animals, often move among labs. Research projects sometimes draw on experiments or analyses the students worked on at more than one place.

One researcher working in Dr. Fishell’s lab was formerly a student of Dr. Stewart Anderson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who sent Dr. Fishell a text message on Wednesday to offer help. “I told him that even if it costs money, we’re happy to keep experiments rolling, if we’re able to,” Dr. Anderson said.

By late Thursday, freezer space in minus-112-degree units was extremely tight in the city. So was dry ice.

Susan Zolla-Pazner, director of AIDS research at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had lost power in her 18th-floor lab in the department’s building at 23rd Street and First Avenue. She finally hired a company to haul her 20 freezers-full of specimens, for safekeeping.

“We spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday hauling 1,300 pounds of dry ice up to the 18th floor, using the stairs, to stabilize the freezers first,” said Dr. Zolla-Pazner, who is also a professor of pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. “And the dry ice people would only take cash. I have about 25 to 30 people working for me, and everyone was out there on 23rd Street, reaching into their pockets to get what we needed. It was a herculean and heroic effort on the part of everyone here, and that is the story that needs to be told.”

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Changing of the Guard: Facing Protests, China’s Business Investment May Be Cooling

SHIFANG, China — Local leaders were all smiles this summer at a groundbreaking ceremony for a vast copper smelting project that seemed like the answer to the chronic unemployment that has plagued this city in northern Sichuan ever since a devastating earthquake in 2008.

Reuters

A protest against plans to expand a petrochemical plant in Ningbo, China, last month. More investment projects are running into opposition from a growing Chinese middle class concerned about environmental damage.

Articles in this series are examining the implications for China and the rest of the world of the coming changes in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

But within days, the tree-lined plaza at the heart of the city was packed with thousands of youths, protesting that the $1.6 billion factory would pose a pollution hazard. After two nights of street battles pitting youths against the riot police, city leaders canceled the smelter.

“The environment is more important” than new investments or jobs, said a young woman sitting on a recent afternoon at the cafe across the street from the plaza, now empty except for a clutch of retirees gathered under the clock tower.

China’s economic boom over the last three decades has depended overwhelmingly on a build-at-all-costs investment strategy in which pollution concerns, the preservation of neighborhoods and other such questions have been swept aside. But that approach is starting to backfire, posing one of the biggest challenges for the new generation of Chinese policy makers who will take over at the Communist Party Congress, which starts on Thursday.

New investment projects used to be seen as the best way to keep the Chinese public happy with jobs and rising incomes, assuring social stability — a paramount goal of the Communist Party — while frequently enriching local politicians as well.

But from Shifang in the west to the port of Ningbo in the east, where a week of sometimes violent protests forced the suspension on Oct. 28 of plans to expand a chemical plant, more projects are running into public hostility.

In many cases, they are running into opposition not just from farmers who do not want their houses and fields confiscated, but also from a growing middle class fearful that new factories will lead to more environmental damage.

In response to this and other worries about the economy, a number of influential officials and business leaders in China have stepped up their calls for changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of investment and simultaneously shifting the country toward a greater reliance on consumption.

But China’s leaders, including the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have been talking about such a transformation for years with little sign of success, as state-controlled banks continue to lend huge sums to politically powerful state-owned enterprises and local governments.

Frenzied construction of roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines over the last decade has left China with world-class infrastructure. But it has also produced deeply indebted local governments that are struggling to finance more projects.

At the same time, vast unused capacity in practically every industrial sector has crippled profitability and left manufacturing companies straining to repay their borrowings, a problem that has been partly masked by banks in the habit of simply rolling over loans rather than recognizing losses.

“All Chinese industries are like that — can you dig out which area of Chinese industry is not in overcapacity?” said Li Junfeng, a longtime director general for energy at China’s top economic planning agency.

Investment reached 46 percent of China’s economic output last year. By comparison, Japan’s investment rate peaked at 36 percent, which it reached in the early 1970s; South Korea topped out at 39 percent in the late 1980s.

Growth in Japan and South Korea started to slow and eventually tumbled after investment peaked. The big question now is when China will run into the same limits, and how rapidly change will take place, said Diana Choyleva, an economist at Lombard Street Research in Hong Kong. “The potential for a big crisis is always there,” she said.

Even experts who strongly favor fundamental policy changes, like moving to a more market-oriented system for allocating bank loans and setting interest rates, doubt that China’s leaders are preparing to move quickly. Conversations at senior levels of the Communist Party appear to have focused so far on reducing the state’s role in the day-to-day management of many state-owned enterprises rather than selling them or breaking them up.

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Sprint Through Swing States in Campaign’s Last Hours

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Mitt Romney greeted supporters at a campaign rally on Monday in Sanford, Florida.

WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign of 2012 is now measured in hours and minutes.

Early voting has been under way for weeks across the country, but with Election Day almost here, the presidential candidates and their supporters are offering one last burst of activity in a handful of swing states that will determine the occupant of the Oval Office next year.

President Obama began his last day of campaigning in Wisconsin, a state that almost every Democratic model for an Obama victory assumes will be in his column. After being introduced by Bruce Springsteen and his voice hoarse from days of intense campaigning, the president told a crowd of 18,000 bundled up outside the state Capitol in Madison, “Our fight goes on.” He described his vision of an America where “everybody is doing their fair share, everybody is playing by the same rules, that’s why you elected me in 2008 and that’s why I’m running for a second term!”

At Mitt Romney’s morning rally earlier in Sanford, Fla., supporters chanted “45! 45! 45!” — a reference to the fact that Mr. Romney would become the nation’s 45th president if he is elected.

The Republican nominee has a hectic, state-hopping 14-hour campaign schedule on Monday, traveling from Florida to Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire.

During his speech just outside Orlando, Mr. Romney toned down his sometimes harsh words for Mr. Obama, focusing on a sunny outlook for the country under a Romney presidency that he vowed would be friendly to business and diplomatic to Democrats.

“If there is anyone who is worried that the last four years are the best we can do, or if there is anyone who is fearing that the American dream is fading away, or if there is anyone who wonders whether better jobs and better paychecks are a thing of the past, I have a clear and unequivocal message: with the right leadership, America is about to come roaring back,” Mr. Romney said.

“We are Americans; we can do anything,” he said. “The only thing that stands between us and some of the best years we’ve ever imagined is lack of leadership. And that is why we have elections.”

Such candidate appearances are the visual embodiment of the presidential campaigns, but they are hardly the most important in the final hours. That distinction goes to the thousands of volunteers on both sides who are deployed in swing states with the mission of making sure that supporters who have not already voted find their way to a polling place.

In Florida, Ohio and Iowa, that effort has become tied up in some legal wrangling as both parties play out the final days of their yearlong battle over provisional ballots, voter identification and early voting.

Mr. Romney has not officially weighed in on the partisan battles unfolding in Florida and Ohio over early voting and provisional ballots. But his word choice at the rally in Sanford was telling, mimicking the Republican Party’s emphasis on policing against fraudulent balloting, which Democrats have cast as attempts to suppress voting.

“Look, we have one job left,” Mr. Romney said. “And that’s to make sure that on Election Day we get, make certain that everybody who’s qualified to vote gets out to vote.”

The last-minute demands on the candidates’ schedules were intense. Three of Mr. Romney’s rallies on Monday are veritable flybys, held in airport hangars so that Mr. Romney can land, jog down the steps of his private plane to the blaring thrum of Kid Rock’s “Born Free,” and then begin taxiing to the next city nearly as soon as he has shaken the last hand and kissed the last baby.

When Mr. Romney’s plane touched down in Florida after an 18-hour day (four events in four states) just before 1 a.m. Monday, his aides had already begun setting up for the day’s rally. A “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” sign greeted the plane, and an empty hangar waited lighted and ready for the voters who would file in just hours later.

For Mr. Obama, who held a weekend marathon across every swing state, the schedule on Monday looked almost tame by comparison. Even so, he will be hitting three states before he heads to sweet home Chicago for the night.

After his Monday morning stop in Madison, a college town, Mr. Obama will return one last time to the swing state of all swing states for a rally in Columbus, Ohio. The president has been holding on to a small lead in the polls in Ohio, and his campaign aides believe that if he wins the state, he will win the election. Unless, that is, Mr. Romney manages to sweep all the other swing states, or turn a blue state — Mr. Romney planted a flag in Pennsylvania on Sunday — red.

After Ohio, Michelle Obama will join her husband for one last rally where the two like to insist that it all started — Des Moines.

Michael Barbaro contributed reporting from Sanford, Fla., and Helene Cooper from Madison, Wis.

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Apple sells 3 million iPads over first weekend

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Aerosmith plays free outdoor concert in Boston

BOSTON (AP) — Hundreds of people have gathered in a student neighborhood in Boston to hear a free live performance by Aerosmith.

The band played Monday outside the apartment building where they got their start in the city's Allston neighborhood. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is there along with Boston Mayor Tom Menino's wife and others.

The band is promoting its new album, "Live From Another Dimension," and encouraging people to vote.

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A Wheelchair Tour of Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

Alex Watters does a wheelie in a parking lot at his alma mater, Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He damaged his spine in a diving accident freshman year. More Photos »

THE specially equipped Dodge Sprinter pulled into the Morningside College parking lot, transporting my campus guide and his Quickie 646 SE motorized wheelchair. Alex Watters was returning to this small liberal arts college in Sioux City, Iowa, for a wheelchair tour of the campus he had navigated as an undergraduate. Our mission was to understand some of the challenges faced by students with a physical disability for a book I was writing on the first-year college experience.

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

A caregiver, Jennifer Mozak-Wubbena, helps Alex Watters prepare for the day. Mr. Watters can’t use his hands. More Photos »

I stuck my hand out. Alex could raise his arm but had no mobility in his hands, so I shook his outstretched fist. Freshman year, he had damaged his spinal cord in a diving accident and lost the use of his legs and hands. “Ready to go?” he asked as I grabbed my manually operated wheelchair, on loan from the nursing department.

“Ready as ever,” I said, not altogether sure how to operate the thing. As I struggled to get over the tiny ribbon of tar between the parking lot and sidewalk, Alex zipped around the lot doing wheelies, as if to say, “You have no idea what you’re in for.”

Motoring backward while talking, like an admissions office tour guide, he was contagiously optimistic. “Sure, I have challenges now,” he said, “but I’m not going to let them take over my life.”

ALEX WATTERS comes from Okoboji, a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, on the border with Minnesota. He had applied to the University of Iowa and Drake but chose Morningside because he was heavily recruited to play golf. He had been captain of his high school team junior and senior years. When he arrived on campus — it was fall 2004 — he was full of excitement and expectation.

The second week there, Danielle Westphal — a classmate with whom he had won a dance contest during orientation — invited him to a family get-together on Lake Okoboji. He and a friend drove up to the cabin, arriving at about 10 p.m. As the guests toasted marshmallows around a bonfire, Alex and his hostess’s younger brother decided to go for a swim. The weather was beginning to get cold. He figured this would be his last swim of the season.

The two of them changed into their trunks and walked 150 feet out onto the dock. A gust of wind blew, and Alex’s hat flew off, landing near a boat hoist. He took off his shirt and dived in after it. But there was a sandbar. The water was only 18 inches deep. He heard his neck snap.

“I remember laying face-first underwater,” Alex said, a crack in his voice. “At first I tried to start swimming, but of course I couldn’t move. I thought, this was it. I’m a pretty religious person, so I was thinking, ‘I’m O.K. with this if it happens.’ And then I blacked out.”

At first the young boy thought Alex was playing a joke on him. Then he sensed something was terribly wrong. He ran back to the cabin to get help. They came running, and Danielle jumped into the water feetfirst and knelt beside Alex. He had now been under water more than two minutes. She turned him over and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. E.M.S. arrived, and from the local hospital he was quickly airlifted to Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City.

“Next thing I remember are Mom and Dad and our pastor standing by my bed and the surgeon telling them about the operation I would soon have,” he told me. His spinal cord wasn’t severed but pinched. “Your spinal cord is like a banana,” Alex said. “If you bend it severely enough it won’t necessarily break but it will be permanently damaged.”

After surgery to stabilize the vertebrae in his neck, Alex underwent therapy for six months at a rehabilitation hospital in Denver. I asked him what he was feeling at this point. He and his parents had become interested in stem cell research, and the possibility he would someday walk again. “But I really didn’t want to live my life hoping I would walk again when the chances were I might not,” he said. “Even at that point, I was pretty happy with who I was and even then I was thinking about the possibility of returning to college.”

He took courses at Iowa Lakes Community College that summer, and the next fall returned to Morningside to resume his first year.

Roger H. Martin is president emeritus of Randolph-Macon College and author of “Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again.”

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